musings and mumblings
After a week of family gatherings and summer job application filings (which has rekindled the whole what do I want to do with my life question), I'm darting south early tomorrow morning for a week of off-piste skiing in the Chamonix Valley (France, you stupide americaines) with my brothers. Olof is going to be sticking to the slopes, but Martin and I are booked for a week of guided backcountry hotness. Here's hoping I return in one peice.
In an article in MIT Technology Review, James Surowiecki asks, "is it possible that technology, instead of liberating us, is holding us back? Is technological progress merely a treadmill, and if so, would we be happier if we stepped off of it?" A solid read, touching on Jacques Ellul (Frenchie) and Robert Putnam (author of Bowling Alone).
The closing money-shot from an article on genetically engineered cocaine in Wired:
...found no evidence of modification. He tested specifically for the presence of CP4 - a telltale indicator of the Roundup Ready modification - as well as for the cauliflower mosaic virus, the gene most commonly used to insert foreign DNA into a plant. It is still possible that the plant has been genetically modified using other genes, but not likely. Discovering new methods of engineering glyphosate resistance would require the best scientific minds and years of organized research. And given that there is already a published methodology, there would be little reason to duplicate the effort.
Which points back to selective breeding. The implication is that the farmers' decentralized system of disseminating coca cuttings has been amazingly effective - more so than genetic engineering could hope to be. When one plant somewhere in the country demonstrated tolerance to glyphosate, cuttings were made and passed on to dealers and farmers, who could sell them quickly to farmers hoping to withstand the spraying. The best of the next generation was once again used for cuttings and distributed.
This technique - applied over four years - is now the most likely explanation for the arrival of Boliviana negra. By spraying so much territory, the US significantly increased the odds of generating beneficial mutations. There are numerous species of coca, further increasing the diversity of possible mutations. And in the Amazonian region, nature is particularly adaptive and resilient.
"I thought it was unlikely," says Gressel, the plant scientist at the Weizmann Institute. "But farmers aren't dumb. They obviously spotted a lucky mutation and propagated the hell out of it."
The effects of this are far-reaching for American policymakers: A new herbicide would work only for a limited time against such a simple but effective ad hoc network. The coca-growing community is clearly primed to take advantage of any mutations.
A genetic laboratory is not as nimble. A lab is limited by research that is publicly available. In the case of Fusarium, the coca-killing fungus and likely successor to glyphosate, there is no body of work discussing genetically induced resistance. If the government switched to Fusarium, a scientist would have to perform groundbreaking genetic research to fashion a Fusarium-resistant coca plant.
The reality is that a smoothly functioning selective-breeding system is a greater threat to US antidrug efforts. Certainly government agents can switch to Fusarium and enjoy some short-term results. But after a few years - during which legal crops could be devastated - a new strain of Fusarium-resistant coca would likely emerge, one just as robust as the glyphosate-resistant strain.
The drug war in Colombia presupposes that it's eventually possible to destroy cocaine at its source. But the facts on the ground suggest this is no longer possible. In this war, it's hard to beat technology developed 10,000 years ago.
Another two-fer.
There's a new word in Sweden that's all the rage: curlingparents. It's used to refer to parents that pave the way for the children similar to how curlers (is that what you call them?) scuff and smooth the ice for the rock in curling. I find it very amusing...and I was reminded of it by two recent article on child rearing that look at the problems of over-protection and over-prescription.
Think of the cell phone as the eternal umbilicus. One of the ways we grow up is by internalizing an image of Mom and Dad and the values and advice they imparted over the early years. Then, whenever we find ourselves faced with uncertainty or difficulty, we call on that internalized image. We become, in a way, all the wise adults we've had the privilege to know. "But cell phones keep kids from figuring out what to do," says Anderegg. "They've never internalized any images; all they've internalized is 'call Mom or Dad.'"
Between 1997 and 1999, he was paid by McNeil to conduct one of three studies used to get FDA approval. The company currently uses the three studies to claim that 96 percent of children taking Concerta experience no problems in appetite, growth, or sleep. But Pelham says the studies were flawed. The original intent of the studies was to measure both side effects and main effects of the drug. But two of the three studies, including Pelham's, required that the subjects had to already be taking MPH and responding well to it in order to enter the study. In other words, by stacking the studies with patients already successfully taking stimulants, McNeil ensured the subjects would be unlikely to register side effects, Pelham says.
A run through of the NY Times Magazine peice The Year in Ideas. The whole collection is freaking amazing and is fully deserving of your time.
"To dilute the power of the liberal arts with premature professionalism will deprive our society of the thoughtful leadership it needs." If they have the luxury of time, he said, students should "go deeper into the liberal arts, because that is the seed corn of an intellectual life and informed citizenship." After all, college is breathlessly short, and the American working life increasingly long. How many professionals think back fondly to those industry-specific lingo-training courses of their undergraduate days?Yeah, I'm totally going to be in school for at least another decade. Screw the real world, I'm working on me leadership needs. hehe.
Isaac tipped me off about Shakespeare's "Love's Labours Lost," about swearing an oath to scholarship, including fasting and avoiding contact with women for three years. Sounds awfully familiar. I'm really surprised that I've never heard of it before, and that it didn't show up once in the scores of Deep Springs application essays I read. (Don't get me started on Thoreau...) Has anyone read it? I know I know people who've guzzled down the complete works...is it worth a read? Erik?
The west, young man, haven't you been told?
This is not quite as cool as Ben Mezrich's book 'Bringing Down the House', which chronicles the escapdes of the MIT blackjack team in Vegas, but my brother linked me to a short article about a group in Britain that used lasers to gauge the speed of the roulette ball to make millions. This type of gadgetry is strictly illegal according to Mezrich, so I'm surprised they will be keeping their money. Nonetheless, clever ways of shaving away at the razor thin probabilities in gambling will always earn top honors from me, the more absurd the method the better.
OK, now it's personal. Fox News recently (11/26) did a report from nearby Malmö, a large city here in southern Sweden, right across the water from Copenhagen, titled Swedes Reach Muslim Breaking Point. A full-page editorial in Sydsvenskan, a major swedish daily, brought the piece to my attention, and searching the Fox News site I found two related pieces from late October, Where the Busses Won't Go and The Swedish Way.
I'm working on a series on Muslims in Europe and just returned from Malmo, Sweden, a city with a large population of immigrants. During interviews the Swedes would not say anything negative. Doctors, police chiefs, and teachers were all extremely diplomatic in their choice of words. It was only after a long while that they would start to say what they thought, that the city could not handle such rapid immigration, that it was not able to absorb or integrate the immigrants. I interviewed one nurse, then talked with her for a while off-camera, where she said that she was actually afraid to come to work because sometimes people in the emergency room would yell and become physically abusive in their demands for rapid treatment. Her eyes got wide. She said "it is not the Swedish way" to behave like that. So I got the cameraman Barnaby and interviewed her again.
Despite the fact that Steve Harrigan traveled all the way from the US to Malmö and Rosengård, he didn't take the time to talk to a single one of those people he refers to as 'hating illiterates.' Muslims are simply depicted generally, without names or identities. They are, simply put, not human.
For those who are concerned about what is happening in Sweden, there are many aspects that need to be considered as part of any explanation, not the least of which is that the problem is not so much muslim--but Swedish.
"Tear gas, clubbings, trip to airport, back to the sandbox.......illiterate lizards."
"My advice to Europeans --- send in the National Guard. Crush them. No group should be allowed this much power."
"Sweden was such a beautiful peaceful country, with such lovely people, a neanderthalic blood-cult should be allowed nowhere near it."
A hat tip to James Walcott, for an interesting view of the Iraqi deathscape. Sounds like an iraqi could make good money as a taxi-driver though....or a kidnapper. What says, erik? Wanna kidnap me and sell me back to Sweden for a couple hundred grand? I'll give you 60/40.
So I just found this article discussing the current state of computer-brain interaction, following new developments at Cyberkenetics. Once again, incredible.....for good, but also for DARPA.
Today I found an interesting couplet of links. Political Theory Daily posts dozens of links a day and made my head spin, but I'm including it exactly because it makes my head spin: there's a staggering amount of interesting reads collected, and visiting the site is a cold reminder of all the interesting questions in the world and the fact that a persons intellectual energies are finite--sometimes you have to just say no, and for me this is one of those times.
Pygmalion is "blessed" with an incarnation of his ivory girl, his realized ideal, which is free from the imperfections of natural creation.
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love is most present in the incongruent interactions between two lovers where their difference of being is most accented.
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To draw a parallel to the physical/mathematical duality in science, these surprises are quite like surface texture found in the physical world. Without texture, there would be no friction, and without friction, interactions would be severely limited. Objects would only be able to transfer energy through collisions. Because of friction, we can touch, we can walk, and the surface of the Earth refuses to level itself out into one eternally flat surface. There is no texture in mathematics, just as there are no surprises in ideal love. Friction releases energy as heat into the interacting bodies. Appropriately, scientists actually understand very little about the details of friction.
