Case #5623 out of uncountable myriads:
I really want to hear more from this knowledgable fellow, “all-because-we-fell-in-love”. I’d like to know where he thinks the penis goes in, or where the baby comes out. I’d also like to know where he gets the confidence to lecture women on their genitalia when he knows essentially nothing about them.
Many thanks to this week’s guest scriptwriters, Dr Elaine Starkey and Sarah de Nordwall, who provided us with such eloquent explanations of religious belief in last week’s The Big Questions (fun begins about 12.30 minute mark). Note that they are not answering the charge of wishful thinking, as the boys are in this strip – they are just confessing to it shamelessly.
Beyond the faded town and crumbling cliffside, past the skeleton of a long-abandoned church that was itself just one strong storm away from tumbling into the water, through the sand and scrubby sea grass and under the waves, lay the remains of a British Atlantis. There were shipyards and guild halls, mansions and market squares, two friaries, six or seven churches, an untold number of homes. Sear, a small child on vacation with his family, would perch on the ruins of the old church and listen for the bells that people said could still be heard tolling from the city’s submerged steeples...More information and images at the Washington Post.
Once among the most important cities in England, Dunwich was the victim of ferocious storms that lashed Britain’s eastern coast as Europe’s climate cooled going into the period now known as “the Little Ice Age.” Sonar maps, sediment samples and contemporary accounts revealed how the successive storms eroded the cliff the city once stood on, destroyed its economy and ultimately demoralized its inhabitants so thoroughly they all moved away.
ALRIGHT MY FRIEND I have received about six messages in this vein since yesterday, but I worked for thirteen hours today and I have no time for this nonsense. Short answer: YES.
I’m gonna summarize some salient points on why pandas are awful from a conservation standpoint:
I’m gonna be frank with you. We are in the middle of a mass extinction event, caused by us. Not to be a downer (jk, I’m gonna) but we’re already driving so many species to extinction that we cannot afford to save them all with the money and interest that is in conservation right now.
Instead, we have to do some kind of awful extinction triage and assess which animals will do the most good to work to conserve - and getting into keystone species, ecosystem engineers, and other truly integral species is a whole other can of worms I’m not gonna touch on - but there are animals that are “more important” in a certain sense than others, in that they can support or affect a much wider range of other species than another.
People only care about big, cute, fluffy animals - a common lament heard from conservationists, but it’s so true. There are thousands, if not millions of species that don’t fit this mold that conservation work would benefit eons more than pandas. It’s like fixing a pretty, stained-glass window in a house whose foundations are collapsing and thinking you’re helping.
Pandas have always been the face of conservation, and they continue to be one of the biggest and most expensive ongoing failures.
[Sources/ stuff to read to make sense of my incoherent response!]
My Superb Owl Sweets for Super Bowl Sunday must have been super inspirational, because look what Ashley ordered for her daughter's birthday!
D'awww.
Ashley ordered it from a different baker, though, which meant there were bound to be just a few slight differences.
[poker face]
[eye twitch]
[biting lip]
Er...
Quick, look at the cake. Look at the cake!
AHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAAAAAAAA!!
Whooo WEEE! Almost didn't make it, there.
Thanks to Ashley G. for reminding us that wreckage can be a real hoot.
*****
Thank you for using our Amazon links to shop! USA, UK, Canada.
Well, this is awkward. I don’t particularly like Hillary Clinton, but most of her supporters seem cool. I very much like Bernie Sanders, but a lot of his supporters seem to be assholes. So what am I to do?
The latest incident is that Sanders’ followers shouted Dolores Huerta off the stage when she offered to help translate at a Nevada caucus. Dolores Huerta? Civil rights and labor leader? The so-called Democratic Socialists chanted “English only!” at a woman who is a prominent activist for unions, equal rights for women and minorities, and for a more just immigration system?
Who the fuck are these people?
“The fellow that was running the caucus said that the first person to come up to the stage could translate, so I went up. Nobody else did,” she said. “Then the Bernie people started yelling no, no, no. One of their people came up, and I suggested we both translate. But the moderator decided we would have no translation. So the Bernie people preferred we would have no translation just because I was going to do the translating. It’s ridiculous, because if I had said something that wasn’t accurate, I’m sure somebody would have corrected me.”
It’s not clear who was opposing Huerta’s offer. It’s possible that there were Republican shills there to disrupt the proceedings; there are conflicting reports on who was against Huerta translating; I’m also hearing that it was only the moderator of the caucus who rejected the idea of a translator. Caucuses are an ugly, chaotic, obsolete mess, so who knows what was going on. The bottom line is that the amazing Dolores Huerta was on hand to translate the proceedings into Spanish, and the caucus ultimately rejected the idea. Bernie Sanders, at least, has deplored the action.
It’s going to be interesting when we have our caucus in March. I live in what is basically Lake Wobegon: very white, mostly conservative, lots of people of Scandinavian and German ancestry. However, we also have an increasing Hispanic population, largely relegated to doing the poorly paid scut work at local dairy and poultry farms…but there are now a few businesses in town that have Spanish language signs in their windows, and we see lots of brown-skinned workers being quiet and maintaining a low profile. I hope some of them show up at the caucus, and if they do, I hope our local moderator is enthusiastic about providing translation to bring them fully into the democratic process.
I’m still planning to vote for Sanders at the caucus, because as I said, I like him and his ideas better than I do those of Clinton. But Sanders’ more zealous followers, especially the ones who are supporting Bernie because he’s not a woman (and not a Clinton woman) rather than because they like his egalitarian ideals, have the power to turn me away.
Sady Doyle hits another one out of the park. She discusses the phenomenon of the angry white male public intellectual and their anxieties.
Rather, the root at the problem of this kind of online harassment is that political and intellectual authority has for centuries been the domain of white men. The rise of feminism and civil rights; increased cultural awareness of Islamophobia; and the very real possibility that a woman may soon break the 200-year-plus lock that men have had on the United States presidency are all challenging that authority. Intellectual spaces have become more accessible for everyone. And that’s caused some men to wield their authority more anxiously, and brutally, to those who challenge it.
These anxieties are profound and pervasive. We’re used to seeing them expressed by people with the luxury of anonymity and unaccountability. To see them coming from “legitimate” sources is depressing. But there is an upside. By bringing online harassment out into the open and signing their real names to it, Dawkins, the Bernie Bros and others have let us know that the people ready to attack anyone who threatens the status quo are not necessarily strangers or faceless losers. They can also be people with real power.
That shows us exactly how entrenched ancient attitudes about authority really are. What’s at stake is not simply one election, or what a few people have to say on the Internet. It’s whether marginalized people have a place in the public conversation at all.
Yeah. We don’t have good gatekeepers on who gets to express their authority any more (although, this is Sunday morning: turn on your TV and watch all the male pundits. Some places still have really good gates). Furthermore, we don’t get to assume the public will gratefully defer to our authority. It can be very uncomfortable, being compelled to listen to and respect the opinions of, say, a black woman.
I’d only disagree with the focus on white male intellectuals. These are situations where intellectualism does not raise its noble head, except perhaps to assist in the rationalizations.
For example, there has been another mass shooting in Michigan, with seven dead after an angry white man went for a drive and started shooting random people out of his car window. Nothing intellectual about it — just another guy, frustrated that everything isn’t going his way automatically, and instead of firing off on Twitter, he decided to use his handy handgun.
These things are all connected. There is a climate of disquiet as the old order slowly shifts, as people brought up with the idea that they were the center of the universe discover that no, we are not, and we are losing unmerited advantages.
Killer Mike On The Importance of Voting
NowThis caught up with Rapper and Sanders supporter Killer Mike in the spin room following the democratic debate.
This can not be broadcasted enough
Dear American readers: this is actually more important than voting for president. Imagine what Obama could have achieved if he HADN’T BEEN FIGHTING A REPUBLICAN CONGRESS EVERY. DAMN. STEP.
Voting is not a one time act and a wizard saves everything.
A-fucking-men.
Rubio’s approach to world affairs essentially repeats the “let’s have it all and who cares if it adds up” mentality of his fiscal policy. His solution to every problem is to confront some foreign country more aggressively, with no regard to the idea of trade-offs or tensions between goals or limits to how much the United States can bite off at any particular time.
He’d start things off by alienating Latin American allies by undoing the Obama administration’s normalization of relations with Cuba in order to return to a decades-long failed policy of isolation.
But that’s small potatoes compared with the consequences of Rubio’s pledge to cancel the nuclear deal with Iran on day one. He isn’t too worried that this will lead to Iran building a nuclear weapon because there will be a “credible threat of military force if Iran decides to ramp up its program.” He also wants to deploy more American troops to Syria and Iraq to fight ISIS.
He wants to attack ships and aircraft bound for North Korea that are “suspected of carrying material related to North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs.” He is also hoping to convince China to help with the Korea situation, but his China policy calls for tougher measures to “stand on the side of freedom and human rights, both inside China and on its periphery.”
He also wants to send more weapons to Ukraine, increase sanctions on Russia, move more heavy weapons into Eastern Europe, and clarify “that there will be no U.S.-Russia cooperation in the fight against ISIL until Russia brokers the departure of Bashar al-Assad from power.”
We really did have a president who tried to govern this way for a year or two. His name was George W. Bush
”
Hovertext: Pro Tip: Any quote that sounds pithy was either (A) never said by the person who supposedly said it, or (B) at least somewhat contradicted by the surrounding sentences in the original source.
I encountered this nifty fact reading Dr. Liben's new, and excellent, paper!
The ER-1250 was a massive bucket wheel excavator designed for surface mining in the Soviet Union in the mid-20th century. The tracked vehicle stood taller than an 8-story building. Brilliant Russian Technic builder Kirill has built a minifig-scale version of this behemoth that stands 56 cm tall and 123 cm long, and weighs 7.8 kg. That’s over 4 feet long, nearly 2 feet tall, and more than 17 pounds.
Even more than with his previously featured Ice Planet “Elephant” and snow rover, Kirill has built a huge amount of functionality into his vehicle using 14 Power Functions motors, 6 IR receivers, 2 regular battery boxes, and 2 rechargeable (lithium) battery boxes. Working features include fully steerable tracks, superstructure rotation, rotating bucket wheel, conveyer belts, elevating booms, and more.
You can watch a video of the excavator in action here:
The minifig worker in this photo provides a real sense of the massive scale of Kirill’s LEGO Technic vehicle.
Each of the six excavator buckets on the end of the boom is a full-size LEGO backhoe piece.
The model is incredibly detailed, with ladders and catwalks for minifig safety.
You can see more photos along with Kirill’s detailed write-up in his post on Eurobricks.
This ignorant fundamentalist boxer, Manny Pacquiao, made a comment about gays being worse than animals and deserving of those biblical punishments (he’s lost big endorsements over it, too). But I do rather like Dave Bautista’s taciturn reaction.
Drax is very literal-minded, but empathic at the same time.
Justin Keller wrote an open letter to the mayor and police chief, demanding that something must be done. There are homeless riff-raff cluttering up his streets! They are howling and lying down and collapsing in despair everywhere; why, one even leaned up against his car! The horror…
I know people are frustrated about gentrification happening in the city, but the reality is, we live in a free market society. The wealthy working people have earned their right to live in the city. They went out, got an education, work hard, and earned it. I shouldn’t have to worry about being accosted. I shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle, and despair of homeless people to and from my way to work every day. I want my parents when they come visit to have a great experience, and enjoy this special place.
Yes, something must be done. Only I don’t think the solution involves hiding the “pain, struggle, and despair” out of sight of smug dudes with lots of money. It’s got to involve deeper changes that give poor people a living wage and an opportunity to better themselves that might also require fewer luxury cars for the wealthy.
If you want to seriously address the problem, you might try reading an open letter from the other side — Talia Jane writes to the CEO of the company that used to employ her. She was working in customer service for one of those tech startups. She’s spending 80% of her paycheck on rent, is living on a bag of rice, and is pouring a big chunk of her income into the expensive commute. She has a car but can’t afford to repair it.
So she wrote and published a letter describing the deplorable way her company, Eat24, treats its wage slaves (ironically, her company is a food delivery service, and she can’t afford to use it). As you might expect, her wealthy CEO was quick to respond, with a Justin Keller solution.
UPDATE: As of 5:43pm PST, I have been officially let go from the company. This was entirely unplanned (but I guess not completely unexpected?) but any help until I find new employment would be extremely appreciated. My PayPal is paypal.me/taliajane, my Venmo is @taliajane Square Cash is cash.me/$TaliaJane. Thank you so much for helping my story be heard.
The very first comment on her letter demonstrates the deplorable moral state of tech dudes today. It basically says to sit down, shut up, and obey. Your boss is worth more than any of his employees.
Calling out the CEO because of his net worth is just stupid. The guy co-founded the company. He built it from nothing to what it is worth today. Of course he is going to be worth hundreds of millions if he is running a very successful company.
Nobody is worth hundreds of millions. Nobody. The life of the CEO making all that money is worth no more and no less than the life of the drunk homeless guy who offended Justin Keller by leaning on his car. The person who had the capital and the support to be able to go to college, make profitable connections, and get the investments to begin a startup is not working harder than the person who is doing two minimum wage jobs and getting periodically laid off by a volatile economy, and I am disgusted by these people who have failed to learn these basic lessons in life.
But greed and short-sighted selfishness and a lack of empathy seem to make up the recipe for financial success, which allows these oblivious parasites to foster more greed and short-sighted selfishness and lack of empathy.
Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) is one of the main non-destructive techniques at the disposal of modern archaeologists. While Tyler Sky says that this crew of LEGO space scientists are on a geomorphology survey expedition, I like to imagine that they’re xenoarchaeologists hoping to discover buried alien civilizations. Built in realistic grey, the GPR vehicle evokes the retro-futuristic vibe of Classic Space LEGO, while the shape of the sensor array on the front appears to be eminently practical.
Ken Perrott of New Zealand SciBlogs waded into the controversial Dawkins disinvitation, and wrote a load of typical bullshit. That is, he tries to logic all critics of Dawkins into some kind of fallacy, because they must be mistaken, and we cannot examine the flaws in Dawkins worldview without first dismissing everyone who disagrees with him as irrational. Therefore, suggesting that Dawkins has said some terrible things…
…is so mistaken I think only people who are already hostile or desperately searching for something to confirm their anti-Dawkins or anti-male bias would actually fall for it – or promote it. But that is the sort of thing we get on social media – especially Twitter.
This is the fallacy of faulty generalisation – or more precisely, faulty induction. Very often resorted to by people with a large axe to grind.
One problem here. None of the people he names were initially “anti-Dawkins” and none seem to be “anti-male”. It defies reality to make this accusation: the accurate generalization is that a lot of people in the atheist community were extraordinarily enthused to have a scientist of Dawkins’ stature promoting unbelief. He is still a huge draw at conferences, and look at me — I’ve been asked to introduce Dawkins at events, I’ve shared a stage with him a couple of times, I am definitely not nor have ever been “anti-Dawkins”. Yet I have been disillusioned by his gullible anti-social justice stance in spite of my bias in his favor.
And then, of course, it’s all Rebecca Watson’s fault, because she hates Richard Dawkins and evolutionary psychology. I’ve known Watson for a few years, and again, this was not a prior bias. This was a gradual and strengthening rejection of what they stand for, built on experience and evidence. When you’ve been blacklisted by Dawkins, I think it’s only rational to oppose him. As for Watson and evolutionary psychology…
I can’t help feeling there is a lot of bruised ego involved there – but lets stick with her logical fallacy. I have criticised her in the past for committing the fallacy of faulty generalisation. In that case her use of valid cases where studies in evolution psychology amounted to very poor science and bias confirmation (pop-psychology) to attribute that problem to the whole field of evolutionary psychology.
No. The problems are that EP’s premises are not valid: the undemonstrated brain modules, the bogus environment of evolutionary adaptedness
, the whole idea that the last ten thousand years of adaptation to agriculture and urban living don’t count. And then they hide behind the uncontroversial claim that the brain evolved every time someone questions their much more specific assumptions.
That Watson can also get so much mileage out of the truly appallingly awful pop psych studies is also a problem for EP: apparently, they are so undiscriminating and credulous that they won’t criticize their own.
And then Perrott goes after Massimo Pigliucci.
My point is that Massimo comments seem motivated by professional jealousy, rather than any real concern about the sceptic/atheist “movement.” He is being unprofessional to carry out a personal public campaign in this way. And he ends up looking foolish for that and his identification with the NECSS blunder (I have not seem any comment from Massimo on the later reinvitation which attempted to correct that blunder.)
Ah, the old “professional jealousy” argument. You’re only criticizing him because he’s smarter and more popular than you!
I have my differences with Pigliucci, but get real. He’s a successful and popular scientist and science popularizer, too, and suggesting that his substantial criticisms are purely the product of seething envy rather than genuine intellectual rigor and serious thought makes Perrott look foolish. And I say that as someone who disagrees with some of Pigliucci’s arguments while agreeing with others.
Oh well, I did learn something from that tripe. It turns out the retraction of the disinvitation of Dawkins was authored by Jamy Ian Swiss. But of course it was.
You might want to read Siouxsie Wiles, a fellow Kiwi, rather than Perrot. She points out the real problem with the attitudes that too many skeptics and atheists have.
Watson and Roth continue to be active in the atheist/skeptic community but many others have left because of the treatment they have received. It saddens me that Dawkins either doesn’t appear to understand the impact of his actions, or doesn’t care, and neither do his supporters. Perrott ends his post by implying that Watson and others are bullying extremists who bandy around words like “sexist” and “misogynist” to shut down important discussion. I disagree. They are valuable members of the atheist/skeptic community who have a different perspective from people like Dawkins and are actively working to make the community a more inclusive one. Watching the harassment feminists have received by people who identify themselves as critical thinkers also saddens me. It would be nice to see them apply those critical thinking skills to their idols as well as their ‘enemies’.
There is an authoritarian trend behind all the defenses of Dawkins — the idea that one Great Leader is too valuable to question, even if he is actively repelling a substantial number of precisely the people we need to broaden the reach of atheism. Atheism already has the avid support of scientists and manly patronizing men — speaking as one, I can assure you I will never lose confidence in my declarations that there are no gods — but picking up a privileged class that hasn’t had much use for religion anyway is no challenge. If we expect to grow beyond our little techno-scientific enclaves, and further, if our techno-scientific enclaves want to be more inclusive, we have to accept that we need greater depth.
And no, tempting as it is, manly patronizing men like me can’t simply explain to women, black people, Latin folk, American Indians, blue collar workers, etc., why they should find solidarity with our cause. Especially not when we’re sending the message that old white dudes get all the excuses for whatever they say. We members of the priesthood of Man Science need to step back and let others tell us what’s best for them.
Sometimes, letting go of control is the best and only way to learn.
The Oregon ranchers literally shit all over Native American artifacts
When nature calls, you must answer, but please don’t do so by pooping on sacred ground used by Native Americans for hundreds of years. After their 41-day occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon ended, a group of right-wing armed ranchers left behind a scene so rancid that one tribal leader described it, simply, as “disgusting.”
I really hope these fuckers spend a long long long time in federal prison.
i hate elitist expensive classy food culture
In all seriousness this is what I’m talking about whenever I go off on how the rich can’t even spend their fucking money. Do you honestly think these fuckers are getting that much enjoyment out of these goddamn gummy bears compared to regular store-bought one? No, they get enjoyment out of the CONCEPT of them, out of the thrill of conspicuous consumption in the face of people who actually have to work for a living, or who, god forbid, don’t even have the opportunity.
So they’ll buy seven houses when you would be hard-pressed to justify them owning two, and they’ll buy huge-ass limousines and designer clothes just to look a tiny bit cooler (as if any real fan of a celebrity gives a fuck about the label they’re wearing rather than the content they put out, or the persona they have, or even the way the outfit actually LOOKS), and they’ll pay out the ass for ludicrously expensive ingredients placed in such ludicrously tiny portions that they can barely fucking taste them.
I don’t understand it even slightly. I can barely imagine what I’d do with $150,000 a year, much less millions. And I’m not even like a “simple pleasures” fanatic – sure, I get the appeal of a second house! I get the appeal of regular vacations! I get the appeal of eating steak five nights a week, drinking expensive champagne! But wealth disparity has become so fucking absurd in this country and on this planet that those quasi-reasonable luxuries aren’t enough, so they have to make up bullshit that can’t possibly even be enjoyable in its own right just so they can feel good about having money.
It’s disgusting. Eat the rich.
Open letter to a guy who wrote an open letter to the mayor of San Francisco about homelessness
This is brilliant, and worth your five minutes.
He’s an editor for the Huffington Post, and was asked why the HuffPo doesn’t pay its writers.
I love this question, because I’m proud to say that what we do is that we have 13,000 contributors in the UK, bloggers… we don’t pay them, but you know if I was paying someone to write something because I wanted it to get advertising pay, that’s not a real authentic way of presenting copy. So when somebody writes something for us, we know it’s real. We know they want to write it. It’s not been forced or paid for. I think that’s something to be proud of.
See, you’re inauthentic if you get paid fairly for your work. You can trust someone if they did the work for free, which implies that you ought to be deeply suspicious of people who expect to get paid.
Isn’t that a conveniently beneficial attitude to take, if you’re rich? We saw this same thing in the Roman and British empires, where as wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few, working in the trades was scorned, merchants were despised, and laborers were the filth and scum of society. Money was evil, if you worked for it, but was simply the fair and virtuous reward given to those who had it fall into their laps.
But HuffPo has lots of traffic and lots of ads, and the money that comes in must go somewhere…just not to those wretches who only work to get paid. The Queen of Virtue is Arianna Huffington, who contributes nothing but the occasional vapid column of banality, and is rewarded with a net worth of about $50 million.
If you want something to be proud of, Freethoughtblogs pays its writers every bit of profit — there are no paid executives, we have a part-time tech we would like to pay more, we have hosting costs we pay for out of advertising revenue, and every penny we have left over gets divvied up to our bloggers. When we’ve had to invest more to improve the site, our more successful bloggers in stable jobs have voluntarily reached into their own pockets to pay for it. We can’t pay much, because we unfortunately don’t have HuffPo’s traffic, but there are no managers collecting all the money and making excuses for why the people who do the actual work can’t be paid.
Managers do have an important role to play — we’d love to have a staff who’d work and get paid for ad management and promotion and expansion — but not management who are working to screw over the people who are implementing the whole purpose of the web site.
I swear it was this picture that got me into science fiction..
That kitten, though.
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I actually don't own any of those URLs. I do own ass.golf though.
You can be an engineer, too!
Many people are unaware that kidney beans, if consumed raw, contain a dangerous toxin... The toxin is named phytohemagglutinin (PHA), a member of a very common class of proteins called lectins. Lectins are glycoproteins that are present in a wide variety commonly-consumed plant foods, particularly in the seeds. In most cases, they are not harmful and possibly beneficial, but some lectins are known to be toxic. One of the most dangerous poisons known, ricin, is a lectin derived from the seeds of the castor bean Ricinus communis (not a true bean and totally unrelated to the legume family Fabaceae); this is not, however, the same lectin found in beans and other legumes...And from another source:
PHA is known to be an insecticide, and plants probably developed it to keep their seeds from being destroyed by pests. In humans and other susceptible mammals (those of us without compound stomachs) PHA attacks and disables the epithelial cells lining the intestine. The body reacts to the threat by emptying the entire digestive tract as rapidly and completely as possible, to rid itself of the toxic substance...For the safest results in cooking dried kidney beans, they should first be soaked for several hours, the soaking water discarded, then brought to the boil in fresh water and cooked for at least ten minutes...
Gardeners, in particular, should be a aware of the potential dangers of raw beans if they like to "graze" in their gardens, eating the fresh raw seeds directly from the shell. The level of PHA in all varieties is not known.
Green beans (snap beans) are a questionable matter. Many people do like to eat young green beans raw, and overcooking green beans until mushy is widely regarded as a sin against the vegetable. I can find no clear evidence that raw green beans have PHA levels high enough to make them unsafe for most of the population. It should be noted that the level of PHA is highest in seeds, and green beans are usually consumed for the sake of the green fleshy pod, at a stage when the seeds are only beginning to develop.
The syndrome is usually caused by the ingestion of raw, soaked kidney beans, either alone or in salads or casseroles. As few as four or five raw beans can trigger symptoms. Several outbreaks have been associated with "slow cookers" or crock pots, or in casseroles which had not reached a high enough internal temperature to destroy the glycoprotein lectin. It has been shown that heating to 80 degrees C. may potentiate the toxicity five-fold, so that these beans are more toxic than if eaten raw. In studies of casseroles cooked in slow cookers, internal temperatures often did not exceed 75 degrees C.
Amblypygids possess no silk glands or venomous fangs. They rarely bite if threatened, but can grab fingers with pedipalps, resulting in thorn-like puncture injury.
