We really need to encourage Ann Coulter

Ann Coulter uses sexual innunendo to taunt adolescent males to attack protesters. I love it. She's so stupid, and so wrong, that she's walking performance art. With just a bit of a push she might go right over the edge.

It's the duty of every rationalist and humanist to encourage Ann to go just a bit further ... I don't think she'll hurt herself (or I wouldn't be advising this), but she's going to start doing some serious harm to her causes ...

Hookers, spies and the GOP

If the GOP hadn't sold their soul for power I'd almost feel sorry for the party. Duke Cunningham, a GOP stalwart convicted of accepting bribes, is a fallen hero -- but now his fall is looking ever more impressive...

Obsidian Wings: Girls!! Girls!! Girls!!

...according to people with knowledge of the investigation, Mr. Wade told investigators that Mr. Cunningham periodically phoned him to request a prostitute, and that Mr. Wade then helped to arrange for one. A limousine driver then picked up the prostitute as well as Mr. Cunningham...

...I've learned from a well-connected source that those under intense scrutiny by the FBI are current and former lawmakers on Defense and Intelligence comittees—including one person who now holds a powerful intelligence post. I've also been able to learn the name of the limousine service that was used to ferry the guests and other attendees to the parties: Shirlington Limousine and Transportation of Arlington, Virginia. Wilkes, I've learned, even hired Shirlington as his personal limousine service.

It gets even more interesting: the man who has been identified as the CEO of Shirlington has a 62-page rap sheet (I recently obtained a copy) that runs from at least 1979 through 1989 and lists charges of petit larceny, robbery, receiving stolen goods, assault, and more. Curiously—or perhaps not so curiously given the company's connections—Shirlington Limousine is also a Department of Homeland Security contractor; according to the Washington Post, last fall it won a $21.2 million contract for shuttle services and transportation support...

As to the festivities themselves, I hear that party nights began early with poker games and degenerated into what the source described as a "frat party" scene—real bacchanals. Apparently photographs were taken, and investigators are anxiously procuring copies.

The rumor is that this "senior official" has been suspected in Washington circles of leading a bit of a double life. If you want to know the name you'll have to visit the site. My morals allow me to point, but not to repeat.

If there are photos, this will be both terrible and irresistible.

Robert Reich has a blog

I was reading a NYT article on how Reich exposed a corporation trying to bribe him, when I was surprised by a reference to Robert Reich's Blog. I've long admired Reich, a curmudgeonly and proudly liberal intellectual best known for his stint as Clinton's labor secretary. His book 'Reason' was a terrific antidote to Coulter's diatribe. I was surprised, then, to learn I'd missed his blog!

Turns out he started it this month, I'm the 3rd bloglines subscriber. Let the deluge begin!

Update 4/28/06: Looks like the corruption story was his third post. The company was GM.

BTW, it's cute to see how he starts his blog:

Okay, so I'm blogging and blathering. I never thought it would come to this. But there's no other way to tell the whole truth. I don't know if anyone will read this blog, but it's worth a try. Until tomorrow ...

posted by Robert Reich | 5:35 PM | 9 comments
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
A test from your son

Dad,

I know you may feel tentative about me setting this up for you, but I couldn't resist. Blogs are a great way to reach an audience immediately. I'm going to send you posting instructions to your email. You can post personal thoughts, political theory, pictures one day, a quote another, anything. There is an audience for this stuff, but you have to start posting to get it.

Much love.

Reich clearly had no idea how big his audience will be. I suspect he's learning ...

Longer life through younger mothers

The children of young mohters may live longer, on average, than the children of older mothers:

John Hawks Anthropology Weblog : Longer life with younger mothers:

...They also discovered that being the first-born in a family meant a lot, boosting the odds of making it to 100 by nearly 80 percent...

... statistical analysis revealed that young maternal age at birth completely accounted for the first-born effect.

Paternal age had no affet in this study.

Everyone's first guess is that it's the age of the mitochondria that matter, in humans virtually all mitochondria are maternal. One wonders how many "first born" effects are really effects of maternal age.

Building virtual worlds in Google Earth: SketchUp

Great Cyber Shades of Snow Crash. Google is providing tools to build virtual worlds -- atop Google Earth.

Official Google Blog: A great day for 3D

... The new Google SketchUp is for the do-it-yourselfer, the hobbyist — really anyone who wants to build 3D models for use in Google Earth. Go ahead and model that new kitchen, or deck, landscape your virtual garden, or impress your teacher with a roller coaster or medieval castle. When you’re finished, place your model in Google Earth. There! The beginning of a virtual world. Warning: don’t start messing with this stuff after dinner because your first experience could be an all-nighter… making an idea come to life in 3D can be very addicting.

And what could be better than that? Well, sharing your work with everyone else through the 3D Warehouse. Accessible through both versions of SketchUp, 3D Warehouse enables you to upload, search, browse, view, and download SketchUp models. Just as you do with Google search, enter some keywords and the 3D Warehouse shows you all your options. Grab the one you want and import it into your model. (Note that the Warehouse is not stocked up yet — so model something yourself and upload it for all the world to see.)

Windows client, Mac promised (we'll see ...).

Google Calendar is hot!

Google Calendar is hot. I've posted in my tech blog that it's giving me geek goosebumps. A recent discovery, however, pushed it over the edge into this blog.

The XML URL for Google Calendar is a Feed. I now have a private bloglines entry that simply shows updates or changes to calendar events. Now, when my wife updates an event in the family calendar, my bloglines web-client RSS reader will display the updated event. This works even for a non-shared private calendar.

To find the feed url, click on 'manage calendars', a subtle link on screen left (anatomic right). Then click the calendar name you want to manage. (I have two calendars: Personal and Family. I can view them separately or as an integrated calendar. My wife can edit the Family calendar and view my personal calendar.)

You'll see Calendar Details. Click the XML button for the private address. A URL pops up with the helpful note that "you can copy and paste this into any feed reader". It works as advertised. Now bloglines shows the entries I haven't seen yet, and it only shows changes. If I'm logged in and I click on the header for an 'article' I get the details of the event for editing.

Then there's the tight integration with Gmail, the parsing of mail to create events, the natural language processing, etc. I've even momentarily stopped hating Google for letting Blogger fester ...

PS. Privacy? Surely you jest. Privacy is sooo 20th century.

Worse than Buchanan?

I don't know how I missed this one. Better late than never. Historians, admittedly an intellectual, thoghtful and liberal group, struggle to place Bush in the ranking of worst presidents:

Rolling Stone : The Worst President in History?

... Colleagues at Princeton to argue idly about which president really was the worst of them all. For years, these perennial debates have largely focused on the same handful of chief executives whom national polls of historians, from across the ideological and political spectrum, routinely cite as the bottom of the presidential barrel. Was the lousiest James Buchanan, who, confronted with Southern secession in 1860, dithered to a degree that, as his most recent biographer has said, probably amounted to disloyalty -- and who handed to his successor, Abraham Lincoln, a nation already torn asunder? Was it Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, who actively sided with former Confederates and undermined Reconstruction? What about the amiably incompetent Warren G. Harding, whose administration was fabulously corrupt? Or, though he has his defenders, Herbert Hoover, who tried some reforms but remained imprisoned in his own outmoded individualist ethic and collapsed under the weight of the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression's onset? The younger historians always put in a word for Richard M. Nixon, the only American president forced to resign from office.

Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a "failure." Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration's "pursuit of disastrous policies." In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton -- a category in which Bush is the only contestant.

Well, an informal survey really doesn't mean too much, but I'm betting Bush will be among the 'worst of the worst' 20 years from now. Other than as an excuse for venting, the article is an excellent summary of the many ways that Bush has failed, irregardless of one's opinion of his underlying ideology.

It's not simply that his economic policies reward his campaign contributors and his old friends at the expense of his voters (forget the dems, just consider Bush supporters), it's that these actions contradict his rhetoric and impair his effectiveness. So he's even bad at being bad.

It's handy reference to have at hand when someone asks "what's so bad about Bush?".

Iraq: nobody knows where it will go

Phil Carter is a marine and a lawyer. His military law and politics blog was a few years old when he chose to rejoin the marines and deploy in Iraq. He's there now.

He reviews The Assassin's Gate, a book that's highly critical of the conduct of Rumsfeld, Cheney and (thus) Bush but is supportive of the US military's work on the ground. The review, and Phil's guarded commentary (he's on active service) are well worth reading.

I spent some time in Israel 20 years ago. That's where I learned that the reality on the ground is vastly more complex than what media can tell us, or even what intelligence analysts can capture. Carter says the same thing about Iraq. It's a complex place. There's a lot happening. You can justify whatever story you want to tell. Nobody knows how it will turn out, or what the cost will be.

Personally (I think Carter might agree), I think the odds would improve if Rumsfeld were gone, if Cheney were to shuffle off to a secret hide-out, and if Bush were to turn over the strategic direction to the braintrust Howard Baker is now leading. That might even happen ...

Black holes: the heart and lungs of a galaxy

It turns out that the supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies like our's pump out a great deal of energy. This has some interesting effects on the evolution of a galaxy:

Black holes generate green energy - Space.com - MSNBC.com:

... The energy that each black hole emits as jets warms the surrounding environment. This prevents gas from cooling and coalescing into billions of new stars, and places an upper limit on how large a galaxy can grow.'In an environmental sense, the black holes are actually preventing galactic sprawl from taking over the neighborhood,' Weaver said."

Gas rushes into the black hole, pulses of energy rush out. To a physician it sounds like the heart and the lungs of a galaxy. Without these massive black holes it sounds like galaxies would be crowded with stars, and presumably much less hospitable to life ...

A guide to covert communications

Advice for paranoid reporters was written (somewhat sardonically) to help reporters deal with the age of Bush, but it's a handy catalog of techniques to use when one wishes to retain a measure of confidentiality and privacy.

Frothing mad: Colonel Wilkerson

One of the way Rove, Cheney and Bush destroy their enemies is to "feminize them". They does this to women and men alike, but of course it works better on males. Rove uses words historically associated with feminine ineffectiveness, words like "shrill" or "hysterical" or "histrionic". He and his minions ascribed these traits to many democrats in the last election, including Paul Krugman of the New York Times.

When someone uses this kind of effective grade school tactic, one response is to invert the pejorative. "Shrill? Hell, yes I'm shrill. You should be too." Shrillblog headlines those of us who are justly shrill.

Even with its new respectability, however, the word "shrill" seems a bit understated for Colonel Wilkerson's incendiary rage:

Colonel Wilkerson Is Really Shrill!

From the Kyoto accords to the International Criminal Court, from torture and cruel and unusual treatment of prisoners to rendition of innocent civilians, from illegal domestic surveillance to lies about leaking, from energy ineptitude to denial of global warming, from cherry-picking intelligence to appointing a martinet and a tyrant to run the Defense Department, the Bush administration, in the name of fighting terrorism, has put America on the radical path to ruin.

Big science: Regulating the master regulator genes

When I was a child of 19 or so, I helped write Fortran code to simulate the braking system of an ancient freight train. These pneumatic systems were not entirely designed, they evolved over time. A large amount of lost expertise was used to create a kludged system that would reliably activate at roughly the same time over a long train despite large signal latencies. Analysis showed that some of the pneumatic subsystems merely counteracted others, but the emergent behavior was reliable.

I don't recall, at the time, realizing that I was working on a metaphor that was widely applicable to biology, economics, software, and all other complex evolved systems. I think of those lessons again as I read about the very reliable and fantastically arcane bio-nano-machinery that controls the master regulator genes:

Studies Find Elusive Key to Cell Fate in Embryo - New York Times

A question of interest for biologists studying cell identity is what regulates the master regulator genes. The answer has long been assumed to lie in the chromatin, which determines which genes are accessible to the cell and which are excluded. The chromatin consists essentially of millions of miniature protein spools around each of which the DNA strand is looped some one and half times.

The spools, however, are not mere packaging. They can lock up the DNA they are carrying so that it is inaccessible.

Or they can unwind a little, so that the strand becomes accessible to the transcription factors seeking to copy a gene on the DNA and generate the protein it specifies.

... there are protein complexes — essentially sophisticated cellular machines — that travel along the chromosome and mark the spools with chemical tags placed at various sites on the spool.

A complex known as polycomb ... tags spools at a site called K27.

This is a signal for another set of proteins to make the spools wrap DNA tight and keep it inaccessible.

Another complex tags spools at their K4 site, which has the opposite effect of making them loosen their hold on the DNA.

The chromosomes of the body's mature cells are known to have long stretches of K27-tagged spools, where genes are off limits, and other regions where the spools are tagged on K4, allowing the cell to activate the local genes.

... In the current issue of Cell, a team led by Bradley E. Bernstein and Eric S. Lander reports that they looked at the chromatin covering the regions where the master regulator genes are sited.

They found to their surprise that these stretches of chromatin carried both kinds of tags, as if the underlying genes were being simultaneously silenced and readied for action.

... Each cell must avoid being committed to any particular fate for the time being, so all its master regulator genes must be repressed by tight winding of the spools that hold their DNA. But the cell must be ready at any moment to activate one specific master regulator as soon as its fate is determined.

The Broad team then looked at the chromatin state of the master regulator genes in several kinds of mature cell.

... they found that the bivalent domains had resolved into carrying just one type of mark, mostly the K27 tag, indicating the master genes there were permanently repressed.

But in each kind of mature cell one or more of the domains had switched over to carrying just the K4 tags, within which genes would be active.

... Dr. Bernstein's team worked with mouse cells, but its findings have been confirmed in human embryonic stem cells by Tong Ihn Lee and Richard A. Young of the Whitehead Institute...

The new findings raise the question of how the embryonic cell knows where on its chromosomes the bivalent domains should be established. Dr. Bernstein and Dr. Lander believe that the answer lies in the structure of the DNA itself.

The bivalent domains occur at regions on the chromosome where some of the DNA sequence is highly conserved ...

... These particular sequences, however, do not contain genes, so must be conserved for some other reason.

The highly conserved non-gene sequences were first detected in the dog genome, which was decoded last year. It was in trying to figure out what these regions did that the Broad team stumbled across the bivalent domains.

Although only half of the highly conserved regions contain master regulator genes, something in their DNA structure may be the signal that tells the cell where to create the bivalent domains.

... Dr. Young's team has studied another aspect of embryonic stem cells which ties into the new finding about bivalent domains. Three genes, known as oct4, sox2 and nanog, are known to be particularly active in the cells and are regarded as a hallmark of the embryonic state.

Dr. Young showed last year that the genes make transcription factors that act on each other's control sites in ways that in effect form a circuitry for controlling the master regulator genes.

He has now found that these transcription factors bind at many of the bivalent domains created by the polycomb complex.

... a working definition of cell status may be almost at hand, in Dr. Lander's view, in terms of a cell's chromatin state and the transcription factors that can bind to its available genes.

So, how many of these researchers will end up making the trip to Stockholm? There are a lot of moving parts that are coming together here. The Nobel committee will have its hands full sorting things out. I do think it's cool that one of the fundamental breakthroughs appears to have been an unanticipated side-effect of decoding the dog genome.

Fame aside, note the shape of things. The "master signal" that says "control me here" is the shape of the DNA. In other words, this control signal is topological. Signaling by shape is fundamental to DNA and protein alike, in the world of the cell topology is about creating a distinctive signature of electromagnetic fields (and perhaps quantum signals too). On the other hand, there is a binary system of "wrap" and "expose" that controls what DNA is read. On the third hand there's set of 3 genes for transcription factors that regulate each other's activity -- a configuration that will be familiar to anyone who's studied simple transistors.

If one abstracts the control systems as shape and charge, simple circuits and binary actions, it becomes possible to see how such an emergently complex nano-world could evolve a little bit of a time. I am still waiting, however, for the announcement that biologists have uncovered the DNA equivalent of the LZW-compression algorithm. [Note to software designers -- if you're looking for new compression algorithms, look how DNA solves this puzzle.]

This is huge news. The biggest thing I've read for a while.

Missed comments: Gmail eating them!

GMail has been eating (filtering as spam) Blogger's comment notifications. So if you're commented and the comments didn't get approved for posting, the blame goes to GMail's atrocious spam filtering. It appears to be untrainable -- I've several times marked these as 'non-spam'.

I think I've found all the comments and approved them.

Revolt against Rumsfeld: It's the torture.

This week's Economist features a Lexington column baying for Rumsfeld's head on a pike. I think this is the "new" Lexington, since the prior Lexington was a GOP poodle this is a bit of a change. There's no denying attacks on Rumsfeld are also attacks on Cheney and Bush.

Salon has more to say. They claim the root of the general's revolt is not so much in Rumsfeld's strategic failures and tactical blunders, but rather in his execution of Cheney's torture program:

More top brass blast Rumsfeld | Salon.com News

..."I sense a great deal of distress among senior military officers over what's happened with prisoner treatment," Irvine said. "I believe the abuse is playing a significant part in how these generals are feeling and why they're speaking out. There's an understanding that whatever we're doing at Guantánamo and elsewhere constitutes license for others to do to us when our soldiers are taken prisoner in the future. There's the realization that we've pretty much trashed the high ground along with the Geneva Conventions."

On April 14, Salon revealed that Rumsfeld was personally involved in directing the harsh interrogation of a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay, according to a sworn statement by an Army lieutenant general who investigated prisoner abuse at the U.S. base in Cuba...

The thesis is that emotional fire beneath the rebellion is a hatred for the dishonor Rumsfeld has brought upon America and the American military.

Honor. I figured Americans had forgotten what it meant.

Space Race. Brain Race.

I have to give FuturePundit credit here. I've long assumed that economic competition within the US will overwhelm any resistance to messing with IQ genes, but FP points out that competition will likely be nationalistic as well.

Obvious in retrospect; I'm sure it's shown up in a science fiction story somewhere. China is the obvious suspect to start things off, but the US is about as good a candidate. One or the other will make altering IQ genes a national agenda, and the race will take off.

Practically speaking nationalist competition only speeds things up a bit compared to internal economic competition. Either way the outcome will be a lot of people with very high IQ, and a lot of people suffering from the expected and unexpected consequences of this kind of gene manipulation.

It will be an interesting problem, but it's manageable. The much bigger problem will be artificial minds, I suspect the merely linear enhancements of gene-engineering will be a historical footnote; assuming there's a history.