Conspiracy theorists are getting desperate

The conspiracy theories are never going to end. Here’s a new one:

Right. The big ship snarling up the Suez Canal right now is the Evergreen; Jen Psaki founded a company called Evergreen Consulting; therefore…? They don’t say. The feeble connection is enough. Here, let me help you out, loons. Washington is also nicknamed the Evergreen State; it’s liberal and voted for Biden. Evergreen State College is the hyper-liberal college that drove beloved IDW professors Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying away. “Revenger” is an anagram of “Evergreen”, with only one “e” left over. Green is the color of envy, and everyone knows the Demonrats are jealous of Trump. Therefore, Joe Biden owns a container ship that he’s using to confound global trade.

How about another one? The QAnon kooks are very excited about a video artifact that seems to show Joe Biden’s hand passing through a reporter’s microphone, which they say means he was a green screen projection (“green” makes another appearance!). It was just a common glitch, a trick of perspective, but Jack Posobiec, that fucking loon, and Nick Fuentes, that evil racist clown, have declared that it means Biden wasn’t actually there: he was a deepfake or projected digital avatar…which sounds like an awful lot of work to go through to record a guy talking to a group of reporters, who also recorded the “incident” from multiple camera angles.

Now these deranged fanatics are endlessly rewatching a 10-second clip of Biden, dissecting it frame by frame, and breathlessly noting things like a mole appearing on Biden’s right hand that wasn’t there before. They’re declaring now that it was either a digital model or recorded body double of Joe Biden, which means that Biden is actually dead, or never existed, but is definitely not the president, and he’s a puppet controlled by the New World Order, or maybe by Trump, they really aren’t sure.

I want you to know I sure turned up a lot of bizarre websites, which I will not be linking to, in order to find out if there actually are people promoting such patent nonsense. There are. Also, I have now wrecked my search engines and am getting a lot of extremely strange ads, so that was all a big mistake on my part. I should have gone incognito to scout these things out.

By the way, another peculiarity: the majority of the conspiracy theory sites I saw are also packed full of Bible quotes. Religion sure is the mother of bad, lazy thinking.

Tekporn, and a spider

Something for everyone! In the last spider zen thread, I showed off my collection of junk optics, and someone mentioned Tektronix oscilloscopes. I have those, too! Two of them!

These are relics of my old days, when I spent my day punching teeny-tiny electrodes into teeny-tiny neurons. I wasn’t a hard core electrophysiologist, I was mainly interested in delicately poking in without killing the cells so I could fill them up with interesting probes that glowed all kinds of garish colors. I brought them here with me with the idea of using them in neuroscience classes, but it turns out that you need all kinds of other infrastructure to do neurobiology of that sort right, which a small liberal arts college lacks (unless you’ve got a core of several faculty who were interested in building that infrastructure, which we didn’t have — I was alone.)

Anyway, these almost certainly don’t work anymore. They were old and finicky when I was using them, and they’ve been neglected for 20 years.

But who cares? Here’s a spider.

[Read more…]

The prodigal spider returns, and my cabinet of optical curiosities

I reported yesterday that the tiniest of my juvenile spiders had vanished, and I feared that she had escaped. I was wrong! She was still there, tucked away under a crossbar of the frame, being shy and quiet. Either that, or she had just taken off for a day to fight crime. She was famished and immediately chowed down on a fly this morning, so that is a possibility.

I also mentioned that in my ongoing lab clean-up efforts, I had unearthed another assortment of microscopical oddments that I tucked away in my cabinet dedicated to antique optics, and threatened to show you some of it. I now make good on that threat.

My predecessors at this university in cell biology, Drs. Abbott and Gooch, collected a few gadgets and were clearly imaging people. Some of it was just lying around in boxes, and when I find it, I fish it out and toss it onto a shelf. It’s really just junk at this point, and I have no use for any of it, but once upon a time these things cost a lot of money and I have a fondness for old technology, so as long as I’ve got the space, I’ll hang onto it.

Here’s the whole cabinet. It’s just a hodge-podge, not organized at all.

Look at this — a real treasure. That’s a Konica (now Konica-Minolta) Hexanon camera lens! Those, once upon a time, were high-end optics — now though, they don’t fit any camera I’ve got, and you can’t even get adapters to make them work with DSLRs, since the focal length is too short. I’ve thought a few times about collecting old lenses to play with photographically, when I get rich, but this one…nah, sadly, not something I could use, unless I were to also collect old camera bodies. Nope.

There are also a few cheap video lenses in view, and I’ve got a few CCTV cameras that seem to work, if ever I wanted to image stuff with RS-170 again. Ooh, 525 lines of fuzzy resolution. Also lenses from Cosmicar (a division of Pentax) and Computar (which is still around, making lenses), and several C-mount adapters for various microscopes.

I have a couple of Zeiss lamp housings and this tube for a fluorescence microscope. Someone was doing some nifty stuff in the 1970s, I suspect. There are also a couple of massive illuminator bases with interesting clamps — part of an optical bench setup?

These were some other curiosities very neatly packaged in solid boxes with faded velvet padding: something called an optibeam, a name I associate with antennas, but this has a couple of lenses, so I have no idea what it’s for. There’s also a massive syringe of metal and glass, very impressive, I might have to use it to terrify the grandchildren.

Not shown: I also have some mystery boxes of my own, with DECtape reels and Zip drives, which were all the rage in the 1990s. They seem quaint now — 100mb on a clunky plastic drive when I’m carrying around a terabyte in my pocket, on little thumbnail sized chips? Nah, they’re about as obsolete as all the junk on my shelf.

If you see something in those photos that get you excited, though, I can probably make arrangements with the university bureaucracy to ship them out. Otherwise, I predict that my successor someday will just sweep them all into a box and send them off to a landfill.

I have a talent for inspiring people to hate me

Way, way back in 2007, a guy in Morris decided to generously donate a great big fancy electronic carillon to the cemetery near my house, which was nice. Except that he programmed it to play hymns and patriotic tunes loudly, every 15 minutes, all day long, every day, from 5am to 10pm. He lived nowhere near his giant cheesy loudspeakers. I did. I complained. Other people in the neighborhood complained. Nothing was done, because this is small town America, and how dare you question a person’s right to screech Sousa marches and Lutheran hymns into your ears all day long are you some kind of commie pinko atheist or something? It went on for a few years (millennia?) with constant complaints & letters to the paper & some brave hero cut the wires & it was repaired & the guy left town in a huff & took his precious colossal beep-boop Nintendo away with him & donated it to a more grateful town in Arizona where the residents appreciate his contributions to the spiritual life of the community.

He has retired and moved away, but he still writes in to the Morris paper to tell us how much the carillon is loved in its new location, or how he visited some other town that had one and they adored it, and how Morris is full of philistines and liberals.

Well, Ted Storck is back in the paper again.

He’s still nursing his resentment. His account is accurate, as far as it goes. The bit where he says Things then got even worse… and refuses to say how is a little misleading, though. What happened, as I recall, is that town officials finally asked him to turn his music down and maybe play it a little less frequently, which I think is what prompted his hissy-fit and his decision to take his toys away.

It’s silly and stupid, but I have to note that Ted Storck has been seething in rage for fourteen years now and is focused on me as the source of his impotent grudge. That’s not good. I’ve had many obsessed haters over the years, but they all tend to be far away and more into railing at me over the internet. This goon knows where I live, and apparently visits the area now and then. I’m a little worried that some day I might open my door and there’s Ted Storck with a shotgun, and that’s how my story ends, blown away over a petty, small town dispute by an “insufferable self-important Christian” who can’t even spell “Pharyngula”.

Spider Zen: a loss, and a discovery!

I had another morning therapy session in the lab. First, the bad news: I think there was an escapee. Sound the alarms! Head for the hills! Panic! Run in circles, scream and shout!

Actually, the problem is that I’ve moved some of the juveniles to my larger cages, and the one that seems to have gotten away was tiny, and I think she may have found a crack in the lid and scurried off to even wider vistas. In the future, I’m going to have to grow the babies to a larger size before moving to the bigger cages. Oh well. I hope she prospers out there!

The fun news, though, is that while I was tidying up I found a Mystery Box in one forgotten corner. It was full of antique microscopy gear! I think much of it might have come from my predecessors, Dr Gooch, who retired just a few years ago, or Dr Abbott, who retired a few years before I was hired here. This box contained an oddball assortment of video adapters — nothing that fits my current microscopes, and they’re all fitted with the old C-mount style threaded fittings for, like, CCTV cameras. I’ve been collecting these odds and ends for years, and I’ll add them to my mini-museum shelf. I’ll sort them out tomorrow, and maybe post a few photos here — I should probably catalog them at some point, because while they aren’t actually useful to me, except as curiosities, maybe someone out there could find a purpose for some fragment of a Zeiss scope from the 1980s.