One of my students had to mention that we only have 13 days until classes start again.
I am not ready.
Next week, I have to get my syllabi ready and figure out this brand new courseware they’re forcing us to switch to, at the same time when my granddaughter Iliana is visiting. This is going to be impossible. Unless Ily is ready to help? She’s what, 10 months old?
Yeah, she’s ready. Looks eager, even. I’m sure she can hammer out a syllabus in no time.
I’m still crunching numbers (heck, I’m still entering numbers and trying to sort out the analysis) of our summer spider survey, but this is actually a pretty low estimate of the numbers we’ve seen in garages.
<NdGT>But this doesn’t take into account the degree of variation, and that numbers in a clean home with few bugs will be significantly lower.</NdGT>
Over the last few days, I watched The Family on Netflix, a five part series on this shadow cabal of fanatical Christians bent on shaping the American government. It’s horrifying. But then, I read the book, also horrifying.
It’s a kind of understated horror, though — it’s not sensationalist at all, and that might be a flaw in the documentary. These people march through the halls of power, and all they do is say Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. They say nice things about the power of Christ, but they don’t push the Bible or fundamentalism, but only constantly invoke the name of Jesus to authorize their use of power…for anything. There are these interviews and recordings of smug, confident people asserting with unshakeable certainty that Jesus wants them to do the things that they do, and the evidence that they are exercising Jesus’ will is that they have power. Power itself is proof that God wants them to use that power.
There are little hiccups in their philosophy, like John Ensign, the former Senator who thought his title meant he could cheat on his wife and use his position for a coverup, or Mark Sanford, the South Carolina governor who made “hiking the Appalachian trail” a synonym for having an affair. It’s funny how the personal peccadillos get them in trouble, but they apply the same attitude to everything, including acts of corruption and sedition. The laws don’t apply to them, because Jesus.
It’s a documentary that is also rather frustrating as an atheist, because it never engages with the lie at the heart of the Family. They don’t know Jesus. Jesus is not talking to them. Jesus is dead, and the godly prophet they imagine is a fiction. In a few places it tries to rebut the Holy Certainty of the Family by arguing that Jesus wasn’t that bad guy, that he also wanted to help the poor, for instance, but that kindly Jesus is also only in your imagination and is also another example of Holy Certainty.
You can use Jesus to argue for whatever you want, he’s never going to speak up and tell you you’re wrong. The only way to win that debate is to never engage in it — every time Jesus is your backup, it’s just your id and predispositions speaking, and don’t allow them to pretend otherwise.
The Jesus thing is also never ending. I hope our next president is someone who can say “no” to the National Prayer Breakfast, a creation of the Family, but I doubt that even the candidates I like will be willing to do that.
This is a drone video shot in the UP of a lovely lake scene, some kayakers, and…HOLY CRAP THE CLIFF JUST COLLAPSED.
So…don’t go kayaking near the base of a cliff, it might fall on you. Don’t go hiking along the edge of a cliff, it might fall under you. Don’t go near cliffs, period, they’re evil. The midwest gets mocked a lot for being boring, but at least it’s mostly flat.
They’d be sending palp pics.
Swipe left or swipe right?
We have so many egg sacs in the lab right now. 800 spiderlings is a low estimate.
Myke Cole dissects the weird phenomenon of laconophilia, or Sparta worship. There’s something about it that has fascinated men for centuries — the whole fiercely macho, iron man myth keeps going and going, despite the fact that it is actually that, a myth.
The Spartans, popular wisdom tells us, were history’s greatest warriors; in fact, they lost battles frequently and decisively. We are told they dominated Greece; they barely managed to scrape a victory in the Peloponnesian Wars with wagonloads of Persian gold, and then squandered their hegemony in a single year. We hear they murdered weak or deformed children, though one of their most famous kings had a club foot. They preferred death to surrender, as the legend of the Battle of Thermopylae is supposed to show—even though 120 of them surrendered to the Athenians at Sphacteria in 425 B.C.E. They purportedly eschewed decadent wealth and luxury, even though rampant inequality contributed to oliganthropia, the manpower shortage that eventually collapsed Spartan military might. They are assumed to have scorned personal glory and lived only for service to the city-state, despite the fact that famous Spartans commissioned poetry, statues, and even festivals in their own honor and deliberately built cults of personality. They all went through the brutal agōgē regimen of warrior training, starting from age seven—but the kings who led their armies almost never endured this trial. They are remembered for keeping Greece free from foreign influence, but in fact they allied with, and took money from, the very Persians they fought at Thermopylae.
I’ve actually used a short clip from the opening of that comically over-the-top movie, 300, in introductory biology classes when discussing the flaws of eugenics. You know the one, the bit about how they culled the weak, shown with a mountain of infant skulls, and sending young boys off to fight unrealistically gigantic wolves with a stick. It’s a horrible way to run a society, and isn’t going to “improve the stock” in the way they imagine it. Spartan culture doesn’t seem to have survived very well, and has left to us only these destructive myths. Really destructive myths.
For much of this time, laconophilia was a relatively benign ahistorical myth, but Spartan admiration unmistakably turned malignant in the late-nineteenth century with the advent of scientific racism. German scholar Karl Müller included in his influential Geschichten hellenischen Stämme und Städte a history of the Dorian race responsible for founding classical Sparta. Müller’s work lionized the invaders’ Northern origins, which dovetailed into the early evolution of Nordicism, the pseudo-anthropological notion of a Nordic master race that would become a cornerstone of Nazi ideology. Müller was hardly alone, and European thinking about inherent inequality and Nordic superiority was already maturing in the fevered minds of thinkers like the French aristocrat Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, whose writings influenced the famous composer and German nationalist icon Richard Wagner. It is not surprising that Adolf Hitler saw in Sparta “the first völkisch state” and gushed about the ancient city-state’s legendary eugenics: “The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short, their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more human than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject.”
The only “wretched insanity of our day” we have to worry about is the fascism Hitler endorsed, and the toxic masculinity celebrated in all of this Spartan nonsense. Pathological cultures, like Sparta, might capture the imagination, but they don’t last.
HJ Hornbeck succinctly summarizes the catastrophic collapse of the credibility of the Atheist Community of Austin. It’s rather shocking — at this time last year, if you’d asked me, I would have said the ACA was the perfect model of a dynamic, progressive, activist atheism group, largely because of the excellent people they had representing it. Now most of those people are out, a rather nasty subculture has taken over, and their reputation is in shambles. It’s just a shame. Matt Dillahunty worked his butt off helping to build that and become a full-time professional atheist, which I’ve come to conclude is a terrible aspiration for anyone, and now he’s an example of how not to run an organization. I wonder if debating terrible people like Jordan Peterson is going to continue to put food on the table for him — he might want to consider alternative careers.
What’s also sad about it is that overall, any kind of organized skepticism/atheism is on the decline. There are fewer meetings, attendance is down, and part of the reason for that is that any time someone sets themselves up as a Thought Leader, we know they’re going to fall and fall hard. We’re not going to have the equivalent of megachurches because authority must always be challenged, and human individuals are intrinsically imperfect. Humans also tend to overreach and grasp for more authority than they can handle. Organized religion seems to be fine with that, but organized atheism has a tendency to splinter.
It doesn’t have to be that way. I just got back from Skepticon, a skeptic/atheist conference that, rather than focusing on one hero of the movement, always strives for diversity and bringing in new speakers and new ideas, which undermines the trap of the cult of personality. It celebrates a community, as the ACA used to do. There’s no figurehead, there’s a team of hardworking organizers, but they’re not the people the content of the conference revolves around, and that’s good. It’s a separation of powers that keeps the institution strong.
That philosophy that everyone matters and that it’s the attendees that makes the conference means that everyone who goes comes away with the warm fuzzies and a sense of anticipation for next year. Attendance may have its ups and downs, but somehow, they keep pulling it off, and everyone walks away happy (well, except for the horrible people who want to sue it out of existence; there’s always that asshole).
The ACA could have been a similarly joyful organization, but it has ground to a halt now, and is never going to have the sterling reputation it once possessed…and is probably going to accelerate its own destruction.
Isn’t this a lovely example of a catastrophic threshold effect? Humans produce excess carbon in the atmosphere, warming the planet; warming the planet dries out gigantic swathes of peat in the arctic, which catches fire and releases more carbon into the atmosphere. The Earth has all these colossal reservoirs of sequestered carbon, and we burn through one, the buried fossil fuels, and it unlocks all the others, such as the peat bogs.
The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, leading to the desiccation of vegetation, which fuels huge blazes. Fortunately for us, these wildfires typically threaten remote, sparsely populated areas. But unfortunately for the whole of humanity, so far this year Arctic fires have released some 121 megatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, more than what Belgium emits annually. That beats the previous Arctic record of 110 megatonnes of CO2, set in 2004—and we’re only in June.
Yes, that article is from June, and being late in paying attention to it by a mere two months feels like I’m disgracefully tardy. We’re talking about climate events on a planetary scale, and they’re moving so fast that we need to be talking on a time scale of months. Usually, scientists and science reporters are telling you that geology moves incredibly slowly, but humans have effectively goosed the planet into bringing change so fast that we’re seeing it in a fraction of a lifetime.
These fires are largely happening where few people live, so we don’t see the effects directly. Aren’t we fortunate that we have satellites that let us see what destruction we have wrought?
All those fires are producing clouds of soot that darken the arctic ice, absorbing heat from the sun and increasing warming and melting. These are “some of the biggest fires on the planet”, and I don’t think anyone is going to put them out.
Meanwhile, back in the American fantasyland, we have a leadership that is denying that climate change is occurring, or that it’s entirely natural, or part of a normal cycle, and besides, even if it is happening, it would hurt the economy to do anything about it. Someone ought to explain to them that gradual change can lead to a crisis point and catastrophe…and that can happen in politics, too. There are fires smoldering everywhere.
I was not looking forward to today — we have these swarms of spiders hatching out, and we have to do something with them all. They’re in cramped little petri dishes, an entire clutch together, which is fine early on, since they naturally aggregate after first emerging from the egg sac, and then a few days later start ballooning and dispersing by wafting away on the wind. “Wafting away on the wind” isn’t a great strategy for maintaining a laboratory colony, though. Last year I would pluck them out one by one and put them in tiny individual containers, which is ridiculously labor intensive, and then feed them flies individually, even worse, and that wasn’t going to work at all with the numbers we’re dealing with. Especially since fall term starts way too soon, and students are going to be occupied with mere classes.
So my student Maya is doing a simple experiment to see the effects of population density on juvenile mortality. We didn’t put the spiderlings in individual containers, but in two different sizes of containers in different numbers. We opened up the petri dishes of spiderlings and counted out individuals into larger containers.
It was amusing and different. The spiders, as soon as the lid was off, saw freedom awaiting them and would put out a thread to start ballooning. We’d gently sweep in with a paintbrush and snag them, move the brush over their new container, and give a little shake — sometimes they’d oblige by neatly rappelling down, sometimes they’d jump off, sometimes they’d get obstinate and you’d have to dab the brush against the container to convince them to move. Meanwhile, while you were distracted, more spiderlings were launching themselves skyward. More than a few escaped. More than a few, I’m sure, snugged themselves down in our clothing. It’s all good.
(Oops, just found one in my shirt sleeve. Now my office has some new residents.)
The end result is that we now have a known number of spiders in known volumes of space. We’ll track survival every few days to see how they fare. Once they get larger, we’ll spread them out a little more, but currently we find that the adults coexist nicely with two in a 5.7L container, so we’re hoping that the babies won’t fight and cannibalize each other at a somewhat higher density.
(Just found another baby under my shirt collar.)
