I am … unhindered by talent

photo credit: Unhindered by Talent
In catching up on a bunch of old podcasts (I’m as behind there as I am on posting here), I ran across a very interesting Science Talk podcast from July 30 featuring “an interview with IEEE Spectrum editor in chief, Glenn Zorpette, talks about high-tech attempts to battle improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Iraq as well as the state of reconstruction of Iraq’s electricity grid”. There’s lots of cool geeky stuff about blowing things up, and the high-tech ways people are developing to stop them. Perhaps the most interesting (and significant) bit, though, is at the end, where “journalist John Horgan talks about the possibility of eliminating war”. His position is that war isn’t an inevitable consequence of human nature, and that we might be able to construct a world where we’re much less likely to want to blow each other up. Two key points he mentioned were:

• Democracies are very unlikely to attack other democracies. So more democracies for the win?
• Countries that educate girls and women tend to greatly reduce the risk of conflict.

On a vaguely related point, a SciAm 60 Second Science podcast from way back in late May looks (briefly) at some of the significant problems that researchers are having getting women, especially older women, involved in medical trials.

Women were also more likely than men to say that they’re too old or not healthy enough [to participate in a trial] … But women over 65 are one of the fasted growing segments of the population. … our ability to improve care, develop new treatments and find cures depends on research and educating aging women about their role in medical breakthroughs.

Damn - women are apparently important! Treating half the population like dirt is not only ethically dodgy - it has negative practical consequences as well!

Who’d'a’thunk?

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Just did a pile o’ dishes and listened to a SciAm podcast featuring the remarks of Robert Rosner (head of Argonne National Laboratory). The short version is that science (and, I would argue, education in general) is a matter of necessity plus vision. First, science is not a luxury, but instead a necessity:

Without the science base, you cannot build an industrial base.

Second, science requires long term vision and public and private support in in basic research. It typically takes decades for culture changing technologies to move from the basic idea to ubiquity; Rosen gives as examples railroads, airplanes, transistors, computers, the internet, and lasers. The question then is

How do you convince the politics and the public that that lag in fact is real and that if you don’t make the investments … today … we’ll be lagging things that other folks that are making the investments

Rosen is (quite reasonably) focussed specifically on the question of support for science, but points out that this is part of a larger trend of irrationality in the U.S.:

But we all know that in the United States there are long traditions of anti-intellectualism, of what the Times today also refer to as anti-rationalism, the idea that there really are no facts, it’s all opinion, the idea that scientists [are] just playing their sand box and don’t connect with anybody.

What it really comes down to is a distressingly common failure for Americans to see any form of education (science or humanities, K12 or university) as a necessary investment in the strength and future of our society and country. For me this has become a useful litmus test to separate sensible conservatives (who understand the economic necessity of investment in key areas) from the wingnuts that have come to dominate the Republican party (who spout anti-intellectual nonsense while shredding schools and lining the pockets of themselves and their friends).

Eisenhower understood the practical necessity of an interstate road system, and encouraged and supported that investment. All Shrub can seem to invest in is Halliburton and their ilk.

Things to think (and ask) about in this happy election season.

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I was listening to a recent podcast from Steve Lamacq’s “In new music we trust” program where he was interviewing the Video Nasties. At one point Lamacq asks them how they got turned on to all these classic punk recordings as kids. It was from going through their dad’s record collection!

When I went through my Dad’s record collection, I was discovering excellent jazz from the 40’s and 50’s, as well as brilliant stuff from Mort Sahl and Tom Lehrer. Other kids my age might have reasonably found early recordings of Elvis and classic 50’s R&B, blues, or country.

For Sub-Evil Boy’s generation, this is how they might find the Sex Pistols and Siouxsie And The Banshees.

Now I definitely need to go lie down.

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Listening to a podcast of a concert by Art Brut as part of NPR’s Live Concerts series. I didn’t know anything about these folks, but this is a total blast of loud, punk fun. Silly, strange, and definitely bad for your hearing.

A complete hoot, really :-). I’m definitely in favor!

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Another in the generally excellent series of TED talks, this time with Lessig in fine form on his favorite subject of how horribly broken our current approaches to copyright are. One of his repeated points that rings very true for the father of a 13 year is the role that (digital) remixes play in their lives. It’s what they watch, and it’s what they make. Sub-Evil doesn’t take snapshots and write letters to his friends back home. He takes photos and video at school, remixes them, and posts them to YouTube for his friends (here and there) to watch. He takes photos his Morris friends post on Facebook, remixes them, and then posts them back to Facebook. This is how he connects and communicates with his peer groups. Quite a change from his old man’s experiences 30 years ago, but that doesn’t make it any less true, despite all the inane business, legal, and legislative decisions that try to ignore that reality.

You can’t kill the instinct the technology produces, we can only criminalize it. We can’t stop our kids from using it, we can only drive it underground. … Ordinary people live life against the law … [our kids] live life knowing they live it against the law. That realization is extraordinarily corrosive, extraordinarily corrupting, and in a democracy we ought to be able to do better…

Amen, brother.

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What price are we collectively willing to pay for fewer cavities?

A week or two ago I caught a cool interview with Jessica Sachs on the 24 Oct issue of the SciAm Science Talk podcast, and chose to subscribe to her blog as a result.

She just posted a piece that is a great example of both how totally cool and utterly creepy modern molecular biology can be. The short version is that Jeff Hillman has done some pretty amazing (and potentially scary) engineering on Streptococcus mutans (the micro-organism in your mouth responsible for much of your tooth decay) in an effort to reduce our problems with cavities. He’s done this by:

• Identifying a variety of Strep. mutans that tends to crowd out other varieties.
• Knock out the gene that produces the acid that eats away at your teeth.
• Splice in new genes that produce alcohol instead. It turns out that the acid was crucial to the bug’s waste disposal process, and without it it died. The alcohol can serve a similar function, without being damaging your enamel. And, yes, the amounts of alcohol are so tiny as to have no inebriating effect.

In theory, then, he can introduce this newly engineering bug into your mouth, and it will crowd out the bad Strep. mutans currently beavering away at your beautiful teeth, leaving you with a mouthful of (presumably benign) alcohol producing critters and fewer cavities as a result.

Hillman’s had trouble getting permission to run human trials, though, in part because the FDA is concerned about his bug “escaping” into the wild and having unexpected consequences. They’ve required that he create a way to essentially put the genie back in the bottle if need be, so he’s engineered a version that doesn’t produce a key enzyme it needs, so users will have to swish daily with a solution containing the enzyme to maintain their population of tooth-friendly bugs. His first approval allowed him to work with two people with dentures, but he’s just gotten permission to work with people with real teeth, although “the volunteers will be isolated in a biohazard ward for the study’s one-week duration”.

This all sounds a lot like a Michael Crichton novel, and I’m sure there are those who are dismayed by the FDA’s caution regarding what sounds like a potentially revolutionary win for human dental health. Their concerns definitely aren’t irrational, however, as Hillman’s essentially proposing releasing a deliberately invasive species into the complex ecosystem of human mouths all across the planet. Unfortunately our track record with deliberate introductions ain’t real hot (rabbits in Australia anyone?), and these genies have typically been impossible to re-bottle.

From a commercial perspective, for example, it would clearly be easier to sell the treatment if they removed the need to swish daily, although there’s no doubt good money to be made in selling the swishing stuff, and re-selling the treatment to people that missed their swish and need to start over. Without that safeguard, however, then this can (and presumably will) spread pretty quickly through the human population before we will have any clear idea of the long term implications of replacing a long-standing resident in our mouths.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out, and I suspect that the true long-term impact (for good or for ill) won’t be known even in my lifetime. In the meantime, careful who you kiss - you never know what kind of heavily engineered super-critter might be living in their mouth.

Thanks to dhammza for the cool photo.

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One of my goals for our sabbatical year is to figure some things out about my photography. I really like taking pictures, and I don’t completely suck at it, but it isn’t my job and it can consume a lot of time and money. The massive ego part of me would really like to see my photographs published, hanging in galleries, etc., etc., etc. That, however, takes work, and really isn’t what I’m supposed to be doing with my days (either here or when we return home next summer).

So I’m trying a really low impact option, namely selling prints via ImageKind. They connect in nice ways to Flickr, which makes it easier for me to move images into their universe, and then they provide nice printing and framing services, sending me a small piece of the action on any of my photos that they sell. I’ve started with a small gallery of six images, and will add more in bits and pieces over the next few weeks.

I can attest to the quality of their printing and framing. I used them to print and frame one of the images I have hanging in the Horizontal Grandeur show at the Stevens County History Museum. The print was very good (probably not quite as nice as what we get from AutumnColor, but AutumnColor charges quite the pretty penny for their work), and the framing was very nicely done.

I don’t ever expect to make any real money at this, but if I’m lucky there might be enough in it to buy a new tripod :-).

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Huzzah! One of the advantages of having internet at home is that I could (more easily) upload the second in our bizarre and on-going serious of video podcast/slide show thingies. This has three major sections, featuring the University of Essex, in and around our new apartment, and Colchester. It has been (correctly) pointed out that I talk too much, so I think we may leave me out of the narration next time :-).

I wasn’t very happy with the compression last time, so I played with generating a higher quality file. The quality definitely is improved, but it takes longer to download and play as a consequence. I also had trouble uploading the larger file to YouTube, so I switched to Google Videos. Google’s software was much easier to use, and actually worked; YouTube, however, clearly has quite a lot more features (many useful) once you have the video uploaded. I also generated a 640×480 version that’s much nicer (if even bigger), but when I uploaded that Google clearly resized it on me because it still displays at 320×240. I might just put the larger one up on our web site and see how that goes.

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HTB!* We’ve gone and made a silly video podcast that almost entirely fails to detail any of our adventures here in the UK! And posted it to YouTube! So you can watch! And listen!

Phew - I feel so much better now…

Ok, it’s short, silly, and largely pointless, but it’s us without all that annoying cost of flying over here to visit us. (You are, however, more than welcome to engage in the latter behavior as well.) I’ve never done this web video/YouTube thing before, and the amount of compression artifacts is kind of annoying.

We might try to do this every week or two if people care. Or we might not. It all depends :-).

We’re again super grateful to Jess, KK, and KK’s family for their help in getting us to the airport and across the pond. We had a very nice week in Preston (I know I needed the rest), and now we’re in Colchester looking for a place to live and a school for Sub-Evil Boy. We still don’t have stable internet, as the house we’re staying in at the moment doesn’t have any connection. I got a key to my office today, however, which is blessed with much happy internet, so we may spend part of the weekend in here cleaning out accumulated e-mail cruft, catching up with blogs, and the like.

Best to all!

*”Heavens to Betsies!”

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I’m listening to Brainwashed radio on the prehistoric tangerine iBook in the kitchen while I’m making pancakes for the fam on this fine Saturday morning. Some excellent tunes have wandered by, including:

• Cabaret Voltaire - Here to Go [Extended Mx]. Came in in the middle of this, but it made me want to dance. I suspect that WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil Boy would have dug it, which isn’t true of much stuff Brainwashed is likely to play :-).
• Michael Prime - Timeslips. Some cool ambient sound stuff. Reminded me of several ReR records, including Lauren Weinger’s wonderfully atmospheric Silo, Peter Cusack’s very cool (ho ho!) Baikal Ice, and Chris Cutler’s excellent pair Twice around the earth and There and back again.
• Hox - 7f’s. Some wonderful heavy-beat noise dance fun. Sub-Evil Boy couldn’t help jamming out a bit when he wandered through with some dishes. I could definitely imagine spending money on that…
• The Hafler Trio - The Closed Bread/An Elderly Testament. More cool ambient stuff, but much more constructed (vs. found) than the Michael Prime piece. Reminds me of Tod Dockstader and David Less Myers’ Bijou.

I quite like both Brainwashed’s radio and podcast, and have often thought that ReR really ought to do something similar. Their music is pretty hard to conceptualize, especially if you’ve not listened to much of it before, so I think written descriptions aren’t a super effective way of conveying how cool some of it is. A podcast on the other hand…

Sure, it would require some careful editing (lots of their releases are very long, like Fred Frith’s recent Impur, which clocks in at nearly an hour), and I’m sure they’re running on a shoestring, but Brainwashed certainly shows that it’s possible. I’ll bet there’s some clever fan or three out there that would do something like this in return for access to the catalog.

Maybe I should send them an e-mail encouraging them to look into is…

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