No, you do not pronounce the “g” in gnosticism – mainly because, well try it, you know that can’t be right. Gnosticism is a fancy word for a style of religion – a style with which you might be familiar from The Matrix. 
In The Matrix, people inhabit a material world created by imperfect and selfish beings that prevents them from living full lives. A few people have discovered the true reality behind “reality”. That knowledge (the gnosis of gnosticism or the red pill of The Matrix) brings great power (e.g., kung fu) and salvation. Continue reading “Skeptical Gnosticism”
Post-apocalyptic giant John Christopher passes away
Christopher Priest writes a brief obituary in the Guardian. Christopher (real name Samuel Youd) was one of the three giants of the excellent British school of post-apocalyptic fiction in the 50’s in 60’s, the others being John Wyndham and J.G. Ballard. Christopher, with his brutal The Death of Grass was somewhat of a transitional figure between the “cosier” Wyndham and Ballard’s dark novels.
h/t to io9.
Good science writing makes me purr
For my money (what little of it there is), good science communication starts with the familiar and gives it a twist. People connect with the familiar and are compelled by the twist. If you are doing it right, you don’t even have to bother telling people that you are educating them. Brian Switek gets it right in his article, “Why Margarita Can Purr, but Can’t Roar” for Wired: Continue reading “Good science writing makes me purr”
Faculty of 1000 going arXiv
In math and physics we have the arXiv, but nobody referees those papers. In biology and medicine, a board called the Faculty of 1000 chooses and evaluates the best papers, but there’s no archive: they get those papers from traditional journals.
Whoops—never mind! That was yesterday. Now the Faculty of 1000 has started an archive!
• Rebecca Lawrence, F1000 Research – join us and shape the future of scholarly communication, F1000, 30 January 2012.
I’m all for giving this a try, but I still have a hard time seeing how some type of arXiv thing would work in the life sciences, simply because the life sciences are so damn big. Life scientists in academic research make up more than one third of all academic scientists. There are more than twice as many academic life scientists as physical scientists, and more life scientists than all academic physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, chemists, and earth scientists combined. As far as I can tell by my anecdotal observations, life scientists publish many short papers, as opposed to fewer and longer papers, which is the norm in other fields.
Gene Networks and Natural Selection
This was originally posted at Adaptive Complexity, but it might be of interest to our patrons here at The Finch and Pea.
Life can be brutal for yeast in the wild. You don’t know where your next meal is coming from or what form it’s going to take. The key to being a successful yeast is to be metabolically agile, able to switch your metabolic state quickly based on the food source that’s currently available on the bark of an oak tree or in the leaf litter of a forest floor.
So yeast, especially the set of species related to baker’s yeast, have various networks of genes that specialize in making a meal out of different sugars. A yeast has to detect, pump in, and break down various sugars like sucrose, galactose, maltose, and glucose. Each of these sugars has different chemical properties, and therefore yeast requires different sensors, transporters, and enzymes to use each as a food source. Continue reading “Gene Networks and Natural Selection”
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