The Funnel Weaver

There is a funnel-weaving spider on my deck,

which reappears each year to build its ragged web,

although whether it is the same one I can't tell.

Perhaps an ancestral procession of such beasts?

Lurking in its tunnel, it takes a peek at me

sometimes with its eight eyes when I chance to appear.

Araneomorphae, it’s thought, evolved two hundred

million years ago and have been weaving funnels

all that time. I came much more recently myself,

but look on this arachnid pal fraternally,

which has so long known how to stave off entropy

's ever-present threat. Martingales,* though, should never

bet against thermodynamics’ Second Law, an

astrophysicist says.† So quit while I'm ahead?

*See Roger Mansuy, "The Origins of the Word ‘Martingale.’" Electronic Journal for History of Probability and Statistics 5, no. 1 (June 2009). Originally, it referred to a  betting strategy popular in 18th-century France. Cf. Jacques Rozier’s 2001 film Fifi Martingale, starring the lovely Lili Vonderfeld as Fifi.

†Jacob Bekenstein (1947–2015), recognized "for his ground-breaking work on black hole entropy, which launched the field of black hole thermodynamics."

Wednesday, July 16, 2025