We got legs!

I am excited to report that the latest generation of spiders in the colony is developing nicely. Here’s a closeup of a Steatoda triangulosa egg sac, and you can see the adorable little spiderling embryos inside. There are legs! Eight of them! Everything is looking good.

A lot of you don’t like spider photos (cute baby spiders don’t count, right?), but you can see those on Patreon. She’s out of focus in this one, but as soon as I put the optics on that egg sac, she scurried over and maternally embraced it — she’s the loving darkness lurking in the deep blur behind the eggs you see here.

The racist BS of Intelligence and Breast vs. Ass Preference

Here’s one for the Evolutionary Psychology Hall of Shame:

The author of this “study” has a theory, which is his, that breasts are an expensive ornament that could only be selected for in a stable environment where individuals can afford them. They’re kind of like elaborate antlers in species that have them, I guess. Maybe. I could consider an argument along those lines, except this one runs off the rails pretty quickly.

My theory of the evolution of breasts is that they are an adaptation for a slow life history rather than a fast life history. Breasts are K-selected. r-selected animals with a fast life history have short lifespans and mature quickly. K-selected species have longer lifespans, invest more in their children and take longer to mature. Fast life history is an adaptation to unstable ecologies where mortality is more random and uncontrollable so the best option is to have as many offspring as possible. By contrast in predictable environments, there’s an advantage to investing more in offspring to increase their chances.

Breasts by selecting for stable, long-term relationships between males and females facilitate long-term investment in offspring. It makes sense that only humans would have permanent breasts. Compared to other primates we have a slow life history strategy. We live for a particularly long time, take a long time to mature and need substantial resources and protection to develop our large brains.

For those of you fortunate enough to have never encountered racist literature, this r and K stuff, while legitimate parameters in ecology and evolutionary biology, is going to be sadly abused by racists. They want to argue that different populations of humans are living in very different r and K selection regimes, and that they have been living in those situations for long periods of time that are evolutionarily significant. They only trot out these terms to justify with pseudoscience their biases. So be warned: this is garbage science of the rankest kind.

You can’t see the axes of the big graph in the tweet above, so let me extract it for you.

The title, Intelligence and Breast vs. Ass Preference, should alert you to the absurdity that is about to follow. Note the horizontal axis: National IQ. This is a totally bogus parameter. As near as I can tell, it comes from the work of Richard Lynn, an English psychologist associated with a network of scientific racists who fabricated a list of IQ values associated with different nationalities which supported his bias that Africans were less intelligent than Europeans who were less intelligent than Asians. He’s on the board of the Pioneer Fund, an organization that hands out cash to other racist groups and individuals, and he’s also on the board of the notoriously racist journal Mankind Quarterly, which is a recipient of those funds. It’s an incestuous gang of bad pseudoscientists who reference and support each other’s bad pseudoscientific claims.

Now turn your eyes to the vertical axis, Big Boobs-Big Ass Google Trends Search Ratio.

Yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like. He used Google Trends to look at the frequency of people in various countries searching for the terms “Big Boobs” vs “Big Ass”. In English. He even admits that his results may reflect a linguistic bias, unaware that there are a lot of other reasons why this could be a very poor metric for measuring anatomical preferences. He’s an idiot trying to shoehorn technical terms from evolutionary biology into an inappropriate context with an incredibly sloppy methodology, all to support his racist biases.

Also note that Emil O W Kirkegaard, another racist, is touting this “work”, suggesting that it should appear in the next issue of Mankind Quarterly, which does tell you something about MQ’s standards.

He did later sort of retract that, dismissing criticisms of the inanity of that graph by saying this was a blogpost, not a formal study and making it clear that it wasn’t his work, but George Francis’s.

I want you to know that it was painful for me to dig into Kirkegaard’s repulsively racist Twitter history, in part because he has me blocked (Yay! And also easily circumvented), but also because it was imbedded in all kinds of wretched crap. Did you know Gypsies got bigger balls than Hungarians? And that Unnatural hair color really is a danger zone marker? (You will not be surprised to learn that a picture of Rebecca Watson is used as evidence, although I’m sure she’s tired of it.)

I need a shower after that.

Kirkegaard, by the way, is an editor for Mankind Quarterly. You should be troubled by the fact that Psychology Today, a reasonably mainstream publication that I already didn’t trust at all, has cited him in a terrible article that claims “Higher rates of mental illness have been found on the far left.” The foundation of the entire claim is built on a single paper by Kirkegaard published in Mankind Quarterly, which, I remind you, he edits.

The real danger zone marker here is Mankind Quarterly. Any time you see that journal cited, know that you are going to be exposed to toxic racist bullshit of the worst kind, with the kind of rigor that can be demonstrated with a graph of Intelligence and Breast vs. Ass Preference.

Before the Bat, there was the Spider

If I asked you to think of a masked comic book hero, the alter ego of a wealthy multimillionaire, who wore a costume chosen to strike fear into the hearts of criminals, and who had a battery of gadgets he used to foil crime, who would you think of? Batman? WRONG! It’s…the SPIDER, Master of Men!

Yeah, I never heard of him either.

That’s rather interesting, actually, because he was a phenomenally popular character in pulp novels of the 1930s and later. He was in several movie serials, and published in multiple novels over the decades. Apparently he was revived for some comic book series in the 1990s and 2000s, too. Before there were superheroes with magic powers, there was a collection of mysterious detectives in the popular literature — the Shadow, the Green Hornet, Doc Savage, and of course, the Spider — who were all eventually eaten by the Bat who now dominates comic books and movies.

The only thing that seems to distinguish the Spider from the Batman is that the Spider relied on the two pistols he was always running around with, and which he used to straight-out murder his foes. I wonder if the Batman’s evolutionary success, since he was always portrayed as avoiding killing, was a product of Fredric Wertham and the Comics Code Authority, which made publishers leery of excessive violence? The gunslinger heroes seem to have faded away, to be replaced with overpowered superheroes who don’t carry guns, but can raze whole city blocks with a punch. Maybe the Spider needs a Zack Snyder movie? (No, he does not. No one deserves that.)

Here’s a video with some clips from the old Spider serials.

I’m a sucker for that old pulp fiction graphic style, but I have zero interest in watching any of the old serials or reading the pulp novels of the time, and I’m not going to mourn the absence of the Spider from modern movies. What I find interesting is that this one successful, popular franchise could so thoroughly disappear over time, and not even occupy any space in my memory. It gives me hope for the future, it does. I can look at the current glut of comic book movies and tell myself that this too shall pass.

Or that they’ll be replaced with a different glut of franchised fantasies.

How a spider eats

This video has been online for 9 years, and only has 358 views. That’s sad. Maybe it has something to do with the subject?

If you’ve wondered how spiders eat, they have a pair of chelicerae in front of their face that are used for injecting venom/chopping up prey, but they’re not for ingestion at all. They have mouthparts behind the chelicerae, which they then use for sucking up fluids and spitting up more saliva. The video is a closeup of a prey animal with a rather translucent exoskeleton, so you can actually see the juices sloshing around inside and being sucked out. This is cool; fruit flies don’t show much, there is only a small amount of bug goo inside, but I have seen mealworms get their guts literally drained out of the exoskeleton, leaving nothing but a hollow shell when the spider is done.

I can guess why this is an unpopular video, so I’ll hide it below the fold.

[Read more…]

I voted for Hillary Clinton, once

I’m sorry.

My only excuse is that her opponent was even more awful, but she should never have gotten to that level in the first place, except that she does appeal to conservative Democrats. I also liked the idea of a woman for president (still do), so I was willing to accept a compromise in what I valued.

Somewhere, I wish I could remember where, I read that the Clintons managed to replace the Democratic party with Republican Lite, and that one of the consequences of that is that real Republicans were free to run far, far off into crazy town. That rings true to me.

What finally convinced me that the Clintons were a huge mistake was a recent chatty (so much pointless detail about what she had for lunch!) in the Financial Times. The whole thing made me feel ill.

My espresso has arrived. Clinton asks for more iced tea. I cannot allow the lunch to end without questioning the direction of her party. I say that Democrats seem to be going out of their way to lose elections by elevating activist causes, notably the transgender debate, which are relevant only to a small minority. What sense does it make to depict JK Rowling as a fascist? To my surprise, Clinton shares the premise of my question.

“We are standing on the precipice of losing our democracy, and everything that everybody else cares about then goes out the window,” she says. “Look, the most important thing is to win the next election. The alternative is so frightening that whatever does not help you win should not be a priority.”

Whatever helps you win. That’s a phrase that belongs on the Clinton coat of arms. No principles, no goals, just whatever gets you power, that’s all that matters. Just once, I’d like to see a Democrat stand up and forthrightly say what they value, so I’d know if I agreed with them, and they’d get my vote.

Oh, hey, there is one: John Fetterman is running for the Senate in Pennsylvania. This is what I want to see from everyone who thinks they belong in the Democratic party.

Don’t hide from it. Don’t tell me you’ll tolerate transphobia in the name of winning.

I’ll never vote for a Clinton again. To put it in terms she might understand, she’s a loser. Isn’t that all that counts?

Pity Elon

This is just the worst. In time for Father’s Day, Elon Musk’s daughter filed a petition to change her name and gender.

I am definitely not a Musk fan, but I don’t wish this kind of pain on anyone. Her explanation for why she’s doing this is a knife right to the heart.

He’s the richest man in the world, and that is a statement that demonstrates he’s a total failure in the game of life — he can’t even win the respect of the child he presumably raised from infancy. I’m just saying that if one of my kids said something like that to me I would be shattered and would seriously be questioning my whole life. Maybe Musk is so unconscionable and so disinterested in his children that he is unperturbed by such a statement, but I can’t imagine myself feeling that way, so maybe I’m reading my own values into him, but man, I couldn’t help but feel some deep pain on reading that.

Now I’ve gone and made myself vulnerable to my kids, handed them a knife and told them exactly where to stick it, but I’m fairly confident that they wouldn’t do me that kind of harm.

Distantly related, but weird: I did not know that Musk’s former partner, Grimes, had a Minnesota connection.

Back in 2009, when Grimes was just a 21-year-old college student eager to go on an adventure, she paired up with 23-year-old William Gratz, who she met at school in Montreal, according to a 2009 Star Tribune report. The couple packed chickens, a sewing machine, and 20 pounds of potatoes into a houseboat that they built from scratch. They named the boat Velvet Glove Cast in Iron and called themselves Veruschka and Zelda Xox, seemingly with the goal of taking off on a journey worthy of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” a book they packed for the ride but had not read.

They had spent more than a month constructing the 20-foot boat on a friend’s property in Bemidji, Minnesota, from where they hauled it to Minneapolis. They installed “accordion folding doors, glass windows, pink shutters and painted murals in black, white and red paint of fantastical creatures on the sides. Strangers gave them bikes, a mattress and the sewing machine (powered by on-board batteries).”

According to the Star Tribune report, they intended to sail from Minneapolis to New Orleans, but their journey ended up being only a few miles downstream after boat engine troubles and run-ins with law enforcement…

Okaaay. They hadn’t read the book, and their trip only lasted a few days. What a strange story…

The schadenfreude continues

I don’t follow crypto religiously — there’s no way I’d ever invest in such an obvious grift, just like I avoid MLMs and Ponzi schemes — but I do have to occasionally chortle when the fraud becomes obvious. Apparently, this past week, Bitcoin dropped below a significant threshold.

Bitcoin had bobbled along all this week just above $20,000. Ether similarly bobbled along just above $1,000.

This was not a psychological level. There were large DeFi loans that would liquidate if the price number went down. Liquidations like this were what had just destroyed the crypto investment funds.

You could watch the charts as borrowers frantically poured millions of actual dollars into the markets, desperate to prop up the price. Often, a seller would dump straight into the pump, a minute later. Thanks for the exit liquidity!

This, too, worked until it didn’t.

This morning, Bitcoin broke below $20,000 at 06:51 UTC on Saturday 18 June 2022. It plummeted from $20,300 to $19,100 in just a few minutes:

Ether finally went as well, at 07:18 UTC. Someone on /r/buttcoin got live video of the $1,000 buy wall on Coinbase ETH-USD being destroyed. Beauty, grace and style, 10/10 from all judges.

They’re doomed. Really, the only reason I pay attention at all is for David Gerard’s entertaining descriptions of the circus.

It’s a huge Rube Goldberg machine slapstick custard pie clown car, where each custard pie triggers three more custard pies. A clown’s tie pops up, causing three other clowns’ ties to pop up. Several tons of organic cow manure fall from above. The clowns stick their heads up out of the poop, proclaiming how clean they are and what a mess everyone else is.

As long as you haven’t invested in crypto yourself, the show is totally free!

Capitalism wins!

It’s impressive that Lyft can profit off women getting raped in their cars. Lyft just paid out $25 million in a lawsuit that accused them of failing to protect passengers from predatory drivers. You might assume that money went to the victims, but no.

According to Alison Turkos, one of the survivor-plaintiffs suing Lyft, neither she nor any of the other survivors harmed by Lyft are receiving a dime. She told Jezebel in a phone interview that she fears people who see Thursday’s news will read “$25 million” and “settlement” and conclude that Lyft is paying survivors.

It’s not.

In 2017, Turkos was held at gun-point and kidnapped by a Lyft driver, taken to an abandoned park and gang-raped by him and several men. Now, Lyft is paying its ultra-rich shareholders $25 million. They say they were the ones who were harmed—because Lyft cost them money by mishandling sexual assault allegations. Lyft did not immediately respond to Jezebel’s request for comment for this piece.

Holding shares in Lyft is an investment in profiting off rape.