Now here’s a good book!

I’d like to read this one.

Bacteria respond to stress with more mutation

I’d like to see Mike Behe and Bill Dembski explain this solid research finding.

Carl Zimmer’s new book, Microcosm, has a chapter on E. coli in hostile environments. The bacterium has a precise DNA-repair chemistry (enzyme?) that it uses in normal times. But when it suffers a lot of damage, a fast but sloppy chemistry takes over (different enzyme?). It makes more mistakes but it might keep more bacteria alive.

The result is that in a really hostile environment, e.g. flooded with antibiotics, the bacteria begin to mutate at a rate a hundred times faster than their usual rate. If I read your definition correctly, they increased their evolvability by the same factor. As a result, they evolve at startling rates. That’s probably what happened when bacteria were sent into space and came back with an unexpectedly high number of mutations to help them survive.

When the environment settles down, they go back to using the more precise repair chemistry and the mutation rate falls back to its usual level.

Simply put, it seems to be the bacterial equivalent of panic: When you’re going to die, do something - anything! Maybe it will work.

Can you sue God’s publishers?

Gay man sues Bible’s publishers for causing harassment: Powell’s book blog, Monday, Item 3.

Bradley LaShawn Fowler, 39, has filed lawsuits in a Michigan federal court against Zondervan Publishing and Thomas Nelson Inc., claiming some editions of the Bibles those companies put out specifically declare homosexuality to be sinful, which has led him to suffer discrimination, emotional pain and mental instability.

[...] The suit against Zondervan cites a specific passage of the company’s 1982 and 1987 editions, 1 Corinthians 6:9:

“Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral no idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders.”

Fowler claims the term “homosexual” was edited out of the 1989 and 1994 editions.

In addition to campaigning to get the churches’ free tax ride rescinded (why pay their salaries so they can insult us?), maybe we can make this a class action suit. And one for women.

Currently reading: “Microcosm” by Carl Zimmer

I’ve started to read Carl Zimmer’s latest book, Microcosm, and learned many fascinating facts about the bacterium. For the first few chapters, Zimmer is reviewing the history of research on bacteria and DNA. He mentioned that Oswald Avery, a microbiologist at the Rockefeller Institute, was the first to prove that DNA was the material of heredity and genes; that the food-poisoning bacterium Shigella is really just a strain of Escherichia coli; and that E. coli itself is more comples\x and individual than we dreamed of.

My books have arrived!

My latest batch of books has arrived, after Amazon promised to ship them August 11th. They are

• Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures, by Carl Zimmer
• Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain—and How It Changed the World, by Carl Zimmer
• Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life by Carl Zimmer
• Victory of Eagles by Naomi Novik

Do you notice a trend there? I’m treating myself to some of the best science writing on the planet, that of Carl Zimmer.

The last book is fiction, an alternate history of the Napoleonic Wars in which dragons provide air support as a branch of the Navy. This is the fifth book of the series. Start with Temeraire.

The celebration begins today

Sven DIMilo points out on Pharyngula,

The sesquicentennial celebration rightly begins today: it was June 18, 1858 when Darwin received the manuscript from Alfred Russell Wallace that finally kicked Darwin’s reluctant ass into publishing.

New book: “Your Inner Fish” by Neil Shubin

I have a new book to look forward to: LotStreetWiz bought me Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body. (Follow the link for Oliver Sacks’ review of the book Neil Shubin talking about his book, and images of the discovery of Tiktaalik in 2004.

Neil Shubin is one of the discoverers of Tiktaalik roseae. He says,

It turns out that being a paleontologist is a huge advantage in teaching human anatomy. Why? The best roadmaps to human bodies lie in the bodies of other animals. The simplest way to teach students the nerves in the human head is to show them the state of affairs in sharks. The easiest roadmap to their limbs lies in fish. Reptiles are a real help with the structure of the brain. The reason is that the bodies of these creatures are simpler versions of ours.

During the summer of my second year leading the course, working in the Arctic, my colleagues and I discovered fossil fish that gave us powerful new insights into the invasion of land by fish over 375 million years ago. That discovery and my foray into teaching human anatomy led me to a profound connection. That connection became this book.

Getting Things Done

I’m in Chicago with LotStreetWiz. We are both taking a time management course called the GTD RoadMap, given by David Allen, who wrote the books Getting Things Done and Ready for Anything.

GTD RoadMap course:

The flagship of the GTD (Getting Things Done) seminar series, The RoadMap defines the game and helps you jump into it at a new and expanded level. This lively one-day workshop features David Allen live and in-person as he examines the core principles of productivity improvement, then provides you with a unique opportunity to develop your own specific and immediate action steps to implement them.

GTD l The RoadMap provides black-belt techniques for gaining control of the day-to-day, tools for achieving alignment and balance by viewing your world from the appropriate horizon of your commitments and the master key to getting motivated to overcome resistance and move forward. Essentially the Roadmap will provide you with your own internal GPS reading, so at any time you can identify where you are and what you need to do to get on your game and get going.

For those who are new to GTD, The RoadMap provides high-level overview and introduction to a lifelong set of best practices for staying clear, focused, and in control. For those who have already had experience with GTD in some fashion, it will take you for a spin around the block with the basics and inspire you to a new level of implementation (there are no “beginner” moves in the martial arts).

You’ll benefit from:

…decades of in-the-trenches research on achieving relaxed productivity, plus a wealth of up-to-the-minute tips, tricks, and best practices compiled from the whole David Allen Company team (applying GTD material currently with leading-edge individuals and organizations). Collaborate with David in designing your own action plan to keep you winning at the game of work and business of life.

You’ll learn:

• How to get immediate control of “current reality”
• How to keep track of the total inventory of your commitments
• What decisions are critical to make, about what, and when
• Why most “personal management systems” don’t work
• How to evaluate the best tools to use to stay in control
• Why organizational issues are often personal process issues
• Why it’s so challenging to really change the simplest habits, and the secret key to make it easier
• How to use procrastination to your advantage
• How to continually self-consult to get back “on your game”
• How to install simple tricks that create profound results

You’ll have an opportunity to:

• Corral your inventory of “loose ends”
• Practice important decision-making on the front end
• Evaluate and upgrade your personal management system
• Identify the key conversations to have with yourself and others and set next actions in place to start them
• Have fun engaging directly with the expert Fast Company called “the guru of personal productivity” and Forbes identified as one of the five top executive coaches in the U.S.

Contents include :

• The limitations of “psychic RAM” and how to free it up
• Tools and best practices for capturing and corralling your “stuff”
• The two questions that transform “stuff” into real work
• Gaining “horizontal” control with the Five Core Principles of Positive Engagement
• Gaining “vertical” control using the Six Horizons of Focus
• How to install the two components for permanent change

Participants can expect to leave the seminar with enhanced freedom and energy, knowing that their busy lives are indeed manageable, inspired to enjoy life and work at a new level of effectiveness.

Hours: 9 to 5

Apartment therapy: the amazing staircase

A friend sent me this link to the amazing bookshelf staircase. It seems like a neat idea but a bit hard to navigate while one is half asleep.

All libraries should be this pretty

In 2005. a private bookstore let a local artist arrange the books on their shelves by color.

The results are beautiful… go and look at the full-sized pictures: “Superhero Journal: There is nothing wrong in this whole wide world.”

Pick your criteria carefully

It’s not enough to measure: you must know what you’re measuring and why it’s appropriate. You should be able to explain why it’s appropriate.

Ideally, when you’re making a choice for a project, you lay out the desired results and the criteria by which you are judging, and the decision is firm that when competing solutions are evaluated, the one that fits the criteria best will be chosen.

Unfortunately, that’s not how governments work. They run the tests or consult their consultants and then pick the one they wanted in the first place. Sometimes they even falsify the data or dictate the conclusions of the report—or simply refuse to publish it. Or, as happened here, they seem blissfully unaware of what’s really important. Ed Darrell reports… how the U.S. National Education Library got new staff.

Books: The Whole Hog by Lyall Watson

I just finished reading this most enjoyable book, The Whole Hog by Lyall Watson, all about superfamily Suoidea: pigs (family Suidae) and peccaries (family Dicotylidae), but not hippos.

The book describes the domestication, species, and subspecies of pigs, the story of pigs and explorers, and the sensorium and intelligence of pigs. Watson is right: pigs are inexplicably overlooked when we think about domesication, culture, and animal intelligence. Except as stand-ins for humans in medical research, they are little studied.

Watson makes a good case for them more-or-less domesticating themselves, as they are sociable omnivores. Signs of pig domestication have been found at least 8,000 years ago. But do we hear about that great advance, the domestication of the pig? We do not. We hear about dogs, cattle, horses, and cats. He describes his childhood pet, a fostered baby warthog, that accompanied him and his guardian on walks through the African bush.

There’s a tiny population of Himalayan pigs which average about ten pounds—perhaps a better pet than the 80-pound Vietnamese pot-bellied pig. They are unique—and threatened—but is anyone their champion? He tells of the discovery of a remnant population of Giant Peccaries in Yucatan in the 1970s. Until those were discovered, we believed that they had gone extinct 10,000 years ago.

Find a copy if you can.

Superfamily Suoidea. comprises two familes.

Family Suidae:

• Subfamily: Suinae - “true” pigs
  • Genus: Sus (pigs)
    • Sus scrofa (domestic pig) - many subspecies
  • Genus: Potamochoerus (river hogs)
    • P. larvatus, bushpig
    • P. porcus, Red River hog
  • Genus: Hylochoerus (forest hogs)
    • H. meinertzhageni - forest hog, four subspecies
• Subfamily: Phacochoerinae - warthogs
  • Genus: Phacochoerus
    • P. aethiopicus, desert warthog
    • P. africanus, common warthog
  • Subfamily: Babirousinae - babirusa
    • Genus: Babyrousa
      • • B. babyrussa
        • Family: Dicotylidae
          • Genus: Tayassu (peccaries)
          • Genus: Catagonus (giant peccaries)

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Whose books did Hitler burn?

Here you see Nazis confiscating the library of the Institute for Sexual Research:

They appear to be trampling on the books while looking for the ones with the good pictures.

Far from being inspired by evolutionary theory, in fact, Hitler burned Charles Darwin’s books:

Books to be burned, in German:

6. Schriften weltanschaulichen und lebenskundlichen Charakters, deren Inhalt die falsche naturwissenschaftliche Aufklärung eines primitiven Darwinismus und Monismus ist (Häckel). (Guidelines from Die Bücherei 2:6 (1935), p. 279)

In English:

6. Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (Häckel).

As noted before, Hitler believed in the creationist theory of “kinds”:

“Whence do we get the right to believe, that from the very beginning Man was not what he is today? Looking at Nature tells us, that in the realm of plants and animals changes and developments happen. But nowhere inside a kind shows such a development as the breadth of the jump, as Man must supposedly have made, if he has developed from an ape-like state to what he is today.” (Hitler’s Table Talk)

Expelled the movie seeks to blame the Holocaust on Hitler’s version of the Origin of the Species. If that’s what caused it, you have to blame the Bible and Creationism!

Rebel against textbook costs

Here’s a New York Times article about the high cost of textbooks. Like car dealers loading their merchandise with unwanted extras such as pinstriping or restaurants piling more mashed potatoes on every plate, textbook publishers add CDs or new revisions to create costlier goods with planned obsolescence.

Meanwhile,

Schools are beginning to balk at outrageous pricing. Rice University offers textbooks for some classes free online and charges a nominal fee for the printed version. A new company called Flat World Knowledge, based in Nyack, N.Y., plans to offer online textbooks free and hopes to make its profit by selling supplemental materials like study guides and hard copies printed on demand.

A study being carried out by the geographer Ronald Dorn at Arizona State University suggests that students who use free online textbooks perform as well academically as students who buy expensive copies from traditional publishers. Colleges and universities should take advantage of these new developments.

So