Larry writes:

> I think this [the black widow spider] can be classified as a true computer
"bug".

Actually, just to be a true picker of nits (which are the eggs of lice, of
course :-), a spider isn't a bug. In fact, for that matter, neither are most
insects, although the whole group, spiders, centipedes, crabs, insects,
millipedes, water bears, etc., are all members of the giant phylum
Arthropoda, which means "jointed-legs" in Anglicized Latin and Greek.

The ordering/naming process for all life on this planet that people have
deduced is:

     Kingdom
         Phylum
             Class
                 Order
                     Family
                        Genus
                            Species

Because of all life on this planet seems to have arisen just once -- and
because we're all coded in exactly the same way, using almost exactly the
same DNA -- it's becoming surprisingly easy to track back who's related to
who and when the branches split, simply because we're beginning to get quite
good at reading the code. In a hundred years from now, we're going to be
truly quite expert at it.

However, people have been assembling these phylogenetic ("family tree")
charts for several hundred years now, ever since Linnaeus, and even early on,
they pretty much got it right, just by looking at the minutial differences in
how the various plants and animals are assembled.

For us humans, the lineage is:

         Animalia
             Chordata
                 Mammalia
                     Primates
                        Hominidea
                            Homo
                                Sapiens

For a spider, the hierarchy is:

         Animalia
             Arthropoda
                 Arachnida
                     ..

For an insect, the hierarchy is:

         Animalia
             Arthropoda
                 Insecta
                     ..

The last possible point of contact between us and and a spider, that last
period when we still shared code, was about 540-570 million years ago
(although it could actually be quite a bit earlier than that). This era was
called the "Cambrian Explosion". It was the time of the invention of the
basic body plans of all multicellular animals (the Metazoa). Spiders and
wasps and lobsters use an exoskeleton; we use an endoskeleton. Otherwise, we
still share an enormous amount of common code. Our musculature is similar,
our eyes see much the same, etc.

After saying all of that, and because we demand technical excellence on this
list, let me get to the point (if anybody cares :-): Within Insecta (a
Class), there are multiple Orders. Only the Order Homoptera (meaning "equal
wings") are scientifically said to be Bugs. This order includes stink bugs,
cicadas, leaf-hoppers, aphids, etc. Other insects with common names such as
lady bugs are actually beetles [Order Coleoptera ("hard wings")]. Similarly,
a sawfly is actually in the Order Hymenoptera ("membranous wings") and a
butterfly is in the Order Lepidoptera ("scaled wings"). Neither is in the
Order Diptera ("two wings"), which are the true flies.

By these simple measures, a spider is a long ways from a bug. But if you want
to see an animal that is a spider (at least in some people's lists), but one
that you might never think of in that manner, look at a horseshoe crab.
There's a page for an elementary school on the web that has some excellent
pictures. It's at:

     http://globalclassroom.org/hshoe.html

Horseshoe crabs have remained essentially unchanged for a third of billion
years -- and their larvae look so much like trilobites that they're called
the "trilobitic phase", pushing their obvious heritage back to a full
half-billion years, right to the edge of the Cambrian Explosion.

Wirt Atmar

PS: further off the topic, helicopter(a) means "rotary wings".