Wouldn’t it be nice if the people who wrote abortion laws had to know some biology?

Here we go again. In Ohio, Republicans are trying to pass a law requiring that ectopic pregnancies be surgically reimplanted into the uterus. This is not medically possible. An ectopic pregnancy is a crisis that requires surgical intervention, and this law would require that a doctor who tried to save a woman’s life would be charged with murder.

In Pennsylvania, they want to require a birth certificate be issued and a formal burial be carried out for any fertilized egg that fails to implant. Most failures to implant are not even noted by women or doctors — it’s just another menstrual period. This is another law that cannot practically be implemented, and is just another hurdle added to the trauma of spontaneous abortions, or additional expense for planned abortions.

I am getting the impression that regressive conservatives are desperately trying to exploit this moment of ascendance before a progressive rebound slaps them back into the teeming, hellish pit of hatred they come from.

Bad sex

Pssst. Wanna read some porn? The short list for the Literary Society’s Bad Sex in Fiction award has been announced. You can also read some longer excerpts, if the short quotes in the first link are insufficiently repellent.

I almost liked this one.

She gave a yet deeper, moaning sigh. Like breathing in he saw the word he had said shiver and expand inside her. Her arms moved now, and flexed: out of here, Venus de Milo. He watched the death-life fill her growingly. She grabbed and caressed him with more muscle, more zest, than ever before. Her long lean arms were spider arms, while her kisses roved and dug.

‘I see it,’ he said. ‘You are the female praying mantis, devouring her mate.’

‘I am. You are. I shall eat every shred of you.’

‘Mouthful by mouthful.’

But nah. The author is just trying to trick me with the spider allusions, but there’s no substance here.

Actually, all of the choices are out of date and obsolete. They’ve all been superseded by one brief tweet on Twitter.

Mmm-mmmm. Now that’s bad sex.

Spider Queen

The other day, Mary stopped by the lab and immediately spotted two spiders lurking in the crannies that I hadn’t even noticed before. Obviously, females were endowed with superior spider spotting skills by Evolutionary Psychology in the Pleistocene, when it was their essential duty to scour the cave of venomous spiders while their man slept in, or ate his raw mammoth, or knapped flint spearheads.

Anyway, then I ran across this painting of Mary’s bronze-age Nordic avatar, so I had to include it.

(possibly by Docatto, from a game called Legend of the Cryptids)

The image is captioned “The remote areas of the Outlly continent are under the control of the snow spiders and their riders. The leader of the riders, Kastehelmi, patrols the sparkling snowy fields on her trusted friend Salomo to drive out any unwelcome intruders. The only colors they want painting the endless white expanses are their own.”

There’s another image also captioned appropriately, “When Kastehelmi sights an interloper, she summons a swarm of snow spiders. Suddenly, the ivory plains are speckled in scurrying black dots of all sizes. Mealtime has come at last. They pierce the flesh with their legs and crush bones with their tough mandibles. Not even a drop of blood is left behind, as this would blemish their perfect domain.”

Yep, sounds like her.

Marketing atheism badly

You wanna watch a train wreck? Probably not, so I’ll summarize this video down below. The interviewer, on the left, is someone named David Worley (sorry, never heard of him before), and on the right is Lance Gregorchuk, one of the organizers of that silly anti-theism conference to be held in Brighton. Warning: Gregorchuk seems to be unable to complete a thought, or even a full sentence. The squirrels are running races in his cranium.

OK. To summarize the chaos, in the first half of the video, Gregorchuk seems to be trying to persuade Worley to attend his conference, but doing so by negging him, telling him he’s run-of-the-mill, that he’s failed to ask any hard questions in the interview. What he wants is for Worley to come to the event and have every speaker come to him for an interview afterwards with hard, challenging questions. He says he would love someone to challenge their thinking, and to challenge Dawkins or Krauss. He gives an example of a hard question to ask Dawkins: “Why are you an atheist?”

Jesus. That’s a softball. Dawkins has written whole books on that; do you think he’s going to be stunned by such a difficult question? Gregorchuk is clueless and naive. It’s painful to watch.

But not as cringeworthy as the last half! Worley finally gets a word in edgewise, and gives an example of a question he would ask, and it’s a good one: “Is it right to platform Lawrence Krauss given the sexual assault allegations?”

Whoa, Gregorchuk is thrown for a loop. He becomes even more incoherent as he tries to justify his answer, which is Absolutely!

I can’t possibly transcribe his words. It’s a collection of sentence fragments, stammered out without much connection between them. I’m just going to give you an incomplete collection of his confident excuses.

Absolutely. You never got wrong signals from a girl and you touched her? I did it, you did it.

They could have nailed you, me, anyone else.

We don’t get signals from women.

You’re out with a girl. I’m out with a girl. She’s nice, she’s flirting her hair, how do you do this?

It’s like hand on the knee, hand on the … come on man, I’m not justifying anything, I’m just being honest.

I’m thinking of the 80s, I probably put my hand on a few…

The 80s, 90s were a time when we weren’t very…

It was a different time. It wasn’t correct…but Joe Biden used to put people’s arm on other people’s hands whatever, it’s OK.

Wow. That conference is going to be a gathering of yammering shitgibbons, isn’t it?

Allow me to answer from my experience as a man. Women are sending out signals all the time, but you have to listen to hear them. They are most definitely not sending the signal “Please lunge for my breasts” or “Stick your hand up under my skirt”, and if you think that’s what you’re waiting for, you’re going to be frustrated. Maybe you should try talking with them, listen to what they have to say, and at professional and provisionally intellectual events in particular, consider that they are people who have not come out of an urge to gratify random men’s sexual urges.

Women were not welcoming breast-lunges in the 1980s. In fact, they never appreciated those in all of human history. It’s never been that different time, except in the minds of men who had the power and the will to execute it thoughtlessly, but even those cases, the recipient of that careless brutality wasn’t appreciating it.

As for “how do you do this”, I started dating my wife in the mid-70s. The initial overture did not involve my hand creeping up her thigh — I asked her out to a dance. I was a bad dancer. We mainly talked. We got along and enjoyed each others company. We went on more dates — initially, we double-dated and went to churches, which is safe ground for a young woman in the company of a man who, in Gregorchuk’s head, might start randomly grabbing things. We went for walks, we went out for pizza, we had long phone calls, we got to know and trust each other as people and friends first.

We kissed (and I asked if I could first) after 3 months of weekly dating. I know, it doesn’t reward you with quick sexual gratification, if that’s what you’re after, but if you really want to know someone as a human being, talking works. Start there. We humans evolved to have some very sophisticated and subtle means of communicating information-rich signals, and women are just as good at it as men. Try it! There’s something wrong with you if you think women don’t send signals or are sending confusing signals.

Also, an atheist conference isn’t an 80s disco, usually. People don’t usually go there to hook up, they’re there to learn and share ideas and be inspired. I do not recommend that women attend the anti-theism international conference, since it’s going to be full of strange awkward men peering you at you looking for the “please fondle me” signal, and if you don’t give it, they might intentionally misinterpret your “please stop staring at me” signal. Or they’ll only hear the first word of your “Fuck off!” signal.

By the way, Gregorchuk is listed on the conference home page as the “marketer of the event”. He is quite possibly the worst communicator I’ve ever witnessed with a lead role in an organization.

He did it. They finally let Sergio Canavero carry out a head transplant.

I said it couldn’t be done. That the proposal was unethical. That Canavero couldn’t possibly get a spinal cord to regenerate. Then his head transplant volunteer rejected the plan.

Apparently, Canavero found new volunteers, and went ahead and did it. The result is even more horrifying than I ever predicted.

I think I’m going to be sick.

You fools! You argued over whether you could, when you were supposed to care about whether you should!

Triangles are fine, but Rorschach is lovely

My concern about my declining Parasteatoda population led me to check on the juvenile stock. They’re fine. They’re looking good. They look to be about 50:50 male:female, too, and the males are flaunting huge pedipalps, so maybe I should think about breeding them soon, even though they look so small compared to the big adults currently in the breeding cages. Here’s a quick look at the teenagers.

[Read more…]

God must love triangles

Another sad discovery in the lab: another spider, Gilly, has died suspiciously of an exploded abdomen. This has only been happening since I started feeding them waxworms and mealworms, so I suspect gluttony might be the culprit.

Strangely, this has only been happening to my Parasteatoda, while the two species of Steatoda are doing just fine. My colony is currently dominated by Steatoda triangulosa, which is unexpected, since they were relatively rare in our collection sites. I do have about 20 or so juvenile Parasteatoda growing up in smaller containers, though, so the pendulum may swing back in a few weeks when they get promoted to the big breeding cages.

Meanwhile, here’s the latest juvenile (Steatoda triangulosa, of course) that is ready for breeding, I think. The picture catches her at a good angle so you can see both the zig-zag brown stripe down the side of her abdomen, and the sawtooth or triangle pattern you can see dorsally.

You can sort of see a white-flocked Christmas tree on her abdomen, maybe. (NO, IT’S TOO SOON FOR CHRISTMAS REFERENCES!).

The War on Thanksgiving?

I am weary after many years slogging in the trenches, drafted to serve in a war I didn’t want to fight. Every year, in December, we’re called to go over the top and assault the Christmas redoubt in our bloody war on the name — never mind that we never actually do, preferring to sit back and sip our wine and enjoy a feast instead, it’s the thought that we’re expected to clamber over barbed wire to somehow force people to say “Happy Holidays”. It’s tiring. And the truth is, I don’t really give a damn. It’s just the fucking Christians wanting to pretend to be persecuted again.

And now, this silly escalation.

OK, which of my fellow Lefties was asking for this? Was it you? I didn’t hear a word about this until Trump suddenly started whining about how we’re attacking him. Come on, people! We’ve got to be coordinated about these attacks!

Again, I don’t really care. I don’t celebrate a bunch of long-dead Europeans feasting at the onset of their invasion of a new continent, I just like the day off, visiting with my kids, and seeing my students recharging with their friends and families before the conclusion of a semester. If that’s the War on Thanksgiving, I guess I’m a combatant. Once more.

They better not try to declare a War on Halloween, though. We have the witches on our side in that one.