Weekend in HH

Hamburg: The Port City














I spent the weekend in HH and got to hang out with Michal, a new friend who is also an artist in training. He took some photos of me just after Christmas and included them in an exhibition that is on right now at Cafe Gnosa. The exhibit is titled Intimate Portraits (by Michal Glazik), here is an advert:




























It's a small collection of portraits and I'm pretty excited to be part of it. Michal gave me copies of my pix- I will try to post something in the next days.

I also got to see Tobi, a friend from Köln. We had an interesting discussion about "Business Intelligence" (read data mining). The parallels between market research and the life sciences are interesting. Both think about how to make sense of very large data sets and like to build models for how things will behave. Somehow I think the biologists have a clear advantage. The huge amounts of data we collect are biased by the methodology, of course, and nobody denies that. Indeed, one need to make that very clear so that the data can be better understood. Then the questions we ask of the data are in the hopes of uncovering very interesting phenomena. On the other hand market research is mostly begot from surveys, a science that has benefited from years of experience, but which is still oft poorly executed. The data is only as good as the assay. And alghough those that are conducted well provide more specific information, I am not convinced that people can ask questions that generate unintuitive answers.

As an example. A very bio-eco friendly hotel chain in Sweden, that Tobi has experience with, has a hotel restaurant concept. The problem was how to get everyone to eat at the restaurant? It turned out that the 20-somethings were not interested in staying in the hotel to eat and so the hotel launched a collaboration with a restaurant chain that visitors of the hotel can eat at- everybody's happy! But I couldn't help thinking that this is an intuitive conclusion. All one needs to do is actually spend some time in their own hotel restaurant and see that the 20 somtehings are not eating there. The collaboration-friendly restaurant is actually also a chain and is found in most cities where the Bio hotel is. I would make the leap and suggest that this restaurant chain markets itself to 20-somethings. It only takes an intelligent employee to put two and two together. Tobi refers to this as the trigger that the market research sets off. As large data sets in Biology also sets off triggers (think microarray data or even the large modifier screens in Drosophila), nobody could have predicted the outcome of those experiments and the triggers are inherently nonintuitive- that's precisely why they are so exciting. Maybe I need to consulate companies about marketing and high-thoroughput experiments in the future :)

The Poles

Via Spiegel

EDGE Animals

On Display at BBC.

Also: EDGE.

Commandments vs Precepts

I am in the middle of reading "The Story of B" by David Quinn, which I borrowed it from a colleague. I will reserve my opinion until the end but so far I am not overly impressed by the book. There are some unique ideas, I guess, but both Evolution and Buddhism are misrepresented (the usual fare for both subjects).

This prompts me to write a bit about one of the major differences that is quite easy to describe between the Christianity (and, as you will see other Dogmatic Religions) and Buddhism (which I would not describe as a Religion at all, but that is a post for another day).

In Christianity, we are dealt the Ten Commandments. The first three deal with our relationship to God and the rest to our relationship with each other:

ONE: 'You shall have no other gods before Me.'

TWO: 'You shall not make for yourself a carved image--any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.'

THREE: 'You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain.'

FOUR: 'Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.'

FIVE: 'Honor your father and your mother.'

SIX: 'You shall not murder.'

SEVEN: 'You shall not commit adultery.'

EIGHT: 'You shall not steal.'

NINE: 'You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.'

TEN: 'You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor's.'

In Buddhism we have the five precepts (these are for laymen, there are many more for monks):

ONE: To refrain from destroying living creatures.

TWO: To refrain from taking what is not given.

THREE: To refrain from sexual misconduct.

FOUR: To refrain from incorrect speech.

FIVE: To refrain from intoxicating drinks and drugs which lead to carelessness.

The fist major difference is "You shall not..." vs. "To refrain from...". i.e. "you must never do this" compared to "try to avoid this". This ties into the second point...

The second major difference is also more subtle. While messages against murder, stealing, adultery, and lying are present in the precepts, there is a difference as to why they are there. These are seen as things to be avoided because they only bring people in contact with the three poisons. The three poisons are Greed, Anger and Delusion. The three poisons can all bring you happiness now, but in the long run they are all for naught. This is because the three poisons support the concept of the Ego; destroying Ego is a major theme in Buddhism. So to destroy your Ego, you cannot support it. The three poisons support your ego and the five precepts describe things that feed into the three poisons and thus should be avoided. The precepts are not hard and fast rules that you must must must obey simply because they are bad and wrong things. There is no concept of sin as such. If you go against the precepts, hey, that's ok. learn from you mistakes, get over it and get on with your life.

The opposite of the three poisons are Generosity, Love and Wisdom. All of which cultivate your true nature.

artscience

...and on the topic of book reviews in Nature:

First: Kudos to Nature for consistantly providing excellent book reviews on all aspects of the sciences. I have discovered some great books this way.

Second: Here is an interesting topic that is not discussed nearly enough: artscience. The new book is Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation. (See also here)

Artscience is not about showing me your fluorescence confocal microsocope pictures. It is not about showing me the perfect Northern. Is it not even about showing me expression patterns in your favourite embryos. Alghough I will love all of them, they are not artscience.

Artscience is when... "art works to make science more accessible, whether to the scientists themselves, to entrepreneurs who might translate ideas into reality, or, ultimately, to the public."

Artscience is when you... "experiment in multiple environments, carrying a single idea to social, industrial, and cultural fruition by learning to view traditional art-science barriers as a zone of creativity."

How does my way of thinking as a scientist affect how I would approach a completely creative endeavour? How do i reflect my knowledge and ideas about development, evolution, disease, etc. into something other than experiments, slide shows and papers?

Check out Le Lab

Profi and Mock Fish

This is the American cover for the new book by Neil Shubin (of Tiktaalik fame).



















...and this is the British cover (!):


















They are amazingly different and I can only guess as to the reason. Perhaps in a very Evolutionary skeptical society like the Americans it is important to present the book as very intellectual and thus showing the model Tiktaalik on the cover. Over all it is more profi looking as well. The British one looks like a throw back to retro style and much more appealing to mass markets, is it because the Brits and Europeans will be in general more accepting and inherintely interested in the topic than the Americans. I wonder what the Canadians will get.

Oh, and that "Inner" fish on the British cover comes close to looking like the Jesus fish. Come to think of it, I wonder if it's British humour that makes the cover a mock of a popular religious or self help book.

Oh, and also: Zimmer has a review in this issue of Nature.

Xenophobia in Germany

All of the top stories in the German Politics section of Spiegel Online right now deal with immigrants and xenophobia in Germany. This is pretty amazing, but also not so much unexpected.

Here are some highlights from reader comments on being an Aüslander in Deutschland:

This from an anonymous Asian scientist in Munich:
"...I was utterly shocked when it comes to integration and tolerance. I never suffered explicit racist attacks like those which happened in eastern Germany. But I was exposed to a subtle yet stubborn kind of racism on a daily basis. This mostly takes the form of social exclusion -- I always felt that I am not and will never be allowed to become a normal member of society, despite holding a promising academic record and decent linguistic skills."

From a white American former ex-pat:
"Another friend was born in Germany to a black American father and a white German mother. She was a German citizen, with German as her first language, and very German culturally, yet new acquaintances never failed to ask her how her German got so good -- the idea being that since her skin was darker, she couldn't possibly be German."

From a current American ex-pat in Heidelberg:
"...His response was that stupid foreigners should know better than to let a dog off the leash. This time I had no choice but to let him (verbally) have it.

I asked him if he would like to send me in a train car to the east. I then told him that I am American, like my father and my grandfather, and that my grandfather gave his life in World War II to free Germany and that he should be glad that he isn't speaking Russian right now."

That last one just smacks of Americanism but for the first two I can either relate personally or have at least have heard strikingly similar stories from others.

Perhaps one of the worst things is that unlike descrimination and prejudices. Xenophobia can be politically supported in various guises and is much more vague than other forms of separation. Anybody that is not part of the "group" does not fit in and that can include a lot of people. It can also occur on very small levels and be very subtle at the same time.

Sweet Lesbian Man

JD Samson is probably the sweetest lesbian making music today!




and how can you resist a remix band of 2/3 Le Tigre? MEN!

Best Sentence, pt. 1

"... These connections underscore the critical role the DDR (1) surveillance pathways (2) play in diretly controlling DNA repair and genomic stability beyond their roles in controlling the cell cycle."

From Harper, JW and Elledge, SJ (2007)

Americana Toothpaste Hotdog

Brian McMullen on sale at the McSweney's Store:

Baume in Westwind

Here is a great image from our area of Germany, Schleswig-Holstein.




Botany is great... how easily it is to observe environment and development interacting.

Armsrock

A blog of street art from Armsrock