Why the Ocean Sunfish is a magnificent beast

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.

Virginity is a scam

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.

How about if we take all the billionaires’ money?

I think it’s a rule that all rich people have to have their “let them eat cake” moment before they’re trundled away to the guillotine. Here’s Bill Gates’ moment.

Speaking at a forum in New York with New York Times writer Andrew Ross Sorkin, Microsoft founder Bill Gates came off as far from enthusiastic about Warren 2020. Speaking about the wealth tax, Gates said there’s a limit to what he would be willing to pay.

“If I had to pay $20 billion, it’s fine,” Gates said. “But when you say I should pay $100 billion, then I’m starting to do a little math about what I have left over.”

Let’s do a little math — very little math. Bill Gates has money worth $107 billion. Take away $100 billion, that’s … $7 billion left over. Oh, how will he live on a mere $7 billion? If he were to live another 70 years, that would leave him with only $100 million dollars a year to live on! How could he possibly stretch his budget to survive on that pittance?

What he’d really lose his unwarranted clout. He loves having that power and influence, able to lecture people on education policy and economics, despite being a college dropout from a wealthy family who made his money by luck and ruthless capitalism.

Elizabeth Warren has already responded to reassure him that her wealth tax wouldn’t cost him anywhere near $100 billion. I’m disappointed in her. Why not? Go ahead, take 99% of the money Gates didn’t earn.

Gates isn’t done, though. He’s got another foot to stuff in his mouth.

Then, Sorkin posed a scenario which, for the moment, is a hypothetical — albeit one which appears to have more of a chance of happening by the day. The Times writer asked Gates who he would back in a general election: Warren or President Donald Trump.

And despite being a vocal Trump critic in the past, Gates would not commit to supporting Warren to defeat the president.

Good god. He’s so selfish about his absurd excess of wealth that he’d consider supporting an incompetent, treacherous buffoon for the presidency, rather than getting taxed 6%? I was considering wheeling the guillotine away and just confiscating his ill-gotten riches, but now, sorry, guillotine is back in play.

You want more fun? Here’s a billionaire hedge fund manager, the classic capitalist parasite, breaking down in tears at the thought of the government deciding how to distribute his money, skimmed off the labor of workers. He was planning to leave half of it to his kids, who had done even less to earn it.

That guy, Leon Cooperman, seriously believes he worked hard enough to earn $3 billion. Let’s disillusion him.

Seriously, billionaires weeping at the thought of a Warren presidency is the best advertisement for her ever. I think Sanders would make them cry just as hard. Let’s get one of those two into office!

By the way, did you know that after retiring, despite his carefully calibrated charitable donations, Bill Gates’ net worth has been going up? Somehow, he manages to dole out money to his own foundations in such a way that none of it actually costs him anything, while claiming to be a generous philanthropist.

Here’s some more fun with math.

Gates has to know this, or he’s even less deserving of his wealth than I thought.

I am giving an exam today

You know what that means, boys and girls? A sudden flood of email from students letting me know they are sick today, or have some other major conflict, and can I please take it on Friday, and gosh I’m sorry. And I get so mad.

Because I want to write back to them and tell them to never ever feel bad for being sick or stressed. I’m not here to make anyone miserable or force them learn stuff while I hold a whip over their head, and if you tell me you’re struggling or have encountered unavoidable problems, my job is to say OK…what can I do to help you get through this? If it just means giving you a few days to overcome, I’ll always say yes. Just do it. Don’t apologize.

Now we are working within a system here, and that system says I have to evaluate you and say something about how well you’ve mastered the material in the course. I also know that I have to incentivize keeping everyone focused and working steadily to keep up with the material, because last-minute cramming is a terrible way to learn, but ultimately all I care about is that you know it all well enough to be competent in the next course in the curriculum, and that you at some point graduate with broad knowledge of biology. That’s my goal! Making you take an exam while sick is not part of that.

Some people do have this idea that I’m supposed to train you in servility and fitting into capitalism with bosses telling you what to do. I’m not a boss. That’s not my vision of the teacher-student relationship. If I’m told I’m doing students no favor for their future in the workplace by cutting them some slack, that isn’t telling me I need to change — it says we need to change the world.

So get better and go do that.

In case you’re wondering where all the spiders go in the winter…

Easy. They’re in my house.

It’s been consistently cool out here in Minnesota — temperatures have been right around 0°C, we’ve had a little light rain, a little snow. It’s not a happy time for spiders outdoors, and not at all good for their prey. The mosquitos are mostly dead! I see an occasional fly, but mostly the local arthropods are busy diapausing or retired to refugia or migrating away, while some are in their larval stages hiding away in lakes and streams. It’s not easy being a spider right now.

Mary of the piercing eyes spotted these little ones spinning away in out of the way places in our kitchen, though. They’re tiny, little more than dots, but they’d put up barely visible webs under a windowsill, possibly hoping to catch the rare fruit fly from the produce we keep on the counter. I had to zoom in with my camera lens to recognize them, and yes, they’re Parasteatoda.

They’re lucky, now they get to go into my lab where they’ll get a more reliable diet.

P.S. They’re not all in my house. There are some hanging out in your house, too.

Phillip Johnson is dead

The last time I talked about Phillip Johnson it was to say I am honestly happy that Phillip Johnson is still alive — I wanted him to witness the ignominious decline of his baby, Intelligent Design creationism, and live to suffer with it’s irrelevancy and routine rejection and abysmal failure to challenge science at all. I said then:

I make no bones about the fact that I consider Johnson to be an intellectual criminal.

The reason is simple: Jason Rosenhouse is right. Intelligent Design is dead. I want Johnson to suffer the pain and frustration of knowing that he has wasted his life, and that he’ll be remembered as a failure.

His book was a cobbled together hodge-podge of specious reasoning, using legal logic to raise unwarranted doubts over concepts he couldn’t understand. He was no scientist; neither are his followers. He was a pettifogging lawyer coming off a divorce and a midlife crisis who tried to find redemption by lying for Jesus. It didn’t work.

I guess, then, I should now be sad that Johnson has joined his movement. Phillip Johnson is dead, but I’m not. I don’t care. He died as Intelligent Design did, barely remarked, recognized mainly by his cult sympathizers and the people who fought against his nonsense. We’ll just remember, as Larry Moran said, that Johnson was the very best of the Intelligent Design creationists.

There are no victories

There were elections yesterday, and the results were encouraging. Virginia flipped their state senate, and is now a Democratic majority state. Kentucky threw out their lickspittle Republican governor. This is all good news.

I’m seeing lots of happy liberals and leftists gleefully declaring that McConnell must be pissing his pants, Trump must be trembling in fear, Republicans must be dreading next year’s election. I just want to say…no, they’re not. We’re the ones who should be worried.

McConnell isn’t afraid. He’s scheming right now: what laws can he abuse, what palms can he grease, what arms can he twist, what rats need fucking, to make sure there is no November 2019 repeat in 2020. Trump is less subtle. He’s angry and is thinking about what minorities he can slander, what country he can attack, and who will be his scapegoat. He’s going to lash out and it’s going to get ugly.

Remember, when fighting sewer rats, backing them into a corner doesn’t mean it’s all smooth sailing to victory now.

Meet a few of my Texas gals

This morning I set up some housing for a few of my new Texas imports, moving them out of their cramped vials and into big roomy spaces with cardboard frames. As usual, they were a bit frantic and were scurrying all over the place at first — I found the easiest way to shift them was to let them come out onto my hand, and then hold them gently over their new digs, and often they’d just drop a dragline and rappel down into their new home, and if they didn’t, a gentle nudge with a paintbrush would send them on their way.

They’re still a little bit stressed. After running around in circles for a bit, they found a comfy corner of the frame and just hunkered down and refused to move further. I left them a few flies and then took some photos before leaving them alone to settle in. I assume they’ll saturate the space with webbing and then hang somewhere comfortable, but that’ll take a few days.

Here are a few photos of them sullenly occupying a corner. They are all Steatoda triangulosa.

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