Digital divide
Mood:  not sure
Topic: Computing
Read about a new scheme to provide commodity-priced computer systems to all the schoolkids in third-world countries.

BBC article on Green Machine"

This might be pure esoteric impenetrability, but I wanted to add rather parenthetically that wifi networks have not been known to form spontaneously from primordial soup. Distributed wifi coverage is somewhat complicated to implement and requires some supporting infrastructure with ongoing technical maintenance. Larger networks often have problems with interference and signal degradation.

Will this project also distribute and install the wifi infrastructure?

In a village with no electricity, how will the wifi routers be powered?

What happens when problems arise in the infrastructure? Lightning strikes a router? Water buffaloes stampede across a network concentrator? Monsoon winds topple a repeater tower?

I suppose these kinds of questions have been asked, but I have not seen the answers. Just pie-in-the-sky praise for the concept of getting everyone plugged in.

I just cannot help imagining that somebody in this elaborate scheme is thinking about all the ways money can be diverted from expensive grandiose projects like this. Imagine your company contracting to build a million of these little green boxes. Or securing a grant to install and maintain wifi networks through dozens of villages and towns.

Perhaps I am completely wrong, and it won't turn out like so many other UN-affiliated do-gooder schemes.

Web design
Topic: Computing
In my usual mindless meandering fashion, I accidently got infatuated with the process of designing web pages a few weeks ago. So I cranked out a dozen different versions of homepages for our family webs at cobabe.org and my other personal stuff at tripod. I haven't updated my pages for nearly five years. By comparison with current stuff on the web, they were looking pretty lame.

I was surprised -- and a little set back -- to find that web programming has actually become a subject with quite a substantial depth. Though thankfully, not quite as expansive as astronomy. :-)

Originally the committee that developed the HTML standard envisioned rather simple requirements. The web quickly outgrew all of those foundational ideas.

Web browsers and "standards" have evolved in a rough-and-tumble fashion. It has been sadly depressing to watch Microsoft establish such a dominating presence, with IE eventually brow-beating most others into oblivion, much to the detriment of the internet browsing public. Early on, Microsoft apparently decided to cater to commercial internet interests. Their browser product is packed to the gills with every concession to commercial interests. Most who use IE don't realize how they put themselves at the mercy of commercial exploitation.

After trying every alternative along the way, now I'm using Firefox. It seems to be becoming very popular. I'm hoping more people will discover how nice it is to NOT use IE, to not be subject to every marketing splash that wants to smear advertising all over the screen. I use the Firefox AdBlock extension and am very seldom bothered by pop-ups or animated blinking or screaming or obnoxious music or even unwanted marginalia. I'm in control of the material displaying on my screen, and have the final veto over everything that comes across.

Anyway, I digress. Though the HTML idea was a marvelous one at inception, it fell far short of the current requirements. The HTML presentation approach is basically to assume that data should simply flow across virtual pages, without imposing much in the way of external structure. This works fine for naked unadorned text, but is not satisfying when adding the elaborate graphics and controls we use so much now. Without careful structuring the page elements fall into an unintelligble jumble.

Because of the very stubborn underlying browser bias, I have experienced a lot of frustration just trying to get web page elements to display as I want. Now I have resorted to CSS2 methods to order my web elements. This after I discovered that many commercial sites on the web use this approach.

In fact it appears that I am somewhat of an anachronism with my preferred hands-on approach to web programming. I like to write the code myself, instead of letting a web page generator tell me what to do. I use a text editor.

I'd probably still be coding in x86 assembler if it was still practical. Most of my page output is now coming from server-side CGI scripts. Pretty cool stuff, dynamically generated HTML, all appropriate for new-age high-tech web surfing. Actually it's all still pretty cranky, but I'm getting the hang of it. Now that I actually know what I want to do, I need to go back and start all over again to get it done right. Isn't it always like that? :-)

One other frustration I have encountered is getting things to curve gracefully. Computer displays just don't do that very well, at least not yet. Just looking at the curves and graduated color columns on the Smartgroups page gives a good example. Everything with a curve radius or color gradient is a fixed graphical element, presented from a boilerplate GIF file. Some artist painstakingly rendered these shapes using an art program. Browsers are too dumb to know how to draw anything but straight lines. I'm using GIMP to fix up my graphics. It is a very capable graphics editor, but doesn't have all the fancy builtin features you'd get with a fancy HTML generator.

Anyway, I'm way too cheap to buy Dreamweaver.

One-liners from Judy...
How Do You Catch a Rabbit?
Unique Up On It.

How Do You Catch a Tame Rabbit?
Tame Way, Unique Up On It.

How Do Crazy People Go Through The Forest?
They Take The Psycho Path

How Do You Get Holy Water?
Boil The Hell Out Of It.

What Do Fish Say When They Hit a Concrete Wall?
Dam!

What Do Eskimos Get From Sitting On The Ice too Long?
Polaroid's

What Do You Call a Boomerang That Doesn't work?
A Stick

What Do You Call Cheese That Isn't Yours?
Nacho Cheese.

What Do You Call Santa's Helpers?
Subordinate Clauses.

What Do You Call Four Bullfighters In Quicksand?
Quattro Sinko..

What Do You Get From a Pampered Cow?
Spoiled Milk.

What Do You Get When You Cross a Snowman With a Vampire?
Frostbite.

What Lies At The Bottom Of The Ocean And Twitches?
A Nervous Wreck.

What's The Difference Between Roast Beef And Pea Soup?
Anyone Can Roast Beef.

Where Do You Find a Dog With No Legs?
Right Where You Left Him.

Why Do Gorillas Have Big Nostrils?
Because They Have Big Fingers.

Why Don't Blind People Like To Sky Dive?
Because It Scares The Dog.


What Kind Of Coffee Was Served On The Titanic?
Sanka.

What Is The Difference Between a Harley And a Hoover?
The Location Of The Dirt Bag.

Why Did Pilgrims' Pants Always Fall Down?
Because They Wore Their Belt Buckle On Their Hat.

What's The Difference Between a Bad Golfer And a Bad Skydiver?
A Bad Golfer Goes, Whack, Dang! A Bad Skydiver Goes Dang! Whack.

How Are a Texas Tornado And a Tennessee Divorce The Same?
Somebody's Gonna Lose A Trailer

Future of Evolution
Topic: philosophy
Obviously, y'all have not kept up with StarTrek-class science. It is common knowledge that the warp drive can break through any space-time barriers, given a stressful enough scenario (and corny enough scripting), with Scotty in the engine room and a handy supply of fresh dilithium crystals.

We don't know the limits of technology. It may be that we can eventually accomplish anything we are capable of dreaming.

In application to evolution, it is evident that self-directed forces in the hands of humans at least have the potential to abruptly transcend any such gentle force of nature, however implacable. We are at the edge of a huge unknown chasm, ready to take the leap. We now have or are quickly developing the ability to manipulate all the forces that, given naturalistic science assumptions, would normally drive the evolution process. All the rules about evolution are changed, subject to our discretion.

Any diabetic who uses insulin can tell you about the practical implications of this point.

As with every such cusp in decision-making, the real question for evolution does not necessarily have a good rational answer.

Where do we want to go next?

(...segue into ST theme music...)

Evolution and DNA
Topic: science
This is a fascinating ongoing discussion from the internet, on DNA and evolution.

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Kendell Hyde quoted: "The rate of base substitution in mtDNA is much higher than nuclear DNA. An estimate of the initial rate of sequence divergence is 20x10-9 per site per year per evolutionary line (this is 2% sequence divergence per million years between pairs of lineages; 10 times faster than the highest rates in nuclear DNA)."

Restating this number for nuclear DNA, the base rate substitution is about one per line per year (actually 1.5, considering 3x109 bases). Rich, I am trying to be very clear about this number, which I have seen several places.

DHB quoted several days ago that human and gorilla beta hemoglobin are 99.3% the same. The beta hemoglobin has 147 amino acids, or a little over 400 bases. .7% difference would be 2 or 3 bases. Given the number of humans, each year every DNA base could be changed by the process above more than once, so any single change would be easy, somewhere within the human population. It is the second change that requires some thought.

Most mutations in working DNA, the exons and control sequences, are thought to be fatal, and some of those sequences are highly conserved, like being the same in yeast and Homo. However, just looking at the base rate substitution as above, the probability of another change in the 400 base beta hemoglobin chain is 400/3x109 per year. If that change has to be a specific base, and a specific type of substitution (of A, G, C, T) the chance becomes 1/4 per 3x109 per year, or about 10 billion years to get the correct 2nd substitution. If there are more than one person who got one correct mutation, then the probability goes to maybe several in 10 billion years. However, it has only been several million years since Homo and gorilla diverged. And if there are 3 bases to be changed by random mutation, that multiplies the probability by about 1/10 billion, or 1 chance every 1018 years.

The more we find out about exactly how the genome works, the more difficult it is to explain how natural random processes could be the source of evolution.

I was reading in the current Sci Am, where an article explains the way cells produce proteins from DNA. It says that there are about 150 proteins involved in the splitting and copying of the DNA. I would guess that a cell without those proteins available would not be able to reproduce any proteins. I would think that the sperm and egg contain a set of those copying proteins. I understand that some of the very simple single celled organisms use a simpler copy method, but it would seem that even they have to have the necessary support system to copy any DNA. Makes me wonder just how complex the first cell would have to be in order to make the first copy.

Carl Cox

Welfare performance metrics
Topic: politics
It seems ironic to me that so many welfare bureacrats reporting on their performance first mention the size of their ever-growing budget and appropriations. As if the massive treasure they expend in their efforts is somehow an accurate measure of actual social benefits.

In the reality of things, the best economic indicator of a really beneficial welfare project would be a rapidly shrinking budget. Because any welfare institution that produces a lasting and significant benefit ought to put itself right out of business.

Dyson spheres
Dreaming about dyson spheres --

Dyson's sphere was the product of considering the classic physics problem -- the heat death of local systms, and eventually, the entire universe.

Cosmologists started thinking about this along with the evolution of understanding about how stars in our universe represent the ultimate primary energy source. We realized that a star is basically an engine that runs on the matter-to-energy conversion process of nuclear fusion. Like all other such processes, subject to the second law of thermodynamics, these fusion engines will eventually start running out of gas -- or hydrogen, as the case may be. Some day the stars will cool off and die.

If we are thinking on an extended time scale, just casually tossing around billions of years, we can project a time when human civilization might be threatened by this approaching "heat death". Since we require the energy that comes from the stars to fuel our own existence, when the sun starts running out of gas, so will we.

Dyson figured that one way to forestall the inevitable demise of human culture would be to maximize our collection and use all of the energy coming from the sun. Right now, most of the sun's energy production radiates out into space. Dyson envisioned a construct like a shell, surrounding a star, which would effectively intercept nearly all the solar energy coming from the sun. His original idea was to construct a huge array of moderately-sized platforms, something resembling the solar panels that some use for generating power, only on a collosal scale. These platforms would orbit the sun at about the same distance as the earth's current orbital path, effectively surrounding the whole diameter of the star. Later development of Dyson's theme resulted in the idea of a solid spherical shell construct that the term "dyson sphere" now evokes.

Anthropic Principle
Funny word, anthropic. Sounds like some kind of graphic.

Can't sleep tonight. I'm dizzyly spinning around the cosmos -- contemplating "The Anthropic Principle". I looked it up in the Wikipedia -- Anthropic Principle. It means that the universe we can see looks to us as though it fits us like a glove.

Some are rather surprised at this striking coincidence. If things were even minutely different, by a particle of a degree, we could not possibly be here. In the development everything would have fragmented into disorganized chaotic bits and pieces with no purpose or meaning. Seemingly, only the most complex rigorously orchestrated and exacting choreography put us where we stand, a grand production that has occupied eons of time in the staging of this scene.

From our perspective this is an easy judgement. We already know that Heavenly Father created all this just for us. He has told us so. Not everyone is in possession of such assurance, so they argue a lot and entertain lots of doubts. When the day comes that we finally settle our differences, there will be no more doubts.

Isn't it just so grand that everything in cosmology seems to have a hyperlink that shifts us right back into the gospel. The anthropic principle becomes just a fancy label for Alma's Reply, the answer to Korihor's solipsism (Alma 30:41).

All things testify of Christ.

Amen.

Posted by jcobabe at 5:18 AM MDT

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Human Female Genetic Study
This is one of the most intriguing bits of information yet, from current studies of the human genome.

Nature: Human Female Genome Study

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"In female mammals, most genes on one X chromosome are silenced as a result of X-chromosome inactivation. However, some genes escape X-inactivation and are expressed from both the active and inactive X chromosome. Such genes are potential contributors to sexually dimorphic traits, to phenotypic variability among females heterozygous for X-linked conditions, and to clinical abnormalities in patients with abnormal X chromosomes. Here, we present a comprehensive X-inactivation profile of the human X chromosome, representing an estimated 95% of assayable genes in fibroblast-based test systems. In total, about 15% of X-linked genes escape inactivation to some degree, and the proportion of genes escaping inactivation differs dramatically between different regions of the X chromosome, reflecting the evolutionary history of the sex chromosomes. An additional 10% of X-linked genes show variable patterns of inactivation and are expressed to different extents from some inactive X chromosomes. This suggests a remarkable and previously unsuspected degree of expression heterogeneity among females."

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This does have some really fascinating implications.

Here's a fun article that discusses the function of X inactivation in producing tricolor female cats.

Mosaic Genetics

One thing that makes the new chromosome study so intriguing...

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"Early in embryogenesis in mammals, all but one X chromosome are functionally inactivated through a process called X chromosome inactivation. Because this inactivation occurs randomly, all normal females have roughly equal populations of two genetically different cell types and are therefore a type of mosaic. In roughly half of their cells, the paternal X chromosome has been inactivated, and in the other half the maternal X chromosome is inactive. This has a number of important biological and medical implications, particularly with regard to X-linked genetic diseases."

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This article reflects conventional thinking about X inactivation. But the latest study indicates that it isn't nearly this simple -- in human females, the X inactivation is incomplete and shows quite a range of variability. Apparently even in the cells within an individual.

Part of the import is that alleles which are heterozygous may be pathogenic -- something like the possible adverse results from conditions like trisomy. It is pretty confusing to me when I try to think of exactly what happens when multiple different alleles in the same cell are actively transcribing to produce the same protein, but if they're very different, it seems obvious that the results will not be good.

At the very least this might explain why I have such a hard time understanding the female of the species.

Anyway, where this is taking me --

Imagine an organism with such fundamental characteristic capriciousness built in, from the level of chromosomes on up.

Little wonder that women should reserve the right to change their minds. Their very constituent cells are explicitly built, from the ground up, upon that very theme. ;-)

Religious Left?
Headline: America having second thoughts about influence of religious right

Do you think the stuff this guy writes is true, or is he just another disgruntled liberal? They all still seem to be pretty much clueless about why left-wing politics is such a big loser.

Here's the main point of the editorial, and what this guy is really hoping to sell:

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"Maybe they're realizing that for all its pious moralizing, the fundamentalist movement is less about right than self-righteousness, less about faith than intrusion and less about God than power."

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This is a laundry list of what the frustrated liberals are really worried about, and the big lie they're hoping to get everyone to swallow. Isn't it amazing that these guys are so vitally interested in public opinion polls -- they absolutely hang on the hint that public sentiment might possibly be manipulated or shifting in their favor, regardless of what people really believe. So now they're hoping to exploit this paranoia about the "religious right", whoever that is, caricatured as some kind of power-mad out-of-control ugly monster that burns books, destroys scientific progress, and brutally forces everyone to recite that horrid pledge. It's obvious that the "religious right" is really just a thinly disguised Hitler, waiting to enslave us all in tyrannical dictatorship and mind control.

Despite the "attack" stance of this piece, this kind of left-wing preaching can never resist the chance to do some promotion of their own doctrine:

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"Yes this is, as the fundamentalists are fond of saying, a Christian nation. Thing is, it's also a Jewish, Muslim, atheist, Hispanic and gay nation."

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Here is another big lie -- it's a fatal moral flaw if the majority somehow fails to perfectly serve every minority interest. The system is a failure if it fails to serve Muslims or gays, or Wiccans or Druids or any other freakish but politically correct vanishingly small faction they can scare up out of some dark corner.

But of course, this is why our founders created a Representative republic, designed to weight the consideration of minority interests, but without letting them derail the whole machine every time there is a minor dissent. And the liberals never seem to recognize that their style of representation tends to disenfranchise the majority, the unique interests of a few are served at the expense of many. Witness the current controversy over filibusters and judicial appointments.

Liberals seem to wholeheartedly believe that they invented religious freedom, and in their great wisdom granted limited license to this special privilege, along with all the other civil liberties they so graciously extend to plain common folk.

Of course, it was never intended for us to actually use this license. It was supposed to be subject to their oversight and approval.

Perhaps that's why they're so flustered and frightened that we now presume to exercise those freedoms -- without their permission.

The editorial asserts,

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"The only way that works is if we inculcate respect for difference and, more to the point, respect for the laws and customs that protect difference."

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Nonsense. These people have such a selective, blinkered focus. Their whole ACLU-dominated mission is to create and exploit loopholes in the law, and is the antithesis of "respect for the laws". They cannot abide the traditional values that are the foundation of our common law, and are forced to hammer in their own brand of dictatorial "respect for difference" through divisive and devious means like judicial legislation and phony public opinon polls.

Truly the most invidious form of intolerance is the one that discriminates against and abuses the majority, the people who empowered these elite snobs in the first place.

(How's that for reactionary?)