If you like food, hate pretentious irony, and think social misfits should get a chance to be successful, then you will probably enjoy this interview of Anthony Bourdain by Mark Maron.
If Bourdain is correct about people (and I suspect he is), people get involved with the cooking industry (around the 55th minute) for the same reasons they get into the scientific industry – and it is not for a love of food or science, though that may come later: Continue reading “Other damaged people”
The other day, I was inspired to think about creative ways to lose weight. “Creative” meaning solutions that allow one to eat tasty food. That pretty much leaves us with quackery or increasing energy expenditure. Unfortunately, quackery, being quackery, generally does not work, and increasing energy expenditure usually means doing things that are either boring (e.g., jogging) or hard work (e.g., jogging) or both (e.g., jogging).
What really increases your energy usage, isn’t boring, or hard work? Shooting energy beams from your eyes, like Cyclops[1]. Shooting energy beams from your eyes has to require lots of energy, doesn’t it. I mean, they are beams of energy. And, Cyclops always seems to be in pretty good shape. Could the two be connected? Where does the energy for the beams of energy come from? Continue reading “The X-Men Diet”
The adrenaline rush of going fast is undeniable. The fear. The excitement. Yet, there also seems to be something redemptive about going fast, as if we can actually run away from our problems.
Well now I’m no hero
That’s understood
All the redemption I can offer, girl
Is beneath this dirty hood
–Bruce Springsteen, “Thunder Road” Continue reading “Tag, or the Springsteen-Smoke Theorem”
This fourth post, long-awaited by two people, concludes a two-part post based on my having to watch Disney’s Cinderella roughly 17837 times. After a while, you start noticing the little things, or go mad, or both.
Like a Freudian psycho-analyst asking about mom, screens bring up issues[1] for classical geneticists. Screens are what we do. Conceptually, screens are simple. In fact, they are like your screen door. The goal is start with everything and separate it into two groups – one that passes the screen and one excluded by the screen – based on a particular characteristic. Your screen door tries to do this based on size, letting in the breeze, but keeping out the flies, if everything is working well.
With screens, be they in the genetics laboratory or your back door, the devil is in the details. We need to worry about how well the screen works. If our screen door has holes in it or we are opening the door a lot, bugs are going to get in. If the screen is dirty, it might not let as much of the breeze through as we would like[2]. We need to worry about whether we are actually screening for the characteristic we care about. Screen doors separate bugs from breeze based on size. They do not detect “bug” and zap it with a laser, because one house could not contain that much awesome[3].
I’m concerned that the King, Grand Duke, and Prince did not think through the details of their attempt to screen their female subjects for Cinderella – i.e., The Great Slipper Screen[4]. Continue reading “Cinde-really 4: The Great Slipper Screen”
My daughter really enjoys playing the iPad game Flick Fishing HD. Don’t worry folks. It’s all catch and release. Also, The Frogger can now identify about 30 different species of fish. We also use it for spelling practice:
Can you spell “barracuda”?
It also got me to wondering why different fish react differently to being caught on a line as this is a threat that is completely different from any natural predators. Are the fish aware they are in danger or just trying to get away from an annoyance? Is the behavior panic or some version of a standard predator avoidance? Or, is the fish evaluating the threat and then putting together the best strategy it can to counter the specific threat? That sounds pretty advanced, but we already know that some fish can use tools*.
*Depending on how you choose to define “tool”.
The Finch and Pea 