Freeman Dyson’s biotech future

Freeman Dyson, the physicist, provocateur, and one-time colleague of Richard Feynman, has written a piece for the New York Review of Books called Our Biotech Future, and boy is it a doozy. This is no timid prediction about curing the common cold or even avoiding the next plague. It’s a full-on embrace of a bio-kaleidoscopic future. I’m not sure if he’s playing the I’m-old-and-I’ll-say-whatever-I-want card or if he’s always been this wild-eyed, but here’s a good sample quote:

The final step in the domestication of biotechnology will be biotech games, designed like computer games for children down to kindergarten age but played with real eggs and seeds rather than with images on a screen. Playing such games, kids will acquire an intimate feeling for the organisms that they are growing. The winner could be the kid whose seed grows the prickliest cactus, or the kid whose egg hatches the cutest dinosaur. These games will be messy and possibly dangerous.

You bet they will, Freeman! But that won’t stop us, right? Hey Mrs. Patterson! Billy’s cheating off my Ornithopsis genome!

Honestly, I admire him for writing this, and I admire the New York Review of Books for printing it. They must be taking bets in the editorial offices on how many letters this is going to draw. Someone needs to be talking like this, because the future of biotech is going to be a lot weirder than most people realize.

Things get really interesting when Dyson starts to compare the last few billion years of genomic evolution to evil proprietary software practices, as contrasted with a pre-Darwinian (and upcoming post-Darwinian) era of open-source horizontal gene transfer. For this last reference, he cites some fascinating papers by biologist Carl Woese. It’s wacky at times, but thoroughly thought provoking.

Unfortunately I don’t have time for further speculation… I’ve got to go tune the thagomizer on my dwarf stegosaur.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma

I can happily recommend Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, although it did strike me as longer than it needed to be. The book, about our food economy, features reporting, analysis, and some self-indulgent introspection. I enjoyed the reporting, in which he details trips into the heart of America’s industrial food-making machine. I was surprised, for example, to learn that corn is not good cow food. It fattens them up nicely, but their gut, having been built for grass, is distressed and gassy as a result. “Corn-fed beef” sounds so rich; I had always pictured cows somehow luxuriating in their corn-based diet. Instead, they are standing shoulder-to-shoulder in their own waste with a painful case of the frothy burps.

I found Pollan’s analysis less satisfying and more left-leaning than it needed to be. The facts he reports about our food economy, if taken at face value, are devastating enough, but he puts a political gloss on it that is sometimes irritating. For instance, he describes global capitalistic markets as an evil influence on food economies and the environment. By contrast, he describes a few enlightened organic farmers who are having small successes battling this malign force. But hey, it’s all capitalism. Markets learn and markets change. When organic practices become more widespread, as I’m sure they must over the long term, it will be because of a change in global markets. Ironically, it is precisely books like Mr. Pollan’s that educate readers, which is to say the market, about the true costs incurred by government-subsidized corn and confined animal feeding operations. Pollan also displays the annoying habit common among idealists of attacking the moral flaw in otherwise sound improvements to the status quo. Thus modern “industrial organic” practices aren’t free from sin. They may not use pesticides, but the labor-intensive practices of organic farming still require liberal amounts of petrochemicals to run machinery and transport the product. They still employ poor and easily exploited immigrants. Well, of course they do. But surely half a loaf is better than no loaf at all. Make the gains you can this year, and we’ll improve on them next year.

But overall, it’s a worthwhile and eye-opening read. It was worth it just for the part about Joel Salatin’s eccentric and endearing Polyface Farm. And it’s already changed some of my purchasing habits.

China makes, the world takes

The Atlantic has a great article by James Fallows this month called China Makes, the World Takes. Unfortunately it’s behind a subscription wall. But there is a free slideshow narrated by Fallows which pretty much gives you the gist of the article. In a nutshell: China’s manufacturing output is stupefyingly vast, but not only that, the Chinese work hard, they work fast, they’re more modern than you think, and they’re smarter than you are. So quit whining and be gracious when they zoom by… it’ll do you a world of good in the future. Among other observations, Fallows calls out this telling fact about our mutual trade. The Chinese send us almost every manufactured item you care to name. In return, we send those same ships back filled with… scrap metal and scrap paper. Which one is the developed economy?

The narrated slideshow was a nice touch. It’s fun watching newspapers and magazines branch out into other media. You can watch wacky videos at the New York Times and listen to audio dispatches from the Washington Post. Maybe they’ll have some fun as they slide into oblivion.

Google Maps: Drag your way to good directions

I’m very impressed with the latest wrinkle over at Google Maps. They have solved one of the last remaining problems with computer-generated directions: often you are given a suggested route that is just stupid. Sometimes I want to thump the screen and say “Are you nuts? I’m not going to drive through the middle of freaking Newton to get to 128!”

If the directions were uniformly terrible, you’d never use them, and that would be that. But they are often pretty good. You just want to modify your route in a few places. Like telling it to take the Mass Pike out to 128 instead of plodding down Centre Street like a dope. For instance, suppose you were visiting your parents-in-law near Southport, North Carolina and you needed to get to the airport in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I was in exactly this situation last Sunday.

Here’s the computed route from Southport, NC to MYR. But my father-in-law had certain knowledge that South Carolina Highway 31 is beautiful, fast, and parallel to 17 for much of the trip. What’s nice is that you can now just drag the blue route line and re-calculate the trip. Now all the turn and distance information on your trip printout is accurate. Here’s the new route to Myrtle Beach. I had to insert three way points to make it behave. But it was extremely simple to do so. My father-in-law kindly thought to give us a Triple-A TripTik® Travel Planner for the same route. I feel bad for the people who make TripTiks. That thing seemed as ancient as a carved stone tablet.

Another unstoppable video: Bunny vs. Predator

I was away for a week of vacation, so my apologies for the comments getting untidy. My vacation was an extended family beach trip, and as one or two of the people there read my blog from time to time, I did some market research. This is what I learned: the things I blog about that tend to get remembered are the YouTube video clips. I’ve also noticed that even without prompting I’m linking to more of these videos over time. That’s a self-feeding cycle that applies to many bloggers. Video content on the web is sure to accelerate and ad-sponsored television will suffer correspondingly. I know that’s not news, but I sure see it happening in my back yard. Maybe Google wasn’t crazy to spend all that money on YouTube.

With that in mind, here is a domestic version of the great water buffalo showdown. Standing in for the poor baby water buffalo is a three-foot snake. Playing the part of marauding lion is a bunny rabbit.

We’ll not risk another frontal assault. That rabbit’s DYNAMITE.

[Spotted on the Todoist blog]

Strange maps

I like maps and strange things, so a blog devoted to strange maps is double treat. I first came across the site because of this nifty map matching all 50 American states with countries having commensurate GDPs. Thus California, the wealthiest state, is paired with France, and so on down to lowly Wyoming-Uzbekistan. There are some real surprises in there. Who would have guessed Tennessee is on par with Saudi Arabia? Can somebody please write a country song about that?

But the US map is downright pedestrian compared to the map about Poland’s Wry-Mouthed Duke. I’ve always liked nobility with descriptive nicknames like Ethelred the Unready and Pepin the Short, but I do wonder how the Duke came by his moniker. Maybe that can be a country song.

He was a wry-mouthed camel driver
on a hajj to Tennessee,
and he played that Dhahran dobro
like a Bedouin hillbilly…

Fossil phones and genetic atrophy

I’m reading a biology book right now, The Making of the Fittest, that talks about how much information about the past we’re able to reconstruct from the forensic record of currently available DNA. One of the things that Sean Carroll, the author, talks about is the fossil genes to be found in our genome. Fossil genes are the cratered but identifiable remains of genes that no longer code for anything. They can arise when the protein they code for no longer does anything useful. For instance, the genes that help form eyes are no longer useful among cave fish. Eyeless mutants can thrive in a sunless sea, and their nonfunctional eye genes can persist in a recognizable form for millions of years before eventually being pulverized into genomic dust.

This weekend I went to a conference (Foo Camp), and at some point my cell phone went into an unrecoverable coma. Since I needed to coordinate an after-conference visit with some friends in the Bay Area, I had to make several phone calls. Old-school mesozoic landline phone calls. This means that I needed to find public pay phones in Berkeley on a Sunday afternoon. This brings me to the topic of fossil phones, which is closely related to the topic of fossil genes.

Since the rise of Homo mobilephonicus, the selection pressure to maintain working public phones has essentially vanished. This has allowed vandalism, neglect, and cosmic rays to do their worst to existing phones. Let me save you the trouble of walking into a liquor store on San Pablo Avenue and asking for the nearest pay phone. You will be looked at as though you just asked for the whereabouts of the neighborhood gramophone purveyor.

By the time I found a phone that worked, I had stopped at no fewer than five ostensible pay phone locations. Two of these had been simply ripped off of their mounts. They’ll all be dead soon. But the fossil record will betray our ancient love for gramophones and bakelite records to a thousand generations yet to come.

2D to 3D: an impressive video

Only a couple of posts ago I was pointing to a short video demonstration of Photosynth. Now here’s a nifty video from mok3.com (which maps to http://travel.supertour.com/). The Supertour stuff that you see on the website doesn’t impress me so much… QuickTime VR was there years ago, but the video is a nice piece of work. This video, combined with Photosynth at Microsoft, is enough to convince me that the photos-to-3D application has tipped and is on its way to the consumer market. If they can make it dead easy, it should be fun stuff to play with. I like the idea of building a 3-D photo album of my house.

Here’s the video. Dig that crazy Gauguin painting. Now that’s what I’m talking about.

[spotted at O’Reilly Radar]

Creatures from the Deep

Movies that depict fictional encounters with alien life forms always seem so tame compared to the weird animals here on Earth. The deep sea is one of the best places to go looking for the unusual, and the good news is that we’re getting lots of snapshots these days.

Claire Nouvian is the author of a new book called The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss. She was good enough to make a gallery of pretty pictures for those of us too cheap to buy the book. These creatures look funny, and they have funny names. If I’d gotten to name them, I’d have given them funny names too. Why, you may ask, do they call the noble Chondrochladia lampadiglobus a Ping Pong Tree Sponge? Go find the thing in the gallery and you will wonder no more.

All the while I’m gawking at these things, part of me realizes it’s just provincial bad manners to stare as I do. I imagine that somewhere in the Stygian depths there is a museum of all the strange stuff that’s drifted down from the surface.