I have to admit that I am confused. I have been confused since Clinton got impeached.

If your neighbour is quiet and non-intrusive, you don't care if he is cheating on his wife and doing "injustice" to his kids. You mind your own business. If your politician is doing his job, why should you not give him the same respect and non-censure? You could argue that his affairs might be used to blackmail him but of what use would a blackmail be if the public didn't care? What if we only cared about our politicians performing their jobs? Don't you think enough damage has been done not only to this country but millions abroad, by impeaching a relatively nice non-warring president over his personal affairs?

Even if your politician is not doing his job, is there any reason to dig up dirt on his personal life and mix it in with his performance on his job? Does your boss add a line on your annual performance report about your sexual partners and your affairs? Does your boss even care about your affairs if you do your job (or don't do your job)?

You could make a valid bitter case and complain if an extra-marital affair of any politician affected his performance of his job. Last I checked, politicians are not generally elected because they are a moral example. I don't see why affairs should even make it into any news source other than lurid tabloids that exist for such details. How is being a "moral (or even mortal) messenger" any different than being the paparazzi that hounded Diana to her death?

... asked Dr. Fing in (e:fing,45357). This little research snippet in today's issue of Science answers your question, at least partially:

Big leg bones from the Indonesian island of Flores show that the meter-high "hobbit" people (Homo floresiensis) who once lived there shared the island with enormous flesh-eating storks, researchers say.



Hanneke Meijer of the National Museum of Natural History in Leiden, the Netherlands, and Rokus Awe Due of the Indonesian Centre for Archaeology in Jakarta found the bones in Liang Bua cave in the same layers as the hobbits--dated to at least 18,000 years ago. They identified them as a new species of extinct giant marabou. The scientists say the 1.8-meter-tall bird was a carnivore and top predator on the island; whether hobbits were among its fare is open to speculation. They reported on the find this week at the meeting of the Society of Avian Paleontology and Evolution in Sydney, Australia.

So (e:carolinian)'s guess is probably more closer to truth than we'll ever know! The little people did exist at one point. Their extinction points to the fact that they were probably not very evolutionarily stable. Yeah, we were biologically fated to have kitchens with 9 - 10 foot (or higher) ceilings and similarly scaled counters and appliances.

(e:MrDeadlier)'s handiwork staring right back at me!!

Synchronized Cubicle Dancing
This has to be the most creative yet goofy video wishing good luck to the Russian synchronized swim team at the Olympics. :)



The "Official" Formuloid 1 Championship.

::Download Flash Video::

For more diversions e.g. a literal "Draughts" game and other crazy and borderline weird (but insanely hilarious) Official Olympoid efforts, check out this .

Quite strangely, very similar algorithms, statistics and probability models are used to generate Gene Ontology and Music Ontology Networks. Based on the structure of my music ontology tag-cloud network, can Science one day predict what kind of allelic variants (of genes) I carry? Or more importantly, can my musical tastes predict my reaction and response to medical treatments?



Intriguing... The possibilities are endless.

I was lazily skimming through some articles on pubmed when I found this

Harry Potter and the curse of headache.
Sheftell F, Steiner TJ, Thomas H.
The New England Center for Headache, Stamford, CT, USA
From the Abstract:
Headache disorders are common in children and adolescents. Even young male Wizards are disabled by them. In this article we review Harry Potter's headaches as described in the biographical series by JK Rowling. Moreover, we attempt to classify them. Regrettably we are not privy to the Wizard system of classifying headache disorders and are therefore limited to the Muggle method, the International Classification of Headache Disorders, 2nd edition (ICHD-II). Harry's headaches are recurrent. Although conforming to a basic stereotype, and constant in location, throughout the 6 years of his adolescence so far described they have shown a tendency to progression. Later descriptions include a range of accompanying symptoms. Despite some quite unusual features, they meet all but one of the ICHD-II criteria for migraine, so allowing the diagnosis of 1.6 Probable migraine.

Someone actually sat down and analyzed Harry Potter's headaches and categorized it according to the International Classification of Headache Disorders, 2nd edition (ICHD-II). The article received 4 comments from other scientific groups. It seemed rather unbelievable. So I read the article and to their credit, the authors use the rather flippant subject matter to point out that research in pediatric/adolescent headache is woefully inadequate.

Then I wondered if using Harry Potter was a trend in scientific publishing. And indeed, a search for Harry Potter in Pubmed turned up no less than 26 links including 2 reviews, some of them published in high impact journals. A search on Scopus lead to 46 results referencing Harry Potter including the fields of Medicine (17), Engineering (14), Neuroscience (6) Psychology (5) Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmaceutics (3) Multidisciplinary (3) Environmental Science (3) Computer Science (2) Materials Science (2) Chemistry (2) Chemical Engineering (1) Nursing (1) Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology (1) and Agricultural and Biological Sciences (1).

Another interesting article referencing the pediatric wizard was this

Origins of magic: review of genetic and epigenetic effects
Ramagopalan SV, Knight M, Ebers GC, Knight JC.
Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, University of Oxford, Oxford OX3 7BN.
From the abstract:
OBJECTIVE: To assess the evidence for a genetic basis to magic. DESIGN: Literature review. SETTING: Harry Potter novels of J K Rowling. PARTICIPANTS: Muggles, witches, wizards, and squibs. INTERVENTIONS: Limited. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Family and twin studies, magical ability, and specific magical skills. RESULTS: Magic shows strong evidence of heritability, with familial aggregation and concordance in twins. Evidence suggests magical ability to be a quantitative trait. Specific magical skills, notably being able to speak to snakes, predict the future, and change hair colour, all seem heritable. CONCLUSIONS: A multilocus model with a dominant gene for magic might exist, controlled epistatically by one or more loci, possibly recessive in nature. Magical enhancers regulating gene expressionmay be involved, combined with mutations at specific genes implicated in speech and hair colour such as FOXP2 and MCR1.

It references no less than 7 Harry Potter books and in the process, does a very entertaining review of some of the basic principles of genetics and epigenetics.

I find such a trend very refreshing. It's high time we, as a scientific community, moved away from high-flown and quite incomprehensible jargon in our scientific publications. We owe it to every new student in science and to so many non-science people who fund our research. I think that science can be just as entertaining and simple to understand as the latest sci-fi movie on-screen. I am so tired of tolerating scientists who speak in notations and three-lettered jargon, make no effort to connect with their audience, assume everyone works in their lab or could care less whether their audience is awake, asleep or dead. It is very demotivating to sit through conference talks and lectures with these nasty representatives of the field that I love. They are a disgrace.

I am not claiming that I am, in any way, better than the scientists I have so merrily pulled down. However, I do claim that I want to be better and literary efforts such as those from the Harry Potter Scientific Club strengthen my belief that anyone can understand and convey science lucidly if they wished to.

My advisor strongly believes in the KISS principle -> K.eep I.t S.imple and S.tupid, when it comes to presentations. Some of the clearer explanations that I have read for topics in statistics have come from the "For Dummies" series. Though the words, "Stupid" and "Dummies" may have negative connotations for some, to me they mean that the author or the presenter understands the pain of the student and has made an effort to convey the science in the simplest way possible. In fact, I now believe that if I come away from a talk confused, I can partially attribute it to the fact that the presenter was confused as well.

Clear communication is what makes us all human and I really don't see any reason why science communication should be held at a different standard from daily speech. Some may argue that Science is a complicated field and hence, only insiders need understand it. But that is not the spirit of Science. If you are not able to explain your science in simple words and draw analogies, then perhaps you don't understand it as well as you thought.

Simplifying Science is not a simple task because you are faced with years and years of muddled explanations of other confused authors and teachers before you. In trying to stand on the shoulders of giants, you often find that the particular giant you picked has a fractured humerus and scapula. It is, quite undeniably, a challenge to make it all simple. However, challenges are not new to Science. So its hardly an excuse to not accept this particular one.

Just imagine how many headaches we could prevent if everyone in the scientific and academic communities made at least an effort to stomp their own simple way into science for everyone else to benefit from. Otherwise, there will be a decline in students who choose science as their future and it will not be because of the dullness of the subject but rather, the confusion of the presenter.

Behold Larson, the hidden.

Doesn't ring the bell of evil now, does it?

Watch and learn.

::Download Flash Video::

That is what I thought I heard (e:enknot) utter at lunch today. I am not sure what it was in reference to - perhaps a certain league of homeless perennially living in rollercoasters? I was too far away and too distracted by (e:mike)-stalking to figure out the context or even if it was actually what he had said. But that is not the point of this post.

I had an epiphany ten minutes ago and I think (e:enknot)'s phrase has immense potential and is poised to make it's grand entry into the English idiom universe. In fact, I see it sweeping the global vernacular in the next couple years or so. The endless possibilities of this unique phrase are compelling.

Someone vetoes an excellent proposal just because of their idiocy. You step out of the veto meeting and declare in bitterness, "Some full-sized thumb he has." Touche.

Some impatient creep jumps the queue and gets service out of turn. You exclaim in frustration, "BUT he had a full-sized thumb!" Touche.

Yeah, I can see some of you clickety-clicking away from this journal. Stop fidgeting and settle down, will you? You have a full-sized thumb for goodness sake! Touche.

Some crazy superior comes along and unravels months of your hard work by declaring the project you have been working on, as defunct. You want to grab him by the collar, shake him down and yell - "You full-sized thumb abuser, you!" But you also don't want to lose your job so you end up not doing any of the above. You did, however, use the idiom mentally. So, touche.

You are trying to get your friend to reach a time-bound decision for e.g. which restaurant should you be eating dinner at. You could say, "Tick Tock, put that full-sized thumb to work, will you?"

The government makes another thoughtless decision and goes to war with the rest of the universe. You think in exasperation, "What's new? Their brains obviously didn't grow in proportion to their full-sized thumbs". Touche.

Just a taste of how a well-placed and probably misheard phrase can prove to be a full-sized thumb in the evolution of language.