Wait! The end of the semester isn’t all that bad!

There are a few good things going on right now — they’re all extra work, but it’s the kind of work I don’t mind.

We’re in the midst of a job search — we’re hoping to hire an ecologist. Last night, and twice next week, we get to experience the dreaded Job Seminar, where some poor candidate gets to suffer through a long day of meetings and then present their work in an intense environment where we’re going to judge them and possibly reward them with employment, or not. It’s utterly miserable for them, as I recall from the long ago days when I was in the hot seat, but it means I get to sit back and listen to cool, interesting stuff from a candidate who has worked long and hard on their presentation. Also, I’m not on this search committee, so I don’t have as many responsibilities. So I got to ‘work’ a bit late and be entertained by a fine seminar on prairie ecology and diversity.

Then, today, I volunteered to teach a course for a colleague who has a lot on their plate right now. This wasn’t just generosity — I’m a developmental biologist who rarely gets to teach developmental biology, because in these small departments we have to be responsible and teach obligatory courses outside our main discipline a lot, and this year and next year I’m all about nothing but cell biology and genetics…which is fine. I usually smuggle in a few lectures on developmental genetics in both. But today I get to talk to first year students about the philosophy and history of embryology! Easy, I can do it in my sleep, but I also hope I can inspire the new students to want to join a lab where they can explore development, too. Which is only my lab here.

Both of these things are additional work on top of a heavy load, but I’d rather do that than make students suffer through the grueling end of semester grind. How about if I just tell all my students to forget studying, I’m handing out free As on the final, and we just have to hang out and talk about cool science for the next week? (I don’t think the university administration would approve, unfortunately, and there’s also the obligation to make sure the students are prepared for the next course in our curriculum.)

I got a suggestion to have a Q&A on YouTube. Would anyone else be interested in just talking about science informally this weekend?

Everyone is on edge

I’m afraid this one doesn’t quite hit the mark for me.

This close to the end of the term, stress levels are sky high, but I always manage to avoid blowing up at the students, so politeness is a flat line.

This is Minnesota, so the students also maintain their equanimity pretty well, but I can see a few gritted teeth and beads of sweat out there as they struggle to retain the required Minnesota Nice. I imagine they have some angry words erupting back in the dorms and on phone calls to their parents.

Next week: last week of classes! Finals the week after that! Then sweet freedom for all until late January.

The perfect social medium

An interesting idea: what if using social media didn’t leave you buck-naked and exposed?

What would “internet realists” want from their media streams? The opposite of what we have now. Today, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are designed to make users easy to contact. That was the novelty of social media — we could get in touch with people in new and previously unimaginable ways.

It also meant, by default, that any government or advertiser could do the same. Mr. Scalzi thinks we should turn the whole system on its head with “an intense emphasis on the value of curation.” It would be up to you to curate what you want to see. Your online profiles would begin with everything and everyone blocked by default.

Think of it as a more robust, comprehensive version of privacy settings, where news and entertainment would reach you only after you opted into them. This would be the first line of defense against viral falsehoods, as well as mobs of strangers or bots attacking someone they disagree with.

Right now, the system is set up so bad social media can sell your information if they want. That’s all they’re in it for, is monetizing you. I would be so there for a site where you weren’t public by default, where you could control what bits and pieces of your life that you want to share, and where the hosting service didn’t assume that they owned everything you published.

Of course, you’d need a different model for funding it, unless it was nationalized somehow.

Here’s another idea that appeals:

Trying to keep up with this torrent, media companies have used algorithms to stop the spread of abusive or misleading information. But so far, they haven’t helped much. Instead of deploying algorithms to curate content at superhuman speeds, what if future public platforms simply set limits on how quickly content circulates?

It would be a much different media experience. “Maybe you’ll submit something and it won’t show up the next minute,” Ms. Noble said. “That might be positive. Maybe we’ll upload things and come back in a week and see if it’s there.”

Yes, throttling would be good, as long as it were fairly applied. I could imagine a system at Freethoughtblogs, for instance, where all the bloggers would submit their posts to a system-wide queue, and the software would post for you when a slot opened up say, once an hour, and publishing would be prioritized for who entered the queue first and for people who hadn’t posted in a while. It might also lead to longer and more substantial posts from us kneejerk fire-hose wielders if we knew our stuff was likely to be delayed to give less prolific bloggers the next available publication slot.

Not going to happen, though. Blogs here are independent and autonomous, so that’s a scheme that probably wouldn’t be favored. We’d also have to implement it, which would take considerable tinkering with the guts of WordPress.

Wheeeee!

Imagine this hurtling across the sand at you:

Unfortunately, there’s a limit.

The move doubles the spider’s speed, to 6.6 feet per second from 3.3. But since it uses so much energy, the maneuver is a last resort, called on only to escape predators.

“I can’t see any other reason,” Dr. Jäger said, adding: “It is a costly move. If it performs this five to 10 times within one day, then it dies.”

Don’t die, speedy spider! Slow down and take it easy! That’s what I tell myself every day.

Shy and nesting

A while back, I told you I had a slight problem: I probably had two nearly indistinguishable Parasteatoda species in my colony, P. tepidariorum and P. tabulata. The way to tell them apart is by close examination of their genitals, or by dissection, and a) I don’t have the skill to do that, and b) I’m trying to maintain a live, breeding colony, so taking individuals apart to figure out their sex is off the table.

I did hatch a cunning plan, however, to get a provisional identification. P. tabulata is known to build nests from scraps of debris and wind-blown litter, so I thought maybe I could get a tentative guess at their taxonomy by cluttering their cages with scraps and seeing who built homes for themselves. It’s not at all definitive, especially since they’re all living in a sheltered environment right now and even P. tabulata might find nesting superfluous, but I raided the department’s paper shredder and hole punch for little bits, and scattered them in all the tanks.

Most of the spiders ignored them. They couldn’t eat them, after all. But a few have slowly dragged bits and pieces of paper towards their roost and built little hidey-holes. Here’s Melisandre:

So maybe I can put together a rough behavioral test to estimate who is who? I don’t think a real taxonomist would be satisfied with it at all, but it’ll be useful for me, making it less likely that I send a P. tepidariorum male off to mate with a P. tabulata female, which probably wouldn’t go well.

By the way, P. tepidariorum is thought to be native to the Americas, that is, it hitch-hiked here with the first humans to move here; it colonized Europe when the human colonizers boats sailed back home. P. tabulata is probably native to Asia, and emigrated to the Americas and Europe much more recently. Both are thriving almost everywhere humans live now, but the timing would suggest that the two species diverged at least 15,000 years ago…or about 15,000 generations ago. It’s kind of neat how their morphology hasn’t drifted apart much, but their distinct genitalia make an uncrossable reproductive barrier.

I can’t abide Biden

Please wipe that smirk off his face.

Especially not a Biden who is getting cocky. He thinks he has this whole thing in the bag. But it’s this failure of the system that really annoys me:

Biden’s confidence also rests on his position in South Carolina and a raft of Southern Super Tuesday states that include more diverse populations and more conservative Democrats. To that end, Biden said Monday, if he faltered in Iowa, he could still win the nomination. But if he won Iowa, Biden argued he’d be almost unstoppable.

And Biden said he doesn’t see anyone even close to him in South Carolina polling who could surge even if they won Iowa.

Iowa. South Carolina. Because of the screwy way our primaries are set up, these unrepresentative states early in the game have undue weight in determining who the rest of the country gets to vote on. Biden is relying on pandering to a few conservative states to game the system, and then the media will follow along and use the horserace model to let the early front-runner run away with it. Then, like Trump, he’ll rely on the aberration of the electoral college to give him a win. It’s no way to elect a president.

It’s a national office, have a day for national primaries. Then elect someone to the office on the basis of the popular vote with a national election. We have the last bit, but the rest…nope. It’s a disgrace.

That said, if he gets the nomination, even if it’s due to our broken, corrupt system, I’ll vote for him on election day. He’ll at least slow the country’s downward slide into fascism, but I don’t think he’ll do more than maintain the status quo.

Anti-theism conference imploding

It looks like that Anti-Theism International Conference is deservedly self-destructing. Maryam Namazie and Aron Ra have withdrawn from the event.

No word from Richard Dawkins yet.

They really needed a better marketing director.