I’m ambivilent about the names paleontologists give to dinosaurs. Anatotitan copei sounds really impressive, until you discover it translates to “giant duck.”
 Corythosaurus casuarius (“Corinthian-helmet reptile”) |
You can check out the complete flickr set here.
A short short SF flash fiction you can read here.
“You’re angry.”
“I’m not angry, I’m frustrated.”
“If you’re frustrated, that usually means you’re about to learn something.”
“Don’t quote Philo to me. You know I hate it when you quote Philo.”
“I’m just trying to think this through like he would do. This was his project, and now we’re responsible for it.”
“You think you’re so smart, but you’re not.”
“Obviously, I’m still here aren’t I?”
Dodd huffed back into his chair, folding his arms across his chest. I took advantage of his impromptu pout-break to nab Philo’s old Rubik’s Cube off the desk. Dodd moaned his displeasure at this, but knew better than to say anything. I was consistently solving the puzzle in under five minutes now.
It was almost a year since Philo vanished, along with a significant minority of city-dwellers, half of University Campuses, and all of Mensa International. Where did they go? Was it the fabled “Singularity” the old websites talk about? The “Rapture for Nerds?” Who knows, the people who came up with that idea had all disappeared as well.
So here we were, Dawson, I, and the rest of humanity’s dimbulbs left on Earth, playing with the toys the smart kids had left behind, trying to figure them out. Keeping faith in the supposed plasticity of our minds. We were muddling through understanding the brainiacs’ artifacts one by one.
I put the Rubik’s Cube, solved, down on the desk, thinking toward my lunch break, when I would resume tackling chess problems, and I had an epiphany–my new word of the week, and said, “Remember Dawson? She worked on an application just like this at her new job. I remember Philo giving her phone support on it all the time. They even set up an online forum to collaborate… before they–you know–transcended. I bet we can–”
“Dawson?” Dodd cut me off. “You mean Chelsea Dawson? The girl we fired from Help Desk? She went to egghead heaven too?” Dodd’s eyes rolled up into his head, frowning, “Oh, that’s more than I can bare.”
“I know,” I shook my head ruefully, “I’m feeling a little insulted too.”
Dodd was immersed in his self-loathing again, his very existence offending him. I popped a fish-oil pill and resumed squinting at Philo’s impenetrable tomb of programming code. My head hurt, but I didn’t mind. It was all part of what the smarties endured, like working out or dieting for a better body. No pain no gain on the road to a better mind.
Maybe one day I would vanish too.
It’s a little bit on the Jack Kirby side, but here’s my superhero:
 ideonexus superhero Credit: NASA |
HT Sour Swinger
 Spore Installation |
So much for the wisdom of crowds!
As of my posting this 1,962 of 2,134 reviews posted on Amazon for EA’s Spore are one-star, claiming the DRM method employed by EA to prevent pirating was so draconian that it has rendered the game worthless.
So there are 1,962 dimbulbs on the Interwebs, criticising a game they haven’t played for DRM they apparently know nothing about. Hundreds of them are even monitoring the 5-star reviews that come in so they can click “No” for Amazon’s “Was this review helpful?” query. It must be nice to live with your mom and dad and have the time to pursue such worthwhile endeavors.
I wonder… Were these kids running on a Windows XP operating system when posting these one-star reviews? If so, wouldn’t that make them hypocrites? Windows XP has even more stringent DRM running on it.
Just like Spore, you have to activate your Windows XP installation online with Microsoft. Unlike Spore, Windows XP regularly connects with Microsoft to report on you (this got even worse with Vista). Spore only connects on the initial installation and when you download expansion packs.
One of the rumors floating around online is that you only get to install Spore three times, but the reality is that you get three licenses. There’s a very big difference, which all the Boing Boing sheeple are apparently too technically illiterate to understand. Anyone who works in an office understands the concept of software licenses, maybe when all the Boing Boing kids grow up and get jobs they’ll understand.
How many of these kids play World of Warcraft? Perhaps they should aquaint themselves with Warrant, which is scanning player’s computer’s processes while they adventure in Blizzard’s world. Where’s the outrage over this? World of Warcraft had three versions in the top ten best selling PC games for April 2008. Where was the slew of one-star reviews for them?
I’m just as anti-DRM as the next rational human being; however, I also appreciate ideological consistency. The online crowd is trying to burn down Spore while there are obviously much bigger offenders out there. Imagine if all this energy was focused on a really offensive software like Vista.
What does suck about EA’s licensing strategy is that it opens users up the same victimization Microsoft’s Music store inflicted on its users, where Microsoft is dropping support for the music sold, which requires their DRM to run, and leaves users with music collections they can no longer access.
While the same thing could happen with EA and Spore, it’s important to remember that EA isn’t Microsoft. We can give EA the opportunity to make the honorable decision to free Spore of its DRM should they ever be forced to stop supporting it. Spore’s DRM is an improvement over forcing users to keep the CD in their drives, but it’s not as good as the Steam Games, which allows game owners to create an online account, which they may subsequently resell.
On the plus side, all those bad reviews didn’t prevent spore from claiming the #1 spot on Amazon’s best-selling games list. On the down side, I still had to enter that @#$%ing 20-digit product code to install the game.
I’ve copy and posted the following documents for anyone wanting to read the fine print. Lawrence Lessig once said that excessively long license agreements constituted an undue burden on users, requiring a substantial investment of time to read and understand:
(HT Clint for the lead on this story.)
 House Dust Mite Credit: Food and Drug Administration |
In Herman Melville’s classic novel “Moby Dick,” the white whale Ahab relentlessly hunted was so massive that flocks of birds would hover above it. Moby Dick was like a moving island, and an entire ecosystem had grown around its existence. Although we cannot see them with the naked eye, humans support colonies of microscopic organisms also.
The average human sheds 0.5 to 1.0 gram of skin daily, enough to support between hundreds of thousands and millions of dust mites living in our beds, eating our dead skin and soaking up the humidity in our respiration and perspiration, our breath and sweat. Like ticks and spiders, mites are arachnida, and each one produces an average of 20 faecal pellets per day, meaning every night when you lay your head down on your pillow, you stir up and inhale a cloud of mite poop.
While dust mites live in our beds and carpets, demodex mites take up residence on our bodies. These microscopic scaly, semi-transparent bugs live in our eyebrows, eyelashes, and nose hairs, feeding on the dead skin and oils that collect in our hair follicles with their pin-like mouth parts. Although the demodex has a digestive system that is so efficient and produces so little waste it doesn’t need an excretory orifice, their corpses are probably decomposing in your hair follicles and sebaceous glands right now.
While these bugs live on and around us, our entire bodies are made up of individual living units, Somatic Cells. Our skin, brain, liver, blood, heart, and myriad other cells have given up their ancestors’ single-celled way of living to collaborate on surviving as a multi-cellular form of life. Every single cell in your body has bet its survival and reproduction on your survival and reproduction.
For instance, our skin cells form a nice barrier around us, holding us together and protecting our insides from bacteria, ultraviolet rays, and dirt. They do this to keep us alive long enough to have offspring, who will also be covered with skin cells, and thus skin cells successfully reproduce through us. Here we think our skin cells are just being nice by wrapping up our bodies and valiantly defending us from the world, but really they’re just looking after their own self-interests.
Every cell in our body has its own inhabitants, producing the chemical energy that power them. These are mitochodria, and they reproduce by cell-division and have their own DNA separate from the DNA that makes up our cells. The mitochondria in our cells have the same DNA as the mitochondria in our mother’s cells, and her mother’s, and so on all the way back to “Mitochondrial Eve,” our matrilineal common ancestor who lived in Ethiopia around 140,000 years ago.
Although they cannot live outside of cells today, it is commonly believed that mitochodria were once independently living organisms, protobacteria, that survived being eaten or otherwise ingested by another cell. The cell, having its own power source provided by the mitochondria, was able to inhabit a much larger range of environments. The mitochodria got to hitch a free ride, reproducing inside their new hosts. It was the start of a beautiful, symbiotic relationship that has lasted for more than two billion years.
One step up from mitochondria in complexity are the microflora we carry around inside of us. Immediately after we are born, bacteria start taking up residence in our digestive tracks, primarily through nurturing contact with our mothers. These bacteria, which are more numerous than the cells in our bodies, help us to derive nutrients from foods we would otherwise be unable to digest, strengthen our immune systems, and prevent us from developing certain allergies.
They also protect us from harmful bacteria as well, starving them out of our personal ecosystems and producing toxins to poison the alien invaders. Every one of us supports a unique garden of micorflora, which interact and combat with every other person’s microbial colonies. The first kiss that seems so spine-tingling and unifying for a pair of young lovers is like World War III for the microflora in their guts and the somatic cells in their immune systems.
That is, until their microflora eventually even out with more kisses. : )
Notes:
When will people learn? Democracy doesn’t work!
– Homer Simpson
John McCain’s campaign is outraged that Obama quoted the old cliché, “You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig” in a campaign speech referring to McCain’s policies, the McCain campaign tried to spin it as a attack on Sarah Palin. But John McCain said the exact same thing in reference to Hillary Clinton’s health care plan in 2007, saying, “I think they put some lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.”
The Daily Show summarizes the rhetorical flip-flops coming from the Dittohead lobby nicely, but I have this horrible sinking feeling just the same that this Jerry Springer nonsense will trump reasoned discourse for yet another American election:
After seeing The Aristocrats, and learning about a joke that comedians tell each other, trying to out-do each other with offensiveness, I thought I’d update this old joke to do the same, but in an attempt to out do other joke-tellers in science.
You can read this new spin on and old joke here.
One very fine day, a group of professorial-types of differing backgrounds happened at random to collude at the same table in the University cafeteria. Their conversation evolved from small talk into more substantive topics, and eventually the Professor of Civil Engineering, with a mischievous grin, posed the question, “What kind of a Scientist is god?”
“God,” in this case, being a reference to the natural world, similar to Einstein’s use of the word, synonymous with nature and cosmos, and although such a conversation might seem highly unlikely for a bunch of secularists, the law of really big numbers dictates that such an incredible chain of chance would occur somewhere on planet Earth at sometime. Plus these were Community College Professors, and therefore more prone to undisciplined flights of fancy.
“It’s so obvious even you book worms should get it,“ said the brawny Physical Education Professor, who also happened to coach the football team, and who sought immediately to dominate the conversation, “You only have to look at the way slow and fast twitch, skeletal, cardiac and smooth muscles connect with bone, cartilage, ligaments, skin, and internal organs to produce the bazillions of ways humans can express themselves physically.
The Phys Ed Professor then brandished a mighty bicep to emphasize his point, “No doubt about it, God is definitely a Mechanical Engineer.”
“You meathead!” the Professor who taught a course in Electromagnetism exclaimed, “Human muscles have only a measly 14% to 27% energy efficiency! The Mechanical dimensions of the human body are clumsy and brutish without their electrical components to inform and control them!
“Look at the way the signals in the sensory, motor, and mixed nerves of the Peripheral Nervous System all flow from the extremities into the central nervous system, look at where the fatty myelin sheaths insulate axons from interfering with one another’s signals until they reach the branches of dendrites, all to bring them together into a coherent symphony of functionality.”
The Professor of Electromagnetism pointed to the kinetic watch on her wrist knowingly and folded her arms over her chest decisively, “God is most certainly an Electrical Engineer.”
“You’re a dimbulb,” the Chemistry Professor sniffed contemptuously, “The optic nerve runs right through the retina of the human eye, creating a blind spot in our vision! Cephalopod eyes don’t have such an obvious defect.
“The mechanical and Electrical engineering in a human body are not only fairly reproducible in robots and electronics, but they are also designs easily improved on! No mystery in those imperfect systems.
“Now consider the elegant, self-monitoring system of molecular interactions in a single human cell, from parent DNA molecules to daughter molecules, from messenger-RNA molecules into ribosomes to synthesize all the proteins that run our biological systems – like the inspection-repair enzymes that turn right around and maintain DNA integrity. The system is so complex there won’t be a computer powerful enough to figure it out until 2020!
The Chemistry Professor held up a spoonful of amino acid-rich cottage cheese for all to admire, “We must accept that god is a brilliant Chemical Engineer.”
“But a computer will eventually figure it out lepton!” the Computer Science professor daunted, “Human DNA is 97 percent junk, it serves no known purpose. How can you characterize such a waste of space as ‘elegant?’”
“Only one organ has the ability to overcome the inefficiencies and architectural mistakes of the human body, and that would be the brain. The human mind is plastic enough to let us adapt to and function within all the environments humans were born into over the last several million years. That requires terabytes of information storage and near-instantaneous retrieval, which we currently have no idea how to replicate with today’s computers.
The Computer Science professor leaned in and tapped one finger on her temple, “God is indisputably an Information Architect.”
“Your obsolescence is showing,” the Mathematics Professor chided. “The brain fills in the gaps in our memory with vivid imagination, lying to us to convince us our memories are infallible. The brain, which produces the mind, yet another illusion of consciousness separate from it, is still in the Stone Age of functionality. It hasn’t evolved yet for the Silicon Age where ideas must be digital in their accuracy.
“Mathematics, on the other hand, cannot lie to us. They describe every aspect of our existence. Everything may be broken down into numbers. Wherever you go in the Universe, the life you meet there will speak the same mathematics. They not only describe this Universe, but any other universes that may exist as well.
“God, therefore,” the Professor concluded, rapping his slide rule on the tabletop authoritatively, “must be a Mathematician.”
“Ah baloney! You’re just being trivial!” the Civil Engineering Professor shot back. “Mathematics is 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs and 50 percent imagination; and mathemagicians are just machines for turning coffee into theorems. The majority of it is just mind-games.
“We need to look at this empirically. Existence is much more real world than any of you explain it. Just look at the human body. It’s obvious that god must be a Civil Engineer!”
The other Professors’ jaws dropped, “How do you justify that conclusion???”
“Because,” the Engineering Professor replies with a big goofy grin, “only a Civil Engineer would run a sewage line through a recreation area!”
 Genesis Biolabs |
Genesis Biolabs sells a $99 Ruthlessness Gene test, which they are recommending everyone thinking about getting married have their potential partner tested for AVPR1a. At the bottom of the page, we find this quote, linking to my Top 10 Genes post:
AVPR1a was named one of the Top Ten Human Genes at Ideonexus.com!
How could this company take one look at this blog and think it was a good idea to refer customers here to legitimize their $99 product, where they’ll see a guy in a labcoat wearing welding goggles and a Cruella De Vil wig!?!? Wrong!!! No!!! Bad! BAD!! BAD!!!
On a side note, I found this quote from the site rather ethically pain-inducing:
Here at Genesis Biolabs, we don’t believe the nature vs. nurture debate has been resolved in favor of nature. We are a product not just of our genetics, but of our experiences and our choices. However, one can conceal or misrepresent ones choices and motives, but genetics do not lie… Before getting married, or making a business partnership, this genetic test might be appropriate. All of our politicians should probably submit to this test. As of May, 2008, with the passage of H.R. 493, The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008, it is illegal in the United States to use genetic testing in hiring or issuing insurance policies.
We believe nurture is very important, but nature trumps it. It’s illegal to use our test to discriminate in the workplace, but please do discriminate against your lover.
I do agree with the mandatory testing of politicians part. : )
 Archaeopteryx lithographica Credit: Ryan Somma |
I’ve been trying to figure out what that ring of bones is in the eyes of bird and reptile fossils. Apparently its a sclerotic eye-ring, and there is some debate as to its function. Some argue that its primary function is in focusing the eye, which accounts for birds having fantastic vision. Others argue that it protects the eye, which explains why the structure is more pronounced in diving birds. It is found to some degree in all North American birds, such as eagles, owls, and hummingbirds.
See the complete flickr set here.
Lortimer thought the woman sitting next to him, Drea, was very odd. The entire flight she had engaged him with incessant conversation, drawing up every spare moment of his time. There was something almost urgent in her need for his attention.
“Isn’t that just a fantastic view?” Drea asked, gripping Lortimer’s arm and shaking it, violating his personal space in abnormal way. She was pointing out the portal at the Earth and Moon in the distance.
“Yes,” Lortimer agreed quietly. “Just like in the photos.”
“Yeah, but Lortimer,” Drea rolled her eyes, “this is for real. Come on! Get excited! We’re almost home.”
“Um,” Lortimer cleared his throat. “Yay.”
“You are such a character!” Drea punched his arm and he flinched. Then her eyes grew still and serious, “I’ve really enjoyed our flight together Lortimer.”
“Me too,” Lortimer replied with a slight shrug.
“No,” she reached across him to slide the cabin door shut and whispered raspily in his ear, “I mean, I’ve really taken a liking to you.” She placed a firm hand on his chest, her breath heavy against his neck.
Lortimer’s pulse quickened at the though of all the bacteria this woman was undoubtedly spraying on him and he shrank back slightly, “You’re a very nice girl.”
She began unbuttoning her blouse like in those ancient films. She took his hand and placed it on her breast. She said, “I want you inside me.”
Lortimer frowned, trying to understand this last sentence, and he quickly withdrew his hand, scooting away from her on the seat, “I’m sorry, but that sounds very unsanitary.”
“What?!?” Drea slapped both hands on the seat where Lortimer was just sitting. “It’s natural!”
“So’s eating and defecating,” Lortimer drew his carry-on pack up to his chest, “but you don’t see me soiling myself with those biological processes.”
Drea’s eyes welled up suddenly. “Eunuch!” she spat and flopped over on the seat, crying against the wall and chanting some sort of gibberish between sobs. It sounded oddly familiar to Lortimer, and suddenly he knew her whole story, feeling deeply sorry for her.
This girl was part of a dwindling population, a community in desperate need of fresh DNA in order to survive. The fact that they had almost returned to Earth meant Lortimer was her last chance for a successful pilgrimage. A successful pregnancy would return her to the cult a hero, but would also condemn him to a life on the reservations.
A news story Lortimer read once reported that many of these pilgrims were choosing not to return to their communities after tasting life off world. There was so much more to life than baby-making and mere survival. Perhaps Lortimer could help convert another pilgrim to the whole wide universe of possibilities?
“Excuse me,” Lortimer lighted his hand on her shoulder in a manner similar to the way she had done with him earlier. Drea’s sobbing immediately lessened and her chanting stopped, “Would you like to see the Lunar Gardens with me when we land?”
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
ideonexus.com
