Fear of spiders

At my university, the secretary in my office was a woman who had previously served in the army. She was young, strong, and tough but let her find a spider, however small, anywhere in the office and she would freak out, rushing to my office to tell me to get rid of it while she stayed as far away as possible. It was no use my saying that spiders are harmless and that they are actually helpful in getting rid of other insects that are actually harmful, like mosquitoes. She didn’t want to hear it. She wanted it gone and I had no choice but to comply.

But spiders are ubiquitous so arachnophobes have a tough time because there is no habitable place on Earth where you are free of them. This article in the February 17 & 24, 2025 edition of The New Yorker by Katheryn Schulz, a self-described arachnophobe, reviews a lavishly illustrated book The Lives of Spiders by Ximena Nelson that takes a comprehensive look at the immense variety of spiders who occupy pretty much the entire world. The statistics are staggering.
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Musk family values

(Doonesbury)

Even cartoonist Garry Trudeau, who is usually up-do-date on his references, cannot keep up. Musk just announced the birth of his 14th child.

But even that might be understating the number. As Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes:

He has sired, at least in a technical sense, thirteenish known children, and has reportedly offered the dispensation of his sperm to friends, employees, and people he met once at a dinner party. (Musk denies this. Skeptics of the strategy, though, might recall that Genghis Khan, according to legend, had more than a thousand offspring.)

News you can’t use?

A new study finds that the ‘quality’ of a man’s sperm correlates with their longevity.

Sperm may be the canaries in the coalmine for male health, according to research that reveals men with higher-quality semen live longer.

Danish scientists analysed samples from nearly 80,000 men and found that those who produced more than 120 million swimming sperm per ejaculate lived two to three years longer than those who produced fewer than 5 million.

The men with the highest-quality sperm lived to 80.3 years old on average, compared with 77.6 for those with the poorest-quality sperm, the researchers report in Human Reproduction.

“It really seems to be that the better the semen quality, the longer the survival,” said Dr Lærke Priskorn, an epidemiologist at Copenhagen university hospital, who led the study with Dr Niels Jørgensen, an andrologist at the hospital.

This is a major longitudinal study with a large sample of 60,000 people done over 30 years. I hesitate to critique scientific research based on newspaper reports but what one is to do with this information beats me, and the report’s only statement about possible benefits is rather weak.

The researchers now want to find out which diseases are more common in men with poor semen quality. If particular conditions are identified, doctors could ultimately advise men on preventive action should sperm analysis show they are at risk.

You. can read more here.

Women have long complained that much more time and money and effort is spent on research on even relatively minor aspects of men’s health while research on women’s health is underserved. This kind of news will lend support to that belief.

Film review: Around the World in 80 Days (1956)

I posted recently about how the 1956 film Around the World in 80 Days played a role in explaining the sudden popping into my mind of the actor-singer Gracie Fields. As a boy I had read and enjoyed Jules Verne’s 1873 book of the same name on which the film is based but had not seen the film when it came out, presumably because I was too young. In those days in Sri Lanka, if you did not see a film during its first run release, it was pretty much gone forever.

So I decided to watch it now. It is a long and extravagant film done on a large scale, lasting about three hours. David Niven is perfect in the role of the fastidious and punctilious Phileas Fogg who makes a bet for £20,000 with four members of his stuffy mens-only London club that he can go around the world in 80 days. Cantinflas plays his valet Passepartout and provides most of the comedy. He actually dominates the film, seemingly having more screen time than Niven. He has the dress, stature, and some of the mannerisms of Charlie Chaplin and the facial expressions of Chico Marx. There are about 40 famous international actors making cameo appearances and about 70,000 extras from around the world. It was done in a widescreen format.
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Welcome to America!

A German woman has experienced what so many poor immigrants experience at the hands of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.

A German tourist is fighting to be released from an immigration detention center after she was denied entry at the San Diego border and taken into custody by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) last month.

Jessica Brösche, a 26-year-old German tattoo artist, is being indefinitely detained by US Customs and Border Protection after she tried to enter San Diego on 25 January from Tijuana, Mexico, with her American best friend, Amelia Lofving. The two were traveling with tattoo equipment.
…

Brösche had her German passport, confirmation of her visa waiver to enter the country, and a copy of her return ticket back to Berlin, Lofving said. But she was still pulled aside for a secondary inspection by a US Customs and Border Protection agent.

Brösche said she then spent days detained in a cell at the San Diego border before being taken into custody by Ice. The agency brought her to the Otay Mesa detention center, where she’s now been for more than a month.

According to KPBS, US Customs and Border Protection accused Brösche of planning to violate the terms of the visa waiver program by intending to work as a tattoo artist during her time in Los Angeles.

According to ABC’s 10News, she was forced to spend eight days in solitary confinement in the facility.

“She says it was like a horror movie. They were screaming in all different rooms. After nine days, she said she went so insane that she started punching the walls and then she’s got blood on her knuckles,” Lofving said of her friend’s experience.

Surely suspicion that she might commit such a minor infraction does not deserve high-handed treatment like this? The republic will not collapse if someone works illegally for a short time as a tattoo artist.

But this is Trump’s America, where border officials have been empowered to treat everyone as potential terrorists. She should consider herself lucky that she has not been sent to Guantanamo and disappeared forever. At least, not yet.

Why would anyone like these things?

It looks like Reels, Meta’s attempt to match the popularity if Instagram, had a malfunction in its algorithm that resulted in some people having their feeds flooded with ultra-violent imagery.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has apologised after Instagram users were subjected to a flood of violence, gore, animal abuse and dead bodies on their Reels feeds.
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One user on the subreddit wrote: “I just saw at least 10 people die on my reels.”

There were also references by users to a video of a man being crushed by an elephant. Others flagged footage of a man being dismembered by a helicopter and a video where “a guy put his face into boiling oil”. Several users posted videos of their Reels feeds dominated by “sensitive content” screens that are designed to shield users from graphic material.

A list of violent content on one user’s feed, published by the tech news site 404, included: a man being set on fire; a man shooting a cashier at point-blank range; videos from an account called “PeopleDeadDaily”; and a pig being beaten with a wrench. The user in question had a biking-related Instagram account, 404 Media reported.

The people reporting this did not seek out these images, but had them foisted on them. But the existence of such videos means that there is a market for them. What kind of person watches, let alone produces, these kinds of sickening images? I try not to be judgmental about what other people like and dislike and think of myself as fairly tolerant of people’s proclivities even if they tend towards the outre. But that does not mean that I necessarily approve of them. If I learned that someone I knew enjoyed watching these kinds of things and actively sought them out, I would give that person a wide berth.

War criminal Benjamin Netanyahu commits yet another war crime

Netanyahu has announced the complete halt to all humanitarian aid to Gaza. He, with the support of the US, has unilaterally changed the terms of the ceasefire deal and is using starvation to coerce Hamas into accepting it.

Israel has cut off humanitarian supplies to Gaza in an effort to pressure Hamas into accepting a change in the ceasefire agreement to allow for the release of hostages without an Israeli troop withdrawal.

The office of the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said on Sunday it was imposing a blockade on Gaza because Hamas would not accept a plan which it claimed had been put forward by the US special envoy, Steve Witkoff, to extend phase one of the ceasefire and continue to release hostages, and postpone phase two, which envisaged an Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

“With the end of phase one of the hostage deal, and in light of Hamas’s refusal to accept the Witkoff outline for continuing talks – to which Israel agreed – Prime Minister Netanyahu has decided that, as of this morning, all entry of goods and supplies into the Gaza Strip will cease. Israel will not allow a ceasefire without the release of our hostages,” it said in a statement. “If Hamas continues its refusal, there will be further consequences.”

The 6% lie

Elon Musk claimed that only 6% of federal workers work full time in their offices. This would be dismissed as manifestly false by anyone with any sense. And yet, this lie took wings. Stephen Engelberg, editor of ProPublica, writes that although this was just one of the many falsehoods put out by Trump-Musk (another manifestly false and ridiculous one was that $50 million was sent to Gaza for condoms), it was worthwhile to see how it came about, as a case study of how assertions made by fringe people can, in the current climate, become repeated by more influential ones and thus quickly accquire the status of fact for the cult followers.

As the administration of President Donald Trump throws one government agency after another into the “wood chipper,” a startling statistic about federal workers keeps coming up: Only 6% of federal employees are working full time in their offices.

By any post-pandemic standard, it’s an astoundingly low number, particularly as major American corporations move to force workers back to the office five days a week.

It’s also completely untrue.
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