Accidental Blogger

Label? Diagnosis? Ill-Defined Something? (Joe)

Interesting NYT article about the movement for the 2012 DSM-V to get rid of "Asperger's syndrome," as well as "pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified," and make everything fall within the autism spectrum.  Link.

"Nobel" does not always equal "Noble"

The Nobel Prize is awarded for extraordinary achievement, not for special wisdom or emotional maturity. One of this year's three Nobel laureates in chemistry is Venkatraman Ramakrishnan. Ramakrishnan is the seventh Indian born person to win this honor. Although he was born in India and received his early education there, he did his graduate studies and the subsequent research that led to the prize, in the US. The scientist is currently working in Cambridge, UK. Indians are understandably thrilled that a desi born scientist has been awarded the world's most famous prize. Congratulations have been pouring in from all over India, including a message from the country's president.

But instead of being pleased,the neo-Nobelist has complained bitterly about the outpouring of good wishes emanating from the country of his birth. Ramakrishnan is particularly miffed that the valedictory messages have "clogged up" his email account and that people he doesn't ever remember knowing are making up fictitious personal connections with his early life. The scientist is very annoyed that winning the Nobel Prize has opened the door for Indians to claim him as their native son, based just on the "accident of birth."

NEW DELHI: Nobel laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan has expressed disenchantment with people from India "bothering" him "clogging" up his email box and dubbed as "strange" their sudden urge to reach out to him.

"All sorts of people from India have been writing to me, clogging up my email box. It takes me an hour or two to just remove their mails," he said. He said the deluge of emails had buried important communications from colleagues or from journals concerning papers we have in press.

"Do these people have no consideration? It is OK to take pride in the event, but why bother me?" the 57-year-old Indian-American scientist wondered in an email interview said.

"There are also people who have never bothered to be in touch with me for decades who suddenly feel the urge to connect. I find this strange," said Ramakrishnan, who shared this year's Nobel Prize for Chemistry with two others.

He expressed anguish over "all sorts of lies" published about him in a section of the media that he went to school and pre-Science in Chidambaram, the Tamil Nadu temple town where he was born in 1952.

 "People I don't know, for example a Mr Govindrajan, claim that they were my teachers at Annamalai University which I never attended, since I left Chidambaram at the age of three," Ramakrishnan clarified.

Ramakrishnan said that it was a good thing if his winning the Nobel Prize encouraged people to read about the work, read books and take interest in science.

"But I, personally, am not important. The fact that I am of Indian origin is even less important. We are all human beings, and our nationality is simply an accident of birth," he said.

Ouch! Yeah Venky, pretty pathetic, those hero worshiping Indians. I am not a great fan of chest thumping patriotism and nationalistic pride myself and I admire you for rising above a narrow ethnic identity. But come on, haven't you seen any other group of people seeking allegiances with successful stars? Kenya (sometimes all of Africa) calls President Obama its own. Colin Powell's relatives in Jamaica proudly pointed out his ancestry when he became Secretary of State. And those two were born in the US. Isn't a celebration due when a native son or daughter does well on the world stage? Or is that too gauche a sentiment? Anyway, not to worry. The excitable Indians will soon forget you and your achievement in due time and latch on to some other celebrity. Fame is an ephemeral commodity. Too bad, you could not be gracious enough to enjoy it while it lasts.

A question to the linguists: Is it appropriate to call the good scientist a curmudgeon? Or at least a surl or a churl?  (Narayan indicated that the last two may be acceptable words)   

When good physicists go rogue (D)

The New York Times has an article about someone who thinks the higgs boson is traveling back in time to stop the Large Hadron Collider (where I do my research) from working. As evidence, we are reminded of project delays, the fact that the Superconducting Super Collider project was canceled in the nineties, and that time travel isn't strictly impossible. We can confirm the hypothesis by drawing cards from a large deck to see if unlikely combinations arise. Read the article, but only to marvel at the burning stupid it summarizes (the paper itself is here). It's just a dreadful paper, and you don't even need much physics to know so. In fact, time travel is hardly the biggest problem here:

• Not the slightest reason is given for why a higgs might want to not be made
• There's no explanation for why it would work its magic by playing puckish trickster pranks on physicists and engineers.
• In fact, there's no consideration at all given to *HOW* a particle would happen to tweak the brains and bodies of tens of thousands of people (including members of congress when they canceled the SSC) in just such ways as would preserve the ordinary operations of thought. You must have people thinking and acting in utterly prosaic ways as they decide whether and how to build accelerators (should this connection between two parts must be made of two-centimeter thick copper or one? Maybe construction on that sub-project ought to be shelved to speed up turn-on...) while all the time they're being tweaked to achieve something distinctly un-ordinary - the failure of a large-scale multi billion dollar project. This sounds like the adaptive, reasoning, intelligent operation of an Evil Agent, not the steady, simple, lawful action of a particle obeying fundamental laws. What do the authors imagine the tee-shirt equation-of-motion for an adaptive saboteur looks like? Perhaps as a toy model they can present it evolving forward in time, if backwards seems too hard.
• The so-called argument from reverse-causation would apply to anything that has ever faced difficulties. Maybe the universe also hates the big dig or the Kyoto Protocol and tries its damndest to keep them from working.
• The probabilistic reasoning is fatuous - how are we to tell "Ooh, we picked a rare card! The higgs really wants not to be discovered!" from "Man, this card is rare. We must paint Botswana purple at once!" from "Such a splendiferous card! Surely the saints are telling us Roman Polanski is innocent and that the Riemann Hypothesis is false"? In the paper, this magic is accomplished by writing text on the cards. The authors haven't seen fit to inform us whether words in any language reach the holy ears of the higgs, or if it likes only English. I imagine we are to be direct and straightforward in all our questions - it's a spin-free boson, get it?

The physics itself doesn't help one whit - there's no more than a smidge of formalism about frameworks where you can have backward propagation in time. At least real papers on the subject treat the attendant issues in depth and seriously. Here it's three or four essentially content free word-equations. The funny thing is there are much saner (and ubiquitous) ways of writing theories where the universe (or a part thereof) has a way of getting what it "wants" - you write an equation with a potential function, and regions of high potential are disfavored. So, the universe "wants" to keep us from escaping the surly bonds of earth by using gravity, if you want to put it that way.

The paper essentially serves as proof, if it was ever needed, that even people embedded in large scientific research communities may temporarily believe astonishingly foolish things when they're deprived of the means for keeping them sane, busy and active: data, if possible data that don't agree with what you already know.

Norman Borlaug: Scientist, Visionary, Humanitarian (1914 - 2009)

Norman Borlaug died of cancer last Saturday. Despite being the recipient of numerous national and international honors, the Nobel Prize, Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal among them, through his long and productive life Borlaug remained quiet, unassuming and mostly unknown to the public.  But the impact of his life's mission on the world is extraordinary. A tireless crusader against world hunger, he was better known in some developing countries whose agricultural methods he helped revolutionize, than in his own homeland. An excerpt from an obituary - a brief account of Borlaug's life, his achievements and the Green Revolution:

Norman Borlaug has, in the opinion of many experts, saved more human lives than any other individual in history. He was the grandfather of the “Green Revolution” in which, between 1961 and 1980, wheat crop yields doubled, tripled and sometimes quadrupled around the world. His experiments with hybrid wheat strains and nitrogenous fertiliser created strains of the staple food impervious to pests, bad weather and poor soil, enabling the world to support a far greater human population than many thought possible after the Second World War. Yet his methods and message fell out of favour, to the detriment of millions — especially in Africa.

In the mid-1950s Malthusian doomsayers saw the contrary trajectories of population growth and food production in South-East Asia and the Indian sub-continent and predicted catastrophic worldwide starvation, the denudation of forests and seas followed by an inevitable population crash. The reversal in the Third World’s agronomic fortunes was so sudden and so miraculous that many have since forgotten the holocaust forestalled — especially, in Borlaug’s view, the trendier sections of the green lobby which seek to impose organic food and “natural” production methods on the world’s poorest countries.

Norman Borlaug was born in 1914, the grandson of Norwegian immigrants, in Saude, near Cresco, Iowa. He worked on the family farm until 19, when he signed up for the National Youth Administration, one of Franklin Roosevelt’s “alphabet agencies” set up to combat poverty and despair during the Great Depression. His commitment secured him a place at the University of Minnesota in 1933, but he ran out of money. He transferred to the College of Agriculture’s forestry service and then joined the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the US Forestry Service. As a group leader with the CCC he was in charge of many recruits who were emaciated and starving; refugees from the great Dust Bowl that had laid waste to the plains of America from Texas to South Dakota. He said: “I saw how food changed them, and this left scars on me.” 

....

In April 2002 Borlaug signed a declaration with several environmental experts, including Patrick Moore, the co-founder of Greenpeace, in favour of “high-yield conservation”. The movement against trendy agricultural primitivism has since gained pace, yet the lack of respect paid to Borlaug’s teachings in recent years is astonishing in relation to his impact on human society. Many of those who rubbished his acheivements as a “brown revolution”, he said, were Utopians and elitists who had “never experienced the physical sensation of hunger”.

He won many international awards, but his own country was slow to give him credit. In July 2007 he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, although the wording of the law by which it was awarded sought political mileage from his acheivements: “Dr Borlaug has saved more lives than any other person who has ever lived,” it stated. “And likely has saved more lives in the Islamic world than any other human being in history.”  

Here is the long list of honors and awards bestowed upon Norman Borlaug from all around the world. 

(Blogger's note: The posting here has been infrequent of late.  I have some ideas brewing but haven't had the time to flesh them out in blog posts due to travel and other pressing tasks. I have another trip coming up next week. Will try to get something out before that. Hopefully, other authors will find the time to write also in the midst of their busy schedules. Thanks for your patience.)

Lose your mind; become one with the cosmos (D)

Sometimes man stumbles upon great truths entirely undeservedly. Kamerlingh Onnes just happened upon superconductivity while twiddling around with mercury and refrigerators; Roentgen was playing with himself in electrical ways and realized to his shock that he could see through his skin. Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard neuroscientist, woke up one morning with headache, a stroke and noble sentiments. Her discoveries are even more astounding.

As preliminary, recall that blood clots in the brain can cause loss of language, memory, or face recognition, paralysis, personality changes and the like. What had hitherto gone unsuspected is that certain parts of the brain actively hinder us from realizing our potential. Blood clots in such undesired parts (the stodgy and linear left hemisphere, specifically) instead improve us! Indeed, they cause us to Awaken to our full, true nature, as the unshackled remainder reveals what had previously been blocked off.

Now, it is hardly surprising that no scientist has predicted this - why would large parts of the brain be actively engaged in keeping us from Truth? And yet, why should it be otherwise? After all, do we not function better without an infected appendix? Surely the loss of what forces us into dull, methodical, detail-oriented, negative-energy patterns might have similar effects! Taylor's work is being widely celebrated; she has written a bestseller, appeared on Oprah, and is recognized by Time as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Here is a colloquium where she presents her findings (a twenty minute video, but well worth the trouble. Do wait for the standing ovation she justly receives):

Her testimony is fascinating and jarring, even humbling. With bad brain gone, she found the boundaries between her body and the rest of the universe dissolving into the common Energy Field of which she discovered she was made, like everything else, and experienced herself connected, perfect and together, brother and sister with the Whole, beautiful whole. She lost all sense of her day-to-day life and work and relationships, which she found was quite compatible with Oneness. She saw the stranger in her body, that tiny, detached bit of universal consciousness, and wondered how she would ever contain such enormous vastness of being into a mere meat-brain. She realized, somewhere in the buzzing blooming confusion, that she was rising above her parochial, linear need to parse time into past, present and future and saw it pictorially, complete. As she says, she achieved Nirvana, energy lifted and spirit surrendered to the nurturing womb we all emerge from.

The connections she draws to eastern contemplative practice are perceptive and profound. Also eerie, almost frightening - how could those sages from ages ago possibly have adumbrated what materialistic Science is only now coming, dimly, to appreciate? Now, it is a bit troubling that that the path to becoming one with everything involves losing your mind. That seems to suggest something rather peculiar about what we are to unite with. But brain as yet unmutilated, we miss the brilliance of the insight: this is precisely the sort of distracting, bad-karma-thought sprit-strokes rid us of!

And to think, we each may possess such knowledge, for the contemptible price of keeping golf-ball sized clots in our heads! Taylor does say she lost the ability to read, speak, and move, and that it took her eight years to recover. Still, who among us wouldn't be tempted by the thought of even a few moments of perfect clarity? Would not viewing visvarupa compensate for blindness before and after? As she says,

"Who are we? We are the life-force power of the universe, with manual dexterity, and two cognitive minds, and we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. Right here, right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere, where we are - I am - the life-force power of the universe. I am the LIFE-FORCE POWER of the fifty trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form! At one, with all that is!"

THIS is what we miss by retaining left-brain. Effulgent, incandescent truths are offered us. Shall we fail to confront them?

It's not our fault

Our forefathers were responsible for global warming. I don't know if this article belongs in Joe's friend's blog, NCBI ROFL.

Iraq War And The Politics Of Pluto

It's the month of August and once again, as the International Astronomical Union (IAU) is about to convene for its general assembly meeting in Rio de Janeiro to discuss matters astronomical, my thoughts turn to Pluto, the planet / unplanet.  Apparently, since its high handed and mostly unpopular ouster from the line up of planets three years ago, Pluto has lost its lobbying power. It is not likely to be reinstated to the planetary fold any time soon although some astronomers believe that a decade or so in the future, data collected by space probes will establish its bona fides as an authentic planet once again. (See Eric Berger's article in the Houston Chronicle) 

So with no revision to Pluto's status is the former planet's demotion officially a fait accompli?

Not likely, said Mark Sykes, director of the Planetary Science Institute in Tuscon, Ariz.

“The IAU executive committee does not want to address it,” Sykes said. “They put out their encyclical, and they're basically done with it. But does the IAU dictate thought? No, they're not the holy mother church. There are a lot of scientists who will simply ignore what they have done and continue to refer to and write about Pluto as a planet.”

Celestial evidence

Sykes said he believes evidence will come out within the next decade that will force the IAU to reverse its decision on Pluto.

Two separate probes, the Dawn mission to the large asteroid Ceres and the New Horizons probe to Pluto, should reach their respective targets in the year 2015.

The IAU definition essentially treats dwarf planets such as Ceres and Pluto as innate hunks of rock, Sykes said. But both of these bodies have atmospheres, and Sykes believes the probes will also find evidence of geological activity. Ceres might even have a sub-surface ocean.

“I think we're going to find that these planets are much more like the Earth than Earth is like Jupiter,” he said.

Not all American astronomers agree. Foremost among Pluto's detractors is Neil deGrasse Tyson , who as director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City in 2000 omitted Pluto from an exhibit of the planets.

At the Houston Museum of Natural Science, Pluto remains entrenched in an outdoor diagram of the planets, with a plaque that still lists it as a planet.

“We have no plans to remove the object since it's still there in the real solar system,” said Carolyn Sumners , the museum's director of astronomy. “Since changing plaques is expensive and Pluto's status is still in flux, we decided to leave the plaque as it is and see if the astronomical community can reach a more permanent consensus.”

 

A couple of more observations. While searching the archives for Pluto related posts, I discovered that  this is the sixth time in less than four years that I am writing about the ninth planet on A.B.  And although I had suspected that Pluto's (the only planet discovered by an American) demotion had something to do with the unpopularity of American politics in 2006, I had not seen anything until now, to confirm my suspicion.  Berger mentions that the plight of Pluto had much to do with the rest of the world's anger with the Iraq war. Oh well, so Pluto didn't just get plutoed - it also got Bushed.

The Longest Eclipse

The longest total solar eclipse of this century started in India on Wednesday morning and is sweeping eastward. The New York Times has a report by a blogger who is chasing the eclipse.

My previous post on total solar eclipse is here. As per Anna's suggestion (see comments), I have since then read Annie Dillard's essay, "Total Eclipse."  

 

Mission Mars: Man or Machine?

A spirited debate is underway at NASA on whether the next big space exploration project should focus on sending astronauts back to the moon and installing a permanent lunar base or if the money and effort will  be better spent in attempting a manned landing on Mars.  Buzz Aldrin, one of the two Apollo 11 astronauts to set foot on the moon, thinks the latter is a more worthy goal. But others like Robert Park, professor of physics at the University of Maryland argue that with sophisticated robots at our disposal, humans need not venture out too far into space for the sake of gathering information.

This is the 21st century. Telerobots have been invented. Our two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, are merely robust extensions of our fragile human bodies. They don’t break for lunch or complain about the cold nights, and they live on sunshine. They do suffer the afflictions of age. Their teeth are worn down from scraping rocks, and one has an arthritic foot that he drags behind him. But their brains are still sharp since they are the brains of their PhD handlers. No need to bring them home when they are no longer able to explore, they will just be turned off. [NASA administrator Charles] Bolden also said he wants to go to Mars. How incredibly old-fashioned! We are on Mars now. We have been on Mars for more than five years, looking for evidence of water and life. A human on Mars would be locked in a spacesuit with only the sense of sight. Our rovers have better eyes than any human, and we don’t have to take their word it; everyone can see what they see. How wonderfully democratic! Moreover, they have the IQ of their PhD operators back on Earth.

Meanwhile, I am sure everyone saw the cute image that Google put up to commemorate the 40^th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing.

 

Musings on the conjunction fallacy (D)

The classic demonstrator of the conjunction fallacy is the following:

1. Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations. Which is more probable?
1A. Linda is a bank teller.
1B. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

The general form is this: of an entity X, qualities x_i are asserted. We are to decide whether X is more likely to possess quality y or quality y in addition to to some quality z. The fallacy consists in the fact that people, when queried, pick 1B. as more probable, when, as a proper subset of 1A., it couldn't possibly be. (All feminist bank tellers are bank tellers but some bank tellers aren't feminist) Now, we commonly understand this as emerging from use of the heuristic of representativeness. To use the jargon of the election cycle, latte-sippers like Linda sound more like feminists than like bank-tellers. So much more so, in fact, that people are willing to contemplate and assert mathematical impossibilities like p(y & z | x_i) > p(y | x_i) simply because p(z | x_i) > p(y | x_i).(*) Here, the x_i's are the facts stated about Linda, y is the state of her being a bank teller and z is the state of her being a feminist.

Okay. But now consider a related but different situation:

2. Someone murders a nice Jewish couple in a high-rise apartment complex. Linda is a suspect. In which of the following situations is it more appropriate to convict her? She's seen to leave the building:
2A. five minutes later
2B. five minutes later, covered in blood, with a gun in her hand, and with a swastika inked on her exposed right forearm.

Now here too 2B is a proper subset of 2A, yet now the the correct response is obviously 2B, not 2A. There's no logical puzzle here; it's just that now we're reasoning backwards from the observations 2A, 2B to settle the truth of 2. That is, now we're comparing p(x|y & z) to p(x|y) and it's quite kosher for the first of those two to be larger (or smaller) than the second.

Now for the musings: in addition to failures of the representativeness heuristic, does some part of the conjunction fallacy arise from matters of this kind? After all,
- we pretty generically confuse the p(A|B) with p(B|A) - assuming we intuit that these things are different at all.
- we often confuse the thing assumed with the thing to be proved, as anyone who's ever tried an A-only-if-B style math proof knows too well.

Maybe instead of following imperfect heuristics through to the implicit conclusion that intersections can be more probable than what they're intersections of, some people are just trying to "convict" Linda of her stated biography (1) in two alternate worlds 1A and 1B, and deciding that 1B gives a more workable case for the prosecution. If so, their reasoning wouldn't instantiate idiotic math, just math that - reliably and well - answers a different question. Maybe the very fact that respondents are being asked about these things using the language of probability pushes some of them to start thinking like good prosecutors, getting them to condition priors on posteriors

How might we test for such? It's hard, and I wouldn't know, but here's the first thing I would try: ask people question 1. as before, except ask them to assign numerical subjective probabilities to options 1A and 1B. Then, ask them to assign probabilities to:
1C. Linda is a feminist.
1D. Linda is anti-nuclear.

I'd expect that at least some of the people who committed the conjunction fallacy would be tricked into assigning lower probability to 1D. than to 1C, something which no-one who saw 1D as given fact should do.

Finally, what if some people, instead of reversing premises and conclusions, aren't separating them clearly at all? What if what's being done instead is to evaluate an overall web of interrelated fact-claims for how well it hangs together? This would be representativeness heuristic taken to a certain logical endpoint, where all the different qualities mentioned simply may or may not apply to someone labeled 'Linda', and one essentially evaluates each belief for plausibility in the background of the rest. To test for that, one might ask something like this:

3. Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy at Vassar College. She intends to home-school her children some day. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations. Which is more probable?
3A. Linda is a bank teller.
3B. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

If some people really are doing this last horrible(**) thing, I'd expect such to assign measurably lower probabilities to:
3C. Linda approves of home-schooling
than to
3D. Linda is anti-nuclear.
(She's been plonked into Vassar to "compensate" for the intuition that feminists are less likely to homeschool)

Conclude ramble.

(*)I'm setting entirely to the side the question of whether knowing a person is like Linda in fact raises the odds of her being a feminist more than it does those of her being a bank-teller.

(*) Well, horrible in this kind of setting at any rate, where the known is utterly known, beyond all possible doubt and whatnot. In more realistic situations, we frequently must revise assumptions in light of conclusions, and reason our way out of particular first principles and into others. Maybe Linda wasn't that big on social justice after all. Many people simply mayn't have acquired the peculiar academic discipline of really, truly, completely, suspending disbelief when presented with a set of consistent assumptions and therefore end up thinking about them instead of just with them. It's not like we particularly excel at abstract thought anyway...

From Oil Town To Space City

On the eve of the 40^th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, Houston remembers how it was transformed from a regional oil town to the international space center - home of NASA. The fast developing space race of the 1960s quickly began to leave its mark on the city's broader culture. From Tranquility Park in downtown Houston to professional sports teams known as the Rockets and the Astros (who played their games in the first of its kind modernistic sports arena, the Astrodome), the city enthusiastically embraced its new image. Did you know that the first word spoken on the moon was Houston?

“Houston Gets $60 Million Space Lab for Research on Moon Shot” blared the Houston Chronicle headline on Sept. 19, 1961. The coup was big, big news, commanding nearly all the front page, relegating the city's usual preoccupations — oil, football, hurricanes and communism — to the forlorn bottom corners.

And why not? Project Apollo, “the quest for the moon,” was coming to town. A “spacious, self-contained research city” would be built 22 miles southeast of downtown, and the capsules “in which the moon voyagers will ride” would be designed here. Other cities might build the rockets or be home to the launch pad, but thanks to an exercise in raw political power, Houston would be the moon shots' command center — the boss.

Project Apollo broadened Houston: To the oilmen who dominated its civic psyche, the city added astronauts and engineers. Apollo fixed Houston's eyes on the future: After years of being part of the backwoods oil patch, it became Space City, USA, where engineers were designing the world of tomorrow. And Apollo cemented Houston's notion that it is a can-do place, able to git 'er done no matter how big the job.

During the heady race for the moon, backwoods, bumptious Houston suddenly felt like the center of the universe. When Kennedy talked of “The New Frontier,” he seemed to be talking about the young, barely tamed city itself. The Manned Space Center sprouted on land where cattle had grazed.

And bang: Just like that, Houston, home of the Fat Stock Show, suddenly, surprisingly, became the city from which humans reached for the stars.

Rest of the report here. (check out the related videos and links on the page)

No Centaurs For The Senator

Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) is a long time champion of "sanctity of human life." He is a staunch opponent of abortion and since his conversion to Catholicism, also of the death penalty, except in rare cases. It is not surprising therefore that Brownback does not support embryonic stem cell research or cloning. All this while I had assumed that his opposition to both stemmed from his "culture of life" philosophy in which making and taking of lives should be left in the hands of the almighty. But now I find out that the senator is also worried about genetic research leading to the creation of human-animal hybrids. To thwart the sudden emergence of mythical creatures like centaurs and minotaurs in the midst of our otherwise peaceful world, Brownback has introduced a bill called the The Human-Animal Hybrid Prohibition Act.

“This legislation works to ensure that our society recognizes the dignity and sacredness of human life,” said Brownback. “Creating human-animal hybrids, which permanently alter the genetic makeup of an organism, will challenge the very definition of what it means to be human and is a violation of human dignity and a grave injustice.”

The Human-Animal Hybrid Prohibition Act would ban the creation of human-animal hybrids. Human-animal hybrids are defined as those part-human, part-animal creatures, which are created in laboratories, and blur the line between species. The bill is modest in scope and only affects efforts to blur the genetic lines between animals and humans. It does not preclude the use of animals or humans in legitimate research or health care where genetic material is not passed on to future generations, such as the use of a porcine heart valve in a human patient or the use of a lab rat with human diseases to develop treatments.

Brownback continued, “This legislation is both philosophical and practical as it has a direct bearing upon the very essence of what it means to be human, and it draws a bright line with respect to how far we can go in attempting to create new creatures made with genes from both humans and animals.

“My background is in agriculture, and for a number of years we have been working with crops and animals to produce a superior soy bean, a superior cow, and so-on. We can genetically engineer safe products and herds that are disease resistant or that possess more desirable attributes. But doing this in plants and livestock is very different than doing this in humans.

“The issue is that when you make changes in the germ-line, such changes are passed along to one’s offspring. You could make a change now that could be passed along through the gene-pool for the rest of humanity. We do not know what the full effect of this could be, and it could be disastrous.

“Tampering with the human germ-line could be the equivalent to setting a time-bomb that might detonate many generations down the line; but once it is set, there is no reversing course.

“I am optimistic that our nation we will make a sound choice for the generations to come. Already, in Louisiana last month, Governor Jindal signed legislation into law that would prohibit the creation of human-animal hybrids. That law is modeled after earlier versions of the legislation that we introduce today.”

All the co-sponsors of the bill are Republican senators (John McCain among them). What is Democrat Mary Landrieu doing here? Trying to outdo Governor Bobby Jindal in political grandstanding, I suppose. But don't they love mermaids in Louisiana?

NCBI ROFL (Joe)

Bringing new meaning to navel gazing and much, much more, is NCBI ROFL. Am I just giving a shout out to a friend's blog? No -- I'm giving a shout out to a friend's blog that posts abstracts from real scientific research articles that are often hilarious enough to have you rolling on the floor laughing. So check it out!

DIY Electric Car: If you can't buy it, make it (Sujatha)

From the Indychannel:

Patrick Roth uses a fully electric car to take his daughter to school and run errands, 6News' Jennifer Carmack reported.The car may look like any ordinary Ford Escort, but a closer look reveals that it's anything but. Roth didn't buy the car that way. He built it himself

Here's a step by step link to how he did it, all at the cost of about $13,000, including the car.

Now again, why did GM kill the electric car?

Recycling In The Sky : Let's Drink To That

I am sure everyone saw this item in the news yesterday on TV or on the web. There is really nothing chemically or nutritionally  yucky here. I guess one just has to get used to the idea.

At the international space station, it was one small sip for man and a giant gulp of recycled urine for mankind.

Astronauts aboard the space station celebrated a space first on Wednesday by drinking water that had been recycled from their urine, sweat and water that condenses from exhaled air. They said "cheers," clicked drinking bags and toasted NASA workers on the ground who were sipping their own version of recycled drinking water.

"The taste is great," American astronaut Michael Barratt said. Then as Russian Gennady Padalka tried to catch little bubbles of the clear water floating in front of him, Barratt called the taste "worth chasing."

He said the water came with labels that said: "drink this when real water is over 200 miles away."

The urine recycling system is needed for astronaut outposts on the moon and Mars. It also will save NASA money because it won't have to ship up as much water to the station by space shuttle or cargo rockets. It's also crucial as the space station is about to expand from three people living on board to six.

The recycling system had been brought up to the space station last November by space shuttle Endeavour, but it couldn't be used until samples were tested back on Earth and a stuck valve was fixed on Monday.

So when it came time to actually drink up, NASA made a big deal of it.

The three-man crew stood holding their drinks and congratulated engineers in two NASA centers that worked on the system.

"This is something that had been the stuff of science fiction," Barratt said before taking a sip.

NASA deputy space shuttle manager LeRoy Cain called it "a huge milestone."

Cracking a 4000 year old linguistic mystery?

Are scientists on the path to deciphering the Indus Valley script?  The story here and here.

An ancient script that's defied generations of archaeologists has yielded some of its secrets to artificially intelligent computers.

Computational analysis of symbols used 4,000 years ago by a long-lost Indus Valley civilization suggests they represent a spoken language. Some frustrated linguists thought the symbols were merely pretty pictures.

"The underlying grammatical structure seems similar to what's found in many languages," said University of Washington computer scientist Rajesh Rao.

The Indus script, used between 2,600 and 1,900 B.C. in what is now eastern Pakistan and northwest India, belonged to a civilization as sophisticated as its Mesopotamian and Egyptian contemporaries. However, it left fewer linguistic remains. Archaeologists have uncovered about 1,500 unique inscriptions from fragments of pottery, tablets and seals. The longest inscription is just 27 signs long.

In 1877, British archaeologist Alexander Cunningham hypothesized that the Indus script was a forerunner of modern-day Brahmic scripts, used from Central to Southeast Asia. Other researchers disagreed. Fueled by scores of competing and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to decipher the script, that contentious state of affairs has persisted to the present.

Among the languages linked to the mysterious script are Chinese Lolo, Sumerian, Egyptian, Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, Old Slavic, even Easter Island — and, finally, no language at all. In 2004, linguist Steve Farmer published a paper asserting that the Indus script was nothing more than political and religious symbols. It was a controversial notion, but not an unpopular one.

Taking the measure of a storm

Less than a year ago, I recounted my experience of living through a hurricane both before and after the storm.  Although Ike was technically a Category 2 hurricane (falling 1 mph short of Cat 3), it has been repeatedly described as a monster storm and the devastation it wreaked on the cities of Galveston and Houston qualified it as the third most destructive hurricanes on record to have made landfall in the US. 

Although Ike packed Cat 2 strength winds, it was a huge storm that covered a broad area and gave rise to storm surges way higher than would be expected from a hurricane of that intensity. Considering that a storm relatively low on the currently used Saffir-Simpson Scale of measuring hurricane strengths based on wind velocity did so much damage, some meteorologists now wish to devise a new scale to predict the effects of hurricanes more accurately by taking into account additional factors. That scale, they say, should take into consideration not just the speed of the hurricane but also the size of the "real" storm surge which cannot be calculated accurately on the  current scale. According to Saffir-Simpson, a Cat 2 hurricane causes storm surges of 6 - 8 feet. Yet Ike gave rise to surges measuring up to 15 - 25ft. upon touching down in Galveston.  Storm surges, say hurricane experts, do more damage to life and property than wind speeds.  

AUSTIN — For this year’s tropics season, the National Hurricane Center won’t abandon the venerable Saffir-Simpson scale, which rates hurricanes on a familiar scale, from Category 1 to Category 5.

But the center’s director says any single index cannot begin to capture the local impact of a hurricane, a fact Hurricane Ike — only a Category 2 storm on the Saffir-Simpson scale — made stark to residents of the upper Texas coast.

“If I could wave a wand and make it go away, I would,” said Bill Read, at the National Hurricane Conference in Austin on Friday. “It made sense in the era it was conceived, four decades ago, and now it’s ingrained in the culture.”

Attendees at the hurricane center have buzzed about the Saffir-Simpson scale’s inadequacies. KHOU-TV’s chief meteorologist Gene Norman said it needs to be modified to better account for surge. Greg Bostwick, a meteorologist at KFDM-TV in Beaumont, said his viewers couldn’t believe how “only” a Category 2 storm striking 90 miles away could flood one-third of Orange County.

Some hurricane scientists, such as Mark Powell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Hurricane Research Division, have been arguing in recent months to replace the Saffir-Simpson scale entirelySaffir-Simpson scale entirely. Powell said the scale is especially deceptive when it comes to storm surges, and when you review the data there’s simply no correlation between the category of a hurricane and the amount of land it inundates.

Developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by civil engineer Herbert Saffir and Robert Simpson, then-director of the National Hurricane Center, the Saffir-Simpson scale is simple and has gained wide public acceptance.

Seeking Life Among "Twinkling" Stars

NASA hopes to launch the giant telescope / light meter Kepler on Friday. The mission is to look for Earth-like planets in our galaxy - planets whose size and conditions could support life forms.  From the Houston Chronicle:

The universe may be filled with Earth-like planets — worlds where extraterrestrials might flourish. But these planets were once considered too small to spot, even with the latest in space technology.

Now, many astronomers believe NASA’s $600 million Kepler telescope, which is scheduled to shoot into space this week, will help to clear up the mystery.

Named for Johannes Kepler, a 17th-century German astronomer who studied planetary motion, the telescope is designed to search 100,000 stars in the Milky Way for Earth-sized rocky planets where water could flow and form streams, lakes and oceans.

Some astronomers believe the spacecraft could eventually find about 50 Earth-like planets.

“If we find that many, it will certainly mean life may well be common throughout our galaxy,” said William Borucki of NASA’s Ames Research Center, the astronomer who leads the Kepler science team.

“On the other hand, if we don’t find any, that is still a profound discovery,” he said. “It will mean that Earth must be very rare. We may be the only life in our universe.

“It will mean there will be no Star Trek.”

Finding wobbly stars

The unmanned Kepler is scheduled to lift off aboard a Delta II rocket on Friday from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Its quest, though, is not as fanciful as it may seem.

Astronomers first discovered a planet outside our solar system in 1994 and have since identified 340 of them. But even the best observatories, the Hubble Space Telescope among them, are not equipped to spot something as tiny as the Earth at great distances.

So far, the discoveries have been made with telescopes that detect small wobbles in the movement of stars, which astronomers attribute to the gravitational tug of unseen planets.

Most of these worlds rival giant Jupiter in size. Many are larger. Some circle their stars so closely that their surface temperatures are much too high for life.

Belief in evolution can turn you into a serial killer!

Astounding? No, not according to some anti-evolution, Intelligent Design proponents like Kelly J. Coghlan whose op-ed piece appeared in Houston Chronicle's opinion page last Sunday.

Jeffrey Dahmer, America’s most infamous serial killer who cannibalized 17 boys before capture, gave a final interview to Dateline NBC before his death and explained: “If a person doesn’t think that there is a God to be accountable to, then what’s the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges? That’s how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all just came from the slime. When we died, you know, that was it, there was nothing….”

Wow! Jeffrey Dahmer as the expert against Charles Darwin! I am confused as to why the religious right is so focused on the theory of evolution. Is it because scientists are still debating certain aspects of it that the obscurantists feel emboldened to enter the forum with their own fond views of things? Coghlan, generously cedes ground on micro-evolution but goes ballistic when it comes to the macro part. His outburst is in response to the Texas state board of education at last becoming bold enough  to unshackle itself from religious bullies and leaning toward eliminating the "strength and weakness" approach to the teaching of evolution - the Trojan Horse of the Intelligent Designers.

In describing evolution, there are two distinct categories: Micro-evolution and Macro-evolution. Micro-evolution is defined as small changes within the same species such as bacteria becoming resistant to drugs, birds’ beaks changing size and moths changing color. It makes perfect sense that a good designer would design each creature with built-in abilities to adapt to survive. I suspect we are all micro-evolutionists. The debate before the Board is not over micro-evolution.

Macro-evolution, on the other hand, is one species becoming an entirely different species such as a fly becoming a mosquito. Science has never observed macro-evolution; neither has science observed life arising from non-living matter. The debate before the Board is whether macro-evolution and life origin should be taught without “weaknesses.” The answer is no.

The validity of  scientific theories and evidence comes to naught for the believers unless they can relate it to their deistic view of the natural world. But where is the room for conflict in their minds? I don't see it. If after all, one believes in a supreme creator / god, then everything is his /her will. Where is the problem? Why don't they just think of scientists as diligently engaged in deconstructing god's design and treat the science class room as an extension of a theology seminar?  Just leave the rest of us in peace. Problem solved. But since the obscurantists don't seem to have many quibbles with most other scientific theories that explain natural phenomena, one has to wonder about their obsession with the theory of evolution.  Could it be that it has little to do with god but everything to do with ego and their own sense of exceptionalism?  Perhaps not even the man-monkey link bothers them as much as black-white-brown equality of man does? Take a look at this news story about a right wing political cartoon and decide.   

From frumpy to foxy - reincarnating the first First Lady

A second post on the same day about altered images - or at least an extrapolated one. This one does not involve plagiarism or copyright infringement. Rather it is an exercise in the restoration of national vanity.

The president of the United States is widely perceived to be the most powerful person in the world. So far only males of the species have occupied the august office. Their mates, the first ladies, have played public roles that have ranged from ceremonially ornamental to activist partners. Apparently, it irks some folks that any consort of a US president should be perceived as "frumpy," even if the woman in question has been dead for more than two hundred years. The very first First Lady, Martha Washington is the lady in question.  Her likeness in existing portraits, most of them painted in middle age, are as one historian describes it, of the double-chinned Old Mother Hubbard variety. So, armed with ultra modern technology, a few historians and museum curators embarked upon a mission to revise or rather, photo shop history. With the help of forensic anthropologists at the Lousiana State University's special project known as Forensic Anthropology and Computer Enhancement Services, or FACES, a new image of a twenty five year old Martha Washington was created by working backwards from her middle aged visage. This painstaking Benjamin Buttoning of the first lady has yielded a satisfactorily attractive and lissome young woman and revamped her "dumpy" reputation.  

  This just in: Martha Washington was hot. Or at least hotter than we thought.

Our image of the mother of our country, vague and insubstantial as it is, is drawn from portraits painted after her death showing a frumpy, dumpy, plump old lady, a fussy jumble of needlework in her lap, wearing what could pass for a shower cap with pink sponge rollers rolled too tight underneath.

But today, 250 years after Martha and George tied the knot, a handful of historians are seeking to revamp the former first lady's fusty image, using the few surviving records of things she wrote, asking forensic anthropologists to do a computerized age-regression portrait of her in her mid-20s and, perhaps most importantly, displaying for the first time in decades the avant-garde deep purple silk high heels studded with silver sequins that she wore on her wedding day.

Take that, Sally Fairfax.

History is about to be revised.

"We always see Martha with a withered face in her old age. But she was quite a beautiful woman in her younger years, and Washington loved her deeply," said Edward Lengel, senior editor at the Papers of George Washington project at the University of Virginia. "What's happening now is revisionist. But I think it's a whole lot closer to the reality of what she was."

The full story in the Washington Post here.

151 Contributors, 107,000 Words (Dean)

That's the tally as I skim the responses to the 2009 Edge Annual Question: "What will change everything?"—or, more prosaically, "What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"

The respondents tend to represent the science crowd (of the hard, social, and popular varieties), with lots of neuro-this and that-ologists. There is a token coterie of artsy folks. Consequently, the responses largely sound like failed pitches for science fiction movies. Lots of AI, some ET, cloning, and the like.

The writers and artists don't fare much better, although their responses are more likely to be quirky. One calls for "a different kind of male subjectivity" (I'm all for that, you jerk.), another (a male, I gather) for "no more reality." To the credit of physicists everywhere, one brilliantly anticipates nothing more than "a very very good battery."

Some of the entries surprise me. I expect mostly drivel from Brian Eno, but I appreciate his sense that the "what" destined to change everything won't be a thought, but a feeling, namely, that we're screwed (my paraphrase). And a television producer(!) envisions "a farewell to harm."

Anyway, were I invited to contribute, I'd suggest, modestly, a very good poem. That will change everything more capably than, say, "superintelligence" (Nick Bostrom) or a "web empowered revolution in teaching" (Chris Anderson). There is one poem among the contributions, but it's not very good. (All credit to Ron Silliman, whose daily posts are replete with this sort of stuff.)

Text, Book, Matter (Dean)

The latest Chronicle of Higher Education (January 9, 2009) includes a brief article (sub'n req'd) about an English professor and his biologist brother, who together are developing a way to use DNA to determine the local origins of medieval manuscripts.

While in Europe researching the origins of a poem, Timothy L. Stinson, an assistant professor of English at North Carolina State University, became frustrated with the limited methods available for determining where the original text came from and when it was produced.

"And then there was sort of this light bulb," Mr. Stinson recalled. "Wait a minute, they're on animal skin. Why can't we look at DNA?"

Indeed, in the age before paper was widely available and affordable, the written word was recorded on the hides of sheep, goats, and cattle. Shortly after Mr. Stinson had his epiphany, he began putting his idea into practice. Working with his brother, a biologist who has performed DNA extraction and analysis, Mr. Stinson is developing a method of using DNA to determine when and where medieval manuscripts were written. The approach will significantly improve the accuracy of the standard identification process, which typically relies on analysis of the author's handwriting and dialect — approaches that are "notoriously unreliable," Mr. Stinson says.

Here is where the disciplines of art and science (and history and sociology...) perfectly complement one another. There is some precedent for this partnership. In the mid-'80s, Paul Needham, currently rare books librarian at Princeton, but then at the Pierpont Morgan Library, worked with physicists at (if memory serves me well) UC Davis to conduct cyclotron analysis of the ink used by Gutenberg in the production of his Bible. Their work (see the articles cited at the end of the the foregoing link) produced fascinating conjectures about the details of work in Gutenberg's atelier, tied to findings about the physical substance comprising his books.

But before Needham, there was Allan Stevenson. I read Stevenson's monumental Problem of the Missale Speciale (London: Bibliographical Society, 1967) in one sitting at UCLA's library school shortly after the Needham cyclotron articles appeared. Obviously, Stevenson worked with cruder technology than Needham and Stinson: a microscope, photography, his unaided vision, the historical tools of papermaking. Watermarks are formed by wires shaped and anchored to the wire mesh of a papermold, the bed on which paper was made. Naturally, the shaped wires began to lose their shape as more paper was produced on the mold. Observing the gradual deformation of watermarks in the paper used to print the eponymous missal, Stevenson, like Needham, was able to suggest how the work proceeded from copy to copy.

"And then there was sort of this light bulb..." Perhaps it's not at all ironic for Stinson to resort to a not quite antiquated figure to reflect the moment of his discovery.

The Long and Short of Cancer Therapy

Could dwarfs hold the key to cancer therapy?  Sounds promising.

Turning the ocean into a thing that kills the ocean (Joe)

So apparently there's some other CO2 problem that doesn't get talked about as much as rising temperatures.

CO₂ forms carbonic acid when it dissolves in water, and the oceans are soaking up more and more of it. Recent studies show that the seas have absorbed about a third of all the fossil-fuel carbon released into the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and they will soak up far more over the next century. Yet until quite recently many people dismissed the idea that humanity could alter the acidity of the oceans, which cover 71 per cent of the planet's surface to an average depth of about 4 kilometres. The ocean's natural buffering capacity was assumed to be capable of preventing any changes in acidity even with a massive increase in CO₂ levels.

And it is - but only if the increase happens slowly, over hundreds of thousands of years. Over this timescale, the release of carbonates from rocks on land and from ocean sediments can neutralise the dissolved CO₂, just like dropping chalk in an acid. Levels of CO₂ are now rising so fast that they are overwhelming the ocean's buffering capacity.

In 2003 Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution in Stanford, and Michael Wickett at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, both in California, calculated that the absorption of fossil CO₂ could make the oceans more acid over the next few centuries than they have been for 300 million years, with the possible exception of rare catastrophic events. It was in their Nature paper that the phrase "ocean acidification" appeared in the scientific literature for the first time.

The potential seriousness of the effect was underlined in 2005 by the work of James Zachos of the University of California at Santa Cruz and his colleagues, who studied one of these rare catastrophic events. They showed that the mass extinction of huge numbers of deep-sea creatures around 55 million years ago was caused by ocean acidification after the release of around 4500 gigatonnes of carbon (New Scientist, 18 June 2005, p 19). It took over 100,000 years for the oceans to return to their normal alkalinity.

Around the same time as the Zachos paper, the UK's Royal Society published the first comprehensive report on ocean acidification. It makes grim reading, concluding that ocean acidification is inevitable without drastic cuts in emissions. Marine ecosystems, especially coral reefs, are likely be badly affected, with fishing and tourist industries based around reefs losing billions of dollars each year. Yet the report also stressed that there is huge uncertainty about the effects on marine life.

"On the one hand the chemistry of ocean acidification is very certain," says James Orr of the Laboratory of Sciences of the Climate and Environment (CEA-CNRS) in France. "On the other hand the biological and ecological impacts are very complex. The consequences for ocean life are far harder to predict."

So what progress has been made since the report came out? How serious an issue is acidification given all the other threats to the oceans, from overfishing and pollution to warming waters and changes in currents?

The sea creatures most likely to be affected are those that make their shells or skeletons from calcium carbonate, including tiny plankton and massive corals. Their shells and skeletons do not dissolve only because the upper layers of the oceans are supersaturated with calcium carbonate

Acidification reduces carbonate ion concentrations, making it harder for organisms to build their shells or skeletons. When the water drops below the saturation point, these structures will start to dissolve.

Now, I'm no scientist. But I feel like the world's oceans being turned into giant vats of carbonic acid might have problematic side effects for human beings--even for those non-"tree huggers" who don't care about things like plankton and coral for their own sake.

The New Snake Charmers

The ubiquitous Indian call centers, the source of numerous Indian jobs and American outsourcing have permeated the Indian popular culture.

As India's $64 billion outsourcing industry grows, the curious world of call centers has become the stuff of Indian pop culture. Their all-night working hours, made-up names, adopted accents and geeky global troubleshooting are becoming rich fodder for novels, movies, TV commercials, text jokes and stand-up comedy.

More in the Washington Post.