True's beaked whale.jpg

Western spotted skunk

Hooded skunk

Yellow-throated Marten

Wolverine

Archive for April, 2015

Fixing a Shark SV75 mini vaccum

Monday, April 27th, 2015

Bad batteries–vaccum has 13 sub C NiCD cells. Tested voltage on the individual cells and replaced 6 bad cells.

The vaccum still wouldn’t charge–checking the charging circuit board showed a crack in a trace near the edge where the indicator LED is located. A bit of solder fixed it, and now it is charging.

FYI, the main IC on the circuit board is a ABOV MC96P0202, a 8-bit OTP CPU.

Average Number of Recessive Lethal Mutations Carried by Humans

Sunday, April 26th, 2015

Recently Gao et. al. published “An Estimate of the Average Number of Recessive Lethal Mutations Carried by Humans”. They studied a Hutterite group in South Dakota, highly inbred (63 founders 13 generations ago). From serious genetic diseases common in this population, they determine the number of deleterious variants present in the founders. They find that 0.29 recessive lethal alleles per haploid genome. Since some lethals manifest before birth, they double the estimate to 0.58.

This gives an expected 1.8% increased chance of a genetic disease from two first cousins.

Gao, Z., Waggoner, D., Stephens, M., Ober, C. & Przeworski, M. Genetics 199, 1243–1254 (2015).

Links for April 2015

Wednesday, April 1st, 2015

NPR Enables The Anti-Worker Movement
Economics blog: Beat the Press (Dean Baker)
Purple frog
Ultrasound Alzheimer’s treatment fully restores memory function. pub link. Worth following up in a year
Welfare that the well off get
Medzhitov / Galli theory that allergies are a response to toxic chemicals
Family firms
Survey of gun researchers: having a gun increases your risk