Musings

A lovely bottle of bubbly we shared on Xmas Eve; hand-carried to us all by S. from Germany.

The OLPC laptops are making a (positive) difference, the WP reports; kids favor especially using the camera and video capabilities. Their story is from very rural Peru. Give one (or more) here. You can choose to get one for yourself, too!

The snooty discriminating French may bow to market pressure and expand the geographic area that can produce effervescent wines that can legally be called champagne. Well, at the earliest in 2009, and the vines won’t come on line until, um, at least 2015…leaving them plenty of time to reverse or adjust the decision….

The NYT has finally published (dated yesterday; hmm, I was too busy to read the paper and missed it then) an article that explicates the anthropologist’s analysis of Diamond’s “Collapse”—basically too much environmental determinism and an unbalanced argument about human decisions. Diamond is a geographer, and gets it a bit, well, skewed (you’ve probably gotten that from me eight or ten times; apologies for the repetition). Yes, climate change is a factor, but, the complexity of cultural evolution isn’t addressed properly in D’s volume. [Reminder to self: get that MS finished!]

Posted at 9:09 AM | 2 Comments »

Pontil (the indented base) of mold-made (modern) bottle.

Several years ago, we discovered this lovely after-dinner wine, a variety of sherry, as I understand it. The grape is called Pedro Ximénez, and is often referred to simply as PX. The wine has a rich raisin backnote and makes for some fine sipping. Especially when it’s nippy out.

Posted at 5:10 PM | Comments Off on Fluid: fortified

AP reports that this current year is likely to be the first in which US households spend more, on average, on cell phones than on land lines. [Read the story here, at Wired, or here, at CBS News.]

How much of a push have those expensive iPhones given to this statistic?

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Phone costs

SE of Woodbury GA on Cove Road is an abandoned dish installation, visible on GoogleEarth.

Note on a twisted world: I’ve seen lots of ads for batteries on TV, but I don’t ever remember seeing one for rechargeables.

Is this just “the best of” capitalism?

Speaking of the free market, look at this table of changes in food prices since November 2006. So why is dairy up so much more than even meat? I’m mystified.

Maybe it’s because the meat figures are subsumed into a category with fish and eggs? Or does it have to do with agricultural subsidies skewing things behind the scenes, as it were?

And how is it that apparel prices have dropped? Is this a China/Asia factor?

Posted at 6:36 PM | Comments Off on Market shifts?

So many topics today!

Number One has to be the machine above! Cool on every front! More later, I’m sure, as we find the time to dig around in its innards—which are quite transparent! My short take on the OLPC machine (yours for a small donation—really!) is that now I see why Bill Gates has so much money! If this is all it costs to have a machine and have software unburdened by huge royalties, then I’m more than ready to move on. This machine is not a toy, it’s a tool, more powerful than many machines, and more portable, durable, better at just about anything you can name. Record music. Do a calculation. RSS. IM/Chatting. Share composition of a document. Powerful!

And, remember, you’ve gotten 2-two-dos for Four-Twenty-Something (that is, approximately $423, or $200 for each machine, and the remainder to ship yours to you!). Get yours here!

Next: Fun Xmas Party! But private, so I’ll move on, except to say that many people examined and loved the OLPC!

Third: I have true admiration for the statistical concept of average, and the insights it can give, but these figures from the WashPost on the financials of the average household here in the US have little resemblance to that of any I know that I’m staggered. Who do I know that spends $3600 a year on furniture and household equipment? This must mean a staggering number of households are spending oh so much more than my acquaintances do! Consumer credit average: about $21,500. Whew. Don’t think that high figure represents many (any?, no I can think of two…) of our friends, but spread across the nation with an average income of a smidge over $55K, not hard to see why we’re hearing so much about the credit crunch/squeeze/Problem!

Four: Big snow in Lower Michigan. Sorry, Kids, since it’s Sunday, no Snow Day from school.

Posted at 10:22 PM | 3 Comments »

If…*

You’d think that by now biologists agree on what a gene is and have moved on.

Apparently not.

And the reason is both historical and scalar.

It’s historical in that the term was originally used in biology and genetics in a particular way that made sense at the time. Then, as research continued, scientists uncovered additional complexity in the role of genes and genetics. In addition, they began to look at genes from new scales and perspectives.

Thus, while a geneticist tends to still see genes as locatable regions of genomic sequences, those who delve into phenotypes and function tend to find that an insufficient definition. For example, DNA, that old workhorse considered the master molecule of life, is now seen to be sometimes quite passive (meaning other factors can act or dominate), and just plain multifunctional in ways that weren’t known when the locatable regions concept was developed.

If you want to read more (I’m not being sarcastic!), check out this 2007 paper by Evelyn Fox Keller and David Harel in PLoS ONE, one of the free, on-line Public Library of Science journals (hence: “PLoS”).

My take on this: see, scale makes all the difference (sorry to flog this idea, but, as I’m sure you’ve discerned, this is one of my truths).

Corollary: it may be difficult to match your language and concepts to the scale of analysis. If you’re using the words already in use, they may no longer suffice if defined in old ways. On the other hand, if you introduce new vocabulary, you may introduce layers of confusion. Still, the latter may well be the best choice.

Philosophical question: does this topic link somehow to my current “off-duty” reading that has settings in China, Tibet, and Turkey?—three different volumes….

Keller, Evelyn Fox, and David Harel (2007) Beyond the Gene. PLoS ONE 2(11): e1231. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001231 [Apologies to AFK if she’d prefer to be “Fox Keller, Evelyn”; I see both in the Google-able world.]

Sidebar: I see pink champagne, rechristened rosé champagne of course, is très chic, but I remain a prosecco gal! (Especially at those prices!)

Okay, one more. How could I not link to this, on a huge ice skating rink in Mexico City’s main plaza, created atop forty-six miles of chilling tubes, energized by ten truck-generators? Did they make the rink because the US border is harder to cross these days?—so they import the cold?

* If your eyes are sharp and your screen is good, you’ll see ice—the picture is from several years back, but right here in good ol’ ATL….

Today’s vocabulary—peripeteia

the sudden reversal of fortune or change in circumstances, often used referring to fictional narrative.

Posted at 7:16 PM | 1 Comment »

Doh!

I can hardly believe it took me until today to realize that burning candles, fireplaces, and campfires add to the carbon footprint!

Posted at 4:59 PM | Comments Off on CARBON sources

The share of the population possessing college degrees in the 1970s is the best predictor of which northeastern and midwestern cities have done well since then.

That is, northeastern and midwestern cities in the US of A….

Edward L. Glaeser says this in an article about Buffalo’s potential for “coming back” from the decline of this once-important manufacturing and transshipment hub.

Glaeser makes the point that however much tax/government money flows into the community, and however wise and effective are the projects that money is used for, what really makes the difference are citizen-originated entrepreneurial undertakings that effectively use human capital. Glaeser cites Boston and Minneapolis as examples of that kind of turn-around.

What Glaeser doesn’t mention, at least in this article, is that both those cities also have important, prominent, and vibrant university and medical communities that maintained their eminence throughout the second half of the last century. I keep thinking both have to have been important components of the mix of factors that allowed the reinvention/survival of those cities—factors that aren’t prominent in dear old Buffalo….

You will not be surprised to know that I read Glaeser’s article while thinking about Detroit and other cities in my home state. Same huge population and economic declines as Buffalo. Same elevated percentages of poor(ish) and generally poorly educated people. And the educational and medical training and treatment nexuses of the state are not in Detroit. Not good odds….

I also wonder if there are parallels among European cities, once prominent in transportation networks webbed among ports along coasts or rivers….

Posted at 11:12 PM | Comments Off on Declines/resurgence

The Botanist keeps up with the modern world mostly through reading the NYT daily. So he guesses at pronunciation. Example: C D roam (for CD-ROM). And: blodging (for blogging, commonly recorded as blahging here, which adds to the confusion, I guess).

The WashPost reports that the Japanese make more blog entries than any other nationality, at least according to Technorati data (and how accurate is that, the Scientist in me asks). They apparently do it via texting on their mobile phones.

Pfffffffft. If I had to do it that way, well, you’d be reading something else every day! Like about some lady’s weekday lunch, or other “chatty postings”….

Posted at 12:08 PM | 3 Comments »

Cousin S is a very talented potter—she gave us a lovely pair of bowls that are my current favorites!

Post-T-giving turk soup looked great in it.

So did this lamb and spinach dish—with lots of cilantro.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Super Bowl(s)