Month: February 2015

The way of the dodo

Starting as a ‘rewind boy’ at his local cinema in east London in the days when film prints had to be reset by hand, Ümit Mesut has since made it his mission to keep celluloid alive. He’s converted his shop Ümit and Son – once a video and general store – into a haven for likeminded cinephiles on the lookout for old and rare prints and projectors, and he tirelessly scours conventions for films to add to his collection. Ümit’s love for film is contagious and gets at something fundamental about collecting – those who dedicate themselves to preserving what the rest of us might overlook are keeping our history and memories alive.

The White Devil Kingpin

Willis was the most notorious gangster in Asian organized crime – and, even more remarkably, the first white man to rise so high in this insular underworld. He was once just another hockey-playing Catholic kid in this working-class Boston neighborhood. But now they knew him here as Bac Guai John. White Devil. 3 years later, he’s sitting in prison khakis across from me in a small room at the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland, where he recently started serving a 20-year sentence for drug trafficking and money laundering. Armed guards patrol watchfully nearby. In person, Willis is cautious but respectful as he shares his story publicly for the first time, but he’s an intimidating presence nonetheless. On his left arm is a tattoo of a dragon, for strength; a koi, for prosperity; and, on his elbow, the Chinese characters tong fu, for pain. “My life’s been pain,” he tells me in his thick Boston accent. “It hasn’t been easy. You might look at a guy who’s driving around in a Bentley and think that guy’s got the world by the balls. But you don’t know his mind, what he’s been through. I’ve struggled for everything that I did. Look at me now. I’m sitting in prison. It’s not as simple.”

Parasite rex

If you can overcome the horrors in this book (aliens is nothing), this is very very interesting. It’s likely that most species are parasites, parasites can control speciation, sex, move effortlessly from dinosaurs to mammals when the former die out, etc etc.
2022-12-06: A more nuanced view

“Among all known animals, there are more species that live as parasites than are free-living.” Parasitic life styles exist in all major animal groups, with the single exception of echinoderms, the phylum containing starfish and sea urchins. Parasitism is rife, too, among plants and, as you’d expect, fungi. Many organisms are what are termed “obligate parasites,” unable to complete their life cycle in the absence of a host—and obligate parasites include viruses, which, some scientists contend, aren’t even alive until they hijack a host’s cells.

Among the parasitic infections that affect humans, a large portion are caused by various species of nematodes, a phylum of worms. Nematodes account for 80% of all animal species and are so plentiful that, the authors write, one could “line them up end to end and have nematodes in every meter across our entire galaxy.” Envisioning a “parasite Olympics,” the authors award their gold medal to the nematode Ascaris lumbricoides, which has succeeded in establishing residence in the intestines of 15% of the human population, more than 1b people. The worm causes a tropical disease, ascariasis, whose symptoms include fever, abdominal pain, cough, vomiting, and weight loss. The success of the species comes in part from the fact that, unusually for a parasite, it doesn’t require an intermediate host—the way that malaria, say, needs a mosquito in order to infect a human. Instead, Ascaris is transmitted from person to person via contaminated feces.
Humans appear to have incorporated products of beneficial parasitic infection. The endosymbiosis theory holds that we may have co-opted parasitic bacteria that are now essential to life. Early in the evolution of single-cell organisms, bacterial parasites that were not destructive entered cells. These parasites ultimately became mitochondria, the organelles within the cell which produce energy—a structure essential to animal life.