BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: October 2009
Monday, October 26, 2009
Human Evolution: Not Stopped
Scientifically-literate piece from Time.com about how human evolution is proceeding these days.
Stearns' team examined the vital statistics of 2,238 postmenopausal women participating in the Framingham Heart Study, which has tracked the medical histories of some 14,000 residents of Framingham, Mass., since 1948. Investigators searched for correlations between women's physical characteristics; including height, weight, blood pressure and cholesterol levels; and the number of offspring they produced. According to their findings, it was stout, slightly plump (but not obese) women who tended to have more children. "Women with very low body fat don't ovulate," Stearns explains - as did women with lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels. Using a sophisticated statistical analysis that controlled for any social or cultural factors that could impact childbearing, researchers determined that these characteristics were passed on genetically from mothers to daughters and granddaughters.
If these trends were to continue with no cultural changes in the town for the next 10 generations, by 2409 the average Framingham woman would be 2 cm (0.8 in) shorter, 1 kg (2.2 lb.) heavier, have a healthier heart, have her first child five months earlier and enter menopause 10 months later than a woman today, the study found. "That rate of evolution is slow but pretty similar to what we see in other plants and animals. Humans don't seem to be any exception," Stearns says.
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Steve Jones, an evolutionary biologist at University College London who has previously held that human evolution was nearing its end, says the Framingham study is indeed an important example of how natural selection still operates through inherited differences in reproductive ability. But Jones argues that variation in female fertility, as measured in the Framingham study, is a much less important factor in human evolution than differences in male fertility. Sperm hold a much higher chance of carrying an error or mutation than an egg, especially among older men. "While it used to be that men had many children in older age to many different women, now men tend to have only a few children at a younger age with one wife. The drop in the number of older fathers has had a major effect on the rate of mutation and has at least reduced the amount of new diversity - the raw material of evolution. Darwin's machine has not stopped, but it surely has slowed greatly."
Bad news for guys in 500 years; all the chicks will be short and dumpy. On the other hand, there's a clear mandate here for tall, slender women. You must breed more frequently to ensure the future beauty of the human race! (Since current standards of beauty are sure to endure for another four centuries.)
The article is useful for what it does, but it doesn't even attempt to address technology or culture, which are likely to be far more important factors than just reproductive evolution in shaping humans 10 or 15 generations down the line. Everyone might be 7 feet tall in a century, once scientists learn which gene to click to control height. Such changes would probably not be inheritable, but it's easy to imagine a society (especially in America, the last bastion of resistance to universal health care) where the rich can have their children perfected by some simple gene therapies in utero, giving them stronger muscles, greater height, disease resistance, etc.
Or not, if there's religiously-fueled opposition to human genetic engineering. Or we could refuse to transition to a post fossil fuels era and hit oil shocks and worldwide economic ruin, resulting in mass starvation and poor childhood nutrition, and shrink down to 5 feet, like our blighted ancestors in the Dark Ages. Forecasting today's conditions forward 500 years, without assuming massive technological and other changes seems almost pointless, when you look at the changes human society has undergone in just the past century.
Not that scifi predictions have a place in simple articles about potential, gradual, incremental evolutionary changes in human beings, but considering some of them provides more than enough reason to largely ignore the article's safe, sane, and highly unlikely conclusions.
Perhaps this has become, unbeknownst to me, common practice for rock bands, but I found these videos on the Nine Inch Nails channel of Vimeo, fairly amazing. They're taken with a mini-cam from right on stage during live performances, by a camera man who has full access. He's right there on stage, looking out over the audience, at arm's length from Trent as he bangs away on a computer or keyboard, walking up behind the guitarist, all but leaning over the drummer's shoulder, etc. The fact that the images and sound are DVD quality gives it an amazing, "you are there" sort of feeling, which is what I liked. I never watch concert videos, since it bores me just watching them march around on stage. These are fascinating since it's what the band sees, and the different perspective is novel. If I ever had dreams about being in a rock band, they would probably look a lot like this.
I watched all 14 of the videos, and I don't even like going to concerts. I do, however, like NIN's music, which certainly helped me get through the experience. If the videos were for like, Coldplay or some other wimpy band, I'd still have watched a few, but with the sound muted. One is embedded below, though I doubt the image quality will be as good as it is viewing them directly from the Vimeo channel. Which I suggest you click through to.
In one of those mysterious quirks of the human brain, I woke up this morning with the jingle for Freedent Gum running through my head.
Freedent's the one that takes the stick out of gum ...and puts the fresh in your breath. It also moistens your mouth... Yeah Freedent's the one!
I've been sick since the weekend with the worst sore throat I can imagine (I literally double over in pain every time I swallow, even with the heavy doses of painkillers and penicillin I'm on), so I'm not sleeping (or doing anything else) very well, and when I do doze off (frequently) I keep having weird dreams. And waking up with remnants of them in my head. None so far have been as weird as a 20 year old commercial for a brand of gum I never once tried and that probably doesn't even exist any longer.
The jingle, once accessed, stuck, and as I showered and gargled and spit in pain, I found myself turning the lyrics over in my head. How odd that they never even claim it tastes good? Isn't that pretty much a prerequisite for a mouth-based product, especially one that people are going to naturally assume tastes awful? Sure, it would be a lie, since it probably does taste awful, but you'd think they would at least make the effort; all other inedible diet products do.
So there I was in the shower, trying to decide if the exclusion of any "tastes great!" type lyrics were some sort of very rare modesty/honesty in advertising? Did consumers back in the 90s not need to be lied to so blatantly? Could adults back then decide to buy a gum for practical reasons, without needing ridiculous lies about amazing, long-lasting flavor? Or is the failure to tout the taste a mark of a failed ad? (But how can it be failed if I remembered it, unprompted, two decades later? On the other hand, I've never bought the product, so the success of their theme song as a lasting meme is kind of irrelevant if it doesn't spur market share.)
Naturally, I had to look it up on YouTube, and the tune was just as I'd remembered, though the commercial was far, far, far cheesier than I would have believed. It plays like a parody of itself, or something from a Black Studies class about how White People see themselves.
I haven't watched TV in a few years, so I'm pretty oblivious to current trends in non-Internet advertising, but unless we've hit some surge of 80s nostalgia, I have to think everything in that commercial struck you as oddly as it struck me. It's hard to believe it was meant to be taken seriously? The whitest man ever seen on TV, in those clothes, pretending to play golf before sort of idly dry-humping the whitest woman ever seen on a TV... It's amazing. I had to watch it twice, since my mouth was just hanging open the first time and I couldn't absorb the details.
But yeah, Freedent's the one. Or was. I don't think they exist any longer, or at least not with that marketing angle, since there are tons of "adult" chewing gums now with no calories, and they all freshen breath and actually taste fairly good. And none of them are prone to sticking to dental work, at least not in my experience with a lot of brands of gum and quite a few crowns in my mouth. Or perhaps there have been dental appliance improvements since 1990, and the amount of people with ill-fitting dentures has dropped to the point that marketing special brands of gum just for them is no longer viable?
The Greatest Investment in the History of the World?
So an art collector bought a painting last year for $19,000, largely on a hunch. Extensive analysis eventually turned up an actual palm print from the artist, a fairly well known Italian artist from the fifteenth century, and bingo, the painting is appraised for one-hundred and fifty million dollars.
There are some nice quotes in the article, too. Nicer than the picture itself, which is entirely unremarkable, and doesn't even approach the quality of work you see in some of Leonardo's seemingly simple sketches. One of which I attached below, for the sake of comparison.
Biro examined multispectral images of the drawing taken by the Lumiere Technology laboratory in Paris, which used a special digital scanner to show successive layers of the work.
"Leonardo used his hands liberally and frequently as part of his painting technique. His fingerprints are found on many of his works," Biro said. "I was able to make use of multispectral images to make a little smudge a very readable fingerprint."
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Canadian-born art collector Peter Silverman bought "La Bella Principessa" — or "The Beautiful Princess" — at the gallery in New York on behalf of an anonymous Swiss collector in 2007 for about $19,000. New York art dealer Kate Ganz had owned it for about nine years after buying it at auction for a similar price.
One London art dealer now says it could be worth more than $150 million.
If experts are correct, it will be the first major work by Leonardo to be identified in 100 years.
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Silverman said the Swiss collector first raised suspicions about the drawing, saying it didn't look like 19th century artwork. When Silverman saw it at the Ganz gallery in 2007, he thought it might be a Leonardo, although the idea seemed far-fetched. He hurriedly bought it for his Swiss friend and then started researching it.
"Of course, you say, 'Come on, that's ridiculous. There's no such thing as a da Vinci floating around,'" Silverman said. "I started looking in the areas around da Vinci and all the people who could have possibly done it and through elimination I came back to da Vinci."
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Silverman described the Swiss collector as a very rich man who has promised to buy him "lunch and dinner and caviar for the rest of my life if it ever does get sold."
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As for the possibility of finding other Leonardo works, "there are thousands of lost works of Leonardo, mainly pages from codexes or drawings," Vezzosi said, but discovering a lost or undocumented painting would be "much more difficult."
It's mostly a curiosity, since it's not a very good piece and the only value comes from the fame of its alleged artist. (Who created many other wonderful works of art... just not so much this one.) But what a value!
I addressed that in the title of this post, but seriously... if the identification holds, a sale is made, and the appraisal proves accurate, was buying this painting for $19k the best single investment in human history? Plenty of purchases appreciate in value, astronomically in some cases, but have any ever gained so much, so quickly? Stock values sometimes increase by billions in a single day, but that gain is spread over millions of shares, and they usually had some substantial value to begin with. This painting increased in value approximately 7895x, and had an absolutely gain in value of nearly $150,000,000m.
The only thing I can compare it to is a lottery ticket. Those cost about $1, and sometimes pay over $300m on the biggest jackpots in the US. But that's not really a fair comparison since no one (sensible) buys lottery tickets as an investment, and there's no inherent value to a lottery ticket. It's either a winner and worth lots, or (in the vast majority of cases) it's a loser and worth nothing. This painting was worth about $20k, and had been sold for that much in the past. Suddenly, just by changing the artist's identity, it's damn near priceless. And it's an investment since this clever agent just snapped it up for his rich Swiss client, and he brought about the price inflation by researching it and proving the pedigree. Great success to him. Great jealousy for the rest of us.
Since I previously posted about an informative Economy 101 type article by Paul Krugman, I figure I'm obligated to link to this new one. It actually is an Economy 101, where Krugman replied to a couple of dozen questions from readers, on various basic, elementary aspects of the economy and finance.
There's not much editorializing in it, for better or worse, but if you want fairly short and straightforward expert answers to common questions in all sorts of financial areas, this is a good read. The questions are grouped into sections like, Definition of "Economy", Signs of Recovery, Stimulus Money, Rescue Efforts, End of the Recession, and so on, so you can easily click just to the field you're most curious about, if you lack patience/time to just read the whole thing.
In recent months, I've been thinking and reading a lot about the current, scorched-earth, fact-free state of political "discourse" in the US. I've not often blogged about it because um... words are hard. Well, more accurately words are hard when I want to semi-concisely sum up a vast and sprawling issue; a task that would require a great deal of "and this other guy said" type commentary, since I'm highly unlikely to find/make the time to dig up links for everything.
Too much real life work and writing, weekends spent primarily engaged in recreation with my new girlfriend Elle, etc. This past weekend was more of the same, with Elle overnight at my place on Friday night, much romping on Saturday, before we attended a wedding of a friend of hers from grad school on Saturday. I stayed over there that night, and we crashed fairly early since we hadn't gotten much sleep the night before. I left her place earlier than usual Sunday afternoon (usually it's dark by the time I depart after an overnight), but the problem with the Bay Area on a nice weekend is hella traffic getting into/out of The City. Thus was my return trip twice as long and ten times as frustrating, and by the time I got home the neck ache I'd awakened with was much worse, and I was feeling weird chills and sudden patches of goosebumps all over my body. I took a hot bath, had a bowl of chicken soup and some fruit, and drank some OJ, but by 10pm I was definitely on a downward spiral. Not that I'd have blogged something then anyway, but I had hoped to spend a few hours on fiction.
I crashed by 10:30, shivering and unable to get warm even with heavy clothing on and wrapped tightly in warm covers. I woke up at 2, predictably soaked in sweat, partially thanks to Jinx's fully-extended, log-like presence between my thighs/knees/ankles. Extracting myself and crawling out of bed was a torturous exercise, made somewhat easier by the fact that I was back to sleep 10 seconds after I threw down my sweaty clothing and returned to bed.
The rest of the night, morning, and afternoon went pretty much like that. I'd wake up every couple of hours, sweaty and under Jinx, take a long drink of water from the bedside bottle, move over a few feet and flip over the pillow in search of a dry spot, and fall instantly back to sleep. This charade continued well into the day, and it wasn't until near 1pm that I felt capable of rising and functioning. I've felt fairly okay all day, though still obviously not well. Periodic chills and painfully sore muscles (neck and back mostly), a condition which several hot showers and a delicate, yoga-intensive evening gym visit did something to ameliorate.
And now I'm quite eager to get back to bed (despite sleeping 13+ hours last night) making a (presumably) quick blog post just to throw in a couple of links to recent, trenchant, political articles that have been squatting in browser tabs for the last several days. Worse yet, I've got a long-awaited 1-on-1, 30-minute phone interview with the lead designer of Diablo 3 tomorrow morning, and I really need to spend at least a couple of hours further paring down, honing, and prioritizing my overlong list of questions.
Incidentally, they say it takes misery and despair to spur good writing, and while that's overrated (since misery and despair much more often spur lethargy), but any reader of this blog would be excused for agreeing with that concept, based on my recent performance. I wasn't posting a great deal over the past year+, but at least back when I was girlfriend-less and vexed by the cock-teasing and mixed-messages I chose to ignore/overlook/misinterpret from the IG, I semi-regularly wrote something amusingly-anguished and self-absorbed about my psychological state. Now that I'm in a happy and stable relationship with code name Elle, I'm not writing much about it, and I'm busy every damn weekend which leaves me no time to blog anyway.
May your audience's online reading happiness exist at a directly inverse proportion to the contentedness in your own personal life.
That digressed, here's the political news posts I thought worth sharing.
This first one sums quite well, I think, the scorched earth approach of the modern Republican party to virtually every political issue. When there is massive celebration of America failing to score an Olympics hosting gig, the sort of behavior that would have prompted enough "Anti-American!" cries from those self-same celebrators if done by leftists under a Republican administration, we have entered some sort of bizarro political world.
Perhaps the single most profound change in our political culture over the last 30 years has been the transformation of conservatism from a political movement, with all the limitations, hedges and forbearances of politics, into a kind of fundamentalist religious movement, with the absolute certainty of religious belief.
I don't mean "religious belief" literally. This transformation is less a function of the alliance between Protestant evangelicals, their fellow travelers and the right (though that alliance has had its effect) than it is a function of a belief in one's own rightness so unshakable that it is not subject to political caveats. In short, what we have in America today is a political fundamentalism, with all the characteristics of religious fundamentalism and very few of the characteristics of politics.
For centuries, American democracy as a process of conflict resolution has been based on give-and-take; negotiation; compromise; the acceptance of the fact that the majority rules, with respect for minority rights; and, above all, on an agreement to abide by the results of a majority vote. It takes compromise, even defeat, in stride because it is a fluid system. As historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once put it, the beauty of a democracy is that the minority always has the possibility of becoming the majority.
Religious fundamentalism, on the other hand, rests on immutable truths that cannot be negotiated, compromised or changed. In this, it is diametrically opposed to liberal democracy as we have practiced it in America. Democrats of every political stripe may defend democracy to the death, but very few would defend individual policies to the death. You don't wage bloody crusades for banking regulation or the minimum wage or even healthcare reform. When politics becomes religion, however, policy too becomes a matter of life and death, as we have all seen.
I also thought Krugman's new editorial hit the nail on the head, as he took the fairly amazing, "they even hate the Olympics?" issue and segued it into a discussion of the Republican opposition to Obama's health care reform efforts.
The Politics of SpiteTo be sure, while celebrating America's rebuff by the Olympic Committee was puerile, it didn't do any real harm. But the same principle of spite has determined Republican positions on more serious matters, with potentially serious consequences -- in particular, in the debate over health care reform.
Now, it's understandable that many Republicans oppose Democratic plans to extend insurance coverage -- just as most Democrats opposed President Bush's attempt to convert Social Security into a sort of giant 401(k). The two parties do, after all, have different philosophies about the appropriate role of government.
But the tactics of the two parties have been different. In 2005, when Democrats campaigned against Social Security privatization, their arguments were consistent with their underlying ideology: they argued that replacing guaranteed benefits with private accounts would expose retirees to too much risk.
The Republican campaign against health care reform, by contrast, has shown no such consistency. For the main G.O.P. line of attack is the claim -- based mainly on lies about death panels and so on -- that reform will undermine Medicare. And this line of attack is utterly at odds both with the party's traditions and with what conservatives claim to believe.
Think about just how bizarre it is for Republicans to position themselves as the defenders of unrestricted Medicare spending. First of all, the modern G.O.P. considers itself the party of Ronald Reagan -- and Reagan was a fierce opponent of Medicare's creation, warning that it would destroy American freedom. (Honest.) In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich tried to force drastic cuts in Medicare financing. And in recent years, Republicans have repeatedly decried the growth in entitlement spending -- growth that is largely driven by rising health care costs.
But the Obama administration's plan to expand coverage relies in part on savings from Medicare. And since the G.O.P. opposes anything that might be good for Mr. Obama, it has become the passionate defender of ineffective medical procedures and overpayments to insurance companies.
I'd add discussion, but um... 24-hour semi-flu. More later, mortality permitting.
