subliminal influences of TV programming?

We don't have a TV.  Perhaps because of that, I notice them in public spaces and have a harder time ignoring them than other folks.  They're over the checkout stands at a local grocery, and over some gas pumps. 

Today I went to the local branch of a bank whose name rhymes with "Smells Cargo."  I have to do business there every month or so.  The previous time I was there, I noticed that they had installed a TV above the line of tellers, so the folks waiting in line would have something to pass the time.  When a TV is set up in a public space such as a bank or airport terminal, it has to be set to something anodyne, so the set was tuned to some sort of vintage-1950's -60's TV station. 

The last time I was there at the bank, there was an episode of some cowboy drama, featuring an armed bank robbery.

This time, it was an episode of the Lone Ranger, featuring an armed bank robbery. 

It could be taken as evidence that violent TV programming does not have any effect on behavior, as everybody else in the considerable line was ignoring it, and I was unarmed.  

Friday Flora egregious error edition

It would have to be a big mistake to have a Friday Flora on Monday.
It would be a worse mistake to think that that's what poison oak looks like. That's poison ivy. If you were hiking around here, you would itch so bad. Full page ad on the back of the Economist; I suppose that you wouldn't encounter either in the UK.

I thirst for REVENGE!!! (and a pony, please)

Looking through the entertainment section of the Gray Lady (something that sounds far more scandalous than it actually is), I see that a wonderful new miniseries is going to rear its head on the networks. "Revenge," a tale of...revenge apparently, involving various high-society and filthy rich and snobby types traipsing around the Hamptons and getting what is coming to them. I glanced at the review and an online preview (I won't provide the link, as a gesture of my respect for you), and Gott in Himmel it looks unwatchable.

Normally I wouldn't bother to read such a review, but for the fact that I got to see some of the filming of this entertainment. The last time I visited my parents, we went for a hike at Will Rogers State Park. Old Will was quite a horseman, quite wealthy, and so his estate (now the state park) has a polo field. Apparently the Will Rogers polo field is more convenient for filming than one in the Hamptons, so the place was swarming with the film crew, real polo players and ponies hired for the show, and a passel of extras. But how to make it look like the Hamptons, and not Southern California? Just label everything "Hamptons" with a sign fresh out of the laserjet (click on the picture to enlarge).
Never you mind those eucalyptus trees! Now, all that's needed for total Hampton-ness is some Hampton-y looking people. A cattle call and a quick visit to wardrobe produced this tony crowd:
(Not the best photo, but it was very much the rich-east-coast stereotype (except for being, overall, several skin shades less white). Oh, and do make sure that the Porsche and Land-Rover stay in the picture!)

Finally, the polo. They had to make the polo grounds look like they'd been used. Rather than actually waste time playing polo (which I'm sure the real players would not have minded being paid for), they had this guy drive all over the field, randomly flinging clods of turf around.
At this point, I started wondering just how many minutes of screen time this was going to amount to, how much it was costing--and just how much it would be worth. Oh, and make sure the Mercedes stays in the picture.

Finally, some polo! First the leading man has to get his polo jersey sweat-stained--easy, he lifts his arm and the make-up lady spritzes them with a spray bottle. Then, it's up into the saddle of his doughty steed, already poised in front of the camera:
...and...ACTION!



Well, that was worth it. If anyone out there who reads this actually sees this moment on TV, let me know. I'm curious as to whether it was worth the efforts of everybody at the shoot. We found it diverting, but it was free.

Predator, Prey, and Jabberwock

I noted that scientists can sometimes be unintelligible. Sometimes, this is a cultural thing, where the structure of language is just different. Other times, it’s just the words.

I’m reading through my backlog of Science magazines, and I found this interesting paper titled “7000 years of Emiliana huxleyi viruses in the Black Sea.” It’s really very neat: basically, if you look into the sediments at the bottom of the Black Sea, you can look back in time—the gunk on the top is stuff that floated down recently, while if you dig down a little bit you find gunk that was deposited thousands of years ago. Some of that gunk is minerals, washed into the Black Sea by its tributaries. However, a lot of that gunk is the shells of a type of plankton, Emiliana huxleyi.

What’s neat about this paper, by Marco Coolen from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, is that he isolated the DNA of E. huxleyi from that ancient ooze. So, he could look at how the genes in the population changed over the last seven thousand years. Even more interesting, he isolated DNA from the viruses specific to E. huxleyi, so he could look at how their population changed over time. This is nifty, because viruses are really predators. So by looking at the genetic changes in predator and prey over time, it’s possible to see how each changes in response to the other—and also how both respond to changes in the environment, as the Black Sea swung from brackish to fresh and back.

Viruses generally evolve quickly. What Coolen found was that, over 7000 years, the viral DNA he found in the Black Sea muck showed signs of continuous evolution and innovation. A certain combination of viral genes would be dominant for a couple of hundred years, then be replaced by a new combination. Every few hundred years, there would be a completely new dominant virus.

However, the prey—E. huxleyi—evolved more slowly, and revisited certain genetic combinations. While the population might be almost entirely of one sort for a while, it would evolve to be almost entirely of a different sort in a thousand years. It’s as if a population of humans were 99% brown-eyed and 1% blue-eyed, then over a thousand years the population evolved to be 99% blue-eyed. It’s likely that at least some of this change in E. huxleyi was driven by the viruses, as if (in our analogy) there were a virus effective at killing brown-eyed humans but not the blue-eyed. What’s neat is that as the viruses got good at killing the new majority type of prey, rather than evolving into something completely different, the E. huxleyi just reverted back to the original majority. Extending the analogy, it’s as if the viruses became good at killing blue-eyed humans—but rather than the population innovating and evolving to become 99% green-eyed, the population drew upon a small remnant of brown-eyed survivors. These became the parents of a new population that eventually evolved to be 99% brown-eyed.

This is all very neat: it tells us something about predator-prey relationships, the mechanisms of evolution in microbes, and how a very neat and ecologically important organism evolves in response to environmental changes. The paper is also really, really hard to read, freighted as it is with ten-dollar words. These are convenient—it is easier to simply say “coccolith” than “cute little calcite shield made by E. huxleyi,” but it makes for hard reading. After a while, it gets a bit much (and these are just some of the choice words and phrases in a two-page paper):

The song of Coccolithovirus to E. huxleyi, or

"You can't spell 'coevolution' without 'love'":

Let us stroll by euryhaline seas,
Wiggle our toes in recalcitrant alkenones,
Saunter the hypersaline chemocline
And bask in deglaciated photic zones.

I am pelagic, I come from the sapropel--
Of laminated coccolith ooze my home.
You are a haptophyte—of Holocene stock,
With many an amplicon in your genome.

Stratigraphic chemoclines mean nought
To us, who share in glycosphingolipid.
Come to me!--such palynological deposition
Is more than coccolithophorid!

Oh, let us co-occur in the deepest core
‘till hydrologic and nutrient regimes are no more.

Science-speak gem of the day

Science writing occasionally barfs up pithy nuggets, worthy of Basho or Rumsfeld:

"An unexpected residual excess of teleological thinking has influenced the evolution of biological sciences during the last few decades."

J. F. Linares, I. Gustafsson, F. Baquero, and J. L. Martinez (2006). Antibiotics as intermicrobial signaling agents instead of weapons. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 103:51, 19484-19489.

Today's lesson

Axiom: Always wear clean underwear. You don't want to be embarrassed if you're in a traffic accident and the paramedics have to peel you off the pavement.

Corrolary: Always keep your back yard tidy and don't leave your underwear on the clothesline. You don't want to be embarrassed if there's an armed robbery down the street and the police have to look there for the suspect.

As far as I know, he's still at large. He was not in the chicken coop.

Twitchy

The most common image that people have of how bacteria move is of a little bug swimming along using its flagella. So busy!

But the bacteria have other means of getting around—one of the more amusing ways of moving is called “twitching motility.” Cells that move by twitching motility don’t have a flagellum. Instead, they produce a thing called a "pilus." This is kind of like the telescoping radio antenna you see on a car: it’s a thin shaft of protein that can extend from the cell, then retract back--here's Pseudomonas pulling in some pili:

The end of the pilus has a sticky protein on it, so to continue our metaphor, the pilus is like a telescoping antenna with a blob of crazy glue on the end. A twitching cell extends its pilus, sticks it to something, then draws it back in. Here's Pseudomonas grabbing onto a hair, then pulling itself along:

Rather than smoothly swimming, the motion is herky-jerky. Or, twitching. So, it's called twitching motility!

This is how I’ve always pictured twitching motility: a cell lying down, and moving in a linear motion. But, what if the cell is standing on end? If it just made one pilus, it would pogo up and down. But if it made a few pili, it would sort of stagger—go up, then go down a little off to one side; go up, then go down a little off in another direction, depending on how poorly synchronized the pili were. A twitching cell standing on end would “walk,” but it would be a drunkard’s walk.

It turns out that there are situations where a drunkard’s walk is actually very useful. An army of drunkards, all starting at the same place, will effectively “explore” every nook and cranny of an area. If the “drunkards” are twitching bacteria, standing on end, then a population of bacteria can effectively, if blindly, explore every bit of an area, and if there’s a particularly good place to set up shop, at least one individual bacterium is bound to find it (panel A).

In contrast, the bacteria who are “lying down” and moving by twitching motility will travel farther, but won’t cover an area as thoroughly (panel B).

This isn’t just an amusing vision of staggering bacteria—a set of experiments led by Gerard C. L. Wong showed that certain types of bacteria actually use this method to effectively explore an area. Using microscopes rigged with cameras and computers, he was able to track individual bacteria; he found that the “staggerers” were much better at covering an area than the twitchers who were lying down, or those lacking pili altogether.

The bacteria that lacked the ability to make pili never really explored their environment, so they ended up crowded—a situation that makes it hard for them to get the food they need.

Bacteria that could make pili and walk around after dividing were nicely spaced out, with plenty of elbow room—and access to food.

The need to get up and explore seems to be built in to the bacterial program: Wong’s group watched hundreds of individual bacteria divide, and most often division resulted in one cell that was lying down and another cell that was “standing,” ready to get up on its pili and stagger around. If things were just due to chance, you'd expect far more freshly divided bacteria to be lying down--not the most efficient way to disperse. It seems that roving is in the genes.

This is not an earth-shattering discovery. However it does provide some insight into how bacteria explore and exploit their environment, and how wanderlust seems to be genetically programmed. It also provides the amusing mental image of a cell, twitching and staggering around like a Dickensian drunkard looking for a place to sleep it off.

Maxsim L. Gibiansky, Jacinta C. Conrad, Fan Jin, Vernita D. Gordon, Dominick A. Motto, Margie A. Mathewson, Wiktor G. Stopka, Daria C. Zelasko, Joshua D. Shrout, Gerard C. L. Wong (2010) Bacteria Use Type IV Pili to Walk Upright and Detach from Surfaces. Science 330:197.

The movies are from Howard Berg's lab's excellent website.

Amusing

Back in Wisconsin, there was a farm stand that I'd go by while on my usual bike ride. They had a sign out front advertising what was for sale, "PUmPKins" or "BEAN PEA applES." One time, they were trying to convey that they had raspberries and sweet corn for sale, but they didn't have enough room on the sign. What I saw as I rode past was

"S.CORN
RASPBERRIES"

No thanks, I get enough scorn and raspberries for free.

Today I was driving home from work, and there's a slightly more upscale farm stand on the route. However, their sign maker seems to be a relative of the one in Wisconsin. They were trying to sell

FRESH AVOCADOS
CORN

But some recent windy weather has edited the sign. They are now selling

HAVOC

No thanks, I get enough of that for free too.

Reminds me of this oldie but goodie (starts at 2:30)

Bracing for Winter

I was walking the dog the other night and I saw somebody, other than me or the Real Doctor, rollerskiing up M street. So, there's at least three of us in this town.

I mentioned that rollerskiing put me on the bleeding edge of the avant-garde; however, it appears that I've been outdone.


I will have to somehow work out a rollersnowboard. Maybe a skateboard with bindings and the wheels on pivots.

Zombies among us?

Approaching the UCDavis campus, one often sees signs directing befuddled visitors to this or that meeting. They all look similar: big white arrow on an Aggie Blue background, and some truncated form of the group name. "Summer Cheerleading Institute" or "Horse Breeders Seminar" or such like. Today's was a winner: "Med School Body Donation." Come as you are, I guess.

Career paths

In the near term, the career of university teacher is looking slightly less promising than the career of typewriter repairman or steam locomotive engineer. As a result, I'm intrigued by people who have made mid-life career changes, and we met an interesting one at our local coffee shop. He, like us, is a regular. While we are there with newspaper and novel, he is there with laptop and auxiliary hard drive; for us, the coffee shop is an escape, while for him it is an adjunct office. After grilling him about hard drives (we're wanting to get a couple for back up purposes), we asked what he does. He is a self-employed professional coin photographer.

I did not know there was such a job. I knew that there were professional food photographers (and food stylists), and the violin building class we took is taught by a guy who got his foot in the door as a violin photographer. But coin photography?

It actually makes sense. Coins are a collectible commodity, and their value is highly dependent upon their appearance. If you would traffic in coins, you need to have fair representations of them. Coins are also (apparently, though I did not know this) the very devil to photograph well. Capturing the nuance of a subtle patina and the shadings of relief are tricky under the best conditions; collectible coins are generally permanently encased in clear plastic, which complicates the project. So, it makes financial sense for a collector to hire a pro. The photographer was quite proud to show us some of his work, which fills his auxiliary hard drives, and it really is quite spectacular. Additionally, he gets paid to travel, and gets to see up close some incredibly valuable specie. As any coin collector will tell you, such items are heavily laden with intriguing history, sometimes almost as much as violins.

The photographer used to work in the financial field. He quit, developed a hobby into a career, and has never been happier. It doesn't pay as well, and he has to hustle, but beyond making an acceptable living what matters is happiness, not extra zeros.

Oh, and how many coin photographers are there in the U.S.? It is rather a niche market. Our coffee-house cohort is one of maybe ten or so nationwide. The field would be crowded by an eleventh, so I don't think I'll follow that particular path.

Adventures in the Archives (II)

Continuing with the task of archiving the boxes of vinyl, I found this note printed on the sleeve of a 1961 LP:

This Columbia High Fidelity recording is scientifically designed to play with the highest quality of reproduction on the phonograph of your choice, new or old. If you are the owner of a new stereophonic system, this record will play with even more brilliant true-to-life fidelity. In short, you can purchase this record with no fear of its becoming obsolete in the future.

Well, I suppose. It was state of the art of thirty-odd years, and is still fairly widely playable after fifty years. Still sounds pretty good. Not a bad run for a technology.

The music? Pieces by the American composers Theodore Chanler and Lester Trimble (no, I hadn't really heard of them either). On the one hand, recordings of these guys are scarce, and scarcity fosters value--so I could buy this LP on the web for $55 plus shipping. On the other hand, the music is OK but obviously hasn't become part of the mainstream and is mostly forgotten--so I could probably sell it for at most the price of the vinyl.

New record set for faintness of praise

From a NY Times article describing a documentary about one of my favorite love/hate pianists, Glenn Gould.

The filmmakers also interviewed...Gould’s...teenage sweetheart. She provides one of the film’s more amusing moments: asked if Gould was romantic, she responds with a long pause before answering, “sort of.”

What is fair, revisited

A while ago, I noted a paper that tracked the evolution of views of fairness with development in children. The paper noted that the percentage of "libertarian" children remains constant, and I suggested perhaps developmentally stunted. It seems somebody else may have read that paper, and came up with something much more amusing. Go read.