Good morning from the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia!

I’m out here at Washington and Lee University to attend the American Arachnological Society 2019 meeting, and the sessions start in a few hours. It’s going to be intense: the sessions today are on functional morphology, morphological evolution (the session I most look forward to), molecular phylogenetics and systematics, and circadian rhythms. Damn, I’m interested in them all. My brain is going to be running hot all day long, so it’s a good thing the program culminates in a trip to a brewery to cool it back down.

There are no zebrafish talks to give me a retreat to the familiar, so it’s going to be a challenging day.

Oh, also, I met another first-timer here at AAS, and learned she has a blog called Spidermentor — it’s very good. It’s full of stories about collecting and raising and observing spiders in Western Pennsylvania, and is first-rate science communication. Check it out while I’m getting a high-speed cerebral infusion today.

Regretful Father’s Day

Hey, Dad…

James Clayton Myers 1935-1992

Just thought I’d let you know how things are going. When you left us, I was a weird nerd doing incomprehensible things with insects for a living, with three little bitty kids. Well, I’m still a weird nerd — some things never change — and now I’m doing incomprehensible things with spiders, after doing incomprehensible things with fish for a long time. The kids are grown-up adults now, and have moved out. The oldest works in a law office, the middle boy is a captain in the army, and the youngest is a grad student doing incomprehensible things with computers. You’d be proud of them. We are.

They’ve provided you with two more great-grandchildren. I wish you could meet them, and even more, I wish they could meet you. They’d like you, but then, all kids liked you. All I can do is tell them about you when they’re a little older. Maybe I can take them fishing. Read some comic books. Make some pancakes. Do some tiny fraction of the things you did with me.

Oh yeah, I’m as old as you were now. That feels weird. I’m supposed to be littler and younger than you.

Mom’s still doing fine.

Miss you. Wish you were here.

The journey begins — I’m off to the @AAS_arachnology meetings

It takes a while to escape the gravitational pull of Morris, Minnesota, so we’re about to leave for the Twin Cities so I can catch an early morning flight to exotic Lexington, VA for the American Arachnological Society 2019 meeting. It feels a bit strange. There’s some imposter syndrome going on in my head, only I really am an imposter — I just started exploring arachnology this year, so I’m nothing but a novice.

I’m going to pretend I’m a bewildered and confused and uncertain first-year graduate student at this meeting. Just ignore the wrinkles and the grey beard, OK?

I’m also excited to get my first spider meeting t-shirt.

Disband the Phoenix police force and blacklist all the current officers

It’s the only way to be sure. There’s something wrong with those damn people, as the latest incident reveals: a dozen armed police descended on a report from a Dollar Store that a child had shoplifted a doll, and they abused and threatened a young family with murder over it. The force is a gang of thugs drunk on power.

This is madness. Those policemen are not competent or of an appropriate temperament to do their jobs.

You have to decide which part of the club charter matters most

Remember when Francis Collins published a book containing his goofy, ridiculous testimonial about how he became a Christian because he was out hiking and saw a waterfall in three parts, demonstrating the Trinity? Oh man, that was stupid. Then he became director of the NIH.

Remember when Francis Collins announced that equality in science was so important that he was refusing to speak on non-inclusive science panels?

“It is time to end the tradition in science of all-male speaking panels, sometimes wryly referred to as ‘manels,’” Dr. Francis Collins wrote in an online statement this week. “Too often, women and members of other groups underrepresented in science are conspicuously missing in the marquee speaking slots at scientific meetings and other high-level conferences.”

“When I consider speaking invitations, I will expect a level playing field, where scientists of all backgrounds are evaluated fairly for speaking opportunities,” he continued. “If that attention to inclusiveness is not evident in the agenda, I will decline to take part.”

Good for him. That’s the right decision.

Hey. Hey…remember when swarms of popular atheists proudly declared that god is a fiction, and that feminism is a cancer and women can’t be funny and atheism doesn’t have the estrogen vibe that would encourage women to disbelieve in gods? Remember that?

Fucking hell. You get to choose between the club that still does silly prayers and wacky rituals, but thinks women are people, or you can choose the club that supports the obvious conclusion that gods don’t exist and girls and brown people are inferior. I hate choices like that, but I guess they aren’t choices at all — I’m part of the former, at least until atheism wises up.

I think it’ll be a long time before that happens. People are sneering at Collins not for his religious beliefs, but for his ideas about human equality — people like Geoffrey Miller, evolutionary psychologist and atheist.

What an ugly clubhouse…

Pretty babies

I may be becoming notorious in Morris. Since we got mentioned in the local paper, I’ve gotten a few phone calls from community members asking about spiders. The latest was an excited call that a swarm of baby spiders had hatched out on their screen door…so of course we had to leap into the Spider-Mobile and race across town. I suggested to Mary that we ought to get a giant fiberglass spider mounted on the roof and one of those magnetic sirens/flashing lights that I could attach on the roof for these moments when I get emergency Spider-Alerts.

Anyway, we got there, and they were adorable. Hundreds of baby spiderlings stretching their limbs on the door.

We took a sample, but left most alone. We took a few photos and then turned them loose on a bush outside my office window. I don’t mind seeding my yard with orb weavers.

We truly are in a dark dystopian timeline

I was kind of horrified at the idea of Quentin Tarantino making an R-rated Star Trek movie — it kind of misses the point.

Star Trek is about hope. It’s about exploration and finding the right way to do things, not the easy way. It tells us how we can be better, how we too can find peace among the stars. That thematic line doesn’t seem to line up with any of Tarantino’s previous work, so unless he proves me seriously wrong, this film won’t necessarily capture the spirit of what makes Star Trek so good. It’ll just be The Hateful Eight but in space.

Now, though, something even more incongruous: they’re making a Banana Splits movie. You may remember this if you’re above a certain age, a Saturday morning live-action kids series with goofy people in goofy costumes and goofy plots which wasn’t very good, but nowadays, Hollywood is so desperate for ideas that they’re remaking any old dreck from fifty years ago.

Only to make it “fresh”, they’re remaking it as a horror movie.

I didn’t watch it when I was 12, I’m not going to watch the splatter-movie version when I’m 62.

Hey, you know what else is wrong with this timeline? David Bowie is dead, and Donald Trump is president.

Read your Bible, Ken

Here’s a beautiful fossil from the Green River beds, a whole school of fish fossilized in formation.

The article mentions that scientists are uncertain how the animals were locked down in sediments quickly enough to preserve their relative position…or even if this is behavior frozen in time, but maybe an alignment generated by whatever process imbedded them in sediments. It’s something scientists do all the time, admitting that they don’t know something.

Ah, but here comes Ken Ham, professional fool with a sense of absolute certainty. He knows the answer!

A recent article reported on the attempt by several experts to discover how this fossil, found in the Green River Formation, was formed (and I encourage you to go to the article and see the photo—it’s a truly incredible fossil!). One expert, who has studied other fossils from the Green River Formation, said that the school of fish probably died together because of a volcanic eruption, a mass of oxygen-poor water, or a temperature shift, and then all the fish fell to the bottom of the lake and were aligned by the current and then fossilized. But mathematical models appear to rule out this explanation. Others have suggested maybe a collapsed sand dune buried them, but they admitted “they don’t have a great explanation.”

But I do! Since I start with the history in God’s Word, I have the proper lens with which to view the world. This school of fish was catastrophically buried by water-borne sediments during the immediate aftermath of the global flood of Noah’s day. It’s no great mystery!

You can almost hear him giggling at the thought that he is so much smarter than those stupid scientists.

Only one problem: this stupid scientist has read his Bible, specifically, Genesis 7:11-12. His answer doesn’t work.

In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.
And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.

“Catastrophic” is a somewhat ambiguous word. To trap a school of fish in situ would require an event that locked them in place in a fraction of a second. The Biblical account of the catastrophe does not propose that everything was killed and flash-frozen in a picosecond, or a millisecond, or a tenth of a second, but an ongoing disaster that dragged on for a global flood taking forty days and forty nights and leaving everything under water for a year. In Answers in Genesis’ own Creation “Museum”, they have a video recreation showing a gigantic wall of water, a tsunami rising up hundreds of feet, sweeping in and destroying a village (and killing all the happy innocent children playing in it, by the way).

A tsunami would not leave a school of fish unjumbled, just as it would not leave the corpse of a child unbattered.

I am sorry, Mr Ham, but your flood, if we postulate that it even happened, was a prolonged, violent event of unimaginable magnitude. Your own site describes it as a year-long global catastrophe that destroyed the pre-Flood world, reshaped the continents, buried billions of creatures, and laid down the rock layers. Yet when it’s convenient, you now claim that it was a delicate, swift event that froze animals in motion. It reshapes continents, but it leaves a few fish unperturbed.

I think you need to go back and read your Bible. The Book of Genesis is short, the flood is described in only a few vague pages, I’m sure that if you concentrate real hard, you can get through it all. There aren’t even any long words!

Now I know for sure that Jordan Peterson is delusional

Jordan Peterson has a brilliant idea. Not this one…

He’s pushing a new forum idea, only it’s not so new.

Jordan Peterson, the Canadian academic whom I think I could absolutely describe as a “Dingus Supreme,” has a new idea for an online platform. This is very important to Peterson because he and his largely alt-right fan base need a safe space online to share controversial opinions and practice free thought. So Peterson is launching Thinkspot, self-described as “a collaborative community where individuals can explore and exchange ideas in a thoughtful and respectful manner. The platform is an intellectual playground for censorship-free discourse.” It will also shadowban users.

The grand idea of Thinkspot, as far as I can tell, is that it’s a place for people who know how to be racist and sexist in a more dog-whistle-y way, not in the more direct way you might see on Twitter — or on Gab, the platform for people who are somehow too racist for Twitter.

I have so many questions! Here’s one. How will he coax “thoughtful and respectful” ideas from his existing fanbase of alt-right fanboys?

On his podcast this week, speaking with guest Joe Rogan, Peterson outlined how he planned to keep Thinkspot from spiraling out of control: a minimum word count. “If minimum comment length is 50 words, you’re gonna have to put a little thought into it,” Peterson said, as recapped by the right-wing site NewsBusters. “Even if you’re being a troll, you’ll be a quasi-witty troll.” I’m maybe a little more skeptical that Peterson and Rogan’s crowd — the one that spends hours at a time watching men yell into a microphone on YouTube — will have trouble coming up with 50 words to fill space.

Um, the cliche is “brevity is the soul of wit”. Long-windedness won’t help, although I am not surprised that Peterson thinks rambling on and on is the same as erudition. Also, you know that the regulars will evolve ways of turning empty noise into repetitive phrases to lengthen their comments to the appropriate length. This place is going to be the domain of droning bores practicing their mansplaining.

Here’s another scheme he has “invented”.

Even weirder was Peterson’s reveal that the site will hide downvoted comments. “If your ratio of upvotes to downvotes falls below 50-50, then your comments will be hidden. People will still be able to see them if they click, but you’ll disappear,” he said. What Peterson described is a completely valid form of site moderation. The tactic is also what conservatives have often misconstrued as “shadowbanning.”

You mean like Reddit and Disqus? All this is going to do is reinforce the majority view. Actual dissenting voices will be swiftly downvoted into oblivion. It sounds like a formula for building the most sanctimonious and stupefyingly maundering heap of trollery ever. It’s going to be a goldmine for ridicule.

I have another question.

Who pays for it? Who profits from it?

Those questions remain unanswered.