Cavalcade of Mammals

Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures by Carl Zimmer.

Great book. About parasites. What they are, the recent discovery of how big a role they have in ecosystems, how they live, how they have jumped from animal to animal, and of course, which ones afflict people.

Several chapters describe a range of human parasites in amazing and often frightening detail. From botfly larvae to liver flukes, malaria’s Plasmodium to the nematodes that parasitize humans. There is some discussion of microbial parasites, but most of the book covers metazoan parasites. Zimmer tells the stories of some of these parasites–how they find their way to people, what they do once they arrive in a new host, how they escape detection, and the course of the disease. The story of how several parasites were discovered, how they were identified and followed through their changes of form and host are told. And there are pictures!

John Scalzi, writer of science fiction and recent GOH at Capricon has an article about movies and science fiction, an often awkward pair. This is an endless topic among sf readers. Especially with movies, the nature of movie production tends to stomp the sf out of them. I still don’t think Scalzi really gets the meat of the argument.

The vital element in speculative fiction is that it raises interesting questions–predictions about the future or about whether aspects of our society are necessary or universal, just to pick two.

Star Wars is space fantasy because it eschews sf and tells a fantasy tale of adventure and superpowers. The space future setting doesn’t make it sf any more than it did for Bugs Bunny cartoons with Marvin the Martian.

The science content is not a critical aspect of sf, but it is a signifier. Good speculative fiction respects science to the extent it can while telling it’s story. It does this so the reader or viewer has a context in which to think about the ideas raised by the work. If ‘it’s all a dream’ or ‘you’ve thought about this more than the director’ is the best answer to the questions the work raises then doesn’t work as sf.

Many movies with a futurist setting ignore all the rules of the world, violating laws of nature randomly. It’s a flag that the author isn’t telling a story you are meant to think about, just an adventure romp or a horror tale. Shows like Star Trek jump back and forth across this divide–it pulls things together for a spot of speculative fiction but then retreats fantasy.

Putting web sites on phones: 1, 2
Heat pad, $14 and thermostat, $13, combine for temperature controlled water bath.
Small crudely adjustable heater, small temp. range, $8
Batch orders of custom PCBs at low cost
Natural human sleep patterns are two four hour blocks with a hour or so between them. Article
Open Library, has catalog (author, title, ISBN, etc) info available for bulk download.
Why cats paint: a theory of feline aesthetics

Interesting post on John C. McLoughlin, author of The Helix and the Sword and Toolmaker Koan, other books, speculations on the nature of dinosaurs. His book Archosauria, a new look at the old dinosaur (1979) was a head of its time.

0.005″ Thick 6″ x 50″ Stainless Steel

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Smith & Jane Austen (2009)

Great first line, it had to be polished, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”

I haven’t read Jane Austen’s novel. This one I found quite enjoyable. Without zombies and katanas I suspect it would be a bit tedious. Everyone is happy in the end, except for those who deserve it and the people who turn into zombies.

Pumping Station: One Chicago hackerspace
Project 2061 Textbook Evaluations (late 90’s editions)
Tools for leanrning Morse code
Geomagic squares–magic squares made up of shapes

Ion torrent’s sequencer will be coming out this year. The specs:

$50k for the machine.

Runs will generate 100,000 reads of 100 bps, 10Mb per run.

Runs take about an hour, and cost $250 for the chip and another $250 for the other consumables.

Tippe top
Penrose tilings: non-periodic tiling of the plane
More Penrose tilings, site by Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, University of Wisconsin
Neutrophil chases bacteria
Magnetotactic bacteria used to assemble tiny pyramid
Lace making machines:1, 2, 3
I wandered into to a strange pocket of the web: “In 1832 he patented a steam plough, the only full version of which sank without trace in a field.”
2008 Presidential election, no retconning of the recent past allowed
Things Everyone In Chicago Knows
100 Greatest Adventure books of all time
What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?
Darryl Cunningham cartoon take on Global Warming and Conspiracies
Calamities of Nature comic
Guo Juan’s Internet Go School

NCBI remote BLAST databases
Zooniverse science site
How to remove the IR filter from a Canon Powershot camera.
The double penis in snakes

Notes on water fluoridation and the Fluoride Deception video

I’d heard of the great water fluoridation fight but never looked into it. In the 60’s the John Birchers were saying it was a Commie plot to weaken America’s vital fluids or something of the sort. And it was parodied in the movie Dr. Strangelove…

Let’s start by bracketing things. Fluoride in water can’t be highly dangerous or people would have noticed. Not putting fluoride in water is not a risk-free choice–it prevents cavities. Cavities don’t just make your teeth fall out, they also increase risks of bacteria related heart disease, and the occasional person dies of a tooth abscess. So the question is, is there disease caused by fluoridation, and is it worse than the diseases caused by no fluoridation?

OK, let’s look at the video.
5:42 Suggests that the idea of adding fluoride to water supplies was to hide the dangers of for fluoride pollution or avoid responsibility for damage due to fluoride pollution. Doesn’t really make sense so far. Ah, reading in the history, when government regs made industry stop dumping fluoride in air and water, one thing they did with it was process out fluoride for water fluoridation. Doesn’t sound that damning, after all it would have been cheaper to dump it in a landfill.

~7:00-20:00 Fluoride air pollution can be bad. Some of the early fluoride researchers also worked on and perhaps had a part in the worst cover ups regarding industrial pollutants. What I’ve read of the tetraethyl lead story is appalling. The connection with the lead story is tenuous. Fluoridating water wasn’t a gold mine, I don’t see there being much pressure to push fluoridation back when it started.

21:30 The NRC report (below) discusses Waldbott’s results, concludes that some people are sensitive to typical water concentrations of fluoride and that it appears to be fairly rare.

From the NRC report, it doesn’t appear that the safety of water fluoridation was well-established, certainly nowhere near today’s standards, back when it began. It was safe by 1940’s standards, and had a clear benefit. I’ve probably got an extra tooth in my mouth due to it.

25:00 The NRC report discusses the Mullenix study. Calls it inconclusive, calls for more studies.

The video didn’t have much info. Here are the establishment reference sources:

CDC recommendations

Fluoride reduces cavities by 15-40%, depending on the study. The low figure is an estimate of the benefit of water fluoridation in a population that already uses fluoride toothpaste.

2006 National Academy report (the greybeards)

Here’s the meat! Water fluoridation is 1 mg / L, when the level hits 4 mg / L studies start seeing negative health effects. That’s a pretty narrow window between benefit and danger level, the smallest one for an environmental exposure I’ve run into. YMMV, I’m not an environmental toxicologist.

What hasn’t really been studied are neurotoxic effects of low level exposure. A few studies have turned up disturbing results. Check out the summary on page 205.

Interesting take on differences between Europe and US fluoridation, Pizzo et al. 2008

The bit about Europe in the video is misleading. Europe hasn’t avoided fluoride, it’s just mostly not in water, it’s in salt or toothpaste.

Northwest Passage is open!
Time travel in TV and movies
Cartoons by Tom Gauld
Tom Lehrer – Be prepared Lyrics
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
Catalyst, a Perl Model/View/Controller (MVC) Framework for web apps

Hitting the ESC key will stop cycling GIFs in Firefox.

DIY DLP 3D printer using commercial light activated polymer

14 amazingly cool research facilities
Galaxy bioinformatics pipeline
Shrouded wind turbine design works better
Unexpurgated Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 published after a delay of a century!

US Civil War: Declaration of Causes of Seceding States
Best scientific talk ever!