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The Weather

Today was nice because it was chilly* and I got to dress like I did back in Indiana.

By the time I moved, I had really settled into rolling up the sleeves on button-ups and wearing a thermal at 3/4s length underneath. I realize that I’m delving awfully deep into my fashion habits but I really liked this look and I never get to do it down here because it is always far too warm. So getting to bust this out today with jeans and not sweat completely through it on my hike to class was thrilling.

So today was basically the most exciting of days. It’s right up there with last Tuesday when Alyssa and I found a new grocery store. This all sounds really sad out of context, but I’m telling you, this grocery store was incredible.

* Today’s high was 72, low was 64. Don’t worry, I hate myself too.

WHAT

The Emerald Cockroach Wasp female stings a roach twice into specific ganglia, delivering venom. It delivers an initial sting to a thoracic ganglion and injects venom to mildly and reversibly paralyze the front legs of its victim. This facilitates the second venomous sting at a carefully chosen spot in the roach’s head ganglia (brain), in the section that controls the escape reflex. As a result of this sting, the roach will first groom extensively, and then become sluggish and fail to show normal escape responses. (In 2007 it was reported that the venom of the wasp blocks receptors for the neurotransmitter octopamine.)

The wasp proceeds to chew off half of each of the roach’s antennae. Researchers believe that the wasp chews off the antenna to replenish fluids or possibly to regulate the amount of venom because too much could kill and too little would let the victim recover before the wasp’s larva has grown. The wasp, which is too small to carry the roach, then leads the victim to the wasp’s burrow, by pulling one of the roach’s antennae in a manner similar to a leash.

Once they reach the burrow, the wasp lays a white egg, about 2 mm long, on the roach’s abdomen. It then exits and proceeds to fill in the burrow entrance with pebbles, more to keep other predators out than to keep the roach in. With its escape reflex disabled, the stung roach will simply rest in the burrow as the wasp’s egg hatches after about three days.

The hatched larva lives and feeds for 4–5 days on the roach, then chews its way into its abdomen and proceeds to live as an endoparasitoid. Over a period of eight days, the wasp larva consumes the roach’s internal organs in an order which guarantees that the roach will stay alive, at least until the larva enters the pupal stage and forms a cocoon inside the roach’s body. Eventually the fully grown wasp emerges from the roach’s body to begin its adult life.

This is one of the most incredible things I’ve ever read about wasps.

Shooting fish in a barrel.

These days, I normally try to not bicker with strangers on the internet about sports, as it is something I wasted far too much of my teenage years doing. I still indulge in a forum if it’s going to stay above the fray and not be reduced to “your team is full of gays and queers and gays”, which is the usual high-brow material that can be expected from 95% of any given sports board in cyberspace.

But if there is anyone left that can still get a rise out of me, it’s fans of rival teams who make really dumb points. I should take a moment to state that over half of my closest friends in high school ended up at Purdue and I’ve made many more acquaintances at the institution since then. They’re all good people and I generally had a blast when I visited the campus. That said, a Purdue-centric sports blog decided to drop this gem earlier today (the tweets have since been deleted, so I grabbed them off my phone before refreshing):

I first dismissed it as general butt-hurtness that comes on the heels of getting embarrassed on your own floor. However, after a few days of deliberation, I decided to speak up:

It has to be one of the worst arguments I had ever seen to discredit IU this season. When you play in the best conference in the nation, your out-of-conference scheduling means so little because your conference schedule will take care of your RPI and give you enough chances for quality wins.

But then there’s the fact that he straight up ignored that IU put the best team in the nation and a neutral court game against a top 20 team on the schedule as well.

Also, the Hoosiers possess the best non-conference RPI out of anyone in the country. Which, for those less savvy at college basketball terms, the RPI comprises a team’s winning percentage (25%), its opponents’ winning percentage (50%), and the winning percentage of those opponents’ opponents (25%). Forget being above Purdue, the Hoosiers’ non-conference schedule and its results are above everyone.

But what is this all leading to? Well when I started writing this blog the zinger that follows seemed a lot cooler but now that I decided to write it all out and point out how stupid the notion was to begin with, it seems rather pedestrian. That said, he did delete all his responses to me, the internet equivalent of the white flag. Anyway: here’s how it ended:

Go Hoosiers.