Cavalcade of Mammals

I was listening to the NPR food show, The Splendid Table, and they ended the show with by having Dean Radin from the Institute for Noetic Sciences on to talk about how ‘thinking at’ chocolate makes it better. No, I’m not joking, and it wasn’t April Fools’ day. Ordinary fools day, I guess.

Looking at the Institute for Noetic Sciences (IONS) web site, it looks like this is the place where the California nuts collect. They are still doing psi studies, lots of ‘intentional’ studies which test various ways thinking at something changes it, from prayer and healing to remote viewing to psychokinesis. Not too surprisingly, Deepak Chopra is ‘associated faculty’.

The chocolate study guy, Dean Radin, is an interesting nut. He was a real engineer, then got a Ph.D in psychology from U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, then went off the deep end. It’s odd, he uses methods that look quite respectable–the chocolate study was double-blinded–to come to nutty conclusions, and publishes them in nutty niche journals. IONS has its own journal, “Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing”, and disturbingly the NIH’s Pubmed article indexing service includes its articles (see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17905358). This is by far the craziest journal I’ve ever seen in Pubmed.

With next generation sequencing technologies that have become available over the last two years, there is enough DNA sequencing machines that their combined capacity is, at a guesstimate, about 30,000 Gb per year.

How much DNA sequencing is that? Enough to sequence the genomes of 10,000 people per year. In other terms, enough capacity today to sequence every bacteria and virus species in a single year, or every the genome of every species on the planet in 300 years, bacterial genomes being small.

The sequencing technology is improving at a fast clip and I expect that in ten years or so it will be 1000X better (faster and higher capacity sequencing machines). So in ten years, it will be possible to sequence every species on the planet in a single year.

Scanners can be used for macro photography, at least the ones with a great depth of focus. The scanners with CCD sensors tend to have a good depth of focus while the thin scanners with a CIS sensor can only focus on objects a mm or two from the glass.

I collected a list of scanners recommended for macro photography.

from here:
EPSON Perfection 3170
from here.
Microtek ScanMaker X6 EPP
Artec AM12S, AM 2400-U Pro
Epson Expression 836XL
3D Pro Scanner
Memtek Memorex SCF 9360P 3D
from here:
Epson Perfection 1240U Scanner
Epson Perfection 1200U

Checking specs, these also look well suited:
Epson Perfection 2480
Epson Perfection V300
Epson Perfection 2450
Epson Perfection 3490

Parasitic diseases are common in the eastern Kentucky Appalachian region. This is one of the topics of a report in June 2008 PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

The diseases mentioned, Strongyloidiasis and Ascariasis, are parasitic nematode infections!

Strongyloides stercoralis

Ascaris lumbricoides

And the Ascaris lifecycle. The Ascaris worms are huge, 20-49 cm long!

I saw an article of the problems Univerity Presses are having these days, the problems of an industry facing a changing market combined with university budget cutting during the recession. I think University Presses should embrace change. To me, the Univerity Press looks like the easiest segment of the publishing industry to move completely online. Most of their books are published by academics and mailed to university libraries where they sit bulky and using expensive floor space, rarely read. And for an academic, the electronic book has plenty of advantages, easy searching, cut&paste for quotes and organizing digital research notes, etc.

The physical book is unnecessary, and the price could easily drop several fold. Libraries would save money both buying the books and on shelf space. Without physical books, the main cost is in Univeristy Press is acquisitions and editing staff. The only things holding the Press to physical books are old academics who can’t/won’t use computers (few), the norms of what counts as a book for academic advancement, and inertia.

Keeping track of the rising tide of socialism in the US under that fiend Obama:

Still a way to go, but it is never too early to raise the alarm.

Today the US had another domestic terrorist attack, the second in two weeks. This time, a long time right-winger, an anti-semite, white supremacist, and anti-Obama birther attacked the Holocaust Museum in DC. Like the guy last week, today’s shooter had a previous conviction for domestic terrorism.

I was listening to right-wing talker Sean Hannity and a listener called in and told a ‘joke’ that was basically death-wish for the Pres. and VP, wouldn’t it be great if they both died, ha ha. Hannity had a laugh along with the caller. I wonder when these right-wing talkers will stop encouraging the violent talk?

Two recent posts on the theoildrum.com look at the question of wind power. The first post looks at the how practical it is to fit wind power into the US power grid. The main problem with wind power are that sometimes the wind doesn’t blow, so the power grid has to have excess generating capacity to meet the demand. Critics say that because of the ‘no blow’ times, wind power can’t replace base capacity, so even if lots of windmills get installed, the US still needs all the coal, nuclear, and gas power plants.

The theoildrum.com article considers the problem and concludes if wind farms are spread out and high capacity transmission lines are built to pool the power wind farms should be able to provide base power at about a quarter of the total installed windmill capacity. The power grid should be able to accommodate somewhere between 25% to 50% of US power coming from windmills.

‘Smart grid’ capability, having devices like A/C that temporarily shut off when demand is too high is also an option. Wind power is also nicely complementary to hydroelectric generation, as a dam stores power and the turbines can be spun up and down quickly as average wind strength varies.

The other theoildrum.com article looks at the cost of wind power and at whether anything limits the prospect of building lots of windmills today. There appear to be no resource that constrains windmill production. Today windmills are cheaper than anything but coal in the US, and modest carbon taxes would make wind power the cheapest power source:

It is time to build windmills, and lots of them!

A child inherits half each parents genes, and for any individual gene a sibling can either inherit the same or the other allele. Averaged out over the genome, siblings have the same allele for about half the genes.

But genes don’t assort independently of each other, genes are found on chromosomes and due to this inheritance of gene variants is lumpy, a parent has a pair of each chromosome and siblings either get the same chromosome or each gets one of the parent’s pair. This happens randomly for each of the twenty-three pairs of human chromosomes. If humans had only two chromosomes then one forth of the time two siblings would inherit the same pair (out of the four) and be genetically identical. Because humans have twenty-three chromosomes this is vanishingly unlikely. But while on average two siblings have the same gene variant half the time, there is actually a distribution centered at 50%, and siblings can inherit more or less than 50% of same alleles. So how likely are siblings to be 30% or 40% related?

Here’s what the distribution looks like. There are a few more wrinkles to consider. First off, the chromosomes recombine before they assort, so each chromosome a child inherits is a combination of the parents chromosomes. It turns out that in humans, recombination happens more than once per chromosome, about thirty-three times (The Human Genome Project
By Necia Grant Cooper, p31). I include this in my model. I don’t consider the chance that a parent will have two copies of the same allele for a gene, or how recombination is more likely at particular places along a chromosome, or that genes are clumped together in certain chromosomal regions. Here’s the distribution I find:

So siblings don't always share half their gene variants, but rather have a modest chance or being a bit more or a bit less related.


Sometimes I run across a thing so odd that it makes me wonder if I slipped into an alternate world. Today’s example:

Swatch Internet Time was a decimal time concept introduced in 1998 and marketed by the Swatch corporation as an alternative, decimal measure of time. One of the goals was to simplify the way people in different time zones communicate about time, mostly by eliminating time zones altogether.

Swatch Internet Time was announced on October 23, 1998, in a ceremony at the Junior Summit ’98 attended by Nicolas G. Hayek, President and CEO of the Swatch Group, G.N. Hayek, President of Swatch Ltd., and Nicholas Negroponte, founder and then-director of the MIT Media Lab. During the Summit, Swatch Internet Time became the official time system for Nation1, an online country created and run by children.