Death Shall Have No Dominion

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

--Dylan Thomas

This post is dedicated to a co-worker of mine who passed away last week.

I found a few quotations from Gloria Steinem that impressed me.

"Most women's magazines simply try to mold women into bigger and better consumers."

"For women... bras, panties, bathing suits, and other stereotypical gear are visual reminders of a commercial, idealized feminine image that our real and diverse female bodies can't possibly fit. Without these visual references, each individual woman's body demands to be accepted on its own terms. We stop being comparatives. We begin to be unique."

"We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs."

"Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age."

"The family is the basic cell of government: it is where we are trained to believe that we are human beings or that we are chattel, it is where we are trained to see the sex and race divisions and become callous to injustice even if it is done to ourselves, to accept as biological a full system of authoritarian government."

"A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual."

"Planning ahead is a measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days."

"From pacifist to terrorist, each person condemns violence--and then adds one cherished case in which it may be justified."

"For much of the female half of the world, food is the first signal of our inferiority. It lets us know that our own families may consider female bodies to be less deserving, less needy, less valuable."

No commentary needed. Gloria is very assertive.

"It is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself...." --Malcolm X

"I dare do all that may become a man; who dares do more is none." --Macbeth

"Now we are all sons of bitches." --Kenneth Bainbridge, director of the Trinity nuclear weapons test

"I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." --Krisha as paraphrased by J. Robert Oppenheimer

Route 44

Did you know that Yamhill County Transit Area provides bus service from McMinnville to Tigard via 99W? A few weeks ago I noticed several nights in a row on my way to work a transit bus heading East on Haworth Ave. I first thought it was an extension of the Trimet system until I noticed the words Yamhill County printed on the side. Yesterday I found this website:

http://www.yctransitarea.org/

Please consider using public transportation the next time you have to travel to McMinnville, Tigard, or anywhere in between.

Trois Gymnopedies

I was listening to my new collection of classical music and heard a familiar tune. When I looked for the title, the song was called Trois Gymnopedies. I had to laugh when I deciphered the Greek into English: "three naked children." Now you can laugh too.

Here are the piano pieces if you care to listen:

http://www.pianosociety.com/cms/index.php?section=151

"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." --George Orwell

What Humans Fear

In the book How the Mind Works, psychologist Steven Pinker makes so much sense it seems silly.

Fears in modern city-dwellers protect us from dangers that no longer exist, and fail to protect us from dangers in the world around us. We ought to be afraid of guns, driving fast, driving without a seatbelt, lighter fluid, and hair dryers near bathtubs, not of snakes and spiders. Public safety officials try to strike fear in the hearts of citizens using everything from statistics to shocking photographs, usually to no avail. Parents scream and punish to deter their children from playing with matches or chasing a ball into the street, but when Chicago schoolchildren were asked what they were most afraid of, they cited lions, tigers, and snakes, unlikely hazards in the Windy City.

Major phobias include fear of snakes, spiders, large carnivores, heights, darkness, blood, deep water, and social scrutiny. People can learn new fears and forget old ones, but instinctive fears are hard to unlearn while learned fears are easily forgotten. Major factors in successfully overcoming fear are predictability (implying that the subject has repeatedly confronted the fear and learned its patterns), a sense of competence and control, and the presence of allies. This is how our childhood fears fade as boys become men and girls become women-still-afraid-of-spiders. The things we still do not feel confident with continue to make us squirm.

"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." -Mario Savio

Hood-to-coast: the movie

Hood To Coast Movie Trailer #2 of for Race Website from HoodToCoastMovie on Vimeo.

Food for Thought

Check out this story. Click on "Listen to the Story" for the audio file or read the roughly equivalent story on the same page.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129027124

Mr. Lindon has a funny way of putting it.

TalkOrigins.org and other Sources

I am posting a few links for a friend. They might also interest my other readers.

The first links to the online version of an article originally printed in the journal Natural History, issue 111(3) pages 73-80, in April 2002. It discusses Intelligent Design and covers topics such as irreducible complexity, specified complexity, and the proposed difficulty of natural selection to produce new features and new species. The articles is republished on the web by actionbioscience.org.

http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/nhmag.html

The next link leads to the Talk Origins Archive, a newsgroup archive of articles that deal with the creation/evolution debate and other related themes. The tone the authors take, I have found, is non-antagonistic toward religion itself, only toward those who attack the sound concepts of biology and other sciences. I would say most if not all of the authors allow for or subscribe to a belief in Deity themselves. The articles tend not to be quite as well polished as textbook standard, but the info is well researched and very reliable. The website contains review articles and to my knowledge does not allow original research.

Before I give the link, I will warn that the reader will see the word creationist used often. Understand that this label refers to a group of religious persons that believe in a very strict and literal interpretation of the biblical book of Genesis and that wholly reject the concept of biological evolution and much of the geological and astronomical sciences. The word creationist here does not refer to just anyone who believes the universe was created by Deity.

Here is the home page:

http://www.talkorigins.org/

I recommend the FAQs page to help orient the reader:

http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-qa.html

Here I quote one of the questions with its answer from this page. "Q: Don't you have to be an atheist to accept evolution? A: No. Many people of Christian and other faiths accept evolution as the scientific explanation for biodiversity."

The introduction to evolutionary biology will help the reader build a basis for understanding and discussing the topic.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-intro-to-biology.html

Check out the five major misconceptions about evolution:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-misconceptions.html#observe

I found the following article interesting. It gathers instances of observed speciation and explains why lists like this one are uncommon. Section 3.0 is especially helpful.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html

Lastly, after logos is satisfied, make sure ethos gets its fill by checking out the awards page:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/awards/

The last link I will post sends us to a famous article written in the 1970's by Theodosius Dobzhansky, a christian and biologist who died in 1975. The article is titled, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." Dobzhansky's logic is sound and despite the passage of more than thirty-five years it remains most relevant and accurate today. The article is reproduced by PBS.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/10/2/text_pop/l_102_01.html

Scroll to the bottom of the page for the reference of the original publication.

I hope my readers enjoy these sources and will appreciate the importance of becoming acquainted with them.

Artificial Life

Craig Venter is the guy that headed the Human Genome Project. Since the completion of that project he has been working on creating artificial genomes and life. Check out the news article and the journal article:

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64P6OZ20100526

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/rapidpdf/science.1190719v1.pdf

Watch this video, it is very helpful:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/may/20/craig-venter-synthetic-life-form

This accomplishment repressents an important part of theoretical biology made reality. The possible utility of this technology in the future are nearly endless.

Homo neanderthalensis: the Genome has Arrived

(Photograph used with permission by the copyright holder under GFDL.)

Four years ago I heard that a group of anthropologists had started on a project to sequence the Neanderthal genome. I was amazed. Many had their doubts and the researchers faced immense obstacles. Two years into the project, it had lost momentum and I accepted that the dream had failed.

Today I picked up this article from the journal Science: http://www.eva.mpg.de/neandertal/press/presskit-neandertal/pdf/Science_Green.pdf

More to come later. I needed to publish this immediately. Expect the world to change.

Later:

You may wonder why this is significant. Neanderthals and humans overlapped geographically and chronologically. They are our closest relatives in the fossil record and had similar lifestyles. However, humans were able to surpass Neanderthals in many aspects. Eventually, Neanderthals disappeared and only we remained. We do not completely understand what gave us the advantage over our non-human relatives, but studying the genome of this extinct species promises great insight into why.

Lets look at the article together.

The journal Science is unique in that it publishes studies from all disciplines of science and includes only those studies most important to the entire scientific community and also to the general public. The articles in this journal maintain high standards while modifying the standard format slightly to make the material accessible to non-specialist readers. The study by Green et al. that we will discuss mixes methods with discussion and conclusions instead of giving all of the methods in one sterile block, making it easier to follow.

We will start on page 715. The authors identify differences in protein structure that make humans different from Neanderthals. The first gene discussed, SPAG17, plays a role in  the flagellum of sperm, indicating that Homo sapiens sperm swim differently than that of H. neanderthalensis. Differences in PCD16 show that H. sapiens' wound healing process may differ from H. neanderthalensis. TTF1 is interesting because it helps regulate transcription of genes, meaning that it affects the way that all proteins are constructed from our DNA. This one gene has the potential to affect all other protein coding genes across the entire genome. Changes in RPTN indicate a difference in the epidermis, sweat glands, hair roots, and taste buds.

Also of note is TRPM1 that has lost functionality in some humans but is functional in Neanderthals. This gene codes for, in short, skin pigmentation.
The authors then focus on regions (called HARs) identified as being stable throughout the history of other vertebrates but that underwent many changes in H. sapiens. These areas should give clues about what makes us physiologically different from other animals, including H. neanderthalensis. Forty-five of these HARs were identified as being different in humans from the Neanderthal sequences. Not much is known about these regions, so the authors were unable to comment on them; however, they show great potential for further insights.

We skip to page 717. The authors investigate 20 regions in the human genome that have experienced heavy selective pressures relative to Neanderthals. The first five do not contain protein-coding genes and may be regulatory or structural in function. (Ask me about gene regulation and DNA structure and packaging if you are interested.) The most heavily selected on the remaining 15 regions contains the gene THADA, which has been associated with type II diabetes. This shows that human metabolism likely differs from Neanderthals. Other genes in these selected regions have been associated with diseases like Down syndrome, schizophrenia, and autism. Changes in these genes and regions would have created cognitive differences between the two species. The last gene discussed that has undergone heavy selection is RUNX2, which is responsible for the disease cleidocranial dysplasia. In short, this disease causes abnormal skeletal formations including an enlarged, protruding frontal bone (forehead or brow); heavy clavicles resulting in a change in the shoulder joint; and a bell-shaped rib cage. This one gene shows how some major skeletal features changed in humans.

The last half of the paper deals with multiple methods used to demonstrate the same results. The authors say it best:

"We find that the Neandertals are equally close to Europeans and East Asians.... However, the Neandertals are significantly closer to non-Africans than to Africans."

Multiple hypotheses can account for this, but the most likely scenario says that H. neanderthalensis interbred with H. sapiens some time during their overlapping histories but posterior to speciation. Because of this, a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA is present in the human population today.

The Neanderthal genome has initially created many more unanswered questions than those it has helped answer. The next few years (or couple of decades) will tell us much more of who Neanderthals were and what made the difference between our survival and their demise.

Supergame XXXIX

Here is some footage from the game we went to earlier this month:

Indie Short Films

The National Film Board of Canada is holding a short film competition. Here I post my two favorites. Jenny said she didn't understand them and Jeff got scared and ran away. With whom am I to discuss art?

My Favorite News Casters

If you don't know what Onion News Network is, you need to look up some of their videos. Here are some samples:








Warning: Don't watch this one unless you are feeling unusually intrepid-->

Battle of the Black Sea

This excerpt is from the epilogue of Mark Bowden's book Black Hawk Down:

Aidid died in 1996 without uniting Somalia under his rule, a victim of the factional fighting the UN had tried to resolve. His clan still struggles with rivals in Mogadishu, trapped in the same bloody, anarchic standoff. Clan leaders I spoke with in that destroyed city in the summer of 1997 seemed to think that the world was still watching their progress anxiously. Photographer Peter Tobia and I were the only guests at the Hotel Sahafi during most of our stay there. We were the first and only Americans who have returned to Mogadishu trying to piece together exactly what happened. I told the Habr Gidr leaders who were hostile to our project that this would likely be their only chance to tell their side of the story, because there weren't journalists and scholars lined up at the border. The larger world has forgotten Somalia. The great ship of international goodwill has sailed. The bloody twists and turns of Somali clan politics no longer concern us. Without natural resources, strategic advantage or even potentially lucrative markets for world goods, Somalia is unlikely soon to recapture the opportunity for peace and rebuilding afforded by UNOSOM. Rightly or wrongly, they stand as an enduring symbol of Third World ingratitude and intractability, of the futility of trying to resolve local animosity with international muscle. They've effectively written themselves off the map.

Mark deserves much praise for his pain and efforts to maintain objectivity and fidelity in his retelling of the Battle of the Black Sea. I often admire the level of professionalism demonstrated in the writings of journalists, but Mark's work on this project stands above all others I have read.

"Whoever does not have the stomach for this fight, let him depart. Give him money to speed his departure since we wish not to die in that man's company. Whoever lives past today and comes home safely will rouse himself every year on this day, show his neighbor his scars, and tell embellished stories of all their great feats of battle. These stories he will teach his son and from this day until the end of the world we shall be remembered. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; for whoever has shed his blood with me shall be my brother. And those men afraid to go will think themselves lesser men as they hear of how we fought and died together." From Henry V, by William Shakespeare.

Stability vs. Agility in Animal Flight

I just read an article by John Maynard Smith called "The Importance of the Nervous System in the Evolution of Animal Flight". Smith's message was simple but helped me understand some principles of animal flight that I have overlooked before.

Stability in flight can be described as how well an aircraft resists rotation in the horizontal or vertical axes as it is acted upon by external forces. Stability is opposed to maneuverability. To make an aircraft more maneuverable it has to be fundamentally less stable. A less stable, more maneuverable aircraft requires a more skilled pilot to fly it successfully. This translates to the need of an enhanced nervous system and acute muscle control in less-stable flying animals.

There are two classes of airborne animals: gliders and true fliers (the difference being in non-powered versus powered flight). Gliding is thought to be a more primitive form of flight and, indeed, of the four lineages of powered fliers evidence suggests that flight progressed from gliders to stable fliers to unstable fliers. The pinnacle of powered flight is something like the common house fly. This fly is so agile in flight that it requires precise and rapid sensory perception and motor reflex so it can instantly change trajectory in any direction. This feat requires a well developed nervous network. In the robber fly who hunts other winged insects, we also see the ability to predict the trajectories of prey and intercept them in-flight. These predators know no limits: if it's an insect with wings, they can bring it down.

Photograph by Fir0002/Flagstaffotos. Used with permission under GFDL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License

Cultural Cognition

We only believe what we want to believe. This statement makes sense and it's easy to think it applies to others but not to ourselves. I recently discovered that sociologists and others have begun investigating and quantifying the effects of what is known as the cultural cognition of risk. Some of these researchers are affiliated with the Cultural Cognition Project at the Yale Law School. Here is an excerpt from their home page (http://www.culturalcognition.net/):

The Cultural Cognition Project is a group of scholars interested in studying how cultural values shape public risk perceptions and related policy beliefs. Cultural cognition refers to the tendency of individuals to conform their beliefs about disputed matters of fact (e.g., whether global warming is a serious threat; whether the death penalty deters murder; whether gun control makes society more safe or less) to values that define their cultural identities. Project members are using the methods of various disciplines -- including social psychology, anthropology, communications, and political science -- to chart the impact of this phenomenon and to identify the mechanisms through which it operates. The Project also has an explicit normative objective: to identify processes of democratic decisionmaking by which society can resolve culturally grounded differences in belief in a manner that is both congenial to persons of diverse cultural outlooks and consistent with sound public policymaking.

One of their findings suggests that when given information regarding a risk or decision, we tend to side with the presenter most like ourselves. This makes sense and we should have always expected as much. I suspect that no one is immune to the tendency of siding with whomever appears to share our beliefs or with whatever information already fits our accepted paradigm. The moral of this story is we should learn to better question our own motives when assimilating information and assessing risk.

Update: After reading my post again I realize it doesn't quite say what I wanted. Researchers at CCP have found that when different presenters provide identical information, we are more or less likely to accept the information based on how well we identify with the presenter. Ethos trumps logos. That's a bit disturbing to think about. Appealing to ethos is a rhetorical technique that dates back to ancient Greece, so the importance of ethos in argument has been understood, in part, for many centuries.

Tactical Pistol: closing words from Gabe

Here we have another slice of wisdom from Tactical Pistol by Gabriel Suarez:

The past few years have seen great strides in the fields of weapons development and training. Never before in modern history have so many people been interested and involved in owning, carrying, and learning to use weapons.

One reason for this fascination is, of course, a concern over the prevalence of criminals in our society. The other reason is the concern that an increasingly paternalistic government will continue to restrict, and eventually try to prevent, the ownership of arms by private citizens. This is a very valid concern because historically, without weapons, the rights of the people exist only at the whim of the governing body. Without the routine ownership of weapons by private citizens, the Bill of Rights is only a worthless scrap of paper. The issue is not the freedom to own guns but the existence of freedom itself!

There is a sick notion in our country to sacrifice our personal liberty in order to promote a "safe and stable" society. The idiocy of this idea is easily seen when you realize that no law can ever prevent an individual from committing a crime--it can only punish him after the act. Crime is a matter of will that cannot be controlled by legislation. This same legislation can, however, affect and incrementally strip away the rights of law-abiding citizens.

This man speaks the truth.

Got Glock?

G26 Baby Glock; a new addition to the family.

Is that Bin Laden on that box? Take a closer look.

Midwifery

The Business of Being Born. Ever heard of it? I highly recommend this movie. It brings together stories, interviews, and statistics of home-birth versus hospital births. I have had a lot of conversations with friends and acquaintances on this subject, and I have seen that most couples are afraid of having their babies at home because "it's dangerous". Did you know that among other developed countries, the USA has the lowest percentage of home-births but has a higher mother and infant mortality rate than most?

This movie touches on aspects of the history of anti-midwifery, showing it's resemblances to the US anti-cannabis campaigns in it's use of lies, fear tactics and most of all in the motivations that backed them.

You can thank the hippies for saving midwifery in the USA. Keep up the good work, all you midwives and mothers out there!

Gabriel Suarez

I found some new books to read by a very interesting author. Gabriel Suarez is a veteran of the Southern California police force and an instructor of small arms tactics. He now operates his own training school called Suarez International.

Here are a few words from the first chapter in his book, Tactical Pistol:

The only way to curb the violent crime infesting our nation, without sacrificing our free society, is the swift and terrible punishment of the criminal. It is unlikely that our kinder and gentler (really meaning softer and weaker) judicial system will take such a direction, in my lifetime at least.

Until we decide to deal harshly with criminals, there will be no deterrent, and as long as there is no deterrent, criminals will continue with their activities. The next victim selected might be you!

What can we do about this? I have an idea. Armed, law-abiding citizens can make it very dangerous for the criminal to prey on society. You, the reader, must be the deterrent!

I believe we have the right--actually the moral duty--to resist the criminal oppressor. Quite simply, he who robs (insert your favorite heinous act here) and runs away, lives to rob another day.

There are those who advocate nonresistance. They would rather give up their car or wallet to "avoid trouble." I would ask them where they draw the line. What will they say when the thugs ask for their wife or kids, or their house, or their bank account, or even their nation? It is not an issue of losing material property. There is much more to it than that. We resist because free men and women resist. Free men are not slaves to oppressors or aggressors of any sort. So we fight not for our wallets (though they be empty) nor for our cars (though they be insured) but rather for our freedom. The author Robert Heinlein wrote, "The price of freedom is the willingness to do sudden battle anywhere, anytime, and with utter recklessness." That about says it all.

To resist you need the tools of resistance, which in our modern age are usually firearms. Foremost you need the will and the ability to use those tools at the required "moments of truth." Lack of will has caused more innocent deaths that lack of ability.

One notably poignant incident springs to mind. A man was set upon in his own home by three hoodlums intent on robbing him. The goons were not armed with firearms and were substantially smaller (physically) than their intended victim. The man, however, offered no resistance as they forced him to the floor and tied him up. He told them where the money and all the valuables were. Then they killed him in a
particularly ugly way. The three were later captured and stood trial, but even the longest prison sentence will not reverse their deed.

The message is clear: this man could have easily trashed the three goons and lived to tell about it. But he lacked the will to do so and died without resistance.

I could tell this man was a student of Heinlein even before he mentioned the name. Heinlein was a strong believer in the rule of law, harsh judiciary punishment, and resisting injustice.

Statistics show, by the way, that an armed populace is a very strong--possibly the best--deterrent against violent crime. Fear is the greatest motivator.

FS2000

My new toy. Semi-automatic, bullpup carbine chambered in 5.56mm with a 17.4" barrel, adjustable gas valve, integrated 1.6x optics, 1913 top rail, forward case ejection, slanted muzzle brake, modular forward grip, and forward and rear sling attachments. This puppy is fully ambidextrous. I'm in love.

Animal of the Week: Pan paniscus

(Photo taken by Kabir Bakie at the Cincinnati Zoo May 2005; click image to follow link)

Pan paniscus, or the Bonobo Chimpanzee, lives only in a single forest in the Congo; this limited range, coupled with a recent decade of civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, has aided the demise and endangerment of the Bonobo.

Compared to its sister species Pan troglodytes, or the Common Chimpanzee, whose aggressiveness produces long-lasting and brutal tribal wars and genocide, the Bonobos are said to represent the more benevolent side of human nature. Intelligent and self-aware, Bonobos also engage in frequent sexual activities, apparently for the benefit of individuals and their communities, which can serve as a greeting, a means of conflict resolution, or post-conflict reconciliation and may also preempt communal conflicts and disorder and promote cooperation in some cases.

"I am fortune's fool!"
-Romeo Montague of Verona, Romeo and Juliet

"Ethics, however, must also consider the conditions under which what ought to happen frequently does not."
-Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals