There’s a Jeremy Renner app? Why?

I am mystified. There’s an app you can download that will keep you up to date on all your Jeremy Renner news, which is a thing, I guess. Not a very interesting thing, I’ll admit, but apparently there’s all this drama on it, with users getting upset at censorship, which is the only unsurprising detail about it.

It made me wonder, though: is there any celebrity in the world for whom I would find an app interesting and worth downloading? You know, something where I could check in on a whim and see what they had for lunch, what they were watching on TV, how work was going, that sort of thing? And I realized…no, no one. Not the Queen of the UK, not Donald Trump, not even (or especially) people I actually like and respect. I seem to lack the hero worship “gene”.

Apparently, though, this is the core of the Instagram “influencers” phenomena — people who become celebrities by carefully grooming their appearance in photographs and cultivating mobs of people who regularly check in to see what a Kardashian is doing. It’s fine if that’s your deal, but I just find it weird and unrelatable, and I suspect there are a lot of people out there who similarly find it bizarre. But the difference is that we therefore do not aggregate and push up the popularity of certain individuals beyond reason, so all you see when you get a peek at the media landscape is the few who have been elevated by a minority of follower-types.

So, who would you follow obsessively? Anyone? No one? I do follow my grandchildren on Facebook Messenger and Instagram, because their parents post lots of photos of growing babies, but I can’t imagine caring what party some superstar model went to last night, or what they wore. Am I really missing out?

And Jeremy Renner? How strange and trivial is that? This tendency of humans to develop cults of personality is worrying.

Breaking news! The Jeremy Renner app has been shut down! Follow every detail of the tragedy by googling “Jeremy Renner” at least once an hour.

Science, why you gotta do me like this?

“It would be cool to map the appearance of a pigment pattern,” I said. “Just photograph spider abdomens over development,” I said. “It’ll be easy,” I said. “Just do it!” I said.

So I took these Steatoda triangulosa embryos that emerged from their egg sac yesterday, and I sat down at my microscope and configured my camera to a useful and consistent setting (with a little tinkering, I found I could get decent photos at f/4, 1/80th of a second, ISO 3200 (!), at 64x on my Wild dissecting scope), lined up the containers with the spiderlings next to me, and thought I’d just march through and snap photos of the dorsal surface of the abdomen. Then I’d repeat this procedure every couple of days, and at the end of it all I’d have photographic series of pigmentation changes over time in a developing set of spiders. Simple! Except…reality intrudes.

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A meme is born

Karl Rove once said this.

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

And now…Donald Trump is making that attitude manifest in so many ways.

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But…but…that’s the whole goddamn problem!

MIT is struggling with the disclosure that one of their star professors, Joi Ito, accepted a heck of a lot of money from the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. So, at one of their meetings, Nicholasa Negroponte decided to “help”.

Throughout, the meeting had proceeded calmly. But as one of the organizers began to wrap things up, Negroponte stood up, unprompted, and began to speak. He discussed his privilege as a “rich white man” and how he had used that privilege to break into the social circles of billionaires. It was these connections, he said, that had allowed the Media Lab to be the only place at MIT that could afford to charge no tuition, pay people full salaries, and allow researchers to keep their intellectual property.

Negroponte said that he prided himself on knowing over 80% of the billionaires in the US on a first-name basis, and that through these circles he had come to spend time with Epstein. Over the years, he had two dinners and one ride in Epstein’s private jet alone, where they spoke passionately about science. (He didn’t say whether these occurred before or after Epstein’s 2008 conviction.) It was these interactions, he said, that warmed him to Epstein and made him confidently and enthusiastically recommend that Ito take the money.

It was at this point that Negroponte said he would still have given Ito the same advice today. Different people in attendance had conflicting interpretations of his statement. Some understood him to mean he would act the same way even knowing what he knows now about Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking. But Negroponte told the Boston Globe that in retrospect, “Yes, we are embarrassed and regret taking his money.”

Oh my god. Stop shooting yourself in the foot.

Negroponte has all these privileges. MIT is a good university with an excess of wealth and privilege. Isn’t it nice that he hangs out with capitalist looters? Shouldn’t all our science and education be funded by making friends with rich criminals? Yeah, let’s all cozy up to perverts and bankers and stock market speculators and hope they shower us with gold. Money is magic! It doesn’t matter where it comes from!

Some in the audience were shocked and horrified, the ones with some awareness and social consciousness. Negroponte just got up and admitted that all the great things that benefited all the lucky people at MIT were the product of unclean hands, and that he’d happily take any money from anyone, no matter how they acquired it.

I guess ethics isn’t one of the scholarly disciplines MIT is known for.

Biased sources, motivated reasoning, and blithe assumptions: the TERF story

This is quite possibly one of the more horrifying sentences I’ve read online lately.

Since my recent lunch with my friend Graham Linehan, I have been learning more about the issues of biological sex and socially-constructed gender.

Graham Linehan is, of course, a notorious TERF with an infamous reputation in the trans community. He is precisely the wrong person to give you an introduction to trans issues, and he doesn’t have any particular qualifications in either biology or sociology.

Now to compound the horror: the author if this ominous sentence is Michael Nugent, who proceeds to spew out thousands of words of centrist rubbish that ultimately all comes down on the side the TERFs. There ought to be segregated bathrooms for “biological women”, sports ought to be segregated for “biological women”, the “idea of socially constructed gender…reinforces false and harmful social stereotypes about sex”, etc., and he concludes with flattering words of praise for his personal friend, Graham Linehan, who is most definitely not a bigot.

I am not going to address most of it, because I think the perspective most needed here would be that of actual trans people, not another cis het man. It is intrinsically offensive that a couple of guys would meet for lunch and decide what should be done about the LGBTQs, and another guy chiming in doesn’t help matters. I will say that I, as a biologist, categorically reject his blatherings about “biological sex” and reinforcement of the binary myth.

Here’s the problem: yes, you can identify single parameters that allow one to sort of, roughly, split people into two boxes of your definition, male and female. You can declare that possession of a penis makes one male, and lack of one, female. Fine; we can sweep the rare intersexes under the rug (sorry, intersex individuals, I’m just saying where this approach leads us). Or we can say it’s the possession of a Y chromosome; you either have one or you don’t, therefore, we triumphantly crow, sex is clearly binary! (again, ignoring any complicating genetics). Or it’s testosterone levels. Or it’s thickness of the skull bones. Or it’s muscularity. Or it’s testicles. Or it’s subcutaneous fat distribution. Or it’s laryngeal cartilages. Or digit length. Or it’s…you get the idea. Sexual characters are complicated and diverse, and you can only maintain the illusion of a gender binary if you have tightly focused tunnel vision and demand that your two categories are defined by a single parameter. As you add more, as you recognize intermediate states, it all becomes a continuum, a regular smear where every individual has a different combination of attributes.

You can either recognize that every individual is unique and doesn’t neatly fit into your binary assumptions, or you can go reactionary and insist that your two boxes are real and everyone must go into one or the other, ignoring the fact that you’ve already got a heck of a lot of boxes and insisting that there are only two is delusional.

Here’s a good thread by @transadvocate that discusses the continuum — and the fact that feminists have been saying that this is the reality of sex and gender for a long time (the book mentioned looks very interesting, but they don’t give a specific citation — anyone know it?)

I know what “biological sex” is. If I go into the lab and want experimental animals to produce embryos for my research, I will identify a male with the capacity to produce sperm and a female with the capacity to produce eggs, and put them together and hope they procreate (they don’t always do so, because even animals vary in these primitive functions). This is the only sense in which “biological sex” is meaningful. In our fellow human beings, though, and also in our experimental animals if truth be told, “sex” is far more varied and complicated in its meanings, and insisting that people must fit into one reproductive role or another is crudely reductionist and grossly inappropriate. When you announce that I am a “biological male”, you are defining me by a biological function that I performed only three times in my entire life, and I think maybe I’ve done a few other things in my 62 years. So has everyone. Many people live their entire productive, happy, interesting lives without ever reproducing biologically. I guess if the TERFs have their way, that would mean they are biologically sexless.

Here’s another quote from the TERF conflicts in the 1970s, posted by @transadvocate. I like it.

You are not the box a repressive society wants to put you in. Biology is not destiny. Be free.

Three words: “I was mistaken”

Donald Trump said that Alabama was at risk from Hurricane Dorian. It wasn’t. The weather service had never said it was. He was told that was incorrect.

So he or his staff whipped out a sharpie to add a line to a weather map, and the White House put out a video of Trump pointing to a fake map to “prove” he wasn’t wrong. That is so pathetic.

He can’t even say, “I was mistaken”.

Should I feel sorry for the grim flunky in the background who had the job of handing him the edited map?

My children will be heartbroken

I have just learned that there is no legal way to leave my skull to my children.

Even if you exploit fuzzy legal arguments in your quest to get your hands on Dad’s skull, you’re still going to run into a big problem: There is currently no way in the United States to skeletonize human remains for private ownership. For the most part, skeletonization happens only when a body is donated to scientific research. Even this isn’t explicitly legal; authorities just tend to look the other way for museums and universities. But under no circumstances can you just skeletonize your dad and display his head among the decorative gourds in the Thanksgiving centerpiece.

Well, you know, if you just do nothing at all, it will eventually be defleshed. You’ll just have to live with a rotting head for a while.

It’s just as well. I only have one skull, and three children, and I wouldn’t want to inspire the kind of vicious familial in-fighting that would occur as each desperately tried to seize the goods.

Last minute rush to win the Worst Movie of 2014

It’s got Kevin Sorbo in it — there’s a man whose career has taken a swan dive into the black pit of stupid suckiness. It’s about a world in which gun rights are limited…which means everyone is blasting away with guns and everything is blowing up. Antifa are the armed and dangerous bad guys. Behold, The Reliant.

Best part: don’t blink or you’ll miss it. It’s only showing for one day, 24 October, before it vanishes into far right wing church basements, rather like Eric Hovind’s crappy Genesis movie, that only had a limited release and they actually had to lease theaters to get it shown.

Sad. I remember watching Hercules with the kids and enjoying it as campy fun. Who knew he was a soggy-brained twit back then?

Steatoda triangulosa!

I said I was going to tend to my shiny newborn Steatoda triangulosa today. It didn’t take as long as I expected. Here’s the vial of my freshly emerged spiderlings; the egg sac is the foamy looking bubble at the bottom, attached to the yellow plug on the vial, and the little dots are the babies.

There were only nine spiderlings from that egg sac. It was a bit of a surprise, since when a Parasteatoda egg sac pops, I easily get over a hundred spiderlings. It makes me wonder how well S. triangulosa does in the wild — I can tell you from our summer survey that they were the rarest of the false widows we found, with even S. borealis far more numerous, and they were a distant second to Parasteatoda. Now I’m curious about what niche they fill in the local spider ecosystem.

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Chemistry and triangulosa

Work is heating up as it always does in the first few weeks of classes. Today and Friday I’m blitzing through a basic chemistry review in cell biology, because…biology is all chemistry. A very narrow and specific domain of chemistry, sure, but if you don’t understand how electrons flow you’re getting nowhere in cell biology. Yesterday was spent re-reading a lot of introductory chemistry stuff to remind me of how this all works, today I lay it all out for the students, who might be bored, but still a bunch of them will mess up on the easy chemistry questions in the first exam.

It always shocks incoming students who think biology is all frog dissections and memorizing organs. Nope, all chemistry, and in order to get the chemistry, you need to know the math. So all you high school kids thinking it would be neat to major in biology and play with spiders, buckle down and learn your basic algebra and pre-calc, at the least, and work through chemistry and physics.

Then I have some lab stuff to do. Today I’m going to focus on our Steatoda triangulosa. We’ve got a few young second generation juveniles coming up that I need to sort into larger quarters, and another egg sac that is full of baby spiders. The cool thing about S. triangulosa, besides the pretty pigment patterns, is that their egg sacs are fluffy, loosely woven silk and are semi-transparent, so you can see the eggs right through them, and right now I peek in and it’s a mass of writhing spider legs, so they’re about to emerge, I’m sure. The less cool thing about them is that they seem to be slower to develop, and for at least the one mama I’ve got in the lab, lay a smaller number of eggs. I might have to go hunt down some more adults so I have a larger sample before the frost hits.

Anyway, I’ll take pictures! I think I’ll post a purely S. triangulosa article later today.

But first, chemistry! That’s my day sorted.