Crazy Daisys

A picture of my Crazy Daisys with which I have liberally festooned my garden.

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...and finally this evening...

A little titter before bedtime, courtesy of a posting at b3ta.com:

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....on Geeks

The secret to being a closet Geek is knowing when to shut up. This cannot be overstated. Geeks surround me. They represent >80% of the people that surround me at work, and that I've just used a percentage to quantitate this clearly points me out as a Geek too. However, and I cannot be more emphatic about this, I know when to stop.

Now there is nothing inherently wrong with Geekiness. It has its time and its place. Even the most geezerish of the hoy polloi become Geeks when their favourite pursuits (say football) are up for discussion. Now the particular brand of Geeks I cringe at, are those academic Geeks who, whilst being aware of their Geekiness, are unable to stem it in the appropriate manner. I refer to such people as "errant Geeks". They are those people in a discussion who will take the conversation to a deeply obscure realm of weirdness, which is either met by a solidarity movement on the part of the others in the conversation, such that all descend into wanton Geekiness; or, as is more common in large mixed coffee groups, the rants of the Geek are met with embarrassed silences and a few false titters (I must admit that I am a nervous smiler in these situations).

The really embarrassing thing is, the protagonist of the Geek discussion is invariably aware that they have made a social faux pas, and that their cerebral line of non-linear deductive reasoning has fallen on deaf ears. Even more embarrassing than that, is that they know that you know that they know they've made a faux pas. THIS IS WHEN THEY SHOULD STOP. Unfortunately, as is their want, the said protagonist tries to save face within the same conversation, to redeem their hard won right to be part of the discussion....and invariably falls deeper and deeper into the realms of Geekiness. If they'd just let their faux pas lie, then all could have been ok. The discussion could have been salvaged by a well placed and more appropriate quip, or witticism. But oh dear, oh deary me. No.

So a lesson to the wise. Know when to stop, otherwise you’ll find that you always seem to arrive at the lunch spot at the moment when people have just apparently finished theirs.

I thank my missus for keeping the Geek in me thoroughly grounded, as she tolerates it not, and I am glad for that.

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Seat in Parliament...

Over lunch I did a sample of questions that prospective citizens will be asked after having read the new 150 page citizenship book Life in the UK. I got 13/15 questions right, which gets me a "seat in Parliament" (joy).

Haven't managed to track down this "book" yet - I guess you have to pay for it? Hmm, maybe that's their plan?

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Browsings....

I was browsing through the fine website that is b3ta.com and found this particularly amusing, if a little sad, song about Google, from a student with way too much time on his hands: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~pcxee/google_flash.htm

...and so back to the book.

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Rhetoric...

Fanciful marketing
The other day, whilst spending a bit of quality time in my local Borders bookstore, I happened to leaf through a listing of the top 20 "best" new fiction, based on a reader vote. Clearly, one might expect this to represent recent books that are "damn good reads"? Unfortunately, at number 6 was Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, a book not yet published(!), and therefore impossible to say whether it really is a "damn good read". The list was therefore practically useless, a completely inefficacious statistical phantom with no real information value beyond being a measure of “what are the top 20 most marketed books?”

Toilet pride
I discovered a new bathroom in my department yesterday. I should point out that we are being temporarily housed in a different building whilst air con and negative air pressure facilities are installed in our lab. Anyway, I had to smile at a seal of approval adorning the Armitage Shanks ceramic toilet tank, which informs us that it was “proudly inspected by Maurice Udale". So Maurice, thanks mate. Really appreciate your work there.

Talking of toilets, and our current "arrangement", why on Earth do we take "unisex", in the context of toilets, or hair salons for that matter, to mean both sexes? "Uni", per se, means the singular, one, the latin equivalent of the Greek "mono-". We have unicycles (do these have two wheels? No) Unicorns (do these have a horn that I don't know about? hehehe). No. It's all a little strange and confusing. The OED suggests that the term can be interpreted as "not peculiar to one sex", which is a bit of an arse over tit way of thinking about it. Of course, "bi-sex toliets" conjures other images. So perhaps it is all well and good the way it is?

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How to take a shit in Japan....

...and other things you always wanted to know.

So here you go: http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~AD8Y-HYS/movie.htm

...and now you know.

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Jackson beds a win...

...and from the BBC News Online:

"Michael Jackson's lawyer said the singer will no longer share his bed with young boys, after the star was cleared of 10 child abuse charges".

Well that's very big of you Mikey. Well done.

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Lost and found (and lost again...)

I knew it would be too good to be true. Whilst I won't bore you with the finer intricacies of my financial comings and goings, but I arrived home yesterday to tell the missus all about my £89.47 discovery, only to discover a bill I hadn't planned on paying for a couple of months. Now I had set aside £200 for said bill, but I guess I miscalculated it, and do you know what the actual bill was? Yup, £289. So my winnings, as it were, are a mere 47p, which wouldn't even get me half a pint.

Bollocks (Insult of the day opportunity: Thou dankish, eye-offending skainsmate).

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Coming soon...

Back by lack of demand....

"Insult of the day"

Thou gnarling, full-gorged canker-blossom

Witty, but none profane (where's the exercise in that?), insults invited.

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More lost and found....

I got a nice surprise this morning. I discovered a savings account that I had completely forgotten about! It didn't contain much, a mere £89, but it is all that remains of my funds from my last year at (my first) university - some 6 years ago! I was only alerted to its continued existence as my bank now sends me reports of my financial situation having acrued a certain level of savings.

It took a while to remember the account. I had set it up because I planed to copy my cousins who had taken out student loans each year and put them into a high interst account. At the end of their degrees, the paid back the money and pocketed the interest.

I was doing ok on this scheme, which I only started in my second year, right up until the the start of my third year. That is when things started to go wrong. I, erm, spent it all in my last two terms. The account contains a full record of my spending during that last year (a little bit of nostalgia)....all those "night out" withdrawals and the rather larger withdrawals for certain other items like Play Station, Camera etc....all of which have fallen by the way side now. It got so easy to spend, and I convinced myself that I'd easily pay it all back (damn my 20 year old self!)...so pretty soon it was all gone, but for an interest payment I missed. Score.

A little present from yesteryear.

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Lost and found.....

Now this fine compendium of correspondences vanished for a while, and I kicked myself for not having saved them somewhere, but now the erudite correspondences of Julian Date are back, and are worth a browse.

...and so, to bed.

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Yes indeedy....

Ferenci, T. (2005) Maintaining a healthy SPANC balance through regulatory and mutational adaptation Molecular Microbiology 57: 1-8.

SPANC indeed matey!

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Lamond Lab does it again....

Where on Earth do these guys find the time to keep adding new and amusing content to their site?
Full respect to them though!

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Spirited intentions....

I almost felt like having a rant about Bush's recent snub to the third world debt issue (this in a long line of snubs that followed import trade agreements, Kyoto, the UN, the small matter of the Vietnam II Iraq etc.)....but then I realised - it's after midnight. I'm tired, and I have better thinks to do with my time. Though you can bet your bottom dollar that as soon as the BIACORE 2000 throws a wobbly again (as it did today), then I'll be in here. Ranting as usual.

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“How do you feel about your horse being gay?”

Apparently, a student at Oxford University's Balliol College was [locked up] in a cell overnight and fined £80 for approaching a mounted policeman and calling his horse gay. Action was deemed to be necessary, by the rider of accused horse, after the young lad continued to make suggestions regarding the horse's sexuality.

Now this should really have been nothing more than good humour between the "gown" and the "town". Unfortunately, when the "gown" is a little too clever (and drunk) for his own good, and the "town" has the power to arrest you, then things get a little out of hand.

Bloody good fun though!

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Potty Parity

So it seems that there is a new law in town over the pond, at least in New York. Dubbed the "Potty Parity" law, it in meant to alleviate the long queues for the women's toilets in the city. From now on, all new developments and rennovations in public buildings must have twice as many facilities for women as they do for men. Quite enlightening.

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Know thine enemy, Dog...

Oh, this did amuse me..."How to Destroy the Earth"

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Random Science Class #4: A lively effusion of wit and humour.

Hmm, it occurs to me that my "Random Science Class" is slightly less than random, being sequentially numbered as they are. Oh well, I guess they're random because you (or I) have no means of predicting what "science" will be covered next. So here we have Random Science Class #4. What do I mean by a lively effusion of wit and humour? Well if Class#3 wasn't enought to convince you that we biologist do have a sense of humour, if a little disturbed and scary, then this surely will. It is a hacked down version of an essay I wrote some years ago.

What do hedgehog, merlin and okra have in common with jelly belly, pimples and Genghis Khan? What if I said that hedgehog is not just a cute, spiny mammal? That Merlin is not just the name of a bird and a wizard? That okra is not just a vegetable? Would you be interested to learn that “jelly belly” is crucial for gut muscle development? “Genghis Khan”, far from being a Mongol lord who conquered Asia, is involved in the stimulation of structural components in cells. Oh, and we can look to “Merlin” to restrain cell proliferation.

Confused? Don’t be. They are all names of genes - sequences of DNA that exert influence on a creature by encoding and regulating the production of a protein. These particular genes are found in Drosophila melanogaster, otherwise known as the fruit fly. Aah, the joy these geneticists get from assigning trivial names to the genome of this little fly.

Scientists are interested in a region of the fruit fly chromosome called the “homeobox”. The homeobox - “homeo”, from the Greek for “similar”, and “box” as the sequence is defined - contains “Hox genes”. First identified in fruit flies in the early 1980s, they control the different aspects of body development – head, legs, wings or other structures. Interestingly, many other creatures, including humans, possess these genes, which carry out similar functions. We are all basically running on the same genetic software. Research in this area is helping us to understand why our head is where it is, why we have two arms joined to our upper body and not to our hips, and why we have feet, rather than hands, at the ends of our legs. More significantly, they are helping to identify the genetic basis of certain human diseases by understanding the mechanisms of this genetic control.

Hox genes produce proteins that govern the activities of other "target" genes, which result in the development of a specific body parts at specific locations. The arrangement of genes mirror the arrangement of the body parts they control, starting with the head at one end, followed by the mid-sections, and so on.

One set of genes under being studied are the hedgehog genes. The hedgehog gene in the fruit fly has a counterpart in Humans, called “sonic hedgehog”, which has little to do with the fuzzy computer-console character. This gene is involved in limb and central nervous system development and has already shown promise as a means of gene therapy.

Drs [Bill McGinnis] & [Mike Levine], performed a classic experiment to see how universal the power of the Hox gene was. They took a mouse egg and extracted the genes controlling the formations of its eye. They then transferred that gene into a fruit fly larva. The mouse and the fruit fly last had a common ancestor five hundred million years ago so they expected only the smallest genetic effect. What emerged was a complete surprise. The mouse gene made a complete eye but rather then a mouse eye it made a fly eye. It was perfect in every detail, a control gene had worked in two creatures separated by half a million years of evolution.

Now, in the course of their work, geneticists often assign rather arbitrary names to genes, often governed by the phenotype (physical appearance) of the organism when that gene has been knocked out (prevented from working); or because they've found a couple of genes that work in tandom, and they want to be a smart-arse. In addition to these trivial names, they also assign more assiduous genetic names. The net result is a bit of a laugh for those doing the naming (and their mates), and those of us with the familiarity to find these names. For the rest of the genomics community, it is a constant headache as both genetic and trivial names are often recycled in different organisms.

Here are some classics:

smaug: The gene represses activity of the nanos gene (Greek for "dwarf"). In J.R.R. Tolkien's Hobbit, the dragon Smaug drove dwarves away from their caves.

british rail: A dominant suppressor of the always early* gene. Not in FlyBase yet (22.7.2001), information directly from researchers.

(*always early: regulates cell cycle progression and terminal differentiation during male gametogenesis).

sunday driver: Neuronal molecule traffic is mixed up when the sunday driver gene is mutated.

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Personal space invasion...

I was happily leafing through the very good quality magazine that my university publishes, full of the usual discoveries, upcoming meetings and scholarly debate, when a letter to the editor catches my eye:

"In the preface to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, and under a heading in bold capital letters, headed ‘FACT’, is this statement: “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.”

The Da Vinci Code contains few ‘facts’ and what few it does contain, require serious qualification. All of this might be excused, except that Brown ‘dignifies’ such aspects of the book as ‘FACT’. The work is fiction, yes, but it claims to be rooted in fact, and it is only because Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular is considered ‘fair game’, that this sort of work is received not with outrage, but with a ho hum.What is surprising, is not that

Brown labels as ‘FACT’ what has been so totally refuted by the evidence, but that our culture is so misinformed about Christianity, woefully ignorant of history, and clueless about the Bible – its origin, composition, preservation, and translation. That millions will be completely unaware of the lack of authenticity in The Da Vinci Code is more than surprising, it is very, very sad. That critics and even news media are so gullible is tragic.

Professor Elliot’s subjective comment that “this bestselling novel still makes for a ‘jolly good thriller’” prompts me to comment that God in fact ‘went public’ some two thousand year ago, by coming to visit planet Earth as the Lord Jesus Christ, and His life, death, resurrection from the dead and ascension back to Heaven, are all recorded in the New Testament, the primary source of reputable information about Jesus Christ.

Now that really is ‘a jolly good thriller,’ “extra, extra, read all about it!!”

I didn't mind this letter, right up to the last paragraph where he lauched into some totally unexpected glib Christian rhetoric, the like of which I wish to avoid in my lesurely reading. It got my goat up, so felt compelled to issue a short retort to the Editor:

"I couldn't help but feel somewhat "invaded" on reading the Letter from [ed] in [ed]. Up until the penultimate paragraph, I would have quite happily agreed with his point, although it is perhaps a little arrogant to presume that the public is somehow "tragic" because it is not aware of the contents of the bible.

However, I found the last paragraph a little distateful for this publication as I don't believe this is the forum for attempts to propagandize Christian rhetoric. That being said, it is somewhat contradictory that he should cite the New Testament as a "primary source" as this "source" is itself not a contemporary record made by someone with personal knowledge of the facts but is more a report of the recollections of others; this is not primary, and is subject to the same creative licence and interpretation that Dan Brown has employed."

Now the editor says she wants to put my retort in next week's magazine. Score....it'll probably start a flurry of ecumenical debates in months to come. Hehehe, twisted fire-starter.

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Random Science Class #3: Communal peeing - a new form of flood control in Ants

I happened upon a paper that made me smile this morning.

Apparently there are these Ants, Cataulacus muticus, which happen to be obligate bamboo-nesting Ants. These Ants live inside giant bamboo, which as any survival expert knows is prone to a bit of flooding in the hollow internodes. This of course riles the Ants a little, so their response is apparently two-fold. During the heavy rains, the workers form a living umbrella over their nest entrance using their packed heads.



Of course, rainwater may still seep in. So not being ones to skirt responsibility, the Ants respond by drinking the water, exiting the nest and excreting the water droplets down the outer stem surface – basically, they hang their arses out of the window. This, in the typical wit of Biologists, has been coined communal, or cooperative, “peeing”. Fantastic.

For those with access:

Maschwitz & Moog (2000) Communal Peeing: a new mode of flood control in ants. Naturwissenschaften 87: 563-565.

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Holiday indecision...

I've been sat here for the past 2 hours trying to decide where on Earth to go on holiday, and more importantly, what the hell I want to do when I get there!

Any ideas?

I'm doing San Francisco next year (prior to a scientific conference at Lake Tahoe), so I don't plan on getting to N. America this year. Oh balls, there are too many damn places to choose from. I guess I'll just scroll through the list of countries and rule out all those that have had a recent outbreak of some god awful disease, however interesting; and those countries where you're likely to get your ass blown off by some damned fool....actually, come to mention it, that has considerably reduced the list. Score.

Ok, what else can I exclude....places with zones of arid wantonness, places with the death penalty (and a corrupt police force - very dangerous combination, and could rule out a number of Eastern European options). Hum, what else? France is always a reliable favourite, I haven't actually done Provence before, though I've done ever other region. I always did fancy taking a gastronmic picnic down wind of one of those lavender fields, and my French isn't too bad - though these days my Greek is better. Kefalonia is another option, a bit of the old Captain Corelli and his ukulele.

To be honest, I get a little bored with sitting around on beaches etc. I can only tolerate swimming for so long before gorwing bored of that too. Eating, well, that is our favourite pass time...and wine. Perhaps a Wine and Gastronomy tour is in order - but I hate organised tours, especially with English people....but I do fancy the opportunity to meet like minded people, and attend archaeological, historial and other such cultural lectures in situ. Decisions, decisions.

Oh well, work first, then play.

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You've been Gouranga'd

I got my first Gouranga mail today (otherwise known as the Hare Krishna Spam). I wondered when I might get one.

"Call out Gouranga be happy!!!
Gouranga Gouranga Gouranga ....
That which brings the highest happiness!!"

So what is Gouranga? Well some say it is Hare Krishna nonsense, and others say it is a cult term from the console game Grand Theft Auto. It is of course both, though I believe it is nothing more than another attempt to generate "a phenomenon", much like the "all you base are belong to us" phenomenon - which if anyone recalls was actually quite amusing and apparently arose from a poor "Engrish" translation in a cult Japanese game. It sparked rather a lot of time-wasting by geeks trying to create a cult around it. Evidence [here] (I'm amazed this site is still here actually, I bookmarked it years ago).

There are probably a few hundred [blogs] commenting on the same mail, and in this regard, perhaps they have achieved what they wanted. Notice.

The only place I have encountered Gouranga previously is on Motorway bridges. It's all a little strange and unusual.



More so, because no one in the Highways Agency seems to be bothered about removing them. This begs the question, are they endorsing it? Or in their inactivity, are they leaving prime advertising space for anyone idiot who has the balls to hang upside-down from a motorway bridge to hang a sign?

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Unfortunate ironies...

There is a certain macabre irony in life sometimes, and frankly I find it a little unsettling. Take for instance [Professor Sally McGill] of the University of Leeds. She was tragically killed in the Boxing Day Tsunami whilst on holiday in Krabbi, Thailand. Her daughter, Alice was also killed. The irony is that she worked in environmental management and risk assessment. Not that this provided her with any clairvoyance or any more ability to handle being involved in a tsunami, but it is there none the less.

So earlier today I learned of the death of Dr Rob Milne, a technologist at the University of Edinburgh who was pioneering the latest technology (IM-PACs) for climbing communications. IM-PACs was designed to provide a feedback system to inform interested parties of the movements (and alterations) of climbers, and to generate alternative routes (and rescue strategies) when confronted with deteriorating weather conditions. The system, designed as a life-saving measure, was being road-tested on Everest. Whilst the death of Rob Milne is completely independent of the system and should not reflect on its efficacy, it is still sorely ironic, and demonstrates that when it comes to it, we are all very vulnerable when it comes to Nature (externally or internally). A great shame.

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