Cavalcade of Mammals

Over the period 1976-2006, Harvard’s endowment had a real growth rate of 6.7%, while US GDP growth in real dollars was half as large, 3.5%. Having some fun plotting exponential growth, in 2056 Harvard’s endowment is projected to be $747 billion (2006 dollars), and exceed 1% of US GDP.

In 2155, Harvard’s endowment is projected to be 20% of US GDP and in 2208, Harvard’s endowment is projected to pass total US GDP. Add in other universities with large endowments, and in time they are projected to dominate world investment dollars. This begins to look silly, so at what point are these large investment funds likely to stall out?

These endowments are professional managed for growth and spending less than they earn, and this is expected to continue indefinitely. They are diversified and large enough that their investments don’t depend on any one company, industry, or class of financial investment.

I read today that gorillas weren’t known to people in the West until 1847 when Thomas Staughton Savage described the gorilla from skeletons he obtained. And it wasn’t until later, in 1861 that Paul du Chaillu sent back specimens to England, and the general public became aware of them.

I hadn’t realized that gorillas were discovered in the West so recently. So many fundamental, basic things about the world were first understood in the 1800s. Scientifically it was a time of much greater change than any time before or since.

Chimpanzees and orangutans were sent to Europe in the 17th century. It sounds crazy, but the relationship of humans/chimps/gorillas (human-chimp closest, gorillas more distantly related) wasn’t definitively established until molecular biology techniques were applied in the 1970s! I wonder what Africans thought about chimps and gorillas, and their relationship? I think their ranges overlap in West Africa.

Few in the city, but a fair number in the new construction suburbs.

Image from http://hotpads.com.

In 1997, the Kyoto Protocol agreement to reduce green gases was signed by 30+ nations including (as best I can tell) all the Western countries except the US. So it was clear in 1997 that the world was warming and green house gas emissions needed to be reduced, but *when* exactly did scientists figure this out?

My memory of the issue with a little proding stretches back to the 1992 climate agreement signed by George HW Bush, officially called the U.N. Framework Convention of Climate Change. It called on countries to cut green house gas emissions but didn’t set binding targets. So global warming was understood back in ’92, and must have been known about years earlier for political action to have been taken then. I didn’t know about research earlier than the 1970s modeling research.

A great talk laying out the history of global warming science by historian Naomi Oreskes is on the web:

She lays out a number of landmarks. She gives an interesting talk–I’ve pared it away and just list the landmarks here:

• 1931, E. O. Hulbert, increasing atmospheric CO₂ 2-3X will lead to 4-7°K increase in world temperature.
• 1938, G. S. Calender, increasing CO₂ leading to increased temps, 1880-1930s
• 1957, Suess and Revelle paper pointing out that dumping back into the atmosphere over a few decades CO₂ stored over millions of years in coal and oil could heat up the world. Calls for detailed research into the world CO₂ budget–where will the CO₂ go, and what secondary effects will there be?
• 1964, NAS committee warns of “inadvertent weather modification” caused by CO₂ from burning fossil fuels.
• 1965, Keeling, about 1/2 of CO₂ from burning fossil fuels will end up in the atmosphere.
• 1965, President’s Science Advisory Committee, Board on Environmental Pollution, by 2000 there will 25% more CO₂ in the atmosphere and marked and uncontrollable changes in climate could occur.
• 1979, JASON committee reports that predicted increases in atmospheric CO₂ will increase world temperature 2.4°C or 2.8°C (two different JASON models). Further, the increase will be much greater at the poles, 10-12°C [Now observed].
• 1979, Charney report summarizes climate science “If CO₂ continues to increase, [we] find no reason to doubt that climate changes will result, and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible.”
• 1988, IPCC created to study climate and suggest solutions.
• 1988, US National Energy Policy Act, “to establish a national energy policy that will quickly reduce the generation of CO₂ and trace gases as quickly as is feasible in order to slow the pace and degree of atmospheric warming…to protect the global environment.”
• 1992, U.N. Framework Convention of Climate Change
• 1997, the Kyoto Protocol

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.

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.