We need bigger spiders in Minnesota

Poking around in the weeds as we do every summer, looking for spiders, one thing we turn up a lot are frogs. Big frogs. They like to nestle in some nice shady leaves during the day, and we occasionally part some leafy foliage to find a frog looking back at us, as if wondering how dare we intrude on his home. I’ve often thought they need a good predator to teach them a lesson.

Like a clever huntsman spider.

Retreat and predation event near retreat of Damastes sp. (a) Spider specimen of Damastes sp. (THC140, adult female), the prosoma and opisthosoma are approximately 1.5 cm in length (smallest square = 0.1 cm)—Observation 1; (b) Damastes sp. feeding on Heterixalus andrakata (frog) inside of the retreat, built of leaves of Tambourissa sp.—Observation 1, (c) Predation event where Damastes sp. captured Heterixalus andrakata near the retreat—Observation 1; (d) Damastes sp. hiding in the retreat, built of leaves of Cedrela odorata—Observation 4

These cunning ambushers from Madagascar use silk to stitch together a few leaves, making a nice shady refuge that might appeal to a frog looking for respite from the daytime heat. The frog snuggles in, not noticing the large-fanged venomous arthropod lurking in the back, and then snicker-snack, he’s a juicy piece of meat being sucked dry by Damastes.

I don’t know about you, but if I poked my face into a local bush and saw a big glorious spider instead of a fat frog, I’d be delighted. It’s not likely, though, since our harsh winters tend to kill off most of the spiders, giving them only a short growing and breeding season.

Maybe this would be a bright prospect from global warming? Do you think Republicans would be even more resistant to the idea of good legislation if they thought climate change would create a better environment for big hairy blood-suckers? They do have some things in common.

Seattle will allow you to rot!

Yay for the Pacific Northwest! The first official human composting service in the US has opened. They stuff your corpse in a cylinder with wood chips and rails that automatically rotate your rotting body to maximize the rate that you decompose.

I am impressed with how quick the process is — two months, and then you get to be put into the garden.

The Recompose process takes 30 days in a vessel full of wood chips and straw, then another few weeks in “curing bins,” large boxes (one per person) where soil is allowed to rest and continue exhaling carbon dioxide. Once that process is complete, friends and chosen family can either retrieve the soil themselves, or donate it to an ecological restoration project at Bells Mountain near Vancouver, Washington. So far, most have elected to donate.

What I also find appealing is that the service is based in Kent, Washington, which is where I grew up. There’s nothing special about the location except that I like the symmetry of being recycled back into the place I began when I end.

Don’t send a puppy to do an old dog’s work

I am surprised that Philadelphia, a city that has medical schools and hospitals, turned to a small group of enthusiastic college kids to help with their rollout of the COVID vaccine. Enthusiastic volunteers are great, but these young people were in charge of the management of the vaccinations, and that wasn’t a very good idea.

Philadelphia is home to some of the most venerated medical institutions in the country. Yet when it came time to set up the city’s first and largest coronavirus mass vaccination site, officials turned to the start-up Philly Fighting COVID, a self-described “group of college kids” with minimal health-care experience.

Chaos ensued.

Seniors were left in tears after finding that appointments they’d made through a bungled sign-up form wouldn’t be honored. The group switched to a for-profit model without publicizing the change and added a privacy policy that would allow it to sell users’ personal data. One volunteer alleged that the 22-year-old CEO had pocketed vaccine doses. Another described a “free-for-all” where unsupervised 18- and 19-year-olds vaccinated one another and posed for photos.

Again, tapping into youthful energy is a great idea, expecting youthful energy to manage a serious enterprise responsibly is not wise. I’ve known some 22 year olds who’d definitely have taken the job very seriously, but the guy who ran this show comes off as a glad-handing entrepreneur-type, which Drexel has in spades, and sounds like someone who is eager to self-promote himself into a CEO position for anything.

Just a few weeks ago, Philly Fighting COVID was receiving glowing coverage from the likes of NBC’s “Today.” The group had a compelling story: Doroshin, a graduate student at Drexel University, helped orchestrate an effort to use 3-D printers to make free face shields for hospital workers at the start of the pandemic. By summer, he and his friends were running their own pop-up testing sites citywide.

But as Philadelphia magazine reported, the group’s “executive team” lacked anyone with a medical degree or advanced degree in public health. Doroshin himself listed a résumé that included stints teaching a high school film class, producing videos of people longboarding and practicing parkour, and founding a nonprofit that, according to Philadelphia magazine, “mostly consisted of a meme-heavy Twitter account, some minor community lobbying, and a fundraiser with a $50,000 goal that netted $684.”

After all, who needs expertise?

Speaking to “Today,” Doroshin said that his lack of a traditional public health background allowed him to “think a little differently” and speed up the vaccination process. In another interview, he expressed hopes of setting up a McDonald’s-like franchise and suggested that best practices for administering vaccine doses “can go out the window.”

It may also be that the group was superfluous, leaving open the question why they were given this job.

When asked why the city didn’t initially partner with Penn, Temple, or another medical powerhouse for the vaccine rollout, Farley [Philadelphia Health Commissioner] said he wasn’t sure whether the organizations would have agreed to help when they were already tasked with vaccinating their own staff.

“In retrospect, I wish we hadn’t worked with Philly Fighting COVID,” he said. However, Farley said the fractured partnership “will not overall slow down our vaccination process,” adding that the city is limited by the number of vaccine doses it has, not by the number of people who can administer it.

Identifying the mission-critical bottlenecks seems like a job for an experienced manager, and Doroshin wasn’t it. My own experience here in Minnesota is that we don’t have a surplus of vaccine at all, and our queries about getting it have been met with recommendations that we just sit and wait patiently for everyone with higher priority to get theirs, and while I’m sure we’ve got plenty of college students who’d be willing to help, there just isn’t any vaccine for them to help with.

Retailing pillows is not credible training for government

The MyPillow guy is dithering over whether to run for governor of Minnesota — he’s distracted right now, trying to decide whether to overthrow the system by pursuing bogus claims of election fraud, or join the system and run for elected office.

You may laugh now because Mike Lindell is a delusional moron, but I wish to remind everyone that five years we were all looking at each other, saying “No way, this Trump goombah is a delusional moron, he’s going to go down in flames in the primary.” Remember that. Take these ridiculous clowns seriously and slap them down hard early.

Adjusting to pandemic rules is going to wreck me this term

It wasn’t a good night. It’s not a particularly good morning either. I’m teaching the first in-person lab of the semester today, and in addition to anxiety about mingling with potential flesh-incubators of a virus that could kill me, I’m sweating over the major changes to the lab.

Under normal circumstances this first 3 hour Drosophila lab would be casual: here are the flies, here’s how to grow them, take your time setting up this first cross, take a little while to get familiar with fly morphology, and all the while I’d wander the lab, helping people out and answering questions and showing them things on the microscope. You know, the normal way of doing things.

Not this year.

The lab has been split up into 3 one-hour sections, with a third of the enrolled students assigned to each. I have to prep the lab so everything is at hand right there at their bench: no wandering over to that shelf to pick up fly bottles, then to that sink for medium, then to the incubator for flies. Nope, the ideal is that they come in, sit down, and don’t get up until their tasks are done. I have to run around and set up 8 stations with all supplies, including anesthetized flies of the right genotypes. I have to have it all set up before lab, and then I have to replenish everything 15 minutes before the next hour long section comes in.

The tasks have been greatly pared down, too. Make medium. Learn to distinguish male from female flies sleeping in a petri dish. Sort them into the bottles of medium. Put them in the incubator. You’re done, get out, I have another batch of students coming in. I’ve tried to trim every non-essential thing out of the process so that if I had to do it myself, I’d be done in 5 minutes, because I know that it takes a lot longer to navigate the unfamiliar.

I feel like a choreographer who has carefully laid out all the steps, and then I’m expecting the students to do a full performance without rehearsal…and if they mess up (which will be all my fault, not theirs), it’s going to delay or ruin the next 6 weeks of crosses, and will block the next hour’s worth of students from getting in and getting their job done. I had anxiety dreams about forgetting some little thing, and waves of students getting progressively more and more slowed down, and hundreds (my class isn’t that big) of students accumulating in a socially-distanced mob outside my door, waving signs and chanting about how I’m an incompetent teacher.

So yeah, everything’s going just fine. The sad thing is that even if everything goes off flawlessly, I’m going to go mad trying to juggle everything for three hours this afternoon, and I’m going to stagger out lathered in sweat at the end of it. After I clean up the chaos, that is, because I’m doing it again on Thursday. I hope I don’t have to be coherent or conscious for anything tonight.

Oh, and yesterday I had to run out to the local plague pit grocery store for last minute supplies, and encountered two mouth-breathing a-holes who couldn’t even be bothered to wear a mask. I am beginning to hate about half the residents of this town.

The Oumuamua ‘controversy’

A few years ago, an unusual object zipped through the solar system. It flew through on a straight trajectory at high speed and vanished into the depths of space; it was also unusual in shape, flickering in intensity as it tumbled through. It was named Oumuamua, and astronomers had a great time trying to figure out what it was, where it came from, and how it came to be moving so fast.

And then one guy, a Harvard astrophysicist named Avi Loeb, came up with the Intelligent Design explanation: aliens built it and launched it at our solar system. It was a perfect example of Intelligent Design thinking. He had no evidence for his hypothesis, he automatically rejected all other explanations, and spends most of his time complaining about other people’s hypotheses while not proposing observations or experiments to support his claim. The reaction by everyone else was typical, in that Loeb got all the attention in the tabloids and newspapers and television, while the scientists were left to do the unheralded real work, as reported in a maybe too even-handed New Yorker essay.

“No, ‘Oumuamua is not an alien spaceship, and the authors of the paper insult honest scientific inquiry to even suggest it,” Paul M. Sutter, an astrophysicist at Ohio State University, wrote.

“Can we talk about how annoying it is that Avi Loeb promotes speculative theories about alien origins of ‘Oumuamua, forcing [the] rest of us to do the scientific gruntwork of walking back these rumors?” Benjamin Weiner, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, tweeted.

By the way, the essay title is a question, “Have we already been visited by aliens?. You know the answer. No.

You will not be surprised to learn that Loeb has now written a book that asserts that Oumuamua is an intelligently designed object. Ho hum. Maybe double the ho-hums, because of course he also compares himself to Galileo, one of the most common symptoms of terminal crackpottery.

Loeb has now dispensed with the scientific notation and written “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). In it, he recounts the oft-told story of how Galileo was charged with heresy for asserting that Earth circled the sun. At his trial in Rome, in 1633, Galileo recanted and then, legend has it, muttered, sotto voce, “Eppur si muove” (“And yet it moves”). Loeb acknowledges that the quote is probably apocryphal; still, he maintains, it’s relevant. The astronomical establishment may wish to silence him, but it can’t explain why ‘Oumuamua strayed from the expected path. “And yet it deviated,” he observes.

One of the better parts of the essay, though, is that it concludes by comparing the book to “Chariots of the Gods?,” by Erich von Däniken, and predicts that he will most likely end up ranked with von Däniken, not Galileo. Unfortunately, that means that while it ends up as pseudoscientific trash, it will also be profitable and spawn all kinds of pseudodocumentaries, and that Loeb will be very popular on the space alien lecture circuit.

Can we have another sigh of despair, everyone?