This is probably the best photo I’m ever going to get of this, so I have to share. This is what spider sex looks like.
The female is the larger one, which is very typical of spiders. The little ‘legs’ seen here extending out to the front are pedipalps, and one of the ways you can easily (well, more or less) tell the gender of a spider, because the male’s are
One of those items on my mental list of images to capture is the emergence of newborn mantises from their egg sac. I’ve gotten recently hatched nymphs a couple of times, but none ever emerging.
On spotting an egg sac near the pond in the park close by a few days ago, I found dangling debris, the shredded structure of the sac, that indicates the hatching has already occurred.
Some things get accepted into culture, maybe unintentionally, maybe in a casual way, but then become established enough that we get fooled into thinking they came from a reputable source, or from careful consideration most of philosophy is this way, it seems. One that I’m going to address here is something that I’ve coined unevidence.
Unevidence should not be confused with the curious
Hey! Carl Zimmer has been inspired by one of my posts!
Didn’t give me credit, though…
Well, it’s my 500th post, provided you ignore some deleted update markers and having to rebuild the blog long ago when the last software failed to perform, and the idea that everything I write goes through a few drafts. But anyway, it’s an important milestone, since it’s halfway to 1,000 posts, which is where I actually get readers, right? Nice
Edit: I’d already used “part eight” on a previous post and missed it, so this has been renamed.
I have a small collection of school presentations that I’ve put together, primarily about arthropods – life cycles, feeding habits, camouflage, and so on. For one of them, I have pretty much everything about lady beetles illustrated, save for just one thing:
There were two things that prompted me to read this book: an interest in the curious history of psychic research within the US military, and the reputation that the author seems to have in skeptical circles. I’ll skip the dramatic buildup by saying that the book failed to address either of these.
The Men Who Stare at Goats, by Jon Ronson, is an account of Ronson’s
The Girlfriend pointed this out to me, since this one had slipped past my radar, but two recent pics illustrated a trait I had mentioned long ago, in the early days of the blog, back when my readers numbered, well, pretty much as they do now (we won’t talk about those numbers.)
When I was taking an online course on reasoning and constructing good arguments (which I never completed, but that’s another post,) there was one interesting tidbit that was covered: some conclusion might be perfectly correct, but the argument leading to the conclusion could be flawed or unsupportive.
“Middle of nowhere.” This is one of those phrases that have gradually gotten more annoying to me over time, and I realize now that it subtly says a lot about our society, and perhaps even influences our reactions.
The middle of nowhere tells us that it’s far from roads, and restaurants, and telephones, and people overall – this is, supposedly, the “nowhere”
