Across the Bilayer

A familiar meme with a familiar interpretation?

noreply@blogger.com (DSK Samways) — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 13:59:00 +0000

h/t Drugmonkey

Cool, we won an award...

noreply@blogger.com (DSK Samways) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:16:00 +0000

Game of the Year took the Midrash award at the St. Louis International Film Festival earlier this month.

Two decent local reviews so far. Hopefully this bodes well for GOTY breaking out of MO and making a few more national festivals:

We'reMovieGeeks.com

Filmwell.org

Butterfly garden

noreply@blogger.com (DSK Samways) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:26:00 +0000

We planted a butterfly garden for The Bug back in Spring, and I was skeptical when we were told the plants would be flourishing the same year. But they have with a vengeance. The Butterfly Bushes are going bonkers, each covering about 4 ft in diameter. Plenty of of bees and flutterbies, for sure, although I managed to miss a pair of monarchs with the camera.

My two degrees of George Clooney

noreply@blogger.com (DSK Samways) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:34:00 +0000

If I achieve nothing else in this world, I will at least die knowing that I achieved that.

Monsieur Clooney is starring in a small, local St. Louis* indy film, and two of my acting buddies share a few lines with him (at the editor's discretion, of course).

These buddies are also in the far superior Oscar contender, Game of the Year, by St. Louis-based film company, 88MM Productions.

Consistent with the current economy and state of the academic establishment, my income is barely sufficient to clothe, shelter and feed my family. And so I am obliged to strut and fret many an hour upon the stage and before the camera in order to make up the shortfall. There's no money in it, of course, but all the pizza and Doritos I can eat and later regurgitate for The Grub back home in the den. It's a good arrangement, and the IRS can't take a cut out of it.

Anyway, I'm in Game of the Year, hence the Two Degrees of Clooney. That's only Four Degrees of Kevin Bacon, though, which isn't enough for fast-tracking into SAG.

Alas.

Game of the Year will be showing at a certain film festival in a certain city bearing a French name and abiding by a certain large body of water* (Nov 12-22, 2009). It will also be showing at the Archon 33 SF convention (Oct 204, 2009).

I'm not well-versed in regard to the ins and outs of the D&D world**, but I have it on good authority that, besides simply looking pretty awesome, the movie poster is also highly authentic and liable to elicit ecstatic whelps of enthusiasm from a certain section of the geekosphere.

* St. Louis is a small city occupying that vast area of wilderness between New York and LA. It is sometimes rudely referred to as Deep South Chicago. This is unacceptable. There are no good baseball teams in Chicago.

** No, seriously I'm not just saying that to try and be cool. I had to do a two month "boot camp" to learn, among other things, what a d8 is and what it's for.

Goldhill on CNN

noreply@blogger.com (DSK Samways) — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 21:22:00 +0000

In a CNN interview, David Goldhill summarizes the main themes of the article I posted on previously.

Money quote:

"I think we have to recognize that all politicians are limited by the 55% of Americans who are happy with their current health coverage. What I say to them is that if you're happy with your current health coverage, it's because you don't know what it's costing you. You don't know what it's costing you in terms of lost wage increases. I mean, I've run several companies, and the average cost to a company of insuring an American is now $12,000; that comes out of potential wages, that's a lot of money."

I think that he's saying we're happy like this fella is happy:

Narcoleptic doggy

noreply@blogger.com (DSK Samways) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 13:52:00 +0000

It starts off funny... but then you realise it's a duggy with a v. sad tail. Ahem... tale.

foto klub: botanical dissection

noreply@blogger.com (DSK Samways) — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 14:46:00 +0000

David Goldhill writes in the Atlantic on health care reform

noreply@blogger.com (DSK Samways) — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 14:07:00 +0000

This is a stellar article, and one that has completed a gradual shift in my opinion on the subject of the correct direction for health care reform in the US.

In an earlier post, I stated my appreciation for single-payer health care, and regardless of my feelings about US health care, I still strongly support the continued existence of the National Health Service; one of the finest things about The Old Country. If this sounds a little contradictory, let me explain.

The NHS came in the years immediately proceeding the Second World War, when the then Labour government was implementing socialist reforms to heavily centralise the economy (which, of course, was already highly centralised during the war for obvious reasons). Thus, the creation of the NHS was consistent with the broader economic landscape and didn't require a major overhaul of an already established health infrastructure.

Clearly, the USA in 2009 is not Britain in 1948, and this is an important factor to recognise when talking about the pros and cons of a single-payer system. There is a strong argument to be made that implementing a single-payer system in the US is unfeasible not simply for political reasons, but for reasons relating to the basic economic structure of the country. That is, even if every American was screaming for single-payer, it would be an astronomically expensive, labour and time intensive process to implement such a system.

Of course, none of the reforms currently on the table have anything to do with a single-payer system, I'm just highlighting the above to explain why my view of American health care is legitimately different from my view of British health care; Britain got lucky in that it managed to buy into and retain one of the few advantages of the socialist model. Appealing to foreign single-payer health care systems born out of centralized economies is something of a non sequitur with respect to any discussion of US health care.

Contemporary realities aside, I am still undecided as to whether a deregulated free market model will provide better service than a fully single-payer model. One thing I am sure of is that either one of those systems is preferable to the current insurance-based absurdity that passes for US health care at the moment.

"But the current health care mess is a result of wicked free markets!" has been the cry from some on the left, as if trying to outdo the right in misrepresenting the facts.

As David Goldhill explains, there is nothing remotely "free market" about the business of US health care, right now. It's a system regulated out the wazoo at state and federal level, facilitating the existence of state monopolies and preventing the competition that is necessary to stabilise prices. In addition, the existence of an administrative behemoth that is the insurance industry has completely divorced the consumer, you and I, from the true cost of the product, health care, meaning that there is no consumer-driven price control either (as there is in all other areas of the market). When you understand this, the current administration's public option plan suddenly start to look a little ridiculous, because the ideological basis of the solution that it proposes is essentially the cause of the problem it aims to rectify!

If my support for the NHS doesn't make it clear, I am not a Ron Paul libertarian by any stretch of the imagination (at most, I'm a centrist cherry-picker of certain classical liberal notions), and I understand the profound necessity for government regulation and support many them in many aspects of the economy. However, when the government has to introduce new regulations to regulate the negative impact of its previous regulations - as is being proposed for health care reform and has been previously implemented in the aftermath of the mortgage crisis - isn't it time to entertain the possibility that a bit of deregulation might not be such a bad thing?

Read Goldhill's article, because it lays all this out far better than I can. In addition, he covers many other sobering aspects of America's health care woes, such as the resistance of US hospitals to revert to good practice in regard to combating hospital-born infections.

My dad became a statistic—merely one of the roughly 100,000 Americans whose deaths are caused or influenced by infections picked up in hospitals. One hundred thousand deaths: more than double the number of people killed in car crashes, five times the number killed in homicides, 20 times the total number of our armed forces killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another victim in a building American tragedy.

About a week after my father’s death, The New Yorker ran an article by Atul Gawande profiling the efforts of Dr. Peter Pronovost to reduce the incidence of fatal hospital-borne infections. Pronovost’s solution? A simple checklist of ICU protocols governing physician hand-washing and other basic sterilization procedures. Hospitals implementing Pronovost’s checklist had enjoyed almost instantaneous success, reducing hospital-infection rates by two-thirds within the first three months of its adoption. But many physicians rejected the checklist as an unnecessary and belittling bureaucratic intrusion, and many hospital executives were reluctant to push it on them. The story chronicled Pronovost’s travels around the country as he struggled to persuade hospitals to embrace his reform.

Actually, this is an issue that is of far broader relevance to western health care as a whole. I recall somebody explaining in horror that a 1990's British ward was actually a lot less sterile and orderly than a WWI field hospital, with the hypothesis that our complacency these days is a result of better post hoc treatments for infections.

Of film directors and rabbits...

noreply@blogger.com (DSK Samways) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 14:54:00 +0000

inre my previous post, I think I've come up with a situation that acquits natural selection from the charge of tautology.

Imagine two competing species of hominid that find themselves thrown together and competing for resources in the same environment. One species is big, muscular, high in awesomeness, and able to breed like Leporidae; the other species is made up of male and female gender variants of Woody Allen, with a breeding rate hamstrung by congenital insecurity, lengthy self-analysis, and sometimes terminal anxiety.

As time wears on, Homo awesomeness is trouncing Homo selfdepracatus on all fronts, and barring a freak cataclysmic event, the latter seems set for extinction.

Suddenly, a freak cataclysmic event occurs. Hundreds of thousands of small meteorites descend from the heavens and, inscrutably, splat every single Homo awesomeness dead. The freakishness of the event is that, even though a meteorite would just as easily have killed a Homo selfdepracatus unfortunate enough to have been struck by one, pure luck results in the falling rocks striking only members of the Homo awesomeness species. Every single one of them.

And so Homo selfdepracatus lives on and prospers; not because of a random mutation that caused them to be resistant to falling meteorites, but by a purely external stroke of cosmic fortune bearing absolutely no relation to the passing on of genes from one generation to the next.

Note that a scenario in which a virus wiped out Homo awesomeness would not necessarily be equivalent to the one I posit above. If Homo selfdepracatus is also exposed to the virus but has a resistance to it, then Homo selfdepracatus would simply have received a rather rapid promotion from least fittest to most fittest relative to Homo awesomeness for this new virus-afflicted environment. The critical factor in my analogy is that what ultimately brings the hammer down on the fittest species is a completely chance occurrence unbiased by genetic variation.

The hypothesis that "only the surivingest ultimately survive" is therefore falsifiable.

Am I wrong?

"Survival of the survivingest!"

noreply@blogger.com (DSK Samways) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 22:16:00 +0000

Evolving Thoughts has a series of posts on the history of the charge that the mechanism driving evolution, natural selection, is inherently tautological.

Despite the fact that this has never occurred to my simple brain before, I'm now having a hard time trying to convince myself that the charge is unwarranted.

Ignoring for a moment my general level of bamboozlefication inre the difference between an analytic proposition and a synthetic one, it seems to me that if we accept that a tautology can be a logical proposition it might be argued that every scientific theory ultimately strives to be tautological. In which case, perhaps it's not such a bad thing?

However, even if some tautologies are useful by virtue of being theories that have become so thoroughly tuned as to be logical deductions, many of them are not useful at all. And as Wilkins points out with a quote from Karl Popper,

“...those that survive are those that survive.”,

there's a case to be made that natural selection falls into the less-than-illuminating category of tautologies.

I'm rather hoping the next installment is going to reveal a big "Gotcha!" that deftly parries the tautology charge, and lets us all laugh heartily about how we allowed ourselves to be taken in by it.

Unless it was just me. In which case I'll just remain silent with my hands in my pockets, while the crickets chirp and the windblown tumbleweed bounces on by.

Just in case we can push up the price of aluminium a little bit further...

noreply@blogger.com (DSK Samways) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 16:29:00 +0000

Can we really be sure that the US President is a bona fide African American? Or is his current skin tone merely the result of all those billions of United Nations-issue Black Helicopters flying around his bloodstream (the type that can only be transmitted by immoral sexual activity between same-gendered Marxists)?

Why doesn't he just submit to a blood test and lay the suspicions to rest?

WHY?!

Courtesy of The TRUTH about Black Helicopters.

"What it is to be an atheist" - Evolving Thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (DSK Samways) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:45:00 +0000

Linkety-link...

Over on Evolving Thoughts, Dr. Wilkins has posted a .pdf of a paper under review entitled, "What it is to be an atheist", which I enjoyed reading over coffee this morning.

It got particularly interesting for me at p7, when he talks about the issue of probability and argues that the philosophy of some of the more vocal atheists has perhaps been unconsciously usurped by a kind of positivism.

I'll certainly revisit (and pilfer 'fair use' excerpts from, no doubt) the published version and discuss it later.

Crystal structure resolved for first P2X receptor (w00t!)

noreply@blogger.com (DSK Samways) — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 17:01:00 +0000

The lab that recently published the crystal structure of another trimeric ion channel, the ASIC1 receptor, have now published the structure of the Danio rerio (zebrafish) P2X4 receptor. Very exciting stuff.

Check it out:

Kawate T, Michel JC, Birdsong WT, Gouaux E. (2009). Crystal structure of the ATP-gated P2X(4) ion channel in the closed state. Nature. 460(7255):592-8.

In a companion paper, the authors draw attention to the interesting resemblance between the trimeric pore architectures of ASIC1 and P2X4, despite the individual subunits of the two receptors sharing limited sequence similarity:

Gonzales EB, Kawate T, Gouaux E (2009). Pore architecture and ion sites in acid-sensing ion channels and P2X receptors. Nature. 460(7255):599-604.

pdb files: full trimeric structure, 3I5D; and single subunit structure, 3H9V

Figure made using Pymol.

Anthony Weiner lays down the glove...

noreply@blogger.com (DSK Samways) — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 15:31:00 +0000

Anthony Weiner authored an amendment to HR 3200 America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009, that would repeal Medicare, thus challenging his GOP opponents to walk the talk inre their supposed antipathy to government-run health care. It's a classic moment, check it out.

The vote went 57 to zero against the bill (obviously!).

This tactic of forcing people to vote on knee-jerk ideological issues has proven very useful to Democrats of late (another was on the Obama citizenship issue).

On a related matter, Paul Krugman has an excellent article on the misinformation surrounding Big Gummint health care. Not that I'm not a fan of Dr. Krugman's keyensian credentials in a general sense, but health care is one place where the free market seriously does not, and arguably cannot, deliver.

[Edit: I retract this last statement, having been moved by some of the more persuasive arguments as to the current state of health care in the US, and how at part of the problem may well be a lack of free market mechanics rather than a presence.]

Sci-art

noreply@blogger.com (DSK Samways) — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 13:27:00 +0000

Here's a shout out to my friend and local St. Louis artist, Amy Van Donsel, who painted the cover illustration for the current issue of Molecular Cell.

More of her work here.

Extracellular solution

noreply@blogger.com (DSK Samways) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 20:18:00 +0000

Sticks and stones...

noreply@blogger.com (DSK Samways) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 17:39:00 +0000

Bah humbug.

I thought Jerry Coyne's contest to pick the best name for we fuzzy-wuzzy fence-sitters yielded up some good entries. I thought "Jesuits" was a clever swipe, but it was disqualified for not being legitimately original. As for "faitheists"... meh.

"Placatheists" was better.

Of course, it's slightly embarrassing that it's come to this. It all started with the highly unwise adoption of the term "New Atheists" by we Placatheists. Unwise for two reasons:

1) There is nothing remotely "New" about the opinions of Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers and company. They are in good historical company in terms of their muscular criticism of faith and superstition.

2) I believe* the modifier "New" was originally adopted by anti-evolution proponents, with the intent of insinuating that the current batch of atheist activists were some kind of brand new and potentially cultural anomaly. A childish if potentially dangerous fad to be reponded to with a fatherly wave of the finger and a cautionary lecture.

3) (Three! there are three reasons, read on...) Given that the label "New Atheists" is one that most prominent "New Atheists" have objected to, it also bears a resemblance to the term "Puritan" applied maliciously to Protestants. Alright, that's a stretch...

Anyway, "What's in a name?" eh? A little too much brouhaha and not a lot of sweetness these days. In fact, frankly, I think it's better just to take it all the way and rename the accommodationists as the People's Front of Judea, and the New Atheists as the Judean People's Front. Or maybe it would be more appropriate vice versa?

Trouble is, although Coyne is clearly sending up this nonsense, irony tends to have a short half-life on the internet, where it quickly and inevitably decomposes back to its stable and very literal progenitor. It won't be long before "New Atheists" and "Faitheists" are the registered factions in a conflict that is arguably equal to, if not greater in absurdity than most religious fisticuffs of the past.

So it goes.

"With our humble apologies, passengers please be informed that the scheduled arrival of The Age of Reason has been further delayed due to the blustery and turbulent gusts of hot air attributable to the intransigent nature of the Human Condition. Please come to customer services for your free food and accommodation vouchers. Once again, we apologise for the inconvenience."

* wrongly, it turns out. It was The People's Front of Judea what done it, afterall. Apparently "New Atheist" was, according to the Hitchhiker's Guide, originally coined by one of our woolly-brained brethren, Gary Wolf, writing in Wired magazine.

Next stop: Mars

noreply@blogger.com (DSK Samways) — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 19:57:00 +0000

Relive the moment.

Master of angels and algebra...

noreply@blogger.com (DSK Samways) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:06:00 +0000

All things are linkified...

I've enjoyed reading the posts over at The Renaissance Mathematicus lately. The most recent being a brief article on the more conventional side of the notorious magician, John Dee.

[image commandeered from http://sigilhouse.net/]

You got no proof, mate!

noreply@blogger.com (DSK Samways) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:51:00 +0000

News from Linkin' Park...

The Sensuous Curmudgeon has previously posted this excellent response to the creationist request for a mere slice of solid proof of evolution.

Comment: Ask Podblack: What Does Supernatural Mean?

noreply@blogger.com (DSK Samways) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:53:00 +0000

Comment on Ask Podblack: What Does Supernatural Mean? over on the Podblack Cat blog. (edited for posting, here)

“Supernatural” is really a redundant term, because anything that manifests itself in our perceived reality is, by virtue of being experienced, a part of the natural order. If we discovered a genuine and fully bona fide vampire somewhere in the future, its existence would simply lead to a reassessment of the natural order, and that vampire would be realised as being a natural element within that order. It would not be “supernatural” but merely a piece of tangible evidence suggesting that we need to rethink certain conclusions that we’ve drawn about our reality.

A common error by non-scientific skeptics is to assume that something is only “real” or “natural” if it can be subjected to empirical investigation. Although this is hypothetically correct, it is often nonsense in practice. The actual extent of the natural world that is currently amenable to our current empirical methods is limited and only a portion is ever likely to be revealed, regardless of how sophisticated we become.

This caveat is compounded by the fact that the manner of “supernatural” hypotheses tend to render them almost impossible to falsify. How do you determine the non-existence of a hypothetically conscious agent like a God or a ghost? i.e. and agent that can ostensibly choose not to be observed? How does one test for the existence or non-existence of Descarte’s Demon or Edwin A. Abbott's "Sphere"? We simply can't without a fairly profound paradigm shift in how we do science.

The correct response towards such claims, then, is to simply say there is insufficient evidence to warrant our accommodation of them, and that there currently seems to be little practical benefit in pursuing them further. Anything else overstates the skeptics case and leaves materialism vulnerable to attack as being dogmatic and prone to similarly unsubstantiated claims, when it is neither.

Defining atheism

noreply@blogger.com (DSK Samways) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 20:00:00 +0000

Link Factor 9, Mr. Sulu...

Evolving Thoughts ponders the evolution of the term "atheism", and explains why it defines a species wholly different from his own non-theistic type.

A while ago, my own similar journey culminated in my self-description as an Ignostic, which seems to me the best-defined (and easily explained) and most philosophically sound "on the fence" position for one to assume; i.e. there are arguably no strong, weak, positive or negative Ignostics.

This is in part the reason I abandoned my highly popular and world-renown blog, "The Agnostic Monk". I was afraid that, to the uneducated visitor, "The Ignostic Monk" might be taken to indicate the the author was a regular theologian with some kind of rare congenital disorder.

[edited to add: Jings, I've never seen that before. There an add for "Dianetics" in the post-posting page on blogger! Weirdness...]

[edite once more to add: Now it's gone. Bizarre. And another thing: I've been posting old comments of mine to the archives of this blog so that I can a) stop repeating myself, and b) remember my thoughts, which tend to roll around my head like marbles and are always threatening to fall out of my ears. I hoped that back-dating them would prevent them from spamming everybody's Google Readers and what not, but my Statcounter says otherwise, so sorry about that.

"W H E N in the Courfe of human Events..."

noreply@blogger.com (DSK Samways) — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 21:05:00 +0000

The Revolution Will Be ...

From The Big Picture, www.boston.com

Boston convention center, 2009 (Biophysical Society meeting)

noreply@blogger.com (DSK Samways) — Fri, 29 May 2009 20:37:00 +0000

foto klub: Eternal Solitude

noreply@blogger.com (DSK Samways) — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 13:48:00 +0000