So, uh, is the spider hotter in person? Because the picture isn’t doing it for me.

From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel.

What I read was that it’s about 200mg per kg, so for a 70kg human that works out to 14 grams. That actually sounds remarkably high (14 grams is a lot). Did I mess up somewhere?

What I had in mind is more like this 25kg bucket. That’s enough to kill about 2,000 people, which is actually a lot fewer people than I would have guessed before I looked up the LD50.

I’ve never actually seen caffeine in a bucket myself, but I worked in a lab once that had a big plastic jar of it.

Caffeine is poisonous to us too, so I think it’s more accurate to say that humans enjoy the side effects of that particular neurotoxin. It’s generally not possible for someone healthy to drink enough coffee to die, but they sell pure caffeine (for research) and even seemingly small amounts of that will kill a person.

No, this is a wolverine:

It’s about twice as big as an American badger.

American dinosaurs carried guns.

I always cry when I get the smaller piece of the non-homogenous one-dimensional continuum.

At 42 years old, Walnut was considered geriatric for her species. She far surpassed the median life expectancy for white-naped cranes in human care, which is 15 years.

Every day I’m undlatin’ undlatin’, undlatin’

It will be the perfect place to restore the Roman Empire.

Maybe some graduate-level classes need to be taught by a researcher in the field and so students will simply have to deal with any deficiencies that researcher may have as a teacher, but IMO undergrads will probably learn more at a community college because the professors are actually there to teach.

I still wouldn’t recommend the community college because the diploma from there won’t get the graduate as much respect, but I do know a community college graduate with a bachelor’s who makes way more than I do. She had trouble getting her first job but once she had some work experience, employers cared a lot less about where she studied. I also know another graduate who got her associate’s at a community college and then transferred to somewhere more prestigious; she saved money without compromising her education.

I wouldn’t be opposed to more funding but there would still have to be some way to decide who to fund and making a good case that one’s research is worthwhile is always going to take a long time.

This post reports that the requirement to use words like “novel” and refer to ourselves using the third-person “we” was circumvented following our transition to industry. Furthermore, the capability to write original text without using the passive voice was gained. These developments represent a significant improvement in clarity. Additional increases in the efficiency of communication may be possible as the ability to express concepts in a straightforward manner is developed further.

But God is a beetle, isn’t he?

I think it’s funny how academia selects people based on their scientific aptitude and research experience and then puts them into positions where they have to spend much of their time teaching (something they may not have the aptitude for and definitely aren’t trained to do) and writing grant proposals. The more experience people have, the less time they have to do research (with the exception of a relatively small number of celebrity professors).

With that said, I’m not sure how things could be changed for the better. I’d say that some training in teaching would be good, but I think most academics don’t actually want that. Being a TA was already an unwelcome imposition back when I was a grad student, so I wouldn’t have wanted to spend more time away from my research to become a better TA.

Wasps stung a man in Reno just to watch him cry.

My worst review said that my paper was technically sound but my entire specialty was a “cottage industry” generating computational models with no real-world relevance and therefore the paper should be rejected. The editor offered the opportunity to rebut but what could I say to something like that?

(The reviewer still lives, as far as I know.)

On the plus side, this meant that I was rejected by PNAS but then published in BJ.

Species with internal fertilization tend to have females care for the young because the male is the one who can leave first. He can maximize his reproductive success by searching for other females while the female is left with the choice between putting a lot more time and energy into caring for the offspring or leaving them to die.

Species with external fertilization usually have the opposite dynamic. The female lays unfertilized eggs and then leaves. The male is the one stuck caring for them because they would die otherwise. However, the males of some species have evolved to be too clever for this:

Among the maternal mouthbrooding cichlids, it is quite common … for the male to fertilise the eggs only once they are in the female’s mouth.