Odd geek out

Uh-oh. I just got a look at the workshop schedule for Skepticon, and there I am, up against a 2 hour block from American Atheists, and at the same time as Callie Wright. Callie Wright! I know where everyone is going to be. I want to go to their session on podcasting. If no one shows up for mine, can I just go next door?

Also, I seem to be the only person doing anything vaguely sciencey this coming weekend. I’m feeling awkward and out of place. I hope no one laughs at me.

12:00 pm – 2:00 pm
Stories to Tell: Breaking Barriers and Building Bridges by Putting a Human Face on Atheism
Nick Fish, American Atheists track

Perhaps the most important goal of the Atheist community is to take away the negative connotations associated with the word Atheist. Nick shares some of his experiences and offers tips as to help us get past the label to see the people behind it.
Colonnade A

1:00 pm – 2:00 pm
Understanding Phylogenetics
PZ Myers

What’s a phylogenetic tree, and why do they keep changing on us? Come build a phylogenetic tree from evidence (with help!) and learn how it’s done.
Colonnade C

1:00 pm – 2:00 pm
How to Make Your Podcast AWESOME
Callie Wright, Secular Women Work track

Anyone can put together a mediocre podcast these days, and lots of people do. Come find out what you can do to make your podcast stand out and be a joy to listen to.
Colonnade B

It’s OK if you’re going to Skepticon and choose to skip my workshop. I’ll understand completely.

It’s Argiope Day!

Over on the iNaturalist site for Spiders of Minnesota, we’ve been tasked with finding Argiope. I hadn’t seen any in Minnesota before (and I’ve been living here for almost 20 years), but as usual, once you start looking, and once you see a few, suddenly their presence just leaps out at you. We found a bunch of them today!

These are among the biggest spiders in Minnesota, and the first one I found, the pictures weren’t so great. I’m used to itty-bitty little beasties, so I’ve got multiple extension tubes in my camera, and all I got were EXXXTREME closeups. Today I popped out most of those tubes. These guys really are monstrous huge, and vividly colored. Once I tweaked my camera, they were also easy to photograph.

We found them in the unmowed drainage ditches all along the highway through town. Well, honestly, Mary found them — she spotted the first, I moved in with the camera, totally focused on the specimen, and she had to yell at me that I was about to walk into another one. She was keying in on the stabilimenta, the thickened zig-zag bands that form a line in the webs, and once she spotted one, she was seeing them all over the place. It got to the point that she’d say “one here, one here, another one here” and point and I’d just go where she commanded.

I’ve put a little gallery below the fold. Get out into nature and open your eyes!

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A few radical proposals

The traditional sacred American ritual was performed in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio this weekend. I’m beginning to suspect that there’s some bloody Cabin in the Woods scenario being played out — to appease the blood gods spawned by the evil establishment of European hegemony in America, there must be a regular sacrifice of the innocent, and those gods are getting hungrier.

In any given week in America, you can watch as a different ritual of childhood plays itself out. Perhaps it will be in El Paso, at a shopping mall; or in Gilroy, at a food festival; or in Denver, at a school. Having heard gunshots, and been lucky enough to survive, children emerge to be shepherded to safety by their parents, their teachers, or heavily-armed police officers. They are always frightened. Some will be crying. But almost all of them know what is happening to them, and what to do. Mass shootings are by now a standard part of American life. Preparing for them has become a ritual of childhood. It’s as American as Monday Night Football, and very nearly as frequent.

The United States has institutionalized the mass shooting in a way that Durkheim would immediately recognize. As I discovered to my shock when my own children started school in North Carolina some years ago, preparation for a shooting is a part of our children’s lives as soon as they enter kindergarten. The ritual of a Killing Day is known to all adults. It is taught to children first in outline only, and then gradually in more detail as they get older. The lockdown drill is its Mass. The language of “Active shooters”, “Safe corners”, and “Shelter in place” is its liturgy. “Run, Hide, Fight” is its creed. Security consultants and credential-dispensing experts are its clergy. My son and daughter have been institutionally readied to be shot dead as surely as I, at their age, was readied by my school to receive my first communion. They practice their movements. They are taught how to hold themselves; who to defer to; what to say to their parents; how to hold their hands. The only real difference is that there is a lottery for participation. Most will only prepare. But each week, a chosen few will fully consummate the process, and be killed.

A fundamental lesson of Sociology is that, in the course of making everyday life seem orderly and sensible, arbitrary things are made to seem natural and inevitable. Rituals, especially the rituals of childhood, are a powerful way to naturalize arbitrary things. As a child in Ireland, I thought it natural to take the very body of Christ in the form of a wafer of bread on my tongue. My own boy and girl, in America, think it natural that a school is a place where you must know what to do when someone comes there to kill the children.

I’d also add that 8chan is the holy scripture of its acolytes, a meandering screed that combines the mindless repetition of a manic prayer wheel with the ravings of the book of Revelation. Free Speech is its shibboleth.

Until law enforcement, and the media, treat these shooters as part of a terrorist movement no less organized, or deadly, than ISIS or Al Qaeda, the violence will continue. There will be more killers, more gleeful celebration of body counts on 8chan, and more bloody attempts to beat the last killer’s “high score”.

There’s a radical suggestion right there. If there were an online forum in which Muslim terrorists gleefully shared tales of glorious murder, urged each other to outdo each other in suicidal mass killings, and celebrated every time one of these incidents occurred, the FBI would be all over it, tracing communications and working to arrest the ringleaders. 8chan, though, is fueled by the frustrations of disaffected middle class white men, so no, nothing will be done. It will continue to fester and spread its toxins.

So, here’s my first radical suggestion. Only it’s not that radical.

  • Shut down 8chan. Arrest anyone who tries to revive it. Publicly shame anyone who participates in it.

That’s just the start. Another obvious problem is ready access to guns. There is incredibly stupid resistance to any form of common-sense gun registration, background checks, etc., and so gun manufacturers continue to flood a willing market with weapons of mass destruction. We’re making no progress on rational gun laws. Therefore, let’s take a different tack.

  • Criminalize gun manufacture. Lethal weapons can only be made under a license for sale to the military,
    and the military will be prohibited from allowing remarketers to sell their surplus. Hunting weaponry will also be licensed and the sale tightly controlled. The police will crack down on black market sale of guns; no more gun shows. Manufacturers will be held liable for the crimes committed by their weapons, so Glock, Smith & Wesson, and Remington will be the enforcers who regulate gun sales.

I’m just getting warmed up. People have been talking about revising the constitution to get rid of that useless vestige, the electoral college. Don’t stop there. There’s another political institution that does nothing other than enrich its members and allow a rich elite to throttle progressive laws.

  • Abolish the Senate, or at least reduce it to a purely ceremonial function. Right now, the Senate is nothing but a relic of an elitist era, when it was considered important to preserve a version of aristocratic privilege, and power was distributed based on arbitrary property lines. It’s undemocratic. It needs to go. It’s not as if it will be doing anything to end the tyranny of the assault rifle in America.

Is that enough? I know it’s all unrealistic, and isn’t going to happen, unless there’s a revolution (which, at the rate we’re going, isn’t entirely unlikely). Basically, I’m suggesting that we correct the failings of the first American revolution, which wasn’t revolutionary enough, change our mindset to make capitalism accountable, and shut down the most extreme propaganda organ. It’s not as radical as it could be — a real socialist would suggest that the people should seize total control of the production of weapons, for instance, but I’ve become less trusting of the will of the people nowadays.

I’ll toss in one more, just for the heck of it.

  • Outlaw the Republican party. Throw its leadership in jail, unless they repudiate all the principles of greed and bigotry that currently drive it.

That one might not be necessary if the other suggestions were implemented.

Another day in the spider lab

I took care of some tedious maintenance work in the lab today — organizing the vials of spiders (lots of them!), double-checking their classification and sex and relabeling them. I color-coded them by species (white is Parasteatoda, green is Steatoda borealis, yellow is Steatoda triangulosa) and made pink and blue stickers for females and males, which tells you the degree of excitement at the lab bench!

But some fun stuff was going on. Remember Brienne, the hugely swollen female that we were sure was going to make an egg sac any day now, and she didn’t, and she kept getting bigger and bigger? She finally got off the pot and laid a big batch of eggs!

Here’s Brienne before:

Here’s Brienne now:

Finally! She hasn’t moved from that corner of her cage, but it’s got to be a relief to expel that load. The egg sac is bigger than she is!

Also, as I was sorting through the spiders, I saw that another egg sac had popped overnight. Here’s a contented female surrounded by her brood in one of our vials:

She’s a nameless P. tep, which seems callous now — we don’t give them names until we move them into the bigger cages, but they’re still quite capable of pumping out eggs in more cramped quarters. Maybe I’ll have to give her a newer, bigger home…and a name. Got any suggestions?

Today’s spiderwalk: featuring a patch of prairie

Getting away from the decaying, abandoned human homes for a bit, we acted on a tip from a colleague and visited Stahler prairie, a lovely spot of land near the university that was donated to us for research and teaching. I didn’t even know it existed until this morning! Those ecologists…always keeping secrets from us lab geeks. But now we know, and we went strolling through the grasses. That’s Mary, off in the distance.

We were disappointed at first — the place is buzzing with bugs, and we found quite a few large webs, but we didn’t see much of the resident spiders. Big empty webs meant there had to be a webspinner nearby, but these are cunning beasts and very good at hiding. We finally found one big Neoscona cozy deep down in a tube made of a furled leaf.

We’ll be back, Stahler Prairie! We’re figuring you out and we shall tease out your secrets!

The latest poll on creationism is out

The latest Gallup poll is interesting.

The anti-science, evolution-denying creationists have had an uptick (the grey line). I’d guess that’s due to radical conservativism experiencing a triumphal moment right now — a rising tide of sewer sludge fills the hip-waders of all the wacky denialists.

That uptick seems to have come entirely at the expense of the theistic evolutionists (the green line) who have lost a smidge of popularity.

Despite the slight rise of creationists, the godless evolutionists (the dark green line, the color of our heart’s blood) are still rising! Again, I’ll credit that to, in part, our current political polarization. Although I’d like to claim that better education on the subject is helping, too.

All of these shifts are slight, and shouldn’t be over-interpreted.

The latest findings, from a June 3-16 Gallup poll, have not changed significantly from the last reading in 2017. However, the 22% of Americans today who do not believe God had any role in human evolution marks a record high dating back to 1982. This figure has changed more than the other two have over the years and coincides with an increasing number of Americans saying they have no religious identification.

We might be edging upwards, but it’s a nail-biter with the final innings far off in the distance.

Spider hunting in the haunted barn

We went on another field trip today, to barns in Hancock. I had predicted that we’d find many more orbweavers in barns than in garages and sheds, and that’s tentatively true. We first visited a working barn, one with lots of chickens strutting around, and didn’t see a dramatic difference in the spider populations, though — I suspect that chickens are going to eat any large, bold orbweaver that exposes itself. These barns had the densest cobwebs I’ve ever seen, and lots of hidey-holes for our friends the Theridiidae, so we only saw a scattering of S. borealis and P. tepidariorum.

Then we saw the abandoned, crumbling farm down the road. “Hey, let’s go explore that!”

Preston led the way through the weeds and thistles.

This place had definitely seen better days. The ceiling was falling in, the windows and doors were gone, you could just walk in through the gaps in the walls. The floors were littered with old debris from long-gone residents. It was a sad place.

It was clearly an old dairy farm. Maya found the milking room.

Maybe we should have turned back when we found the rotting, decapitated doll. If this were a video game or a horror movie, that would be a sure sign we were on the path to Hell.

But what we found inside were…

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I have to remind myself that the foundation is not a distraction

Honestly, I often feel like the creationist wars are an irrelevant distraction when there are greater threats to our civil liberties and political system…I mean, it’s hard to get worked up about some pathetic god-botherin’ dweeb getting onto a school board on a platform of transparent lies and superstitious nonsense when fascist jackboots are stomping in the streets and white nationalists are murdering people.

But that’s what they count on. Oh, you’re worried about racism in the highest offices in the land? Perfect time to pack state houses and city councils and schoolboards with assholes while you’re not looking. It never ends. And then in a few years we all look back and say, “why didn’t you pay attention to local races?” and we have to remind ourselves that the roots matter.

So. Florida has a new Board of Education chairman, Andy Tuck. He’s another of those petty theocrats who doesn’t trust science but still insists on being in charge of education. This Andy Tuck:

School Board Vice Chairman Andy Tuck said Thursday, “as a person of faith, I strongly oppose any study of evolution as fact at all. I’m purely in favor of it staying a theory and only a theory.

“I won’t support any evolution being taught as fact at all in any of our schools.”

Brandon Haught is reluctant to call him a creationist. I’m not. Someone who thinks the established, well-substantiated science of evolutionary biology should not be taught in school is a creationist, a science-denier, and someone who should not have any responsibility in managing a classroom at any level.

Censoring science in the public schools is just one step on the road to creating another generation of Fox-News-watching, MAGA-hat-wearing, science-denying fuckwits who will work to wreck the country while declaiming their patriotism. This is how we get an electorate that puts the worst people in high office.