Category: Uncategorized

Digitizing weather

probably a race against time, too. yet another case where analog data is pretty much equivalent with no data.

How to Track Climate Change? Digitize a Century’s Worth of Moldy Old Records, Scientists are embarking on data rescue missions all over the world to find and save old climate information.

Somatic mutations

If somatic mutations are common in healthy bodies, then biomedical researchers can no longer assume that DNA aberrations point toward the causes of disease. Doctors won’t be able to trust that the DNA found in a blood or saliva sample actually reflects the gene sequences in the heart or the liver. Should somatic variation turn out to be not just common but also good for you, it will undermine the longstanding presumption that the healthiest genome gets replicated with perfect fidelity. The most highly functional bodies may be the ones that permit a little mutation, that encourage a certain amount of genetic wildness and disorder within

not only are you 90% bacterial, but the human parts of you can’t get their shit together.

within our bodies our cells are not all created equal at the genomic level. In other words, we are mosaics.

Viruses most ancient life?

these viruses “represent a form of life that either predated or coexisted with the most recent organism from which all other organisms on Earth are descended. If giant viruses are as old as Caetano-Anolles’ calculated, the implications are staggering. It means that a giant virus or one of its ancestors existed before other types of life and may have played a major role in shaping life as we know it. This could mean that viruses are one of the dominant evolutionary forces on this planet and that each organism has a deep, viral past.

2021-09-01: See also Giruses, giant viruses, which may have been there since the beginning.

The Onion Art Department

Where The Onion gets truly weird is in its faux-local coverage–the archetypical “Area Man.” Area Man is one of The Onion’s longest-running memes, a take on the silliness and pomposity given to local schlubs by local news teams. But since none of these stories actually happened, The Onion’s art department has to create, from scratch, 1000s of different “everyday” scenarios. Some recent ones: “Area Man Pretty Sure He Knows Which Athletes Are Gay,” “Area Man Too Poor To Afford Movers, Too Old To Get Help From His Friends,” “Area Man Lacks Star Power Necessary To Carry Major Motion Picture.” These images call for subtle, banal shots, which can become totally forgettable or sell the joke by giving it the weight of a constructed world.

Feudalism is back

it’s coming back everywhere (see banksters), but it is farther along in some places:

You don’t get $321 in fines and fees and 3 warrants per household from an about-average crime rate. You get numbers like this from bullshit arrests for jaywalking and constant “low level harassment involving traffic stops, court appearances, high fines, and the threat of jail for failure to pay.” If you have money, for example, you can easily get a speeding ticket converted to a non-moving violation. But if you don’t have money it’s often the start of a downward spiral that is hard to pull out of

Media is self-obsessed

between the endless navel-gazing with stupid “tweets” and this:

When the Tribune Company recently got rid of their newspapers, the New York Times ran the story under a headline “The Tribune Company’s publishing unit is being spun off, as the future of print remains unclear.” The future of print remains what? Try to imagine a world where the future of print is unclear: Maybe 25 year olds will start demanding news from yesterday, delivered in an unshareable format once a day. Perhaps advertisers will decide “Click to buy” is for wimps. Mobile phones: could be a fad. After all, anything could happen with print. Hard to tell, really.

i’m surprised they’ve held on so long.

Hypocritical culture

you’d hope this hypocritical society would have moved on, but you’d be quite wrong.

She tried public appearances. She tried being reclusive. She tried leaving the country, and she tried finding a job. But the epic humiliation of 1998, when her affair with Bill Clinton became an all-consuming story, has followed Monica Lewinsky every day. She critiques the culture that put a 24-year-old through the wringer and calls out the feminists who joined the chorus.