Night moves

Our spiders are very quiet during the day, but we noticed that every morning their cages were full of fresh cobwebs. We knew they were sneaking around at night, and we resolved to catch them at it. A student, Ade Atolani, and I put together a gadget so we could watch.

We got a Raspberry Pi with a NoIR camera, drilled a hole in a plastic cage, and mounted it above a spider. I had no idea if this would work adequately at all — would we have enough resolution to even see the spider? How effective was this camera at seeing in the dark anyway? — so we just slapped together a quick trial run. We turned everything on late one afternoon, told the Raspberry Pi to take a picture every 60 seconds, and let’s see what we get. Miraculously, it all worked, first try.

What you’ll see in the video is a rectangular wooden frame in a cage, and we’re looking down on it. There’s a nice velvety dark cloth on the bottom, to minimize glare and reflections. At the beginning, there’s diffuse light from the window, so the infrared camera isn’t kicking in yet, but when it gets dark enough, the IR lamps automatically switch on, and the purplish black cloth looks pink. The important thing is that we can see the spider all night long, as it goes through bursts of activity. Awesome.

It looks like we’re going to have to sample at a higher rate, because the behavior is very bursty. We’ll enclose the whole set up in a light-proof box to get rid of the extraneous light. I also want to try some side illumination with an IR lamp to see if we can resolve the webbing as it goes up. This was just a pilot experiment, but it’s very promising.

A marvel of bias in the guise of objectivity

I could learn to hate journalism, I really could. This is an abomination of the craft.

I mean, we’re all just objects in space, shifting meaninglessly in time. You can’t really demonstrate causality or even any kind of connection at all between multiple events. Two people died, bullets came out of a gun, an editor emitted words, the sun rises and sets, everything is meaningless.

Scott Adams is making desperately bad arguments now

I haven’t been able to read Dilbert for decades now without imagining the lunatic writing it. When he became a Trumpkin, that was the last shovel of dirt out of the grave for his brain. Now he’s in the advanced stages of cerebral decay, because his case against Biden is absurd.

Adams argued that if there was any proof to be had of the Biden campaign’s ties to satanism, small signs of proof would be “hiding in plain sight.” He pointed to Biden’s slogan, “Build back better.”

“Build back better—BBB. If you were going to imagine ‘666’ and you wanted to show it to people and disguise it at the same time, can you think of any letter that the numeral six would fit inside completely? Only capital B,” Adams said.

Even Joe Biden’s name, Adams said, has a satanic coincidence.

“Did you know if you took the capital letter J—just imagine the capital letter J in your mind—now think of the next letter in ‘Joe.’ It’s an O. Now just move with your mind the O to the left until it’s on top of the J. It’s a backward six,” Adams said. “Now suppose the next letter is the lowercase E. What does a lowercase E look like if you turn it upside down? Well, it looks like a six.”

He continued, “So you’ve got the J and O together. If you combine them it looks like a backward six. You’ve got this lowercase E that looks like an upside-down six, but that’s just two sixes. Six​, six wouldn’t mean anything, right? But the next letter is capital B for Biden, and capital B is where you hide your six. So even J-O-E-B is 666.”

He surmised that the letters I, D, E, and N left in Biden’s last name is short for “identity.”

“666 identity. That’s what Joe Biden’s name actually is,” Adams said.

He’s a total clownshow. Why do papers still publish his crappy cartoon? (Probably because once your cartoon is syndicated, it’s syndicated forever, and it doesn’t matter how unfunny and tiresome it becomes.)

Kenosha

I despair. There is no hope. The United States is too deeply broken, burdened with flawed ideas of justice, too hateful of equality. Even the most obvious, easy ethical principles are discarded by the people in power. Kenosha is just the latest example. There will be others tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

Kenosha exposes the inexcusable nature of policing in this country. You would think that it would be apparent to anyone that a gun is not a universal solution to every problem, and that you don’t use deadly force in response to offenses that do not threaten others. Not to the cops! They responded to a “domestic incident”, witnessed an unarmed man, Jacob Blake, walking away, and shot him in the back. It ought to be a strongly enforced rule in the police that you do not react to a non-death penalty offense, one in which no one is under threat of harm, with an extrajudicial execution. If someone is rampaging with a long gun and murdering people, you can make a case for stopping them with a firearm; if someone is walking away from a disturbance, even if they were responsible for it, and doing nothing but getting into a car with their kids, you do not have cause to shoot them. It’s really that simple. Go ahead, let them drive away. You’ve got their license plate number, you’ve seen and can ID the individual, you have body cam photos of the guy. It’s OK. Getting into a car, even getting into a car while black, is not a crime, and is not a threat.

But our cops are trigger-happy, and think that disrespecting them by disobeying a shouted command is grounds for immediate execution. That has to stop. It is unconscionable. The entire squad of police who committed this atrocity need to be immediately fired and charged with a violent crime. Instead, the police are defending this attempted murder. As usual, they’re raking through Jacob Blake’s history to find anything that makes him less than a divine angel, smearing him to justify their actions.

More than defunding the police, we need to disarm the police, simply to short-circuit their knee-jerk tendency to solve every difficulty with a bullet. No more guns. Have a small force trained to use guns that are only deployed when the circumstances warrant…and 99% of the circumstances police deal with do not warrant firearms.

Kenosha adds another twist. I said that maybe the police could justify using firearms if someone is rampaging with a long gun and murdering people? They had exactly that situation. Two people are dead and another is maimed because a punk kid saw the protests as an excuse to gun down people in the street. The police aided him. They praised him for showing up at protest with a long gun, which is already insane — this is a situation that desperately requires de-escalation, and they encourage random civilians to intrude with a display of weaponry?

The cops are guilty, guilty, guilty of enabling and provoking the violence in Kenosha.

But further, the actual murderer is a product of a culture that rewards obsession with guns. That’s not changing. Right now I’m seeing people treating the murderer as a hero, while Jacob Blake deserved it. The rot is threaded throughout the core of American society. As usual in this country, it’s also an infection erupting around skin color.

The murderer has been arrested driving away from Kenosha — I don’t know how that happened, shouldn’t he have been shot in his car? — and has been charged with first-degree murder. Anyone want to take any bets on whether that charge sticks? I’m going to guess he’ll pull a George Zimmerman.

The protests are still going on in Minneapolis, by the way. This is a fire that is spreading, and it’s not going out as long as police- and gun-culture are not torn down.

You know Abby Johnson is a liar, right?

Johnson spoke at the Republican National Convention, which is no surprise, given that all the speakers had the prerequisite of being a liar and fraud in order to get a slot. I first dug into her history when her life “story” was told in the Christian propaganda film, Unplanned.

It’s good to get a reminder, though. Go read this update from Texas Monthly posted last year. She lied about Planned Parenthood, she lied about the abortion that she claimed motivated her to leave the organization. The truth is that she’s a venal fraud who saw an opportunity for a scandal that would profit her greatly, and has now put her on the national stage.

Is it too much to hope that hitching her star to the criminal grifter Trump will finally bring her down?