Look what I’ve got…

Adam Rutherford, lovely gentleman that he is, sent me a review copy ahead of its release date in the US, so I’ve got a head start. It’s looking good so far, although I’m so overwhelmed with work this week I might be a little slow getting through it — I’m the biology coordinator this year, and we’re managing a faculty search this week — but once I’m done, I’ll post a more thorough review.

If you’d like to pre-order it and send a message to publishers that you value this kind of quality science content in contrast to the deluge of racist dreck we usually get, click on the book cover below.

Another abuse of power

Yet again, the Republicans demonstrate their fondness for voter suppression. They’ve scheduled a Trump rally for the day of the New Hampshire primary, with the explicit goal of screwing up traffic to hinder voters.

The president relished the idea of dominating the stage in New Hampshire and stealing some of the media oxygen from the Democrats. Advisers hoped that Secret Service moves in downtown Manchester to secure the area for the president’s arrival would make it harder for Democratic candidates and their supporters to transverse the state’s largest city in the hours before the primary’s first votes are cast.

This is legal? And sweet Jesus but I’m tired of this president’s incessant bigotry rallies, which seem to alternate with his golfing weekends. When does he actually do the work we elect a president to do?

Thinking about a patreon account…

Mainly because I’ve now got a tremendous legal debt thanks to a certain Jesus-Mythicist asshole, and I’ve got to start bringing in extra revenue to pay that off, especially since we got rid of the obnoxious ads that did provide a feeble revenue stream. I’m trying to think of what I could do that some of you might pay a few bucks for. Some random ideas:

  • Ask volunteers to chip in a few bucks per week for meaty science posts on a regular schedule.
  • Create a patron-only Discord channel for direct conversation.
  • Have a mechanism where patrons can suggest and vote on specific topics for blog posts.
  • Ditto for YouTube videos.
  • The big one: if I get 10 $1000/month patrons for 6 months…live online lingerie shoot.

That last one would clear up everything.

Anyway, you people think about it, suggest better ideas, and I’ll try to do the same, over the next couple of days. Alternatively, you could just tell me you’re not going to ever pay for something you get for free, so I shouldn’t bother, and I’ll pursue other plans…like selling my janky ol’ plasma for the big payola.

Who is more popular in their home country, Putin or Trump?

We’ve got less than half the information we need to figure that out. Here, for instance, is how people react to a Putin portrait in a Moscow elevator.

Now someone needs to do a similar stunt with a Trump portrait in a New York elevator. Well, maybe New York isn’t the best choice — it’ll get shredded. A Chicago elevator?

At least I think we can safely agree that they’re both polarizing figures.

Never underestimate insects

Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia are being hit hard by massive clouds of locusts — would you believe a mass of insects 37 x 25 miles in area sweeping across East Africa? And that’s only one of multiple swarms.

Also troubling — this is a side-effect of climate change.

The swarms are reaching such an unusual size now because of cyclones that rained on the deserts of Oman last year, the FAO’s senior locust forecasting officer Keith Cressman tells Reuters’ Nita Bhalla.

“We know that cyclones are the originators of swarms – and in the past 10 years, there’s been an increase in the frequency of cyclones in the Indian Ocean,” Cressman tells Reuters. Eight cyclones occurred in 2019.

“Normally there’s none, or maybe one. So this is very unusual,” Cressman says. “It’s difficult to attribute to climate change directly, but if this trend of increased frequency of cyclones in Indian Ocean continues, then certainly that’s going to translate to an increase in locust swarms in the Horn of Africa.”

I used to raise Schistocerca, and they are amazingly, scarily prolific when given good conditions, which is what these cyclones are providing.

They’re going to need a lot of spiders — big spiders. Locusts are impressively large and well-armored.

Seriously, America? Laura Loomer in congress?

She’s running, and fundraising successfully. But this is Laura Loomer.

First, she’s not the least bit bashful about her efforts to stoke hate against Muslims.

In 2017, she bragged on Twitter about being a “#ProudIslamophobe,” as she called Muslims “savages,” calling for a ban on allowing Muslims into America “EVER AGAIN.” She has called Islam a “cancer,” and worse, she wrote that there’s “no such thing as a moderate Muslim. They’re ALL the same.” Loomer dangerously wants you to believe that a Muslim American like myself is no different than a person in ISIS.

Loomer, who once worked for the right-wing group Project Veritas, seems to especially despise immigrant Muslims, tweeting in 2017, “Someone needs to create a non-Islamic version of Uber or Lyft because I never want to support another Islamic immigrant driver.” That resulted in her being banned from Uber and Lyft for violating its community standards, which prompted Loomer to tweet, “Uber will literally hire an Islamic terrorist, but they will ban a conservative journalist for addressing legitimate safety concerns.”

In 2019, Loomer took to Instagram, where she made a video attacking Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) in vile terms, blaming all Muslims including Omar for 9/11, and adding, “Muslims should not even be allowed to seek positions of political office in this country.”

Beyond social media, in October 2018 Loomer praised and appeared with self-professed Canadian white nationalist Faith Goldy, who has claimed in the past that homosexuality facilitated the Holocaust and openly recited and defended the “14 word” mantra used by white supremacists. Loomer also trespassed on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s property in January 2019 along with her colleague, Charlottesville Unite the Right marcher Antonio Foreman, to denounce her refusal to support Trump’s wall. While on Pelosi’s property, Loomer reportedly made racist comments about Latinos.

The article doesn’t even mention the time she handcuffed herself to a door at Twitter headquarters and peed herself. Or the time she crashed a Shakespeare play to yell about ISIS controlling CNN. She wants to declare Keith Ellison’s election invalid, because he got 50,000 votes from Muslims and another 50,000 by voter fraud.

The Florida GOP loves Loomer, which is just another sign that the entire goddamned party has been infected with a brain-eating virus, and that we’ve got to do more than topple Trump.

For those who think Trumpism ends with Trump, think again. Loomer, who is 26, and the others we saw march in Charlottesville in defense of white supremacy are part of a younger generation that will be with us long after Trump. The best and only antidote to driving Trumpism to the fringes of society where it belongs is winning big in November. Barring that, Trumpism will spread and infect our nation like a deadly cancer.

Did you watch the Oscars?

I didn’t. My two favorite movies of the past year, Little Women and The Lighthouse were barely acknowledged in the nominations, so I was uninterested. I still have opinions, though!

Best picture and best director: Parasite. OK, good choice. It is a great movie, but did the voters even realize what it was about? It’s a horror movie where the monster is class and wealth inequality. Hollywood obliviously chose the anti-Hollywood movie.

Best actress: Rene Zellweger in Judy. I haven’t seen it, although I’d like to, and Zellweger does good work.

Best actor: Joaquin Phoenix in Joker. Joker was a better movie than I expected, but it was still a hopeless muddle in what it was trying to say. Phoenix did put in a very strong performance though, so I won’t complain.

Best supporting actress: Laura Dern in Marriage Story. Another one I haven’t seen, because I’m in a happy marriage and have no interest in a story about a marriage self-destructing. I’m gonna pretend Dern won this for Little Women.

Best supporting actor: Brad Pitt in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I like Brad Pitt but despise Quentin Tarentino, so this is another one I skipped.

Best adapted screenplay: Jojo Rabbit. A really good movie. I was surprised that Taika Waititi actually pulled off a comedy that was respectful of the tragedy.

Cinematography: 1917. Look. This was a mundane story with a simple plot that went from A to B on a linear trajectory. But what it really was 2 hours for Roger Deakins to show off, and it deserved this award.

Hmmmph. Little Women did win best costume design, but The Lighthouse was skunked. I could probably complain more, but generally I think The Academy made some safe choices.

Frustrations with Jenoptik, and a better photomicrography solution

In my lab, I have a nice, inexpensive setup for capturing microscope images. About 10 years ago, I bought a dedicated photomicrography system from Jenoptik, a cooled CCD camera with a software package called ProgRes. It did what I needed, which was basically to provide an easy way for students to see on the computer screen what they were looking at on the microscope, and also to capture time lapse recordings of developing embryos. It had other useful features, like being able to calibrate the images, automatically annotate them with scale bars, etc. I had quite a few students learning how to easily get scientific-grade images out of this thing.

“Had”. The system has a few huge flaws: like most of the companies making these gadgets, the scientific side feels like a low-profit sideline for them, and most of the money is coming out of industrial imaging applications. That means poor support for us people who are on a tight budget who aren’t going to buy a hundred cameras for our factory, and that means you’re screwed when something doesn’t work. The software for this system breaks every time there’s an update to the MacOS. Like, it runs, but it doesn’t connect to the camera, so all I see is a blank screen. And the software hasn’t seen an update since 2010.

The last time this happened, they sent me a camera firmware patch that had to be run from a PC, not a Mac, and a slightly patched version of the application. It got it working again, but I can see the writing on the wall: as far as Jenoptik is concerned, they are done, they’ll continue to sell off their inventory as long as suckers are willing to buy it, but it’s not as if they’re going to invest any further resources into maintenance and development for mere biologists. It’s frustrating. The system is currently dead and useless.

So I’ve been exploring alternatives…on a tight budget. I’ve come to the conclusion that simple consumer grade cameras are far better bang for the buck. They won’t work if you’ve got some specific, narrow application, like low-light fluorescence imaging, but for the kind of general transmitted light microscopy I do, they’re better: higher resolution, more control, more imaging options. The only thing they lack is that one touch of a button capture of an annotated image.

I was tinkering this morning. Canon Rebel cameras come with something called the EOS Utility, which allows you to connect the camera with a USB cable (or in some models, over wifi) and control everything — aperture, exposure, focus, ISO, I mean everything, and take pictures with a click of a button. You can also set it up to do time lapse with intervals as short as 5 seconds (my usual is one image every 60 seconds, so no problem), and it was impressive to watch. It takes a photo, downloads it to the computer, and shows a preview image, and you end up with a folder of 30mbyte RAW images, which is just what my camera is set to take, I could go to a lower resolution. I’ve got tools to convert those to mp4s, and I also have tools to do bulk processing.

It’s somewhat more complex than a dedicated software solution, but I have smart students. They can master this easily. And the output is much nicer.

Now the next step: paying for this. Anybody want to buy a Jenoptik C3 camera? I can’t use it anymore, but maybe they’ll be better about keeping it updated for Windows machines. Otherwise, it’s going to get stuffed in a drawer and forgotten.

I can get a Canon t5i body (I don’t need lenses) for a few hundred dollars, and even the nice t7i for a bit more, and I’m happy with used cameras, too. It’s about a fifth of the cost of my Jenoptik! I may have to write an in-house grant proposal to scrape up that much, or if there’s anybody out there that has an old Canon sitting in a closet, I’ll take it off your hands. I’ll even put a label on it naming it after you: the [your name] Spider Cam! What an honor! I know some companies would dream of this promotional opportunity, but I’m sorry, I won’t accept the Exxon Spider Cam or the Facebook Spider Cam. I do have limits.

Until I can set up a dedicated lab camera, though, I’ll make do with my personal camera. If anyone out there is setting up a lab and need a low-cost camera system, I’ll offer a word of advice: steer clear of Jenoptik.

It happened again!

I had to go to the hardware store this morning to get a little craft saw, and as he was ringing up my purchase, the clerk cheerfully asked, “What are you working on?” In my newfound spirit of sharing my scientific interests with the community, I said:

“I’m cutting bamboo strips to make artisanal cages for the spiders in my lab!”, with a smile.

Ftzzt. Short circuit. No comment. Silently handed me my receipt. I left.

Maybe it was the smile. I’m not very good at the smiling thing.