Explaining the RNA Interference Nobel: Zimmer scores

NPR had a sadly incoherent discussion of this year's Physiology Nobel. It's a shame they didn't just read Zimmer over the radio: The Loom : A Nobel Prize for The Shadow Network.

Is there some point in the evolution of these complex interacting networks that the system starts to collapse of its own complexity? Does evolution then have to choose new directions, such as abstract systems for memetic evolution (aka, sentience)? Just asking ....

What would a collapsing evolutionary end-point look like anyway? Probably just a pile of viruses ...

Deconstructing human programming: The amygdala and the rostral angular cingulate cortext

Another step towards understanding the programming of the naked plains ape ...

FuturePundit: Brain Circuit Found That Resolves Emotional Conflicts:

... the amygdala generates the signal telling the brain that an emotional conflict is present; this conflict then interferes with the brains ability to perform the task. The rostral anterior cingulate cortex, a region of the frontal lobe, was activated to resolve the conflict. Critically, the rostral cingulate dampened activity in the amygdala, so that the emotional response did not overwhelm subjects’ performance, thus achieving emotional control....

On the bright side

On the bright side, hideous aliens from another galaxy haven't yet invaded our planet, reduced our cities to smoking rubble, and enslaved all survivors.

Oh, wait, if they have that would explain a lodftrdfaad urrrrkkkkk ...

New world: Lua, Brazil and Adobe Lightroom

I'm posting this here rather than in my tech blog because the significance is much broader than it might at first appear.

Adobe Lightroom is a major development from a leading software firm. It turns out that about 40% of it is written in "Lua", something I'd never heard of. Adobe did this so they could write code that would run on both OS X and Windows (Credit: Daring Fireball). Ok, so what's big here?

A few things. One, Lua was developed in Brazil, and the web site has both Portugese and English versions. So, globalization. Two, open source. Three, adoption speed. Four, for the geeks among us, Lua supports software who's behavior is configured and controlled by accessible data stores -- it's adaptive in a way that's big in software now (sometimes called model-driven computing) but is as old Lisp/Smalltalk etc. And, oh, yes, bytecode again.

The world, speed, winning by giving things away, adaptive software. That's the bright side of the 21st century .... (emphases mine)

Lua: about

Lua is a powerful light-weight programming language designed for extending applications. Lua is also frequently used as a general-purpose, stand-alone language. Lua is free software.

Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua is dynamically typed, runs by interpreting bytecode for a register-based virtual machine, and has automatic memory management with incremental garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping.

A fundamental concept in the design of Lua is to provide meta-mechanisms for implementing features, instead of providing a host of features directly in the language. For example, although Lua is not a pure object-oriented language, it does provide meta-mechanisms for implementing classes and inheritance. Lua's meta-mechanisms bring an economy of concepts and keep the language small, while allowing the semantics to be extended in unconventional ways. Extensible semantics is a distinguishing feature of Lua.

Lua is a language engine that you can embed into your application. This means that, besides syntax and semantics, Lua has an API that allows the application to exchange data with Lua programs and also to extend Lua with C functions. In this sense, Lua can be regarded as a language framework for building domain-specific languages.

Lua is implemented as a small library of C functions, written in ANSI C, and compiles unmodified in all known platforms. The implementation goals are simplicity, efficiency, portability, and low embedding cost. The result is a fast language engine with small footprint, making it ideal in embedded systems too.

Lua is designed and implemented by a team at PUC-Rio, the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Lua was born and raised at Tecgraf, the Computer Graphics Technology Group of PUC-Rio, and is now housed at Lua.org. Both Tecgraf and Lua.org are laboratories of the Department of Computer Science.

'Lua' means 'moon' in Portuguese and is pronounced LOO-ah.

There's something really stunning about all this ... But maybe that's just me.

Pigou: where the rational left meets the rational less-left

Greg Mankiw is the the closest thing to a "rational right" person I know of. He's "close" because he once worked for Vlad Bush and because he's a Libertarian, which I think sort of qualifies as sort of on the right. (Would he work for Vlad again? He doesn't say these days.)

The Pigou Club is where he meets people like Al Gore and Paul Krugman. Follow the wikipedia link to get the background.

Neil Armstrong vindicated

Long ago we walked the moon. Yes, I know it seems unbelievable.

Anyway, Neil Armstrong, now 76 yo, has long been thought to have "flubbed" his historic catchphrase "One small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind"...

High-tech analysis may rewrite space history:

... In the 2005 book First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong, Armstrong told Hansen that others have pointed out that he can often be heard dropping the vowels from his speech in his radio transmissions.

'It doesn't sound like there was time for the word to be there,' Armstrong said in the book. 'On the other hand, I didn't intentionally make an inane statement, and . . . certainly the 'a' was intended, because that's the only way the statement makes any sense.

'So I would hope that history would grant me leeway for dropping the syllable and understand that it was certainly intended, even if it wasn't said -- although it might actually have been.'"

Emphases mine. New analysis suggests Armstrong did indeed include the vowel, but a communications glitch dropped it. Apparently whatever NASA was doing to conserve bandwidth tended to chop Armstrong's vowels ...

The complexity of causes: Pompey and the Fall of Rome

In 49BC Caesar crossed the Rubicon, and tyranny ruled Rome. Twenty years before, the laws of the Republic were swept away so that a terrifying threat could be ended...

What A Terrorist Incident in Ancient Rome Can Teach Us - Pirates of the Mediterranean - New York Times

IN the autumn of 68 B.C. the world’s only military superpower was dealt a profound psychological blow by a daring terrorist attack on its very heart. Rome’s port at Ostia was set on fire, the consular war fleet destroyed, and two prominent senators, together with their bodyguards and staff, kidnapped...

With the acquiescence of an anxious populace, Pompey passed laws that gave him unlimited power, and he crushed the pirates with an efficiency Rumsfeld would envy. (Pompey was not incompetent.) Caesar used those laws to seize power.

Would the Republic have survived if Pompey's power grab had been thwarted? Perhaps not, the Republic had many problems. Pompey's power, however, was a leading indicator that the end of the Republic was near.

Khmer America: The fellowship of the waterboard

Recently the GOP legalized waterboarding. Today Crooked Timber provides us some historic context. The United States of America has joined the illustrious Khmer Rouge in the Fellowship of the Waterboard ...

Crooked Timber: What Waterboarding Looks Like:

The current administration is out there on torture together with the ******* Khmer Rouge.

and in comments ..

... Am I the only one here disgusted by this repulsive attempt to imply moral equivalence between our democratic torture, torture for the sake of liberty, democracy, Judeochristianity and free markets – with Khmer Rouge’s godless, evil, anti-market torture?...

May the ghosts of Cambodia visit the dreams of Vlad Bush.

Note that McCain voted for the torture bill. I would like to repeat that. McCain voted for this bill. On a day of infamy, that was a particularly sad note. With that act, he destroyed the reputation of a lifetime.

In the last election American Catholics swung towards Bush. The GOP has failed yet another test, how will the Catholic church respond this time? Will the religious right begin to wonder if they've chosen the wrong champion?

BTW, the October surprise? A direct attack on Roe V. Wade -- something to make the religious right forget the torture bill. (Incidentally, I think it is time for RVW to pass into history, but the October action will be done in the worse possible way ...)

PS. Regular readers note this is the first obscenity ever to appear in the posts of CT. There's cause.

How hot will it get? Hotter than ever.

Another analysis of historical temperatures has come out. The Look has summarized the article and presented the graph. The graph is a bit hard to interpret because it spikes so severely between 1900 and 2002. We're not talking hockey stick, we're talking rocket.

The easiest thing to do is follow the blue line for the 2001-2005 mean. The earth was super hot 400,000 years ago, and we're still about 1 degree C short of that. That was the hottest earth in 1.35 million years - as far back as we can go. If we don't do some radical CO2 reduction however, we'll blow by that record (pass it by a whopping 2 degrees C) and move out of the range of human evolutionary history.

Cut and run? Ok, maybe limp.

This is blackly funny. A GOP House candidate parrots Rove's tired 'cut and run' line, forgetting who his Democrat opponent is ...

WorkingForChange-Beyond the pale:

... In Illinois' 6th Congressional District, long represented by Henry Hyde, Republican candidate Peter Roskam accused his Democratic opponent Tammy Duckworth of planning to 'cut and run' on Iraq.

Duckworth is a former Army major and chopper pilot, who lost both legs in Iraq after her helicopter got hit by an RPG. 'I just could not believe he would say that to me,' said Duckworth, who walks on artificial legs and uses a cane.

I hope Duckworth is savvy enough to have gotten a chuckle out her opponent's stupidity...

Paul Graham: a big thinker in the world of software development

A brilliant colleague of mine recently recommended I review some of the writings of Paul Graham, in particular a famous essay Hackers and Painters and also the rest of his essay collection. The essays are primarily about creating a software business, also an interest of mine. You know he has to be good, because he recently returned to OS X.

Beyond the direct interest of Mr. Graham’s work, a few observations about the new world:

• The famous essay, which has been widely read, has never been published except on the web.
• My Graham doesn’t bother with RSS feeds, but two fans have created unofficial but “blessed” feeds that point to new essays. In our new world, there are creators and communicators and creator/communicators. All roles are valued. I added Joseph Grossberg’s feed to my Bloglines collection, then from there found an interesting comment by another blogger, and added him as well. Thus does the network grow.

My colleague, btw, is a creator but not a communicator…

Avandia (rosiglitazone) for Rat Alzheimer's Prophylaxis?!

I'm sure it's too late to buy stock in GlaxoSmithKline today, but it might be worth shorting it when disappointment sets in.

This FuturePundit article describes a rat study demonstrating that a "PPAR delta agonist" prevents progression of rat Alzheimer-disease like dementia. Sounds like they're talking about Rosiglitazone (Avandia), a Thiazolidindione class drug [1] that's alleged to work in diabetes by stimulating PPAR Delta receptors and thus enhancing intracellular glucose uptake.

The theory is that defects in insulin uptake into neurons play a role in the development of Alzheimer's disease, and the plaque and tangles we see are secondary processes arising in glucose starved brain cells. Improve uptake is alleged to slow disease progression.

I follow this domain casually, and this "type 3 neuro-diabetes" theory of Alzheimer's seems new to me, but of course being middle-aged I've probably forgotten about earlier readings.

Interesting for sure. In the unlikely event it actually worked GlaxoSmithKline would have hit the jackpot and the US debt bomb would be defused. Anyway, if it's really promising we'll know within the year.

[1] All of this stuff is pleasantly new to me, I'm getting far enough removed from medical practice I actually get to read about new physiology periodically. That's fun.

PS. I've always been suspicious that exercise really helped prevent Alzheimer's disease. It would fit with this though, if exercise had some global effect on insulin response and glucose uptake ...

PPS. All members of this class of medication cause weight gain ... Isn't that a deliciously nasty choice? You can be thin and demented, or hefty and not demented ...

Update 4/21/2010: Didn't do so well in human trials!

The Hall of Shame: 6 Democrats join

Histories Hall of Shame will include the Bush administration and all but two every GOP Senators in office today. It will also include six democrats. Five are anonymous drones, but it is astonishing how far Lieberman has fallen. This was a man who once had a reputation.

10/2/06: Correction: Lincoln Chafee opposed and Olympia Snowe did not vote. My apologies to these two.

What DeLong reads

DeLong responds to yet another decrepit journalist decrying the blogosphere. Those articles are both ridiculous and boring, I'm surprised DeLong has the energy to respond.

Along the way, he tells us what the reads. He rates the FT and the WSJ (news only, not the rabid and demented editorial pages) above the Economist, then runs through his blogs. Happily, I read at least half of them. DeLong is more avidly political than I, so my list leans more to science, technology and OS X than his. Still, I'm pleased to read at least half his favored set!

Now I need to start reading the Finacial Times ...

Guardians of the Enlightenment: Join SEFORA, promote the rationalist bill of rights

SEFORA is special interest group -- for scientists, engineers, and rationalists. Non-partisan, but it's obvious what's inspired them. My spouse and I have joined, even though we didn't make the illustrious first thousand. SEFORA (Scientists and Engineers for America) asks candidates to endorse a rationalist bill of rights -- and promotes candidates that sign up:

SEFORA

# Federal policy shall be made using the best available science and analysis both from within the government and from the rest of society.

# The federal government shall never intentionally publish false or misleading scientific information nor post such material on federal websites.

# Scientists conducting research or analysis with federal funding shall be free to discuss and publish the results of unclassified research after a reasonable period of review without fear of intimidation or adverse personnel action.

# Federal employees reporting what they believe to be manipulation of federal research and analysis for political or ideological reasons should be free to bring this information to the attention of the public and shall be protected from intimidation, retribution or adverse personnel action by effective enforcement of Whistle Blower laws.

# No scientists should fear reprisals or intimidation because of the results of their research.

# Appointments to federal scientific advisory committees shall be based on the candidate’s scientific qualifications, not political affiliation or ideology.

# The federal government shall not support any science education program that includes instruction in concepts that are derived from ideology and not science.

# While scientists may elect to withhold methods or studies that might be misused there shall be no federal prohibition on publication of basic research results. Decisions made about blocking the release of information about specific applied research and technologies for reasons of national security shall be the result of a transparent process. Classification decisions shall be made by trained professionals using a clear set of published criteria and there shall be a clear process for challenging decisions and a process for remedying mistakes and abuses of the classification system.

I can't imagine any Republican who could sign up for this, so SEFORA will inevitably be supporting Democrats.