Part way there

Hey! I’ve been driving all day long! We made it all the way to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and are recovering in a hotel room. We’ll be finishing the journey to St Louis tomorrow morning.

We made a few stops along the way, looking for spiders. Didn’t find many other than a few jumpers. We did find a strange painted rock at a rest stop near Owatonna.

All I could find about it was a closed facebook group for a rock club in Oklahoma, and I don’t do facebook. Apparently they paint these things and leave them hidden in various places, and it turns out that spider hunting is a good way to induce one to look in odd little crevices.

Skepticon tomorrow!

Talk is done, more or less!

I spent the morning adding the last bits to my Skepticon talk — it’s ready 3 days ahead of time! It’s been so long since I’ve given a conference talk that I might have over-prepared. Anyway, I could give it right now if I had to, but of course I’ll think of other things to add. Just on my walk home from the coffeeshop I have a few cunning ideas to throw in.

I can’t get carried away, though. It’s a 50 minute talk and no more — Lauren will be waiting in the wings, looking for any excuse to leap out and shiv me on stage. They run a tight ship there.

So tomorrow we start driving, with frequent stops for spiders. We’re spending the night in lovely Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and finishing the trip to St Louis on Friday. All you cool people — we’ll see you there.

Sorry, everyone

You like me! You really like me!

Yesterday’s short video clip of maggots has turned out to be surprisingly popular, second only to my most recent video about Jordan Peterson. This means that I seem to have found my YouTube niche: making videos about horrible, repulsive creatures that make viewers want to vomit. I’ve also gotten requests to make more. This was not expected.

Making more Jordan Peterson videos is too much for my stomach, so now I’m thinking about ways to lower a good camera into the slime pit without risking wrecking a good lens. Maybe a cheap old kit lens with some extension tubes? I’m also going to have to puzzle out a way to adapt a tripod to look downward, because I don’t want to do it hand-held for a half hour.

You never know when someone might want some good quality B-roll of maggots, you know!

Where’s Alex Jones when you need someone to scream about scary science?

The word is “necrobotics” — using science to reanimate corpses. It’s still necromancy. This one lab is taking advantage of the mechanics of spider limb movements to use their dead bodies as robot hands.

Unlike mammals, which move their limbs by extending and contracting opposing muscles, spiders move their legs via hydraulic pressure. More specifically, they have a “prosoma chamber” located near their head which sends blood into the legs as it contracts – this causes the legs to extend. When the pressure is released, the legs close back in.

You can see where this is going. All we have to do is apply a little pressure and the limbs will extend, so you can just slide a needle into the chamber and presto, you can make the dead spider dance like a puppet. One thing that surprises me is how easy it is, using just a hand-held syringe to pump up the limbs.

It’s a rather gimmicky approach, and I don’t believe for a moment that it will ever have any practical applications. You’d have to murder a lot of spiders, and it sounds like they’re only going to have limited utility. It’s the same reason we can’t use zombies as Amazon warehouse workers — sure, they’d be cheap, wouldn’t unionize, and you could work them nonstop, but after a few days to a week their arms would rot and fall off.

Jeff Bezos has probably already done the analysis.

The most horrible video I’ve ever made

This will be popular, sure.

My compost bin is extraordinarily productive in producing maggots, which makes the spiders living in there very happy. The resolution here isn’t great — I used my el cheapo camera, since I was plunging it down in close to the writhing mass of larvae. If anyone insists, I suppose I could redo this with a reasonably good macro lens.

Everything is real time — no time-lapse. That’s how fast they move! Also, listen carefully and you can hear them eating. It sounds a bit like soggy rice krispies.

It’s only a minute long, so don’t worry, it ends quickly. If anyone also insists, I could record a much longer video.

No one will insist.

I know this will make some people queasy, so I’m hiding it below the fold.

[Read more…]

The skunk is free!

I tried calling the authorities about our little skunk problem.

The humane society wasn’t equipped to deal with skunks. They suggested I call the police.

The police (who have been disbanded) couldn’t do anything. They suggested I call the DNR.

The DNR doesn’t have any officers in town. They suggested I call the police. When I said I had, they told me I’m on my own.

So…I threw an old tarp over the cage, opened the door while wearing goggles and heavy gloves, and the skunk scurried off to our backyard without mishap, fortunately, although the tarp is now rather stinky. Unfortunately, though, we found out where our skunk family lives: under our deck.

Which fantasy is hurting America more?

Oh gosh. We know what to blame for our current situation now. Fantasy Role-Playing Is Hurting America! I heard this same claim back in the 1970s, although usually the argument was that it was the Satanic imagery that was going to invoke occult forces. This guy takes a different tack — he’s going to invoke Steve Bannon as an authority. I prefer the occult forces.

Senior points to a 2018 documentary in which Bannon explains to a filmmaker how, when working in the internet gaming industry, he was surprised to learn just how many people are devoted to playing multiplayer online games. Bannon interprets this intensity through the grid of a hypothetical man, Dave from accounts payable, in the days after his death.

“Some preacher from a church or some guy from a funeral home who’s never met him does a 10-minute eulogy, says a few prayers. And that’s Dave,” Bannon says. He contrasts this boring, real-life Dave from accounts payable with Dave’s online gaming persona: Ajax. Ajax is tough and warlike. When he dies in the fantasy, there’s a funeral pyre and thousands of people come to mourn Ajax the Warrior.

“‘Now, who’s more real?’ Bannon asks. Dave in Accounting? Or Ajax?” Senior writes. Bannon realizes that “some people—particularly disaffected men—actively prefer and better identify with the online versions of themselves.”

OK, this isn’t very interesting or surprising. Yes, people can be inspired by stories, can identify with a cause greater than themselves. This has always been true. It’s not unique to video games, but has been the foundation of religious and political movements for millennia. It’s just that occasionally someone decides that finding identity in a cause is bad when they dislike the cause (like videogames), while simultaneously saying that finding identity is a cause is good when it’s something they like (like Christianity). This article is the same old story — video games bad, Christianity good, therefore the only problem is which fantasy you choose to follow.

I can at least credit the author for realizing he could be walking into a trap. Why isn’t his Christian fantasy also dangerously seductive and misleading people’s lives? Easy. Because Christianity is different.

Yet the way of Jesus is quite different. A Christian vision of heaven is not Valhalla with wine (or grape juice) instead of mead. Valhalla—and almost every other pagan vision of an afterlife—looks backward. It’s the echo and celebration of the warrior’s success in the life that was.

The kingdom of God doesn’t find meaning there. It brings meaning by joining our stories with an altogether different narrative—the story of Jesus. His life is our life. His glory is our glory. And Jesus redefines what wisdom and power really are—by embracing an object found most baffling by the Romans and other pagans of his day: the cross.

When we start to really understand and embody that in our churches, maybe fewer Daves will find their identities in either accounts payable or Ajax online. Maybe more of them will see that there’s glory in the ordinary, in giving your life away for the people you love.

Except…he’s still saying that believing in religion is a way to find “glory”. It’s still a tool to trick people into thinking their mundane lives can be made “glorious” by layering on a belief in a fantasy. Maybe also he should take a look at some of the Christian iconography out there — these would fit perfectly into the imagery of a fantasy role playing game.

If World of Warcraft and Dungeons & Dragons are hurting America, I think a better case could be made that the biggest role playing game of them all, evangelical Christianity, is destroying the country.

Morning surprise

We’ve had an animal raiding our compost bin late at night. They’ve been burrowing underneath to get at the rotting vegetables in there, and then scattering them over the yard. This isn’t good. The bin is there to keep the decaying organic material confined rather than just flung about all over the place.

We’ve had this problem before — a couple of times now, we’ve had groundhogs living under our deck. We have a humane trap that we use to catch them and then we transport them a few miles away to somewhere near the Pomme de Terre river, where we release them. This is practically routine now.

So we set up the trap last night, went to bed, and bright and early this morning I go out to check on things. I blithely stroll out to the other side of the garage, and…oh shit.

I backed away quickly. I know that skunks can easily spray 10 or 20 feet, and are shockingly accurate (they aim for the eyes). They can also be mean little guys. This is about the worst thing we could have caught.

My current plan is to wait until 9 to call the local animal control office and make sure they don’t have a policy for dealing with wild animals in city limits. Then if I must I’ll approach the cage with garbage bags as a shield and open it up and let Pepe LePew go.

Lesson learned. Don’t set traps unless you’re prepared to deal with what you catch!