Oh
brave new world, that has such people in it!ISSN 1534-0236
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
Oh
brave new world, that has such people in it!
An experimental technique for treating a particular kind of infertility has led to the birth of healthy children with two mothers, and a father--for a total of three parents.
The children were born following a technique called ooplasmic transfer. This involves taking some of the contents of the donor cell and injecting it into the egg cell of a woman with infertility problems. ...The US researchers wanted to supplement a woman's defective mitochondria with healthy ones from a donor.
Having just tested the children born as a result of this procedure, the scientists have confirmed that the children's cells contain mitochondria, and hence genes, from two women as well as their fathers.
Writing in the journal Human Reproduction, the researchers say that this "is the first case of human germline genetic modification resulting in normal healthy children".
Everyone except the researchers--and, presumably, the parents of these children--is scandalized, at least for the record, though a lot of the objections seem to come down to fears that other people will be upset that this has been done so soon.
This explains a lot: The Onion reports that
God has been
diagnosed
with bipolar disorder.
Unfortunately,
there is no modern earthly medicine that can be prescribed for a deity as vast and complex as God.
Another triumph of open source: the first
implementation
of RFC 1149 runs under Linux.
[via the null device]
Listening
very closely, it's possible to hear the Big Bang. The
harmonics confirm some cosmological predictions, but leave important
questions unanswered.
[registration required; sorry]
David Mazel decided to
test
David Horowitz's claim that "censors are on the run" and
the commitment of conservative campus papers to the free speech
principles that conservative leaders have recently been championing.
Following Horowitz's example, he sent a
deliberately controversial pro-abortion
ad
to newspapers
on a dozen conservative campuses. Answers ranged from
"we are not allowed" to publish it to unexplained refusals.
As of press time, only one of the 11 conservative papers I had targeted, the Hillsdale College Collegian, expressed its willingness to run my ad.Hats off to Hillsdale for being as committed to free speech as UC-Berkeley (whose Daily Californian ran Horowitz's ad, but then printed an apology for doing so).
In an April 2 article in Salon, Horowitz wrote that his own ad had been accepted by 14 of 48 papers. His 29 percent acceptance rate is certainly nothing for the left to cheer about, but it sure beats my own paltry 9 percent.
Things are bound to start looking up, however. Horowitz has vowed to carry on his fight "until American campuses are rendered safe ... for expressing different points of view" and surely this can only mean all American campuses. I look forward to the day, doubtless arriving soon, that Horowitz lays siege to conservative academia.
If it walks like a
gang,
and talks like a gang, it can be sued under RICO--even if it's
the LA Police Department. Furthermore, it's not just the city as an
entity that is liable--
Mayor
Riordan, City Attorney Hahn, and members of the City Council may
be exposed to RICO lawsuits.
Ironically, just before the rulings were made public, Riordan said that "the best way to stop police corruption in its tracks is to punish the command staff, because they should know who the bad apples are and if they don't, they should be fired for that." For eight years, Hahn, Riordan, and the City Council members all knew who the bad apples were, but were in public denial.
What are the chances that this will be used as the argument for narrowing, if not repealing, the RICO laws?
Are California's blackouts and rising electrical rates Margaret
Thatcher's
fault?
Reading something else, I stumbled across a
material
safety data sheet for North America's favorite recreational
drug. It begins, in large unfriendly letters, with "WARNING: HARMFUL
IF SWALLOWED OR INHALED." There are also warnings about
skin contact, and suggested first-aid treatments. And this oddity:
Boiling Point:More relevant if you're not setting up a lab or making your own cola, the LD50 for caffeine is about 10 gm.
178C (352F) (sublimes)
Melting Point:
238C (460F)
In the latest Slashdot poll, given the chance to
choose
a superpower, 10% of respondents chose a turkey sandwich.
That's well below teleportation and flight, but well above adamantium
claws. Think about it: day to day, would you rather have adamantium
claws or a turkey sandwich?
Extra!
Extra! Read Less About It: you've heard about the dangers of
media mergers, and ownership of more and more of the
press by the same few corporations, but you probably hadn't
seen this:
Also ignored in the coverage was the stake that media moguls had in the Democrats not gaining control of Congress. Had that happened, John Dingell (D-Mich.) would be chairing the House Commerce Committee, which oversees the work of the FCC. Dingell was on record as opposing the Tribune purchase of Times Mirror because such mergers lead to a "huge concentration of power in a small group of hands."
The Brooklyn Botanic Garden
is surveying all plants in or near New York City. The
results
so far are discouraging, if not surprising:
many native plants are being displaced by invaders, many of them
introduced deliberately, some escaped from gardens.
I spoke to the Parks Department's northern Manhattan forester over the weekend: they're working on restoring as much of the native flora as possible to Inwood Hill Park. The project includes planting native flora--when I saw her, they had just planted some tulip tree saplings, and her immediate concern was the need for rain--and removal of some invasive non-native plants, including porcelain berry and Norway maple. She assured me that the Norway maples are being replaced by sugar maples, not just cut down. (This wasn't any kind of official interview: I was walking in the park and saw the green Parks Dept. truck and the new planting, and said hello.)
A
critique
of Roget's Thesaurus, and of the general idea
of thesauri: Winchester argues that they encourage poor
writing, and the decline of English,
by pointing people to vaguely related words without defining
them.
Agree with him or not--I'm not sure how much of this I buy--this article is worth reading for the historical notes, everything from the brief bio of Roget, who researched bees and invented the slide rule before retiring and producing the famous thesaurus, to the difficult question of what a synonym is. [via Follow Me Here]
The importance of
memory
to elephants: older elephants are better at recognizing
elephants they've met before, and families with older matriarchs
are more successful at rearing calves.
"We believe this to be the first statistical link between social knowledge and reproductive success in any species," Dr McComb said.Hasn't anyone looked at this in primates? [via Follow Me Here]
Another step towards putting everything online:
a list of
swimming holes,
mostly in the eastern US.
Unintended consequences? A variety of anti-abortion
groups are pushing for laws that would allow pharmacists
to refuse to dispense "morally, religiously, or ethically troubling
therapies." (The customer's ethical choices are ignored here:
s/he has probably already decided how she feels about morning-after
pills and gene therapy.) The nice people at
AIR have noticed that this
could protect pharmacists who don't want to sell
quack
remedies.
It will be interesting to see who takes a stand against these new laws, and why. It could be a very odd mix of persons, and an even odder mix of reasons, both stated and unstated.
Biological control of insect pests may be a new idea in
the West, but Chinese farmers have been using
ants
to protect citrus trees for at least 1700 years. The
ants were raised and sold commercially, and the farmers even built
walkways to help them get from one tree to another.
Do you know your planet's albedo?
The dark side of the moon provides good large-scale
albedo
measurements, after correction for short-term effects
like sunrise over Asia.
Copyright 2001 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
If you like this, you might also like my home page.