Jacob Wohl keeps kicking his own ass

It’s a marvel. He keeps putting himself in the spotlight to do something incredibly stupid.

He got some fool college kid to help him make the claim that Pete Buttigieg assaulted him…but the kid backed down and confessed to making the story up, so Wohl and Burkman just did a press conference in their driveway in which the piece de resistance was a video of the kid drinking a caramel frappucino. He’s got a Starbucks caramel frappuccino. Most forced coercion events… do not involve caramel frappuccino. No one has argued that this was a case of “forced coercion”.

They announced that there were going to be “hundreds” of protesters showing up at their press conference (that’s all these guys do, I think, is call “press conferences” for attention), and as evidence, they showed that there was an Eventbrite event organized by Leftist agitators.

Examining the event revealed that the organizer was…Jacob Wohl.

I’m sure the only reason journalists show up for their press conferences at all any more is just to see Wohl and Burkman faceplant.

I guess I’m being sued, I guess

I’ve only heard about it indirectly, from people who noticed it on legal databases, but I haven’t been served yet…because Richard Carrier is acting as his own lawyer, and he flubbed something in the filing so no papers were delivered to the accused. I’m still waiting. At least we’ve got our lawyer primed and ready to respond.

I got a lot of the detail from this extraordinarily entertaining video. Rebecca Watson recounts some of the documents Carrier submitted himself, in his defense, to show that no, he’s not creepy and obnoxious, no sir. She reads his own “evidence”, which does a very good job of showing that he’s creepy, obnoxious, oblivious to criticism, and completely unaware of boundaries. It’s amazing how his own incel-like emails demonstrate his lack of awareness.

Now I just have to wait for my own copy of the filing. No hurry. It’s all another silly, futile exercise.

Urge to join a union rising…rising…rising

I love watching corporate idiots roasting over an open fire. Delta Airlines tried doing a little gentle union-busting with some posters, and it didn’t go at all well.

Two posters made by Delta as part of an effort to dissuade thousands of its workers from joining a union drew a torrent of criticism after they were posted on social media Thursday.

The posters included messages targeting the price of the dues that company workers would be paying if the union formed.

“Union dues cost around $700 a year,” one noted. “A new video game system with the latest hits sounds like fun. Put your money towards that instead of paying dues to the union.”

The other, with a picture of a football, was framed similarly.

“What does $700 mean to you?” it said. “Nothing’s more enjoyable than a night out watching football with your buddies. All those union dues you pay every year could buy a few rounds.”

Who needs job security, safe working conditions, and better wages when you could just play video games and drink beer? Those posters reveal how much contempt management has for their workers.

Here’s my favorite response:

The meme that points out that you can build a guillotine for $1200 is my second favorite.

Still the one

This evening, my wife plunked a big box of old papers and junk in front of me and told me it was my job to sort it out and clean it up. I went through it obediently, even though I quickly discovered that it was mostly her old trash. There were a few gems scattered in there, though, and I pulled them out before tossing the rest into the recycling bin. It seems only fair that I get to post some of them.

Like her school photo from when she was in 4th or 5th grade.

Ah, yes. The Summer of Love, 1967. We were going to school together then. She’s still just as pretty, just a bit more mature, fortunately.

I guess it should be no surprise what happened 13 years later.

Now see what she’s done? She not only made me clean up her stuff, she sent me on a nostalgia trip.

Wily grandparents set cunning traps

We have a plan. First thing we’ve done is install a baby trap inside of our baby transport vehicle.

Once captured, the baby will be transported to our baby cage.

It’s a foolproof plan. Here’s the baby.

She arrives by plane tomorrow afternoon, we snare her upon arrival, and then race back to Morris. It’s going to work.

Unfortunately, this is a catch-and-release program, so we’ll send her back to Colorado early next week. That’s OK, though, this is kind of proof of concept, and we have a second grandbaby we can try and capture sometime.

That one may be more of a challenge, since he seems to be fully mobile and more capable of evasive maneuvers.

How to make a spider ‘penis’

To the relief of many, I haven’t been saying much about my lab spiders lately, and there’s a good reason for that — they aren’t doing much. They’re all females, they’re not producing egg sacs, and despite checking daily, I’m not finding any Parasteatoda tepidariorum in the wild, either. I think they’re in hiding, reeling away from our horrible winter weather, and we haven’t had enough spring warming yet for them to emerge and start spawning lots of little babies for me to use to replenish the colony.

I miscalculated. I started with a small group of about a dozen spiders and several egg cases before the winter hit, and I clearly need a larger colony to maintain a balance of the sexes, because the females occasionally chow down on their partners, so I was seeing the male population in constant decline. Then I also failed to sort out the sexes in the second generation, because I couldn’t tell them apart.

Adult male and female P. tepidariorum can be easily distinguished, because the males have these massively enlarged pedipalps hanging off the front of their face — I can easily tell them apart with the naked eye, they’re so distinctive. These palps are a sperm storage and intromittent organ, specific to each spider species, which they use in a lock-and-key arrangement in mating, so they both deliver sperm and guarantee that they’ll only mate with conspecifics.

I’m sure the spiders will be back soon, and I’m looking up all kinds of stuff on recognizing sexes in pre-adult spiders so that I don’t repeat this year’s mistakes again. Then, jackpot: this paper on Formation and development of the male copulatory organ in the spider Parasteatoda tepidariorum involves a metamorphosis-like process, and it’s got exactly the information I need, and also is pretty nifty in its own right.

This is a close-up of the organ I’m interested in. Impressive and rather terrifying, isn’t it? Males have two of them, too, which makes me a bit envious.

Like I said, these just leap to the eye when you examine an adult, since they’re much, much bigger than the female palps, which are slender and relatively delicate. I want to know how to spot them in younger sub-adults, though, and so here’s a developmental series illustrating the changes that go on. What’s interesting is that after an earlier molt, the terminal part of the palp swells up like a balloon, literally simply inflating with hemolymph (blood) to form a fluid-filled shell with a little primordium (in orange) of the adult palp resting within it.

What’s fascinating here is that, in the subadult, the hemolymph will coagulate to form a stable matrix which may play a role in shaping the species-specific expansion of the primordium. So it inflates, fills with material that shapes development and then is gradually lysed as the adult cuticle grows and fills the space.

As the title of the article suggests, this looks familiar — we see something similar in arthropod metamorphosis, where the structure of the larva is actively broken down, basically digested with enzymes, and adult primordia (the imaginal discs) grow to replace the animal.

It also has me wondering if one of the reasons spider intromittent organs can be so labile, varying from species to species, is that this developmental process of interactions between a coagulated matrix and the primordium is highly plastic. The authors say it’s consistent within this species, but I’d be curious to know how sensitive the adult morphology is to fluctuations in that matrix.

Now I’m really eager to get more spiderlings so I can watch their organs grow.

We Believe in Dinosaurs

It’s unfortunate that I don’t think we’ll ever get a showing of this documentary, We Believe in Dinosaurs, in Morris — it’s too narrow a niche for our little community. The reviews make it sound pretty good, though.

Adding to that discussion is Monica Long Ross and Clayton Brown’s documentary “We Believe in Dinosaurs.” Attempting to portray both sides even-handedly (though a principal figure presumably refused to be interviewed), it offers not so much a critique as a slightly bemused observation of the Ark Encounter, a Biblical theme park-style attraction in Kentucky designed to promote a creationist rather than scientific view of Earth’s history — which spans about 6,000 years, in this reckoning.

The peculiar brand of pseudoscience utilized to provide supporting “evidence” is controversial, needless to say. So is the “separation of church and state” breach many view in such projects getting de facto governmental approval. Often amusing, but never condescending towards either Ark proponents or their equally vocal opponents, this feature should attract interest from various exhibition channels — perhaps particularly abroad, where admittedly it will not do Americans’ current popular image any favors.

An even-handed approach to both sides is a good idea, as long as you don’t lose sight of the truth. Show that the creationists are sincere, but also be unambiguous in pointing out that they’re peddling pseudoscience. It sounds like they take that approach.

…we get a good look not only at the world of “Young Earth creationists” and their logic (which extends to quasi-scientific academic conferences), but at individual players on both sides of the fight. Lead designer Patrick Marsh and artisan Doug Henderson are among the affable personnel who found their “dream job” creating a facsimile of Noah’s Ark, which requires some interesting imaginative leaps not found in the Bible.

Not least among those leaps is the depiction of dinosaurs and other extinct (as well as some murkily confabulated) creatures as passengers, since it’s the belief of creationists that fossil-record species simply died during, or shortly after, the Flood. It is also interesting to see the attraction’s PG-13 diorama of the decadence that triggered God’s watery wrath. There are even animatronic figures used to address such philosophical quandaries as, “Why does a loving God allow so much death and suffering?”

On the other side of the divide are people like paleontologist Dan Phelps (who points out that roadside Kentucky shale offers ample proof of Earth’s great age) and David MacMillan, a teenage evangelical and Creation Museum charter member who now runs an anti-Creationist website. He sees no conflict between his continued Christian beliefs and acquired trust in science, resenting that faulty creationist “evidence” gets shoved down many a gullible schoolchild’s throat. Farther out among the opposition are members of the Tri-State Free Thinkers, atheists who (not without humor) claim the Biblical story of Noah promotes “genocide and incest.”

I do have reservations, though. Does “fair and balanced” work? The documentary’s conclusion is deeply depressing, and while it’s good to show both sides, does it do a proper job of refuting the creationists? I don’t know.

Without laying on any overt message, “We Believe in Dinosaurs” does definitely suggest that this eccentric collision between faith and secularism, commerce and politics — one that might have seemed wholly outlandish not long ago—is kinda-sorta the direction in which our republic is now headed. Politicians increasingly bend to accommodate religious causes, with judiciary right behind them. Science denial is a trend, whether the motivation is Biblical literalism or simple capitalist greed.

We see Ken Ham (who presumably refused to be interviewed by the filmmakers) selling his wares every which way, using whatever terminology will gain acceptance with a particular audience, but always advancing the creationist cause. That the wind is blowing in his direction is underlined by a closing-credits compilation of recent American politicos publicly distancing themselves from (or outright decrying) evolutionary theory.

I guess I’ll have to wait for a streaming service to pick it up so I can see it for myself, but that last bit is something that might be encouraging to creationists, rather than as discouraging as I see it.