Beer Powered Bicycle

PRADA AND PILLS

It's a saying to be heeded, "Write what you know." Right now, what I know is girls, wine, the MPEP. I think I need to branch out. I could try some new thing, like eating vegetables and exercising. Or going to movies. I've been stuck in a rut lately. I'm in the final straightaway, the end run, to the patent bar. It's in six days. I'm not worried. I can tell you that an assignee can file a reissue application as long as it's not a broadening reissue, in which case it has to be filed by the inventor.

I'm more worried about money and lifestyle. All my bills came due at the exact same time this week, and now I will be broke for four weeks or more. No big deal. I've lived through that before. I can eat peanut butter sandwhich after peanut butter sandwich for days. It's just sad, all the local restaurants will miss me.

I just wish I didn't have to end up poor on some kind of regular cycle. For the past years, I have been learning to be the cheapest date in Portland while still being the most romantical. I know a lot of great places to go for a walk.

Sure, one could suggest that I don't need the Prada and pills (I just had to get the title at least once). But the pills keep me sane, and so do the shoes. Oh, and that jacket? Rachel gave it to me. It came from the lost and found at PNCA. Yup, Pacific Northwest College of Art yielded me 1 Prada jacket.

Readers, you will have to forgive me if my recent posts lack narrative drive or dramatic tension. I am preoccupied. While I now know that a "means for" claim, under 35 U.S.C. 112, paragraph six, should not cite a physical limitation to the means of the preamble, I can no longer write a decent blog post. And by the tone of what my friends are saying, I am no longer keeping up my end of normal social interactions.

It's late. I am going to use this last half-bottle of wine to wash down a couple of sleeping pills and turn in. I promise everything will be back to normal in 6 and a half days.


(file under flair for the melodramatic)

I MIGHT BE A GEEK

I was trying to underline something in Microsoft Word, and I replaced it with a mu. You see, when I hit CTRL and U on my keyboard, the Greek letter shows up. Then I realized that this was familiar. I am used to it. All my computers do it--each in the exact same way. Table 1 lists the standard set of keyboard shortcuts I inevitably end up with if I use a given word processor for any length of time.

Some of these are specific to molecular phylogenetics. Under maximum likelihood tree evaluation models, evolutionary rates among sites are gamma distributed. Further, those gamma distributions each have an alpha shape parameter.

At least one entry in Table 1 relates to lab work and writing about nucleic acid analysis. In the lab, we measure many things in micro-liters.

But everybody has keyboard shortcuts for delta and sigma on their computers, right? How else do you represent change and summation in formulae?

FUNNIEST THING I'VE HEARD IN A WHILE

From the overheard department:
Cat person, "What do dogs do?"
Respondent, "Lots of things. Like there's police dogs."
Cat person, "Well, there could be a police cat. What if there was a police cat? What would a police cat do?"
Respondent, "I don't know, take shits in police litterboxes?"

O'ER YON SNOW-CAPP'D PEAKS

This is where I camped last night.

After years of living in Buffalo, I am gun-shy about being near snow. But this was a nice off-road, secluded spot about 50 miles East of Prineville, OR. It was very cold a few hours after it got dark.

SOUTH OREGON COAST

I really don't get why more people don't spend more time here. I'm spending the night in the Yachat's Inn. From my suite--that is, from the dining room table, from the bed, or from the chair, or from the deck,--I have an un-impeded view of the Pacific ocean.


I've been busting my ass at work lately, because I love it. But on top of working quietly at my desk all day as hard as I can, I have also been studying four hours a night for the patent bar. I must have come to enjoy this workload when I was a graduate student and held down two jobs. So I have been working very hard lately, and it feels nice to finally take a couple of days and go speeding the Odyssey up and down the Oregon coast, drinking wine and listening to loud rocknroll and spending time withe a friend. Here are some pictures.


This is my friend Margot, who I came out here with. Margot lovesd the Honda Odyssey. Oh, and here's the Honda Odyssey:



Last night, we slept in this metal tent at Baker Beach campground. Tonight, we're in a motel with a hot-tub. Tomorrow--back to work.

Just to literally actually prove it, here is me on the beach, drinking Tecate and studying for the patent bar.

Note to self: I don't want to become a person who always does work on vacations. I'll at least make this promise: if I have children, and if I take them on vacation, I will not work. I will pay attention to my children. If I ever have kids (again), and if anyone ever asks, "Hey, what's your child's favorite song? What does your child most want to be doing on any given Saturday at 1:00pm? What aspect of school is your child most afraid of?" I hope I have answers to those questions.


But let's not get all philosophical. This is just a set of vacation snapshots.
Further, I don't really have much to say. I just wanted to share some pictures from this trip.

Here is me giving my best "blue steel".

Here's me and my friend Margot:

And here's one last one of the Honda Odyssey waiting deferentially in the parking area near the beach:

This post is for stofoco people. For L-- who doubted I would study the patent bar while drinking tecate on the beach. For G-- who told me it would rain the whole time, but who gave me the time to go. And for M--, who might be an occasional Beer Powered Bicycle reader. To all my readers, we are the last few BPB posts. The transition to Banana Trout Lily--or whatever I come up with next--will be happening soon.


Good night. I want to close with a couple of shout-outs. B. (RI)--you are on my mind. The big C fucking sucks. Mom--I am out here scoping out places for your upcoming visit. I have a few now.

Zack

STUDYING HARD

I am taking the patent bar in about five weeks, so I took a couple of day off of work so I could study. Some of my co-workers expressed mild doubt about the sincerity of my promises to study, when I talked about the blue sky, sand, sun, and tecate of this weekend. So, here is at least one picture, comprising:
me, studying patent bar material, and further comprising;
tecate;
blue sky;
sand; and
days off of work.


This computer is sqwaking at me about the battery being almost dead, so here is one more pic from my vacati..., I mean, study days:

BACK

I'm a solitary person. Don't get me wrong, I have plenty of friends, and some very close friends that are very near and dear to my heart. But when I approach a chiasma in my life, I tend to go it alone. I stand by past decisions best that way, for now.

Conversations I had with Julia in 1995 gave me an appreciation for solitude. This is a paraphrase, but she said that some people have learned to live in solitude, while some have not yet. In my adult years, I have learned to live with solitude. To relish it, and to exploit it. I do just as well in the din of a crowd, or the occasional din of a peer. But I also know the metes and bounds of solitude.

This explains why a 'lonely impulse of delight' is such a memorable phrase for me. It is something of a mantra.

But now I have encountered a new phrase. The myriad possible paths of life cross again, like spring tendrils in a braided pasture stream, and another four word snippet presents itself. A new idea to contemplate, to adsorb and embrace. Something that I humbly suggest we could consider living by (and documented and blogged further about below):

Haggis samosa's are BACK

TWO GREAT FLICKR GROUP'S



Check out these groups--on the website flickr.com. One is dedicated to the grocer's apostrophe, and one to quotation "mark" abuse.

SIUSLAW: HOW'D I MISS IT?

National Forests are great for a lot of reasons. My favorite is that you can camp in them, almost anywhere, for free. I live in the Pacific Northwest, and I bought a Honda Odyssey so that I could do a ton of camping free, all within a day's drive of my apartment. And I have done so. I have watched a full eclipse while drinking wine with Margot on the top of Pine Mountain. I have woken up alone in the middle of Ochoco National Forest with a flat tire, and battled my way out. I have re-centered myself at Cabin Lake overlooking the desert sage and scrub-brush. I've been hit by flying tumbleweeds out in the Crooked River National Grassland. But how did I miss this?

Siuslaw National Forest, about 2.5 hours south of me, abuts the coast at many points.

Winter is over, and I need to get out. I was looking for camping places and Siuslaw came up because it is open year-round. Other places are closed from like September till May because they are in inland mountains, and beset by snow. Siuslaw is right on the Pacific, so the Forest Service doesn't need to close it during the winter.

Now that I'm examining pictures of it, I need to go there.


I really want to go there right now, but I can wait. I hope I can find people to go with me. I know, I know, camping is a woods thing. But there is nothing like walking out over sand dunes in the sunrise, drinking your coffee. Or, if you smoke, walking out over the sand dunes late at night, enjoying your cigarette.


So I implore you, all my friends and readers, consider if you wouldn't be able or willing to go to Siuslaw for a little overnight.

I really want to take the Honda Odyssey down there. You may be familiar with me calling it my "metal tent". It's camping made easy. You drive to the place, open a bottle of wine, and look. Look. Simply look. Look around you.


If you are happy with what you see, you make up a little bed in your tent, and have some more wine. I actually have a nagging suspicion that Oregon has some beautiful places that very few people know about. And right now, I suspect that the coastal parts of Siuslaw are the best.

As I have said before, and it is very sad, I am getting rid of my minivan this summer. So, for the last hurrah, I want to do some exploring. My mother will be out here on the West Coast this spring. Hopefully she will be willing to consider a camping trip to Siuslaw.

If anyone would like to go, let me know. These will be the last days of the Odyssey/ Zack pairing. As much as I love the inner-Oregon desert, I think I also want to get back down to Siuslaw.

DESTRUCTION=PROGRESS

You might notice some of my previous posts have been deleted. There are various reasons why I have reached back and edited and deleted some material. The over-arching story is that the editors of Beer Powered Bicycle have all decided to call it quits.

A new group of editors has come together, and we are working on a title for a new blog. So far, we have come up with:
bananatroutlily at blogspot dot com

I'm not very happy with it. I suggested we use some underscores, making it something like:
banana_trout_lily at blogspot dot com

It's all in committee right now, where it is sure to die an ugly slow death. But, there will be a new blog, and it will overlap with Beer Powered Bicycle in content and theme.

There are a few reasons for this, one of which is that I have intended for a long time to publish the Beer Powered Bicycle Omnibus. But there really can't be an Omnibus (in the literary sense) if the periodical is still semi-periodically generating. The more recent of my fifteen readers (by the way, welcome Graciela) may not be familiar with my long print existence before the blog. In the omnibus, the blog will be more of an appendix behind the collected original print works.

So watch this space for the announcement of the new blog name. The editors of Beer Powered Bicycle have re-affirmed their commitment to the highest standards of scholarship. Speaking on their behalf, I believe that our new work may be a respectable and positive contribution to the worlds of thought, molecular biology, intellectual property, jurisprudence, evolution, education, library science, and culture. The editors have agreed to consider more outside contributors to the new blog. There are a few areas of interest that the editors value, and that Beer Powered Bicycle has lacked expertise to expound on. In any of the following subjects, we warmly consider submitted work or proposed submissions, with an interest in developing full partner-contributor relationships: women in science now; women in science in history; electrical and computer engineering; inventors; macroeconomics and economic theory; international trade and law; Bicycling; Car Camping; Fine food and drink.

So, gentle readers, watch this space for dramatic upcoming changes. The editors are mulling over names for the new blog. When material begins coming out under the new name, we will edit and compend the Beer Bowered Bicycle into the definitive book, with extensive commentary from any original author. Also, in the new blog, we will no longer say "fucking". We will be a little bit more family-friendly.

Zack

EXPENSE

For a few months I have been serious considering a move to one of New York, Boston, San Francisco, or Los Angeles. You are hereby excused from saying, "It's expensive there."

If you and I talk on the phone tomorrow, or in June, and I say, "Yup, I'm looking for an apartment in Brighton (or the Mission, or West Hollywood, or Bed-Stuy)," you just don't need to say, "It's expensive to live there."

I know how much these neighborhoods cost. In my years studying molecular biology and evolution I have learned to research the bounds of a situation before going into it. Next time we talk, if you ask what I am doing next, and I tell you that I am moving to with a 100 yard radius of 7 North Beacon St./ 02134, rather than telling me it's expensive to live there, I would like it if you would tell me something cool about the place. Although I would definitely be swayed if you told me that the bars within a 1-mile radius of 558 E 3rd St/ 02127. were better.

I know it's gonna cost a ton. I know it. Also, I'm getting rid of the Honda Odyssey. If any of my fourteen readers would like to volunteer a place where I can garage it for academic years, and visit it at christmas and summers, until 2011, I would repay you in kind, forever (I love my car.)

CLINE THINGS

One thing you study in population genetics is the idea of a ring species and a cline. First, I'd like to discuss the cline. Imagine that you see some salamanders on a rock in a creek. In fact, you are standing in Likker Creek. The salamanders are black, with numerous red spots on their backs. They run over the rocks and sticks, and onto the banks of the creeks, where they dissappear under the leaf litter. You spend a few days looking for more of them, and you see one or two every hour. They all look about the same.

You notice that they often run in either of two major directions. Either 'upstream', along the banks of the creek, or along one specific muddy flat, overland. Curious, you follow the salamanders overland, across the muddy flat, and you discover that just a few yards away is another creek, Copper Creek. It is so close, it seems the waters are nearly shared.

You watch the red-speckled salamanders in Copper Creek. They seem to visit, but leave and run back to Likker Creek. You notice that Copper Creek has its own salamanders. The Copper Creek salamanders have orange backs with yellow stripes or lightning bolts pointed away from their spines.

The red-speckled Likker Creek salamanders don't seem to like the lightning-backed orange Copper Creek salamanders very much. They never intermingle.

You are interested in the black ones with the red flecks, so you walk back to Likker Creek.

You figure they keep going across the mud flats to Copper Creek because the amount of water and food and stuff is all about the same between the creek, and the wet, muddy area, and banks of the adjacent creek. But why do they also seem to go upstream? You walk upstream to examine this. You find, about five miles upstream, that the appearance of the salamanders has changed. The salamanders you see are eggplant colored, with red splotches on their back. You wonder if they should be called Upper Likker Creek salamanders. But then you notice something.

You notice a proper Likker Creek salamander basking on a hunk of chert. It is inches from an eggplant colored Upper Likker Creek salamander, also so basking. They seem happy together.

Examining them closely, you realize that the black skin of the Likker Creek salamander is actually a very, very dark eggplant color. And those small red spots are the same hue as those splotches of the Upper Licker Creek guy. Obviously, these critters are related.

You continue your trek upstream. You discover that Likker Creek originates at a spring in a small clearing or piece of pasture in these woods. You note that there are remanants of some buildings here, and another spring. Likker Springs flows down into the creek you just hiked up, and there's this other spring, not 30 yards away and just over the hump, flowing down into the other holler.

It's a warm, sunny day out and not too many bugs. You take out your baloney sandwich to eat. And there on the limestone outcroppings between Likker springs and the other spring, you see a number of salamanders sunning themselves. They are deep red, or reddish-purple in color, lighter on their backs and darker on their sides, and you realize that just as you have walked up Likker Creek and seen the progression of salamanders from black with some red spots, it would take the same amount of progression to walk down from the other spring, and imagine the changes to these pasture-spring salamanders, to arrive at the Copper Creek Salamanders you saw earlier.

Each group of salamanders up and down the length of Likker Creek is interbreeding with the group next door. Up at the spring, the Upper Likker Creek salamanders are interbreeding with the Likker Spring salamanders, who are in turn interbreeding with the Pasture Spring salamanders, who are, in turn, interbreeding with the Upper Copper Creek Salamanders, and so on down the line.

This is a cline. A cline is a series of entities (in this case, groups of salamanders) each directly and substantially related to any immediate neighbor within the cline (in this case, the relationship is through direct, sexual breeding). You sit on that limestone rock, soaking up the summer sun, and think about clines and realize they don't have to be biological. You think that you could park your pickup truck next to your four-wheel drive truck, next to your four-wheel drive Subaru station wagon, next to your Honda station wagon, next to your Honda mini van, next to your Dodge mini van, and so on. But in a living system, like salamanders, this cline idea has some power.

Each group is related to its neighbor, and further, it is necessarily so. Each group is defined by, and exists because of, at least one neighbor. As if to prove your point, while having this thought you witness a hawk hurtle recklessly from the sky and snap up every light-eggplant colored salamander within your sight. The series of attacks are rapid and ugly. Small splats of blood are left on the rock where the hawk has snapped the neck of each morsel it takes. Satisfied, the hawk flies away.

After the hawk is gone, the medium-eggplant colored Likker Springs Salamanders tread back onto the limestone.

From the other side, the dark-red Pasture Spring Salamanders emerge from the fronds and gorse. And as you pack up your lunch litter, and begin to decide whether to go down by Likker Creek or Copper Creek, you see a Likker Springs Salamander and a Pasture Springs Salamander begin their mating ritual.

That's the best I can do to illustrate a cline. There are a sequence or series of well-defined entities. But each group or entity is defined by, and depends inexorably upon, at least its adjacent group. (The yellow-backed, red Copper Creek Salamander and the red-flecked, black, Likker Creek Salamander each only interbred with only one other group in my story, as I told it.)

The biological concept of ring species is illustrated by these two examples. The Copper Creek Salamander and the Likker Creek Salamander do not interbreed, thus satisfying a common definition of distinct species. Yet they are related, and in a way that could manifest in the future, based on events yet to happen. Or, to use population genetics language, there is gene flow between these two species. If a Likker Creek salamander got a virus, and also got a DNA mutation that made it immune to that virus, it is possible that ten years on down the road you would find that exact mutation in all the Copper Creek salamanders, but with never having had a Copper Creek and a Likker Creek salamander interbreed.

If you've hung on and read this post for this long, here's the reward. This post is actually about the jobs I've had in my life.

A LONELY IMPULSE OF DELIGHT

Somebody recently made an appreciative comment that I had quoted Walt Whitman in my writing. I do such things in the hopes that I please my readers. I would like to call attention to a recent example. About three entries ago, I wrote the following:

My coffee spoon is an old ladle with a bent handle. By my calculations, I am 1,562 pounds of coffee old. What milestone will I celebrate? 2,000? 3?

This is nothing but a straight homage/ rip-off/ prequel of "I have measured out my life by coffee-spoons" by one of the greats. Just so you all know. I do try to stuff this stuff in here.

CATS AND POSTCARDS

There has been another contribution to my other blog, Kitties Love Boxes. I am pleased that people keep sending in material. Please, keep it coming. If you have a cat, consider, is there a box on your floor? If not, why not? If so, wait around with a camera for a little while, and your cat will get in the box. Take a picture of that, and send it to zackhyde at pdx dot you-know-what (edu).

My aunt Rebecca send in the last post, which I clumsily titled 'Lia in a Box on English Neighborhood Road.' Not only do I not know that that is where the picture was taken (and blogs have comment sections if Rebecca would like to clear that up), but I doubt the box was on the road. It was probably in a house with an address on English Neighborhood Road. But let's not be pedants. It's a wonderful picture of a cat, in a box.

I am excited to report that the Beer Powered Bicycle postcard project is going well. I believe I have sent four now. I am sure to die of writer's cramp soon, and I couldn't think of a better way to go. But remember, it only works if you obey the rules carefully. You must send your correct mailing address to zhyde at pdx dot edu. I just bought nine very lovely postcards from the Portland Historical Society (don't worry, they are not historical-themed postcards. They are mostly contemporary skylines) and I have them on my desk at work. I am happy to do repeat requests, and I would love to send cards to people who haven't received one yet. So, if you are reading this (and I know you are), and you have not yet requested a postcard, why hold back? If you are a bashful person, simply put your address with a initials, or a pseudonym.

OH JUST GO READ IT ALREADY, IT'S FUNNY

http://xkcd.com/273/

Here it is as a link.

When people at sporting events do the wave, what's the frequency and wavelength? I assume, that for a given sport and nation, there is a tight cluster around a nearly constant average. I mean, NFL stadium waves, from 1995 to present, probably have clear wave-like properties, even from 3,000 miles and ten years apart--and I further believe that those properties are constant for a given sport or league and any period of about ten years or less.

SANDWICH RECIPIE

I know that all of you are converts to peanut-butter and mustard, now that I've disclosed it. So I've decided to go public with another of my favorite sandwich recipies, this one is coincidentally seasonal, but I make it year round.

I will present it as I usually make, as something you make on Sunday night, and take to work with you on Monday, Tuesday, and maybe WEdnesday, but feel free to vary the schedule to suit you. I've been doing this one on and off again ever since I was in college.

Sunday night: buy a box of generic "stuffing" from the grocery store. The store-brand variant of 'Stove Top' is all you need. Take it home and prepare according to the instructions on the box. After the "fluff with fork" step, transfer to tupperware and put it in your fridge.

Monday morning: fetch four or six slices of bread from the bag. Soft, square bread is the best. Wonderbreadd would be good. Put mustard on the bread, and an optional slice of individually-wrapped processed American cheese food. Don't do more than one slice per sandwhich the first time you make this recipie.

Fill each sandwhich the fridge-temperature stuffing, and close. Put your two or three sandwhiches in a bag and take to work. Put in work fridge. Really good at noon.

It might not sound gourmet, but it really is a good dish.

EMPLOYED

Uh, I have a job and stuff. Not a temp, not some weird arrangement, but an actually, outright paying job. I can pay my rent and everything. I can even pay my student loans and car insurance. Yup, I can even pay my car insurance. (I know I'll hear a gasp of disbelief from my readers, but yes, I have very high car insurance.)

So, I'm employed. The nine-to-five gig. I go downtown every morning and take the elevator up to my cube and push papers for the man all day. I actually very much enjoy it. I out right love it. I'm in the process of getting a raise. A significant raise. The raise that they were talking to me about today is almost exactly equal to my rent, each month. I didn't even want a raise, I am so happy to be doing what I am doing, I love the work that much. And yet, they are forcing me to take a raise that equals my rent each month. It's almost embarassing.

Oh yeah, and the corner office, with the view of Pioneer Square that I blogged about a week ago? I don't get that anymore. That was just a temporary arrangement while workmen were installing some furniture. The workmen are finishing up next week, and then I will move into my cubicle. Actually, when the workmen are finished, I will be moving everybody's stuff for them.

You see, I'm "the new guy". So far, my duties include, "Hey you, run to office depot and get three cases of paper," and "Hey Zack, can you brew another pot of coffee?" and "I've looked everywhere for file 966-05a, and I can't find it. Can you see if you can find it? The partners are having a meeting and they want it, just let them know what you come up with..." and "I dropped a staple behind the copier, will you pick it up? Thanks."

I am contributing to the American economy. I am oiling the engines of progress and growth. (cue the patriotic music with lots of shiny brass horns.) Every day I proudly don the "office casual" uniform and salute the sunrise and the flag and the president and I walk to the center of downtown. This morning, a bald eagle with an olive branch in its beak and an arrow in its talon soared over the Willamette as I crossed the Morrison bridge. And the construction workers, laying the new MAX tracks wished me good morning while a policeman with a whistle stopped traffic at Broadway and Main so I could cross and enter the marble-floored lobby of my office building, the American Bank Building. The doorman with his rows of shiny brass buttons held the door open wide, and snickered.

I MUST BE HUNGRY

This random thought just popped into my head while I was reaping the harvest from my garden:

marinate shrimp in:

tequila
lime
habanero
olive oil
garlic

skewer with chunks of bell pepper, onion, and mushroom, GRILL.

Serve on rice with fresh pico de gallo, and maybe a side of charred steak topped with charred ramps (scallions). With white wine (a chenin blanc) AND margaritas.

Maybe finish it off with a spinach, apple, and feta salad.

TODAY'S CLOWN

The clown of the day award goes to one David Ogborn of Ocean Springs, Mississippi.

He got his panties in a wad because his local library (he serves on the board) had on its shelves a book whose title comprises some minor sexual innuendo. So, Ogdon complained and had the book removed from the library shelves.

That is the act of banning a book, and it is an example of censorship. You can read an article about it.

It is not for me to speculate whether the book's author may be the next James Joyce, but this Ogdon assclown would do well to remind himself of Woolsey's 1933 decision, and the spirit it should encourage in us all.

Civilization begins with a public library. A public library as a disinterested house of information allows a public to inform itself at its choosing. This is our shield against the jabs at our minds of active government censorship, and the more ubiquitous censorship by economics. The library allows any person to make of themselves a learned person, and we have a responsibility to refuse to allow any single book to become the thin edge of the wedge, so to speak. There can be no precedent that someone in authority may choose that a given book be denied to the masses.

So, please, I implore my readers to think about David Ogborn. Let us strengthen our committment to the ideal that no one in power can opt to remove a given book from a public library. It is an offense to liberty.

COPY RETRIEVAL FAILURE CONTINUUM

Years ago I had this idea, but I never gave it a voice. As CDs were becoming more popular, and cassettes and LPs were going the way of the coelocanth, lots of people argued that CDs gave "perfect" sound quality reproduction.

And this is my observations: as information storage media becomes more technically gifted, it progresses along two continua.

The first continuum involves that the regular quality of successive retrievals continues to be better, as the technology gets more advanced. The least technologically advanced music storage medium is the human brain, and every retrieval from that source is imperfect. Somewhere in the middle is LPs, and every successive retrieval from that medium is frought with minor difficulties, each slighly aggravated relative to the last. CDs represent a far-advanced technology storage medium, and for my intents, any successful retrieval from a CD is perfect.

But, the second continuum is the calamity of the failure. If you sing "If I only had a brain..." right now, you might forget a few words or be a half-note off at some points. Not a big calamity. If I play, "If I only had a brain..." on an LP right now, and there is a failure, it is likely to involve a "skip", a short segment of the record that repeats until I stomp my foot onto the floor. If I try to play my CD of "If I only had a brain..." and there is a failure, it is likely to not be recovered from by stomping on the floor. Beyond that, if I download an mp3 of the song, and there is any little problem with the file, the entire thing is likely unplayable.

Those are the two continua along which qualities of storage media with different technological sophistication are distributed. There are some obvious possible analogies to be drawn to biological information and nucleic acids. And, I am alway surprised to discover that I actually am qualified to discuss those. But that is for another day.

The point for now is that "advanced" technology in storage or recording is not necessarily automatically an improvement. It is a trade-off. Imagine you had one paper copy of your birth certificate, and one copy that you had burned to a CD. Now imagine that I am going to fold all your media in half, forcefully. Which copy will still serve you afterwards?

SAVE YOUR MONEY

I'm reasonably-well scientifically trained, and an astute critical thinker. I have never believed that there is any reason to buy "organic" foods.

It's a marketing buzz-word. When I ask pro-organic people what the big deal is, I get a stock set of answers: there's no pesticides; there's no chemical fertilizers; the farming methods are better.

Fucking hogwash. Pests are called pests to indicate that we do not want them destroying our crops. Pesticides are fine. If you are worried about ingesting them, wash your produce. You have much more to worry about from the feces you inevitably ingest, and the way to deal with that is to wash your produce.

Chemical fertilizers are the food that plants eat. You feed your children, don't you? And guess what? Us humans need lots of chemicals to survive and thrive. So do plants.

Anyway, here's a pretty good article that covers all my main points.

You are wasting your money when you seek the "organic" label on foods.

What I would advocate for is more detailed and complete food labeling. Rather than this blanket label "organic", how about if food producers simply must disclose a list of exactly what fertilizers and pesticides they used? Well, I suppose that would scare off all the irrational people who are knee-jerk afraid of chemicals, and work against my purpose of making "organic" go the way of the spotted owl.

Next up: what's wrong with hybrid cars, and you're an imbecile if you think there has been a 9/11 conspiracy.

RIBBON

For about four years I have been composing a blog post in my mind about just how fucking retarded those yellow stickers are which are inevitebly on cars, and which are supposed to look like curled ribbons, and which read "support our troops."

I do not have the energy to write that post out now. Needless to say, it is an emblem that brings the bile bubbling up to the back of my tongue.

Among other things, the short version of my expression must include the following.

To any person with such a sticker on their vehicle, I ask, "What one specific, tangible thing have you done, within the past ten years, that could count as material support for troops of the United States military? Something that was received and/ or felt by an actually uniform wearing person."

If my hypothetical askee has something (see list below), not only are they off the hook, but I will personally buy them a dinner of tacos and wine.

There it is. If you, my bpb reader, are hungry or even just enjoy wine, you can get it for free by supporting the troops. Maybe I'll call it the tacos and wine challenge. And the standards are pretty straightforward: Someone who counts as a troop (I'm lenient here, and will include any member of the U.S. armed services) would, if they are aware enough, be able to recognize or acknowledge a benefit, said benefit coming from your actions, even if anonymously.

A couple of minor actions are disclaimed: direct services to someone already in your nuclear family (cooking dinner for you son does not win for you my support hte troops contest) and donating some object that you were otherwise discarding (leaving your old paperbacks in a 'for the soldiers' box in the library probably counts, but leaving old magazines probably doesn't.)

So, what have you done for the troops lately? If nothing, and you don't have one of those ribbon stickers on your car, then you are fine, nothing to worry about. If you have done something for the troops, and you have one of those ribbon stickers on your car, then you are also fine. And, all you people have won my contest, and I will buy you tacos and wine immediately.

If you have done nothing for the troops and don't have such a sticker on the car, fine. Continue supporting whatever it is you support. You are invited to be my friend.

But...

If you have done nothing that a troop member can feel as support, but have a "support the troops" sticker on your car, then I invite you to go to Myanmar and dig trenches in coffle until you collapse.

A Short List of Things that Do Count as Supporting Our Troops:
-Mailing packages containing books/ sweets/ goodies/ toiletries/ toys/ etc., to U.S. soldiers anywhere who are not your blood relatives.

-Sending a one-dollar bill to a VA hospital.

-Donating any amount of money to a VA hospital or other veteran's service institution.

-Sending cash money to soldiers who are not your blood relatives.

-Visiting disabled members of the U.S. armed services for fifteen minutes a month.

-Visiting disabled members or former members of any allied armed service for any amount of time, any time.

-Volunteering on a hotline to help disenchanted soldiers get out of the armed services.

-Volunteering on a hotline to help enthusiastic soldiers advance their armed service careers.

-Visiting members or former members of U.S. armed services, not your blood relatives, for the purposes of making them feel better.

-Performing entertaining acts for any member of the U.S. armed services.

As you can see, the list goes on. You can image what is on the complete list. But if a person ahs that stupid fucking yellow sticker, and does nothing on the list, then I really wish them to die out of existence.

MINOR EPIPHANY NUMBER TWELVE

God, now there's a big concept. God is supposed to be supernatural, transcendental, omnipresent, and a few other things as well. There's a lot of churches in our world, and a lot of religious people. Without weighing in on whether god does or does not exist, I will credit it (him?) with great historical power.

And god is supposedly pretty stupendous. Okay, I know that since the invention of music videos, it is acceptable to call just about anything awesome. "Do you like these striped socks I got at the store?"

"They're awesome!"

Without completely discussing awe, and how it is likely I would behave in the presence of something awesome, I'll at least note that we are killing the word awesome. But I am afraid we are killing the concept of awe.

I am a lucky man. I got to observe a total lunar eclipse from the top of Pine Mountain a few weeks ago. I had a glass of wine in my hand, a fire at my feet, and I was sharing the moment with a friend who I am very fond of. The mountain air that came breezing through the surrounding sage had gotten just cold. Just barely cold. But before it had gotten dark, we had made the bed in the back of the Honda Odyssey--thirty feet away, the bed roll topped with it's sheet, then my down comforter, and on top of it, hers. I couldn't think of a better close to a summer. I took a drink of the wine, and the moon began to disappear behind the chill black cloud of Earth. And over twenty minutes, that lumenescent orb was quenched, turned into a faint, cold yellow ball in the sky.

I hope my readers will believe me when I say that that moment was awesome. I sensed awe, from within myself. Sitting on a mountaintop, overlooking the high desert of Oregon, for a moment there, I was able to forget the electric life of stores and work in the city. I could even imagine myself not knowing what was going on, not having the clear benefit of books and the internet and knowing about orbits and eclipses, and seeing my moon disappear.

I was in awe. Would you like to know what I did?

I shut the fuck up. I never once said the word "awesome". I didn't email anyone, or text message anyone, and for that little while, I actually did not even talk to the person I was there with. Darkening sky over a darkening fire pit cooled my verbal motor. I was not dumb-struck, as "struck" implies some kind of sudden hit.

I went up there to see the eclipse. What does this have to do with god? I'll get there, perhaps. I was dumb-founded. That sliver of night was the foundry that forged my silent self.

Perhaps by 11 am the next day I was back to saying, "I want to stop at this awesome humane society thrift store in Bend I know about..." (where I finally found a paperback Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road' for three bucks), or even, "These tacos are awesome!"

This comes up because tonight I am watching a video I downloaded (illegally) of the comedian George Lopez. He does a bit about people text messaging, and he imagines out loud what they might be saying ("Oh my god!") and then says what they've written ("oh em gee").

This is something we are almost all familiar with, and know that it manifests as "omg".

My question is whether society has the power to kill god. God was created, perhaps, when human-kind ever first heard the "bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronn- tuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!" roar of some age-old thunderclap. And the way god was made then was big. Oh yeah, god was one big motherfucker back then. But that thunder was some big motherfucking thunder, and probably pretty scary, to boot. So people made a god with all the power of that thunder, bigger then them, bigger than Earth, bigger than life itself. And they imbued it with awesome powers.

But are we that scared of anything now? Of course we are, but we don't have such a concrete manifestation of that threat. That caveman, way back then, probably ejaculated "Oh!" and needed something to save him, something of his own, some powerful god, his god, and called out, "My God!"

Thunder struck and "Oh! My God!"

We've killed it, omg. It might be interesting to discuss what we are afraid of now, now that we no longer have the thunder over us, as we stand naked and cold in nature's simple fort. Fuckin' A, I'm an evolutionary biologist. I will be happy to tell you that we have to feel the same amount of fear. Only now we don't have such an immediate evil to direct it towards. Maybe it dissolves into a different malaise, the depressions and deficit dissorders which surround us.

We killed god by text-messaging. To have gone from the omniscient, omnipotent benafactor, called upon when one's mother is getting sizzled by lightning bolts from the sky, to the lowercase "g" in service of a report of how boring the teacher is, or who kissed whom, is to have been castrated. And once successfully castrated, your material issue will not stand another generation.

Do I mean to say that I believe that human-kind has erradicated god? No. There are devout and marveling people. There's probably even some good Jehovah's Witnesses out there who would not send "u c brtnys hr tody? omg lk how orng!!" because of that little gee in there.

I know you pretty much can't understand this until your car has bottomed out because you blew out a tire at a 110 mph and caromed to a halt in the desert with sand, smoke and steam giving you just enough cover to run for the next hill while the bullets fly, but "Attica Rocks" by the Bloody Hollies has to go down in the records as the best song of the past year. I don't think my mother will buy the disc and take the parkway at above 100 mph with an open beer, but then again, sometimes I wonder where I got the gene for this rock and roll. I mean, my folks listen to some okay shit, for dorky old-fogey stuff. For instance, "Don't Tempt Me" by Richard Thompson would be cool if it was re-recorded but with some Marshall amps. And his one song, "Turning of the Tide" totally speaks to all the relationships we've all been in, out here on the killing floor of Craigslist. You know those giant yellow funnels in department stores that kids can drop pennies into for muscular dystrophy or cerebral palsy or girl scouts or whatever and watch the pennies spiral down and down forever? I feel like one of the fucking pennies in a permanent spiral, but with a rocknroll background, but down and down. And I'm brought on down to the next great rock song of this past year and it's too tough to call it's a toss-up between "Year of the Rooster" or "Black Nothing of a Cat" by the Riverboat Gamblers, but the points have to go to "Black Nothing of a Cat" with its lines, "Latchkey children, we don't need to find a villain, it's a boy right there with his head on the desk/ He's got a backpack full of comics and a condom in his wallet, don't need another comment about not using it yet." In all of this I am reminded of my junior high years with Chris Nelson when we made tomato soup with massive amounts of hot sauce and we went onto the roof of his house in West Asheville and listened to Asheville Speedway in the distance , great distance, on those summer nights while we were, for a moment, suspended from the cigarettes and girls and cars. Now those things are all around, but Chris is gone. And fucking surprise, hanging out on the roof in high school is also long gone. Soup doesn't belong on a roof. That's retarded.


'I admit, I forget, I don't know the words.'

TODAY'S INVENTION EXCHANGE

How about an ice cream machine in the supermarket that makes your ice cream to order? It's got plain ice cream of all the major flavors (vanilla, french vanilla, chocolate, coffee, mint, and so on) as well as sorbets, gelatos, and frozen yogurt. And, it's got all the different shit that comes in ice cream in big storage tanks. You use a computer interface to tell it exactly what you want in it, and at exactly what proportions.

Giant, powerful, mechanical mixing arms assemble your ice cream frozen, and put it in a container of a size of your choosing. Like rocky road road, but hate marshmallows? No worries. My machine allows you to start with a recipie for a popular ice cream as a template, and edit it. You can remove the marshmallows from the recipie list on the computer screen.

But, beyond that, it's totally customizable. You add chocolate chip cookie dough. Perhaps a dialog box suggests to you that 2.5 % weight by volume is normal for that ingredient. You punch in 15%. Another dialog box warns you that despite what you might think, that's too high, and you won't like it. You and the machine compromise at 7%. You order a pint. The machine spends three minutes mixing it, printing an ingredients label, and dispensing it.

Then you remember to get ice cream for your spouse. Coffee ice cream with 4% hazelnuts and 4% dark chocolate chunks. A half-gallon. Then ice cream for you child, but you can't remember the recipie. No problem, it's stored in the database. You just punch in your safeway club card number and pull down a menu with a list of all custom orders you've ever made. There it is: lemon sherbert with 3% peppermint chunks, and fudge ripples throughout (teenagers are weird.)

OXY? DUNNO. MORON? CERTAIN

How many words or phrases are used gleefully by advertisers to promote their products, which have nearly direct antonyms which advertisers use just as gleefully to promote their products?

Totally Awesome Ad Word!                Perfectly Acceptable Alternative!
        All new                                       Traditional
    Limited Edition                               Millions sold
        Imported                                    Made with pride in the U.S.A.
        Rustic                                        Precision-crafted
        Rare                                       Used by people everywhere

42.87282889243033, -78.87160867452621

It was fun posting a picture of something along with it's satellite photo, so here's another pair. This is Buffalo's best bar. It's a sailor bar. Like an actual sailor bar, only for sailors who sail on ships. Patrick and I went there a couple of times. We were distinctly unwelcome. But we drank beer and talked to the sailors. They treated us very suspiciously.
The POV in the upper picture is from the upper left corner of the lower picture. The triangle of grass is easy to find in each.


When global warming turns Buffalo nice, and all the yuppies descend on it, and everything industrial starts getting converted to condos, this will be the first place to go. Sadly, the yuppies will flock to anything that feels like it has authentic industrial blue-collar chic, as long is it is not actually the Malamute.

IN FORGETFUL SNOW, FEEDING

That boat that captured my imagination, that I blogged about in the post 'Out of the Dead Land, Mixing'--I have wondered about it. Who owns it? Why does it only sit there? Can I live on it?

Well, I found that boat in satellite photographs.



I wish I were on that boat right now. I wish upon the satellite that took this picture to set foot on this boat one day.

Oh, and now that all three of my readers have learned with me how to find things in google maps with latitude and longitude coordinates, here are the coordinates of this boat:

42.839338062870034, -78.86095762252808

I'M A BIG NERD

I was trying to find a way to search Google maps by latitude and longitude. So far, I can't. But I have posted my problems (I know, I know, this is a big problem, right?) on my blog before, and readers have helpfully commented with useful solutions.

So, if anyone knows how to enter latitude and longitude coordinates into Google maps, please share. Here is a sample set:

39°19’22’’ 122°50’09’’

This should show up at about 14 miles East and 3 miles South of Potter Valley, CA (which is near Ukiah.)

In the spirit of sharing, I have found a cool way to get the latitude and longitude coordinates to a spot in Google maps. You have to know that the point of interest is centered. Your search results are by default centered. So you can enter, say, your employer's street address, and it will be centered. Then paste the following code in your web browser's address bar, and hit return:

javascript:void(prompt('',gApplication.getMap().getCenter()));

You should see a pop-up window (a dialog box, to be precise) with your latitude and longitude coordinates. And no, I am not into geocaching. I'm just a big nerd.

ADDENDUM

Like seven minutes later, I got it. So never mind. This format works:
39 19'22'', -122 50'09''

if you have degrees, minutes, and seconds.

While this works:
39.322778, -122.835833

if you have decimal degrees. If you have either, Google will display both upon finding it. Thus, Google maps is also a handy converter of the form to the other.

All this because I have a camping guide that lists many free campgrounds (Coleman National Forest Campground and Recreation Directory, 2003, Watershed Communications). Most of its listings have really shitty directions, but latitude and longitude coordinates. So now I am trying to print a map/ satellite hybrid image because I am driving down to the bay area on Thursday, to spend the weekend in San Francisco and Berkeley, and I want to camp for free outside of Ukia on Thursday night.

PRIONS ARE THE TRIBBLES OF BRAINS

It's an interesting overlap between information, thermodynamics, and evolution that we have order. Much natural order originates because something is able to copy itself. The skeleton of a forest is a tree that has copied itself thousands of times.

If you think of information as having a cost, this makes sense. Copying self is a low-cost, high-yield transaction. My brain had to burn a lot of energy to write this sentence, but to select it with the mouse and copy it and paste it in again would be very easy.

But for this idea to have the context that makes it interesting, we need some other definitions. First, here's a plausible definition of randomness. Randomness is the incompressibility of information, and something is most random--or completely random--when it can't be described by anything shorter that itself. A stack of menus in a restaurant is not very random. I can take the top one and say, "Here, this stack consists of 50 of these." My sister's diary is almost perfectly random. The only way I can know the entire content is to read the entire thing.

People like to tell us that the order we find on Earth does not violate the second law of thermodynamics because the Earth is not a closed system. But that is not a very useful thing to say. It doesn't illustrate why we need all this order. It's because if we pulled back and looked at a larger scale, then no having the Earth would make for a more orderly universe. You could describe the universe by taking one cold, dead rock of planet and saying, "Here, this universe consists of a million of these." Instead, to describe the universe, you need to say, "Well, there's Mars, and it's got iron. And there's Earth and it's got a Library of Congress, in which you will find, well, electrical outlets, and staff, and books, and sneezes in the air. Hang on, this is going to take a while."

But that miniature amount of organization within the universe (life on Earth) serves to disrupt the larger organization of the universe. At a smaller level, you can't describe all life on Earth by grabbing a bacterium and say, "Here, this life consists of a trillion of these." So once you set about describing that life, all the little organized systems take an assload of work to describe. You have to tell us that human have books, but then those aren't scattered uniformly around the globe. As you detail all the books on Earth, you can't simply take the first TinTin comic book you come to and say, "Here, all the TinTin books on Earth consist of millions of these." And so on. Small pockets of order at smaller and smaller scales helps the universe better satisfy the definition of random.

A minute ago, I was thinking about the thermodynamics of prions. A prion is a protein that can take two different forms. They are normally found in healthy animals in one form, and they presumably do some important molecular thing in a body's biochemistry. But to be a prion, there must be a slim but real chance that they can be "flipped" to another form, like an umbrella that can be turned inside-out by the wind. But what makes prions beguiling is that after one of them flips, it touch other prions and induce them to flip. And as the number of flipped prions accumulates (in the examples we know, they accumulate in the brain), they wreak havoc on their surroundings.

But this is nothing but a copying self scenario.

Copying self is a decrease in the randomness of a system. But the weird thing about "copy self" is that--think about it--anything that has such a property, simply will. The sinister annoyance of prions is that they simply copy themselves. And like tribbles on the Enterprise, they do so until they fuck with all normal functioning of their surroundings. Copy self will copy self until it runs out of resources.

Books are an interesting example of having a cultural property of copy self, in that there is a tendency for people who read a lot to also end up writing. Probably lots of writers have books like tribbles. Swear words have that property. Show me a school full of children that doesn't know the word "motherfucker", and allow me to say it to one of those kids... And obviously, nucleic acids and bunny rabbits have the property, too.

Thus the heat death of the universe should not look like all matter spread out in a uniform, gray smear with no differentiation. Because that would be very un-random, and violate the second law of thermodynamics. This relates to the apparently ordered forms you see in fractal art. To not be uniform (and un-random) the images are governed by having one piece of information that can copy self at different scales.

A prion will copy itself until it abrades the host from the inside, grating the brain into shreds, destroying the environment that allowed it to live in the first place. I suppose is my own life, we will not grate this globe to destruction. But sooner or later, all these billions of copies of us will.

We start the day in circle, walking toe-to-toe,
Then we sit and listen, quietly, you know.

Then I get some water and a pitcher full of rice.
One I pour so neatly, the other swift and nice.

I site my pink tower, on a mat all by myself.
I build it very neatly, and return it to the shelf.

You'll never know I've been here; I put my things away.
I straighten tiny chairs up, and go home for the day.

I will find the other kinder and recruit them with my story,
To this modest, tidy troop, nerd fighter Montessori.

OUT OF THE DEAD LAND, MIXING

As far as I could tell, this boat never moved from this spot, just south of downtown, Buffalo, NY.



(Incidentally, while I'm in a poetic mood, I only ever encountered one person who noticed that the post-September 11th remains of the World Trade Center were evocative of Shelley's "Two legless trunks of stone." Interesting thought. Look on my works, ye, and despair, and all that. All quotes from memory, so I can't vouch for accuracy.)

ONCE AGAIN, WITNESS THE INCREDIBLE

I have long resisted making Beer Powered Bicycle an aggregation of outside content. It's an editorial policy. Yes, Beer Powered Bicycle is governed by editorial policies as detailed and explicit as tax laws. For instance, I never talk about sex or dating. Likewise, I do not simply post links to other shit that I think is hilarious.

Wanting to bend that rule, I have called a meeting of the editorial staff. We shall discuss how to best present outside material without allowing the Beer Powered Bicycle name to become thought of as just links to other stuff. We ask, "What kind of commentary or review could we provide to satisfy readers' high expectations of quality?

So, in that vein, here's an example. This video named Craig is hereby submitted for your enjoyment. I apologize to any Beer Powered Bicycle reader whose internet connection is slow enough to prohibit full enjoyment of YouTube videos.

And now the question for you,
Is not "What would Jesus do?"
But where will you be,
when the Craig Machine comes partying through?

Thanks to my friend Run DMGoolie for turning me onto this guy.

(Also, if you want a second video by the same guy that I think is funny, go watch this one.)

FITNESS LANDSCAPE

In molecular phylogenetics, there is much to be gained from thinking of effective strategies for searching through multiple, related solutions to a complex problem and finding the best one. A common scenario is that you have some way of evaluating the quality of a solution, and you can easily imagine all possible solutions. However, there are so many possible solutions that it is not feasible to consider each and see which is best.

This type of situation is akin to searching a landscape for the highest peak. You have a jeep and an altimeter and a helicopter that can drop you onto the landscape at any point you want. You don't know it yet, but this is what the landscape looks like:


How do you find the highest peak? You don't have time to drive over the the entire landscape.

Think about it for a few minutes. What would you do?

If you had all the time in the world, you could have the helicopter drop you in one corner of the land scape, and you could drive back and forth across it--reading your altimeter the entire time. By the time you reached the far corner, you would know from your altimeter readings the highest point.

But imagine you don't have lots of time. What would you do?

A good strategy would be to have the helicopter drop you at a random point, and then ONLY drive your jeep up, and when you and drive up no more, read your altimeter. However, there is a strong probability that you are on one of the lesser peaks, and not at the highest point of hte landscape. Before you read on, think of what you might do to fix that. You are allowed to have the helicopter pick you up and drop you somewhere else of your choosing.

You may have come up with one of a couple of different strategies. First, you could have the helicopter move your jeep to a different random spot on the landscape, and again you could insist on only driving up. If you did this fifty or a hundred times, you would expect--by random chance--one of those times would put you on the slope to the highest peak, and you would find it.

You might also modify the insistence that you only drive up. You could decide to drive your jeep only up for a long period of time, and then let yourself drive down and over to some other random part of the landscape and then again, allow yourself to drive only up.

But you can probably agree that some combination of random sampling and only driving up is a search strategy that makes it likely you'll find the highest peak on the landscape.

Again, much of the field of molecular phylogenetics involves thinking of more effecient ways to search landscapes for their highest peaks.

Murray Gell-Mann has suggested that the human process of creative problem solving might be likened to just such a landscape search. When we are thinking about a problem, there are numerous different solutions. In some scientific cases there is "one right one", but in some social or legal cases are are various different solutions, each with its own fitness--its own height on such a landscape.

As a fun exercise in thinking about thinking, I am going to write out a problem (also from Gell-Mann). Try to think of a good solution. I will not pretend there is one best solution, or that I know it, but I have written down on good solution here.

Mind you, this problem isn't supposed to be very interesting. I don't really give a shit about it. But it's fun to think about how you are thinking about it. So as you start thinking about it, remind yourself of the landscape, with your jeep, helicopter, and altimeter. What search strategy did you think would work in that case? Did you think that randomly changing where on the landscape you were looking might speed you to the solution? Can you make your mind do that?

Here's the problem. You are a lawmaker in a small town. Some industries want to build factories on any of the several rivers that flow through your town. You want them to build in your town, for the economic benefits it will bring. All factories need a source of clean water with which to produce their products. All factories discharge used water into rivers. That used water is inherently dirty, but expensive technology exists by which a factory can clean its own water. All factories obey all laws about layout: where to site their plants, where to site their entrances and exits, water intakes and outflow pipes, buildings and parking lots and things like that. But factories can not be trusted to obey any other law. What do you do?

This problem might be so easy as to be transparent. Also, my solution above is not necessarily the 'right' one. It's just a possible one. But the point is to see if we can think about how we solve problems, with the underlying question then being can we actually make ourselves faster at solving problems? Rather than waiting for that "Eureka!" moment while we put on our pajamas, can we drive our little brains up the mountainsides?

CHICKEN AND EGG

It's obvious, and I've thought about the component facts a million times in my life. But I've never stopped and appreciated the cyclicity of it: nucleic acids make proteins, and proteins make nucleic acids.

The ribosome is a mixture or RNA and proteins, but the catalytic activity is entirely of the RNA. Ribosomal RNA has been isolated, without proteins, that successfully synthesizes proteins. Meanwhile, all the most familiar nucleic acid polymerases are proteins.

Now how did all that ever get started?

On an unrelated note, I'm reading this book that's really pissing me off, 'Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge' by Vandana Shiva. It's page after page of ill-formed attacks on The Man. The author would like to be saying, "Western scientists are bad because they patent life forms and are big fat liars because they pretend to be objective about the pursuit of knowledge but are really subjective, and in insisting that their 'way of knowing' is the only right one, they're oppressing alternative 'ways of knowing' of indigenous people all over."

Whatever lady. That pretension of objectivity is a straw man. Go burn it in your own back yard.

But, she relies on one assumption that underlies her work without ever even scrutinizing it, and that is that there is something inherently wrong about patenting life forms. But this is predicated on the anthropomorphic fallacy that there is something inherently different about life than non-life. Scrutinize that. We use the word life because it usefully describes certain systems. One Dr. David Boone was gave me a useful yarstick; he actually called it "David Boone's 5 hallmarks of life." They include: the capacity to store and use information; a metabolism (consuming resources and making waste); the tendency to replicate one's self; being distinct, self-sustaining, or independant; the tendency to grow.

But this pageant Earth is not a magic act. We're a thermodynamic predestination, a series of very cool biochemical accidents. We are special, life is special, but lots of non-living things are special as well, and there is not some magic line in the sand across which all life can post its flag and claim as its unique territory. There are enrichments of D-amino acids on extraterrestrial bodies, and there are non-biotic carboxylic acids, and then there are viruses and simple bacteria. But wait, the continuum is more finely graded. There are exogenous fragments of DNA clinging to clothes and ocean-front rocks that aren't quite informative enough to be viruses, but that aren't completely random either.

And at no level of complexity do we suddenly need to call upon some mysterious animating force to explain it. There are systems with four of Boone's five hallmarks of life. Fire consumes energy while leaving waste (thus exhibiting a primitive metabolism), and it tends to grow and reproduce itself, and but it doesn't satisfy the information storage and retrieval requirement of life. But wait, worker ants do satisfy the requirement to store and retrieve information, and they tend to grow, and they consume energy and produce waste. But they fail to reproduce themselves. There's no Maxwell's demon ordaining that we sort them: ants to the left, queue up in the line for 'life', please. Fire to the right, your line is marked 'non-life'. Only our subjective human prejudices.

Yet Vandana Shiva lambasts all of Western science for allowing for patents of life forms. Sorry, but your underlying assumption crumbles when kicked.

Oh, and as I have mentioned in other posts, "all of Western science" is a very common straw man often employed by those who feel the need to prop up naturopathy or accupuncture as positive alternatives to medicine. So let's brandish our bayonets and disgorge this straw man of its stuffing for once and all. "Western science" is not a hegemonic institute of didacts. The phrase refers to the body of knowledge that has lived through the rigors of reproducibility and predictiveness and utility. The most absurd and alternative "way of knowing" percolates into the canon of Western science if it explains the natural world in a way that anyone can go test whenever they feel like it. And if a person suggests a test that can be repeated out in the real world, and performing that test contradicts a tidbit of Western science, that tidbit is discarded. It becomes a historical oddity and lesson, like the flat world.

STUFF THAT IS FAILING TO SUCK

-The Hold Steady. They're a band, and their one song 'Your Little Hoodrat Friend' is my favorite song of all time right now. Go find their album 'Separation Sunday' and rock out to that song a million times. Or, if you can get your hands on their album 'Boys and Girls in America', the song 'Massive Nights' is pretty much failing to suck, but not as much as 'Your Little Hoodrat Friend.'

-There's this guy named Chris Hart who works at PSU's records and registration window. He's a bureaucrat, working in a massive bureaucracy. I had to deal with some shit the other day. You know, typical bureaucratic shit. I stood in numerous lines with pieces of paper trying to get shit in order. Typically, such an experience sucks because the bureaucrats behind the desks are such mindless, inflexible cowards and totally unwilling to consider ever doing anything insightful or creative. So I was looking at this situation in which I would have to drop all my summer classes, but keep attending them. Then petition the university to accept an after-the-fact post-baccularette application, and then ask my professor to record my grades and transmit them to the university after the fact, then petition the university to accept the grades late. I got all the info and the blank petitions from this guy Chris and went home to drink beer and feel sorry for myself while filling out the petitions. BUT, when I got home, I had a message from this guy Chris. He had thought about my case (and that's the key word there: he had thought about what was in front of him...) and gone and asked his supervisor if there was any reason he couldn't just fix my case in the computer, then he had gone and done it, and left me a message at home telling me all my stuff was fixed. Bureaucrats who DO think outside the box and take actions not strictly proscribed in their manuals are certainly failing to suck.

-My drivingest license goes un-suspended on Monday. That fails to suck.

-Tacos continue to fail to suck. Especially carnitas tacos.

That's the short report. Not much else is going on here. I sort-of cleaned my apartment today, and got rid of an assload of books. Now if only I could bring myself to do laundry, this place would be like normal.

ERRATA

I signed up for Netflix a few weeks ago.

A month or so ago, I was a poor broke graduate student. Now I am an even poorer, more broke nothing, not even a graduate student. And, I'm not even employed. So why the fuck did I sign up for Netflix, you ask? Well, it is actually probably the cheapest entertainment option. This time around (I had Netflix when I was with Rachel, and then I shared Netflix with Antonio for a while) I am committed to being a more exploitive Netflix customer and I am actually dropping my watched videos into the nearby post-box at 7:30 am the morning after I watch them.

What does this all have to do with the price of eggs? I will get there.

A few years ago, Rachel and I rented and watched all the episodes of a TV show named 'The Shield.' It was entertaining in a silly and unrealistic way. Think 'Miami Vice' meets 'Across 110th Street.'

So, this summer I re-signed up for Netflix, as per diem it is in fact cheaper than hanging out in bars or accumulating massive late fees on local video rentals, and I was happy to see that a new season of 'The Shield' is out. So I rented and watched it.

One of the things I like about 'The Shield' is that it has a leading character named Lem. Lem is an unusual name, but I have a brother named Lem. So I like to watch the tv show, knowing that my brother's interesting name also appears in this rather mainstream tv show. (And yeah, before some family member posts a comment to inform me, I know, I know. Lem is a name in my family because my grandfather was named Walter Lewis Hyde, and went by Lewis, which over time got shortened to Lew. At some point, one of his kids (I would like to know who), as a mere toddler, tried to write his mom and dad's names and inverted the "w", thus creating "Lem". His wife thought it was cute, and started calling her husband "Lem" instead of "Lew". The name stuck, and now my little brother bears it. I couldn't think of a better man to be named after than my grandfather, Walter Lewis Hyde. In the TV show, Lem is a nickname based on the character's last name being Lemowski.)

So, I was watching the latest season of the shield, and in these episodes the actor Forest Whitaker plays an Internal Affairs investigator who is bent on discovering and documenting the abuses of those cops who are like the main guys in the show. Yeah, the main protagonists in 'The Shield' are corrupt LAPD officers, often depicted on screen committing horrific acts of police brutality. The makers of the show try to spin you around and get you feeling like the corrupt LAPD guys are the good guys, while Internal Affairs is the bad guys. I think it's very fun to watch, but only fun. Not very thought-provoking or sophisticated.

But now that Forest Whitaker, he has something going for him. I liked his acting so much that I went out and watched 'The Last King of Scotland.' That movie was a turd. They gave it all away in the previews, and there was no real suspense, and they wasted having an actor like Forest Whitaker by keeping him doing very predictable Idi Amin things in every frame of film. But in 'The Shield', he truly glowed. It was as if the TV producers told him, "Fuck it, we're just making a tv show, do whatever you want, and have fun." And Forest thought to himself, "How can I act up this role to present the biggest fucking bastard, and the toughest, slimiest, and most intimidating person ever imagined?" And it worked.

But one thing I discovered as I watched this show is how great of an orator Forest Whitaker is. He's in his element when he's not trying to grandstand or be pretensious, but simply delivering some lines about the coffee-maker, or what time he'll swing by your office the next morning. (Which is perhaps why 'Last King of Scotland' was such a stub of a floater of a turd. The directors clearly thought that Idi Amin would be best presented as always grand-standing. There's no internal conflict, and there is no confusion (which is tension) when someone is a resolute megalomaniac.) And, as much as I hated Forest's character in 'The Shield', he became my favorite, because every time he was on screen, I would hang on to his every word, knowing that whatever bastard thing he would do next would be given scant mention, as he ingratiated and bullied his way through people's lives.

I actually began this post to write about copyright and the RIAA. I have been discovering lately that I am "shitty liberal", as my friend Samantha told me. I'm pro-RIAA, pro-NRA, I think organic food is stupid and Monsanto is our friend, and I don't even really like the outdoors that much. But I took off on this Forest Whitaker thing because I mentioned to my friend Eileen the other day that I would like to have Forest Whitaker read me bedtime stories. Okay, so maybe that's a little weird. But I would definitely listen to books-on-tape of Forest Whitaker reading, say, 'Trumpet of the Swan', or 'Voyage of the Dawn-Treader', or 'A High Wind in Jamaica.' I would even pay full price for those CDs, and not try to download them off the internet.

FIRST GOOD NEWS I'VE HAD IN A WHILE

In Oregon, if you get your driver's license suspended for 30 days for having too many traffic tickets, and if before your 30 day suspension begins, you get another traffic ticket, the state simply adds 30 days to your suspension. I would have expected the penalties to be multiplicative. That is, I assumed this 'Failure to stop for a red light' ticket that I got when I drove through a yellow light (it was yellow, ask my dad, he was in the car), would lead to a year-long suspension, or a revocation. But, I called the DMV, and it's just a 60 day suspension. Phew. I was deeply chagrined about not being able to drive anywhere for a long time. But 60 days, I can deal with.

THE MORE YOU KNOW

I just got home from the bar, and I was re-upping my downloads since I won't be near the internet in Big Sur tomorrow night, and I found the coolest thing. Go check out the wikipedia entry for "chicken and waffles". I'm not going to put a link here. The entry will reward the search.

Oh, and if you get done reading that, and you're bored, check out the entry for Highway 61 (link provided!) I bought a Mississippi Fred McDowell record a couple of months ago, and I got to wondering why there were all these songs about highway 61. It turns out that wikipedia has it covered.

Beer Powered Bicycle Report From the Field: LA

Well, in true BPB style, I forgot to bring my camera, so I can't treat my readers to pictures of the Odyssey on Rodeo Drive, or snapshots of Compton, or time elapsed exposures of all twelve lanes of Harbor Freeway at a complete standstill. But perhaps I can evoke some of the feeling with a few words.

The first thing I did when I pulled into town was go the new Frank Gehry opera house. It is way cool. It was closed, so all I could do was walk around the outside, but it was pretty impressive.

Then I mosied over to my hotel to set up camp-- on the 15th floor of the Mayfair hotel in downtown LA. I had a beer while downloading Eminem albums and looking out over the skyline.

I was starving, so I rolled up to Roscoe's in Hollywood. This culminated a desire from my childhood. Ever since I saw Tim Robbins and John Cusack in Tapeheads, and the end credit song asked, "How long's it been since you had a wing with a waffle? Well that's too long, it oughta be unlawful," I've needed a wing and a waffle at Roscoe's. I did something unusually touristy for me, and bought t-shirts for my friends.

Then of course I had to check out the Fluevog store on Melrose Ave. Not surprsingly, it is just like the Fluevog store on 2nd in Seattle, and the one in downtown Vancouver, but it was still a good visit. There are a bunch of new styles out that look very cool, but are way out of my price range. Me and the guy working there talked shoes for like 30 minutes, though.

Then, I got back in my car and drove to Beverly Hills. I parked at 343 Rodeo to go to the Prada store. In part I wanted to see the building. Rem Koolhaus did their New York store, and I really liked his library in Seattle. I don't know who did the Bevery Hills store, but it's reputed to be fantastic. Unfortunately, the place was closed.

What time do all the stores close in Beverly Hills, anyway? I was over there at like 6:30 or so. The Prada store was cool on the outside, though. It's the first clothing store I've ever seen with a solid metal front, and mannequins under the sidewalk.

Next, I got back in my car and drove to UCLA which is right around the corner from there. Their campus is huge, and relatively self-contained. It's not clear where students live, if they don't live on campus. The place is surrounded by the expensive homes of Beverly Hills. There did appear to be student ghetto apartments across the 405, but I'm not sure.

I jumped into the car and flew down to long beach. This was like 8 pm, and traffic was thick. It took me about 30 minutes. We went fast the whole way.

If traffic on the freeways always moves as fast as it was at the various times I saw it today, then LA certainly is liveable. People here handle freeway driving much better than they do in Portland. I did 80 about 80% of the time that I was driving today. Mainly at interchanges, especially right at about 5:30, you sometimes have to slow down for a minute.

I did see one wicked crash. Coming back into LA from Long Beach, there was a black Nissan Altima and a dark reddish pickup that had crashed. The pickup was in the breakdown lane, but the sedan had spun out and was stopped across traffic, blocking two lanes. It had just happened, and people were pretty much just going around, but it looked bad, as it was dark out, and the car was black.

So far, on the whole, I give these people about 8.5 for freeway driving, where Portlanders get a 4.5, and people with Washington plates in Portland get a 3.0. Maybe I'll move down here just so I don't bust a vein in my forehead trying to drive around Portland. My license is suspended for the month of July, for speeding--so of course I will have to wait until after that.

Now I'm back in the hotel, watching a tv show and re-upping my downloads. Here in a minute I'm gonna go out on foot. But there's this thing people say when you ask about living in LA. People always say, "You have to have a car. You have to drive everywhere."

It turns out they're telling the truth. Nothing is within walking distance of anything else here. So, I'm gonna walk around downtown, but I don't expect to find much of interest of foot. I mean, normally I'd get a drink at a bar, but I didn't see nuttin'. I'm near Wilshire, in what I take to be a financial district, and everything looks closed. But we'll see.

Tomorrow I'm gonna check out Malibu and then head up the Pacific Coast Highway to Big Sur. I plan on camping in Los Padres National Forest. Then on Friday, I may check out Palo Alto and/ or San Francisco, or maybe Berkely. But the I have to high-tail it back to stumptown, because I teach a class on Saturday morning.