Update to an earlier post; title cribbed from Verities, who has (have?) been on Fact Check's case about the latter's Bush AWOL coverage (with an update here). I've sent the FactCheck editor a note, so we'll see whether they take notice of an upstart blogger (that's you, Verities, in case you're reading this!).

While I'm at it, here are two more potential occupants of the no spin zone:

Media For Democracy 2004 calls itself "a non-partisan citizens' initiative to monitor mainstream news coverage of the 2004 elections and advocate standards of reporting that are more democratic and issues-oriented". It's email-only; what's so special about these "alerts" that they can't publish them to the web? There's not much on the about page; if this is "a grassroots citizens initiative" (they keep saying it, so it must be true), why will no one put their name to it? The executive director of mediachannel.org (who are also pretty evasive about who they are) doesn't count.

Project Vote Smart, on the other hand, looks good. A 501(c)(3) non-profit that doesn't accept donations from "lobbyists, governmental organizations, corporations, businesses or special interests" and is funded "exclusively through private donations by over 45,000 members, and grants from private philanthropic foundations, including the Carnegie, Ford, Pew and Revson Foundations", they do not "lobby for, support or oppose any candidate, position or issue".

Project Vote Smart, a citizen's organization, has developed a Voter's Self-Defense system to provide you with the necessary tools to self-govern effectively: abundant, accurate, unbiased and relevant information. As a national library of factual information, Project Vote Smart covers your candidates and elected officials in five basic categories: biographical information, issue positions, voting records, campaign finances and interest group ratings.

There's that "citizen's organization" again, but this group means it. The site has an enormous amount of information available; I'll be making use of the introduction to US government in particular.

For the record, and for what it's worth, I disagree with my net buddy Stavros, and agree with the spousal unit on this one.

Update: Doc Searls has a useful roundup of opinions on the Dean thing. Read 'em all. I'll just point out that at the time of writing Dean is in fact winning the primary race as I understand it¹. Stavros has responded in fine style to my remarks, so you can play along over there if you're interested.

¹For those watching in bewilderment from across various seas: brief explanations of the primary system can be found here and here, and more than you ever wanted to know is available here.

How rich art is; if one can only remember what one has seen, one is never without food for thought or truly lonely, never alone.    -- Vincent to Theo, 1878

The Vincent van Gogh Gallery is the site for van Gogh online. It's endorsed by the van Gogh Museum (<brag> I've been there! </brag>) and features, well, everything: 2200 images and 874 letters, every surviving thing that Vincent ever painted, sketched or wrote. Chronological and subject matter indices, a canonical works gallery, commentary and analysis, biography, an online forum and more, available in thirteen languages on a clean, well designed site. Bravo, Mr Brooks.

The Art*o*mat is just plain cool. In 1997, Clark Whittington converted a recently-banned cigarette vending machine to sell his black&white photos for $1 each. Today, his company Artists in Cellophane operates 60 art vending machines in 18 states, featuring the work of over 300 artists from 10 different countries. I note that there are no artomats in Oregon yet; I wonder what it costs to sponsor one?

Way cool update: the artist whose pendant is shown here, Sandra Marchewa, showed up in comments. You can see more of her art here. While I'm updating, it appears there's now an Art*o*mat in Oregon, at Lane Community College -- but still none in Portland...

One of the best things about being a research scientist is that there is always good news to be had from somewhere in my own field or one close by. It always cheers me up to be reminded that the knowledge base is growing every day.


Closest look yet at HIV surface: a Florida State University team has used electron tomography to put together the most detailed images ever seen of the surface of HIV and SIV (S = "simian") particles. The pictures on the right show engineered SIV expressing high levels of the surface protein gp120 (indicated by arrows), from above (right) and from the side (far right). The propeller-like shape of the gp120 trimer can be clearly seen in the top-down view and again in the close-up below (also from above). The final picture shows a wild type HIV particle, showing the much lower density of gp120 (which came as a surprise; most researchers thought it would look like the SIV pictures). The white bar in the HIV picture is 100 nm, about 1/500th the thickness of a human hair; the same scale applies to the SIV pictures.




This is neat, but it isn't new: FRET (fluorescence resonance energy transfer) has been around for a while. The basic idea is to take two fluorescent molecules whose excitation and emission spectra overlap in such a way as to make it possible to excite one using the emission of the other. If you put energy in to the system at the lower excitation frequency and get back light at the higher emission frequency, it proves that the two molecules are in close contact. If you've attached one to protein A and one to protein B, wherever you see the higher frequency emission proteins A and B must be very close together (interacting); you can do this in a living cell to see when and where A and B interact. What's new in this study is that the two fluorophores have been attached to opposite ends of a single molecule which happens to fold differently in its active and inactive states. That's neat, because it allows you to monitor the activation state of the protein by monitoring the emission from the fluorophores. It's true that this is "the first probe of its kind that allows us to actually see in a living system where, when and how proteins are activated", but only because that's very narrowly defined, and the authors do not claim (as the article does) that it's an entirely new kind of probe. Bad reporter, no vodka.


Classic science; first, some background. Listeria monocytogenes is a most unpleasant organism, one of the most common causes of bacterial meningitis. Most bacteria, when taken up by specialized immune cells -- professional eaters-of-foreign-bodies called macrophages -- find themselves trapped in a small bubble of membrane called a phagosome, in which they are rapidly killed by acidification and digestive enzymes. Listeria, though, has found a way to break out of the phagosome, using a phospholipase called listeriolysin O. Macrophages are also professional antigen-presenting cells, meaning that they present foreign proteins to other cells of the immune system, enabling those cells to mount a specific response. Macrophages typically present proteins taken up from outside themselves (like bacterial proteins) to T-helper cells, which act to drive humoral (antibody-based) immunity. When what you want is to drive cellular immunity, macrophages can do that too, but usually the protein of interest has to be synthesized within the macrophage (like a viral protein). One of the long-standing problems in vaccinology has been how to get a foreign protein which is taken up from outside the cell (your vaccine) to be presented like a viral protein, as though it came from within the cell, so as to get a cellular immune response to back up the antibody response, which is often insufficient on its own.

So, what Lee's team has done is to make a vaccine formulation containing their vaccine target protein together with listeriolysin O. When liposomes containing both proteins are taken up by cells, the listeriolysin acts to release the vaccine protein into the cytosol of the cell, at which point it can enter the presentation pathway normally reserved for proteins made within the cell. In other words, Lee and co. have taken the method that Listeria uses to get safely out of the phagosome, and used it to get a vaccine protein out of the phagosome and into a cellular pathway that has until now been very difficult to access. Beautiful, elegant work. They showed, using a mouse viral meningitis model, that liposomes containing listeriolysin plus viral protein elicited a stronger cellular immune response than liposomes containing viral protein alone without antagonising the antibody response, and that this dual response was sufficient to provide sterile immunity against a challenge that killed half of the viral-protein-only group and 100% of unvaccinated controls. Inclusion of listeriolysin in vaccine formulations may provide a way to boost the levels of protection that can be obtained against agents that attack from within a cell, notably viral infections (SARS, HIV, Ebola, 'flu...) and cancer.

(You can read the whole paper for this one; because the study was reported in the first issue of a new journal (Molecular Pharmaceuticals) it's available online as a free sample).

Have I mentioned how much I love Bloglines? I just sent them this via the contact form:

Dear Bloglines,

I would like to be able to see the public subscriptions of people whose blogs I like. Currently, this requires knowing whether they have a bloglines account and, if so, what name they signed up with. Would it be possible to annotate each blog's entry in the directory with a link to the owner's bloglines account, if they have one?

Also, when the ads start, please please please make the paid service ad-free. I'll happily pay a reasonable fee for bloglines, which I think is the best thing since sliced bread, but not if I can't get rid of ads.

I'll update this post when I get a reply.

One other issue, not under Bloglines' control: too many people have crappy feeds that show only the first few words, or just a headline. When I am trying to keep up with 126 sites, I want to be able to skim, and headlines-only feeds make that difficult. That's what the new "full text feeds please" folder in my bloglines account is for: I'll be quarantining those sites for now, and probably only checking them "by hand" once a week or so.

(The post title? "Full text feeds please" reminded me of Chomsky's famous phrase. Perhaps you had to be there me.)

Update: it's been pointed out to me that there are bandwidth issues with providing full feeds (although I think those are minimal if you only feed text), and, more importantly, that presentation is stripped bare in an RDF format. Full-text feeds are nice, but I am also happy with enough of an excerpt to give me a good sense of the post. I didn't mean to demand that other people's designs should be subordinate to my convenience, so I've changed the folder title to "longer excerpts please", but I've let the post stand to remind me what happens when I post without sufficient thought. (I generally won't delete anything, and I'll always make original versions available.)

Update the second: Bloglines' reply to my email:

We'll be adding a directory of public feeds soon. And we currently are planning on having a no-ads version available when we do start running ads.

I have pretty much given up on keeping my bookmarks organised on a day-to-day basis; I keep a few handy reference links that I use regularly (like Merriam-Webster online) and just use Google to find anything else I want from time to time (say, a currency or temperature scale converter). Other than that, I keep a toolbar folder into which I dump all the interesting links that come my way, and every now and then I sort those links into an organised set of folders. It's cleanup time again, so here are a couple of web goodies:

Winning greater influence for science. Daniel Yankelovich argues that there is an unspoken agreement between science and society which provides science with a "separation from involvement with goals, values, and institutions other than its own", and that

This "social contract" has allowed science to pursue long-term fundamental questions and to build slowly on the basis of its new knowledge. Science has been able to do this even in the context of a society such as ours, which in most domains is impatient, excessively pragmatic, and thinks only in the short term. But this same social contract is responsible for the widening disparity between the sophistication of our science and the relatively primitive state of our social and political relationships.

Most scientists of my acquaintance (and I am guilty of this too) treat the gulf between the public and our "ivory towers" the same way as everyone treats the weather: we complain, but we do nothing. Yankelovich at least suggests a model for dealing with the problem.

On a related note, Eugene Goodheart's essay Imperial Science takes on the "two cultures" view of CP Snow and his inheritors EO Wilson, Jared Diamond and Richard Dawkins. I'm probably a little more sympathetic to Wilson's side of things than Goodheart is, but the essay is a welcome thorn in the side of "sociobiology", that misbegotten offshoot of evolutionary biology which attempts to reduce human lives to formulae and ape-behaviours.

.. if I did, I could drive here in my new home without retraining if not for the French, especially Napoleon. Also that Überscheißkopf Hitler. Quelle bastards!

(via Graham)

Iain J Coleman has a good post up on Fistful of Euros highlighting this paper by UCDavis economist Peter Lindert (that Carlos mentioned in this Electrolite comment thread about this NYT article about the working poor in America). See what I mean about conversations? Anyway, the paper describes why a high-spending welfare state doesn't depress GDP (viz., "looks like a free lunch" but isn't). Here's Iain's summary, emphasis mine:

... social spending is good for personal productivity, and democracy is effective in ensuring that real-world governments avoid the costly mistakes that anti-welfare theorists assume. Apart from illustrating the dangers of hand-waving economic arguments, this tells us that the choice between a European-style high-welfare state, and a US-style low-welfare state, has nothing to do with promoting economic growth and is simply a matter of which kind of society we find more pleasant to live in.

I'd better confess that I haven't read the paper yet and will likely be out of my depth if I do, the dismal science being mostly Martian (or worse, mathematics) to me; but that's why I read blogs, and the excerpt makes intuitive sense to me. I certainly know which kind of society I prefer; besides, "growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell"¹. I keep hearing that modern economic theory is predicated on infinite growth, but that can't be right: it's too crazy. Nonetheless, Economic Growth does seem to have become some kind of modern deity, Mammon's offsider, and it's not obvious to me that economic growth is intrinsically good, or that the opposite of growth is shrinkage (or stagnation). Why is it bad if we don't make more, build more, spend more, own more crap this year than we did last year? What has happened to the concept of "enough", as in, "I have enough, I don't need more possessions or security, I can afford to pay into a pool of common good from which those in need can draw"? For what kind of person is a bigger television more important than that the hungry should have food?

But as I said, I'm probably just out of my depth.

¹Edward Abbey

Update: fixed the link to the Electrolite thread.

Happy second birthday (for yesterday) to creatures in my head.

Eliot Gelwan is right on the money again, this time about the anti-SSRI backlash. If you have reason to know what SSRI stands for (and even if you don't), you should be reading Eliot regularly.

Mark Liberman plays interesting sociolinguistic search engine games (see also this earlier post) at Language Log. Personally, I dislike the use of "refute" to mean "deny", and I strongly dislike the ""refute/refutes/refuted that" construct, but (as Mark points out) those are side issues. (Don't take me for one of those barbaric descriptivists though!) What's really interesting is the kind of analyses that a huge body of searchable text makes possible.

Filtering is a life-raft on the sea of information, and taste tribes are emerging as one of the best filtering mechanisms available (link-fu props to Jerry Kindall). I'm a bit surprised that Joshua Ellis didn't mention tribe.net by name (and that he did mention the dismal Blogshares) but it's a good essay. As I've mentioned before, I think that trackback and syndication and metablogging tools are turning blogs into a conversational medium of sorts, out of which it is easy to build your own taste tribes. I note that Ellis' sense of the term seems to be more interactive than mine -- superspecialrock versus Bloglines -- so maybe I need a different term for solitary geeks assembling a virtual panel of cultural taste-testers. Whichever way you look at it, I think it's safe to ignore Xeni's so-hip-it-hurts whining about "that post-Friendster/Tribe/LinkedIn/SixDegrees oh-god-not-again feeling" on the otherwise excellent Boing Boing. Taste tribes, and applications that pander to them, are here to stay.

Skippy at The American Street points out that CBS, which wouldn't take MoveOn.org's "Bush in 30 seconds" ad because they don't run "issue-oriented" ads, is planning to run anti-Mary Jane ads during the Superbowl. He has some addresses if you want to let the rat bastards know that their hypocrisy has not gone unnoticed.

Speaking of rat bastard hypocrites, I am all tingly with Schadenfreude as I note that the American Family Association has had to abandon its "gay marriage" poll because the position they liked lost out by nearly two-to-one. Hat tip to Atrios, whose "go torture X" memelet probably helped. "Pro-family" my arse.

(via Doc Searls) First the Great Old Ones, now pathogenic microorganisms. When they made a plush Cthulhu, I did not speak up because I was not an Elder God of unspeakable evil...

Via Body and Soul, Obsidian Wings has truly outstanding coverage of the Maher Arar travesty. Arar is a Canadian citizen whom the US gummint deported to Syria so that they could have him tortured. I kid you not. Go read about it; this shit could happen to you next.

If you're part of the choir and you like being preached to (I am and I do), go read this from Rep. Bernie Sanders (I, VT) (via Dave):

The middle class is collapsing, and we need a fundamental alternative to trickle down economics and unfettered free trade.
We've got to raise the minimum wage to a living wage.
We've got to renegotiate our disastrous trade policies that have cost us millions of decent paying jobs.
We've got to change labor law so that workers can join unions when they want to.
We've got to protect the overtime pay that workers have earned.
We've got to put people to work building affordable housing, schools, mass transportation, and a sustainable energy system.
Our health care system is disintegrating... we can guarantee health care to all Americans through a single-payer national health care system. [...]
Our national priorities are backwards. Instead of giving huge tax breaks to the rich and large corporations, we should provide for the middle class and working families of this country. [...]
Environmental degradation is threatening the wellbeing of our planet. We must move to sustainable and nonpolluting forms of energy as well as energy conservation. [...]
We must work for world peace, and not U.S. imperial power. [...]

This, via Boing Boing and Atrios, is no surprise to me, but I hope it gets tremendous coverage:

Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media...

It's not clear that the thieving bastards in question can be prosecuted, but then the law is an ass.

"You just wrong, and I be tryin' to right you." Via pretty much everyone, Margaret Cho is a class act, yo.

This could move biology forward in the same way (that is, to the same extent) that PCR did. Chemists at UC Berkely and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have devised a novel method of measuring protein-protein interactions at cell membranes. Microscopic glass beads are coated with artificial membranes in which functional receptor molecules are embedded, and the behaviour of the beads in response to the presence of various binding partners in the surrounding solution is monitored. From the Nature article (vol 427, pp. 139 - 141):

The behaviour of a colloidal system is driven by the pair interaction potential between particles. In the case of membrane-derivatized silica beads, the pair potential is dominated by membrane–membrane interactions. Two-dimensional dispersions of lipid-membrane-derivatized silica beads exhibit colloidal phase transitions that are governed by details of these membrane surface interactions. The collective phase behaviour serves as a cooperative amplifier that produces a readily detectable response from a small number of molecular events on the membrane surface. Using direct optical imaging, we observe multiple near-equilibrium phases and find that protein binding to membrane-associated ligands at densities as low as 10^-4 monolayer can trigger a phase transition. Statistical analysis of bead pair distribution functions enables quantitative comparison among different membrane systems and reveals subtle, pre-transition effects.

That translates to an extremely rapid, high-throughput method for screening ligand-receptor interactions that is sensitive in the picomolar range and requires nothing more complex than a light microscope. Cool.

A heartening article from the Wildlife Conservation Society:

A recent census of the Virunga Volcanoes mountain gorilla population has found that the great apes have increased their numbers by 17 percent, according to conservation authorities in Uganda, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and other groups. The results indicate a total of 380 gorillas, up from 324 individuals in 1989, the last time conditions were stable enough to conduct such a census. [...] Another population of 320 mountain gorillas exists in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, which brings the current worldwide total of mountain gorillas to 700 individuals.

I only just thought to check whether the Poe Toaster (oh how I wish I'd thought of that) made his visit this year. Sure enough, he did. That link goes to the full version of AP writer Brian Witte's coverage, which (apart from a couple of dismal local attempts) seems to be the only version making the media rounds this year.

more...

As I expected, it's taking me longer than I expected to get the rest of the site (bio, non-blog writing, etc) up, so I thought I should address the issue of copyright. I've just gone back and added links for all the unattributed pictures except the Hubble one (I can't remember which news story I got that from, but it's almost certainly a stock beauty shot from the telescope's home page). So without further ado:

Copyright Notice
Case 1: If I didn't make it, it belongs to someone else and you should respect their rights and wishes. I certainly will: all legitimate requests regarding intellectual property and the content of this website will be speedily obliged. By "legitimate" I mean either "made by the owner of said property" or "reasonable, as determined by me".
Case 2: If I did make it, take anything you want, and do with it as you please. I reserve no rights bar this: if you alter something I made in any way, do not identify me as the author of the altered work. I'd love to hear back about anything you do with something you found here.

Update: as discussed here, I intend that this blog should be part of the public domain. You can take anything you find here (so long as I made it) and do anything with it that you like. I'd love to hear about it, but you're under no obligation whatsoever.

That's art -- sorry, Art -- you're looking at there. Dave Barry came across it at a Miami Beach art show, and he couldn't make any more sense of it than I can:

...a ratty old collapsed armchair - worn, dirty, leaking stuffing, possibly housing active vermin colonies. I asked the gallery person if the chair was art, and she said yes, it was a work titled "Chair." I asked her what role the artist had played in creating "Chair." She said: "He found it."    [pic]

Dave further notes that "Chair" (actually "chair", otherwise known as "Untitled (ellipses) II"), by brilliant scam artist Rodney McMillian, is for sale: a mere $2800. I wouldn't touch the feculent thing for twice that, but here is one James Scarborough blurbing in artcritical.com:

Rodney McMillian's work limns absence as an unmitigated presence. His take on absence is more sensuous than cerebral. He doesn't deconstruct the idea of absence and then rebuild it as a dialectical opposition which posits that what's not seen, felt, experienced is as significant, perhaps moreso, as that which is. [...] The subject... is not our reaction to a void but our innate tendency to venerate the void itself as something sacred and iconic. [...] As a repository and sum of former posteriors that have dented its cushions, of previous elbows that have grazed the armrests, the chair offers not a weedy patina of desuetude but an apotheosis of its former occupant.

Uh, what? I'd get those innate tendencies looked at, mate. The comedy just writes itself here, and I don't care if I am shooting fish in a barrel: these idiots are funny. My hat's off to your man Rod, though; he's found some festering piece of crap in a bin somewhere and he's conned these wankers into putting it in a gallery. I bet some fool will even buy it.

Metafilter's signal:noise ratio renders the comment threads a waste of time, but with the magic of RSS I can scan the front page for old school posts like these:

From magullo, a link to this polished amateur continuation of the Library of Congress' exhibit and project on the pre-WWI work of Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. Prokudin-Gorskii took three black and white exposures of each scene he shot, using a different filter for each; then, by projecting the plates back through the same filters he could create a single colour image on a wall. The LoC, and now Addison Godel and friends, have used modern image manipulation to reproduce some of these extraordinary images. [pic ; I made the grayscale one in Photoshop.]

       

Godel has it exactly right:

...I'd always felt that the past was somehow obscured by being viewed solely through a greyscale window. To see places, buildings, and especially people in color was to understand, on a very deep level, that they had at one time really, truly existed - that the "Typical Russian Peasant of Figure 32" was not merely some gaunt presence in the side of a textbook, but a genuine person who, if not for temporal chance, could have been my neighbor or my friend.

Shibori is a labour intensive Japanese textile dyeing method, and this is a labour intensive post from user lobakgo. Techniques similar to tie-dyeing are used to create patterns like those on the left,from which extraordinarily detailed images like the one on the right are built with months of painstaking effort. [pic 1, pic2]

      

This also ended up on MeFi, but I got it from jwz: the industrial photography of Edward Burtynsky.

      

Rebecca keeps a useful list of antidotes to the special-interest spin in which everything seems to be drenched these days:

Snopes is an old favourite, hunters of urban legends (now in 41 flavours) since 1995. They include "common fallacies, misinformation, old wives' tales, strange news stories, rumors, celebrity gossip, and similar items" in their expansive definition of "urban legend". The site is maintained as a hobby by Barbara and David Mikkelson; they take some advertising (they say they have no direct contact with the advertisers, and appear to take ads only through Burst!Media) and accept donations. Of particular interest in these days of Democratic Primaries and Looming Federal Elections is their politics page.

Spinsanity is the creation of Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer and Brendan Nyhan, all of whom disclose activity and affiliations with "Democratic and progressive politics". It's not clear where (other than their own pockets) they get the money for the site; the site is an Amazon affiliate and they accept donations.

FactCheck.org is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania and accepts no funding from "business corporations, labor unions, political parties, lobbying organizations or individuals". Their mission is to "monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews, and news releases."

The Columbia Journalism Review's Campaign Desk offers political reality checks by medium, angle (Fact Check, Hidden Angle, Local Story, Echo Chamber, Money Trail, Spin Reducer, Distortion, Tip of the Hat and Cheap Shot), issue or candidate. Their stated goal is "to straighten and deepen campaign coverage almost as it is being written and produced" and they focus "not on what politicians say and do, but on how the press is presenting (or not presenting) the political story". No mention of funding sources.

I suspect that I might not hate advertising, at least not with a passion so far beyond reason, if more advertising execs were like David Ogilvy, whom Doc Searls says "was to advertising what Shakespeare was to theatre". There are online bios here and here. There are Ogilvy quotes all over the place, and they paint a picture of that rara -- indeed I'd have said extinct -- avis, an honest advertiser:

The consumer is not a moron. She is your wife.

I always use my clients' products. This is not toady-ism, but elementary good manners.

If you tell lies about a product, you will be found out - either by the Government, which will prosecute you, or by the consumer, who will punish you by not buying your product a second time.

Of course, some of them suggest that he came from a time when television was not so dominant a cultural force:

Advertising reflects the mores of society, but it does not influence them.

Does advertising corrupt editors? Yes it does, but fewer editors than you may suppose... the vast majority of editors are incorruptible.

If this piqued your interest, Ogilvy wrote three books, Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963), Ogilvy on Advertising (1983), and Blood, Brains and Beer (1978, reissued 1997 as An Autobiography). The first two are apparently classics in the field.

Over at Alas, A Blog, bean is beginning a series of "on this day" posts highlighting the history of the women's movement. If, like me, you were none from six on this short quiz, you might want to pay attention.

(Via PZ Myers' Pharyngula) Bruce Garrett, a software engineer at the Space Telescope Science Institute reports (with an update here) on the first casualty of Preznit Dimwit's determination boldly to go where, er, we've already been:

No more servicing missions to Hubble, as per the directive of the current head of NASA, Sean O'Keefe.

Hubble has six guidance gyros. But they fail at fairly regular and now predictable rates. Nearly every servicing mission to Hubble has replaced gyros as part of the work done. It needs three to do most of the science it now does, although there is a scheme in the works to do a greatly attenuated kind of science with two. We currently have four working gyros. Expectations were that we would almost certainly be down to two by the time the next servicing mission occurred, and possibly even down to one. So, figure, at around the time of what would have been the next servicing mission, Hubble will probably be no more, or soon, very soon, to expire.

Mainstream news (1, 2) also has the story.

That's the Little Ghost nebula, the remains of a dying star called NGC 6369. I swiped it from the images gallery at Hubble's homepage. Read, er, view 'em and weep. Deep space exploration just got deep-sixed for the time being.

In comments on portable music, Ralf writes I guess this won't whet your appetite for the iPod or its little sibling:

During his regular evening walk, software executive Steve Crandall often nods a polite greeting to other iPod users he passes: He easily spots the distinctive white earbuds threaded from pocket to ears.

But while quietly enjoying some chamber music one evening in August, Crandall's polite nodding protocol was rudely shattered.

Crandall was boldly approached by another iPod user, a 30ish woman bopping enthusiastically to some high-energy tune.

"She walked right up to me and got within my comfort field," Crandall stammered. "I was taken aback. She pulled out the earbuds on her iPod and indicated the jack with her eyes."

Warily unplugging his own earbuds, Crandall gingerly plugged them into the woman's iPod [...]

Oh dear Ghod. Don't we have a social contract, and laws, and rules, and mores, specifically to keep us safe from things like this? Get away from me, you freaks!

From Scientific American:

Scientists report that they have developed a robot that can formulate hypotheses, design experiments to test them and analyze the results. What is more, it performs just as well as real grad students and spends less money.

OK, so it's not as bad as the entry title makes it sound. The real punchline here is not the bit about equalling grad student performance, which a monkey could do if my own grad school work is any indication; nor do I think that automatic methods of generating hypotheses and/or interpreting data have any real future, except in cases so simple that doing it with wetware is trivial anyway. The real kick is the potential for drastic reductions in monkeywork: one of these doohickeys could slave away 24/7 on the boring, repetitive tasks that make up the bulk of labwork. I hate that shit, and can't wait to dump it on someone (or somebot) else. Another thing about robots: they don't require initial training, and upgrades are presumably simpler than is the case with their vertebrate competitors; furthermore, a robot will not care if I am disagreeably sharp of temper and tongue¹. Given how hard it can be to get good hominid help (just ask my former employers!), I can see a real market for these things.

¹ I think of this as the uncharitable interpretation of my reluctance to suffer fools, gladly or otherwise; but then I would, wouldn't I?

Terrance shops for an MP3 player so I don't have to. All in all, I think I agree with his choice, and will opt for the Zen when I get my next spendy toy fix. I take a bus to and from work; there are conversations I don't need to overhear, and then there are conversations I need to not overhear. Must. Have. Portable. Music.

This is about people I work with. It's a bit misleading in that the lab I work in (also here) is not actually part of the copper project and has separate funding, but the quote about mutual benefits is true and we do have good collaborations between the two groups. I have to wonder whether Ninian Blackburn (whom I have never met; he works on a different campus) came across as somewhat patronising to the interviewer, given the quote with which the piece ends.

There's been another round of comment spamming. Argh. Pretty much everything you need to know can be found in, or via, this thread. (I'm watching it to see if there's a way to get rid of this "Ralf" character who keeps spamming my comments...)

Two from jwz:

Soviet exploration of Venus:

The Soviet exploration of Venus, from 1961 to 1984, is the largest effort ever undertaken to study another planet. The fundamentals of interplanetary spacecraft design and remote sensing were first realized in these attempts. Successful missions included 3 atmospheric probes, 10 landings, 4 orbiters, 11 flybys or impacts, and 2 balloon probes of the clouds.

And the best part? Pictures of the planet's surface!

[Update: it occurred to me that "Venus is pretty hot, isn't it?", so I looked it up. Yes, Venus is very hot: almost 500 °C. Not only that, but the surface pressure is 90 atmospheres, and the perpetual clouds are mostly sulphuric acid. The probe Venera-13 survived 127 minutes on the surface in 1982.]

PERV (porcine endogenous retrovirus) can be transmitted to human cells from the pig/human chimeric cells that form in pigs grown from embryos into which human stem cells have been injected. One of the aims of the research is (was) to create tissues that could be used in xenotransplantation. Some researchers would disagree with me:

...the question is how widespread and how many of these hybrid cells were found? If they are very rare - and we haven't found any in our experiments - then I don't think it is that important.

but I think this is the end of porcine xenotransplants.

Typing "poetry" into a search engine will get you nowhere; or rather, it will get you everywhere, which is no use at all. Every angsty teenager should write poetry, of course, but only in a vanishingly small number of cases should anyone else ever read it. Herewith a short list of readable poetry on the web.

Dead white men; or, "classical" poetry:

Steve Spanoudis' Poet's Corner offers 7600 poems by 780 poets indexed by author, title and subject. Biographies of about 30 and photographs of about 120 poets (many of them somewhat obscure) are also available. They accept submissions, if you have a favourite poet you'd like to see included (but beware copyright restrictions!). The daily poetry break features a poem a day from the Poet's Corner collection, with commentary by Bob Blair. I frequently disagree with Bob's opinions, but he's interesting.

Representative Poetry Online includes about 2,900 English poems by over 400 poets. It's based on a 1912 textbook but includes hundreds of additional poems and poets as well as biographical data, commentaries and other features.

The estimable Project Bartleby offers a wonderful selection of verse anthologies and volumes. Special mention here to the best anthology of English poetry ever made, the 1919 Oxford Book of English Verse. Quoth Q:

My wish is that the reader should in his own pleasure quite forget the editor’s labour, which too has been pleasant: that, standing aside, I may believe this book has made the Muses’ access easier when, in the right hour, they come to him to uplift or to console.

The venerable Project Gutenberg currently includes 209 volumes of poetry, from Aristotle's Poetics to the selected poems of Oscar Wilde.

The American Verse Project from the U of Michigan contains entire books of poems from about a hundred authors, mostly 19th century.

The Poetry Archive has about 5000 poems by about 150 poets. Lots of advertising though.

Contemporary:

Poetry Daily will email you a contemporary poem every day, or you can read it online. There's an archive but, sadly, poems are only retained for one year.

Web del Sol is "a collaboration on the part of scores of dedicated, volunteer editors, writers, poets, artists, and staff whose job it is to acquire and frame the finest contemporary literary art and culture available in America and abroad, and to array it in such a manner that it speaks for itself."

Various and Sundry:

Verse Libre offers more than 13000 poems by almost 500 authors, both classical and contemporary, searchable/browsable by author and title. The random poem feature is fun (aaaahhhh! I got one by the horrible McGonagall when I went to fetch that link!), and I was suprised by the top 20 list (I expected it to be pure schmaltz, if not worse; I'm a snob and an asshole). Like Poet's Corner, they accept submissions (but not from angsty teens; published work only).

The Atlantic magazine online has a poetry archive which includes numerous essays and, best of all, audio files of poets reading their own and others' work. Unfortunately, they use the malignant and execrable RealAudio format, but as the spousal unit recently noted, there is at least one alternative way to access those streams.

The Academy of American Poets has photographs, biographies and selected works from over 450 poets. Some are living, some not; not all of them are American. Their listening booth has a nice selection of audio (more RealAudio I'm afraid).

If you like poetry audio, Laurable has more than 2500 links to audio covering nearly 500 poets.

"...if you're going to insist on meaning in life, you're going to have to choose between intellectual dishonesty and unhappiness."

Anapestic is the nom de web of a madman with a golden tongue. He has quite a way with words, too. Think of a waspish (not WASP-ish) American P G Wodehouse, and you're halfway there.

So I finally saw LotR:RotK, and it sucked. Hard. I'm probably too late to do anyone any good with this, but if you haven't seen it, don't. Jackson treats the characters and the story without respect, pretty much exactly as I'd expected him to do in the first two movies. I was suprised when he exceeded my expectations with FotR and TTT, but the signs were there in some of the egregious abuses of character and plot, and the third movie makes it abundantly clear that Jackson simply does not understand the nature of Tolkien's work. He reduces it to Hollywood pabulum -- Graydon (in this thread) is exactly right when he says, "The generosity has been leeched out of [the story], along with the restraint." Even viewed as schlock RotK is a lousy piece of work. Editing, pacing and visual continuity are all sloppy. The spousal unit postulated time/money problems and/or studio interference, but in the end Jackson must take the blame for turning a grand and epic tale into a stupid action flick.

Amitai Etzioni presents an essay by David P. Barash on whether or not it is reasonable to be reasonable. It's excellent, and you should read it.

One of the best parts is an elegant examination of something called the Wason test (after its inventor Peter Wason):

Imagine that you are confronted with four cards. Each has a letter of the alphabet on one side and a number on the other. You are also told this rule: If there is a vowel on one side, there must be an even number on the other. Your job is to determine which (if any) of the cards must be turned over in order to determine whether the rule is being followed. However, you must only turn over those cards that require turning over. Let's say that the four cards are as follows:

T 6 E 9

Which ones should you turn over?

Got that? OK, now think about this:

You are a bartender at a nightclub where the legal drinking age is 21. Your job is to make sure that this rule is followed: People younger than 21 must not be drinking alcohol. Toward that end, you can ask individuals their age, or check what they are drinking, but you are required not to be any more intrusive than is absolutely necessary. You are confronted with four different situations, as shown below. In which case (if any) should you ask a patron his or her age, or find out what beverage is being consumed?

patron #1 Drinking Water
patron #2 Over 21
patron #3 Drinking Beer
patron #4 Under 21

For the answers, see Barash's essay. I guess it's old news to undergrad psych students, but I thought it was just fascinating. You can dig into the significance of the Wason test, and take another version of it, here.

For me, weblogs are largely about conversation. With trackback and comments enabled, a blog can host some amazing conversations; see Making Light and Crooked Timber for just two examples. I'll be using this category to highlight interesting conversations I've come across, starting now with this one on Making Light. From the (relatively uncontroversial) observation that PETA are basically nuts, it has ranged across vegetarianism, ninja tarantulas and questions of natural law and the ordered universe, by way of such arresting anecdotes as this:

You can, actually, feel a lot of pain without showing any sign of it. Or at least that was my experience when my grandmother kindly tried to shave my legs with an electric razor while I was in a coma. The funny thing is, after all the fuss of pulling the plug, I didn't die. For those who have not tried this form of dipilatory torture, may I say it ranks right up there with hot candle wax on a sunburn and veterinary needles through mucous membrane?

(Note: comments to these entries will be turned off; it's not my intention to become a blog-parasite!)

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For me, the best thing about Wampum's 2003 Koufax Awards is the number of excellent blogs to which the nominations (which start here) have introduced me. True to form, though, I haven't been paying attention as I added new blogs into my favourite new toy, so no list of new notables from me. Instead, I've gone through the nominations for Best Post, and here present (in no particular order within each group) my own selections from that list, with reasons why you should go vote for them as well.

Best of breed:

Lady Sisyphus' post, actually written by a friend of hers, called so great a cloud of witnesses. I defy anyone to read this and maintain opposition to gay marriage without engaging in serious cognitive dissonance.

Billmon is nominated for a number of posts, but the one that really resonated with me was Dream Time. I also grew up in a racist milieu, bear its lasting marks, and am determined to rid myself of every last trace of it.

The rest of the best:

Prometheus 6 looks at American slavery from a viewpoint you should not miss. Whites, as well as blacks, had to be conditioned to accept an economy built on injustice.

David Niewert at Orcinus is nominated for a widely (and deservedly) praised post on the impact of the political on the personal.

Amp at Alas, A Blog takes a swipe at one of the last socially acceptable prejudices. What I want to know is, what's so terrible about being fat anyway?

Amp has also been nominated for his succinct explanation of how Republicans could get a late-term abortion ban if they really wanted one, and why they don't.

Very Very Happy on why you should at least get your facts straight before you decide to hate the French. Read this before you ever make the "cheese eating surrender monkeys" joke again, 'k?

Honourable Mentions:

Allen Brill at The Right Christians provides annotations for MLK Jr's "I have a dream" speech. If you can stomach my writing and opinions, you don't need me to explain why that speech is important, and Allen has done a nice job of tracking down the sources of its powerful imagery.

The Left Hook is nominated for a post about Jose Padilla. I was embarassed to realise that I did not know what was happening in that critical case, so the post makes my list for administering a much-needed jolt (even if it was written back when I was still paying attention). If, like me, you need to catch up, Google is your friend. (Bottom line: no progress.)

Greg at The Talent Show also makes the list for telling me something I should have known. He starts out teeing off on Transcendental Meditation, then goes on to deliver the coup de grâce to the Hundredth Monkey bullshit (that the latter was so readily debunkable is what I didn't know, but should have).

Nathan Newman gets points for defending the (almost) indefensible Al Sharpton, and doing a good job of it.

Tresy is nominated for an enjoyable and accurate anti-Shrub rant on corrente, The Chickenhawks Come Home to Roost.

I admit it, Atrios' Secret Media Memo made me laugh.

If you go, love, dawdle
down the unlit path.
Fob the ferryman off
with vague replies.
I won't be far behind.
Throw your penny in the water,
or hand it to some poor shade
trapped on the shore. I'll
bring you another. We'll cross together.

...

Don't drink the water! If you forget me
my name will become another word for sorrow.

In an aside to this post, Mark Liberman at Language Log links to a wonderful talk by Richard W Hamming on how to do significant research. This is a useful collection of observations for anyone who wants to go beyond the solid, plodding "good" to the really first-class. (Not, I hasten to add, lest this post come back to haunt me, that there's anything remotely wrong with "good". I have a long way to go to get even that far; and Hamming himself pretty much admits that, as a general rule, unless you are a towering Pauling-esque genius you can be happy or you can be significant.)

[updated, see below]

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Pericat agrees with Mike Täht that he, Mike, is not a lemming. I don't know Mike from a hole in the ground (though I'm sure he's a fine fellow), so what grabbed my interest was the article concerning lemming population cycles to which P also linked. The research paper on which the article is based is available here in pdf format. It's outside my area of research, so take this with an appropriately large grain of salt, but I am not convinced by the proposed theory. It rests on two ideas I find problematic:

1. plants producing lethal toxins (that they do not normally produce) in response to heavier-than-usual grazing. The mechanism of this toxin production must differentiate between regular grazing and "preferred food has all been eaten, so look out" grazing; if wound-induced toxin production were dose-responsive (more wounds, more toxin) that might work, but as far as I can tell the authors cite no actual examples of this occurring.

2. the idea that the primary reasons for a lack of toxin resistance development in the rodent population are the long (relative to generation time) periods between toxin production and immigration from susceptible genepools. The authors do not seem to explain how either of these is a defense against the fixation in the population of a mutation which provides toxin resistance and is not detrimental to reproductive fitness in the absence of toxin.

Finally, the authors state:

Evolved resistance will be delayed further if the toxins have a longer-term effect of interfering with breeding [...] This will reduce the probability of resistant residents breeding with each other

I don't buy that either. It seems to me that it only holds true if the resistance does not extend to the breeding interference, which does not seem likely; in fact, resistance to a toxin present in the primary food source during a food shortage seems likely to increase reproductive fitness.

How's that for a tangent?

First: it is indisputable that George W Bush is a miserable failure and, in my opinion, he is unelectable.

Second, a few words prompted by the Iowa Democratic debate: "Howard Dean" "sealed records" "flip flop" "Osama death penalty" "Bush was warned" bullshit.

Since he's clearly the frontrunner and seems likely to get the nomination, I wish Howard Dean would add a section to his blog specifically to combat the spin that is going to be repeated and repeated and repeated about him. Three early issues came up in the Iowa debate, and I thought he handled them well:

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Now this is sweet. Bloglines is an online RSS aggregator with a clean, selbstverständlich interface and a host of useful features that allows you to streamline your weblog reading enormously (it will also work with email newsletters and newsgroups - anything that can be syndicated). Here's the overview, and my account is open for public viewing if you want to see the system in action (it's a bit messy because I'm still putting it together). This thing will save me hours; mad props to founder Mark Fletcher.

Some links that were languishing in a textfile; sorry about the lack of attribution, I'll try not to do that again.

Kurt Wenner's amazing trompe l'oeil street paintings.

Possibly the worst CD of all time.

A collection of creative gene names. Most of the best ones are Drosophila genes, fruit fly genetics being a field with a long history of wry jokes. For example: cleopatra (interaction with asp is lethal), barentsz (doesn't reach pole), amontillado (larvae can't hatch -- For the love of God, Montresor!).

An interesting way to divide the US up into political regions. I'm happy to be in a zone that's "known for both civic responsibility and civil disobedience".

A brilliant cartoon from film maker Mark Osborne (Quicktime).

Direct conversion of the energy in a moving liquid to electricity; no moving parts, no pollution. A link: search on Google confirmed my feeling that this story is not getting much attention (and reminded me that I found it on the excellent Laputan Logic), but also introduced me to FuturePundit via this post, which points out some reasons for less than unbounded optimism.

Microangela has a scanning electron microscope, and she's not afraid to use it. That's a fly's foot -- Musca domestica I assume, although the site doesn't specify. No wonder the little bastards can stick to anything.

In-wheel drive. The Dutch city of Apeldoorn is about to undertake a six-month evaluation of a bus with inside-out electric motors in each wheel and a small diesel motor to keep the necessary batteries charged. If the inventors are to be believed, the new arrangement of old technology offers 60% savings on fuel and massive reductions in both noise and fuel-emission pollution.

Campaign for a moratorium on the death penalty. I think there are two ways to look at the death penalty: one, in the hypothetical case of a perfect justice system which never convicts the innocent; and two, in the real case of our present justice system which all too often convicts the innocent. I'm against it in both cases, but I think the argument in the second case is utterly compelling.