Cavalcade of Mammals

Things I dislike about Battlestar Galactica:

Over done ‘artsy’ odd angle close-ups and misdirection camera focus. It builds up false drama and is annoying to watch. Combined with this is occasional bursts of drama highlight music building up to… nothing.

1980’s style gauges. On year 2200, 2500 or whatever year tech gear. And what year is it? The scene hasn’t been set, I don’t know what freakin’ year it is. And somehow they have spaceships but little other new technology. No AI, no nanotech, no advanced biotech.

The intro credits, with flashes of scenes that haven’t happened yet on the show, and introduce things not yet part of the show.

The weird, faux scenes. Are they set in the past, the future, are they dreams, hallucinations, or virtual reality? OK, the woman in lingerie/party dresses is hallucination. The other bits are annoying. I hope this isn’t a show like “Lost” that is lies and cheats the audience.

Who’s bright idea was ‘there are only 40,000 people left’? That means, say 400 engineers, 40 biologists, maybe 100 scientists of all types. Various specialities will be very thin or completely absent. Humanity has completely lost its agricultural and manufacturing capability and most workers with experience in those fields. These folks are going to be screwed. Even without running from and fighting an enemy. This might be workable with 400,000 people. With 40,000 people, technological capability will slip every day.

And yet when the President makes an announcement, there are 30 – 40 reporters there. That’s one per 1,000 people. Reporting to what news org? And how do they move from ship to ship? Shuttles would be rare and hard to get access to. These reporters can’t ‘drive across town’ to attend a press conference.

As space opera, the spaceships all run on fantasy drives and have artificial gravity. And star drives that jump from place to place.

Worse than that is the fighters using reactionless, inertialess drives. Inertia? What’s that? Instead of Newton’s second law we have, “A spaceship that starts out centered in a camera shot will remain centered on screen.”

Cylons that are indistinguishable from humans. No doubt ‘nearly’ indistinguishable, a macguffin will be invented when necessary. Look, if it is that hard to tell, what you have is a ‘human’. Made of flesh, cells, DNA and has a human brain–that’s a human. The Terminator movies pushed the ‘fake human’ idea about as far as it could go without getting stupid.

Medicine apparently has not advanced since the present. Still no effective treatment for common breast cancer, and the runs show morality plays on crappy alternative medicine. If in the far future people are still hoping odd brews will cure cancer, that’s one depressing future.

For some reason everyone ignores that the super scientist is nuts. Everyone relies on him, but he never actually does anything.

The huge, solid metal doors open like they are made of styrofoam.

BG has jumped on the trendy “Photos can be zoomed and ‘enhanced’ infinitely” idea. And for some odd reason this image enhancement process takes just as long in the future as it did in the movie “No Way Out” (1987).

Nobody specializes in the future. The image enhancement analysis gets done in a lab with organic chem glassware. Eh?

BG is really short on personnel–Starbuck, the ‘best fighter pilot’, is also the flight combat instructor, which makes sense. And is reverse engineering cylon ships and running intelligence interrogations, which makes no sense at all.

Hey, Season 1, Episode 11 (S1x11) has the Starbuck with one more job, now running security for the big political event.

And now Season 1, Episode 12 (S1x12) has the President doing the primary aerial reconnaissance analysis. Wow, the BG military seems to completely lack an intelligence command.

And it is the Bush years in the United States, so prisoners get tortured by the ‘good guys’ just like in real life. Got to keep America accomodated to torture. Even if it makes no sense because the man being tortured is a machine that doesn’t feel pain the way humans do. How fucking evil.

In the future, phones are the size of game consoles. And no one has a cell phone. Come on, even in the Star Trek 60’s the future had communicators. How did the set designers miss out on old Navy style talk tubes?

Things I like about Battlestar Galactica:

Gritty, nice sets.

Pretty CGI.

The basic ‘last humans on the run from bad aliens’ overarching plot from the old, horrible Battlestar Galactica series. Gladly, that’s all they kept.

Most recent numbers I find are from 2005 JAMA study in data through 2003. Total biomedical research is $94.3 billion in 2003, with 57% industry funded and 35% US government funded, 5% state and local, and 3% from private foundations.

This is 5.6% of total US health spending.

Press release for the study.

I’m going to make up my own hydroponics solution. Looking around the web it is hard to find a site with a recipe.

Here’s one at U of Wisconsin-Madison:

0.4 NH4H2PO4; 2.4 KNO3; 1.6 Ca(NO3)2; 0.8 MgSO4; 0.1 Fe as Fe-chelate; 0.023 B as B(OH)3 [boric acid]; 0.0045 Mn as MnCl2; 0.0003 Cu as CuCl2; 0.0015 Zn as ZnCl2; 0.0001 Mo as MoO3 or (NH4)6Mo7O24; Cl as chlorides of Mn, Zn, and Cu (all concentrations in units of millimoles/liter).

Good information from UIUC

and USD.

I understand PZ’s point, that the information in DNA is expressed through and requires the cell (cytoplasm, nucleoplasm, etc). But the cell is self-assembling–put a human nucleus in a mouse cell, let it divide a dozen times, (maybe a hundred times), and now you have completely human cell. Cloned animals have epigenetic-derived defects, but I expect their Nth generation offspring will be normal.

Let me push the argument further taking a bacterial cell as the model. In principle, you could express proteins in vitro and combine them with lipids, small molecules, and DNA and reconstitute a cell. It wouldn’t be quite right, but get it close enough that it can divide, let it do so a bunch of times and then the cell will be completely normal.

But which proteins would you express and how would you figure out how to combine them? In principle, you could predict from the DNA sequence the set expressed in a particular environment, relative expression levels, and where they go–membrane, cytoplasm, etc.

True enough, DNA without its cellular environment is not a cell, and in biological systems the DNA is always associated with its cell, but the epigenetic information is mainly derived from the DNA and secondary to it. For the biologist this distinction is meaningless–practically we can’t yet predict epigenetic context from DNA or recreate it from scratch. Biologists describe the epigenetic state, observe it and assay for it.

PS Meyers has blog post criticizing a creationist describing organisms as computer programs, and then arguing from incredulity against naturalistic explanations for human development. That’s well and good, the creationist is an idiot, but then Meyers takes it a step further and expresses a dislike of software-type descriptions of development:

The genome is not code, efficient or otherwise. Sure, you can tally up the bits needed to store the sequence in a database, but that is not the same as saying you’ve got the complete information for an organism, or that you have captured the “code” that can be executed to build it.

I’m happy to think of the genome as a program. At the high estimate, 100 million bits (25000 genes * 1000 bps per gene * 1000 bps of regulatory seq per gene * 2 bits per bp) or 12Mb to describe the human genome.

So a fairly small amount of code is enough to generate a person. The small number is clearly enough–it is what humans develop with. The program isn’t written in a bloated computer language. It’s more like hand-tuned (or genetic algorithm-tuned, ha) assembly code, full of GOTO statements and with enough cross connected subroutines to make the block diagram look knotted as a ball of thread.

The size doesn’t seem small in relation to the code. Look at the Mandelbrot Set, 7 bytes to write it down and an incredibly complex result. So clearly a small program can produce a complex result.

PZ considers epigenesis important and a reason to reject the computer program hypothesis as insufficient. Epigenesis is clearly important but I don’t see it as a reason to reject the computer program analogy. The epigenetic information is an expression of the genomic program.

Also, calling the genome a library of components seems too static to me. “Library of subroutines” or “library of services” captures the sense of what is going on better, with different subsets of routines active at any time.

It is interesting to compare computer programs with living organisms, but as this creationist shows it is easy to be mislead (or to mislead) by the analogy. I think any complete description of cellular activity and development will use the concepts used to describe computer programs.

In anticipation of last night’s lunar eclipse several sites were trotting out the folklore that there are more earthquakes around the time of an eclipse. It seems like an easy thing to study–graph earthquake frequency over time, see if there are more during eclipses. Eclipses occur every couple of years, more often if you consider partial eclipses and small/medium earthquakes occur daily, so someone must have doen this. Looking around the web, the Goddard Space Flight Center answered a Science Question on this very topic (here):

Earthlings can view two lunar eclipses and two solar eclipses just about every year
…
It’s known that the tides during a lunar eclipse aren’t significantly different than tides during a full Moon. Each is just another spring tide — the name for tides that occur when the Earth is between the Moon and the Sun. If tides don’t really differ substantially during an eclipse than during regular full Moon or new Moon phases, why should celestial positions effect the Earth’s surface or subsurface features? The answer is that they don’t.

Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions do indeed occur at times of eclipses. But records show that they occur with no greater frequency or power than on days when full Moons or new Moons occur (without eclipses), when all the planets line up on the same side of the Sun or on days when the Moon is in a crescent or gibbous phase. As special as eclipses are, they simply don’t have a known impact on any geophysical phenomena.

And just how common are earthquakes anyway?
The ASK-AN-EARTH-SCIENTIST page by the U of Hawaii Geology and Geophysics Department says:

Humans point. Pointing is instinctive in humans. Babies instinctively point to things and pay attention to pointing. They know it is communication. I saw this neat stuff on a Nova episode on ape learning. It mentioned that chimps don’t understand pointing. It’s strange to watch. They don’t do it instinctively and don’t understand it.

Also, apparently we have selected dogs to understand pointing.

Have you ever had to push your car around? Very hard when it is possible at all. So let’s make a short distance car mover. Here’s one way to do it:

Put the front wheels on remote control dollies. Have one remote control work both dollies. The remote control would send two sets of signals, one for each dolly. The dollies are basically remote control cars with low speed/high torque motors and gearing.built heavily enough to carry the load.

The down side of this is that jacking each wheel would be required to put the dollies in place. Also, if the carts had roller skate sized wheels it would not be able to climb curbs.

Always fascinating, on the sexual practices of Papua New Guinea:

The Dobo, who live on a small island off the coast of the main island, live in constant fear of sorcery from their wives. Because they believe that they are particularly vulnerable during intercourse, Dobo men have to continually weigh their need for sexual gratification against the possibility of sorcery when they try to satisfy their sexual need (Davenport 1997, 126).

Much of it makes for disturbing reading. Papua New Guinea is a terrible place.

From the Enzyte junk enbiggener ads it was clear the whole thing was a scam. Apparently it has gone to federal court in Cincinnati:

Cincinnati Enquirer article

James Teegarden Jr., the former vice president of operations at Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, explained Tuesday in U.S. District Court how he and others at the company made up much of the content that appeared in Enzyte ads.

He said employees of the Forest Park company created fictitious doctors to endorse the pills, fabricated a customer satisfaction survey and made up numbers to back up claims about Enzyte’s effectiveness.

“So all this is a fiction?” Judge S. Arthur Spiegel asked about some of the claims.
“That’s correct, your honor,” Teegarden said.

Here’s the funniest part:

If customers complained, he said, employees were instructed to “make it as difficult as possible” for them to get their money back. In some cases, Teegarden said, Warshak required customers to produce a notarized statement from a doctor certifying Enzyte did not work.

“He said it was extremely unlikely someone would get anything notarized saying they had a small penis,” Teegarden said.

I wonder who will end up with Enzyte’s list of men who think their junk is too small. The article calls it a $100 million fraud which would imply at least hundreds of thousands of customers!