A bad day in the spider lab

I had such high hopes this morning — necessary reagent had arrived, I had a nice egg sac, I was going to open it up and spend my afternoon exploring embryos. It was not to be. I teased apart the egg sac, and what do I find? Heartbreak. Disappointment. Failure.

The eggs were all dead. I’m not sure what happened here, but I have a hypothesis: this summer and early fall, I had all these fish tanks in the lab, gurgling away, and the place was pretty humid. Now those are shut down, and it’s winter in Minnesota, when the air dries out. Spiders like some degree of humidity, and I’ve been maintaining that by regularly misting their vials with an atomizer, but maybe that’s not enough for the embryos.

So I’m cranking up the moisture levels in the incubator. Now I’ve got to worry about balancing everything — too much and I’ll have to worry about mold and fungus.

Babies are such fussy little creatures.

VOTE! Vote vote vote vote vote vote vote vote vote vote vote vote vote VOTE!

I’m going to the polls as soon as they open this morning out of a sense of duty and a feeling of futility. Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression, as well as the fact that the electorate is saturated with selfish bigots and the media are bought and owned by the rich, means I don’t expect to see much of that mythical democracy today. It shouldn’t even be close, but it’s going to be close.

But, you see, if we don’t try, if we don’t participate, if we don’t march down and make this tiny effort to oppose unreason and corruption and bigotry, you won’t own a right to protest when the election is stolen. You might be upset, but you won’t possess the righteous fury it’s going to take to right this wrong, which is going to take years of struggle.

As we all know, angry gets shit done.

I’m already pretty angry about century after century of injustice. Keep stoking the rage until we rise up and burn the whole ugly system down.

I know what I’m doing tomorrow

My halocarbon oil arrived today! Finally, I can do some arthropod embryo culture.

Squeee!

Would you believe that 100mL bottle cost me $166? Since I’m going to use a 20µl drop for each embryo, that means I only have enough for 5000 experiments. I’m already feeling a little panicky about my supplies running low. Maybe I should order another bottle.

In case you were wondering what this precious stuff is, it’s an inert, high molecular weight polymer of chlorotrifluoroethylene. It’s used a lot in insect culture because you can put an embryo into a drop of it, and it prevents it from drying out, improves optical clarity, and also allows for free gas exchange. I’m eager to try it.

P.S. Oh, right, I’m also voting first thing in the morning, and then hiding from all the media about the election all day long.

Gab is back

Dammit. The racist social media site found a new sugar daddy willing to host their hate. In case you were unfamiliar with what Gab does…

Gab has become the most visible of a collection of services catering to people mainstream companies such as Twitter and Facebook have rejected as too hateful, extreme or threatening in their posts as part of a crackdown on extremism.

Which is astonishing. Extremists who are too hateful or threatening for Twitter and Facebook gravitate there. Given that Twitter and Facebook are incredibly accommodating to Nazis and other bigots, that’s hard to imagine…but my brief glance at Gab was to see a horrifying mess of naked anti-semitism on display. It was briefly, too briefly, shut down when hosting providers balked at providing service to a site that allowed that flaming anti-Semite who murdered 11 innocent people because they were Jews to flourish. But no worries, they managed to find a company that was fine with Nazi memes and dindunuffin jokes and murder planning to take them on.

Epik founder and CEO Rob Monster [appropriate name] echoed that sentiment in brief interviews with The Seattle Times on Sunday. Monster likened his company to a utility provider and said he supports free speech. He praised the operators of Gab and said he believes they will curate the site appropriately.

“I do believe the guys that are on the site are vigilant,” Monster said. Monster said on Epik’s website that his company was serving as Gab’s domain registrar but not its hosting company. KUOW was the first to report on Gab’s new ties to the Seattle area.

Yeah, Seattle. My hometown. So embarrassed. Unfortunately, the Pacific Northwest is a weird place that is generally liberal and progressive, but it’s also got a long history of racial segregation that has allowed a minority of terrible racists to prosper. Some of the worst, most regressive, most vile people I’ve known came out of the Northwest, some in my own family, but at the same time most of the people I knew were knee-jerk liberals. Almost all white, of course.

But this Monster guy is flatly delusional. Vigilant? Appropriate curators? With the announcement that it was back online, the first comments were all “blame the Jews” stuff.

Meanwhile, this Monster guy is blathering on about Free Speech and the heinous crime of de-platforming and the Founding Fathers and entrepreneurship, all as a smokescreen to justify providing support to a site that is basically the worst shit filtered out as too ghastly for other terrible social media sites, where awful people gather to enflame each other and applaud murder. Monster sounds like one of those glib libertarian jerks, but Torba is a Christian fanatic — a dreadful combination.

Could we at least draw the line at “free speech” that is nothing but hate speech intended to incite death and destruction?

Look on the bright side, UK!

I know there are changes coming, but you just have to make the best of them. For instance, the Brexiteers are trying to legislate animal pain out of existence.

The Tory Government has outdone itself when it comes to neglecting animal rights this week – by effectively declaring that all animals (apart from humans, of course) have no emotions or feelings, including the ability to feel pain. While debating the Brexit bill, MPs voted not to transfer into UK law the parts of EU legislation which recognise animals have sentience, and can feel pain and emotions.

You’d think that they’d have noticed that Charles Darwin, who was as British as they get, wrote a whole book (The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals) on the subject, and came to a different conclusion. But sure, you can discard your history of scientific endeavor.

The good news is that if pain and suffering and emotions can be taken away with just the right omission in your law books, Brexit is going to go well. Just deny the emotions. Don’t stop with animals, just erase all human concerns away. If you reject their existence, you’ll be able to stand silently through all kinds of loss and deprivation with a stiff upper lip, and not much more. If you need occasional relief, just poke a Tory with your umbrella — they won’t care, they’re in an even more advanced state of unfeeling. It’s like a witch’s mark, only all over their body.

You won’t be alone, either. The US is going to get a major stress test tomorrow, and I’m trying to deal with it by denying all emotions, too. I may have to get myself comfortably numb to make it through the next few days. Akvavit might help.

Was that really the best photo they could find to put on a billboard?

It’s bad enough they’re equating him to Jesus, but did they have to go with the gape-jawed goofy-eyed look with his tiny hand waving about?

Jupiter is a big fan of Ayn Rand, I hear

Jordan Peterson was asked to write a foreword for a new release of The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It is truly by Jordan Peterson. It is straight-up raging capitalism.

Here’s some thoughts—no, some facts. Every social system produces inequality, at present, and every social system has done so, since the beginning of time. The poor have been with us—and will be with us—always. Analysis of the content of individual Paleolithic gravesites provides evidence for the existence of substantive variance in the distribution of ability, privilege, and wealth, even in our distant past. The more illustrious of our ancestors were buried with great possessions, hoards of precious metals, weaponry, jewelry, and costuming. The majority, however, struggled through their lives, and were buried with nothing. Inequality is the iron rule, even among animals, with their intense competition for quality living space and reproductive opportunity—even among plants, and cities—even among the stellar lights that dot the cosmos themselves, where a minority of privileged and oppressive heavenly bodies contain the mass of thousands, millions or even billions of average, dispossessed planets. Inequality is the deepest of problems, built into the structure of reality itself, and will not be solved by the presumptuous, ideology-inspired retooling of the rare free, stable and productive democracies of the world. The only systems that have produced some modicum of wealth, along with the inevitable inequality and its attendant suffering, are those that evolved in the West, with their roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition; precisely those systems that emphasize above all the essential dignity, divinity and ultimate responsibility of the individual. In consequence, any attempt to attribute the existence of inequality to the functioning of the productive institutions we have managed to create and protect so recently in what is still accurately regarded as the Free World will hurt those who are weakest and most vulnerable first. The radicals who conflate the activities of the West with the oppression of the downtrodden therefore do nothing to aid those whom they purport to prize and plenty to harm them. The claims they make to act under the inspiration of pure compassion must therefore come to be regarded with the deepest suspicion—not least by those who dare to make such claims themselves.

There will always be poor people, just as there is an unequal distribution of mass in the planets, where the biggest planets strove the hardest to be magnificently big. So what if Pluto is so small it got kicked out of the planet club? It should have tried harder.

Unfortunately, I predict his fans will defend this lunacy fanatically, rather than recognize that the guy is one of a minority of colossal loons who have hoarded all the crazy for himself, leaving only faded scraps for the Peterasts to feast upon.

Incels strike again

There’s been another shooting by an incel, and when you read about the hateful stuff he actually believed, you will be surprised that anyone made it through life with that degree of bullshit festering in his head.

But then, read this account by a medievalist of the warped notion of “courtly love”, and you’ll notice this is an ancient and familiar trope. You’ll never be able to watch “Camelot” again.