This is a lovely video of a man handling a black widow spider. Really, they aren’t interested in biting you, anymore than you would care to sink your teeth into a mountainside you’re climbing over. You do have to be gentle, though.
I’ve had spiders crawling on me in the lab, and my advice to students is simple: don’t panic, lead them to where you want them to go, and they’ll do you no harm.
We’re in that time of year when academics everywhere are waiting on budget news. Will we get that cost-of-living increase we were hoping for? Will our requests for new colleagues get funded? What will our supplies budget for next year look like? So we wait, knowing that the Republicans in the state legislature hate us and will be trying carve away as much as they can, not caring that we’ve already been pared to the bone.
Our Alaskan colleagues were in the midst of the same stress, when their Republican governor announced that he was using a line-item veto to kill 40% of the University of Alaska’s budget. That’s nothing but irresponsible butchery of the state university system.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy on Friday slashed $130 million in state support for the University of Alaska, a cut the UA president said could result in the elimination of academic programs, massive layoffs and tuition increases.
UA President Jim Johnsen said the university system will begin planning for the “devastating” and “unprecedented” reduction, while also advocating that the state Legislature overturn the governor’s line-item veto. State legislators have until July 12 to do so, but three-fourths of them would have to agree to throw out the governor’s cut.
“There’s no question this budget — if not overridden by the Legislature — would be devastating to the university and to our mission and to the state and to our economy now and for years to come,” Johnsen told the UA Board of Regents at an emergency meeting Friday.
We’re stretched thin already — I can’t imagine how we’d cope if told we had to slash 40% of our faculty. How would essential courses be taught? What would the value of a degree be if core disciplines were gutted? That’s the cost Alaskan colleges are being asked to pay. If this goes through, it’s going to take decades to repair the damage…if there’s a will to repair it at all.
It is short-sighted and stupid, too. Universities make major returns on the cost of investment. If nothing else, high-tech industries want a pool of educated workers, and they aren’t going to find them in Alaska.
Universities in Alaska certainly take on similar roles. According to a presentation from the Anchorage Economic Development Corporation’s Alaska Common Ground meeting:
- the University of Alaska system provided $714 million (directly) and $402 million (indirectly) to the statewide economy (year 2012 numbers)
- Alaska businesses rely on local talent from University of Alaska for their workforce needs as studies show that 68% of two-year graduates and 42% of four-year graduates remain in the state.
- University of Alaska-Anchorage alone generated $40.2 million in research dollars in fiscal year 2016
It is clear that a 41% cut places all of these things at risk. It also threatens university leadership in serving the energy, seafood, natural resources, health, transportation and education sectors of the region. Candidly, gutting higher education will not be an effective tool for recruiting bright new talent and industries to the state either. In fact, it probably belongs on “a top 5 list” of how not to attract new people to the state.
How could this happen? Easy. Elect a Republican governor who sees his role as taking punitive fiscal action against anything he doesn’t like. Like most Republicans, he despises higher education, so he takes a knife to it. This isn’t the only time he’s been a brutal autocrat: he also vetoed $335,000 from the budget of the Alaska Supreme Court. Why? Because they made a ruling on abortion that he didn’t like.
“The legislative and executive branch are opposed to state-funded elective abortions; the only branch of government that insists on state-funded elective abortions is the Supreme Court,” Dunleavy’s administration wrote in a budget document released Friday. “The annual cost of elective abortions is reflected by this reduction.”
Mike Dunleavy is a man who firmly believes in the punitive power of bad leadership.
This is my usual weekly mailing to students who expressed an interest in spider research.
Good morning, spider-team. Here’s this week’s mission.
1. Monday at noon is feeding time! Last week we started giving them crickets, in addition to wingless fruit flies, and they gobbled them up. We’re trying to fatten up the ladies to get them to start laying eggs, and I think they’re close — I’m hoping to see egg sacs in their spacious new cages soon.
2. We have some babies! A Steatoda triangulosa that we caught over two weeks ago was already pregnant, and laid a fluffy white egg sac for us. It hatched out over the weekend, and we’ve got a small brood of baby spiderlings (see below). We’ll be separating these out into small vials today. This isn’t the species I’d planned on working on, but this will be good practice for future Parasteatoda tepidariorum spiderlings.
3. There will be another spider-feeding on Thursday at noon. They are quite avid little killing machines.
4. Also on Thursday afternoon, I depart for Minneapolis and Convergence, where I’ll be sitting on a couple of science panels. I’ll be away all weekend.
5. Next week, beginning on the 8th, Phase II of our Stevens County Spider Survey begins. We have an ever-growing list of sites to screen, and I’m also adding a few additional steps to our protocol, so all volunteers will be appreciated. We’ll be going out every day, starting at around 10, for the entire week.
6. My offer to take you out for a night at the movies still stands. I’ll be at the Morris Theater at 7pm on Wednesday for Spider-Man: Far From Home. Let me know if you’re interested — we can also pick apart the science afterwards.
It’s day two after the emergence of my S. triangulosa hatch. They’re starting to darken up and look less gelatinous…but still aren’t quite flitting about in their vial. I’ll probably give them some flies tomorrow.
I haven’t done one of these in a while — it’s a dispiriting time to be an atheist — but I was inspired by a sign near my house. This is a truly excellent motto.
Expanding Minds & Inspiring Service
That would be a great theme for an atheist community, but of course, that sign was posted outside the Campus Lutheran Ministry Christus House, which is cause for some reservation. Religion does not expand minds, but instead narrows them. You would not go into the Campus Lutheran Ministry and find the pastor explaining how you should question everything, explore the wide world of ideas, and be reluctant to accept dogma, because their mission is to get you to accept their peculiar, limited, tightly circumscribed interpretation of Jesus Christ. The place where you’ll get your mind expanded is a few blocks north, on the campus of the University of Minnesota Morris, a secular institution.
I’m not going to accept the literal truth of that part of the sign. It’s a nice ideal, though. Too bad they don’t implement it.
The second part of the sign, though, “Inspiring Service”, is more legit. I remember from my church-going days that that was a serious and important message. Some of it was self-serving: service meant volunteering for the church or donating money to the church. Some of it was well-intentioned but horribly harmful: we were regularly exhorted to support missionary efforts in Africa. There was also, however, real good that was done. There were food drives to help the poor, visits to shut-ins, call for donations to help those who had fallen sick, requests to assist the elderly. I mowed the lawn of one little old lady who would invite me in afterwards to say a little prayer and praise the Lord. I went along with it, to be nice, and because she definitely didn’t need an argument.
A while later, she died, and she left me a gift in her will: a giant print of “Christ knocking at the door” in a fancy gilt frame. I was told it was because she’d noticed me looking at it in her house, which was true — I had found it remarkably unattractive. I think I would have preferred a decorative lamp as a Major Award, but OK, I accepted it in the spirit with which it was given. It was a nice thought.
My point, though, is that there is an honest and sincere spirit of service in many church-goers, and I think that is a good thing. An important part of a successful movement has to be an ideal of community, and that requires effort to maintain. It requires service.
That got me thinking about atheism. Unfortunately, I think atheism exhibits the inverse of the traits of religion with respect to that motto.
There are close-minded people within atheism, I can assure you of that, but at its best, atheism practices that ideal of expanding minds. I have been involved in programs specifically geared to discuss science, and there are others who’ve worked hard to communicate principles of philosophy ad logic. We can probably all list a hundred individuals who are more interested in taking advantage of the profit potential of atheism — we have our Joel Osteen types — but there are far more atheists who are honestly interested in learning and teaching. We know their interest is sincere, because the ones who do it for pure motives are also the ones who don’t make bank off lecture tours.
But “inspiring service”? Oh god. Ask that of an atheist group and the vast majority will look elsewhere and wander off. The libertarians will clamor for a hanging. YouTube videos will appear condemning everyone of trying to build a petty empire off the membership, or simply shrieking, “HELL NO” at the very idea, and screaming about SJWs taking over. If we wanted to do “service”, we’d join a church. That’s telling, actually. You can’t build a community out of a mob of arrogant individualists who consider contributing to the greater good to be a crime against their independence.
Imagine, though, what a powerhouse atheism could be if it actually implemented the ideals in that sign. Imagine a movement built on teaching and learning, and also on sharing and working together in a community where every member was respected.
We could also imagine if a church actually worked towards both ideals…they’d stop being part of a religion and turn into a secular community. That wouldn’t be a bad outcome, either.
I’m afraid neither are going to happen, though.
The lab is significantly cooler, at 20°C (the spiders are kept comfortable at 30°C in incubators) and our Steatoda triangulosa egg case has had a few feeble little spiderlings crawling out. Here’s one:
What do you think, adorable or irresistible? It was moving slowly, so it’s alive but still kind of weak and uncoordinated. Give ’em time, they’ll be hunting prey and gamboling about soon enough.
Also, useful information: S. triangulosa takes 17 days from laying to emergence from the egg sac at 30°C. File that away somewhere.
We walked into the lab today, and discovered someone has been helping. There was a gigantic lacy cobweb stretching from the sink across the lab bench to the microscope — we use that scope every day, so we know it wasn’t there yesterday afternoon, but had appeared magically overnight. I tried to photograph it with my phone, holding up a black heating pad behind it to provide contrast, but it was just too wispy and gauzy to capture. If you squint real hard you might see the grayish lines extending from the lower left upwards to the right. And if you can’t, well, you had to be there.
We looked around and couldn’t find the spider. It probably has a cozy cranny it’s cuddled up in when those clumsy humans come bumbling around.
We had to tear the web down because, like I said, we use the scope everyday. I’m hoping our little friend will web up everything else in the lab, though, because my dream would be to come to work in a huge spider web, the walls all cobbed up, and little spiders scurrying everywhere.
So tired of the false accusations…as someone who works on a college campus, ground zero for the PC wars, I have to tell you it’s about as bogus as the War on Christmas. No, college students aren’t trying to silence conservatives, because a lot of college students are conservatives. Conservatives are pouring cash into like-minded student organizations, paying to bring in reactionary fools as speakers, handing out free posters endorsing idiocies, like Turning Point USA, and you can’t turn around without seeing reactionary clods whining about The Gays or The Trans Creeping Into Muh Bathroom, and surprise–no one sets them on fire or kicks them off campus. The crusade to slander universities for being oppressive bastions of PC thought is a load of nonsense invented by people with stupid ideas who didn’t like the fact they’d get their rhetorical asses kicked in any environment that wasn’t packed with their ideological allies.
Martha Gill gets it. The the threat to free speech is an invented pseudo-controversy. The usual suspects promote it as a way to pretend that a goddamned majority is somehow an oppressed class.
This sort of argument is everywhere. It often seems like the first line of defence when a notable figure has overstepped the mark. And just this month the academic Jordan Peterson launched a website, Thinkspot, to protect users from all the “censorship” that is around right now.
The argument that you can’t say anything was given a boost when, in 2015, the Atlantic magazine published The Coddling of the American Mind, an article by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff suggesting that young people, particularly students, were attempting to shut down discussions about topics they disagreed with. Universities, they argued, were sacrificing knowledge on the altar of hurt student feelings.
Then, the explosion. Thousands of articles were written defending free speech against the undergraduates, along with a slew of books – from Mike Hume’s Trigger Warning to Claire Fox’s I Find That Offensive! to Haidt’s 2018 book borrowing the title of the original Atlantic article. There has been the phenomenon of Jordan Peterson, who says the unsayable but is still somehow a bestselling author. (Almost every piece on spiked-online.com has an argument defending free speech.)
She cites chapter and verse of counter-examples, and they jibe with my experience on a liberal college campus. It’s not that my environment has been sanitized of views I find disagreeable; I assure you, I am regularly rolling my eyes at the nonsense that gets promoted here. We had Ben Shapiro give a talk at UMM, and if that dishonest twerp can get a platform here, you’ve got no grounds to claim that conservatives are censored. Don’t worry, though: even as they rake in the cash from obliging conservative think tanks, they’ll keep on whining that they get no respect at the universities.
There’s a reason for that lack of respect, too.
Free speech advocates also misunderstand the motivation of those who might want to shut down a debate: they see this as a surefire mark of intolerance. But some debates should be shut down. For public dialogue to make any progress, it is important to recognise when a particular debate has been won and leave it there.
Even the most passionate free speech advocate might not wish to reopen the debate into whether women should be tried for witchcraft, or whether ethnic minorities should be allowed to go to university, or whether the Earth is flat. No-platformers are not scared – they simply think certain debates are over. You may disagree, but it does not mean they are against free speech.
There is also the problem of self-awareness. The trouble with the free speech defence is that it works to shut down any argument against it. You want to say something boring, or irrelevant, or malicious? Claim someone is trying to ban you from saying it. Dissent isn’t merely dissent then, it’s censure. (And censorship should be banned.)
Your opponents are against free discussion (and shouldn’t be allowed to engage in it). You can tack free speech on to any crackpot prejudice you have and suddenly you’re a lone truth-teller standing up to the hordes. It’s a clever rhetorical trick, the free speech defence. But it shouldn’t be taken much more seriously than that.
You want to go on a college campus and argue for a white ethno-state, or that trans people are perverts, or that life begins at conception, or that evolution is Satan’s religion, you can do that — I’ve heard all of that. You don’t get to say it without pushback from better informed people, though, and you’re not going to get the university administration to actively endorse those views, as they do the ideas that America is a pluralist nation with a diverse population that must be served by the educational system, or that human identities are complex and don’t fit into your limited bins, or that biology is a legitimate scientific discipline that tells us that your ideas are bullshit, and that they don’t deserve to be taken seriously.
That’s not censorship. That’s just us turning our backs on your foolishness.
The Guardian helps us decode Silicon Valley jargon. A sampling:
diversity and inclusion (ph) – Initiatives designed to sugarcoat Silicon Valley’s systematic failure to hire, promote and retain African American and Latinx employees. The phrase is usually invoked when a company is expounding on its “values” in response to incontrovertible evidence of widespread racial or gender discrimination.
free speech (ph) A constitutionally protected right in the US that is primarily invoked by tech bros and internet trolls when they are asked to stop being assholes. Syn: hate speech. See ideological diversity.
ideological diversity (ph) – The rallying cry for opponents of diversity and inclusion programs. Advocates for ideological diversity argue that corporate efforts to increase the representation of historically marginalized groups – women, African Americans and Latinos, among others – should also be required to increase the representation of people who believe that women, African Americans and Latinos are inherently unsuited to work in tech.
meritocracy (n) A system that rewards those who most deserve it, as long as they went to the right school. The tech industry is a meritocracy in much
same way that America is a meritocracy. See diversity and inclusion.
That’s exactly how I translate those terms in my head.
I got online and rambled a bit on YouTube about various subjects.
So, who lost the big political debate of the evening? Have we gotten rid of some of the Democratic deadwood yet?
