Here’s a little slice of Ned’s Ancient History: I artfully surfed the dying wave of the Cold War. I paid for an expensive education with the help of an Air Force ROTC scholarship, thanks to Ronald Reagan’s extravagant defense bender. After three years of thoroughly enjoyable active duty, I emerged from the Air Force earlier than expected, thanks to George Bush the Elder’s frantic defense downsizing. Between those bookends, I pulled down the Berlin Wall, caused the Soviet Union to collapse, and co-wrote the smash hit “99 Luftballons”. Which is to say, I came of age in the 80s, and I wore the blue uniform. And I remember the Strategic Air Command (“Peace is our profession”). So does my buddy JMike, who, like me, was a Cold War cadet. For a while, back in the day, he actually worked at SAC Headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base. He was a weather guy, and one day he coked the WX build. I’ll let JMike explain the significance of the phrase. I like this story, and I want you to know that I specifically requested that JMike include the bonus phrase “spooge jar”.
Nature Biotechnology on Synthetic Biology
If you have any interest in synthetic biology, Nature Biotechnology has been kind enough to A) devote a special issue to the topic and B) make it available for free. I first learned about this on Rob Carlson’s Synthesis blog because he’s the author of an article on the economics of DNA synthesis (PDF).
I also recommend the survey by Lu, Khalil, and Collins: Next-generation synthetic gene networks (also PDF). Taken all together, the issue communicates a sense “We’re moving faster and faster” combined with “Jesus this stuff is complicated!” Commercial breakthroughs won’t come quickly, but it’s hard not to be impressed with the progress being made.
For an indication of where things are headed, look at the projects being built by student teams for the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition. Browse through the abstracts here and remind yourself that these things (these organisms) are being built by undergraduates in a matter of months. The team from Valencia is building the Valencia Lighting Cell Display (iLCD):
We are making a “bio-screen” of voltage-activated cells, where every “cellular pixel” produces light. It is just like a bacterial photographic system, but it’s digital. Within seconds, instead of hours, you can get an image formed of living cells.
I recall doing much less impressive things with my college projects.
GIMME SOME CAW-FEE!
Font designer Mark Simonson does an occasional blog piece called Typecasting (or more recently Son of Typecasting) in which he skewers films for the anachronistic foibles in their fonts. Did you know, for instance, that the steam pressure gauge on James Cameron’s Titanic was set in Helvetica? Crikey! That font was sinking 45 years before it was invented!
It’s a professional hazard. Just as Mark Twain could never look at the Mississippi the same way once he became a riverboat captain, Simonson can’t look at the tombstone in a Western without thinking How did Helvetica (1957) and Eurostile (1962) end up on a tombstone in the year 1885?
When it comes to language, regular readers of the Star Chamber will know that frequent contributor Alan Kennedy is the local expert. This week he has a few thoughts to share about actors and accents.
Happy Groundhog Day!
I can’t let this day pass without a salutation.
Mr. Groundhog has some good news to share: you made it halfway through the winter. It’s February, and you can actually sink your teeth into the afternoon sunlight. Yum.
People often remark that Thanksgiving is nice because, as holidays go, it’s not overly commercialized. Groundhog Day is humbler still. It’s not commercialized, AND nobody knows it exists. Or remembers it, anyway. Plus, it’s named after a rodent. Good luck with that one, Hallmark.
Happy Groundhog Day!
Regenerative medicine: Printed parts for a broken heart
If you needed a kidney, who’s the best person in the world to donate that kidney to you? Your brother? Your sister? Your child? If I told you this was a trick question, you might guess the answer is you. Of all the people in the world, you are the only donor guaranteed to cause no problems with tissue rejection.
By why donate an organ to yourself if it’s already in the right place? Anthony Atala knows the answer.
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
Here’s the short answer. Let’s say your bladder is diseased or broken (sorry). If you give Atala one little chicklet chunk sliced from the healthy side, he’ll pop it in a Magic Grow oven and make you a new one (Please select one of the following: small, medium, large, or extra large. Allow 6-8 weeks for delivery). Then, like a sea turtle release program, a surgeon will introduce your new bespoke bladder to its natural environment: you. It sounds like science fiction, but he’s been doing this successfully for ten years.
I knew this much, but the images are compelling, and I was surprised by how much farther they’ve gotten in the last few years. In their experimental (non-clinical) work, they’re building highly vascularized organs like the liver. They’re using ink-jet printers to make simple hearts. Watch the video. It’s really mind-boggling. By the time I got to the end of it, I was convinced that Bill Gates must have backups of all his organs in three different redundant facilities. Maybe it’ll be cheap enough for me to do that too some day.
Bonus footnote: I grew up in the shadow of Wake Forest University, so I take hometown pride in pointing out that the leading edge of regenerative medicine is happening at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine.
Quasartupilussuusinnaavoq!
A widely traveled friend of mine tells me that there are dozens of countries that pride themselves on having the hottest cuisine in the world. You think you’ve had hot peppers before, my friend? That’s only because you’ve never been to _____. Similarly, people like to believe that their native tongue is the zaniest, most mixed-up and implausible language on the planet. And why not? All languages have their weirdness, and local chauvinism is a satisfying brew. My friend Mike lived in Japan for a few years and got used to having the locals tell him Japanese is wicked hard because, get this, the words for bridge and chopsticks are the same: hashi. He had very little luck explaining that homonyms can be found in English too. Mike liked to point out that, while the writing system and politeness levels are tricky, simply learning to speak Japanese well enough to be understood actually isn’t that hard.
Does it make sense to try to figure out which language is truly the hardest? This is the question that an entertaining essay in the Economist by Robert Lane Greene tries to answer. As you might expect, he doesn’t produced a single answer, but he does give some remarkable facts about languages with difficult sounds (!Xóõ in Botswana has more than twenty clicking sounds) and grammars (Bora in Peru has 350 genders).
My friend Alan, the famous Star Chamber guest author on all matters linguistic, forwarded the article to me with a note that he’d come across it on the Language Log. I recommend reading both the article and the Language Log commentary, because watching linguists argue is almost as much fun as watching statisticians argue, and there many fine points here up with which for discussion to be put.
I especially liked Greene’s comment on long words: “Agglutinating languages—that pack many bits of meaning into single words—are a source of fascination for those who do not speak them.” I am certainly guilty of this. Language Log commenter Bill Poser elaborates as follows.
A point that frequently arises is the idea that languages that pack a lot of information into words are difficult. Is it really self-evident that it is harder to deal with complex words than with multi-word phrases that convey the same information? If a language puts a lot into a word but does so in a transparent way, so that words are easy to parse, interpret, and construct, why should this be difficult? It may well be that the perception of difficulty here merely reflects unfamiliarity, which is likely true of quite a few of the features often cited as leading to difficulty.
Doubleplusgood pointgespoken! Nothing is more contemptible than familiarity, nor more exotic than something that is exoticnessful. Nevertheless, I can’t help but be tickled by a comment from a reader of the Economist article that in Inuit, one can say “it can be very slippery on the deck” with the assertion Quasartupilussuusinnaavoq.
Just Say Hi
For some time my wife Wendy has had strong feelings about the topic of simple friendliness among strangers. I agree with her, but I’m too lazy to do much about it. She’s not. She wants make the world a friendlier place. Will you help her? More follows below…
Flatten the world
Squaring the circle is hard, but it’s nothing compared to the problem of flattening the globe. We like flat maps, but any map of a sphere is going to cause major distortions one way or another. So the map you like tends to be the one that distorts the stuff you care about least. Maybe you want to preserve the areas of the land masses or the great circle distance between points. That’s all good so far as it goes. But there’s a problem: map projections are a drug. They induce obsessive behavior among their users. They multiply beyond necessity and fragment into a fetishistic and surreal cornucopia. Beware!
Oh sure, you start off with a well-intentioned disdain of the old-school Mercator. Then you roll a few of Bucky Fuller’s Dymaxion Icosohedrals and chase it with a Rhombicuboctahedral. No harm done. You could stop. But soon you’re into the heavy stuff. Wiechel’s Modified Azimuthal Projection is just a gateway to a Stabius-Werner Cordiform Pseudoconic. Your lust for exotic creatures like Peirce’s glorious Quincunx are matched only by your ability to end conversations and empty rooms with impromptu lectures on Mollweide’s wicked homolographic compromise. Where will it end?
Today it will end with a lovely movie courtesy of New Scientist on some recent research into algorithmically generated arbitrary interrupted maps. Behold van Wijk’s Myriahedral projection!
http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/2227271001?isVid=1&publisherID=981571807
Oh Lord, keep me away from Carlos Furuti’s lovely cartography site.
Toxic and proprietary fame
Fame is evasive right up to the moment in which it becomes suffocating. Toxic Fame is a book about what an incredible nuisance it is to be famous. The celebrities quoted therein describe so many unpleasant scenarios that you have to wonder why people seek fame at all. It’s as if the your fans feel entitled to claim you as their property. Stephen King gives an especially gruesome rendition of the proprietary nature of fandom in Misery, in which a famous writer is held captive and hobbled by a psychotic fan. To be famous is, in some sense, to be imprisoned.
This scenario has existed for a long time in human culture. When I came across Toxic Fame some years ago, I was immediately reminded of Frazer’s Golden Bough, a Victorian-era encyclopedic compendium of cultural practices. Frazer describes a fantastic variety of rules and taboos associated with chiefs, kings, and high priests around the world. There are whole chapters on the king’s prohibition on leaving the house, on letting his feet touch the ground, on being outside when the sun sets or rises, on being seen while eating, on leaving food on his plate. You don’t have to read for very long before you realize that royal privilege is wildly overrated. The chief is always in a box, always performing, and when his performance does not suit he will suffer.
We need to project our mythic images onto high-profile individuals. The age of kings has passed, but the age of celebrity has arisen conveniently to fit the same bill. The foolish behavior of celebrities is one of the things we demand of them. We need our celebrities to have too much money. We pour money on miscreant rockers and movie stars for the same reason a ten year old boy pours salt on a slug: for the awful pornographic spectacle of it. Then we can tut-tut at the tabloids and pretend it isn’t exactly the performance we were looking for.
What is especially interesting now is that the money is draining out of the music business. Old rock stars are still in the news, but who are the new bad boys? We’re not giving them enough money to misbehave in the truly spectacular ways we crave. Movie stars, for now, still satisfy this need. But consider, if movies should go the way of the newspaper, the vinyl LP, and the ivory-billed woodpecker, then upon whom will we dump our toxic and voyeuristic love?
Perhaps the departure of the celebrity will usher in the return of royalty.
Steward Brand and the new nuke news
Ever since I first stumbled across issue number 57 of the Whole Earth Review many years ago, I’ve been a fan of Stewart Brand and his philosophy of access to tools and ideas. Among many other things, he’s been leading the Long Now Foundation for some years now, and their site of free seminar podcasts rivals TED in its extent and impact.
One of the recent seminars on the site is by Brand himself as he talks up his latest book, Whole Earth Discipline. I highly recommend listening to it. He gives a good summary of one of the major tenets of the book: coal is killing us, and nuclear energy is the only thing that can possibly fill its shoes. Wind, solar, and hydro can help daddy hold the tools, but they won’t come close to meeting the global demand for energy.
Fortunately, there are two good pieces of news. One is that long-term exposure to low levels of radiation doesn’t appear to be nearly as unhealthy as we once thought. The other is that better and safer nuclear technologies are on the way. Coincidentally, Wired magazine just ran an article on the potential of thorium fission. Let’s hope it works, because the alternatives are looking increasingly grim.
As Brand summed up in his talk, the original Whole Earth Catalog from 1968 began with the statement “We are as gods, so we may as well get good at it.” His new book begins with something more emphatic: “We are as gods, and we HAVE to get good at it.”
[Brand’s talk first spotted chez Jon Udell]
Rambles Blog at Star Chamber 