I should be grading last week’s lab assignment for the
class I’m teaching, or reading the papers for Tuesday’s journal club,
but instead I’ve pissed away most of the day avoiding Real Work, and
now I’ve decided that I just must clean out my
bookmark queue. I’m probably going to regret this tomorrow, but here
goes…
Last week, Hal asked me about some
work on mitochrondrial DNA (mtDNA) mutation rates. (It’s towards the
bottom of the linked page.) He was asking about this
report, which found mtDNA mutation rates in
C. elegans that were about 100 times greater than previously
observed. I still haven’t had time to read the original research
article, and I’m not really an evolutionary biologist anyway, so take
the following with a big grain of NaCl. Several questions seem to be
unresolved, to me: First, since the animals were under no selection
whatsoever, is there any chance that they were accumulating other
mutations that could increase the mtDNA mutation rate? (This could be
answered by looking at the rate of accumulation of mtDNA mutations
over the 200 generations used by the scientists.) Second, is 200
generations enough time to get a decent sample? Were multiple
populations grown for 200 generations, or is this based on one group
of worms? How recently were they isolated from a real “wild type”
population? (Animals can accumulate mutations when living under lab
conditions — leading to infamous deaf-blind strains of lab mice,
because they’re more likely to be grabbed by the scientist looking for
one to breed.) Finally, why is the mutation rate of mtDNA assumed to
be constant across evolutionary time? I know it probably makes a lot
of the math easier, or solvable in the first place, but I can’t think
of any reason why it has to be the case. Anyway, hopefully that
answered Hal’s question, sort of.
Oh, and good luck to Hal
on the thesis — hurry back, y’hear?
Reason Online had an article about
animal research last week. Unfortunately, in their desire to tar the
animal rights crowd, the authors choose an unreasonably large
brush. There is a place for animal research in science, but I also
think that there are some species that do deserve some additional
protection — great apes among them. While the move to grant
constitutional rights may be overstepping the case, I think the success
in teaching ASL has shown that there is something not unlike intellect
in some primates, and that probably deserves protection of some
sort.
The National Review
hatchet
piece on Judy Blume is seriously off base. Is there something
about the process of childbirth that causes all parental memory of childhood to
be wiped away?
Texas principal institutes
no-hug
policy.
“Really, in junior high, they just don’t need to put
their hands on each other because they can get into trouble,”
[Robbins] said.
Maybe, just maybe, this issue here is with a grown man unable to
deal with the idea of non-sexualized touching between peers. Maybe,
just maybe, this grown man shouldn’t be in a position of authority
over children.
Nice
summary of some current theories about aging.
Great. I’ve moved from the land of the hantavirus to the land of
West
Nile virus. On the other hand, maybe this will have a positive
effect, if it gets people to be more careful about leaving potential
mosquito breeding grounds (e.g., buckets of water) lying around their yards.
James Lovelock — formulator of the Gaia hypothesis — says that
nuclear
power is the way out of the fossil fuel crisis. I also get a bit
of a giggle out of the idea of dropping reactor waste into the rain
forest as a way of restricting development.
Le
Tigre should probably go onto the “To Buy” list, if I ever get
around to reviving it.
Salon covers the
bioethics
lawsuit. It’ll be interesting to see this play out in the courts;
it’s an interesting complex case.
Beauty.
(Warning: naked bits behind that link.)
Since I got to NCBI, I’ve been reading a bunch of bio-computational
method and technique papers, trying to get a feel for the way people
think about the big problems in the field. It’s a lot more math than
I’ve been used to, and a lot of that math is statistical.
Bayesian
methods are fairly popular, but until I read the linked article, I
didn’t realize how controversial their use is.
There was a new bioperl release
last week — get it
here.
The 1998
Perl Quiz Show Questions, with answers. Should kill a good hour or
so, if you’re looking for something to do.
ISMB2000
papers are up, for those of you (like me) not lucky enough to
attend.
In
Praise of Sloppy HTML, my ass. Look kids, getting it right isn’t
that hard. Being sloppy because it “saves time” and “isn’t
that important” doesn’t make me think an organization is closely
managing it’s resources, it makes me think they hired amateur wankers
to do their coding. Of course, my opinion isn’t worth much, as I’m
part of that unimportant “small minority” of techies. Feh.
As you probably know unless you’re living in a cave, the
2000 Ig Nobles
happened.
Winner list
here.
Thanks to Monkey Fist for
summarizing my thoughts about
political content carried on
broadcast media.
Boy howdy, do I ever
love
that War on Drugs. Yes siree Bob, no two ways ‘bout it.
Unfortunately, the
online
version of a quilting story in the
Washington Post doesn’t have
the nice pictures that were in the dead tree version. The
Renwick
Gallery page doesn’t appear to have any either. (This link
especially for the quilting side of the family; we’re keeping a warm
thought for y’all.)
Most of you have probably heard of Kary Mullis, the, ummmm, rather
eccentric kookball researcher that won the
Nobel for inventing the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which has
made most modern molecular biology possible. Most of you probably
haven’t heard of Michael Smith, who shared the Nobel with Mullis, and
who recently
died. In
contrast to some of Mullis’s actics, Smith put on a class act:
On learning that he had won the Nobel Prize,
Dr. Smith invited 12 co-workers with him to Stockholm to share in the
glory and the festivities, picking up the entire check. The party
included all research assistants, post-doctoral fellows and graduate
students who had worked on projects that led to his prize.
Follow-up on last entry’s request for DC area traffic info on the web:
(First from Rafe; other two from
Mike.)
Ahh, hell. I was getting all set to wrap this
up, when I got mail from
Lyn about a new Medley
entry, which lead me to
a new All
Too Cozy entry about engagement rings (and rituals, in a bigger
sense). I had some of the same feelings back when Lor and I had been
dating for a while — and I guess maybe the best way to explain is
just to tell the story…
So, like I said, we’d been dating for a while — a bit over a year,
if memory serves. Everything was good, we were happy, and at that
relationship point where we technically had separate addresses, but
were in fact living together — you know, the “where are we sleeping
tonight?” stage. It was getting to be That Time. Those of you who are
married know what I’m talking about; we both pretty much knew we were
going to be moving on to the next stage, but we hadn’t actually
formalized anything yet. At one point, being my essentially lovable
yet irascible self, I told Lor that I wasn’t ever going to ask
anybody to marry me, because the odds were that, as the man, I would
have taken the initial step in the relationship, by asking the woman
out. In my opinion, I continued, it was only fair that the woman
should pop the marriage question, so that she too would have to
experience the possibility of rejection. Actually, I might have done
that little schtick a couple times — I don’t remember. I wasn’t
really serious — some of it was my ambivalence about gender equity in
relationships, but mostly, I was just trying to pull her chain a
little bit. So, of course, I was pleasantly surprised when she took me
at my word, and popped the question. She bought a ring for me too; the
whole nine yards. Clearly, I said yes, and it was one of the better
decisions I’ve ever made.
So, anyway, that was my personal solution to the engagement ring
quandary. (And hopefully I don’t come off like too much of a schmuck
in the telling of it.) We ended up using my engagement ring as her
wedding band, which also has a nice cyclic quality to it, I
think. Plus, having the guy wear the engagement ring is a pretty good
way to head trip some of the more up-tight people in your
life. 8^)=
Anyway, I think I’ll wrap it up with that little story. It’s going
to be a long week; I should probably get to bed now.