Lenny and the Money. Halleluah

via MBV

Lotsa drama over in the UK over Lenny's Hallelujah. X-factor winner Alexandra Burke makes a mushy ballad outta one of the most brilliant songs ever (the video is also really lame). Of course, Jeff Buckley fans won't stand for it. I agree, Buckley's Hallelujah is probably one of the best songs I have ever heard. I bought the Grace album on vinyl just for this song and it's absolutely stunning, you can hear ever note in every instrument and the man can sing! If I didn't have to keep getting up to reset the needle I'd put it on repeat all night. But also KD Lang gives it a pretty descent treatment on her Hymns album.

From The Times: Hallelujah hits number one and two slots in Christmas charts (with lots of links to different covers... including a torturous rendition by Kermit).

Also... SkyNews has a wonder piece on the controversy. I love how the English can be absolutely serious about absolutely anything.

Canada on the Radio

More Intelligent Life presents a nice profile of mainstream Can Con bands.

There is no particular Canadian sound. Even as media ubiquity shrinks
our world, the sheer geographical vastness of Canada makes such a thing
improbable. What we are seeing—and hearing—is a new-found confidence.

The Economist. Who knew?

Jaffee!

A March 2008 compilation of Jaffee MAD Fold-ins. Interactive.

Is this it?

I can't remember how I got subscribed to Jack Cheng's Blog, I think it was this recent post on "Maxing out your triangle" (summary: the best things in life let you learn and make lotsa moula while you enjoy yourself - thanks for the advice!!). In any case in my moments of procrastination today I started going through some old posts.. lots of get-what-you-want, get-it-now go-get-it got-to-get-happy babble which kinda put me off. For example, this post: "The Illness"

Tomorrow you visit the doctor and find out you have a life-threatening illness. There’s no cure. Nobody knows how much longer you have to live. It could be a few weeks. It could be a few months. It could be a few years. Possibly longer. The only thing that’s certain is that you will die. You won’t experience any physical pain as a result of the illness. One day you’ll just go to sleep and you won’t wake up again.

If this happened to you, how would you change your life? What would you do right away? What would you do after that? The answer to those questions is what you should be doing right now.

Thanks for the advice!! It sounds alot like "live in the moment" "live like it's your last day" but I'm sure it's completely different. Living my life like I only have a few months to live is not going to help me live it if I don't have only a few months to live! Why is that so difficult to understand?

"If my grandma had wheels she'd be a tractor"

You can't say Canadian politics isn't exciting. The West (read Alberta) will always always hate the liberals (and why not the NDP while they're at it) and this only gives them more fodder.

It's unbelievable what has happened in the past week in Canadian federal politics! The opposition (Liberals) plus the NDP and the Bloq will unite to bring down the Conservative minority government. It was overly obvious when Harper called the snap election in October that if he had any chance of renewal it would not come about when Obama was in power in the US. Somehow, I fell that election, having ripples the world over, would lead to more candians voting Liberal. One only has to see the kind of commoradery that Mulroney and Regean had or Chrétien with Clinton, despite their differences, it only serves Canada well for her PM to have good relationions with the American president. Hence, it was Harper's best bet to get the Canadian election over with before the American.

The worst thing is that Harper is such a two-faced politician. A few years ago he threw a coalition with the Bloq on the table when the Liberals were the minority government, much to the dismay of many Canadians, and now he berets the Liberals and NDP for making a deal with the devil when actually the coalition is only between the Liberals and NDP and the Bloq has agreed to support them in a non-confidence vote! And then he goes on to say that what they are planning is unconsitiutiona and illegal. Somehow I never heard the word coup in any discussions, I don't see how making a coalition is illegal. Now we have to wait unti the 26th of January since the GG has suspended parliment! oh Stephen!

2008 Recap

20 Great albums and tons of MP3s at This Recording - an early best of 2008 recap. How good do I feel having seen Lykke Li on Saturday in Köln, awesome! I just wish people would learn to relax and dance!

The German Care Package

Next Year I'll be travelling home and I have to seriously think of what to get some friends from Germany. This isn't that easy actually, but I've come up with the perfect solution: The German Care Pack. All my favourite little things of Germany in a bite-sized package:

Cookies/Cakes:
Printen
Marzipan potatos
Marzipan pigs
Spekulatius
Zimtsterne

Clothes:
Cologne Scarf
Die Maus pin

Food:
Alnatura Zartbitter Choco spread
Alnatura hefe brot aufstrich
Honeywaffles

Product:
Welede mositurizer
Kölsch glass
CD with German schlager, karnival, folk, and pop hits.

Obama vs Bäder

There are lots of things I need to catch up writing and showing on the blog, but of course the big news is Obama's victory. I turned on the TV this morning looking for the results of the election, I only get four channels and one is ARTE TV. This is a German - French collaboration channel and one can find subtitled programs or full on German or French programming, which is usually of high quality (read cultural programs). This morning, when all the other channels were talking about the 20 people killed in a bus fire on the A2 highway and the election results ARTE had Bäder, a 65 minute french movie from 2004 by director David Teboul:



That's the only image I could find, maybe the movie is even called Banja. From ARTE:

Die Banjas, die russischen Dampfbäder, sind weit mehr als ein Ort,
an dem man seinen Körper reinigt. Sie sind gemeinschaftlich genutzter
Raum. Körper hinterlassen hier ihre eigene Geschichte. Alles vermischt
sich im Dampf dieser Bäder, aus dem persönliche und kollektive
Erinnerungen aufzusteigen scheinen. Man könnte meinen, ganz Russland
sei eine riesige Banja. Der Dokumentarfilm stellt nicht nur die
russischen Badehäuser vor, sondern beschäftigt sich zugleich mit dem
Thema Körper.

"The banjas, the Russian saunas, are far more than a place to purify your body- they are communal spaces. Here, bodies leave behind their personal histories. Everything mixes in the sauna, personal and collective memories seem to ascend. One can think of Russia as a giant Banja. The documentary is not only about the Russian sauna, but also concerns itself with the body at the same time."

Confusing.

Basically the entire movie was about naked Russian men walking around and bathng themselves, full frontal nudity style.

Brilliant.

Why watch "Amerika Wählt" when you can watch naked men walk around at 5:30 in the morning?

Pot Noodle

The boy that amazed you.
The date that got you.
The hands that shared you.
The tears that burst you.

The wonder you shared –
now the public eat it,
using spoons, forks, hands.

This is too sweet. From Corpoetics. Found poetry from the websites of well-known brands and corporations.

via Design Observer.

I Met the Walrus

Required viewing, via Presentation Zen.

A 14 year old Torontonian corners John Lennon ca. 1969 in his hotel room. Set to animation some 38 years later by said kid, the 60s peace movement is invoked.

There is no Us and Them

Two very cool talks that have already been out for awhile on TED:

Hans Rosling: Debunking Third-World Myths with the Best Stats You've Evern Seen



Hans Rosling: New Insights on Poverty and Live Around the World

Adaptive Evolution?

Somehow the article isn't available yet, but this is an advanced Epub on PubMed of a paper in Am J Hum Gen:


Adaptive Evolution of UGT2B17 Copy-Number Variation


Xue Y, Sun D, Daly A, Yang F, Zhou X, Zhao M, Huang N, Zerjal T, Lee C, Carter NP, Hurles ME, Tyler-Smith C.

The human UGT2B17 gene varies in copy number from zero to two per individual and also differs in mean number between populations from Africa, Europe, and East Asia. We show that such a high degree of geographical variation is unusual and investigate its evolutionary history. This required first reinterpreting the reference sequence in this region of the genome, which is misassembled from the two different alleles separated by an artifactual gap. A corrected assembly identifies the polymorphism as a 117 kb deletion arising by nonallelic homologous recombination between approximately 4.9 kb segmental duplications and allows the deletion breakpoint to be identified. We resequenced approximately 12 kb of DNA spanning the breakpoint in 91 humans from three HapMap and one extended HapMap populations and one chimpanzee. Diversity was unusually high and the time to the most recent common ancestor was estimated at approximately 2.4 or approximately 3.0 million years by two different methods, with evidence of balancing selection in Europe. In contrast, diversity was low in East Asia where a single haplotype predominated, suggesting positive selection for the deletion in this part of the world.

Of course this sounds pretty interesting but, from the abstract alone, their title already seems quite lofty. The major beef is if you show polymorphism in both populations, but there is less variation in copy number in one, does that mean it's really adaptive? If you don't know what the function of the gene is, can you call something adaptive? It seems that they actually have a locus which has one of the many hallmarks of positive selection (or a sweep) but that's a long stretch from saying it's adaptive. Out of interest this comes from the same camp as the amylase adaption paper, which was generally well received but is not without it's own faults.

Buddhism broadcasts

I came across some free Buddhist related recording on iTunes. One is a segment from the PRI program To the Best of Our Knowledge. It's part of the East Meets West series and is titled Dharma Days, Yoga Nights. The fist segment is a thoroughly annoying interview with the thoroughly annoying author of Eat, Love, Pray. Basically I'm very much turned off by people who persue a spiritual path and then run around telling everybody about what they have experienced, that's a major sign that they haven't actually gone anywhere, no matter how many clicks they log. I would recommend Cave in the Snow if you are interested in a memoir about following the Buddhist path from a Western female perspective, it's written by Tenzin Palmo who was one of the early Westerners to travel to Tibet. But there is a pretty interesting piece on Dharma Punx, the story of Noah Levine. I think most Western Buddhists will already understand the connection between Punk and Buddhist thought it. That is if you know that punk is not about wearing mohawks and Buddhism is not about smiling all day.

The other thing I stumbled upon is a course at Berkeley, Psychology 107: Buddhist Psychology, taught by Eleanor H. ROSCH. There are now 2 tracks available and if you can get past the banter about being registered for the course, I think she will eventually get to some interesting topics. The couse doesn't assume you have a good understanding of the different schools of Buddhism, which I think is a bit disappointing. I could imagine it would be useful to make Intro to Buddhist History a prerequisite course instead of trying to give a brief history lesson and psychology lesson at once. But I guess the course is geared towards Psych majors and not Religion students.

Anyroad, the last thing to mention is that iTunes has an amazing amount of material freely available, and I don't just mean music podcasts. Check out iTunes U on the frontpage left-side menu. You can find lectures from many universities.

Authors @ Google

On the Talks@Google YouTube channel:

Salman Rushdie
Barack Obama
Noam Chomsky
Michael Shermer
Craig Venter
James Watson
Alex Ross
Junot Diaz

Plus literally hundreds of other people who I have no clue about.

Even Her Stationary Was Beautiful

The Marilyn Files at Vanity Fair

Schriften für jeden Geschmack

Veer markets their typefaces in Germany:

Got You Pegged

I recently discovered the radio program This American Life. It only just became available as a podcast from Public Radio International. This last episode is called "Got You Pegged" and it's about "the trouble people get into when they assume too much about strangers". But, two other huge topics are: the many assumptions people make those familiar to them and also, those assumptions we make about ourselves.

I will get the first point over with quickly. Some assumptions I want to dispel:

-If I don't talk to you, it doesn't mean I am in a bad mood. It could, but maybe I am just tired, or trying to concentrate, or distracted, or I don't have anything to talk to you about, or maybe I simply don't like you.

-If I sing at work, it doesn't necessarily mean I'm in a good mood, often it does, but sometimes I just like to sing. Can't a man sing even when he's down?

-Just because my skin is darker than yours, it does not mean I fake'n'bake. Although I do admittedly visit the tanning salon, my visits are far and few between and it is hardly to get a tan. What you can expect in a country more gray than Canada even? Sometimes I just need a pick-me-up!

And that note leads into my second point: Assumptions you make about yourself.




Over the past few years I have become increasingly aware of racism, and I don't mean observing it, but that I really feel subject to it like I have not previously. When I was a child, basically I knew there was black and white, I didn't really think of Asians as anything particularly different and I didn't think Racism was a global problem. I still remember the day when I realized that Asians weren't white. I remember feeling really shocked, like someone had lied to me, that I grew up thinking we were all the same thing but all of a sudden there were so many different people around. Actually there were always so many different people around, but my child's mind hadn't been corrupted enough. One of my earliest best friends was a black girl. Then I moved and my next best friend was a Philippino and to Indian guys. My schools were populated with other first generation Canadians: Italians, Portuguese, Polish, Philippino, Slovak, Africans, Chinese, Indians. It was only when adults pointed out that we were different that the thought struck me. I think most people who grow up in a multi-cultural society have a similar experience. But I never thought of Italians as being anything than white. I was Italian and ergo I was white. I never questioned it, until I was in my 20s.

I was living in Calgary, the whitest, most conservative place I've ever lived in, doing my M.Sc. degree. We had an undergrad student in our lab, a man of colour, who one day asked me causally if I was ever a victim of discrimination. I thought he was referring to me being gay, and so I replied that you could never know, I mean maybe people don't like me just because, or maybe it does happen because I'm gay. How could I know? But actually he was also also referring to my skin colour. I was really stunned, because it was a direct challenge to my perceptions of just what my skin colour is, and if you grow up thinking the whole time that you're white and someone asks you if you have been discriminated against as a person of colour- well that takes a little getting used to. That is a challenge to your self-identity. Then I really had to think... have i ever been a victim of racism? How would I know it? Am I actually a person of colour? What is a person of colour? Yes, my skin is naturally a little darker than most white people, even in the absence of tanning. And it's oily, and that's not just the olive oil. I also don't sweat, I just kind of get greasy. I had previously been amused when my ethnic background was indeterminable to colleagues or strangers, but I never thought it meant anything other than white. I have been mistaken for Indian, Lebanese, Tunisian, Persian, and Arab. When I went to Iran, several colleagues off-handedly joked that I wouldn't have any problems fitting it, but when I was there, I never felt like I blended into the crowd- to me, it was obvious I was no Persian. Other incidents include the aforementioned tanning questioning. I can think of at least three separate incidents where Germans have made comments on the colour of my skin (in the absence of tanning!) as being quite dark. i.e. not white, and assuming that I visited the tanning salon quite often or used some kind of cream. Of course, there's no way you are white and have such dark skin. That is, of course by German standards.

Here, in small town Northern Germany, the cultural diversity is disturbingly, if unsurprisingly, low. It means anything beyond pasty white is immediately marked as foreign. In addition, I have a big nose, dark hair, a full beard, long eyelashes, and a slender frame, I am not going to be mistaken as German by anyone. The other major difference is that in Germany, multicultural means something very different than what it meant in Toronto. In Cologne (nd much of the country) ethnic diversity means Turkish. The Turks are by far the largest ethnic minority. There are Germans and there are the Turks. If you are dark and you speak bad German, it's obvious where you fit in. In another incidence, I was in Hamburg to meet a friend and at an U-bahn station. There was a small group of anti-fascist punks handing out flyers for a protest. I was handed one and mentioned that unfortunately I wouldn't be in Hamburg on that day because I live in Plön. She immediately asked if I had experienced any trouble there and that they would be willing to help me out. It took me a second to think what she meant. Oh, you mean with me? As in neo-nazis are chasing me down in the street cuz I'm a dark-skinned foreigner whose stealing their jobs? Well why would that happen, I'm a white guy, or aren't I?

So then, have I ever been a victim of racism? Maybe in some twisted way racism self-reflected. Throughout my adult life others have consistently pegged me as a person of colour, although I have never given any thought to being anything other than white. Could it be that I deny my own identity? Maybe after all I am a person of colour. I think the next time I have to fill in a form which asks for my ethnicity, I'm going to put something other than white, and see the reactions I get.

------

As an aside, here is my favourite line from the program. Is it wrong to sometimes feel this way also?

"Here's the thing about people: I don't really like them. That's why I find racism so curious. There are so many reasons to dislike people, you're gonna go with colour?"
-Joel

------

Here is an assumption you most certainly can make:

-If I invite you to my place for dinner, you can assume I would like you to reciprocate.

Amarcord

Amarcord is probably one of my all-time favourite movies. Fellini, in the 70s, presents a year in the life of a little village in fascist Italy. There are many stories and many characters, each of which represents a different aspect of Fellini's Italy.

I came across this review at the Criterion Collection by Rodarte, a sister fasion desiner duo:

"This movie is almost a complete inversion of Louis Malle’s Au revoir les enfants, where the horrors of Vichy France are made all the more terrible juxtaposed to the innocence and ideal of youth. Here, you have the violence of Mussolini and terror of Fascist Italy completely erased by the antics of a bunch of horny teenagers. This film is visually gorgeous; the scene where the peacock flies in the snow always stays in mind. What makes this film so interesting is the notion that idealized beauty is not enough—visual beauty is grounded by the humanity and sometimes fallibility of the characters."

I have to disagree that the point of the film is to erase "the violence of Mussolini and terror of Fascist Italy". The father is questioned and abused as a communist anti-fasc and Fascism is so present that one of the boys has a marriage fantasy wherein Mussolini himself presides over the ceremony! He further mocks the Fascisism in other scenes of movie by showing us the absurdity of the times. This is of course set against the present times when the film was released.

Lykke Li

This has got to be the best pick-me-up song for a rejected paper:

Lykke Li (feat. Robyn) I'm Good, I'm Gone. Can Sweden do no wrong?

Monsters Do Come True

This is a great series of stuffed animals inspired by children's drawings. Check out the whole collection at Flickr

Science Fridays

ScienceFriday is a website dedicated to popular science. Yesterday on Zooillogix over at ScienceBlogs posted this great video of the star-nosed moles sniffing food underwater.

BioMedExpert

BioMedExpert is another site which maps out networks and connections between people. You can put in a persons name and out comes a network of all their coauthors and their coauthors coauthors, the thickness of the line is the number of shared publications. That is a bit of a pain to navigate and you can't zoom in and if you click on a name it just reorients the map with that person as center. It would be more useful if it took me to a pubmed listing of all the coauthored papers or took me to the BioMedExpert page for that person.

But one really useful feature is the Concept Network when you search for a keyword.












This is a zoom of the map detailing locations of researchers associated with the tag "DNA Damage". When I click on a location, I will get a list of the researchers in each place and the number of PubMed citations.

ist World

ist World is an interesting, and perhaps useful, website that tries to link people (researchers), organizations, companies, etc. (n.b. ist is German for it is) For instance, I was interested in learning about the Genome Damage and Stability Centre at Sussex. Over at the ist page, I can see that it is associated with Sussex and what other departments at the uni.

If I use the from page search for DNA Damage and Repair. I get a list of 324 organizations in the European Research Dataset and 55 experts. This is obviously useful for looking for collaborators in areas of expertise which you don't possess and also places them geographically. I can detail my search results, for instance only organizations in Germany and then I'm left with 42 options. After that things get a little messy. I would be nice for links directly to the organization homepages, and a more clear listing of the results, but it makes for a good lead into searching.

Queer Canucks

CBC Radio 3 presents it's first Pride Podcast <mp3>. An all queer & Canuck line up of musicians. You gotta love 'em.

Guest host Lana Gay throws a coming out party for Radio 3’s first ever Pride Podcast. Featuring a talented line-up of artists from every corner of the rainbow, this show includes interviews with Rae Spoon, the Skinjobs and Montag, as well as tracks from The Organ, Hidden Cameras and Creature.

touch+go DNA

Here is a description of "touch DNA" from Scientific American:

Here’s how it works: Investigators recover cells from the scene, then use a process called polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to make lots of copies of the genes. Next, scientists mix in fluorescent compounds that attach themselves to 13 specific locations on the DNA and give a highly specific genetic portrait of that person. The whole process takes a few days, and forensic labs are often backed up analyzing data from other cases.


These 13 locations were carefully chosen because they are highly variable between people and do not give away any specific information, such as race, gender, personal health or genetic disease. The reason: authorities don’t want personal health information being used for law-enforcement purposes, such as interrogations. The chance of DNA profiles from two different people having the same genetic signature is vanishingly small.


The trick to finding these cells: context. If clothing is removed from the victim, as it was in the Ramsey case, a forensic specialist could try to guess where it might have been handled—perhaps the waistband of a pair of pants—and swab those areas with a Q-tip or a blade. But in cases like the JonBenet Ramsey murder, which has tripped up authorities for over a decade, it can provide information that leads to a killer—or at least exonerates the innocent.

It's not clear what type of variation they are using, but I could imagine microsatellites. There are several confusing aspects of this description. If the 13 loci are specific to an indiivdual, common sense dictates it a person of the same ethnicity will be more similar than from another ethnicity. Genetic variation does indeed indicate ethnicity, even if you only have 13 loci. Also, we know from anthropological genetics that there is a massive amount of DNA everywhere, that is pretty amazing with as little as 16 chromosomes (8 cells) you can get individual profiles.

to be and to do

- To do is to be. (Socrates)
- To be is to do. (Jean-Paul Sartre)
- Do-be-do-be-do. (Frank Sinatra)

Three Words: Descent With Modification

Variation in genes through space and time constitute the fundamental basis of evolutionary change; indeed, in its most basic sense, evolution is the genetic transformation of reproducing populations over space and time.

Templeton published Population Genetics and Microevolutionary Theory in 2006. The first chapter offers a nice intro for the layman and is available free as a PDF.

Hombres que tienen sexo con hombres

An article about HSHs (men who have sex with men), HIV, labels and denial.

Searching, and Searching, and Searching

via Tree of Life. An article in Cell concerning Text Mining.

It is difficult to benchmark the efficiency of IR (information
retrieval) engines, especially their recall, because the
complete set of documents relevant to almost any search is
inherently ill defined. Nevertheless, estimates show that the
most popular search engines, such as Google, have both
precision and recall below 0.3 (Shafi and Rather, 2005). In
other words, every time we do a search, more than 70% of
the documents in the output are irrelevant, whereas more
than 70% of all relevant documents never appear in the
engine's output.

Wow! That's why even with Google, I can't find the info I'm looking for. Normally I use google to get to places I know I want to go, whenever I want to use it to discover material its an exercise in tedium.

The article defines:

IR: Information Retrieval
NER: Named Entity Recognition
IE: Information Extracion
QA: Questions and Answers
TS: Text Summarization

and points to some text mining web resources

BLIMP (Biomedical Literature-Mining Publications)

Alexander Morgan's compilation of BioNLP resources and references

Resource links compiled by Dietrich Rebholz-Schuhmann

Text-mining resources compiled by Robert Futrelle

A list of links to current NER, IR, and IE engines

Marti Hearst's What Is Text Mining?

A Different Perspective

Think They'll Take Video Also?

Le :60

The 1-minute film festival

Creative Recreation

They really are that fantastic

But, you have to give respect to the Adi T.O.s

T.O. Art

I got feeling a little homesick just now and decided to look up my favourite band, The Hidden Cameras, to see if they are putting out any new material (all I discovered is I missed their European tour back in May!). Anyroad, I discovered they released two very limited edition LPs of their last album with artwork from two T.O. based artists (Munro and Vocat). That meant I needed to look at Daryl's webpage. Here is a sample of Pact for Adventure

"If you are interested in getting a tattoo of any of the images from my folio, Pact For Adventure, prove it. Get in touch with me, and I'll send you a clean, clear high-resolution version of whatever image you've got your eyes on. Once you get the tattoo done, send me photo documentation (actual prints) of the process. In exchange, I will give you a free copy of the folio."

More Questions than Answers

I just stumbled on Dropping Knowledge, a German-based non profit association. The website:

invites you to ask and answer questions covering social themes of global significance. When you ask in order to understand, when you answer in order to share, this is what we mean by dropping knowledge.

A pretty tempting idea, and some questions are relevant:

Is it possible to make peace more profitable than war?

While others are just plain strange:

If it would be possible to copy food lossless within a few seconds from any point across the world to any other, who would pay the prisons needed for all the evil third world country copyright pirates?

and, of course, lame:

What happened to Love?

It may work better if they moderated the questions a little bit better. And if the person who wrote the question had to submit a 500 (give or take) word essay giving their opinion. And it wouldn't hurt if they actually had more questions covering social themes of global significance.

Anyroad, maybe the second question isn't too bad. I would pose it as such:

If it were possible to "teleport" food safely and economically, what impact would it have on the world's economy?

or: What if a deadly human disease emerged and it was found to come from a domesticated farm animal (think mad cow, but on a larger scale) how would that affect meat consumption and the farming industry?

Unix is Great

I am trying to improve my Unix skills at the moment. I came across this on a help forum for grep:

Ericcarlson: I need to get a string from a file and can't figure out how to grep it. This file is from a subversion commit. Its always of the form.....

From23: awk is going to be better than grep and I can find a simple command for
you later when I get home (if no one else can punch one out). If you
are impatient or just want to learn... `man awk`


But my real reason for posting this. Did you go to FIT and do you want
to be a Vegas showgirl? Sorry if these questions seem weird but I think
I either know you or you share a name with someone I know.


The strange thing is he is serious!

Watchmen

The must see movie of next season has got to be Watchmen. I read the graphic novel a few months ago and it really is as good as everyone says it is! The trailer:

It really looks like the stick to the story in the book. I wonder how they cover the end of chapter summaries where lots of information presented in text form to get the reader informed on what is going on? Oh, and I bet they will have the comic within a comic also. Plus... very good marketing scheme with getting people to make their own Veidt adverts, you can see them here. I particularly like the watergunfilms series:

Food Party!

Food Party (with your host: Thu Tran!) is the coolest foodie related bit I've seen in a while. The videos are awesome! The acting is not, but that is part of the charm.

I've been inspired to document my food related adventures in Germany, which I have been wanting to do for some time. Coming soon... Purple Broccoli, Zucchini Blossoms, Orange Tomatos and Chestnut Jam.

Two is a Trend

The must see movie of the season is Fitzcarraldo! (IMDB: (1982) The story of Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, an extremely determined man who
intends to build an opera house in the middle of the Peruvian jungle.)

From Spiegel:

German actor Klaus Kinski was known for his passionate performances
that bordered on the manic. In countless films such as "Fitzcarraldo"
and "Aguirre: The Wrath of God" -- many directed by Werner Herzog -- he
often portrayed men on the very edge of madness.

The article is about Kinski's widow fighting against the release of his medical records from a Berlin clinic now he is dead.

From Pitchfork:

I've rented lots of good movies lately. One was Fitzcarraldo. You know the German director Werner Herzog? At ATP they showed the documentary of Fitzcarraldo.
Crazy. [Herzog] goes deep into the jungle and tries to lift a ship up
over a hill. You kind of have to see it to really believe it. That and
the documentary, [Burden of Dreams] about the making of Fitzcarraldo.

That is from an interview with Brendan Canning, part of the T.O. based collective Broken Social Scene, and out with a new "BSC presents: album.

Two mentions in two days of a 1982 German movie from a German and T.O. source, coincidence? I think not.

And is it just me or does Brendan Canning look like a junior Andrew Clark?

Cuil Online

I just found out about the new post-Google programmer search engine Cuil (pronounced "cool"). I gave it a spin by searching for my favourite mouse: Mus musculus, and somehow the results were pretty impressive. On the right had side is a stack of headers titles "Explore by Category" with very appropriate titles such as: Model Organisms, Geneic Journals and Bioinformatics Databases. The Fauna of Ireland and Mammals of he United States are on topic but somehow not quite relevant when situated beside a listing of bioinformatic databases. I'm gonna Cuil a fair shot against Google the next copule of weeks.

Aliens are my Brother

Aliens or no aliens, this is pretty spectacular:

"To strengthen its scientific credentials, the Vatican is organising a
conference next year to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of the
author of the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin."

from the BBC.

Beyond the Great Wall

I'm supposed to be making box plots of my data at the moment but I jsut discovered that Alford and Duguid have just come out with a new cookbook: Beyond the Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China. These guys are fantastic. I fell in love with their suductions of Rice cook book years ago and their Mangos and Curry Leaves Cookbook is one of the few I have with me in Germany. The good news for Torontonians is they will be speakng at Hart House (way to go UofT!) on May 14th. And... the book is on sale at Amazon.ca (-37%).

Canada Stamps

Quiet on the science wave, but here are some sweet stamps to pass the time.

Quote of the Day

"It is better to conquer 1-self
Than to win a thousand battles."

-In "The Thousands" of the Dhammapada (The Buddha)

Pinguin, was machst Du denn da?

German scientist blog: Flying Penguins video

Arabesque

I picked up a lovely graphic design book focusing on Arab and Persian work this past weekend. Several themes from Calligraphy to Typesetting and Illustration are represented. Here are two examples:

This first page is from a group working in France:


and this is from the type face chapter:



I have a fondness for the Expletive Script font, but unfortunately it is not one of the three included with the book.

The book is in English and is published by die Gestalten (of Berlin).

Zoomers: Boomers Forever Young

Znaimer will never stop living this way. This from an article in Marketing:

What can the 50-plus crowd-still the largest, most prosperous and
heaviest-spending segment of the population-do to win back the respect
and attention they consider their birthright?

And coincidentially, as I was perusing the Buck Institute for Age Research on actual scientifically related business, I find the sub-heading of their news section:

HERE'S "NEWS THAT YOU CAN USE" (ALONG WITH SOME INTERESTING UPDATES FROM BASIC RESEARCH AND THE GENERAL PRESS) IN YOUR QUEST TO HAVE "100 GOOD YEARS."

(The capitals and quotations are theirs - no comments.) Boomers want to feel young and sexy, not old and tired. They want respect and attention of advertisers- and researchers. Does that mean if you don't get that attention you feel somehow forgotten in society?

The Happiness of Non-identity

Before I moved to Germany, I liked to think I was moving to a country inhabited by a common people. Like all groups of common peoples, they would be nationalistic and rejoice in their glory days, lament at their waning power on the global scene and exhibit how their culture was the greatest thing that ever happened to civilization. Well it didn't take long to figure out that if they do any of those things, its somewhat more subtle than the American drama that Canadians are used to having played out year after year for them.

After I moved to Germany, but in the recent months, to be more precise, I came to the realization that I do indeed like this country and I found myself wondering where that came from. I think I understand now that Germany and Canada are very similar in important ways, most notably the lack of any real identity.

Although both countries are home to large immigrant communities, ideas about what immigration is and the role of immigrants in society are worlds apart. In Canada the immigrant composition of the population plus the short history of the country, make little occasion for forging a national identity. Although many are "proud" to be Candian, we are not a nation of flag-wavers and patriot party-bangers. We are more subtle, we are happy, nee content even. In Germany, there is a long tradition of not having a German identity, it goes back to the original unification and was only reinforced after the war when it was a discrace to be proud of being German. The idea of a German identity doesn't exist in the same way it does for the French, English or Americans, much like it doesn't exist fo Candians either.

Maybe that is one reason why I like the country so. I am as much a piece of a large non-identity here as I was in Canada.

New Genomes Evolving

OK, here's something I didn't get a chance to blog aobut last week. Carl Zimmer has an article on Slate about "Spinach, Lettuce, and the Limits of Bioterrorism". It's about the e.coli strain O157:H7, of past widespread gastrointestinal problems. He discusses a paper reporting widespread genome rearrangements in this strain compared with other non-pathogenic strains. Sure enough Zmmer is good on his reading but he seems to draw some conclusions that leave many, including this reader, in doubt. At the end of the article he writes:

Even if a government built a giant lab just for the purpose of
stumbling across a new pathogen, it might take centuries or millenniums
to hit on something like the spinach strain.

That's the limit of bioterrorism part. The thing I am not so convinced about is that we don't need to sit around waiting for mutations to happen. Geneticists have been inducing mutations on a wide scale since they started calling themselves that name, it's just a matter of shifting though the rubble. Shoot first and ask questions later is the motto of Forward Genetics (point and shoot being the motto of Reverse Genetics). One only need to induce enough translocations, deletions and duplications whilst selecting under the right conditions. The trick of course is figuring out how to induce enough of those large scale mutations and how to select for those that you want to keep, but that hardly seems a limit to bioterrorism.

Comix Online

Great artists including PaperRad members and new Manja at PictureBox Inc.

Stuff!

“Our enormously productive economy . . . demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption . . . we need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”

Victor Lebow (Retailing analyst) in Journal of Retailing, quoted in Durning, How Much is Enough? (1992)

I just found out about this amazing web-site: The Story of Stuff. It is similarly motivating to WorldChanging, but I think somehow more practical and inviting. The center of the web-site is an animated video with a somewhat friendly host bordering on preachy but still entertaining enough to be watchable. The two major problems I can see is that she is preaching to the converted and that the video, which will be the most dessiminated part of the web-site, focuses heavily on the negative aspects of over-consumption, leaving only the possible individual resolutions to the last minute (of 20 total). the response to over-consumption is not asceticism, but it may be hard to get people to understand that at the onset and initially people are turned off.

This Line is Busy...

There is was too much going on with the protests in Tibet and I haven't been able to really keep up with all of it. Basically I have been totally swamped in the lab trying to get my curent love-child off to the presses. Spiegel had a nice piece about the protests and the Chinese reaction, stating that the only way to settle the disaster is to make concessions for the Dalai Lama to return to Tibet. When I hear the Dalai Lama speak here in Germany last year he made the point of how many Chinese are not settled in the so-called Tibetan Autonomous Region, a point that was echoed by the Spiegel piece. It is clear that China has no interest in diplomacy in the issue and one can only hope that further boycotts of their coveted Olympic games has some impact on the admin. In the end it is a blessing that Toronto lost the bid for the games to Beijing. Not only because the games would bring more trouble than good to Toronto but because they will likely do just that for China.

Got Soy?

“I was totally open with the band and my family and my friends and
certainly the people I was sleeping with. I thought it was pretty
obvious,” Stipe said. “Now I recognise that to have public figures be
very open about their sexuality helps some kid somewhere out there.”
(Yes, let’s hope the people Stipe was sleeping with understood he was
gay.)

The coolest thing I bought in a long time

Think Fluorescent

Evolution Video and Meeting Bonanza!

There are way too many Evolution and Genetics meetings happening in Europe this year!

• The Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution (publishers of MBE) will have their annual int'l meeting in Barcelona in May
• The 20th Genetics Congress is being held in Berlin in the Summer and has some great Evol'n based sessions
  
• The European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) also has their bi-annual Evo-Devo Conference this summer and...
• The 12th Evolutionary Biology Meeting in Marseilles round out the season in September

Oh, and to begin the big season we at the MPI Evolutionsbiologie kick it off next week with two days choc full of wild house mouse evolutionary genetics! Our dedicated post-doc Meike Teschke has organized a great collection of people in our field (including Nachman, Foreijt, Bonhomme, König, Penn, Payseur, Tucker, Sage, Hoekstra, Pialek, Klingenberg, Bursot and others even!!).

The video part is thus: the 2007 Marseilles meeting is posted online for all to enjoy.

Directed Human Evolution. Read: People, get a grip already!

This is so brilliantly wrong in so many ways, I can hardly begin.

This is a review excerpt for Ronald Green's book Babies by Design, from The Economist:

"In the very near future scientists will be snipping and splicing the DNA in human eggs, sperm and embryos, not only fixing faulty genes but adding enhancements too. Soon, we may be able to eradicate terrible genetic diseases such as Tay-Sachs and cystic fibrosis."

Let's just take a second to consider Cystic Fibrosis (CF). CF is caused by mutations in the gene cystic fibrosis transmemebrane conductance regulator (CFTR) that allows individuals to become susceptible to lung infections from Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria. A massive number of mutations have been identified in CFTR that can lead to a loss-of-function gene and development of CF. The occurance of CF is about 1:2,500 Caucasians and even without heritability, 1:15,000 cases are from novel mutations. To compound the problem, there is also evidence that being heterozygote for a loss-of-function CFTR may actually provide protection against typhoid fever (infection with Salmonella typhi bacteria). This is a brilliant story of evolutionary genetics that can be found in any good evolution text book and it just boggles the mind that such rubbish as is written above is propagated in the popular media. One would thing that The Economist would have the sense to discriminate between sensationalism and rationality.

The very near future is a very very long way off, especially when ignorance about fundamental biological processes persist among the public.

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