Go click on that link and read some interesting science articles hosted over at Pharyngula. These are an addendum to #22 since the submissions were lost to e-mail lala land while on their way to the previous Tangled Bank.
How time flies. A Guardian article looking at how the Aymara view time--as the past in front of us while the future is behind. In a way, this intuitively makes sense--we can see the past but not the future--strange that more cultures don't view time this way.
Well, I was curious as to all the hoopla surrounding a particular post from The Washington Monthly and I can't really see what's so original about it. I admit I don't frequent pundit blogs, but everyone seems to be behaving rather predictably, hm? So here's what I've basically taken away from the post and the comments: female bloggers argue that they're not popular because they're being ignored, the female bloggers that are famous use their wiles instead of their wits, male bloggers complain that female bloggers are too quiet but when they speak up, they're labeled as bitchy, some people say female bloggers aren't recognized because they aren't good enough (and one has to wonder--by whose standard are they judging?), and that women can't be dedicated bloggers because they're raising kids, etc.
Mostly, it sounds like mean-spirited stereotyping, but I think someone had the gist of it when they said that the popular bloggers mostly read and link to other bloggers just like them. I think for a lot of people (and not just old white guys) reading and thinking outside of the comfort zone is not what they would usually do. Sure, there are some bigots out there who actively discriminate but for the rest of us, the danger is inertia and complacency. The author of the above post complains that there are few female pundits--but from all accounts, he's complained about it before--so is he going to do anything about it now?
This is sort of like people who only read one kind of book and nothing else be it sci-fi, literary, or historical romances. And I have to wonder--don't these people get bored at all? If I restricted my reading diet to a string of Piers Anthony Xanth novels, I'd surely go mad. Wouldn't it be the same for people continually cross-linking to top bloggers? Think of it another way: let’s say the blogosphere is a huge mansion and all the bloggers and readers and commenters are the inhabitants. The popular pundits have firmly parked their butts in a couch in the den with their eyes glued to the television (which is tuned to CNN or whatever). Would you really want to spend all your time stuck in the den with them or take a look around elsewhere? I'd personally visit the library or the attic with the weird junk or the basement laboratory where all the mad scientists are swapping recipes for squid stew.
Of course, most people are not interested in the mechanics of making squid stew. They're all parked in the den with the pundits on the couch lobbing spitballs at each other. Conveniently, the couch is next to an open window so the spitballs sometimes land on the innocent (or not so innocent) neighbors and passersby. Spitballs get boring really fast, but they don't show any sign of stopping any time soon. Maybe someone should rig the satellite dish on the roof so all they get is exercise machine infomercials. Maybe then they'll get off the couch and see that there are other people wandering about the mansion.
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Bacteria thrive at stunning depths. Don't they all. Researchers have confirmed that bacteria do thrive down in the deep ocean floor. Anyone not bowing down to their bacterial overlords should do so now.
What She Said! I personally don't have very much time to sieve through weblogs to find the ones that are interesting (for one thing, they require a lot more reading than your run-of-the-mill link) but this one is handy because it lists a bunch of women pundits.
Photoshopped Romance Novels. Heh. Bodice rippers with altered titles such as "Lord of the Tube Socks" and "For the Love of Scottie McMullet".
Is This It? A Metafilter post filled with links to bubble chamber pictures.
This is not the original beginning of this post. I had started writing it last night, but it turned out to be a rant of sorts and it would have possibly been a bad idea to post it. Sure, it vented some frustration but in the end, I don't think it would have solved anything.
Well enough of that. Onto more trivial things. I started on Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell but it may not have been such a good idea--the novel is not exactly cheery. I've also been fiddling around with interactive fiction again (hence the IF allusions a few posts back) although on the surface, this may not be a very good idea either.
My attention span and persistance on IF puzzles typically is very short. Nonetheless, I finished two different games in a relatively short amount of time without much help which must be some sort of record for me. The Dreamhold is billed as a game for beginners although the puzzles are not exactly trivial. The Cabal is really easy--I'm not sure there's really any way you can actually "lose"--and is more humor and parody with lots of IF in-jokes. I dabbled around on two other games: Risorgimento Represso, the protagonist is a college student who gets sucked into a fantasy world, and The Abbey, which was inspired by Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.
Insiteview has started posting again after a long hiatus--just in time for his blog's third anniversary. One thing the blog's owner had worried about was what to post and was contantly agonizing on what to say. Everyone has something to say and there will always be something to post. True, some stuff might come off as stupid instead of brilliant, but nobody can be brilliant all the time. Not even Einstein. And if other people expect you to sound brilliant all the time--well, don't worry about them. They just have unrealistic expectations.
As the blogosphere matures, webloggers are starting to take themselves more and more seriously which on occasion can sound quite comically extreme. I think one should take it seriously if you're earning a living via blog, but otherwise, this internet medium is nothing more than a way to disseminate opinion and thought, put out some information, hone the writing skill.
Speaking of taking things seriously, Pharyngula asks if he should be flattered or creeped out by somebody exhaustively analyzing his blogroll for gender bias. I think he should be creeped out. It would have been different if a lot of other people's blogrolls were also analyzed for gender bias, but he was singled out for something that suspiciously resembles witch hunting. Blogrolls are poor places to find gender bias anyway because people use them for different purposes. Some might use them to list sites they read, but others might just link for the sake of linking somebody famous or linking to get hits or linking because somebody commented on their site or linked back to them.
More blog-related stuff: I got a Google search for "unattractive persons mostly perceived as murderers." Depressing. Would people automatically think that the ugly person killed someone rather than the attractive person? Let's say you read about a murder in the newspaper and there are two suspects--one that looked like Tom Cruise and one that looked like the hunchback of Notre Dame. Further in the article, the police states that only one person committed the crime but so far they can't tell if it's one or the other. What would your gut feeling say?
Okay, so I know everyone would say that they would look at all the evidence first before declaring one person the murderer, but what if the murder is never resolved and the two suspects are free to roam society? Would you automatically avoid walking into the hunchback more than the Tom Cruise look-alike?
Onesome: Sweet Potato-- Sweet potatoes always remind me of thanksgiving which brings me to food...what is your all time favorite holiday food that you wish you'd get a chance to eat at other times?
I don't have a favorite food.
Twosome: Queens'-- do you follow what Prince Charles and others are up to? What do you think about the Queen not going to the wedding?
I don't really give a crap what the British royal family is doing. But aren't they wasting British taxpayers' money?
Threesome: Field Guide to Men-- when it comes to the opposite sex, do you feel you have a grasp on 'em - or do they continue to just surprise you?
I treat people on a case by case basis. If I think I have a grasp on any group of people, I'm probably in big trouble.
This is just one of those days. I feel like a beginner trapped in the "expert mode" of an interactive fiction game. Or lost in a maze of twisty little passages. Makes one want to kosh one's head against a cave wall except the parser blinks with admonishment: "Violence isn't the answer to this one."
The Haunted Boy. A reporter finds out the real story behind The Exorcist.
Unintelligent Design. This New York Times article has been making the rounds among weblogs. I find ID patently ridiculous. For one thing, it's the lazy man's explanation for how things work--"I can't figure out a rational reason for how things are so some Higher Intelligence created it!" Oh please. If everyone thought that way, we might as well be vegetating blobs basking in hot springs.
Immortality Through Google. "What are memorials to the dead but touchstones for the great post-mortem popularity contest? He whose gravestone draws the biggest crowds wins."
Meet the Slacker Mom. One mother decides to let the kids amuse themselves rather than driving them around for soccer practice and piano lessons.
Too Many Books. Crazy authors. There's no such thing as too many books.
Internet Sacred Text Archive. This is interesting because they included a section called "DNA" which contains part of the human genome. I don't think there's anything particularly sacred about DNA and I don't think a file with just a string of codons is particularly enlightening either. If you want to know anything about sequencing the human genome, look here.
Apologies to anyone who dislikes the link + commentary posts as this blog is changing to that type of post for the next week or so. I'm still in limbo, but I also feel somewhat disinclined to talk about things related to real life as I try to sort them out. I'll continue to post something somewhat regularly just so people reading will know I'm still around.
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Who Can Name the Bigger Number? "A biggest number contest is clearly pointless when the contestants take turns. But what if the contestants write down their numbers simultaneously, neither aware of the other’s?" After reading this, I'm pretty sure a mathematician would beat me, hands down.
Brute Force for Brain Teasers. A Wired article which points out that teamwork and the internet are changing the way how treasure hunts and puzzles are being played.
Uncarrot Tarot. Someone's very unconventional tarot deck.
Color Design Rules. Some amateur template makers desperately need to read this site.
Chilling mystery: Why don't Mexicans read books? The book industry in Mexico is floundering and it's trying to save itself by putting fixed prices. But will that help if people don't want to read? If you put the question in a wider context, why don't some people, in any country, want to read? As someone who loves to read, it is almost impossible for me to wrap my head around the concept that someone couldn't care less about it.
Book brawl in Canada. Heh, a reality show-type concept for books. It's interesting that I read this now since my sister called last night telling me she tried out for Canadian Idol.
For the last month or so, I haven't really talked about the hole but today, well, no matter how you look at it, it's a horrendous disaster. I've been kicked so far down the hole I'm in limbo, at the outskirts of hell. So yeah, I'm in deep shit.
I talked to my father for a while--mostly I was glad he didn't have a heart attack or start yelling at me. But then I'm not really sure how he feels about this whole situation. Two thousand miles and a disembodied voice at one's ear is a poor way to convey any expression.
I asked him what the point was of doing something and then ending up at a job that would make me extremely unhappy. He said he didn't know--but that I should really take some time and think about what I want to do. Maybe he's right. I haven't been thinking too clearly lately.
For a person who has always known where to go, this sort of uncertainty is frightening. I have absolutely no idea where I will be six months from now, but there's a ninety percent chance I won't be New Hampshire anymore.
Onesome: Mountains-- What is the elevation where you live? Do you like it there or would you prefer something a little different?
I have no idea. It's okay, but not too exciting.
Twosome: Valleys-- When you travel, do you have any particular valley or area you like to pass through on the way from here to there? ...and is there any route you'll take just for the scenery even if it's just a tad longer or more out of the way?
At the moment, not really.
Threesome: and Streams-- Do you have a stream you like to walk along and just think and enjoy the view? How about a metaphorical one if you don't have a real one close by?
Forty plus Coolhunters. Ah, who gives a crap about age anymore. I used to whine about how a lot of the grad students were older than me and that their more "mature" concerns just went right over my head. I don't really care any more. Everybody thinks they're more mature, all the way from tantrum-throwing six year olds to oh-so-sophisticated college students all the way to the smirking biddies. What is maturity anyway--coolness, wisdom, experience, white picket fences? Is it something somebody made up so they could feel superior? Who knows.
I'm going to refrain from whining about whining. I'll even refrain from whining about whining about whining. Life's too short for wading about in misery, resentment, etc., etc., etc. Trust me, there are worse things than being alone.
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Disclaimer: I find the following links highly amusing, but I also realize that my sense of humor is not the same as everyone else's. So if there's any remote chance that you might get even more depressed due to the after effects of a certain holiday, don't click on the links. Instead, check the previous entry about no pants.
Compete last, finish first. So in a situation where someone is judging something, it is always better to go last than first.
Neil Gaiman gets soundly chastised by Margaret Atwood for calling her book-signing device a kissing machine.
Love and Selfishness. According to this essay, we're only supposed to give love to people who we think deserve our love and can give us happiness. Well, I suppose that makes some sort of sense. But if this emotion behaves so rationally as the author says, what about the others? Lots of people hate other people even though they don't deserve it.
How a Nerd Complains About Not Being Able to Get Laid. Hah. Someone go smack that guy with a cluebat. On some levels, it's almost as annoying as people complaining that they're going to die a virgin. But the atrocious goobledygook is hilarious.
I'm in the library studying or at least trying to. So will everyone just stop jabbering and hovering about my desk pretending to look at the books on the nearby shelves? I know what you're up to, so cut it out.
Connotea. "Social citations and remote reference management...an experimental bookmarking service for scientists." Looks interesting. I guess I'll play around with it to see if it's useful.
Biologging. "A community website for biomedical researchers which allows you to create your own annotated store of abstracts and to browse the logs of other users."
MetaFilter Redesign Contest Results. I just like looking at all the entries. There's some good ideas people might want to try out if they're planning to redesign.
Small dogs as fashion accessories. Arg! It's a stupid fashion statement, that's what. It makes people look like airheads. Wait a minute, they already are airheads.
Mushroom Life. Oh yeah, this is awesome. I love seeing how many generations it can go before reaching a stable population.
The Rorschach Test. I'm reading the explanatory text and I'm thinking, "Naughty bits? I don't see any naughty bits." The approach is way too Freudian and how the heck can this test distinguish creative people from crazy people? Perhaps the creator of the test wanted to lock all artists up in the looney bin? (And how dull the world would be then!)
There are plenty of avatar/character generators online, but the one at Yahoo! Avatars (via Little Yellow Different) doesn't seem too ridiculous or cheesy. Besides, I find it more apt (and amusing) for a cartoon to represent my virtual self rather than a real life photo. There's a different image on my about page.
Spam approaches 95 per cent of all email. Getting angry at the deluge of junk and trying to erect barriers obviously isn't working. What we need to do is to figure out a clever way to make spammers realize that spamming is not worth their while.
What Exactly Is Under the Sea? "Why, with sonar and satellite scanning, is so little known about the topography of the seabed?"
What Websites Do to Turn On Teens. "If you're designing a website aimed at teenagers, you'd better not make the text too small. That's not because teens have bad eyes, but because teenagers tend to lean back in their chairs when they're at their computers." Then why do teenagers make their own sites with teeny-tiny fonts?
The Telly of the Beast. An interview with Father Gabriele Amorth, honorary president of the International Association of Exorcists and the most senior exorcist for the Vatican in Harper's Magazine.
Elephant Voices. " A main goal is to give easy access to years of field studies related to elephant communication - to elephant voices."
Wayne's Word. An online textbook of natural history.
Zoological Museum Amsterdam. They have put up 3D images of part of their extensive stuffed bird collection online. As I had indicated over at Monkeyfilter, it's like taxidermy on rotisserie.
Literature for Children. "Literature for Children is a collection of the treasures of children's literature published largely in the United States and Great Britain from before 1850 to beyond 1950." All of these books are scanned and online for your viewing pleasure.
Tree-living ants glide to safety. "Canopy-dwelling ants in the tropical forests of the Americas have adopted a neat way of averting disaster should they fall from their perch. They glide to safety, steering towards their home trunk rather than plummeting to the ground, where they might never see their nest-mates again."
At the moment, morning. If I wanted to, I could probably adjust my schedule for night owl phase, but what's the point since everyone does stuff in the morning?
2. What song lifts your mood when you're feeling blue?
Songs usually don't lift my mood.
3. Have you ever had any teeth pulled?
No.
4. Would you rather a)work for Martha Stewart, b) swim the English Channel, or c) eat a serving of Rocky Mountain Oysters?
C. Because the experience would be over the quickest.
5. Who is your best friend?
I don't have a best friend. To be honest, sometimes I think I don't have the personality to have a best friend.
1. Only link to what we've already read and only say what we've already heard.
Oh, I link to other bloggers' stuff on occasion (this list, for instance) but I would say I mostly do it more for the amusement factor. Weblogs that rehash stuff all the time belong to a whole genre of their own--I'm sure they have an audience--so I wouldn't say that it's wrong per se. But it's definitely something I wouldn't read.
2. False modesty.
I agree that this is annoying. If you find me doing this, feel free to virtually slap me up the side of my head.
3. Clearing the archives.
This is somewhat idiotic. Doesn't everyone know that once you put stuff up on the internet, it never really goes away? Deleting everything seems on par with activities like shutting down a site or putting everything behind passwords. Childish and ultimately ineffective.
4. Become overly concerning yourself [sic] with blogging "rules."
Uh, is there really anyone who blogs by "rules"? I had the impression that webloggers on the whole put whatever they want on their sites with little to stop them from doing so. This list of what bloggers do wrong implies that there are rules--making this point paradoxical. This list should have been called: The Ten Most Annoying Things About Bloggers.
5. Fail to follow basic punctuation rules.
I do this all the time. Cut me some slack.
6. Substitute slang for ideas.
I see nothing wrong with this if it's used to make a point (even if it's a stupid, redundant point). File this under writing style. Everyone is entitled to their own style--that's not wrong or right.
7. Fail to take advantage of 95% of the blogosphere.
I'm assuming the basic premise about this is that one shouldn't link to the same sources all the time. I would agree with this except for the case of #1. If the purpose of a weblog is to only link to a couple sources or if the author doesn't particularly care about getting a diversity of sources then they can do whatever they want.
8. Become a one-note charlie.
I suppose if you continually harp about one thing that could turn off readers. But if you specialize in a particular area, I don't see why you couldn't make a subject specific blog.
9. Decline to put up an "about the author" link.
If people want to be anonymous, they have the right to do so. Wanting everyone to put up a profile is nosy.
10. Decline to participate in their own comments section.
I don't see anything wrong with this either. Sure, this will make the blogger seem aloof (at best). Maybe other people aren't accustomed to being ignored but it also seems silly to expect that everything you send off into the ether of the internet will have a reply.
Bonus: Take themselves too seriously.
I take myself seriously although I'm not sure about the too part. And personally, I'd rather have too many serious sites on the internet rather than too many frivolous ones.
Cube Route by Piers Anthony. As the 27th (!) volume of Anthony's first Xanth "trilogy", one wonders if the trademark overload of puns will ever get old for the author's fans. Apparently not. There are at least two (and possibly more) books after this one. First, a little background for those of you unfamiliar with this popular fantasy series. Xanth is a magical alternate reality populated with literal puns (pi trees, boot rear, night mares, etc.--and yes, this book even uses et cetera as a pun), mythical creatures, and people with magical talents. For serious people, this may seem too wacked out and crazy, but that's the whole point. Xanth is pure escapism and exaggeration: it's where all the women are sexy and the guys zonk out into a pleasure induced coma whenever they see a pair of panties.
In this adventure we meet Cube, a very plain young woman who desperately wants to be beautiful so she can attract a man, get married, and live happily ever after. After getting the idea from a mischief-making demoness, Cube goes in search of the Good Magician who might have the ability to make her more attractive. Instead, she gets a rather oblique answer and is sent off in a Quest to find the Cube Route--the path to a new land called Counter Xanth where intrepid colonists could settle. Then there's at least one major problem--not only does Cube not know how to go about finding the Cube Route, but she doesn't have any idea where Counter Xanth exists. During the course of the quest, Cube gathers nine companions and manages to get a whirlwind tour of Xanth, Phaze (another one of Anthony's fantasy worlds), and Mundania (our reality).
The quest is actually less about finding a place and more about Cube discovering herself. Cube is unhappy because the rest of the world perceives her as ugly and unfeminine and thinks that beauty will solve all her problems. Her adventures merely serve as lessons to point out that beauty can have its own problems and that more often than not, smarts and gumption are a whole lot more useful.
One could put this down as a scripted feel-good story for this era pumped up with girl power resolution. But to glance just at the surface changes and to disregard character motivations would be to miss the entire point of the novel. Whether or not this is a conscious realization on Anthony's part, Cube Route is a reflection on the conflicted desires of many young women today. Women may know that to survive and be successful in this society, they will need determination and intelligence. They may know that people will like them despite appearances. But they still believe that they need a man to complete their life. Cube finally acknowledges that the thing she really wanted was the love of a man and not beauty--yet she also realizes that this is not the most important thing in life either.
I am sure this story will resonate with the numerous young women who constantly lament their single status. The author recognizes that in reality, traditional and feminist mores are still duking it out. I wasn't so much worried at how things worked out. It wasn't about getting to the end but the path one takes to get there. Anyways, I just want Cube's magic talent--because who wouldn't want to have the ability to control hordes of ravenous insects?
And if you're not slacking off, you're expanding your horizons (at least that's an excuse you might try on your boss if he catches you reading this blog).
Indonesia plans new morality laws. I find public displays of affection as annoying as the next person, but banning kissing and cohabitation is just daft.
What authors read on Valentine's Day. Eh, all these people are acting hoity-toity with their literary reading material. Personally, I'm not so enamored with doomed love stories.
The art of seeing without sight. A blind man uses his brain for drawing just as a sighted person would. This shows how plastic and malleable the brain is, but this also raises the question, "Just what is seeing anyway?"
Nothing is certain but death and taxes --Benjamin Franklin
Onesome: Nothing is certain- Have you ever thought you had "Sure Thing?" Did it pay off or not?
I'm sure about the small things like whether or not the blue pen will give blue ink or a cup keeping water inside it. Other things, no.
Twosome: But death- Do you belive in life after death?
Short answer: no.
Longer answer: My attitude toward these things is agnostic so I am not certain that there is nothing after death either. I simply don't know. But so far, I haven't seen any convincing evidence to say that there is life after death so I will assume for the time being that there is no life after death.
Threesome: and taxes- Have you got all your tax documents squared away and ready to work on? Or are you one of the people at the post office on April 15th?
Don't worry, I'll get it done before the deadline.
Bacteria Enter Their Golden Years. This summary in Science reports that bacteria (in this case E. coli) indeed get old. Older cells, that is, the cells inheriting the older part of the cell wall from the parent cell, divide more slowly than newer cells. If you're interested, here is the article in PLoS Biology. There's even a video down in the supporting materials.
A Kiss with Consequences. Here's another summary from Science. In this bit of research, scientists show that a neurotransmitter called kisspeptin (which was originally discovered in cancer research) is a key player for the onset of puberty. For more info, read the PNAS paper.
Muddy microbes retrieved from the abyss. Scientists recovered many bacteria when they went collecting sediment samples down in Challenger Deep. The observed foraminifera were soft-walled creatures--perhaps they're so abundant in the ocean deep because they're the only organisms that can withstand the pressure. Also see the Science article.
Friendly foxes are cleaverer. In some experiments where researchers test the ability of a fox to notice human body cues, "domesticated foxes show evolution of social intelligence", but by the way the experiments were set up, we can't know for sure. Maybe the domesticated foxes were just hungrier than the wild foxes. Here's Current Biology'sabstract.
Somebody searched for "scientist have discovered most women at sometime will contain intelligent DNA" recently. Sometime?! I think somebody needs a swift kick in his stupid ass.
The latest edition of Tangled Bank, the biweekly (as in every two weeks, not twice a week!) collection of self-selected science posts around the web, is finally up at About Town. Go, shoo! Click on that link and read some interesting stuff.
So this is that time of year again, and depending on whether you're with it or not, there's either anticipation or fascination. For me, it's mostly fond childhood memories of gastronomic delights and traditional activities. Now, I'm stuck in the hinterlands. I could drive down to the nearest Chinatown for my yearly fix of Chinese pastries, but my current schedule prevents me from doing so. I could look up the college Asian community and drop in on their festivities, but I did that last year and felt somewhat alienated.
Childhood memories can be deceiving. Maybe when I was younger, I had different expectations. Today, I'm not quite sure what to expect. I know I'm not the only one to have this experience, but I feel as if I'm a mutant among Asians who are able to cling to their cultural traditions because they live in large, ethnic enclaves on the coasts. Am I too "Westernized"? In one sense, I am--I attach more importance on being an individual and doing my own thing. Following tradition just because everyone else is doing so chafes against my personal inclinations. In another sense, I'm not. I don't watch television or follow any particular fashion.
It's the old problem of feeling torn between two cultures. If I say I have more affinity to one than the other, I would feel incredibly insincere. There is, too, the awful feeling of being doubly rejected. Among the immigrant Chinese, there is a term called ABC--American-born Chinese. To some people, this may be merely descriptive, but "ABC" can be bandied about as if the possessors of that title were no more than babies regardless of age. Like real babies who could probably recite "a, b, c" and no more, one class of ABCs is generally considered culturally inept--ABCs who hardly know the language of their ancestors, are ignorant of Eastern mores, shun their ethnic roots in their social lives. Another class of ABCs has found a way to learn the language and the culture--overcompensate and become more Chinese than Chinese, ethnic super achievers. For obvious reasons, these people are praised for keeping their cultural identity intact in a country known as a melting pot.
I find this either-or dichotomy amazing. I cannot pick one or the other and yet conventional wisdom says that I can't really have both because different cultures are like oil and water. Is there no compromise?
My earliest memories of celebrating Chinese New Year involved church. In my experience, the Asian population was small and scattershot; any significant congregation (and yes, it was a congregation) borrowed space at a church to not only worship the Christian god but to also meet for social events. This included the New Year festival. Perhaps it wasn't quite so odd that one would celebrate something with pagan origins at a church, but no one really thought about it either. And it wasn't as if people were trying to incorporate one part of their lives with another either--taking over a church for a holiday was just one example. A certain immigrant mindset took over everything--what jobs to take, where to send the kids to school, who to associate with. Buy a huge house and expensive cars on one hand and be a tightwad about purchasing a pencil on the other.
Is it the nature of the beast that I start questioning my identity whenever these things come up? Who am I? What am I? I despise those questions asking me where I'm really from. I don't want to tick those boxes which will box me into a racial category. I don't want to be painted as a psychologically tortured Amy Tan heroine. Am I destined to wandering because I have no place?
Am I really that eager to belong to anything? Do I really want to attach myself to a particular image just so I can explain in one word, 99% of who I am? I say this with the risk of ultra-Chinese ABCs and Asian Pride kiddies denouncing me for cultural rejection. But that's the problem--lots of people see things in only one way: acceptance must be complete and total.
In reality, people who think they know me would be able to describe me in very few words. I don't exactly display a scintillating personality in my interactions with most people and maybe this gives the illusion that nothing much is going on in my head. More gregarious people would point out that giving that impression is entirely my fault. Maybe it is, but just as I have the compulsion to be known as something more complex than a dud, I also find it somewhat crass to define myself to the world when no one, not even the so-called ABCs, can be confined to a single definition.
It's not so much the rejection notices, but I'm tired of paying postage. The only time I submitted anything online was a couple years ago and it was more on a lark than anything serious. So what do you think, are online paying speculative fiction markets legit? Do they hold as much weight as print magazines? If not, are they so lightweight that I shouldn't bother with them at all?
Play it again, Psam. I got a little chuckle out of this cute bit of speculative fiction in Nature by Ian Stewart (who also wrote Does God Play Dice? and Flatterland). As a student, I often wish that my brain had a port in which I could plug in information chips and just download the stuff I need to know instead of staying up at night studying. But then again, wouldn't it be sort of horrifying to have that info chip infected with some sort of computer virus that could hijack your thought processes?
My neighbors are yelling and screaming at their television sets like a bunch of warring baboons gone completely berserk. Every time they bellow, I shudder. Even this sort of couch potato violence is abhorrent to my sensibilities.
The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution by Richard Dawkins. There are two descriptions that come to mind: quirky and encyclopedic. It's encyclopedic because there's just so much information and trivia packed into six hundred pages. It's quirky because Dawkins is so conversational (no, I don't mean controversial) and opinionated that his whole personality simply saturates the work. A technical paper, this isn't. If you took out the quirkiness, all you would have left would be your run-of-the-mill introduction to evolutionary theory textbook.
What is unique about this book is that Dawkins draped an introduction to the field based on the framework of the Canterbury Tales. In The Ancestor's Tale, the pilgrims are the organisms alive today and the road is our evolutionary path (except we're going backwards). The destination: the ancestor of all living things. Like Chaucer's work, each of the pilgrims (in this case a representative organism) tells a story. The "parables" are particular cases that illustrate a principle or concept of evolution. For example: how blind cave fish lose their eyes, the peacock tail's role in sexual selection, fruit flies and the hox genes. Many of these "tales" (the Peacock's Tale, The Blind Cave Fish's Tale, The Fruit Fly's Tale, etc.) are classic lessons that any student that has taken a biology course, or any well-read person for that matter, would recognize. The added structure of going back through time and meeting groups of pilgrims/organisms at "rendezvous" points where we can look at the last common ancestor makes the narrative smooth and easy to understand.
The quirky part of the book is mostly Dawkin's tendency to go off on a tangent. In some cases, it's understandable--such as an explanation on radioactive decay as a segue into radiocarbon dating. In other cases--well, suffice to say, it's like sitting in a lecture hall when the prof suddenly starts ranting and raving with no provocation whatsoever. Sometimes Dawkins manages to refrain himself by adding footnotes (I recommend reading those, they're good for a snicker in context). And then there are those noticeable lapses when he starts spewing about politicians, tenured professors, and the bad behavior of humanity in general. Oh, and one can't forget those inserted reminders for creationists to not misquote him. Maybe all these "reminders" are just desperate attempts to stir up people's ire.
And finally, there is another reason that The Ancestor's Tale is similar to an encyclopedia. Remember when you were a kid and you looked up an entry in the encyclopedia only to be told to look it up at a different entry? Dawkin's work cross-references like mad. He might say, "Oh, I might explain this to you here, but you'll have to go to So-and-So's Tale for that story." And if you didn't already know what he was getting at, you'd have to flip to the table of contents, look up So-and-So's Tale, and read that first before you went back to your original place. There are also numerous remarks about how it's explained in more detail in his other books or other people's books. So this was interesting, but the reader would wonder how much he would be missing without all those other books on his shelf.
Last night, I was looking around at All Consuming and wondering why for the past couple of months it did not register all the books I was reading. I know this blog will never influence the results over there, but it seemed somewhat unfair that that the app trawling all the sites looking for books overlooked someone who goes through books with some frequency.
Well, at least I have a small consolation that I am not going with the crowd. The most cited books through the weeks and months are as predictable as a train schedule. I suppose for reading, most people would rather follow other people's recommendations than pluck a book semi-randomly from a shelf. And you really have to invest some non-trivial amount of time in reading the book. Maybe this is why more people have obscure music tastes than unusual tastes in reading.
In one of the creative writing classes--it turned out it was the first time that class was offered--I signed up for during my undergrad years, the professor told everyone that he really didn't care what subject or genre that we wrote about but he warned us not to write about sci-fi spaceships and whatnot. Apparently the department head thought genre fiction, particularly sci-fi, defeated the purpose of creative writing and because he was so afraid that students would write space operas he decided to personally monitor the class at random times and read what everyone else wrote.
I also took a poetry class that was taught by that department head and he told all the students point blank that he didn't care for any modern poetry. This meant that to him, everything after 1950 was pretty much crap.
I remember thinking that it was kind of weird. I was at an institution where future innovation was pretty much the norm and here was this old guy stubbornly clinging to the past, reaching out with claws in an attempt to drag everyone else back with him.
Jacob's Ladder: The History of the Human Genome by Henry Gee. I am not sure what exactly made me pick up this book. Maybe it was the word "genome" in the title or the science feel of the cover. To be honest, I didn't read the summaries or the endorsements by Jared Diamond and Carl Zimmer, but I had some preconception that maybe the book was about sequencing the human genome. It isn't. The operative word in the subtitle is "history" and that's precisely what we get.
This isn't a bad book by any stretch of the imagination, but one has to keep in mind the audience that it was indended for--the non-biology person. Jacob's Ladder is divided into two parts: genetics as it was before the establishement of DNA as the material for heredity and everything afterwards. The prose and explanation is lucid--ideal reading material for anyone unfamiliar with the subject--but I found it, particularly Part Two, rather tedious. However, this probably reflects more on my impatient nature than the ability of the author. I've already studied about Avery, Watson and Crick, transcription, translation, the lac operon, hox genes, and regulatory networks. It was somewhat like sitting through a rehash of freshman biology without the benefit of looking at diagrams.
But don't get me wrong. I wasn't completely bored. The best part of the book was Part One where we go back to the "father of biology", Aristotle, who asked the crucial question, where do babies come from? College science programs often don't offer or require you to take any history--which in some ways is a relief because I am not enamored with the subject--but the result is, I am somewhat fuzzy when it comes to any scientific history before 1900. There was Hooke, Darwin, and Mendel, of course, but I had fun learning about the other guys: William Harvey and chicken embryology, the microscopist Marcello Malpighi, Nicolas Hartsoeker and his rolled up homunculi, Caspar Friedrich Wolff and vis essentialis, and Jean Baptiste de Lamarck and his concept of need or besoin. I enjoyed reading about the debate between Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and George Cuvier: was the form of an organism adapted for its lifestyle or were organisms only different superficially and had the same underlying structure?
Part One is infused with Goethe's nature-philosophy attitude. In those days, biology was indistinguishable from philosophy. Many natural philosophers believed that the progression of development equaled the progression towards perfection. In Part Two, the author warns us that we shouldn't believe that evolution will always lead to something better. What if, in the process of tweaking our own genetic regulatory networks to make improved humans we tweak our own humanity out of existence? Gee presents an interesting question but omits the answer, leaving the reader somewhat muddled and disturbed.
Brain Scans for Sale. "Despite these caveats, some entrepreneurs and researchers are carrying brain imaging into new, nonmedical territory that could be ethically treacherous. Some of these uses, such as lie detection, are already upon us; others, such as the use of brain scans to screen job applicants, seem almost certain to be explored or developed." For every new piece of technology, there are always ethical problems. The critical questions to ask in all these cases are: Are we willing to give up control of our own lives? If we are given control over other people's lives, should we take it? If using a new piece of technology for something that it wasn't originally intended--if there's a possibility that it will change or destroy the meaning of being human, should we do it?
U.S. students say press freedoms go too far. Why? I would be interested to know why they think so. Is it because they're ignorant of the First Amendment? Do they find even today's watered down news too uncomfortable? Do they not like to read about dissenting opinions? Is it something else?
History of Phrenology. Character divination by looking at the shape of a person's head! I'm glad people don't believe in that stuff anymore. Who knows what the shape of my head is supposed to say about me.
Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century by Lauren Slater. This isn't just a work of non-fiction laying out the key experiments that are the foundation for modern psychology. This is a collection of personal, empathic essays which show the human side of the scientists involved, not just the mythic and reviled image that most of the public accepts on face value. I say that this is a collection of essays because even though the book is organized in chapter form, each chapter is strong enough to stand on its own.
We first get a profile of B.F. Skinner when the author goes on a search for his daughter, Deborah, who was supposedly locked up in a box until she was two years old. The truth isn't as horrible as the myths make it out to be, but Skinner did make the box (it was called the Heir Conditioner). He made a lot of them for his experiments on conditioning which could be traced back to Pavlov's dogs which salivated on the cue of a bell. Skinner believed that human beings could be conditioned for good behavior (thus for a better world), but today, he is most remembered because of the darker implications of his work--that people can be controlled like automatons.
The rest of the book also details the profiles of major psychologists who became infamous because of the uncomfortable implications of their work. There's Stanley Milgram and his experiments on obedience which showed that a significant number of subjects were willing to kill another person if told to do so. David Rosenhan decided to see if psychiatrists were able to distinguish sane from insane people by putting himself in a mental hospital. In the Darley and Latané experiments, we discover that people are less willing to help when they're in a large group because responsibility is diluted. Leon Festinger developed his theory of "cognitive dissonance" when he and his colleagues infiltrated a group of religious cultists. Harry Harlow attempted to tease apart the nature of love with experiments on monkeys that nowadays we would consider completely inhumane. Stories about contemporary scientists delve into the realms of addiction, memory, and psychosurgery.
And there is also the personal side to these essays. Slater tries some of the experiments on herself--can she get herself admitted to a mental hospital even though she is completely sane? Would she become addicted to a drug because of the widely accepted theory that it is chemistry or will she not because of the environment? There are the interviews. Slater meets the traumatized subjects of Milgram's experiment. She talks to a mother who thinks her comatose daughter has a direct fax-line to God. A professor conducts an interview under his desk as a demonstration of free will. Another professor who believes that memory is malleable and unreliable reveals her own loopiness with left field comments. Slater also talks with a man willing to undergo the modern day version of the lobotomy, the cingulotomy.
These essays reveal that the field of psychology is split into two as if the subject itself had a right and left brain. On one hand, we have the behavioral scientists. It could be labeled as "soft" science as there is very little that is quantitative. How do you measure behavior anyway? Within the experiments, what do you expect people to do? What sort of controls can you set up? Is it even possible to set up any controls? Behavioral psychology is still very much rooted in philosophy and morality and sociology. On the other hand, we have the neurologists with their pills and drugs and dissections. They want to understand how our brains work on a molecular level and all experiments are quantitative and controlled. So how can these two sides be reconciled? As far as I can tell, Opening Skinner's Box doesn't indicate that there is any mixing of the two sides. They might as well be two completely different disciplines.
Opening Skinner's Box is actually one of those rare books in which I couldn't wait to read what was on the next page. I'm not quite sure why this was so. Maybe it was the writing style--Slater doesn't hesitate to be both personable and personal. Or it could be the subject matter itself. Before this, I didn't know anything about the field, let alone the history behind it, except what had been done on visual perception and memory. Or maybe it was the sheer kookiness of it all--I have to admit that the author's approach to researching and presenting controversial subjects was a bit audacious. If you're looking for a non-fiction read, I guarantee that you won't be disappointed with this one.
Onesome: All-- all the world's a stage... So what types of issues put you on your soapbox?
Anything can put me on the soapbox if I'm feeling annoyed enough. It depends on the day, the mood, the context. I try to stay away from politics though (there's enough bloggers ranting about that already).
Twosome: Things-- what sort of things are you most likely to purchase "spur of the moment" when shopping?
Books. Sometimes I really wonder if I'm just a crazed bibliophile hiding out in an unassuming body.
Threesome: Girl-- sugar and spice and everything nice? Come now, what are YOU really made of?
Over half of me is made of water. Which is a fact for everyone else. I hope other people think I'm a nice person, but most of the time I probably turn out flaky.
1. You've been given a grant to open a bookstore. Describe it physically and describe what you'd stock, what events you'd have, etc. (this is not in the form of a question, Alex — oh well).
The front of the store would be narrow, three stories tall, and hewn out of a gray stone. A small wrought iron fence would sit just outside the doorstep. There would be no sign except for a plaque next to the front door. The door itself would be wood with a brass handle. In fact, when you go inside, everything would be all polished wood and brass. The light is a little muted but cozy. Aside from the shelves of books at the walls, there would be couches and chairs and strange machines that look like they came out of a 1920s mad scientist's lab. Glass bottles filled with unidentifiable contents would be interspersed into the shelves and a cat or two would wander around.
Books stocked would include anything science related, science fiction, fantasy, horror, philosophy, a romance or two, tons of maps, history, art, psychology, metaphysics, religion, fairy tales and folklore (for the kids), mysteries, maybe some erotica, cookbooks, and some classics (nothing modern, definitely before 1950). I'd rather not have bestsellers or self-help books or magazines but definitely no politics. A cafe would take up the top floor and it'll serve tea and coffee and cookies and sandwiches among a variety of other things.
What sort of events would I do? Local poets would be welcome to recite their works. Book readings and book signings--as long as the author is not doing a political book. I think it would be awesome to have visiting scientists doing science lectures or demonstrations for the public.
2. What is the most interesting item on your last grocery store recipt?
Avocado rolls.
3. What's the story behind one of your scars?
I don't have any scars. This probably means I'm too young, too cautious, or both.
The Monolith on the Hill. Ah, a student complaining that the school may be too liberal and that we need more political diversity. I've also heard other people complaining that the school is too conservative. The truth? Obviously somewhere in between.
Making Books. A Washington Post article about print-on-demand books. After every Nanowrimo, there are always these giddy writers who want to see their work in print so they go POD. They can do that--as long as they know what they're getting into. The problem is that a lot of them are so blinded by the idea of being published that they never read the fine print. Personally, I've gotten e-mails from POD companies and I've just chucked them into the spam bin. I'm going the old-fashioned route by sending my manuscripts through snail mail. Sure, this has a daunting rate for failure, but the possible payoff will would be far higher.
Surprise: Parents more Web-savvy. "New Nielsen study says teens bored quickly, frustrated easily online." Well, we could blame this on bad website design, but I don't think that's it. Teenagers have grown up in a fast-paced, MTV-like environment and they only expect the internet to be like that too.
The Mold in Dr. Florey's Coat: The Story of the Penicillin Miracle by Eric Lax. When it comes to getting a fresh dose of science news, don't count on The New York Times. In the case of discovering penicillin's antibiotic activities and the subsequent 1945 Nobel Prize awarded for the work, the newspaper gave Alexander Fleming the main credit when in fact it was Howard Florey and Ernst Chain who seized upon the therapeutic values of penicillin and ran with it.
In demystifying the penicillin story, Lax does point out one thing that is true--Alexander Fleming did discover penicillin. But was it really an accident, a stroke of serendipity? Upon examining Fleming's laboratory notebooks, one would have to conclude it was a natural outgrowth of his previous research on the antibacterial properties of lysozyme. Sure, Penicillium notatum was killing staphylococci on his plates, but other historians suspect that he first labeled this as lysozyme activity. However when he did realize the agent killing the bacteria was a novel one, he failed to isolate it and abandoned the project altogether.
At Oxford, the head of the pathology department, a brash Australian upstart by the name of Howard Florey, and a German-Jewish chemist, Ernst Chain, took up the problem and systematically devised a plan to purify and extract penicillin and test its efficacy on bacterial infection in animal models and clinical trials. The extraction process, unfortunately, was laborious and the Oxford researchers soon found themselves in a vicious cycle. In order to get data from clinical trials, they needed more penicillin than the lab could produce. Only a pharmaceutical company would have the resources for large scale production. However the drug companies wouldn't invest in penicillin production unless there was clinical data. Despite the initial promise of a new wonder drug, the British pharmaceutical companies failed to take up the bait and in the end it was the American companies like Merck and Pfizer that filed patents and claimed royalties on penicillin.
Even though Fleming discovered penicillin, he would have remained an obscure scientist without Florey and Chain's experiments which proved that penicillin had therapeutic value. So how did Fleming end up with all the credit? Lax speculated that it was a snowball effect due to media frenzy and propagation of misinformation. In 1942, The Lancet published an article reporting the miraculous therapeutic value of penicillin without naming any names. The London Times soon published another article which included a letter from Almroth Wright, the director of the Inoculation Department of St. Mary's Hospital Medical School, crediting the discovery of penicillin to Fleming. (This is rather ironic since Wright, a noted proponent of vaccines, had a grudge against Fleming for touting chemotherapy instead of vaccines as an answer to curing infection.) With this one name, the rest of the media piled on and never looked back.
The scientists at Oxford were perpetually out of funds and they had to cobble together odds and ends for their equipment. A penicillin extraction apparatus consisting of a bookcase frame, glass tubing, copper coils, lights, and a doorbell cost about £5. But even this bit of scrambling was precarious--they knew that if the Nazis invaded England, they would have to burn all their research and start anew elsewhere--so they rubbed the Penicillium notatum spores (which could remain dormant for some time) into their clothes for safe keeping. The most amusing anecdote, I found, was the discovery of the most potent strain of the Penicillium mold on a cantaloupe from a Peoria, Illinois farmer's market. The Mold in Dr. Florey's Coat is actually quite an amazing story. The people involved were an eclectic mix with inevitable personality clashes and grudge matches. It's even more amazing when you realize that these scientists performed this groundbreaking work with World War II as a backdrop.
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