Logistics are so important

I can’t really compete with Marcus and Charly in the big time construction and crafting projects, but I did make something that worked really well today. I made a fly-shaker. You know, like a salt shaker, only you shake flies out of it.

I’ve got a lot of spiders right now, all housed in individual vials, and I’ve got many more on the way. In particular, I’ve got 40+ baby spiderlings, with maybe a 100 more waiting to emerge any day now. I really want to keep them well fed so they’ll grow rapidly (and to Great Size, I hope), which means I’m feeding them every other day. This has been a clumsy process in which I put a few hundred wingless flies in a wide mouth cup, then cover it with a lid, and go down a line of spider vials using a paint brush to flick a few individuals into the loving arms of my babies. This is messy and awkward, because as soon as I open the lid to flick out a couple of flies, they all swarm to escape.

It takes 45 minutes to an hour to feed everyone, and it’s sloppy and a fair number of flies escape…to die, because there’s nothing for them to eat in the lab, and there are also escaped spiders that are thriving on their futile attempts to get away.

My fly shaker is simple: a plastic water bottle with a very small, fly-sized hole drilled in the top. I tape over the hole, use a funnel to dump a lot of flies into the bottle, and then open up all the spider containers. The spiders are well-behaved and will quietly rest in their web. Then I remove the tape from the fly shaker, invert it, and tap it once on each vial. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-etc. I did the whole bunch in less than 5 minutes! Then I was free to sit back and watch the gladiatorial spectacle as my spiderlings went into a frenzy.

I’ve been inefficient and working too hard. Now I can grow this spider army far more easily.

Maybe I should write a parenting book

I’m learning things from raising Steatoda triangulosa. Feeding time is a marvel: I recorded a very short video of the little spiderlings’ reaction to having a fruit fly thrown at them. It’s like instant implacable carnivory! They’re eager to leap onto their prey, exhibiting the same behaviors as the adults.

So, this is my idea of a good parenting book. Take your little human baby, and toss a small calf or a large puppy into the crib with him or her. Leave them to their business for a few days. Come back later and remove the bones and scraps, and toss them another one. Repeat until they’re old enough to hunt on their own.

I guess since they’re weak humans, you could give the baby a Bowie knife or something to compensate.

Unfortunately, my own children are all growed up, and it’s too late to try on them. My kids probably won’t let me try this with the grandkids. That means…

Having trouble reading Pharyngula?

You aren’t alone — it seems to have developed an annoying allergy to Safari, which is the browser my wife uses, so I better get it fixed. It’s only Safari, and it seems to hang at some random point while loading the articles, which makes it hard to track down. I’ve suspected it might be something funky in the sidebar, so I’ve purged a lot of that stuff (some of it was ten years old, so about time), and I’ll continue to pick away at it.

One observation that led me to think it’s something about the main Pharyngula page is that there’s a workaround: if you go to the FtB main page, and go from there directly to individual articles, they load fine. Still very annoying.

Thanks to some advice from @[email protected], I may have sort of fixed the problem. It was a mundane link to Twitter that was making Safari puke. Link now hidden, blog now seems to load on Safari. Why it didn’t like that link is a mystery.

I hope you aren’t expecting the universities to fight back

Florida is leading the way in wrecking the American university system.

In his efforts to remake higher education in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has signed laws that alter the tenure system, remove Florida universities from commonly accepted accreditation practices, and mandate annual “viewpoint diversity surveys” from students and faculty.

DeSantis (R) also pushed through legislation he dubbed the “Stop WOKE Act” that regulates what schools, including universities, and workplaces can teach about race and identity. The legislation — which went into effect Friday — already faces a legal challenge.

Just wait until professors all across the country scramble to organize and leap into action! Just wait! Really. Keep waiting!

We have historical precedent on how universities will deal with the situation. Just look to Germany in the 1930s. How did the professoriate handle Hitler’s transition to power?

If you look at how that transition worked within specific institutions—universities, most notably—you see that in many cases that it took no coordination or controlling attention for it to happen. Sometimes it was that an ambitious existing faculty member within the institution who had already achieved some measure of respect or notability saw an opportunity to move into a leadership position, leveraging some kind of re-alignment towards Nazism. The classic example might be Martin Heidegger, who already had a strongly established international reputation and had taught an extraordinary series of students at Marburg and then at Freiburg, where he had been appointed as Husserl’s successor. In April 1933, Heidegger was appointed Rector at Freiburg; two weeks later he joined the Nazi Party. There’s still an ongoing argument about whether Heidegger’s philosophical thought led him to Nazism as a doctrine well before he became Rector or whether his personal ambition led him to calculatedly join the Party and then to calculatedly back its doctrinal preferences (at which point the debate ends, because he was and acted as a Nazi for a time).

In any event, it happened similarly elsewhere. In institutions and associations, someone stepped forward to make the outward look of the institution favorable to Nazi interests. That in turn required gradual and then sharply forceful remaking of the inward life of the institution for that someone to hold their place and stay on the safe side of power. In short order, faculty were forced to retire, to quietly recede and become as close to invisible as possible, or to at least outwardly pretend support for the new values and culture of the institution. Or to flee Germany altogether—and failing any of those, to eventually face persecution and death at the hands of the Nazi state. In other places, like Poland, the Nazis didn’t waste any time destroying an existing intelligentsia.

The example I usually use is Hans Spemann, probably the most famous embryologist of the era. He won the Nobel Prize in 1935 for an experiment his student, Hilde Mangold, did*, and rapidly rose up to a position of great influence in German academics. Don’t get me wrong, he had a long history of good developmental work, so it wasn’t entirely undeserved, but he also benefited from being not-Jewish. When the National Socialists came to power, he didn’t exactly rush to defend Jewish scientists — he instead sent lists of Jewish faculty to the party, and blocked their promotion. He was a ready collaborator! He gave the Nazi salute at his Nobel ceremony!

Curiously, his association with the Nazi party is not mentioned in his wikipedia entry or his embryo project entry. There was no price to pay for leading German universities into a disgraceful hell.

So watch this space! What will happen is that Florida will use those diversity surveys to promote Republicans into administrative positions, and they’ll use that power to obstruct and fire academics who don’t buy into the conservative worldview, and universities will meekly acquiesce. Professors aren’t rewarded for bucking the system. They’re rewarded for enabling whatever the administrators want.

*By the way, Spemann signed his name as an author on Mangold’s thesis, despite her opposition. That’s the thesis that won the Nobel. In our emerging new academic regime, expect the assholes to rise to the top, as always.

The worst thing to see on your doorstep

Next time some Libertarian tries to convince you that the government should not be involved in charity, let the churches do it instead, tell them to read this article about the Mormon church.

Near the start of the pandemic, in a gentrifying neighborhood of Salt Lake City, Utah, visitors from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints arrived at Danielle Bellamy’s doorstep. They were there to have her read out loud from the Book of Mormon, watch LDS videos and set a date to get baptized, all of which she says the church was requiring her to do in exchange for giving her food.

Bellamy, desperate for help, had tried applying for cash assistance from the state of Utah. But she’d been denied for not being low-income enough, an outcome that has become increasingly common ever since then-President Bill Clinton signed a law, 25 years ago, that he said would end “welfare as we know it.”

State employees then explicitly recommended to Bellamy that she ask for welfare from the church instead, she and her family members said in interviews.

Get that? State employees told her to go to a church, and the church sent missionaries to her home.

She is not a Mormon.

She refused to get baptized as a Mormon.

So the church denied her the aid she needed.

It’s a shame. Utah is a beautiful state, but the Mormons have poisoned everything. I lived there for a few years, but would not go back.

Heart of the storm

Oh boy, Minneapolis-St Paul is bracing itself for a sudden surge.

Steps from an interstate and minutes from an airport sits a nondescript building with a tenant never more in demand.
Whole Woman’s Health is one of the nation’s largest independent abortion providers, and the location of its Minnesota clinic is no accident.
“Some patients may fly, some may prefer to drive. So being near the highways that we are and the airport in Bloomington gives patients the most options available,” said Sharon Lau, Midwest advocacy director for Whole Woman’s Health Alliance.
Lau says the clinic is bracing for an influx of patients from states with more restrictive abortion laws than Minnesota after the Supreme Court overturned Roe V. Wade and enabled states to determine abortion access.
Planned Parenthood of Minnesota tells CNN that on Monday, the first business day after the Supreme Court decision, it received its highest call volume ever — an increase of 50% — with many of the calls coming from out-of-state.

This is hitting at a difficult time, when medical services are already strapped nationwide by a pandemic people have been trying to pretend doesn’t exist.

“I don’t know if we’re going to be able to handle the increase,” Stoesz said. “There is already a healthcare worker shortage and we’ve been struggling with that since the beginning of the pandemic. That hasn’t gone away.”
Stoesz expects an increase in the use of the abortion pill as an initial solution, “because appointments are going to be difficult to get,” she said.

Whenever I feel stressed about my occupation of teaching and the risks therein, I just have to remind myself that it could be worse — I could be working in healthcare. Yikes.

Spider baby update!

I know I was worried about feeding my spiders — they’re so tiny, 1.2mm long, and fruit flies are huge, maybe 3 times that size — so some of you must have been worried. Also, don’t worry, no photos in this post.

I went in to the lab to feed them this afternoon, and I shouldn’t have been concerned. Every one had fiendish, cunning traps strung across their containers, and when I tossed a fly in, they were on them instantly, wrapping them in silk and biting them and sucking out their succulent juices. I’m used to adults being so voracious, but young Parasteada are usually more passive and clumsy. Steatoda triangulosa seem to emerge from the egg sac with their killer instincts already primed.

One somewhat surprising observation: I was curious how the adults get their distinctive zig-zag stripe on their abdomen. What I’m seeing so far is that the spiderlings emerge with pale abdomens, which then darken up fairly uniformly. Today, in the 5-day-old spiderlings, I saw a set of white spots along their abdomens. It’s possible these spiders don’t have a dark zig-zag stripe at all — they have dark bodies (like other familiar Steatoda species), and then they make light-colored triangles to create the stripes.

I’ll be watching closely over the next few days. I also have another egg sac that is darkening up and will probably spawn another set of babies for me to play with.