[Very interesting. -egg]
Why do children resemble their parents? It’s a question that has intrigued people for millennia, and surprisingly, in spite of our cutting-edge biotechnology, scientists still don’t have an answer. But when they find one, it will have big implications for how we use genetics to personalize medicine and understand human behavior.
[Neat! -egg]
Conventional scientific wisdom has it that plants and other creatures have only lived on land for about 500 million years, and that landscapes of the early Earth were as barren as Mars.
A new study, led by geologist Gregory J. Retallack of the University of Oregon, now has presented evidence for life on land that is four times as old — at 2.2 billion years ago and almost half way back to the inception of the planet.
via Greening of the Earth pushed way back in time | Communications.
[Here’s the part that really blows my mind:
‘“I explained to British authorities that there were other copies in America and Brazil so they wouldn’t be achieving anything,” Rusbridger said. “But once it was obvious that they would be going to law I preferred to destroy our copy rather than hand it back to them or allow the courts to freeze our reporting.”‘ ]
Guardian editors on Tuesday revealed why and how the newspaper destroyed computer hard drives containing copies of some of the secret files leaked by Edward Snowden.
The decision was taken after a threat of legal action by the government that could have stopped reporting on the extent of American and British government surveillance revealed by the documents.
It resulted in one of the stranger episodes in the history of digital-age journalism. On Saturday 20 July, in a deserted basement of the Guardian’s King’s Cross offices, a senior editor and a Guardian computer expert used angle grinders and other tools to pulverise the hard drives and memory chips on which the encrypted files had been stored.
[Interesting article from The Guardian. -egg]
We live in the Age of the Algorithm, where computer models save time, money and lives. Gone are the days when labyrinthine formulae were the exclusive domain of finance and the sciences – nonprofit organisations, sports teams and the emergency services are now among their beneficiaries. Even romance is no longer a statistics-free zone.
But the very feature that makes algorithms so valuable – their ability to replicate human decision-making in a fraction of the time – can be a double-edged sword. If the observed human behaviours that dictate how an algorithm transforms input into output are flawed, we risk setting in motion a vicious circle when we hand over responsibility to The Machine.
via The problem with algorithms: magnifying misbehaviour | News | theguardian.com.
[Very interesting book review. -egg]
BETWEEN ROUGHLY 1995 AND 2007, mysterious emails pitching cheap Viagra and penny stocks were part of everyday life online. Over time, the messages grew stranger, incorporating passages of classic science fiction, ribald limericks, and the occasional incomprehensible JPEG. Although IT departments circulated enjoinders to “blacklist” these unsolicited messages, many of us were fascinated, producing blogs, fanzines, and poetry dedicated to the oddly evocative digital detritus. Meanwhile, spam continued to evolve, becoming increasingly intrusive. Often masquerading as urgent communication from a friend or family member, the absurd verse of anonymous “authors” like MegaDik gave way to desperate requests for money. Today, smart filters guard our inboxes, but the spammers are flanking us on blogs and social media. More cockroach than virus, spam adapts and stubbornly survives.
via The Tedium is the Message: Finn Brunton’s “Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet” |.
[Really like this stuff, and love the process. I’ve tried drawing using the same one-breath-per-line a bit in the last couple of days, and it’s really nice to do. -egg]
In his series of drawings titled Each Line One Breath, Netherlands-based artist John Franzen creates textured drawings remeniscent of wrinkled fabric or waves of water by drawing tediously placed rows of lines with black ink. The artist begins by drawing a single vertical line on the far side of a canvas but on subsequent lines allows for various imperfections to become amplified or suppressed as he continues, line after line. The process, which might look maddening, actually appears to be a sort of meditative effort for Franzen who works with almost robotic precision.
via Each Line One Breath: Morphogenetic Freehand Drawings By John Franzen | Colossal.
[Really interesting long article on MSG, umami, and fermentation. -egg]
Without fermentation, we would live in a sad world without beer, cheese, miso, kimchi, and hundreds of other delicious things humans have enjoyed for centuries. But in the carefully labeled containers stacked around the cramped confines of their lab, Chang and Felder have been fermenting new things. They’ve turned mashed pistachios, lentils, chickpeas, and other legumes into miso-like pastes Chang calls “hozon” (Korean for “preserved”). They’ve created variations on Japanese tamari — a by-product of miso production that’s similar to soy sauce — with fermented spelt and rye they call “bonji” (“essence”). They’ve even replicated the Japanese staple katsuobushi (a log of dried, smoked, and fermented bonito that’s shaved into bonito flakes) using fermented pork tenderloin instead of fish.
The flavor Chang and Felder are chasing in creating these new fermented products is umami — the savory “fifth taste” detectable by the human tongue along with salty, sweet, sour, and bitter. When bacteria and fungi break down the glucose in foods that are fermenting, they release waste products. And the waste valued in Momofuku’s lab above all others is glutamic acid, the amino acid that creates the taste of umami on our tongues.
Also on the shelf in Chang’s lab, underneath the jars containing foods in various states of controlled spoilage, is a giant tin of monosodium glutamate, more commonly known as MSG — perhaps the most infamously misunderstood and maligned three letters in the history of food. It just so happens that inside that tin of MSG is the exact molecule Chang and his chefs have worked so hard for the last three years to tease out of pots of fermenting beans and nuts. It’s pure glutamic acid, crystallized with a single sodium ion to stabilize it; five pounds of uncut, un-stepped-on umami, made from fermented corn in a factory in Iowa.
[Interestingly, the central premise of the article — that digital dualism is a fallacy — seems to be rapidly gaining acceptance in the field. I’ve got mixed feelings about it, myself. -egg]
The power of social media to burrow dramatically into our everyday lives as well as the near ubiquity of new technologies such as mobile phones has forced us all to conceptualize the digital and the physical; the on- and off-line.
And some have a bias to see the digital and the physical as separate; what I am calling digital dualism. Digital dualists believe that the digital world is “virtual” and the physical world “real.” This bias motivates many of the critiques of sites like Facebook and the rest of the social web and I fundamentally think this digital dualism is a fallacy. Instead, I want to argue that the digital and physical are increasingly meshed, and want to call this opposite perspective that implodes atoms and bits rather than holding them conceptually separate augmented reality.
Here’s a crazy fact: Thanks to soda and the sneaky added sugars in store-bought foods, 25% of Americans consume a diet that is 25% sugar. In fact, all it takes to hit that is three cans of soda on top of an otherwise sugar-free diet. What does eating like that mean for your health in the long term? Scientists are still trying to figure that out. Scicurious breaks down a recent study in mice that successfully demonstrates both why our sugar intake has health experts concerned AND why we don’t yet know exactly what we’re doing to ourselves.
via Scientists still trying to figure out how added sugar affects your health – Boing Boing.
[The extremely complicated afterlife of James Brown, and James Brown’s money. -egg]
James Brown was not expecting to die when he did. He was 73 years old, with a wheezing chest and swollen feet, but the man wasn’t ready to retire. He was going back on the road: New Year’s Eve at B. B. King’s place in Manhattan, then up to Ontario, west to British Columbia, down to Anaheim in February. Before the tour, in late December, he went to get a new set of bottom teeth screwed into his jaw, but a doctor heard that wheeze and sent him to the hospital. Thirty-six hours later, before dawn broke Christmas morning, his heart petered out.
Yet Mr. Brown was not wholly unprepared to die, either. Several years earlier, in August 2000, he’d drawn up a will in which he bequeathed his “personal and household effects”—his linens and china and such—to six adult children from two ex-wives and two other women. He was very clear, too, that those were the only heirs he intended to favor. “I have intentionally failed to provide for any other relatives or other persons,” he wrote in the will. “Such failure is intentional and not occasioned by accident or mistake.”
Everything else he owned, including his sixty-acre estate in Beech Island, South Carolina, and his catalog of 800 or so songs, was to remain in a trust, which in turn was divided into two funds: one to educate his grandchildren (seven among those six named children, plus the daughter of his son Teddy, who died in 1973) and a much larger one to pay tuition for “financially needy” students who attend school in South Carolina or Georgia. How much is that trust worth? Hard to say, because Mr. Brown’s best assets are of a sort that can be marketed and managed in perpetuity as opposed to simply liquidated for cash. But the lowball estimate is $20 million, which, with proper promotion, could be multiplied many times over for many years to come. Elvis has been dead for three decades, after all, and he’s still pulling eight figures annually.
In other words, Mr. Brown left a fortune to poor strangers.
Fifteen months later, none of those poor strangers have seen a nickel. Nor will they for months, and more likely years, to come, by which point there may be little left, after the creditors and the lawyers are paid. The first attorney was hired barely thirty-six hours after Mr. Brown died, and the first legal challenge was initiated less than two weeks after that. The lawsuits and lawyers rapidly multiplied—there are now more than thirty lawyers suing in three different courts—which has had the predictable result of resolving…precisely nothing.