A moment of silence please for fantasy/SF author, Robert Asprin, who has passed away at 62. Author of the delightful MYTH Adventures, a seemingly never-ending series of novellas, which chronicled the lovable Skeeve, Aahz, Tananda, the pet dragon Gleep, and the carnival of other characters making up the M.Y.T.H. mythos.
I very much enjoyed reading my way through almost all of the 19 books, which began in 1978 and may not end with the latest published just this year. For 30 years I and others have followed Skeeve grow from an inept wizard’s apprentice to the wealthy CEO of his own magical adventuring company. Many LOLs were had in these pages, and many there are many more to come as other readers discover the series.
David Ng is a difficult name to research as, Mr. Ng himself writes, there are a bazillion David Ng’s in the world; however, “David Ng” is also a few genes:
Currently, the code for DAVIDNG9 can be found only in the genetic instructions of one Thermus Aquaticus, a very old species of bacteria that have the nifty ability to grow in boiling hot environments, thereby making them an unfavorable pet choice for children. To be honest, this was actually pleasing to me, to know that DAVIDNG wasn’t literally everywhere in all manner of organisms. By contrast, the code for ELVIS is very common10. Unfortunately, my own curiosity got the better of me and I also took it upon myself to check if DAVENG11 was present in the various genomes of various organisms. Turns out, in a major knock against my individuality, DAVENG was everywhere.
Director of the Advanced Molecular Biology Laboratory at the University of British Columbia, Mr. Ng also authors Science Blogs’ World’s Fair, but most of all, he is… (lead editor…? organizer…? cat herder…?) of the Science Creative Quarterly, where his editorial oversight has prevented me from embarrassing myself in a few places, and where he has published many entertaining columns, covered projects, and made science entertaining–one of the most important contributions anyone can make to the New Enlightenment.
A legal battle in Australia is seeking human rights for a chimpanzee so that he may have the legal right to accept gifts from donors wishing to preserve his sanctuary.
Quantum physics has found empty space filled with sub-atomic particles popping in and out of existence, demonstrating that something can come from nothing.
Every year Edge sends out a question to all the world’s greatest minds. This year, the question was “What are You Optimistic About?, somehow, my invitation to answer the question got lost in the mail, and Edge forgot to post the response I so helpfully e-mailed them, so I guess I’ll just post it here for you to enjoy:
Ahem.
I am optimistic that the Baby Boomers will all die off before stem cell therapies, nanobots, and Star Trekesque medical advances extend average human lifespans beyond a century in length.
Seriously. As we age, we lose our placticity of mind (depending on how much you exercise and keep mentally active), and we become set in our ways. Baby Boomers are totally entering the age of obsolescence (and, unfortunately, in America we consider this the perfect age to elect them to office).
Too Late for Stem Cells to Save these Qwerty-Using,
Standard-Measurement-Worshiping Homo Sapiens
Photo by NarkHaertl
When Baby Boomer media regularly warns of InterWebs destroying our Grammar and writing skills (they think their grammer is so much gooder than ours), they’re actually lamenting the fact that younger generations are shrugging off all the pointless rules and regulations our elders imposed on communication. If everyone knows LOL means “Laugh out Loud,” then there’s nothing wrong with using it. Baby Boomers didn’t have LOL growing up, and that makes them poopy. Some people, who probably aren’t Baby Boomers, are calling the surge in text-messaging a linguistic renaissance.
Baby Boomer’s impose the QWERTY layout for keyboards on us, a layout purposefully inefficient in design to keep mechanical typewriter keys from sticking. Instead of letting us use the Dvorak layout, Baby Boomers make us use the layout they’re used to because they’re concretioned… concreted… crocheted hardened brains can’t make the switch.
The human race needs regular Generational “reboots” (read: death), to maintain a progressive momentum. If human beings lived forever, nothing would change. Imagine your parents or your parents’ parents having authority forever.
That’s why I’m optimistic the Baby Boomers will die just in time to miss the nanobots that will extend life for the truly wise minds who have got it all figured out for real this time: Generation X.
Considering the first one was supposed to be $100 and ended up $200, I’m skeptical that this will come in at $75, but a peek at the OLPC XO2 is very inspiring.
OLPC XO2
OLPC XO2
A plague of kangaroos is threatening Canberra, Australia’s last remaining native grasslands.
A correlation does not equal causation response to the recent study claiming a link between cell phone use during pregnancy and children with behavioral problems.
“The dinner we have eaten tonight, was part of the sun but a few months ago.” - Weston Price
When geneticists mapped out the human genome, they found a complex world of proteins that will take decades, possibly centuries, to fully decipher. Medical applications, such as gene therapy, cloning, and medications must go through years of rigorous testing before being tried on humans, and even then, some of these must be recalled for dangerous side effects. The long chain of events from our DNA to our physical and mental expressions is far too complex for anything else.
Nutritionists work the opposite way. They isolate nutrients out of foods that we know are healthy, and then tell us to get more of that nutrient in our diets. When they say “oatbran” or “calcium,” food manufacturers up that nutrient paste it on their refined cereals, oils, pastas, and other manufactured food stuffs. Then we consumers eat more of that isolated nutrient. Because it’s food, the same rigorous testing does not apply. We consume these nutrients in food, what’s wrong with consuming them isolated from it?
We are in the midsts of a great dietary experiment, because we don’t really know what eating specific nutrients isolated out of their contexts will do to our bodies, but we recognize the effects of this strategy overall. Our obesity rates are soaring, as are diabetes rates and heart disease.
The reasons why this strategy isn’t working are myriad and complex beyond our full appreciation. Counfounders, variables in our whole foods, are not appropriately accounted for in our nutritionist methodologies. Just as chaos theory prevents us from predicting the weather, it prevents us from predicting the effects of dramatically changing our diets. For instance, failing to take into account the ways foods work together:
We eat foods in combinations and in orders that effect how they’re metabolized. The carbohydrates in a bagel will be absorbed more slowly if the bagel is spread with peanut butter; the fiber, fat, and protein in the peanut butter cushion the insulin response, thereby blunting the impact of the carbohydrates. Drink coffee with your steak, and your body won’t be able to fully absorb the iron in the meat. The olive oil with which I eat tomatoes makes the lycopene they contain more available to my body. … We have barely begun to understand the relationships among foods in a cuisine (66, 67).
These complementary and deleterious effects of different food combinations are called Food Synergy. Our diets are more than the sum of their nutrient parts. This is the thesis of Michael Pollan’s well-written and increasingly influential “Eater’s Manifesto.”
As a child, I would often find dead bugs in the white flour in our pantry. My mother, a nurse, explained the bugs had died, “because there are no nutrients in white flour.” Pollan asks, “Is a steak from a feedlot steer that consumed a diet of corn, various industrial waste products, antibiotics, and hormones still a ‘whole food’ (143)?”
Modern agriculture first robs the soil of its nutrients, then we rob the food produced of its nutrients to preserve it. The result is that we now have to eat three apples to get the same amount of iron in a 1940s apple (118). This decline in nutrients is great for food manufacturers, as it forces us to eat more of their product to maintain our health, but has created a culture of over-consumption.
Abnormality is defined as the absence of normality. Diabetes has become a cultural norm, as has tooth decay and heart disease, but in the context of our species, they are not the norm. They are the result of an influx of simple carbohydrates. Combining pure glucose with fructose to produce sucrose was like turning cocoa leaves into cocaine (105), our bodies are overwhelmed by it.
Michale Pollan’s strategy for escaping this downward spiral is simple, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Pollan’s book is a quick read and a simple message, but one that belongs on everyone’s bookshelf.
The article that preceded this excellent book, Unhappy Meals, is available online, which hits many of the point in Pollan’s book about how we adopted the nutritionist approach to food and what foods we should eat for maintaining health.
Legal victories for evolution aren’t enough, Biology classrooms need to spend more than the 3 to 15 hours teaching evolution they presently do and get the 20% of teachers who believe in creationism to stop teaching against the curriculum.
Leah, a gorilla, uses a stick to test
the depth of water while wading through it
Photo by Thomas Breuer/WCS/PLoS Biology
Like Humans, dolphins, whales, and porpoises are mammals. They are warm-blooded, breath through lungs, and give birth to live offspring; however, they also have fins like fish and live in the sea. The skeletons of these aquatic mammals have finger bones in their fins leftover from their ancestors. Some whales even have a tiny pelvis bone free-floating in their bodies, a leftover from when their ancestors had hind-legs. How did these animals, these cetaceans, whose ancestors obviously once lived on land, find their way back into the sea?
Cetaceans share a common ancestor that “resembled a short, legged wolf with hoof like claws.” It is called a mesonychid, and just as Polar Bears will swim for miles across open sea to find food, or Kodiak bears will fish for salmon in rivers, the mesonychid found its way into the water, only it adapted to stay there, and we can follow the long chain of changing fossils from the mesonychid to our present-day dolphins and whales.
While it’s easy to see the present resemblance between humans and other primates like chimpanzees and gorillas, it’s not so easy to explain why we became so different from them. What happened to our fur? Why do we sweat? Why do our noses look so different from chimpanzees’?
Enter Elaine Morgan’s “Aquatic Ape Theory” of human evolution. The theory proposes that our ancestors spent some portion of their history living in a semi-aquatic environment. Seven million years ago, the Afar depression in Ethiopia flooded to become the Sea of Afar. The skeleton of our Australopithecus afarensis ancestor, “Lucy,” was found in this area, where she lived between 3.9 and 2.9 million years ago. Most fossilized evidence of our evolutionary ancestors comes from this region subsequent to this flooding also.
Sea of Afar Depression
Image courtesy NASA
So in the case of humans, we did not run to the sea, it came to us quite suddenly and catastrophically. We were thrown into the deep end of the pool, as it were, and had to adapt with down turned noses to keep the water out, less fur to streamline our bodies for swimming, eyebrows to channel the water away from our eyes, sweat glands to regulate the sudden influx of salt water in our diets, infants that can instinctually hold their breath underwater, enlarged spleens to hold oxygen-rich blood and serve as a biological “scuba-tank” that helps us hold our breath, even the ability to hold our breath, and bipedalism, the ability to walk on two feet, to help us keep our heads above water. Then the waters receded and we were left standing upright on land with much larger brains built from a diet high in fish protein.
Most evolutionary theorists are skeptical of the theory; however, as the Philosopher of Biology, Daniel Dennet observes, this is not because there is any way to prove the theory wrong, only that it seems too “out there” to be plausible. They hold to the “Savannah Ape” theory, which proposes that humans became bipedal running across the open plains and using tools.
Meanwhile, waterfront properties garner the biggest real estate values in human society. Beaches are among the most popular vacationing spots in the world (unlike savannahs). Eating fatty fish, such as mackerel, lake trout, herring, sardines, albacore tuna and salmon, supplies our bodies with omega-3 fatty acids, which help fight heart disease and depression. Scientists are also learning more and more that fish really is a “brain food,” combating mental deterioration in old age.
Perhaps, when we spend a relaxing afternoon fishing, we are getting closer to our true nature than we think?
On May 3, speaking to the issue of rising food prices, President Bush Jr cited developments in India, where the “middle class is larger than our entire population” and added, “when you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food, and so demand is high, and that causes the price to go up.”
This was a true statement, however one that was very incomplete, and Indian citizens’ feeling slighted over the remark was justified. Bush, myself, and other experts have regularly talked about India and China’s rising standards of living as driving up the price of natural resources, but there is an old development that we need to consider also.
China and India have every right to our standard of living and their economic equality will ultimately benefit the world, but our world cannot support everyone living at our level of excess. It’s important that we all moderate our consumption.
Aspiring to be the largest building on Earth, the Two-Mile-High “Ultima” Tower is based off of Termite mound architecture.
Two-Mile-High “Ultima” Tower
While there is a broad, indisputable consensus on Global Warming, there is much debate among scientists over its details, like does it contribute to hurricane strength?
This virtual girlfriend is only an image, but the interface could be wired to something more tangible, like a real doll. Not that I know anything about this sort of thing myself.
The 1964 World’s Fair boggles my mind. I can’t believe there was a time in America when science was revered, celebrated on such an incredible scale, and monuments were built to it. The NY Hall of Science is built up within the grounds of this wonderful event, and area in Queens filled with great big monuments to science, forward-thinking, and positive attitudes about what humanity can accomplish.
The man to the left of this photo,
touching the wall, was last here
at the World’s Fair, when he was four years old.
Part of PBS’s Cyberchase exhibit was an exercise bike showing kids how much energy they were generating. There were also stations for building platonic solids, conveyor belt you program with balls, which fall to make music, computer puzzles, Mayan Numbers, and more.
I know there are people out there who are offended by this, but I thought it was cool that all of these displays were in English and Spanish. I love cultural diversity, especially in America
Einstein’s letter calling religion “childish” sells for $404k.
Other attempts at this pragmatic solution have been shot down by people who don’t get it, but Los Angeles is considering recycling it’s sewage for drinking water. People who object to this: GROW UP. You’re probably the same people eating pus-burgers from McDonalds.
Black Holes evaporate according to Stephen Hawking’s theories, meaning we could theoretically read a book that fell into it by analyzing the radiation that leaks out.
Here’s a really neat way to visualize our world in Real Time. twittervision takes the text-messages posted on twitter, and shows them on a google map as they are being posted. Watching this application with the “3D View” turned on, I was able to watch Californians planning their night as I was turning in to bed, Japanese waking up with positive affirmations about the upcoming day, and Chinese twitters that I couldn’t read at all. : )
There’s also Flickrvision, which provides the same application, but shows you Flickr Photos as they are being uploaded all over the world in real time:
