Mendel's head is spinning

Plants Fix Genes With Copies From Ancestors (washingtonpost.com)Plants can restore from backup systems.

Then, in a move akin to choosing their parents, plants can apparently retrieve selected bits of code from that archive and use them to overwrite the genes they have inherited directly. The process could offer survival advantages to plants suddenly burdened with new mutations or facing environmental threats for which the older genes were better adapted.

Eons ago I wondered if biological systems would somewhere implement algorithmic compression programs resembling lzw compression. This is weirder.

I'm not sure it's totally unanticipated, I think I saw a star trek episode along those lines once (Picard is devolving towards some kind of lemur ...). Nonetheless, it's rather astounding. Gregor Mendel would really be amazed.

Technology bites

Palm is now palmOne and PalmSource - US

My Palm synching had been trouble free for a while. Reassuring to know it's still unreliable! PocketMirror bit me tonight -- all my contacts are in one category.

Some people wonder why the PDA market died. They also wonder why Quicken is fading away.

I could tell 'em!

Theocracy has its bright side -- the catholic church moves on to the death penalty

The New York Times > Washington > Bishops Fight Death Penalty in New Drive

We may be living in a nation that is increasingly theocratic, but even that has its bright side. In contrast to most evangelical churches, catholic churches have always technically opposed the death penalty. They've just been quiet about it. That may be about to end.

I hope mainstream Protestant churches will jump onboard. Even Senator Santorum (separate article), the bane of the Englightenment, is actually thinking that maybe it's a bad thing for the state to execute disabled, incompetent or (dare we say) innocent human beings. Santorum does seem a bit fuzzy about church doctrine vs. the Pope's personal prejudices -- he evidently missed out on a few catechism classes.

It will be amusing to see Catholic bishops and leftie right-to-choose activists sharing the same podiums (even if only virtually).

Bush won't like this one bit.

Digital Rights Management and iTunes: why we should fund Chinese hackers

MacInTouch Home Page:

A father posts on Macintouch about a fascinating problem with Digital Rights Management:

I'd like to raise an issue that I'm faced with and I'd like to know if others find themselves in the same situation, or if this is a time-bomb waiting to ambush others.

Since iTunes opened, I've been purchasing music for my young daughter. This is music that I have generally no interest in, it's music for her library. At the same time, I have my own music library which also includes music from iTunes. All of this music was purchased under a single iTunes account (after all, it is my credit card).

My young daughter is now not as young and is getting ready for college in the fall. I wrote to iTunes to ask how I can transfer her music to her own account so she does not have to share my account with me forever. iTunes wrote back that there is no way to do this. A few back and forth emails have not gotten me any forward progress on this issue.

There are all sorts of variations on this theme. Divorce, marriage, etc. How many more can we not imagine? Digital Rights Management currently binds content to machines accounts, and the machine account is (in theory) bound to a person. The goal, ultimately, is to bind digital media it to a single person by biometric methods (or the old "chip in the left ventricle" technique :-).

I had my first "bite" from Apple's DRM the other day. I had to activate a new machine, but the new machine had an older version of iTunes. When I played a tune I'd downloaded (for free of course, I don't buy music with DRM) iTunes informed me I had to upgrade to a new version of iTunes to play it. Apple did this because they needed to close a security frailty in their FairPlay DRM system. It's nibbles like these that remind me of what that the DRM-beast will look like when it's full grown.

We ought to establish a fund to support Chinese hackers. Soon we'll all be needing their services ...

Ends and means

The New York Times > Opinion > Editorial: A Blow to the Rule of Law

But in the Schiavo case, and in the battle to stop the Democratic filibusters of judicial nominations, President Bush and his Congressional allies have begun to enunciate a new principle: the rules of government are worth respecting only if they produce the result we want. It may be a formula for short-term political success, but it is no way to preserve and protect a great republic.

Madness.

How To Complain about your Wireless Service = especially SprintPCS

How To Complain about your Wireless Service

SprintPCS hides well, but this web site exposes its mailing address. Thank heavens for Consumer Union -- and Google.

Sprint finally managed to push me far enough that I decided to fill out a complaint form from the office of our famously combative state (MN) attorney general. Problem is, I needed a mailing address for the form and Sprint hides its mailing addresses quite well. Happily Google found it for me.

What drove me over the edge? They went too far in hiding information about their calling plans and contracts. After my second call to the desperate and hapless folk who work Sprint's customer service lines it became clear that Sprint considers information on their service plans to be a corporate secret. The information on the web site is hopelessly incomplete and misleading, and they don't provide printed summaries in any form to anyone.

GRRRR. Its worth filling out the bloody complaint form. Hatch wants to run for Governor of MN, if he wants to make his name he can go after Sprint and force them to put their plan information online clearly and completely.

Dyer has 8 more articles on his public site

Dyer 2005

If anyone knows of a free web service that would generate RSS updates based on changes to this page let me know!

You too can be a Guardian!

Want to be a Guardian of the Enlightenment? Well, if you have a Blogger account you too can join this exclusive club! Just add 'GOTE' to the interests section of your Blogger Profile. When the profile is viewed these 'tags' display as a link. Clicking on the link will display the thousands, nay ones, of your fellow guardians.

Join now and win a Darwin bookmark!

The Halifax Explosion -- how transient is history

CBC - Halifax Explosion

December 6, 1917 dawned clear and sunny in Halifax. Before darkness fell, more than a thousand people would die, with another thousand to follow. Nine thousand more would be injured and maimed in the biggest man-made explosion the world had ever seen...

...American emergency teams--most of them from Massachusetts—arrived as well. They remained for months, and became part of the rebuilding effort. Halifax was front-page news around the world. By one estimate, relief donations eventually topped $23 million.

Shades of the WTC attack including similar death toll, but this was an accident. Some quick thoughts:

1. A hundred years from now, how well well will most people remember the WTC attack?
2. Some of the terrorist scenarios that have been discussed in the past few years focus on hijacking a very explosive ship and deliberately triggering this kind of disaster.

I've been to Halifax, but I'd forgotten about this. I don't recall seeing any tourist booklets about the explosion.

(Link via Metafilter)

Defending the enlightenment: Darwin stickers

CHARLES DARWIN HAS A POSSE -- free bookmarks and stickers

Darwin. Franklin. Jefferson. Einstein. Sir Francis Bacon. We need stickers for all of 'em and more.

Rep Barney sums up the Schiavo debacle

Federal Court Hears Schiavo Case (washingtonpost.com)

Totally incompetent. Not much more to say about this.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said it is foolish to think the bill will not become a legal precedent. 'Every aggrieved party in any similar litigation now will go to Congress, come to Congress and ask us to make a series of decisions,' he said. 'This is a terribly difficult decision which we are, institutionally, totally incompetent to make.'

Fortunately my wife has the technical skills to ensure that congress will not have to debate the placement of any future feeding tubes I may have.

Google books are online: The Origin of the Species

Google Print Search: The Origin of Species

Darwin now more readable. Quick, burn the computers.

The highlighted text is annoying however. I can't see how to turn it off.

Calendars, leap years and when spring starts

Why Leap Years?

Spring came on 3/20 in Minnesota this year. This page explains why the first day of spring varies, and gives some good calendar backgrounding as well.

Two years of war - visiting the graveyard

washingtonpost.com: Faces of the Fallen

Intel Dump suggested a visit to this Washington Post site on the anniversary of the war. I've made my visit. You should too. January was worse than I'd remembered.

Propaganda works in America

The New York Times > Arts > Frank Rich: Enron: Patron Saint of Bush's Fake News

In a rare non-partisan note, let me point out that the Clinton white house was reasonably good at propaganda. Bush has merely exceeded their skills by an order of magnitude.

Why invest so much into propaganda? Because it works:

... Enron "was fixated on its public relations campaigns." It churned out slick PR videos as if it were a Hollywood studio. It browbeat the press (until a young Fortune reporter, Bethany McLean, asked one question too many). In a typical ruse in 1998, a gaggle of employees was rushed onto an empty trading floor at the company's Houston headquarters to put on a fictional show of busy trading for visiting Wall Street analysts being escorted by Mr. Lay. "We brought some of our personal stuff, like pictures, to make it look like the area was lived in," a laid-off Enron employee told The Wall Street Journal in 2002. "We had to make believe we were on the phone buying and selling" even though "some of the computers didn't even work."

If this Potemkin village sounds familiar, take a look at the ongoing 60-stop "presidential roadshow" in which Mr. Bush has "conversations on Social Security" with "ordinary citizens" for the consumption of local and national newscasts. As in the president's "town meeting" campaign appearances last year, the audiences are stacked with prescreened fans; any dissenters who somehow get in are quickly hustled away by security goons. But as The Washington Post reported last weekend, the preparations are even more elaborate than the finished product suggests; the seeming reality of the event is tweaked as elaborately as that of a television reality show. Not only are the panelists for these conversations recruited from administration supporters, but they are rehearsed the night before, with a White House official playing Mr. Bush. One participant told The Post, "We ran through it five times before the president got there." Finalists who vary just slightly from the administration's pitch are banished from the cast at the last minute, "American Idol"-style.