Furry things and Goo

A friend posed this question: If you fell off your bike coming back from the farmer's market, would you save yourself or the peaches?

I replied, the peaches!

Correct, she said.

It's not even entirely about the deliciousness of peaches... there's something about the vulnerability of the peach that makes me want to protect them, even at my own expense, when replacing my skin cells is certainly harder than replacing a peach.

So much for logic.

Some peaches are so delicate that they bruise just by touching each other. I like thinking about peaches: I am pleased that such a thing exists.

Speaking of delicate things, later this week I inherit two monster kittens. They're malnourished, and I can't help but picture them attempting to eat me with their devil mouths and stalk me with their seedy little eyes. Careful, you terrors, I'm watching you.

Bargain Hunting

Coupons scavenged from the Mandarin Oriental:

* For every $2,500 or more purchased at Aaron Basha, experience a dinner sampling for two at Asiate at Mandarin Oriental.

* Receive a $200 gift certificate with your purchase of $3,000 at Vera Wang.

* Chopart Boutique is pleased to offer a $500 gift certificate toward your next purchase of $3,000.

* With a minimum purchase of $10,000, Audemars Piguet is pleased to offer complimentary two-hour spa options at The Spa at Mandarin Oriental.

quote of the day

"Roar of a steam locomotive once shook the Earth to haul modern society. Now
the world's pulse solemnly beats with a semiconductor." -- Hynix Semiconductor

That's one way to argue that semiconductor is my hot, hot sex. I'll post another after this weekend. (there's an ongoing debate at work over one editor's heated rant about how "there's nothing more sexy than semiconductors! Nothing!")

On a side note, kudos to life for behaving thematically. I saw Hairspray last night (kind of awesome. John Travolta and Christopher Walken get my vote for couple of the year.) and afterwards we serendipitously wandered into a drag queen bar. The funny thing was we didn't even notice at first. I guess when we entered there were a lot of dudes around, and the lady giants trickled in later. We were just obliviously sitting in our couchy corner and didn't realize, until someone got up to buy drinks, that we'd been completely surrounded by gigantic skirted folk.

cutest lil reactor you ever did see

Caption: Fissures in the ground are visible in front of the Kashiwazaki nuclear power plant today.

Darn cozy-looking nuclear reactor, wouldn't you say?

The Daily Bovine, Second Edition

From a press release:

The New York State Police in Charlton are looking for the owner of a large plastic cow. The cow in question is a full size, black and white cow with horns and made out of plastic and fiberglass. It was found on July 7, 2007, 6:30 am in the Jenkins Park on Jenkins Road, Burnt Hills.

It appears to belong to a commercial establishment of some sort. Anyone missing their bovine can contact the State Police in Wilton at 583-7000.

The Daily Bovine

The BBC, pre-eminent popularizer of cow research, had this story yesterday on how scientists in Aberystwyth have shown that feeding cows garlic cuts their methane production by up to 50%. Apparently, says the almighty Beeb, "experts consider cows the single biggest source of methane -- a gas 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide when it comes to global warming." Also, cows and sheep are responsible for some 30% of the UK's methane emissions.

I wonder how cows rate on the Merck Manual's flatulence scale?

The BBC has a thing with cows and airy science, as in this fabulous August 2006 story on cows that moo in regional accents. I quote:

Farmer Lloyd Green, from Glastonbury, said: "I spend a lot of time with my ones and they definitely moo with a Somerset drawl.

Also, I just learned about a new European language--new to me at least. I was filling out a media advisory form, and it asked me to check off languages I wished to receive my digests in, including Monegasque.

Apparently ethnic Monaco peoples are called Monegasque, so the term refers to both the group and the language. The official language of Monaco is French. The fact that this language still exists is, let's face it, kind of a miracle. [if it still exists and isn't a figment of the internet's hyperactive imagination.]

curmudgeoning on synthetic journalism

I was about to email a friend/fellow science journalist about some posts he'd written that I didn’t like, then decided that was anti-social and bad. So I vent here, instead! He will never know...

Last week Craig Venter’s company/lab (the guy who raced the government to sequence the human genome) announced what it considered groundbreaking, proof-of-principle work supporting the theoretical basis of synthetic biology. They transplanted the genome of one bacterium into another bacterium (a mycoplasma, which is a special kind of bacteria that lacks cell walls) and, voila, got the transplanted genome to take hold in the new host. Basically, they were able to get the new body to express the genes of the old body and start to exhibit the features unique to the donor organism. This is pretty cool.

But the coverage that I’ve read (not exhaustive, of course) has failed to mention a few things, which I found particularly interesting from the conference call with reporters that Venter held last week (if I hadn’t been on the road and super-rushed, I would have blogged this for work, but alas I missed my chance). Notably:

* The efficiency was very low, something like 1 in 150,000 of the DNA-receiving mycoplasma started using the new genome. I find this important because otherwise it sounds like you take an organism, stick some new DNA in there and automatically the original DNA just rolls over and plays dead. So the fact that it’s kind of a chance procedure, at best, indicates how far, still, we have to go in understanding why one genome and not the other wins out. Anyway, it’s far from clear from the news coverage that this success they’re reporting happened as rarely as it did. Maybe I’m over-emphasizing this. When I heard it brought up in the q-and-a session, I was surprised. At the very least, it explains in part why it’ll be insanely expensive to get synthetic biology on its feet.

* The donor mycoplasma and the host mycoplasma were very, very closely related. So this doesn’t tell us anything about trying to switch up the genomes of arbitrarily chosen organisms, or using genomes generated in the lab, as Venter would like to do. Also, the mycoplasma is a pretty special organism, so extending the results will be hard. The absence of cell walls is important for a reason that I'm hesitant to try and explain off the top of my head.

None of these points devalue the underlying science. But I do think they're important for explaining how science works, why we should care about these findings, what its limitations are. Detail isn't always scary!

I wish science journalism was less hung up on the long-shot justifications for why people should read their stories. The part in these stories that talks about "someday we'll be able to..." should occupy all of one sentence. Then again, this entire post is not fact-checked, and so I'm contributing pretty unreliable information, too.

from the annals of transportation

Thursday night, a little after midnight, I boarded the LIRR from Jamaica, headed for Penn Station. A youngish guy walks up to me and says, "Can you help me get to Ocean City?" He has a thick accent, and he seems a little scared. "It is 100 kilometers from New York," says the guy. New York City? New York state? Is it on Long Island? He doesn't know. I promise I'll help him find information once we get to Penn Station, and we get to talking. It turns out he's Kazakh and studying math at Moscow State (a good school). He's a sophomore, and he'd come to the US to work I think... his reasoning seemed ambiguous. All he had with him was a small backpack full of notebooks and a jacket stuffed in a plastic shopping bag. As we're killing time on the train, he says, "Have you seen this film, Borat?" "Oh!" I say, "We all know it was shot in Romania, don't worry." But he did worry, and he set out to convince me he didn't actually live in a village and share a bed with a cow, or sodomize his sisters, or chase Jews around town. I assure him we Americans know better.

When we get to Penn Station, we wander around looking for the information desks but they're all closed. It's now 12:45, and still we don't know where Ocean City is. His English isn't very good and I felt like I couldn't abandon him. I translate some stuff when he doesn't understand, but mostly we spoke in English. "Is Ocean City in New Jersey?" I ask. Finally his eyes light up and he says, "No! Maryland!" My jaw drops, I cuss a little, and I stomp around the Amtrak offices looking for help. Eventually the Kazakh guy pulls out a guide book to the United States (state by state!) in Russian. We find Ocean City on a map, it's a tiny little speck on the coast, 130 miles straight south of Wilmington, Delaware. I'm amazed someone bothered to put it on a map. I stomp around some more, but no one's heard of the place. I decide that he should go to Philly and pray that there's a connecting train. I tell him this, leave my phone number and email address, and leave. It's 1:30 am by this point. He swears his undying gratitude.

I'm worried about the poor kid. I think he only had $100 with him. He was going to meet Kazakh people out there, but only had an email address for them. Isn't that weird? What was he even doing in New York? How was he so helpless? I hope the Amtrak people were nice to him.

The weird thing is, I meet people like this dude all the time. It's like I'm flypaper for profoundly clueless men. [most dramatic example was the South African man in Xi'an who hadn't eaten in days and needed to buy window parts in bulk even though he didn't speak a word of Chinese. It took two days to shake him, but we did find window parts.]

The other update of randomness was that I think I've made peace with the insane woman who lives in the apartment above me. She'd thrown a hissy fit over laundry one day and had pounded on our door, yelled at me, then gone and yanked all my clothes out of the machines and strewn them on the floor of our basement. Well, she turned up a few days ago with a massive bag of Indonesian shoes for me and my roomies. Yes, you CAN buy my forgiveness with sandals from Bali!