Author: gulley

I saw this one a while back, and for some time I thought I wouldn’t post it, but it’s just too funny. Rude, but funny. Consider yourself warned. The topic under discussion is how one might effectively introduce an earnest visitor from Japan to the urban vernacular on, say, the mean streets of Oakland, California. From Becky’s T*Blog, I give you Off the Hook: Randall C. Miller Jr.’s Conversational Ebonics.

Don’t be a playa hater! Show me some love.

I’m sending this post out especially to my cousin Margaret in Avery County, North Carolina.

A biome is a distinctive ecosystem well-adapted for a specific geographic region and climate: tundra, taiga, savanna, your mouth. Ecosystems, it turns out, are complex, well-adapted, and crowded even as you get into teeny tiny biomes like your mouth, your stomach, and your butt. Colon! I meant to say colon. Sorry about that.

Anyway, the point here is that until very recently we just never knew what was swimming in your spit. But you’ve got something like 700 species of micro-organisms in your mouth alone. Did you brush your teeth this morning? There are only 375 distinct mammalian species in all of Tanzania, home of the famous Ngorongoro Conservation Area. You’ve got a bigger zoo under your tongue! Furthermore, research by Princeton’s Bonnie Bassler and others reveals complex means of cell-to-cell communication among bacteria. Those bugs aren’t swirling around your molars in writhing chaos. In fact they are present in specific well-regulated symbiotic combinations. They make plans. They dance. They do lunch. They do your lunch, actually. And a good thing too, because you’d be pretty worthless working your way through that egg salad sandwich without a gutful of E. coli to help spin it into you and poo.

I got started thinking about this after reading a post over at The Personal Genome: Your microbiota is SOOOO agnotobiotic. In it, the author Jason Bobe serves up these tasty stats. You have:

• 10 billion bacteria per ml of saliva (with 700 or more species in the oral cavity)
• 100 billion micro-organisms per ml of material in the human colon
• 1 trillion bacteria on the human skin (2 square meters total of human skin)
• 10 trillion human cells in our bodies
• 100 trillion micro-organisms in the human gastrointestinal tract

Think about it this way: you’re never really alone.

I’m back from a week’s vacation at the beach in North Carolina. I got home with enough daylight to give me time for a run along the Charles River near my home. The run gave me a chance to recalibrate myself to the local culture. For a week I had been in a place where people consistently smile at, maintain eye contact with, and say hello to people they do not know. I was reminded this afternoon that this kind of behavior is greeted with surprise and suspicion in metropolitan Boston. By the end of my run I was able to be tight-lipped and evasive once again.

My wife, though born in Chicago, also grew up in North Carolina (she claims her Midwestern roots whenever she needs to disavow some embarrassing aspect of Southern culture). She has grown so tired of the sour and silent avoidance of eye contact that passes for greeting around here that she is considering launching a campaign called Just Say Hi. She wants me to design a t-shirt for her new cause. I pointed out that a woman walking around with a t-shirt that says Just Say Hi may invite somewhat more attention than desired.

Still, it does make you wonder how different cultures evolve. It also makes me wonder about the geographical distribution of friendly greetings. Is there a quantitative measure of stranger-friendliness that you could plot on a heat map of the US and see, perhaps, a sharp rise across the Mason-Dixon line? And where are the inflection points of friendliness as one moves from sullen New England westward to the cheerful and welcoming Midwest?

I’ve seen examples of multiple pictures being stitched together into panoramas and even three dimensional models, but this work from Carnegie Mellon is particularly impressive in that it builds models from a single photograph. Be sure and check out the little movies on this page.

Somehow this makes me think of a cybernetic version of the bloodhound that can track down a criminal based only on an old handkerchief. Pretty soon, we’ll be able to take a scrap of a movie poster from Titanic, say something with just a fragment of the boat and Leonardo DiCaprio’s nose on it, and we’ll wave it at the computer and say “Come on boy! There you go! It’s melodramatic historical fiction. Now go! Go get ‘im little feller!” And after grinding and chugging for a few minutes, the computer will churn out the entire film.

Guy Ottewell, astronomy writer and eccentric polymath, writes a well-regarded annual astronomical calendar. His Astronomical Companion is the best single book I’ve ever read on astronomy. As an inveterate teacher, he also created an exercise called the Thousand Yard Model, in which the size and relative location of the nine planets is made graphically apparent to students. If, it instructs us, the Sun is an eight-inch ball, then the Earth is a peppercorn 26 yards away and Jupiter is a chestnut 132 yards away. The name of the exercise stems from the fact that tiny Pluto is a pinhead a thousand yards away. The resulting exercise gives a visceral sense of the relative emptiness even of so crowded a region of space as our Solar System.

I thought of the peppercorn Earth model because of a nifty visualization I saw this morning on information aesthetics called The Size Of Our World. The graphics are lovely, and while you don’t get a feel for how far apart things are, you get a better sense of relative sizes with their rendered, shaded spheres than you would with flat cartoons. The bodies displayed graduate from planets to larger and larger stars until we are treated to the enormity of mighty Antares (It looks like Mars in the sky, but it’s not; it’s anti-Ares. Get it?). The very best part is the fact that the stars cast shadows on the surface beneath them. You know, I’d bet quite a lot that old Betelgeuse has never ever once in its venerable star life cast a shadow. I would go so far as to suggest that a star with a shadow is going to have some serious self-esteem issues.

The US is out of World Cup contention, but we all knew the fun had to end some time. See you in four years! In the meantime, there’s still plenty of great soccer to watch. Ben Hammersley’s blog alerted me to a lovely Argentinian goal from their game against Serbia and Montenegro. The game was a 6-0 rout, but still, even if you don’t care much for soccer watch this video and reflect on the fact that every touch had to be just so for the last shot to go in the goal. I think of scoring in soccer as a safecracking job. You’re always turning the tumblers, turning, turning. Usually you’ve chosen a bad combination, CLUNK. But sometimes all the pieces drop into place, CLICK, and it’s just a lovely thing.

I thought of that video when I stumbled across this fun link on Information Aesthetics. It’s a Danish site that replays important World Cup plays using a game engine. The graphics aren’t terribly impressive, but the content is. You can study plays in detail from different angles, including first person views by all players, to see what went right and wrong. So herewith, I recommend the “Flyvende kamera” view for the second goal by Esteban Cambiasso in Game 21, Gruppe C.

Four years ago, I picked up a copy of the new SEED magazine (tagline: “Science is Culture”). I was unimpressed and convinced that it would speedily vanish. I was wrong. I still think it’s an odd mix of a magazine and rarely buy it, but beyond the magazine, the parent Seed Media Group has built an impressive stable of science blogs under the name, er, ScienceBlogs, or Sb for short. It’s sort of Nick Denton-esque cluster of blogs in which the scientists come across as unfiltered outspoken lively characters. I realized they must be onto something when I saw that science writer Carl Zimmer, whose blog I follow, pulled up his tent stakes at Corante and moved to Sb.

The kind of blogs hosted at Sb fill an important role that, for people like me at any rate, has long been vacant. They tell you what the real deal is with scientific papers that are in the news. I don’t have subscriptions to Science or Nature, so I never get farther than the abstracts, but now I have a way to find out what a geneticist thinks when someone publishes about the mingled heritage of humans and chimps. Fun. This motley collection of blogs authored by working scientists comes closer than the magazine to SEED’s stated goal of connecting science to society.

They always tell you not to point your camera toward the sun if you want good pictures, but every now and then you get lucky. Take a look at this APOD picture of sunspots in ultraviolet light: APOD: 2006 June 11 – Sunspot Loops in Ultraviolet

It’s incredible to think that this is what that bright thing up in the sky looks like all the time (assuming you had great big ultraviolet eyeballs). Ordinarily, astronomical photos of the sun tend to flatten the solar disk, but somehow this picture makes it look like you’re coming in for a landing. It looks like the very pit of Hell.

Solar closeups are getting better and better these days, and, relative to snapshots of dusty garbage heaps on old asteroids, they always seem to suggest a profound and dynamic malevolence. I know Mr. Golden Sun is our friend, but this picture reminds me of Sauron’s lidless eye. I love the tiny Earth shown to provide a sense of the monstrous scale of the sunspot. Here’s some more good stuff from SPACE.com, complete with labels and arrows indicating where the lovely twists, canals, and hairs can be found. Which is to say BIG HOT APOCALYPTIC twists, canals, and hairs.

Naturally, real scientists need to distance themselves from this kind of emotional response. Even so, sometimes a scientific debate can benefit from a show of emotion. Al Gore is making waves right now by getting people rattled by the case for global warming. But did you know that, our problems aside, the sun has got a nasty case of solar warming? I feel strangely comforted by the fact that something is going wrong somewhere in the solar system, and it’s NOT OUR FAULT.