This presenter is having a grand time watching people cope with huntsman spiders. Panic never seems to work, does it?
The one time I was in Australia, I didn’t notice any spiders at all. Clearly I need to go back and correct that omission.
I was never a Buttigieg fan — in fact, I was totally baffled by what anyone saw in the guy. He’s a bland middle-of-the-road centrist with no particularly striking qualifications to be president, so I never gave him a second thought. But he’s getting support from somewhere, and it seems to be the usual shadowy cabal of wealthy people who want a Stepford candidate who will look nice on a stage but won’t actually rock any boats.
Some people troubled themselves to look into his background though, and here’s a great example of what they find. He’s an establishment candidate. The powers-that-be know that that faint smoky smell in the air is revolution simmering in the electorate, so they threw their influence behind the harmless nobody from nowhere. The article gets more and more fired up and starts erupting with sentiments I find copacetic. I like this:
Do you wanna know something about partisanship? Partisanship is good. Partisanship is the whole reason we have a democracy. I have no interest in finding common ground with fucking Trump voters or with other assorted white supremacists. I have no interest in making sure those groups don’t feel demonized. I have no interest in making them feel COMFORTABLE when they have made so many Americans, and the world beyond, feel the precise opposite. I’m allowed to be angry at the state of things and I’m sure as hell allowed to loudly call out those responsible for it. I want to vehemently oppose those people, and guess what? I live in a country where I’m free to do that. I don’t like being told I’m out of line for doing so. So you’ll excuse me if I’m not exactly inspired by some South Bend pud who has no stomach for that fight, and doesn’t want me to have it either.
Pledging to sow unity is just a pledge to people that you will do nothing, that you are a bland centrist determined to paint widely approved progressive ideas like M4A as divisive in a brazen attempt to cultivate irrational hostility toward them. THAT is being divisive. That is what Big Pharma is paying Buttigieg to do.
Mayor Pete never had my vote and isn’t going to get it. I’ll be favoring Warren in the Minnesota primary, unless my wife persuades me to back Sanders. Running dog lackeys of the capitalist ruling class do not stand a chance.
It’s Saturday, and I have to go in to work to proctor some makeup exams and finish grading this brutal exam. Sometimes it seems this profession is giving me a bad deal, but then…it’s the rare job that would let me play with spiders.
No spiders today, though. Just grinding away.
Well, maybe I’ll find a moment to peek in on a few spiders…
David Shiffman suggests that we should stop naming species after awful people, which sounds like good common sense, but those arcane taxonomic rules don’t allow for changing it.
Currently, there is no procedure under ICZN rules to change the scientific name of a species because that species is named after someone whose crimes against humanity offend the modern conscience, and the taxonomists I spoke to for this essay told me that they don’t see this changing anytime soon. This is perhaps something that we should think about; after all, “there’s no way to do this under the current rules” doesn’t mean it can’t or shouldn’t be done. At the very least, however, we should probably consider no longer naming *new* species after awful humans from this point forward.
Except…I can already see a problem with that. Awful humans may not be recognized as awful humans at the time of the naming. His own given example illustrates that problem.
At the opening of 2019’s Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists in Snowbird, local host committee co-chair Al Savitsky of Utah State University told us about a local reptile with an inglorious common name: the common small-blotched lizard. These lizards have some unusual reproductive behaviors that have attracted the interest of herpetologists, but for the purpose of this essay let’s just consider their scientific name: Uta stansburiana, named in 1852. They are named after Howard Stansbury, an explorer in the Army Corps of Engineers who led a famous expedition to study the flora and fauna of what’s now Utah and collected the type specimens of this lizard. By the standards of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, the formal scientific body involved in species names, naming a species after an explorer who collected the first specimens of a species is not only appropriate, but fairly standard. However, while Stansbury was an influential naturalist, he was also a terrible person—he was a vocal supporter of and played a key role in a locally-infamous massacre of Timpanogos Native Americans in which more than 100 were killed.
Yikes. I knew about Stansbury already — not only did he participate in the planning and execution of the massacre, he had like 50 of the dead Indians decapitated so he could ship the heads back to Washington DC for “scientific study”. He wasn’t considered awful at the time, that was just standard operating procedure for Western colonizers. You’d get a blank look then if you suggested this was not worthy behavior that merited allowing a lizard to be named after him.
Furthermore, there is a mountain range west of Salt Lake City named after him, the Stansbury mountains, and a big island on the edge of the Great Salt Lake named Stansbury Island. Geographers and geologists maybe have to take some responsibility here, too.
(It’s a very nice island, as desert islands go. Lots of lizards and scorpions and spiders. Good camping and picnicking in those mountains, too.)
One potential solution: don’t allow individual human names in scientific nomenclature at all. There was a long period where anatomists were naming organs and parts of organs and cells after other scientists, which when you think about it, is kind of squicky — who the heck was Paul Langerhans, and why are cells in my body named after him? That has definitely gone out of fashion today, and you’d be considered egotistical if you started naming body parts after your good buddies from medical school, and expected everyone else to go along with your convention.
While we’re at it, isn’t it odd to be living on some continents named after some otherwise forgotten Italian guy who made a couple of visits half a millennium ago?
Elizabeth Warren has a calculator to determine how much you’d pay in taxes under her plan. It’s disappointingly small. What are those people afraid of?
Oh, no. Just as I was looking forward to the Democrats weeding out the deadwood, another useless narcissist steps forward to enter the race: Michael Bloomberg. Ugh.
“As a former business magnate and mayor of New York City, Bloomberg has the two qualities essential to enter the presidential race at this late stage: money and name recognition,” Dr. Thomas Gift, a political scientist at University College London, told Newsweek.
Money? Seriously? How out of touch is this guy? Bloomberg is a billionaire 50 times over. The plan is to tax a big chunk of that away, and if he resists, to put his head on a pike on Wall Street, as a warning to the others. He is the antithesis of what progressives want.
As for name recognition…maybe in New York. Not out here in the “heartland”.
“For that reason, I think Bloomberg can immediately become a heavyweight in the Democratic primaries. Beyond the attention he’d garner with his announcement, there’s plenty of space for Bloomberg to position himself as a moderate voice, especially with Joe Biden’s candidacy stuck in neutral.”
Gift said Bloomberg may appeal to moderate Democrats “looking for a reasoned and pragmatic approach to policy, especially someone with a proven track-record of competence.”
“Unlike Elizabeth Warren, he also radiates electability, which is important to many Democrats who, above all else, prioritize beating Trump in the 2020 election,” Gift said.
Right. Let’s replace Trump with an obscenely wealthy New York real estate mogul. New boss, same as the old boss.
Also, when I hear the word “electability”, which is just a code word for “conservative supporter of the status quo”, I start thinking we’re going to need more pikes.
You want some really good information about hymens and virginity? The Swedish Association for Sexuality Education provides it. It’s definitely a better source than some embarrassingly bad 1980s movie romp about eager teenagers trying to lose their virginity, that’s for sure.
Virginity – what does it mean?
Discussion of virginity revolves around whether a person has ever had sex. In most people’s minds, the main question is whether or not someone has had vaginal intercourse.Virginity is a vague concept based on perceptions and myths, chiefly concerning female sexuality, that RFSU (or Scarleteen!) would not wish to endorse. For one thing, virginity is often associated with a heteronormative view of sex restricted to vaginal intercourse between man and woman (in other words, insertion of the penis into the vagina). For another, in many languages and cultures, virginity is synonymous with innocence, the opposite of which is guilt. There is no guilt involved in having sex, and no need to feel guilty about it. What’s more, such myths are used against women in particular; for instance as an excuse for spreading rumors and committing sexual assaults.
We sometimes receive questions about how to know whether or not you are a “virgin.” You are the only person who can decide that. Different people have different ideas about which sexual acts constitute a “loss of virginity.” Some people restrict it to vaginal intercourse, while others count other activities as well.
Is it possible to see or feel whether a woman has ever had sex?
No. Looking at a penis or a vagina, it’s equally impossible to tell whether that person has ever had sex. Neither a gynecologist nor a sex partner can tell whether you’ve had vaginal, oral, anal or manual sex (unless you have become pregnant or contracted a sexually transmitted infection). No one else can detect whether you’ve had sex.
Good to know. Unfortunately, now I’m torn between “Ha ha, you can’t tell if I’ve lost my virginity” and “Why the fuck should anyone care?”
Also interesting: the explanation for why humans (and other animals) have hymens in the first place.
When a female fetus is growing during pregnancy, her internal reproductive organs and her vagina develop separately from her external reproductive organs (the labia and so forth). The vagina starts out as a solid cord that runs from the body wall to the uterus. Between the fifth and seventh months of gestation, that cord slowly hollows out and turns into a tube. But it still doesn’t have an opening to the outside of the body — it ends at the body wall. Finally the body wall starts to disintegrate at the point where the vagina meets it and an opening forms in the body wall, and becomes the orifice (outlet or opening) of the vagina.
What the hymen is is whatever remains of that body wall cling to the inside of the opening of the vagina after the opening forms. It is the “leftovers” of the sheet of flesh that used to separate the internal genitals from the external ones before the vagina had an opening. The opening(s) in the center of the hymen are the entrance to the vagina.
I like to think of the hymen as a door frame mounted in a doorway that stands on the spot where “external” stops and “internal” starts. You can’t go in or out of that doorway without passing through the door frame. The hymen is exactly the same. It is part of the entrance to the vagina. Nothing can enter or exit the vagina without going through it.
Developmental byproduct theory for the win.
Someone wrote this angry, misinformed rant about the Ocean Sunfish, and it’s now spreading all over facebook. It’s kind of a good example of how ignorance can be popular, if it’s loud and nasty enough. Here’s a short sample:
They are the world’s largest boney fish, weighing up to 5,000 pounds. And since they have very little girth, that just makes them these absolutely giant fucking dinner plates that God must have accidentally dropped while washing dishes one day and shrugged his shoulders at because no one could have imagined this would happen. AND WITH NO PURPOSE. EVERY POUND OF THAT IS A WASTED POUND AND EVERY FOOT OF IT (10 FT BY 14 FT) IS WASTED SPACE.
It’s appalling. The guy who wrote it seems to know nothing about biology, or evolution, or fish in general, or this species in particular…but he could assemble an angry screed driven by his lack of knowledge and his subjective dislike of this one animal. I think he has a future working for Fox News.
Fortunately, someone who is better informed has decided to correct him. It’s a long and detailed description of sunfish biology, well worth reading. Again, just a taste:
Many, many animals suffer from public misperception and bad PR. Previously I have discussed how Komodo dragons are misrepresented as incompetent hunters by media, and how Atlantic bluefin tuna are almost entirely seen as a luxury dish and not as the endangered predator it is. But there are animals that have it even worse. These are species which are wrongly labeled as being just plain useless, and they include today’s subject: the Ocean Sunfish, or Mola (Mola mola).
In this case, it’s almost entirely due to a Facebook rant (http://brobible.com/life/article/facebook-rant-ocean-sunfish-molamola/) that went viral. It’s now almost impossible to see a post on ocean sunfish without seeing that rant posted. Posted by Scout Burns, the original rant has been taken down….but its text is everywhere on the Internet on every social media site. More than a few people actually have stated they also genuinely hate sunfish due to reading that rant, or that they will also will throw rocks at one. People have gone as far as to edit the Wikipedia page on ocean sunfish to further reflect their opinions on this species: someone added that a number of sunfish migrated to North America to vote for Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential elections.
It seems to make sense at first: how can any animal that looks like a decapitated head can be competent at surviving? But this is a gross misunderstanding of what evolution is. Evolution has no standards except reproductive fitness, and the very existence of a species is proof enough that it’s not useless.
But there are worse problems with the rant. Almost everything about that rant is wrong. Most of the information on it is actually from outdated research, or outright unsupported by anything. Yet it is taken as fact by most of the people who read it.
So, having played advocate for two animals that were either dismissed as incompetent or ignored entirely, I think it’s about time I spoke up in defence of a not-really-useless fish that looks like an amputee.
Read the rest. It’s good stuff.
This guy I never heard of before, T.I., is now famous in my head for one thing: being a revolting control freak.
Rapper and actor T.I. said in a podcast interview that aired Tuesday that he goes to the gynecologist every year with his daughter to “check her hymen” and make sure it’s “still intact.”
In an interview with Nazanin Mandi and Nadia Moham on Ladies Like Us, T.I. talked about his parenting style, among other topics. When asked about whether he’s had the “sex talk” with his daughters, he pointed to his approach with his eldest daughter, 18-year-old Deyjah Harris, who’s in her first year of college.
“Not only have we had the conversation — we have yearly trips to the gynecologist to check her hymen,” T.I. said. “Yes, I go with her.”
He then mentioned that after her 16th birthday party, he “put a sticky note on the door: ‘Gyno. Tomorrow. 9:30.'”
“So we’ll go and sit down and the doctor comes and talk, and the doctor’s maintaining a high level of professionalism,” T.I. said. “He’s like, ‘You know, sir, I have to, in order to share information’ — I’m like, ‘Deyjah, they want you to sign this so we can share information. Is there anything you would not want me to know? See, Doc? Ain’t no problem.'”
T.I. also noted that he was informed the hymen can be broken in ways other than through sexual penetration. “And so then they come and say, ‘Well, I just want you to know that there are other ways besides sex that the hymen can be broken like bike riding, athletics, horseback riding, and just other forms of athletic physical activity,'” he said. “So I say, ‘Look, Doc, she don’t ride no horses, she don’t ride no bike, she don’t play no sports. Just check the hymen, please, and give me back my results expeditiously.'”
Then he added, “I will say, as of her 18th birthday, her hymen is still intact.”
Why does he care? What would he do if the doctor came back and said her hymen was broken? A child is not your possession to be controlled — kids are independent human beings whose lives are a process of moving away from you. A 16 year old or an 18 year old may not be fully adult yet, but they are not your servants, either.
And virginity…does he have any sons? Would he be as controlling over them as he is with his daughters? The worth of his children does not lie in a wisp of a membrane, and he is fucked up in the head to think it is.
There is also something wrong with his story. I have responsibilities to maintain the privacy of young people, too: my students’ grades, for instance, are confidential, and it doesn’t matter if their parents are paying their tuition or not, I do not give them away. I’ve had parents show up in my office with their son, and tell me he has given me permission to tell them how he is doing, and I’ve said, “I’ll talk it over with him privately, and he can choose to reveal it to you.” That’s the only way I would handle it.
Doctors have even more serious privacy concerns. I find it hard to believe a responsible doctor would fold over an obnoxious parent, and more likely would just tell the ass what he wanted to hear. His daughter’s vagina is hers, not his.
I hope this is the last I ever hear of T.I.
