Month: September 2008

Mansion

Lawyers are upper middle class. But this lawyer grabbed the saddle horn of magnificence and hung on for dear life—until the day in 2004 when he was bucked off. There in the dust he lay, exposed—in the New Orleans Times-Picayune—for defrauding his law partners. His firm defended big companies from class-action suits. To make the kind of money he needed to live in this house, the poor guy had resorted to allegedly cutting secret deals with plaintiffs’ lawyers. He reportedly gave up his law license to avoid being formally charged. The mansion made him do it: That’s what I thought when I heard the story. As sordid as his behavior was, I’m incapable of feeling toward him anything but sympathy. He wanted this mansion, he bought this mansion, and then he discovered that the mansion owned him.

an analysis of the housing fetish, the root of all financial evil

Barcode of Life

Mitochondrial genes are inherited maternally. They are not scrambled by recombination, and mitochondrial variation offers rough clues about evolutionary history. Insect people were using the back end of a mitochondrial gene known as CO1 to help identify specimens, marine invertebrate people liked the front end, and vertebrate zoologists used a different mitochondrial gene altogether. Hebert’s idea was that, out of a hodgepodge of related techniques, he could build a simple, universal identification system — assuming, that is, the same small piece of mitochondrial DNA worked reliably for all the animals in the world. “We believe that a CO1 database can be developed within 20 years for 5-10m animal species on the planet for $1b”

2020-12-18: Genomic Encyclopedia

Researchers announced a significant advance. They have assembled the largest catalog of microbes to date, containing over 50k genomes from 18k different microbial species—12k of which have never been documented before. Their study expands the known tree of life by 45%. They also found 700k viruses and linked them to their bacterial and archeal hosts, further illuminating the vast interconnections in this unseen world.

“It’s a fucking incredible amount of data. There are only ~10K species of microbes that have been cultured and described formally, and yet there might be 1B species. That is why this study is so important.”

2021-08-06: The database currently holds 10m barcodes mapped to 330k species.
2022-07-15: Evolution isn’t a tree

“If the evolutionary history of the hoatzin conformed to processes we already understand well, then we’d probably have already figured out what it is most closely related to. The fact that we don’t know its nearest relative suggests that there were processes involved that we still do not understand.” The hoatzin could have more than 1 set of closest relatives— “an unsettling prospect in the context of existing classification and in the minds of many contemporary biologists.”

This strange-sounding state of affairs is not unique to the hoatzin; we see it in our own DNA. Human beings share their most recent common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos, but more than 10% of the human genome is actually more closely related to the gorilla genome. Another tiny fraction of the human genome also seems to be most closely shared with an even more distant relative: the orangutan. “This implies that there is no such thing as a unique evolutionary history of the human genome. Rather, it resembles a patchwork of individual regions following their own genealogy.”

21st Century Food

Let’s finally embrace the truth that food is not something to be taken for granted. As a culture, we need to be more curious about where our food comes from. We need to buy from farmers who are trying to do things the right way. We need to think before we eat. If we do, we’ll find that our cuisine and eating habits will more closely resemble those of the nineteenth century than the late twentieth. Hunting will be less about the buck points and more about the meat. Nose-to-tail eating will make a comeback–not because of fashion or Fergus Henderson (whom I love), but because of scarcity and price. And small-scale farming–little vegetable gardens in the backyards of homes in cities, suburbs, and the countryside alike–will become not just economically sensible but cool. Hell, maybe foraging for mushrooms and wild fruits will become a seminormal skill again. At the table, this means our plates will be heavier on grains and greens, and meat will shift from the center of the dish to a supporting role–the role it’s played throughout history in most of the world’s cuisines.

the meat glut is over, and people will learn to eat right.

Baikonur Cosmodrome

When NASA’s last scheduled Space Shuttle mission lands in June of 2010, the United States will not have the capability to get astronauts into space again until the scheduled launch of the new Orion spacecraft in 2015. Over those 5 years, the US manned space program will be relying heavily on Russia and its Baikonur Cosmodrome facility in Kazakhstan. Baikonur is an entire Kazakh city, rented and administered by Russia. The Cosmodrome was founded in 1955, making it one of the oldest space launch facilites still in operation.