whatever


Random rantiness about whatever interests, engages, and annoys me...

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

More wildlife of the buggy kind

Ants have been putting their livestock out to pasture on our artichokes.  Every artichoke I cut off is full of aphids and ants.  Can't something be done?  Won't someone save us?




Enter The Beetles

Just when you thought it would never be safe to enjoy the delicious artichokes again, along come a pair of beetles devouring every aphid in their path.  Thanks, amigos.

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Mushrooms

We used to have a walnut tree out front, that died pretty much when we moved here.  It only produced a little bit, and then passed away.  It was cut down, leaving only a little micro-stump in the front lawn.  After it died it's roots are being eagerly devoured by a mycelium, which fruited like mad with the late spring rain.

You can see the poor stump, and tell where the roots were by the lines of mushrooms.  I had lines of mushrooms running through the backyard, too.  I actually dug until I found old roots there, and deduced that before I moved in there was a similar tree cut down in the backyard.



On a hike in the Muir Woods during the rainy season we had some good luck with the mushrooms.
 

 I love the colors on this one.  Maybe a hygrocybe.

 Some kind of coral fungus

 An amanita.  I think amanita aspera

 Another great coral fungus

 Stinkhorn, maybe?

 This is just a great picture.  Love the black on green. Cortinarius Violaceus, I think.

more below...

Friday, March 18, 2011

For all the women in my life,

Sorry you have to put up with crap like this:



For added fun, check out the comments.

My favorite one is when someone quotes something sexist from Star Trek:

Nabuquduriuzhur said, 4 days ago

Remember what Nomad said about Uhura
Spock: that unit is a woman.
Nomad: a mass of conflicting impulses.

A close second, though is this one:

twright64 said, 4 days ago

“Girl logic” was forever set when the very fitst(sic) one of them took dietary advice from a talking snake.
Bam!  Way to drop original sin!  Not only are women illogical, let's all remember that they doomed us to a world with pain and suffering by defying god.  Thank you, Christianity (and Islam and Judaism, to be fair), for  blaming every single one of the world's problems on women.
 
I feel compelled to keep reading these comments.  It's like a terrible accident on the highway of equality, and I can't stop rubbernecking:
dtroutma said, 4 days ago

Would “girl logic” be putting time in a bottle— of Olay?
Nice!  The youth/make-up angle!  Way to think inside the box!

What hurts the most is there are some women who see no problem with this sort of thing.  There should be a feminist version of an Uncle Tom.   I propose "Aunt Schlafly"



Here's another one that was in the paper the same day:


Those wacky women!  Judging men so quickly, yet always taking so much time with the clothes.  They are so illogical.  And emotional.  And hysterical.  Unlike the guys who wrote this strip.  They're just douchebags. It's the strangest thing, though.  My wife is always waiting on me to get ready when we go out.  Maybe I should tell her to stop bucking the stereotype.

The saddest thing is, I bet the authors think they have very reasonable attitudes towards women.

Unsurprisingly, XKCD sums this up nicely, with fewer words and actual humor.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Baby spiders, slug porn, and other household wildlife.

There is a big beautiful orb weaver who lives in the window above the utility sink in the garage.  She is ancient, for a spider.  I first noticed her in the summer of 2009, right after we first moved in to the house.  She built this beautiful web in the window, which took up the whole window.  A very nice "typical" spider web, an evenly spaced spiral across a network of support threads.  You can't really see the web, but here she is. I wish I could find a better old picture.  I might have to check the wife's computer.:
This picture was taken in June of 2010.



Here she is in March 2011:
 Hiding up in the corner.

She looks like a bulldog here.

Anyway, there are several more spiders that live in the window.  I love them.  I have never seen any other bugs in the garage.  Why?  Because of the spiders, of course.  They are fat and happy in their window.  One in particular got fatter and happier, and laid/spun/whatever an egg sack, which hatched last week.  The rate of attrition amongst the babies was pretty high.  I think some got eaten by their siblings, but I could be wrong.  There are still a bunch of the little gals, though.

The ones with legs sticking out are spiders.  Everything else is just old dead bugs left in the web.  I don't know what kind of spiders they are.  They have this messy web in the corner behind the hand-towel.  But they stay off the towel, so I leave them alone.  Mostly.


While we are on the whole wildlife theme, here's a salamander that was hanging out on the front step one evening.  I saw it when I came home from work.  It was after a big rain, and it was just chilling.
Arboreal Salamander
Aneides Lubugris

And what post on wildlife would be complete without slugporn?  

Yes, that's right, slugporn.

Here are two randy banana slugs (In Butano State Park)
Those lumpy things sticking out of the right side of either head are slug penises.   Yes, slugs, the original dick-heads.  They are hemaphrodites, so both are packing a package, if you know what I mean.  They curl up around each other
In the pic below you can see the vagina (also located on the head) of the upper left slug opening up, with the lower slug about to do his business. Don't confuse the vagina for the breathing hole (properly called a pneumostome) on the back.
And consummation.  Was it good for you?

 Soon they will crawl away and each will lay a little clutch of eggs in some damp spot of the forest floor.

UPDATE:
The big Mama spider found a husband, and has started making her own egg sack.  He's much smaller (sexual dimorphism is HUGE in orb weavers) but she's letting him stay on the web and she's now laying some eggs.  And while this is beautiful, it's also sad, because after she spends all that energy making eggs and watching her babies, she will crawl to a dark little corner and die.  How's that for bittersweet?
 You can see dad on the upper right here.
He's much smaller but still looks like an orb weaver.


She looks like she's eating her own egg sack

Saturday, March 12, 2011

The best is the worst and the worst is 7th?

In light of the Teachers Union-busting going on in Wisconsin, I got into a discussion with my boss the other day about teacher salaries and the quality of education.  Do higher teacher salaries result in better education?  He said that California pays its teachers the most (true, sort of) and has one of the crappier education ranking in the country (also true, sort of.)  He said he wouldn't mind the high salary if we actually got better education as a result.  Do teacher's salaries reflect improved education results?

So we did some looking.  California has the highest average teacher salary.  However, California also has one of the highest costs of living.  In adjusted salary, that is, adjusted for cost of living, Illinois actually has the highest teacher salaries (California was 17th).

There seems to be no generally agreed upon criteria for exactly how to rank public schools, but the most common way is using standardized test scores from 4th and 8th grade.  You can play with the various rankings here. California was definitely in the lower tier (30th according to one synthesis).  Illinois is also in the lower tier, for that matter (38th, same synthesis).   We discovered, like many before us, that teacher salaries are not the defining factor in educational achievement.

But I did find this web site, while I was looking for state rankings in education.  They popped up first in a search for "education rank by state" on teh google (no quotes used in actual search).  They had this nice interactive map where you could look at each state, and at the bottom a rank of all 50 states + DC:


That's funny.  I thought Stephen was the religious, conservative one, and Alec was the liberal one.

What do they really want?

Our Mission

The mission of the American Legislative Exchange Council is...

...to advance the Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government, federalism, and individual liberty, through a nonpartisan public-private partnership of America's state legislators, members of the private sector, the federal government, and general public.

Ha!  Exactly the sorts of principles you want in education - limited government, free market, and federalism!  Let's git us some capitalism in the schools and get rid of federal standards.  Let the states decide for themselves!
 

What could possibly go wrong?


You keep using that word "non-partisan"

Here's the board of directors, a non-partisan group of... well, of republicans. How they can be "non-partisan" when every single one of them is Republican is beyond me.  I thought that was actually the definition of partisan.

 National Chairman 
 Rep. Noble Ellington, Louisiana

First Vice Chairman     

Second Vice Chairman
Rep. Dave Frizzell, Indiana 
Rep. John Piscopo, Connecticut  

Treasurer 

 Secretary
Rep. Linda Upmeyer, Iowa 
Rep. Liston Barfield, South Carolina

 Immediate Past Chairman
 Rep. Tom Craddick, Texas


 Board Members
 Sen. Curt Bramble, Utah
 Rep. Steve McDaniel, Tennessee
 Rep. Harold Brubaker, North Carolina
 Rep. Ray Merrick, Kansas
 Sen. Jim Buck, Indiana
 Sen. Bill Raggio, Nevada
 Sen. Kent Cravens, New Mexico
 Sen. Dean Rhoads, Nevada
 Rep. Jim Ellington, Mississippi
 Sen. Chip Rogers, Georgia
 Sen. Billy Hewes III, Mississippi
 Sen. William Seitz, Ohio
 Spkr. Bill Howell, Virginia
 Rep. Curry Todd, Tennessee
 Sen. Owen Johnson, New York
 Sen. Susan Wagle, Kansas
 Sen. Michael Lamoureux, Arkansas

Yup, every single one is a Republican. A republican who feels that the free market approach is the best approach to education.  I think we should just say to hell with it and throw hospitals and prisons in, too.  Oh, and the police and fire department.  You don't pay, no cops for you.  Plus, think about how much more well run the fire department would be if they had a profit motive, instead of a humanitarian one.

But I didn't even get to the best part.  They rate the states by education achievement. Then they give each state a grade based on education reform the state is planning.  Presumably an "A+" means awesome reforms and an "F" means terrible reforms.  Here's their list:

 Final Performance Rank



 Education Reform Grade

Vermont
Massachusetts
Florida
New Hampshire
New York
Pennsylvania
Kansas
Texas
Montana
New Jersey
Alaska
Virginia
Indiana
Maine
Hawaii
Washington
Colorado
Nevada
Delaware
Maryland
Wisconsin
Idaho
Minnesota
North Dakota
Rhode Island
District of Columbia
Georgia
Wyoming
Connecticut
California
Iowa
Oregon
Nebraska
Missouri
Ohio
Tennessee
Kentucky
Illinois
South Dakota
Alabama
North Carolina
Utah
Oklahoma
Arkansas
Arizona
Mississippi
Louisiana
New Mexico
Michigan
West Virginia
South Carolina
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
    
Florida
Colorado
Louisiana
Minnesota
Missouri
New Mexico
South Carolina
Arizona
Arkansas
Idaho
Michigan
Ohio
Indiana
Kentucky
Utah
Washington
Alabama
Alaska
California
Delaware
District of Columbia
Georgia
Hawaii
Illinois
Iowa
Maryland
Massachusetts
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
North Carolina
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
South Dakota
Texas
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming
Connecticut
Virginia
Kansas
Maine
Mississippi
Montana
New York
Nebraska
North Dakota
Rhode Island
Tennessee
Vermont
B+
B
B
B
B
B
B
B-
B-
B-
B-
B-
C+
C+
C+
C+
C
C
C
C
C
C
C
C
C
C
C
C
C
C
C
C
C
C
C
C
C
C
C
C-
C-
D+
D+
D+
D+
D+
D
D
D
D
D

Last is first?

Something just jumped out at me when I looked at this list.  Vermont has, according to ALEC, the best schools in the country.  Yet they get the worst grade for education reform.  What's going on here?   What do they mean education reform?  This doesn't make any sense.

So I clicked on Vermont, and got this PDF, which sums up their complaints about Vermont's school system.
  1. Vermont doesn't have charter schools.  
  2. Vermont makes you go to the school that is in your district.  
  3. Vermont has strict homeschooling regulations.  
  4. Vermont does not allow alternative teacher certification (state certification only).  
  5. They are given an "F" in "identifying high quality teachers", 
  6. a "D" in "retaining effective teachers" 
  7. and another "F" in "removing ineffective teachers". 
In other words, you can't homeschool your kid if you aren't qualified, and you can't get qualified through some dubious "alternative" certification.   Like, say, some whack-job fundamentalist homeschooling course.  Really they are complaining that fundies can't homeschool their kids and teach them a bunch of crap that isn't true.  Plus their teachers probably teach real(ish) history, and real biology, and sex ed, and don't pray in school.  All of which is bad.

If Vermont sucks so bad at choosing their teachers, why do they have the best education scores? According to ALEC's own website, they base the ranking on:
...[T]he overall 2009 scores for low-income children (non-
ELL and/or non-IEP) and their gains/losses on National Assessment
of Educational Progress (NAEP) fourth- and eighth-grade
reading and mathematics exams from 2003 to 2009.
Seems like a pretty reasonable way to rank education systems.  If the poor kids are doing better, you are higher on the list.  As the rich kids always do better than the poor kids, they are doing better too.

It defies logic that the state with the best education is ranked the worst for education practices.  It seems to me that what Vermont is doing is good, as it is working.

Look at New Mexico, my home state.  Consistently horrible rankings in education, yet it gets the 6th best grade for reforms.  South Carolina is dead last in education, but gets the 7th best grade for reform?  What the hell? Louisiana is ranked 47th on low-income children performance but got the 3rd best grade?  These states have sucked education-wise for years.

In fact, five of the top 10 grade recipients are in the bottom 10 of the education ranking .  Of the 10 best schools, only 1 (Florida) is even in the top 25 of ALEC's reform list.  It's almost like to get a good grade you have to be a shitty school.  Wait a minute...
It all makes sense!
I get it!  The problem with Vermont is that its low-income kids are doing well!  In the eyes of ALEC, that's no good.  How will we keep poor people ignorant if we educate them?  Then they might wonder why they are so poor in the first place.