The world turned upside down

by Richard0 – Catching

Noble: Let’s Have Perpetual War, But No Earmarks, Please
[Via Eunomia]

His dovish stance on the war on terror and his support for earmarking (the gateway drug to huge spending) won’t wear well with newly inspired activists worried about federal spending and the debt. Either you are a fiscal conservative, or you’re not. Unfortunately, Ron Paul is not at the most basic level. ~Sean Noble

This nicely captures the incoherence of the Republican anti-Paul critique. In this view, Paul is far too hostile to the warfare state and the tremendous costs it imposes on the public, which are not just fiscal but extend to lost civil liberties as well. Somehow, this is seen as incompatible with being “worried about federal spending and the debt,” as if military spending had nothing to do with either one. Despite his career of voting against pretty much every expansion of government and constantly voting for spending reductions, Paul is deemed insufficiently fiscally conservative because he has defended the use of the dreaded earmark. Earmarks are the targets of people who like to pretend they care about spending so that they can avoid advocating genuinely unpopular spending cuts. So-called fiscal conservatives who obsess over earmarks but ignore real entitlement reform, which would be almost all of them in Congress, have no business lecturing anyone about fiscal responsibility or fiscal conservatism. Obviously, if Ron Paul does not qualify as a fiscal conservative, no one does.

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I started as a Republican 34 years ago and have been a moderate most of my life. One of the things I really disliked about Bush was he, along with the neocons, somehow made me a liberal because i was against the war, against the huge increase in military-industrial complex spending, against the lack of oversight of the Executive branch, against subversion of the Bill of Rights, against torture, against the corrupting influence of corporations in the political process.

Daniel and I may disagree on many things. I am not a Ron Paul fan at all. But we absolutely agree on this point:

It has never made much sense to me that there can be people who are furious with “big government” for excessive spending but who simultaneously have no problem vesting the same government with virtually limitless power to seize, detain, wiretap, attack and kill just about anyone it wants to target. [...] Noble’s “worried” activists are people who are very familiar with the old line about a government big enough to give you everything you want, but they seem not to understand that the same danger of unchecked power is even greater when it applies to the government’s power to spy on communications, imprison and mistreat suspects, and start wars.

If more of the GOP wrote like this, I could see much greater areas of overlap in our political discourse. Unfortunately, so very few of the conservative leadership seems to want to do this.

Restoring fertility something to be optimistic about

Woman’s fertility restored after chemo

[Via Health News from NHS Choices]

An experimental technique has allowed a woman to successfully have two children after chemotherapy, several newspapers have reported.

The mother, Dr Stinne Bergholdt of Denmark, had part of her right ovary removed and frozen prior to chemotherapy for a rare bone cancer. Although the powerful anti-cancer drugs made her infertile, she was later able to conceive two children once the frozen tissue was thawed and re-implanted. Dr Bergholdt and her two daughters, born in 2007 and in 2008, are reported to be healthy.

This research is encouraging as it is said to be the first time that a woman has had two separate pregnancies following the transplant of ‘frozen and thawed’ ovarian tissue. Dr Bergholdt’s doctor, Professor Claus Yding Andersen, told The Times that the result “should encourage the development of this technique as a clinical procedure for girls and young women facing treatment that could damage their ovaries”.

However, it is important to remember that this is only a single case, and questions remain over how successful or safe this technique might be for other women. Only time will tell whether further cases of ovarian tissue re-implantation will be as successful as in this interesting but very early research.

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There are a lot of procedures that destroy fertility. Using homologous transplantation to restore the ability to have children is a wonderful step forward.

I just wonder how expensive this will be and whether only rich people will be able to use it.

‘Nature, red in tooth and claw’

by jelleprins

Scientists reveal driving force behind evolution

[Via Eureka! Science News]

The team observed viruses as they evolved over hundreds of generations to infect bacteria. They found that when the bacteria could evolve defences, the viruses evolved at a quicker rate and generated greater diversity, compared to situations where the bacteria were unable to adapt to the viral infection. The study shows, for the first time, that the American evolutionary biologist Leigh Van Valen was correct in his ‘Red Queen Hypothesis’. The theory, first put forward in the 1970s, was named after a passage in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass in which the Red Queen tells Alice, ‘It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place’. This suggested that species were in a constant race for survival and have to continue to evolve new ways of defending themselves throughout time.

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I hate interesting press releases that contain no link to the paper itself. Luckily, the lab’s website is totally up to date (a short search revealed thanks to Google) and not only had the paper listed but also a link.

Antagonistic coevolution accelerates molecular evolution is a great title. What they showed is that organisms do not evolve simply due to environmental conditions (i.e. climate), but also are under tremendous pressure from every other organism in the same environment. Whether it is infectious organisms, predators or simply those that want to eat the same foods, the species that have the greatest chance for survival are those that have the greatest diversity, allowing them to respond to all the different pressure of natural selection.

The greatest diversity occurs when the organism is under direct pressure by other organisms. Without this selective pressure, overall diversity is greatly reduced, decreasing the ability of the population to respond to changes.

Thus, in this very specific experimental set up, when only the virus could evolve, its genetic responses were less robust than when the bacteria could also evolve. Then the virus had to keep finding new ways around the protection that the bacteria kept coming up with – the Red Queen’s Race. In order to just keep surviving, the population had to constantly change.

This constant struggle to overcome bacterial changes actually resulted in a viral population that was able to get around many different barriers the bacteria could erect.

Sequencing the viral DNA at different points revealed that these changes were actually selective in nature and not simply some sort of demographic or global change. such as more rapid generation time or higher mutation rates.

Under these conditions, the viral population developed much larger genetic diversity. They evolved at twice the rate as those that did not have to respond to changes in the bacteria. And the genes in the virus that showed the greatest diversity were those involved with infecting the bacteria.

Importantly, the paper showed that this diversity produced by the coevolution of viruses and bacteria allowed the resulting viral populations to infect a wide range of bacterial mutants. No matter what barriers the bacteria erected, there were always some number of viruses in the population that could still infect.

In contrast, the viruses that simply evolved by themselves were totally unable to infect any of the bacterial mutants.

Thus, having to fight with a metaphorical tooth and claw, actually made the viral populations more fit and more able to survive whatever the bacteria could come up with.

This is a nice real world example of something that had been postulated several decades ago. It should also have some impact on our use of anti-viral medications or antibiotics.

Not only could we be selecting for organisms that can get around some of the barriers we erect, we are possibly creating populations that can get around all the barriers we could erect.

Anyone who thinks a single anti-disease approach will always work is looking at the world too simplistically. We will always be fighting. If we ever have to stop, it would make us actually less able to deal with new infectious agents,

The fight is what makes us better.

Just call him Yossarian

Special Report: Why I can’t report on the Apple shareholder meeting

[Via RoughlyDrafted Magazine]

A series of tragic circumstances related to Apple’s shareholder meeting yesterday has resulted in problems only you the reader can help solve. So I’m enlisting your help.
.
Members of the media who attend Apple’s shareholder meeting as reporters and not shareholders have pressured Apple to prevent me from reporting on the questions I posed to Steve Jobs as a shareholder of record. Unfortunately, the tech media also refuses to report on those events.

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An interesting conundrum. Most reporters, who hold no shares of Apple, are put in a separate room, where they can not ask questions. Only shareholders can ask questions. So a blogger journalist, who is a shareholder and also reports on some web sites about Apple, has been able to sit in with the other shareholders and has asked direct questions.

His combination of being both a shareholder and a knowledgeable writer allows him to ask incisive, in-depth questions. But he is now not allowed to report on that.

So the shareholder can ask questions but he can not report what those questions or what the answers were. As one of the commenters said:

The only way to get the questions you want asked is to ask them yourself, but asking them yourself means you can’t report on them.

A nice Catch-22. Of course, the media failed to report on any of the questions also. It seems like a total blackout.

He did not hog the mike, instead asking one question and then going to the back of the line to let others ask.

Perhaps what he should do next time is hand the questions to a fellow shareholder to ask. Then he could report.

Of course, he is really only stopped from reporting because of his own integrity. He told Apple that he would not report on any questions he asked but there really is not law or rule forcing him to abide by that.

Perhaps Steve Jobs can come in and let him report on the questions.

When Apple does things well

by juhansonin

‘Find My iPhone’ Rescues Two Stolen Phones at Busch Gardens
[Via Daring Fireball]

It was like something out of CSI. The St. Petersburg Times is reporting that the snatched iPhones incident began when a mom and her stepdaughter were getting aboard the SheiKra roller coaster at Busch Gardens in Tampa, Florida. The theme park provides unlocked storage bins for people to put things in so they don’t fly away during the ride, so their two iPhones (in purses) were dropped in. Probably not a very safe thing to do, but that’s what they did.

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I have used the ‘Find my iPhone’ feature when I have ‘lost’ my iPhone, usually by it falling under the seat in the car. The feature actually pinpointed the location of the phone almost exactly.

The comments here have many more stories. I love the one where the guy left his iPhone in a rental truck. Gone when he got back. He not only used the Find feature to show it was still in the garage, he activated the beep function of the phone.

One of the mechanics sheepishly removed it from his pocket. It would have been really cool to have that done with the police present.

Any other phone have a similar function? I wonder if the iPads will also have a similar function?

Ripple effect

by mattbuchanan

High-margin accessory makers have high hopes for Apple’s iPad
[Via AppleInsider]

Third party accessory companies have profited immensely from Apple’s iPod and iPhone lines of products, and now they are preparing for next month’s launch of the iPad with an assortment of products, including cases, chargers and more.

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With 1-5 million iPads sold the first year, this could generate a lot of revenue for these companies. iPods and iPhones already create a market for accessories that is almost $4 billion a year.

And the profit margins are 70-90%! Not bad at all.