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Comment by odie5533 | Hacker News Reader

Who would study sea spiders? You'd have to look at and think about sea spiders all day. That's terrifying.

People who are not terrified of spiders, of course.

Arachnophobia (even the mild variety) is not universal. I know some people who think spiders are cute. It takes all kinds, I guess.

Most people can get on board with jumping spiders. Big eyes, recognizable behavior, fuzz like fur, aspect ratios that aren't foreign to mammals. But if they mean knobbly things that look like they came out off the sea floor / out of an alien film, yeah, I'll grant them that they have a special skill if they can find those cute.

I wasn't afraid of spiders until this week https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/yyk8cb/known_as_the_w...

Freaky, except they're only a few millimetres in size and considered harmless to humans.

It would be hard for a spider of medically significant size to suck down their exoskeleton like that.

Lots of fears are visceral, but even if we were to allow only verbalizable fears, one could imagine the arachnophobes thinking "what if this tiny spider burrows through my eyes or ears and lays eggs inside my brain, and then all the baby spiders stream out of my mouth and nostrils"

Why? You could probably wear those much like you would a ring or a bracelet.

I do believe there also is a song about them. It goes something like this: Anywhere you go, you always take your spider, your spider with you... ;)

As a non-arachnophobe, I don't find spiders of any kind to be cute. But I also don't find anything about their appearance or behaviour to be unpleasant or scary. They're just aesthetically unremarkable. Similar to, say, fish---I don't think most people will look at a fish and think either "ooh, so cute" or "weird alien thing, get it away from me", they just see a fish and don't really have any emotions about it.

> Most people can get on board with jumping spiders [...] Big eyes [...] fuzz like fur

Not knowing what spiders are "jumping spiders", I felt like those attributes are what makes many people freak out about spiders in the first place. Looked at some images and yeah, those look way worse than the spiders I have in my house, probably because of those freaky eyes and the thing having fur.

Nope jumping spiders are the worst kind. So are big fuzzy spiders.

They're not insectlike, but in some weird uncanny valley between insect and mammal.

And they can JUMP onto you.

Nope nope nope.

Jumping spiders are quite intelligent and playful.

They will play 'catch the laser dot' with you like a cat does or even do little mating dances when you prop a mirror in front of them.

YouTube has many videos of such activities

Have a bit of fun with them next time you see one and your next encounter will not be so unpleasant!

-ex arachnaphobist

I like to imagine that they don't jump, they _teleport_. It's fascinating to watch them blip out of existence in one spot, or one orientation, and appear in another location in the same instant. Forget what it must be like to be a bat[1], what would it be like to be a tiny jumping spider?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F

You might change your mind if you read this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Time_(novel) or you might not.

I love spiders.. they're like mini steampunk machines.. powered by what is effectively hydraulics. (that why their legs curl up when they die.. the loss of hydraulic pressure)

This reminds me of a thought about veterinarians. What kind of person would be a veterinarian? A good portion of the job is putting down animals and treating suffering animals that can't speak. Either the vet is a psycho or a pure heart who can tank trauma all day long. I find suffering non human animals to be more traumatic as they can't speak, just emote. Anyway, thank goodness for vets.

It’s not quite that bad. My brother was a veterinarian and in his case, it was very much a vocation thing: he knew he wanted to be a veterinarian by the time he was maybe 10 or 11 and took a remarkably direct route there. The vast majority of the work was fairly routine care, and he had a unique gift for connecting with animals (most of his early career he did house call veterinary work and so many clients would talk about how their cat or dog was terrified of strangers but would just climb into his lap and let him do whatever he needed to do to care for the animal, whether it was trimming nails, examining teeth, taking blood or anything else). Euthanasia was something that he felt, but was able to get through for the other aspects of the job.

I have an ex who became a vet (kind of a surprise in that when we were dating she was an artist) and she has a house call practice with a lot of her work being euthanasia. I don’t know how she can manage that emotionally, but I’d like to believe she’s not a psycho even if she was the one who ended the relationship.

Just be happy you got out before she was a vet and knew how to practice euthanasia

Sadly, vets have a high suicide rate. This study found 1.6x the general population rate for male vets and 2.4% for females.

https://blogs.cdc.gov/niosh-science-blog/2019/09/04/veterina...

I have a vet friend that I talk to a lot. One thing that struck me was how many clients will bring in a dog with a serious, obvious malady (the one I remember was a dog with maggots in its anus, sorry for the visual) and will be like, “are you sure he’s in pain? He hasn’t been crying all day”. And it will be evident that this has been happening for weeks.

And then some people will bring their healthy pets into the clinic for euthanasia because they're going out of town for a while and don't want to arrange for care of the animal in the meantime. Or because keeping the animal even if they are not leaving town has become too inconvenient. Some people are pieces of work.

(2.4x, not 2.4%)

There's also that pet-vet jobs are rare compared to ag-vet jobs.

Know thy enemy.

Wouldn't it be "thine" enemy?

this is correct, because "enemy" starts with a vowel, but it's a fairly gratuitous translation either way, since "know your enemy" comes from Sun Tzu

Fun fact: the King James Version of the Bible has several errors where it uses "thy" before a vowel sound. This might vary by edition, but I've verified some in a scan of the 1611 "he" bible. Unfortunately it's blackletter which I can't read quickly, and I really don't trust the OCR.

Semi-manual verse counts from a random digital copy I have convenient, before 'e' only:

  (2 thy, 2 thine) elder
  (2 thy, 0 thine) elect
  (19 thy, 3 thine) estimation (most in the same chapter!)
  ("thy ewe" is correct due to pronunciation)
  (1 thy, 0 thine) exceeding
  (1 thy, 1 thine) excellency
  (1 thy, 1 thine) expectation
  (2 thy, 110 thine) eye

2 John, being short, is the only book that exclusively does it wrong. The other errors are in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Job, Proverbs, and Ezekiel, all of which also use the correct form.

(it also has errors before other vowels and 'h', though the 'u' one is debatable)

For "enemy" it is always the correct "thine".

It's all correct in the original Hebrew. For example in "Ezekiel" 16:61

https://www.sefaria.org/Ezekiel.16.61?lang=bi

Unfortunately I have an even harder time reading Hebrew fonts than I do reading English blackletter.

https://english.stackexchange.com/a/568647/

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