CoffeeBlog

Henry Raddick: Why I love the Web

2003-11-25T21:39:00.000-08:00

Here's one for the beautiful strangeness category. Henry Raddick writes reviews of books for Amazon.com, which, by all rights, shouldn't be that funny. Trust me, it is. If you know who T. Herman Zweibel is, you must read some of Raddick's reviews.

City Pages: Cynical, Bitter, Jaded as Hell. Also Naked.

2003-11-14T22:51:00.000-08:00

City Pages: Cynical, Bitter, Jaded as Hell. Also Naked.

This is a story from citypages.com about a place where people can meet other people, hang out, make new friends, and be a liberated girl. They can also look damn sexy doing it. The article is a great intro to indie pr0n.

Transcript: Rock the Vote Democratic Presidential Debate (washingtonpost.com)

2003-11-05T20:21:00.000-08:00

I was just reading the Transcript of the Rock the Vote Democratic Presidential Debate (washingtonpost.com) and I remembered a lesson my dad taught me. The lesson was: "Find the Referent." It's from Stuart Chase's "The Tyranny of Words". In other words, think about what the words being used actually refer to, physically. Political speak is meticulously devoid of referents, except, of course, in the cases where the speakers abuse statistics. I want to see a debate where candidates aren't allowed to use the phrase, "the American people".

I was kinda enjoying the debate, and laughing about how all the other candidates, including the Reverend Al Sharpton, lord help us all, were trying to give Dean such a hard time for pointing out the unrequited loyalty of Southern white voters to the Republican Party. Bless 'im.

Bush renews rebuke of Boykin - The Washington Times: Nation/Politics

2003-10-29T07:54:00.000-08:00

Trent Lott loses his spot, Rush Limbaugh gets booted, Greg Easterbrook is fired. Each of them for making statements that could possibly have been misinterpreted, or could be seen in a more understanding light, about relatively benign issues. Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, however, has made and, as far as we know, is continuing to make absolutely unambiguous statements about issues that are likely to precipitate immediate terrorist attacks against U.S. citizens, as well as to further the negative image Americans are getting in other countries. He still has his job.

I have to ask: Who would you rather piss off? The American Religious Right, or all Muslims worldwide? I guess all Muslims worldwide aren't going to be voting for Bush in the coming elections, are they?

Asia Times - The more Fox News you watch, the more likely you are to get it wrong.

2003-10-28T18:04:00.000-08:00

This story in the Asia Times is just really too good to pass up. Here's a quote:

The more commercial television news you watch, the more wrong you are likely to be about key elements of the Iraq War and its aftermath, according to a major new study released in Washington on Thursday.
And the more you watch the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News channel, in particular, the more likely it is that your perceptions about the war are wrong, adds the report by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA).
Based on several nationwide surveys it conducted with California-based Knowledge Networks since June, as well as the results of other polls, PIPA found that 48 percent of the public believe US troops found evidence of close pre-war links between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist group; 22 percent thought troops found weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq; and 25 percent believed that world public opinion favored Washington's going to war with Iraq. All three are misperceptions.
The report, Misperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War, also found that the more misperceptions held by the respondent, the more likely it was that s/he both supported the war and depended on commercial television for news about it.

Raw data is here.

Wired News: The Great Library of Amazonia

2003-10-26T10:39:00.000-08:00

Wired News: The Great Library of Amazonia
Yet another way the web lowers the barriers to the presentation of your work. I wrote more about this in a previous posting. Link via Dashes sidebar.

Restaurants On the Fringe, And Thriving

2003-10-21T21:35:00.000-07:00

Restaurants On the Fringe, And Thriving

For those who can't read the article, it's about underground dining. Some chefs retire, but then get back into cooking for people unofficially. Others can't get the large loans necessary to open and staff a new restaurant, but have a thriving home based business. The article, of course, didn't mention this, but I can see a scenario in New Orleans where perhaps a health inspector is corrupt and extorts money from restauranteurs under threat of closure of their business, so a small operation which can't or won't pay up simply goes underground, working out of their house or ever-changing rented facilities. It's only a small step from a dinner club, with invitation only coming by introduction from a current member. I would be interested if anyone knew of something like this in New Orleans, for personal culinary curiosity only, of course ;-)

Processing With Flavonoids Can Mean Tastier, Heart Healthy Food

2003-09-10T18:43:00.000-07:00

ScienceDaily News Release: Processing With Flavonoids Can Mean Tastier, Heart Healthy Food

Understanding how phytonutrients (i.e. epicatechin) behave as reactants and alter the thermally catalyzed reactions responsible for the aroma development would assist the food industry in producing flavorful phytonutrient enhanced value added products. Epicatechin, in general, negatively influenced the generation of aroma compounds produced by Maillard-type and lipid oxidation reactions (i.e. aldehydes, pyrazines, furanones, thiazoles, etc).

Apparently it inhibits pyrolysis reactions during heating of food that result in generation of flavors, both good and bad. Maillard "browning" reactions are the reactions that occur to create the brown color and roasted flavor of roasted foods and the toasty flavor of baked goods. The reaction is inhibited by water, which is why foods don't brown until the later stages of cooking, and they don't occur during steaming, even though temperatures are high enough. Perhaps this sort of processing would reduce the amount of acrylamide formed in the cooking process?

Where do we go to find answers to the kind of questions you don't get taught?

2003-08-17T14:50:00.000-07:00

It used to be that people would wander in the dusty stacks of the library or old bookstores in search for arcane lore. More recently, it's been indie artists who seed obscure references into their music, and even more recently, independent films or TV series such as Twin Peaks. The most difficult thing has always been that it takes a certain amount of commercial success to get your work seen by a large number of people. Writers have always struggled to find publishers, musicians have always wrestled with how to get a recording contract without sacrificing artistic integrity, and TV shows have had much the same problem. The problem has gotten successively worse as the cost of producing a single work has gone up from print to film. In all media, pulp has been the predominant output, be it trashy romance novels, boy bands, game/reality shows and soap operas. But now there's a new game in town.

For less than it costs a publishing company to run a small pressing of books, anyone can share lessons learned from life experiences. Any kind of arcane or abstruse discovery now has an unlimited production run, in almost any language, too, thanks to text translation tools such as Babelfish(itself an arcane reference to THE answer) or Google's Language Tools. I'm talking mostly about blogs.

Here's my bit of arcane lore: This is why we as a nation have become increasingly shallow through the last half of this decade. We're predominantly exposed to more and more shallow media just due to the economics of the situation. Information we receive about "how life is" comes from more shallow sources. There's been a resurgence of the nerd, a person deep in at least some respects, precisely due to the fact that blogging about "how life is" isn't subject to nearly as strong of economic forces. (This revival of the nerd started before blogging became a phenomenon, but it does closely parallel the development of computing.) Instead of "Everyone Loves Raymond" for everyone, there's millions of different ways people can see other people getting through life, making mistakes and learning from them. I think this is so big, it has the potential to restore my faith in the human race.

Of course, the primary output of internet media is still pulp, too.

The Religious and Other Beliefs of Americans

2003-08-16T12:58:00.000-07:00

Pharyngula has a nice table from Harris Interactive on The Religious and Other Beliefs of Americans. I would love to see this broken down by field of postgraduate education. I suspect it's all those theater and art graduate students that are tarring us with the 36% belief in ghosts.

Koslowski's Korner

2003-08-12T22:49:00.000-07:00

This is to chronicle the first mentionI've seen of blogs on prime time TV. It was actually a re-run from 04/02/03. Shows how much TV I watch. During the show, Judging Amy, the little polish girl, who so looks like a blogger, interviewed a co-worker for her blog. She always reminds me of Asparagirl, and I was thinking of that even as the scene unfolded. Millions of jewish girls in New York, and I think of her. Heh!

I could easily have missed something since I don't watch that much TV, so if anyone knows of an earlier occurrence, leave me a comment. I thought it was kinda cute, even though they were sorta making fun of things.

A consulting producer for the show writes occasionally at disordered affections, but there's no mention of the episode.

Have Ashcroft's handlers never read Orwell?

2003-08-12T22:29:00.000-07:00

Whiskey Bar has an excellent deconstruction of John Ashcroft's Vital Interdiction of Criminal Terrorist Organizations Act. It's so obvious. Have Ashcroft's handlers never read Orwell?

Pissing off would be consumers

2003-08-12T22:14:00.000-07:00

MIT, as you know, told the RIAA that it was going to have to play by the rules in the current round of pissing off would be consumers. Boston College won the ruling as well, and now Pacific Bell/SBC communications has brought up the point that it's not the job of the ISP to be policemen.

Is the phone company responsible for ensuring that I don't call a friend and play him a song over the phone?

Does John Ashcroft know about this?

2003-07-30T19:21:00.000-07:00

The Office of Global Internet Freedom. Peter at Open Access says, "Does John Ashcroft know about this?"

Scientists in the kitchen

2003-07-29T22:32:00.000-07:00

Just when I was talking about it. Scientists in the kitchen(Free reg. req.)

Rolling over for the RIAA

2003-07-29T21:57:00.000-07:00

From Wired:

Mit and Boston College are among several universities who are saying no to rolling over for the RIAA. One cites a jurisdictional issue, another cites insufficient information to determine just exactly who was using the computer. In other words, not only are some schools keeping their traditional places as strongholds of free expression, but they're also saying, "Not my job" when an investigation would be necessary to determine who had access to the allegedly infringing computer. From what I've seen at the universities I've attended, unless you keep your computer in your room under lock and key, "insufficient information" about the identity and number of users is pretty much the case.

Do you smell a conspiracy?

2003-07-25T17:28:00.000-07:00

Try a search for Spam Bayes and then do a search for SpamBayes. Do you smell a conspiracy?

Open Access to Scientific Literature

2003-07-22T19:11:00.000-07:00

From HubLog via Open Access News: Physiological Genomics is adopting the Prosser Method of offering open access: Pay to have your article published, leaving all text, figures, and supplementary material open access, or let the article be published under a standard subscription(including page charges too, I'd guess). It's clearly the way to go for someone who believes "free and unfettered exchange of information" is crucial to the scientific process.

Most people at most research institutions can get a hold of an article if they want it, because the institution will have a subscription. My undergraduate institution didn't have online access to anything but pubmed, though, so you had to schlep down to the library and copy it, if you wanted the full article. It was like the internet didn't exist to these people, ironically called the Information Science group. Then there was the time they canceled their print subscriptions to Science, Nature, and PNAS because they were too expensive....

In the near future, when trackback enables a ubiquitous commentary system, we'll wonder why it took so long.

Chris Rocks!

2003-07-21T20:48:00.000-07:00

I wasn't sure for a while, but now I know there is another Molecular Biology and Food blogger in the world. His site is so much slicker and cleaner than mine, too.

We have no assay for a soul.

2003-07-19T18:25:00.000-07:00

"We have no assay for a soul." Nicely put, but Irving Weissman's still wrong about adult stem cells.

The World is Copyrighted. Do Not Make Art of It.

2003-07-19T16:58:00.000-07:00

Brian Flemming said," The World is Copyrighted. Do Not Make Art of It."

He's referring to his feelings after seeing a sadly funny training film for commercial photographers on what not to film or take pictures of. Link via LessigBlog.

I understand that artists need to eat too. I am a willing and paying consumer of media and the arts. Make content available in the manner in which I want to receive it and I am too happy to have the opportunity to get it. Just accept that if it moves or inspires other people, they are going to want to make more art from that inspiration, not just hang it on their wall. This exposes your work to more people, and you'll very likely have more people that become consumers of your work.

Maybe it's all the fault of our educational system, separating the Arts and Sciences. Artists wouldn't know an exponential growth curve if they sat on a really pointy one. The intellectual bar to become an artist has become so low that we have a whole bunch of really dumb people who are being taken advantage of by publishers and recording companies. This is what has allowed the RIAA to become so powerful. Get a whole bunch of dumb people to sign their lives over to you for a relatively paltry sum, then market their tripe to a equally dumb TV narcotized audience. I guess I can't blame even some of the smart artists for realizing that the way to a quick buck lies in the fact that there will always be more sheep than shepherds, but I can't help thinking that the situation would be different if we had started requiring even art majors to take and pass organic chemistry and molecular biology many years ago.

Let's get Grandma lobbying against the RIAA!

2003-07-18T22:15:00.000-07:00

If this lobby was really supporting KaZaa, we wouldn't even be discussing this problem. The music/tv industry doesn't give 1/3 the money retiree political groups do to capitol hill.

A way to search only the blogs that you read

2003-07-18T21:42:00.000-07:00

Much props to Micah Alpern who has created a way to search the blogs that you read.

As he says:

Sometimes I want to know what the world thinks (google)
Sometimes I want to know what those I respect think (blogs I read)
Sometimes I want to know what I think (my weblog)

I couldn't help noticing that Google's "terms of use" specifically forbid using the Google API for services that directly compete with Google. Does this mean it's off-limits for MT users?

My implementation is underneath my blogroll. Check it out!

via NSOP

The things I do for my health

2003-07-17T18:47:00.000-07:00

As a (vain) young man, I try to identify the environmental factors that result in people growing older faster than others, in order to prevent that occurring to me. Particularly, I don't ever want to become one of those guys who has to grunt and strain just to take a good piss. Thanks to this article in New Scientist, my worries are now relieved.

He's a Chef and Molecular Biologist.

2003-07-08T20:17:00.000-07:00

From Brett Anderson's review of Sara's of New Orleans.

"Chef Ganesh Ayyengar, who's from Bombay, is a molecular biologist by training, a fact he uses to explain why he bristles at the confines of traditional Indian cooking. A scientist at heart, he's temperamentally inclined to experiment."

Oh my....I MUST meet him. I didn't know anyone like me existed.

Music downloads don't affect sales, they effect sales.

2003-06-26T17:23:00.000-07:00

Music downloads don't affect sales, they effect sales.

Speaking of sales, there's a boycott going on, and I'm part of it. I have been for at least the past 10 years. A couple things:

I quit buying music from record stores before it was possible to download it, because I didn't like paying $18 for a CD with a couple tracks I like.
It's not the fault of the consumers that the record companies weren't able to get off their fat, litigious asses and work out some way to sell music online.
I sincerely hope the RIAA dies a quick death, and to read the opinions of artists who agree with me, check out the boycott link.
If I buy a song, I want to be able to listen to it where and when I want, in the encoding format I want, on as many devices as I want.
I support artists, I go to live shows as often as I possibly can, and I buy the $5-10 CDs from the artists if I like what I hear.
I've bought more CDs at live shows the past 10 years than in record stores.
It's a free market, and the consumers make the choices. If you're a consumer, let your voice be heard.
It's a free market, and the consumers make the choices. If you're a record executive, get over it. You've all been getting free stuff for years anyways, you hypocrites.

Lazy Man's Gravy

2003-06-15T14:08:00.000-07:00

We cooked a bunch of food yesterday and invited some friends over to help us eat it. I roasted a large chicken from Whole Foods in a clay oven on a bed of onions and celery and Susan had the bright idea of slicing up some old potatoes and putting that in with the celery and onions. When the bird came out, all I had to do was put in on a separate platter and puree the cooking liquid+vegetables. The potatoes had roasted nicely even under the chicken, and when pureed, thickened the gravy to the perfect consistency. No roux needed, and because the potatoes had roasted, the gravy wasn't short on roasted flavor either. Susan acted like she expected this all along and, in fact, told me it was an old trick of her grandmother's. If any of my readers are from Kentucky, perhaps they can confirm knowledge of this among the elders in their area. At any rate, credit is definitely due for the wonderful idea.

We also had bell peppers stuffed with sausage and rice, which were very good, but worth mentioning because of the cooking liquid. Most of the time I've had stuffed peppers, the flavoring is exclusively inside, and they're steamed or whatever. I always feel like this makes the pepper irrelevant and just in the way. I made a little broth with garlic and sriracha chili sauce(mustard, fish sauce used sparingly would be good too), black pepper and thyme, and cooked this down a little, then placed the peppers, stuffed with a rotel tomato, rice, and spicy smoked sausage mixture in the reduced broth(about an inch's worth in a 10" pie pan, wrapped the whole thing well, and baked it. When the peppers were still kinda firm, I took them out and poured the broth in the peppers. This little variation made the whole thing juicy enough to eat, and since the peppers were still firm enough to slice and the peppers were stuffed tight, you could cut them and eat a slice of pepper with the rice mixture, sorta nacho style.

Accompanying this was mashed sweet potatoes(boiled) and a creole tomato and cucumber and basil salad from Thursday's Farmer's market. While we were at the farmer's market, we stopped into the wine tasting at the Cork and Bottle which was featuring Italian wines. They even had an actual Italian doing the tasting, who had about a 5 minute rapid-fire heavily accented spiel to accompany each of the wines. When you held out your glass, he would launch into the appropriate spiel about the grape varietals included, winemaking techniques used, location and size of the winemaking group, etc. Since he obviously served more than one person per 5 minutes, he would frequently switch in mid-stream to talk about whatever the person who happened to be making eye-contact at the time was drinking, only interrupting the stream to keep newcomers from wanting to taste the moscato first. It was definitely something to see. We brought both of the Italian whites home with us and had them with dinner, along with a Pinot I picked up at the Cellars at River Ridge tasting the previous week.

Here's the info on the wines we had:

La Cala 2002 Vermentino D.O.C. Sardogna - a really nice, light, citrusy white with a real clean taste. A favorite.
Fontarca 2001 Chardonnay D.O.C. Cortona - A bottle fermented nutty Chard that might benefit from blending of different levels of malolactic fermentation because it seemed a little flat to me.
Burgess 1998 Napa Zinfandel - A decent Zin made even better because Cork and Bottle had a couple bottles of this normally pricey Zin for $10
Montinore 2000 Willamette Valley Pinot Noir - My favorite of the night. I've been on a Pinot kick lately for some reason, and I really like the body and balance of this one. It's great after dinner because the dark fruits and smoothness make me think of a liqueur somehow.

After dinner, the alcoholics in the house moved on to Moonstone hazelnut sake, but only after determining that it was the last remaining source of alcohol in the house. I'm not crazy about it, but it does indeed have alcohol in it.

How to not be obnoxious. A Tip for Advertisers.

2003-06-09T23:57:00.000-07:00

There's been some talk about whether people should use ad-blocking technologies or not. Putting aside my belief that technological problems require technological solutions, let's think about that for a little bit. There are really two main issues:

The pro side says that ads are obnoxious and don't do any good anyways.

The anti side says that ad revenue is what allows many services to be free and blocking ads is stealing and that if you use a site's services you should be happy to view their ads.

There are some variations on these two ideas, but those are the main points. Based on that, I have simple rules for my ad blocking, which I personally think everyone should employ:

If it's obnoxious, block it, if it's not, don't.

So what makes an ad obnoxious? Here's my shortlist:

If the word "flash" could be used to describe your ad, it's probably obnoxious.
If your ad covers more of the page than it should, it's obnoxious.
if your ad slows the loading of the content which is the reason I'm loading the page in the first place, it's obnoxious.
If your ad requests a popup or popunder window, it's definitely obnoxious.
If your ad is obviously disingenuous in any way(and what the hell is the point of being obviously disingenuous?), it's obnoxious.
If your ad hawks something for which I've been spammed, it's obnoxious.
If your ad has unnecessarily distracting or moving parts, it's definitely obnoxious.

Do you see the theme here? It's all about content. Get in the way of that and you're blocked as easy as a right click(thank you Mozilla!). Ad people, New York to California, Ad people, you weren't born on Jupiter. This is not a war. The point is not to cram your banal fucking message down everyone's throat whether they want it or not. (Except for msn.com, yahoo.com, or aol.com, where that is the point). With that in mind, I think that advertisers need to take into account that this is an interactive medium. It's not TV, where I'm forced to watch the same damn talking toilet bowl commercials over and over unless I want to take my chances on changing the channel and trying to estimate when the content for which I've tuned in comes back on. I can click away, I can block your server, I can get a google cache of the page, I can block you in any number of ways if you make it worth the effort. The key thing is blocking you takes less effort than changing the channel. So don't fuck with me. Don't make annoying ads that zoom across the page flashing yellow, blue, black, and green. I'll sic Dr Octaproctologist on your ass.

High-end animated illustrations of animations of nanobots attacking Staphylococcus aureus and platelet aggregation

2003-06-02T22:23:00.000-07:00

Hybrid Medical Technologies makes high-end animated illustrations of animations of things such as nanobots attacking Staphylococcus aureus bacteria and platelet aggregation. I wonder if they'd let me use some of their sample images in my presentations. They're beautiful.
Thanks to The Eyes Have It!

RIP Shim Sham Club

2003-06-02T21:45:00.000-07:00

Yesterday some friends and I went to see the Shim Sham Revue. It's New Orleans version of a Broadway musical, meaning it's a wonderful burlesque cabaret show straight out of the 30s and 40s. I'm so glad I finally got around to going because it was something truly remarkable to see. So much of the live entertainment in that part of the town ranges from ridiculous to hoky, but not this one. Unfortunately, the Shim Sham club is going to be closing down. It was the only reason I ever went anywhere near Bourbon Street. The word is that they got tired of bribing the fire inspectors, but I have a feeling that it won't be gone forever. The French Quarter abhors a vacuum. Some kind of local celebrity theme bar is supposed to be opening there next, I think. I hope the people involved with the Shim Sham can find something entertaining to do somewhere else locally, because they were definitely a unique class act.

Update: The Shim Sham Revue is now touring, and cabaret lives at Le Chat Noir.

My jaw drops, my eyes grow wide, and my head swells with wonder.

2003-05-12T17:38:00.000-07:00

For the past several months this blog has consisted of nothing but thoughtful and serious comments about serious things such as politics and science and policy. If you truly grasp the Carrollian beauty of EnLumine, this will entirely make up for it.

Ashcroft Sings

2003-05-12T13:58:00.000-07:00

Ashcroft Sings

He also gets anointed with oil when elected to a new office, doesn't think people should look at naughty statues, and thinks cats are a sign of the devil. Is there anything I missed that needs adding to the list?

Online, real-time, science commentary

2003-05-11T00:43:00.000-07:00

Derek Lowe is dipping into the debate on online science commentary at his site at Corante, In The Pipeline. From the perspective of a graduate student, it's a fantastic idea. Instead of waiting for the few scientific meeting and conventions a year to interact with peers and senior researchers in our field, we could potentially receive and respond to comments daily. John Vu is criticizing Eagleman & Holcombe for failing to make any mention of blogging whatsoever, despite the obvious examples, such as Hubmed. I've written before about the neat feature of RSS feeds of literature queries.

Bizarre referrals

2003-05-10T18:51:00.000-07:00

I am proud to announce I am now the number 4 google link for pictures of elderly smoking weed. Yes, and number 6 for nasal mucus pictures. I'm sure having made this observation, I'm probably even higher. I wouldn't have ever known this, had the query not shown up in my referral logs. What are the strangest entries you have found in your referral logs?

French Quarter Street Inhabitants

2003-05-10T17:23:00.000-07:00

TJ Rogers has a hilarious run-down of the various species you may find inhabiting the streets of the French Quarter, as seen from the other side of the coffee counter.

Since Blogspot archives go down regularly, try going to TJ Rogers, and look for the 4/10/03 entry. It's really quite funny and an insight for those of you who may be considering a trip to the Big Easy, especially to help you figure out what not to do.

The Economist Slams John Ashcroft

2003-05-09T13:24:00.000-07:00

This is just too good to pass up. A choice quote: "Mr. Ashcroft's conversion into a centraliser...is short sighted because, as an evangelical who refrains from smoking, drinking, dancing and looking at nude statues, Mr. Ashcroft represents a minority in his own party, let alone the country." Now I know why I've always loved the Economist. The Register is quite good too, applying the same wit and insight to technology issues.

Kofi Annan's commencement speech at MIT in 1997

2003-04-24T19:20:00.000-07:00

I recently came across the transcript of Kofi Annan's commencement speech at MIT in 1997. It's interesting to read his speech, especially this paragraph, in the context of current events. I liked reading this; I feel like it's more candid than a public speech.

I begin with the struggle between reason and unreason. When the history of the twentieth century is written, this struggle will figure very prominently in it. On the plane of international affairs, the outbursts of unreason in this century surpass in horror and human tragedy any the world has seen in the entire modern era. From Flanders' fields to the Holocaust and the aggressions that produced World War II; from the killing fields of Cambodia and Rwanda to ethnic cleansing in Bosnia; from the twenty-five million refugees who roam the world today to untold millions, many of them children, who die the slow death of starvation or are maimed for life by land-mines--our century, even this generation, has much to answer for.

Quite a nice summary, isn't it? He toots his own horn and that of the UN quite a bit, but it's interesting how he draws a parallel between international relations("the project of international organization") and the scientific process.

ASAFO Productions promotes extra-liberal music licensing.

2003-04-15T21:47:00.000-07:00

"The artists' biggest nightmare should never be that the public is making copies of their music and listening to it. That should be their dream."
Thanks Derrick Ashong!

But you kill babies, right?

2003-04-15T20:14:00.000-07:00

I was volunteering at a benefit banquet for a local charity, which meant that I stood there and occasionally served food to people in exchange for being able to eat and drink all I wanted. While I was trying to brew coffee with broken equipment that PJ's delivered but didn't staff, I was conversing with someone who was eagerly awaiting the first cup of that bitter brown elixir of awareness. "It'll just be a minute more", I kept telling him as the machine heated the water. To distract him I asked what he did for a living:

"I'm an artist", he said, but did not elaborate, "what do you do?"
"Oh really? That's cool. I'm a graduate student in molecular biology."
"So do you study the genome project and all that stuff?"
"Not too much. Right now I'm working on a project studying differentiation signals of stem cells. Stem cells, as you may have heard in the news(yeah, right!), are cells that retain the ability to turn into any other cell in your body, so they could potentially be used to repair nerve injuries like spinal cord injuries, which would be great because nerves can't regrow on their own, or treat Alzheimer's, or any number of things. It's been show that these cells will migrate to the site of an injury, and then turn into the specific type of cell needed to repair that injury. These cells eventually lose their ability to differentiate into different cell types as they grow, however, and no one really knows why, so we're trying to study that process. We are looking for something, and have had a little success, in finding something that allows cells to retain their multipotentiality(I was really getting into it now, getting excited, using words like multipotentiality). It would also be great if we could somehow reset the state of differentiated cells. The problem is, though, the current administration has enacted anti-cloning laws that are so broad that they're making even life-saving stem cell research illegal."
"But you get those cells from babies, right?"
"We don't have to, and unless we can study them, we can't find out ways to get them from other sources and to use them to save lives. (trying to change the subject, because I knew where this was going) I once saw this artist who had a bunny engineered to glow green(not really, read the article). What do you think about that?"
"Kinda like playing God, isn't it? That's what worries me about this genetic technology, you don't know what the effects are going to be."
"I guess it is kinda like playing God, but if we can save lives, it's worth it, right? We make a huge effort to study the potential effects of things, so I'm not really worried that stem cells are going to get out and take over the world."
"But we don't know what the consequences of these things will be, how they will affect the environment long term."
"...and if we can't study them, not only will we never know, but we'll be denying sick people the development of live-saving therapies."
Silence for about a minute.
"I'll come back and check on that coffee in a little while."
"Ok, I'm expecting it to be ready any time now."

"Intelligent" Design, my ass.

2003-04-15T19:05:00.000-07:00

Murtaugh dissects the guardian article that I wrote about below. The funny thing, though, is that if you read his and my article you would hardly be able to tell we were talking about the same thing. It's true, Charles, that many of the things they mention aren't new. My impression was that the current creationist push and the stem cell debates are what sparked the current article, and the first couple items, about AIDS and global warming and such, were simply a review of where these old issues currently stand. Come on, we can't expect a bunch of journalists to get it right about scientific issues, can we? It's like expecting scientific verisimilitude from a TV show. The media is looking for a story, so they pick the two most opposite sides of any issue and exaggerate them into a grand debate. They don't have any time for the subtle points or poring over data because they assume, probably rightly, that 90% of their audience doesn't either. That said, anytime anyone writes a decent article showing how silly the ID people are, I am going to link to it, and I think everyone should do the same.

Not because we're fighting a hard fought battle; In truth, I think the amount of people who want to believe in creation is probably going to remain constant or decline with the decline of religion, but simply because even though religiosity is declining, so is scientific literacy. I think creation vs. evolution is a debate that is finished. However, there are other debates that we shouldn't be having, and wouldn't if people understood a little basic science. In response to this, the thing we, need to do is keep the right information and informed opinion somewhere the public will be exposed to it. "We" being all science people with any sort of a voice. Religious belief levels rise and fall( before Murtaugh takes me to task for no data - this is anecdotal), but the fraction of science a layperson knows versus the amount any scientist knows is rapidly decreasing(also anecdotal, but I wouldn't expect any argument here). This is not just because of the pace of science, either. The average person doesn't know any more about important, relevant scientific ideas than the average person in the 1960s, even though so many new and important ideas have come out since then. Many non-scientist people I know have levels of understanding that stop right around the germ theory of disease. This is a problem. This isn't new either, but keeps getting worse. I'm so big about educating, I even stop in the middle of most of my articles to explain things that people who are steeped in the scientific tradition already take for granted, like the explanation about the role of science and concept of falsifiability which can be found in many of my articles.

Here and here, for example.

So Murtaugh is right to criticize the Guardian's article, and he's oh so right to point out that the left has and will continue to do far more harm to the advance of science than the right, but I can't make a statement like that without emphasizing that going too far to either side is the real problem, rather than anything intrinsic about liberalism or conservatism.

The dangerous trend of moralizing and politicizing science

2003-04-12T15:01:00.000-07:00

Here's some quotes from the Guardian's article on the dangerous trend of moralizing and politicizing science. It covers Michael Dini, Intelligent Design, and has some good quotes from both sides, such as this one from Professor Michael Behe of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, the Intelligent Design movement's foremost academic advocate. When asked how he accounts for the very visible evolution of, say, viruses, he remarks, "It's just that I don't think [evolution] can explain everything. Bacterial resistance to antibiotics, for example, is one of the things it can explain."

I've blogged about this in the past: the principle scientific criteria for a theory is falsifiability. It's taken for granted that there may be some things any theory can't explain. Note that this expert does not really answer the most obvious question, "What things can't it explain?" Evolution is currently the best available scientific theory that fits the available facts. When it's shown that a theory cannot be true by positive evidence, most good scientists drop that theory like last weeks news, or adapt it to fit the new data. Absence of evidence, however, isn't sufficient to discount a theory because it's absence of evidence - it proves nothing. It's pretty hard to state an observation that the theory of evolution cannot explain, in terms of a question that can be positively answered. That's why it's such a good theory. Think about it. Science in some ways is fundamentally opposed to responding to religiously based theories, because science doesn't disprove things - we only show that something is more likely than something else. Currently our theory fits the facts better than, "God did it because he felt like it." or to restate it as an ID argument, "God or his agent may have done it, because he felt like it, and you can't prove he didn't."

99% of the time we're working on curing disease and improving the human condition, but since the general public doesn't have the level of scientific understanding necessary to resist the advance of religion into places it shouldn't be on their own, we have to do it.

Here's the quotes:

Some other signs: if you were contemplating an abortion and were worried about the rumour that it might increase your risk of breast cancer, you might visit the website of the government-funded National Cancer Institute to read their factsheet, which noted that most scientists doubt a link. Or, at least, you might have done so until June last year, when the page, criticised by some Republicans in Congress, simply vanished. (A replacement page was posted last month.) Or maybe you were an Aids activist, elated by the president's unexpected (and genuinely revolutionary) announcement in the State of the Union address of $15bn (£9.7bn) in funding for fighting the epidemic worldwide - and then surprised to find that only around 10% was destined for the Global Aids Fund, while the rest would be funnelled through US agencies, where it is more likely to be accessible to American abstinence-only groups campaigning against condoms.

"It's not that I don't think Darwinian evolution can't explain anything," says Professor Michael Behe of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, the movement's foremost academic advocate, when asked how he accounts for the very visible evolution of, say, viruses. "It's just that I don't think it can explain everything. Bacterial resistance to antibiotics, for example, is one of the things it can explain."

Similarly, the White House's strategy on global warming is not to scoff at the scientific establishment's warnings on climate change. Rather, it trumpets the importance of their research activities and calls for even more research - years more, in fact - before any action is taken. In the same fashion, one of the most popular arguments currently circulating on anti-condom websites claims not that they encourage promiscuity but that they can't protect against HIV. The reason, it argues, is because the virus is 0.1 microns in diameter, while there are tiny pores in latex measuring 10 microns. (There is no evidence for this.)

The two men inside the Bush administration who have had the most to do with this: One is Karl Rove, the president's senior political aide, a master tactician who has been Bush's main strategist since his earliest days campaigning for the governorship of Texas. (He does not seem overly bothered by scruples: in one campaign, for another politician, he claimed to have discovered a bug in his office on the day of a major debate. The opponent, tarnished by the insinuation of dirty tricks, lost the race, but the ensuing police investigation found nothing.)

Some saw Rove's influence at play when John Marburger, Bush's new science advisor, was informed that the role would no longer be a cabinet position. The White House had decided that "they don't need that level of scientific input," Allan Bromley, the first President Bush's science advisor, said glumly at the time. The other man is Leon Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics. The occupant of that role was always going to be a central figure in an administration as morality-driven as Bush's.

[Of course, this evil-doer has to be involved:] John Ashcroft's Department of Justice has proved active: when Michael Dini, a Catholic biology professor at Texas Tech University, announced that he would not write academic recommendations for students who did not "affirm" that there is a scientific explanation of the origin of the species, a creationist student launched a lawsuit. Such lawsuits aren't uncommon. What was uncommon was that Dini soon received a call from government lawyers ... threatening to make a minor local dispute into a high-profile federal case.

A good bit of the article concerns the Intelligent Design movement. Kenneth Miller, a professor at Brown University says ID is "stealth creationism...which is a quasi-political theory." The new trend for creationists is for them to say they simply want fair consideration for their rival scientific theories.

"It's a very good rhetorical strategy, because it appeals to the very American sense of openness and fair play," says Miller. "But there's something called the scientific process, you know - involving open publication, criticism, and rejection of things that aren't convincing. We don't teach both sides of the germ theory of disease and faith-healing. Evolution isn't in the classroom because of political action or court decisions. It's in the classroom because it made it through, it stood up to scrutiny and became the scientific consensus. It fought the battle and won."

"They keep pounding their fists on reality, hoping it will break." Ani Difranco - Lost Woman Song.

Power-grabbing in times of national distress

2003-04-02T14:36:00.000-08:00

Power-grabbing. It's happened before, with the USA PATRIOT Act, and now we're seeing PATRIOT II. As Dr. Reynolds mentions, arresting terrorists and bombing their training camps is what we need to do to fight terrorism. This legislation seems more like a power grab to me too, and isn't it a little disrespectful? Don't they have other things more important to think about? After 9/11, the rush to pass the first patriot act felt to me like paramedics checking the ashtray for loose change before helping a person out of a wrecked car. Now the cover of war is again used to pass patriot II. I have a strong feeling of uneasiness about where Ashcroft et al. are taking us. I have never liked a single thing he has done since becoming Attorney General, and even more disturbing is how there is a consistent theme of security before liberty. Here he deconstructs Benjamin Franklin's famous words.

Matt Welch, at Alternet, has a summary of the recently proposed DSEA.

UPDATE: Librarians' Opposition to Patriot Act Becoming More Vocal

Every public computer inside this city's library has a new warning taped to its screen. Beware, the message says, anything you read is now subject to secret scrutiny by federal agents.

"We felt strongly that this had to be done," said librarian Linda Wilson. "The government has never had this kind of power before. It feels like Big Brother."

Across the country, in a movement that belies their staid image, librarians are rising up in anger and rallying against a law the Justice Department calls one of its most important new tools to help catch terrorists before they strike.

....Earlier this year, the American Library Association, which has 64,000 members, formally denounced the Patriot Act provision and passed a resolution urging Congress to repeal it. Since then, about two dozen state library groups -- from California to Georgia -- have taken the same stand. And that is only the beginning of the backlash.

via TalkLeft

Fusion versus differentiation

2003-03-31T20:56:00.000-08:00

Murtaugh has a nice post on the fusion versus differentiation stem cell debate.

Marines discover Iraqi 9/11 mural

2003-03-31T20:50:00.000-08:00

Pay no attention to the man behind the mural. Thanks Michael!

The Arrogant Empire

2003-03-21T11:30:00.000-08:00

The Arrogant Empire, by Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek.

A great article analyzing public opinion of America from many different Eurasia/African continental points of view, with great historical context. The general gist is that everyone loves to hate the strongest nation, but the reason it's just now showing up is that GW's cowboy diplomacy isn't making the other nations of the world feel important, in contrast to previous presidents' better diplomatic skills. The article alludes to further Germany + France + China alliances, perhaps concerning the coming North Korea events.

Filtration of sensory input occurs at the organ level?

2003-03-15T19:06:00.000-08:00

While browsing, I came across these three articles independently of each other. Perhaps it's the new issue of Japanese Journal of Taste and Smell Research?

Male sweat brightens women’s mood

Girl hit by 'fish odour syndrome'

Elderly armpits can lift your spirits

Here's an interesting bit from the MSNBC article:

Wysocki, a study co-author, said the research could point to a “chemical communication” subtext between the sexes that enables men and women to coordinate their reproductive efforts subliminally.

Compare that with the BBC article:

Jeannette Haviland, who also worked on the research, suggested that hormones in the body odour of the young might act as a signal of aggression. Hormonal changes in old age, she said, were likely to make the odour of the elderly, particularly women, signal approachability.

So it's clear: During "that time of the month" women are feeling bad, so they pick a fight with their man or men in general to enhance his agressive smell, thereby cheering themselves up a little. I smell a conspiracy!

More seriously, and especially interesting since I will be starting to do some work in stem cell research is something I read here:

With further study it became clear that growth factors in saliva and nasal mucus influenced stem cell development in both taste and smell systems. Dr. Henkin discovered, isolated, and sequenced growth factors responsible for development and maintenance of stem cells in the taste and smell systems and, thereby responsible for taste and smell function since these stem cells were the progenitor cells for all taste bud and olfactory epithelial cell anatomy, respectively. He discovered that the parotid glands in the mouth and the nasal serous glands in the nose secrete these growth factors into saliva and nasal mucus, respectively. These growth factors act on stem cells in the taste and smell systems through paracrine effects similar in some ways that hormones secreted from various glands in the body into blood influence metabolism through endocrine effects.

So endocrine and paracrine signalling is important for smell and taste function and development. I don't know if any of the cited research addresses whether the signalling affects smell and taste function in the differentiated epithelia, or if the functions are limited to development, acting only on the stem cells. I am reminded of some research that suggested a role for new cell synthesis in memory formation, and of the way your house smells different when you come back from a long vacation. I've realized that cat owners often don't realize that their houses quite frankly stink, and perhaps they don't, to them, because of changes in the olfactory epithelia. This is mostly ignorant speculation since I don't know much about how smell works on the molecular level, but there has to be something for smell that allows us to weed out extraneous input to focus on the ones most important to us, and it doesn't all have to be done in the brain. Aside, I speculate that it's because smell nerves don't go through the thalamus on the way to the brain that smell has such powerful ability to evoke memory. Check out what cognitive psychology has to say about processing of input information. I'll sum this up with the following hypothesis: All senses are filtered of repetitive input at the organ level, as well as the brain level.

Skin filters repetitive touch by developing calluses.

Vision filters repetitive sights by loss of specialized rod and cone cells in the eye. Older people have better peripheral color vision than when they're looking directly at something.

Taste and smell filter repetitive inputs through signalling from growth factors, perhaps even ingredients in food can have activity here.

I can't think of something specific for hearing, other than the general obvious observation that people grow deaf faster in the presence of continual loud noise.

Any comments?

Yea for GeoURL!

2003-03-10T18:10:00.000-08:00

Both Komputor and Mass Spectrometry Blog are both my neighbors. Who would have thought GeoURL would be so cool? I just thought it was kinda neat and maybe a way to meet people, but I've found so many great sites that way.

Emeril's online recipe database

2003-03-10T18:04:00.000-08:00

Emeril's online recipe database, hand-coded by Ben Caston.

RSS feeds of literature queries

2003-03-10T17:30:00.001-08:00

Hubmed - RSS feeds of literature queries - updated daily.

Mass Spectrometry Blog likes the citation incidence plot and XML Resources for Molecular Biology. It's great to see some of the new data technologies getting wider application.
Thanks for the great links, Dr. Murray.

Syndication!

2003-03-10T17:30:00.000-08:00

RSS with autodiscovery now enabled, courtesy of VoidStar.

Update: Voidstar has discontinued their service, but it has been picked up by Wytheville Community College

The Nine Warning Signs of Bogus Science

2003-03-10T08:32:00.000-08:00

Secular Blasphemy, which has several other great articles, has a summary of the seven warning signs of bogus science. I've added two of my own. For laypeople trying to sort through some of the difficult issues today, these are good to keep in mind:

The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media.
The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work.
The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection.
Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal.
The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries.
The discoverer has worked in isolation.
The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation.
The discoverer refuses to show his data.(I'm not linking to the R-elians here, but you know what I mean)
The discoverer claims only he or she can do the technique

The foundation of scientific integrity is peer-review and reproducibility. One scientist making a claim doesn't make the claim true. See rhetorical strategies. Getting an article published in a major scientific journal doesn't even mean that it is an eternal truth, but if someone is making a big claim by himself, and no colleagues nor journals are backing him up, then check your bogometer.

SlowFood has a New Orleans Chapter!

2003-03-09T13:40:00.000-08:00

SlowFood.com, because life's too short to eat fast food. I really like their cheese, but I don't care much for their more Luddite beliefs about genetic engineering.

CoffeeBlog makes the Best of Blogs list at MSNBC!!

2003-03-09T13:16:00.000-08:00

CoffeeBlog makes the Best of Blogs list at MSNBC!!

I know it's just because the editor, Will Femia, decided to focus on medical blogs, and the field isn't really all that big, but hey...it still counts as major media attention! He found my page linked from Lagniappe, and says:

One recent post that caught my attention is a discussion of a really cool idea for mixing text/audio translator tools with the XML program known as RSS which allows potentially wide distribution of Weblog entries. This leads to a vision of a future where we can sit in our cars and listen audio translations of our favorite blog feeds.

I thought it was a little far-fetched when I wrote about it. I was just pissed off at the moment at the Clear Channel radio monopoly and wishing I could get my favorite webcasts in my car, when I happened to read about AudBlog.

Mixing Science and Policy must be done with neutral regard to religion.

2003-03-07T19:19:00.000-08:00

Murtaugh is dissecting a study by the National Cancer Institute on the effects of abortion on breast cancer risk. Overall, there is no correlation, as the study shows, however when you look more closely at the data reported in the NYT article, you find that cancer risk increases with the lateness of term of the abortion. According to his math, this results in a grand total of about 1700 more breast cancer deaths per year, or a 4.3% increase in breast cancer deaths per year. To put this in perspective, risk factors like smoking dwarf this number by several orders of magnitude. If you want to attack a problem that causes unnecessary death, attack smoking, not late-term abortion, which account for less than 10% of the abortions performed anyways.

Homocysteine.net

2003-03-07T08:45:00.000-08:00

Obels.net is blogging homocysteine.net. It's a little secret of the medical community that the correlations between blood lipoprotein levels and heart disease aren't exactly perfect. Information is coming out suggesting that homocysteine isn't simply a marker, but may cause some of the problems itself. Thanks for the blogroll Obels!

2003-03-07T07:09:00.000-08:00

Mardi Gras comes and goes here in New Orleans and I miss out on all the controversy. I think I have discovered the real reason some people get so queasy when talk of genetic engineering of intelligence arises.

If the comments on this forum are in anyway indicative of how the dialog will go on the larger scale(and I suspect that it is) the discussion will be like every other debate about genetic engineering, cloning, or pre-emptive medical intervention.

The anti side will be ignorant of the basic science and will be composed of liberal art majors chattering about how wrong it is to "tamper with nature" and religious right-wingers chattering about how wrong it is to "tamper with god's creation." The pro side will be composed of those who understand the basic science involved and realize that this really is nothing new and nature has been doing it all along, but this side will be totally unable to communicate with the anti side because:

1)the anti side is ignorant of the basic science.

2)the anti side doesn't really want a reasoned debate anyways, they just want to yell and scream about how wrong it is.

Now here's my point:

Those who are less intelligent are canny enough to realize that if intelligence becomes officially realized as a good thing that decisions should be based upon, the less intelligent become disenfranchised. They may not be able to spell disenfranchised, but they're canny enough to realize it when it's happening to them. That's the real reason there will be no real debate. Less intelligent people in power have a strong interest in continuing to push the blank slate doctrine.

2003-02-25T09:49:00.000-08:00

Nobody will probably notice this but me, so I'll point it out because it's so cool. My top-of-the-page ads(which you can remove by clicking here) no longer come from ad.doubleclick.net, which I have blocked at the level of the HOSTS file, but from pagead.googlesyndication.com. This is the cool part: no longer are they for bonzi buddy and the x10 spycam. They have apparently used the same algorithm to target ads to my page as they do for their search pages. Now my ads are for DNA sequencing and genotyping! I think that's awesome.

2003-02-24T22:45:00.000-08:00

There is a nice analysis of the HIV vaccine results at Lagniappe. This story has been all over the news, even making the local television news. Apparently, it's supposed to be some big deal that the vaccince caused a greater immune response in hispanic and african americans than in asians or "others". Who can practice medicine, now in the post genomic era, and not take as old news the fact that different genes may mean different medical treatment? I would certainly hope my doctor places patient care over being politically correct, wouldn't you?

I am so ready for this to become a non-issue, but, as derek mentions, it is going to come up more and more often now, like a repressed memory whose only release is through catharsis. Only then we can start talking about what we're going to do about it.

2003-02-24T22:28:00.000-08:00

Razib has invited me to take my seat at his roundtable, and I am honored to do so. Upon logging in to write my first post, I noticed that 4 out of the 5 most recent pings were from "Gene Expression contributors are racists" discussions. Of course, that's just par for the course when you're discussing such emotionally charged issues as genetic(i.e. racial) influences on intelligence and cross-cultural concepts of beauty.

2003-02-21T10:37:00.000-08:00

Some people in Kentucky have been without power for days now. Good thing whoever took these pictures had enough batteries for their camera. Some of them are simply amazing.

More

2003-02-19T21:23:00.000-08:00

It's nice to remember that humans do more than just kill each other. Sometimes they create beautiful things. Thanks Ailina!

2003-02-19T21:17:00.000-08:00

Lagniappe is sounding off on the decision of the major scientific journals to self-censor material which could be used by terrorists. All kinds of things are being done now, that we normally wouldn't do, due to fears about terrorism. There are reasons why we don't normally do these things. We don't normally keep a database of information about where foreign nationals are going, what they're doing, and what they're buying. Our government doesn't normally provide us a number to call in case our neighbors look like they're doing something suspicious. We don't normally do anything to infringe on the freedom of the press. It's the same issue underlying all three issues: respect of individual liberty. In the extreme case we need to take one of these measures, it should be understood that serious oversight and openness must be part of the process.

The way the journals are handling the issue is a great example of the way to handle an issue like this. For the tiny number of cases that require it, they work with the author to get them to focus their article on the things necessary to make their point, but not to give anyone any unrelated ideas. If additional information is desired by someone, well...any responsible researcher knows how to handle requests for additional information. They are familiar with the people in their field, so they can handle reqests for information such as, "Exactly which conditions most greatly contributed to pathogenicity" in somewhat similiar fashion to the way you would handle a request to borrow your axe. You might loan it to your neighbor willingly, but if somebody you don't know shows up wearing a hockey mask and asks to borrow it, you're gonna be a little more careful.
Thanks for the blogroll, Derek!

2003-02-18T22:44:00.000-08:00

France declares cloning illegal. Identical twins surrender.
Thanks razib! Oh, and thanks for the blogroll, too!

2003-02-17T18:39:00.000-08:00

I recently heard a presentation on this crazy guy, Peter Schultz, who has engineered bacteria to use para-aminophenylalanine instead of amber codons. The bacteria synthesize para-phenylalanine, have a para-phenylalanine tRNA synthetase, and and insert it with very high fidelity whenever the amber codon is found. The amber codon, which causes the ribosome to stop reading the mRNA when it's found, is apparently quite rare, and because bacterial mRNAs aren't as processed as eukaryotic ones, the bacteria get along quite well. I was thinking it would be really keen to make a series of mutants, each of which incorporated a different D-amino acid instead of the L version. Then, analysis of the structures of the D tRNA synthetases, of the ribosome translating the codon, and of the resulting protein could contribute a little information towards answering why we use all L amino acids.

Coincidentally, while I was googling a good link for this story, I found Lagniappe, who just blogged this story about the same time I heard the presentation.

Here's Schultz's PDF in JACS.

Derek, if you're reading this, you're the number one link at google for para-aminophenylalanine. Kinda funny that I find a blogspot blog as the number one search result for something right after google buys pyra. However, there were only 2 results total, so I only mention this to be funny, not to suggest anything conspiratorial.

2003-02-17T17:02:00.000-08:00

Sometimes an article comes out with a title that makes me think, "Wait a second. It's not even April 1st yet."

Joe Tsien's NR2B overexpression experiment and John Chapin's "Rats control robots with minds" were pretty amazing articles, and now Dalle Molle Institute for Perceptual Artificial Intelligence comes out with a technique that can detect "whether you are thinking about a calculation, a place, a colour or even what you want to eat for dinner...but it’s not good enough yet to detect exactly what colour you’re thinking of.” I believe they're using Bayesian analysis, a great statistical learning technique which I've seen being used more and more often, to look for "EEG patterns embedded in the continuous EEG signal associated with different mental states." Here's a summary .pdf describing the technique.

2003-02-17T16:12:00.000-08:00

If anyone knows of a good substitute for Real Player, email me. I don't care how great their compression algorithm is supposed to be, it's bloatarific spyware, and I have to do without the streaming content from most large media outlets because I refuse it install it.

2003-02-17T14:59:00.000-08:00

K is for Kompressor - Cookie Monster meets Einsturzende Neubaten. Cute and fuzzy in an goofy industrial sort of way.

2003-02-16T22:59:00.000-08:00

Too much self-indulgence

I am going to stop sounding like I'm posting to k5 or metafilter, and I'm going to keep the metablogging to a minimum. In addition, I will be posting more local content.

2003-02-16T20:31:00.000-08:00

audblog Post

I wonder how long it will be before this technology is combined with news aggregation and text-to-speech to output RSS feeds to audio...

I really like this idea. I know it's geeky, but I could so use this. Imagine driving down the road and hearing updates to your favorite pages on your radio at specified intervals. Of course, you can't edit the audio once it's been posted, though you can re-record until you get it right, so if you're not careful you end up sounding as dorky as I do in the clip. I used to carry a pen and paper around with me, but something about having to translate your thoughts into writing takes away some of the inspiration. I used to keep a mini tape recorder in my bag, but I never really used it because having to stop and dig it out wasn't convenient enough. This is perfect, since I always carry my phone with me. I can see my private page filling up with audio posts. I wish the audio was better, though.

I just came back from the Circle Bar, where I heard Hot Club of New Orleans for the first time. Instead of writing about how cool it was, I could let the untra-low key jam speak for itself.

2003-02-12T09:40:00.000-08:00

Total Information Awareness update at Science Blog.

The Department of Defense will establish two boards to provide oversight of the Total Information Awareness Project, the program designed to develop tools to track terrorists. The two boards, an internal oversight board and an outside advisory committee, will work with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), as it continues its research. These boards will help ensure that TIA develops and disseminates its products to track terrorists in a manner consistent with U.S. constitutional law, U.S. statutory law, and American values related to privacy.

Members of the outside advisory board are:

Newton Minow (chairman), director of the Annenberg Washington Program and the Annenberg Professor of Communications Law and Policy at Northwestern University;

Floyd Abrams, renowned civil rights attorney;

Zoe Baird*, president Markle Foundation; A New York blue-blood foundation funding "development of innovative media products and services".

Griffin Bell*, former U.S. Attorney General and Court of Appeals judge;

Gerhard Casper, president emeritus for Stanford University and Professor of Law;

William T. Coleman*, former chairman and CEO of BEA (world's leading application and infrastructure company) and now Chief Customer Advocate; and

Lloyd Cutler*, former White House Counsel.

* - 4 out of 7 definitely on the hard-core conservative, and politically connected side. Possibly have a financial interest in wide-spread implemantation of technologies developed by TIA.

Now for a little "taking out of context":

"TIA has never collected, and has no plan or intent to collect privately held consumer data on U.S. citizens...This is and will continue to be the responsibility of the US foreign intelligence/counterintelligence agencies"

UPDATE: Congress Nixes Total Information Awareness (link via Smart Mobs)

2003-02-09T16:06:00.000-08:00

There's been some talk recently about attempts to legislate diversity. Whatever side of the fence you are on with respect to this issue, This is something you must read:

"Whereas the Victorian ladies were concerned about evolution's challenge to conventional religion, their equivalents today are worried about its impact on the egalitarian premise on which democracy is based. Perhaps, Hamilton suggests, Darwin's lesson, put simply, is that all men are not born equal. He considers the current academic enthusiasm for political correctness - an 'escape route for less able minds' - an institutionalised form of denial."

2003-02-03T14:48:00.000-08:00

Compare and Contrast

One of these sites is a "officially licensed ASCAP and BMI site", the other is owned by AOL-Time Warner. One of these sites has "smooth jazz", "Swedish New Classical pieces", and "Nashville's Best Unsigned Talent - Old Time Pickin' Parlor" in the ambient electronic category, and one site has downtempo, IDM, among others. One site allows sorting by bitrate or stream, one has a column headed, "speed", and under it entries like T1, 56k, etc(they're streaming it over a modem?). One site shows the number of listeners/max listeners, one has a suspiciously pay-for-ranking looking TLH heading, which isn't explained anywhere as far as I can tell, but is intended, I think, to be some sort of ranking.

I don't know much about Nullsoft, but I know it is the creator of Winamp, the gnutella protocol, and Shoutcast, and I've always respected Justin Fraenkel for the aesthetic he applies to things with which he's associated. Hell, Nullsoft is owned by AOL-TimeWarner and they can still turn out a kickass webcasting site.

Does anyone still doubt that the only way the record companies can keep from becoming irrelevant is by legislating the competition out of business?

2003-02-02T13:02:00.000-08:00

Compelling read over at Rebecca's Pocket. She's an old skool blogger, predating Pyra, so she knows whereof she speaks.

I know this is a blogger page, meaning I don't know what I'm
talking about, but read it anyway.

2003-02-01T12:25:00.000-08:00

Compare and Contrast

Consider that creation vs. evolution shouldn't even be a debate we're having. Michael Shermer and the philosophical debates over the existence of god are something I can tolerate, because that's what philosophers are for, but the idea that we should have a scientific debate about creationism vs. evolution is every bit as ridiculous as a "lunarist" debate would be, except this time Buzz Aldrin can't help us.

2003-01-19T12:14:00.000-08:00

Struggling writer gets job photojournalism job with Playboy during their search for the Playmate of the Millenium, and feels "embarrassed to be a man".

Look, Mr Ueland. You act like you don't care about being on a bus with playboy models when you're on the bus. That's how you distinguish yourself among the crowd.

"I want you to open your green booklet to page 23, Chapter 5. How to Fake Like You Are Nice and Caring".

However, you look like a fool trying to convince people, through a newspaper interview, that you really didn't like being there, and having to take pictures of all those beautiful naked women made you feel uncomfortable.

Especially when the manager tells you you need to stop inviting the models to strip for a little extra credit after their non-nude photo shoots.

2003-01-13T20:48:00.000-08:00

The Responsibilities of Writing for the Web.

In cyberspace, where your actions are separated by distance, pseudonyms, and perhaps even cryptography, I still think you have a responsibility to think of the effects of your actions. I don't mean legal responsibility, as in "I can sue you if you don't", but an vanishing type of "don't hog the water fountain" responsibility. More than just consideration - noblesse oblige. Sites such as Slashdot, Fark, and others can't be called the nobility of the internet(including Fark nixes that - heh!), but in terms of the ability to get the word out about things that mostly fall outside the scope of or below the radar of major media, they are king. If your websitehas been lucky enough to rate linkage, you have felt the burn of 250 hits per second and nasty bandwidth allocation exceeded notices from your hosting provider. The kind of responsibility I'm talking about would involve sending a message to the owner of the page letting him know the link will be posted in a few hours, allowing him to arrange for a mirroring of his site or to prepare his server for the equivalent of a DoS.

I've noticed a trend on weblogs and meta-sites such as Slashdot and Metafilter of linking to google searches on the linked words instead of a page on the subject itself. Taking Google's amazing ability to determine relevance for granted can certainly be forgiven, but is conceptually against the idea of such sites. A group of people who filter the world through their perceptions, color it with their emotions, and focus it according to their expertise is a group of people who can recommend the most relevant, poignant, or technically accurate pages. Furthermore, the practice undermines the Google rankings for the linked topic: the very thing that makes the practice possible. As the Googlebomb has illustrated, enough articles linking to google searches on the linked words would considerably distort the site ranking from what it would be if all the links were real pages. The only purpose I can see for linking that way is to deliberately not affect site ranking, because Google doesn't cache its own searches. An example of such use can be found above in the link tagged to the words "your website". In this case, the search page itself contains information I wanted to show(146 hits for that search). The kind of responsibility I'm talking about, existing in a completely separate dimension for law and pbligation, would require everyone writing for the web to consider it their duty to use their expertise, perception, and feelings when they link a page.

It enriches the web for us all.

2003-01-13T20:16:00.000-08:00

I think I've found the first example of codon bias at google!

2003-01-13T20:08:00.000-08:00

Comments will return when I can get them hosted somewhere under my control. Enetation provides a fine service, fine enough that I even donated some money so that I could use their dedicated server, but it still made the page load too slow and only worked sporadically. Please email me with those comments or questions about anything(I'm still learning), but especially thoughts provoked by the articles or useability issues and I will include them with the relevant post. I put a fair amount of work into this and would like to hear from anyone who stumbles across this page.

2003-01-13T18:31:00.000-08:00

No Sense of Place directed me to 4 MIT Professors give science advice to the president. The actual number is 85 and counting, from science personalities nationwide, including such personalities as Craig Venter (who has a great rant), Ray Kurzweil (who goes offtopic, but makes some excellent points), Eric Drexler, and this from Stephen Schneider.

The role of science in the public debate is clear: assess what can happen and what are the odds of it happening. The role of policy—driven by the beliefs of the public—is to make value judgments on how to react to the odds of various possibilities. It will take some major realignment of institutions like the media and congressional hearings apparatus to back away from the model of polarized advocates toward a doctrine of "perspective":reporting and debating based on the assessment of the likelihood of various events, not giving advocates of extreme opposite views equal time or space.

Anyone who has the media report on their particular topic of expertise, especially if it's a scientific topic, knows how totally clueless the newspaper or television treatment can be. However, more subtle distortion also exists. Instead of reporting on the different positions of many scientists regarding a certain issue and maybe the relative validity of each postion judged by the number and repute of the scientists holding each position, the stories that get reported force a debate among the two most diametrically opposed views, even when neither is very likely. Ever read anything about Nature vs. Nurture?

My eyes opened wide when I realized how clearly he understands the problems of science debate among the public and the nation. Unfortunately, and perhaps this is the problem, every statement I read declined the hypothetical offer to be science advisor to the president.

2003-01-07T18:00:00.000-08:00

Loophole In Tax Code Means Big Tax Breaks For SUV Buyers.

Let me get this straight. I drive a used '99 Sentra that gets 37+ mpg and all I get is a hundred or so off my tags, but a Range Rover, one of the biggest gas guzzlers out there, getting 14mpg, is entitled to a $21,000 "light truck" credit intended to be an incentive to small business owners using their personal vehicles in farm or construction work. How many small business owners are buying $72,000 vehicles, then using them to haul lumber or cow manure?

2003-01-07T14:07:00.000-08:00

What Science Fiction story am I reminded of? Karl Hansen's WAR GAMES (Playboy Paperbacks; 1981) sounds similar, that's not it. It was a short story in which the army had stay awake ampules which gave them faster reflexes and better sight, but this guy using them goes crazy.

Do you remember Commodore or Atari or NES? Then you'll know why I've been listening to this all day.

2003-01-06T21:42:00.000-08:00

The new CDs: Neither compact nor disks. Discuss.

"To the new generation of music artists and engineers, "CD-quality sound" is an ironic joke. It's like filming a movie in IMAX and then broadcasting it only to black-and-white TV sets."

Why would you want a 6 inch fragile disc that was incompatible by design when you could have a 1 inch 4 GB industry standard portable drive. Isn't that what being digital is all about? Devices that are smaller, faster, cheaper, and media that is infinitely transferable without loss? The rich old geezers who run things in the recording industry are being dragged into the digital age kicking and screaming.

2003-01-06T15:03:00.000-08:00

Comments provided by Enetation.
They even work, most of the time.

2003-01-06T10:38:00.000-08:00

I promise to never write one of the following two things: excuses for not posting frequently enough or overextended, overwrought metaphors so old and tired they not only fell off the turnip truck last decade, but have been lying in the dirt of the dusty road, getting run over by passing farm equipment and tractors, ever since. You figure out which.

Maybe this explains some nerds appalling lack of personal hygeine. No sense of smell.