A tragic loss

I just got off the phone with my mother, where I heard the terrible news: a landmark of my youth, the gigantic monkey puzzle tree that held a prideful place in my grandmother’s front yard, has been cut down (my family had nothing to do with this crime, my grandmother died years ago and the house was sold to someone else). I quickly riffled through an old box of photos to see if I had any of that old tree, and no luck…so I’ll have to make do with this one from Google street view of the house on 1st Avenue in Kent, Washington.

I used to have mow around that giant scaly monster, and as kids we’d collect the strange-looking seed pods it would shed. And now its gone. It’s endangered, don’t they know? And this one was probably lonely without a mate. Oh, well, I was lucky to have known this one when I was growing up.

Minor accomplishments!

Minor, but I intend to celebrate them.

  • I gave the students a pop quiz Friday, and got it graded by Saturday! In fact, I am completely caught up in grading for the first time this semester.
  • I got an exam written for Monday delivery! I could look on the dark side of that, in that it means I’m only caught up until tomorrow, but I’m going to pretend that writing a new and original exam is a good thing.
  • The temperature in my office is currently around 33°C, which is miserable and made getting the work done harder, but I finished anyway. On the bright side, my sweat glands work!
  • I revamped a lot of things for FtB, with some more on the way, and all the other bloggers here are happily tearing through old applications, saying yes or no. I guess I was the bottleneck holding everyone back. But I’m not anymore!
  • This is going to be a short week since there’s some sort of holiday on Thursday. We’re planning to bring my oldest little boy, Alaric, home for a day. We’ll probably continue our tradition of putting up the Atheist Tree while he’s here, preparing for Atheistmas next month.

I guess that’s four good things with one in the works. It counts!

160 years ago today

Darwin’s Origin of Species was published on 24 November 1859, and people are still mad about it.

You know, biologists don’t really regard this like some people do their Bible. It’s an old, flawed book that is now rather outdated, but contained some really smart ideas that sparked a revolution in biology. We don’t take it literally. We don’t even use it in our classrooms anymore, and we don’t think it’s a particularly good place to start your study of the science, unless you’re deeply into the history of science.

We look at it the same way we think everyone ought to regard the Christian Bible, or the Koran: critically, representing a key moment in the history of ideas.

Blackberries everywhere

Growing up south of Seattle, one of the omnipresent features were the blackberries — everywhere I walked, along the roads, in abandoned fields, along the railroad tracks, there were these impenetrable walls of blackberry brambles. They were a nuisance, but it was great in August because it was like all the paths were lined with candy, you could just pluck huge quantities of fat berries while hardly trying.

But today I read about the history of blackberries in that area, and it starts out disappointing — they’re non-native, introduced by Luther Burbank — but it just keeps getting more OH NO LUTHER YOU DIDN’T.

He started selling a new book that he’d written in his catalogs, The Training of the Human Plant.

Burbank wrote that the crossing, elimination and refining of human strains would result in “an ultimate product that should be the finest race ever known.”

He considered the U.S. the perfect place to practice eugenics, because, at the turn of the century, there were immigrants coming from all over the world. He wrote:

“Look at the material on which to draw. Here is the North, powerful, virile, aggressive, blended with the luxurious, ease-loving, more impetuous South.

“The union of great native mental strength, developed or undeveloped, with bodily vigor, but with inferior mind.”

Administrivia

It’s long overdue, but we’re in the midst of cleaning up some of the chaos in the management of Freethoughtblogs. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean firing the CEO with a hefty golden parachute so he can retire to his mansion, but we are reopening the application process, which has been neglected for a long long time.

One of the reasons for the neglect, besides the CEO’s laziness, is that we changed a significant bit of how we operate: NO ADS, therefore NO FUNDING, therefore our bloggers don’t get paid anymore, unless they work out independent sources of income (Patreon, for instance). We’re also facing a SLAPP suit…but don’t let that scare you, our bloggers aren’t subject to that, just me, personally. We do provide a space to write, and of course, the dubious benefits of associating with a rabid mob of SJWs.

If you applied to blog here in the last two years, you don’t have to resubmit, we’ve still got it on file, and we’re just now in the process of injecting the sluggish beast of our review machinery with potent drugs to stimulate it back into life.

There may be a few other projects that rouse themselves to shamble onto the stage in the near future, since there are also a few other developments, to be announced later.

Gahan Wilson is dead

Oh, this is sad. Gahan Wilson hasn’t produced much new in recent years — he has been suffering from dementia — but I discovered his work in the 70s and loved it. He and Gary Larson plucked my brain out and shaped it before stuffing it back in my cranium.

“I won’t bring any more friends home unless you let me play with them first!”

His work was always distinctive and recognizable, and unlike anyone else’s. That’s a great legacy.

Humans are good for something

Winter is a tough time to be an arachnophile, especially in the Great White North. It’s even tougher to be a spider. They’re mostly gone from outdoors — I’ve been looking, and everything is frozen and windy, the bugs are all dead, and it’s no place for an arachnid.

They do have some places to thrive, though: in your house. We people at least provide refugia for a few species, like the theridiidids I’ve been following. My wife, who has the eyes of an eagle, found this tiny little guy in our kitchen and scooped him up. He’s a juvenile so it’s hard to tell, but the palps look swollen and he’ll probably be ready to mate after his next molt.

The photo isn’t the best. A) he’s very smol, b) I’m shooting through plastic, c) he’s dangling on a single slender thread spanning the tube, and is practically vibrating, and d) he’s very excited because I fed him a fly, and he’s fangs-deep in that juicy fresh beast.

He’s Parasteatoda, and has a spectacularly stark pattern of angular pigments on his abdomen (not adequately shown). Once he has settled down and is nestled in a comfortable web — it takes a few days for them to build a cozy nest — I’ll have to get some better shots.

At least when people ask where spiders go in the winter, I have an answer. They go to my house.

This comic is making me uncomfortable

Well, I, for one, do have tenure, and am free to pursue my goal of building an army of multi-legged venomous monsters and taking over the planet from my secret lair in an exotic location that no one would ever dream could be the center of an empire.

Livin’ the dream! Bwahahahahahahahaha!

Now I just have to solve the minor problem that my experimental subjects are so tiny.