Rhinocrisy

(17:36:36) BuckyFull: dude
(17:36:41) BuckyFull: tell me something good
(17:36:47) Pld Kng: i have a bellybutton
(17:36:52) BuckyFull: um
(17:37:00) Pld Kng: that’s honestly all i have anymore
(17:37:09) BuckyFull: where you at?
(17:37:14) Pld Kng: surreal doesn’t even touch it anymore
(17:37:20) Pld Kng: i’m at my place
(17:37:28) BuckyFull: which is not in new orleans, obviously
(17:37:43) Pld Kng: baton rouge
(17:37:58) BuckyFull: ahoo
(17:38:08) Pld Kng: my parents house is pretty much gone.. no confirmation, but i don’t need it
(17:38:15) Pld Kng: the hospital i was born at is completely gone..
(17:38:21) Pld Kng: so my history has been erased
(17:38:29) BuckyFull: you don’t exist
(17:38:42) BuckyFull: everyone else okay?
(17:38:52) Pld Kng: i haven’t heard from my sister since sunday
(17:39:02) Pld Kng: my brother since yesterday-ish
(17:39:06) Pld Kng: he’s a pirate though
(17:39:10) Pld Kng: he’ll be alright
(17:39:14) BuckyFull: pirate?
(17:39:21) Pld Kng: my parents are alright they’re in alabama now
(17:39:32) Pld Kng: yarrr style
(17:40:13) Pld Kng: he rode out the storm in gulfport
(17:40:19) BuckyFull: this is some serious heavy shit
(17:40:25) Pld Kng: you don’t have to tell me
(17:40:26) Pld Kng: honestly
(17:40:28) Pld Kng: you don’t
(17:40:34) BuckyFull: i’m sure
(17:40:39) BuckyFull: i’m trying to get you to tell me
(17:40:48) Pld Kng: there’s just nothing man
(17:40:57) Pld Kng: shell shocked would be a step forward
(17:41:14) Pld Kng: denial might be a survival trait
(17:41:20) Pld Kng: none of which i have
(17:41:42) BuckyFull: this is like something out of the Bible
(17:42:02) Pld Kng: soddom was a fairytale
(17:42:46) Pld Kng: erm sodom
(17:43:00) BuckyFull: so what’s going to happen now?
(17:43:19) BuckyFull: i can’t even comprehend
(17:43:26) Pld Kng: nothing for a long time
(17:43:39) BuckyFull: the whole city is gone… all those people, nothing to do, nowhere to go
(17:44:23) Pld Kng: well it’s not totally gone, but it’s certainly not there I’ll give you that
(17:44:42) BuckyFull: looks pretty damn fucked from the pictures here
(17:44:47) BuckyFull: maybe they’re sensationalizing it
(17:44:55) Pld Kng: they’re downplaying it
(17:45:02) Pld Kng: that’s the irony of it

It’s been a slow week here at Ranch Rhinocrisy, somewhat because of scattered depression, partially because of doing some actual work. But mostly it’s because I think I’ve run dry of material. See, there’s only so much stuff worth writing about. And I only know a tiny fraction of that stuff. Plus whenever I want to be witty and urbane, I have to go look ‘urbane’ up in the dictionary to make sure that’s what I actually want to be.

I feel this is an unreasonably high standard I’m holding myself to. After all, the rest of the euphemism is full of trash, pretty much. I mean, check out this gibberish I found on someone else’s bleg: “Hoy solo me levanté de mi cama sin ningun otro motivo que el seguir viviendo lo ke me a tocado vivir…” Just some nonsense words strung together! And this guy wrote pages and pages of that. If that person is allowed to get away with such nonsense, I feel I should be able to lower the level of my own disquisition^* without impugning my own honor.

That said, on to the meaty prose:

Zeppelin rules!

People who believes in creationism should use Microsoft rather than Unix and should insist that their baggage be carried on this thing rather than transported by the system that has evolved over the past century or two in train stations and airports worldwide. The thing is, stuff that’s created new doesn’t work.

For all the talk about a divine watchmaker, watch design has itself evolved in response to environmental pressures. Early timepieces looked nothing like today’s: the most common, worldwide, was a weir of water that dripped through a hole at a controlled rate, gradually filling a tank. Each time the tank filled to a certain level, it tipped over and either rang a bell or caused a ratchet to click one “tick” forward. If you knew how many bells there were per day, you could tell time. Then, thanks to a profusion of “offspring” with slight differences, followed by their adoption in the “environment” (aka marketplace), eventually the water-bucket principle was applied to metal springs with controlled tension that ticked the tock one carefully calibrated second forward each, you know, second.

Not that I need to convince you or anything. Just another way of thinking about this stuff.

And don’t give me that “god is the perfect watchmaker” crap because if he’s so perfect, how come I don’t have a job?

I’ve just discovered Joe Bageant, thanks to some commenter on Scratchings. He seems to be a cranky alcoholic who writes dystopian non-fiction with his mouth stuffed full of Sour Patch Kids. Chow down.

So, today, the NHTSA announced that it was pushing up CAFE standards for light trucks (for 2008-2011). This is good, especially since it’s been a full decade without any substantial tweaks in standards. The bad news: they’re creating SIX new categories of light trucks (based on their “footprint” size in square feet), each with their own average fuel economy requirement. So while the Ford Excursion and the Toyota RAV4 will have to become slightly more fuel-efficient by 2011, this also means that more Americans can start buying heavier cars without affecting manufacturer’s bottom line. While previously Ford had to sell an Escape (average 24 mpg for a 5-speed 4WD) for every Expedition (average 16 mpg for a 4WD) it sold, now it can sell as many as it wants of each. Meaning Ford is free to discontinue the Escape and sell only Expeditions without fear of penalties. And the U.S. fleet can migrate towards becoming even gassier.

PZ is lambasting Deepak Chopra today. Not for his New Age pseudo-Vedic/quantum mechanics mysticism spooge, but for his apparent anti-evolutionary stance. It’s worth pointing out something that I think goes little appreciated by anyone, especially those idiots arguing against selection all the time, which is how powerful natural selection really is.

Here’s some elementary population genetics: The basic meat of evolution is mutation followed by change in frequency of alleles. Let’s say we’re examining a particular position in the genome. Everyone in our species of interest has the same nucleotide at this position. Now, suppose one individual acquires a mutation here. If we have a breeding population of N_e diploid individuals, this means that mutation has a frequency of 1/2N_e. The probability of this mutation “fixing” in the population (that is, reaching 100% frequency) is:Here s is the “selective coefficient”, a measure of the deviation of the fitness of the individual with respect to the average fitness of the population. If the average individual produces n offspring, our mutant will produce n(1 + s) offspring. (Note that if s is zero, the mutation is selectively neutral and the fitness is the same.) For small s and large N, the above equation can be approximated as π = s.

What does this mean? Well, take our human population. We have a genome of about 3 billion bases. Typically this means about 100 new mutations per generation per individual. That is, your offspring will have a hundred completely novel changes to their genome. Most of the time this will mean nothing. Occasionally this will result in positively selected mutations. In a breeding population of 10,000 individuals (a relatively small population size, as our ancestors had), this provides millions of novel mutations every generation.

In other words, a novel mutation with even a small selective coefficient has a significant chance of being fixed. In the human population this means even mutations that produce marginal changes in fitness - a differential of 1001 to 1000 births per individual - will be fixed 0.1% of the time. A selective coefficient of 10^-2 is powerfully strong selection. And it occurs completely invisibly to us. We would never note its effects; we produce far fewer than 100 offspring, and this tiny differential would never be observed without a complex, rigorous survey. But by the time a mere 10 individuals have acquired this mutation, its fixation probability has already climbed to 10%.

So remember this: natural selection is a powerful, efficient method for sculpting species, much stronger than our intuition suggests.

It’s all fun and games until someone cuts out the middlemen.

This Le Nature’s Water story is a true American tale of grit, moxie, deception and bottled ass water. (Via scrofulous.)

” To experience a food science miracle, go to Canada. Buy a 5.5-ounce bag of Family’s Best brand sour cream and onion (crème sur et oignon) potato chips. Bring them back. Watch closely as a belly-bloating 250-calorie serving drops to 150 calories. Total fats slim down from 16 grams to 9 and sodium lightens by 150 mg per serving.

It’s not all such good news. The chips that offered 20 percent of your daily needs of vitamin C in the Great White North provide only 10 percent in the Land of the Free. And fiber drops from 2 grams to 1.

Most of the changes result from differences in official serving sizes. In the States, a serving of chips is just 1 ounce, “about 12 chips,” according to the nutrition label. In Canada, it is 1.8 ounces. (Mysteriously, their label says that is “approximately 30 chips.” Go figure.) In any case, the Canadians come closer to the 5 ounces I can easily eat in a 15-minute car trip.

But one miraculous trans-border transmogrification can not be explained so easily. It involves trans-fats. In Canada, a serving provides a third of a gram of trans-fats. That little number might convince health-conscious parents to put the bag back on the store shelf, perhaps next to the insecticide.

But why bother? They could turn those toxic tasties into harmless indulgences by carrying them just a few kilometers south. Pass through customs and look again — the bag of chips is trans-fat free. “0g,” says the label.

American consumers, who see Canadian nutrition labels about as often as they play hockey, have no way to know that their label is lying. Zero grams is not the same as .2 grams or even .1 grams.

How can it make sense to punish responsible, label-reading consumers (all 3 of us!) by hiding the truth?

As it turns out, plenty of sense. In the words of President Herbert Hoover, the business of the “American people” is business. And the “American people” includes Mr. Cape Cod, Ms. Granny Goose and their uncle, Mr. Frito Lay.

Thanks to the miracles of monocultures, genetic engineering, and industrial irrigation, there are way too many potatoes. If the Food and Drug Administration needs to tell a little white lie to get you to eat your vegetables, who are you to complain?

Think about it in terms of who benefits. You buy some chips — the growers and chip companies make a buck and you get the satisfying crunch of a salty snack between your jaws. Win-win. Later, you come down with heart disease. The cardiologist makes a buck and the gross domestic product gets the satisfying crunch of your life savings between its jaws. Win-win!

The reason this beautiful synergy fails in Canada is that that country’s government has, despite the best efforts of its homegrown conservatives, aligned itself with public health. This alliance even holds up against the power of agribusiness, which is no weaker on the vast prairies of Saskatchewan than it is on the great plains of our Dakotas.

The difference arises from Canada’s single-payer health insurance system. Americans like to argue that their insurance system is better even though we pay 5 times as much for overhead, our infant mortality is off the industrialized world’s charts, and our insurers think it’s their job to put the “prevent” into preventive care. At least we can get an MRI on 2 days’ notice, if we have a few grand to spare, right?

Americans don’t realize how public health insurance scheme helps put Canada’s government on the same side as its people when it comes to public health. In Canada, there is no question as to whether seatbelt laws are a good idea. Taxpayer money covers everyone’s health care. I have an obvious financial stake in keeping my neighbor’s forehead away from his windshield. If he ends up like Humpty Dumpty, I will have to pay the king’s horses and men for their hopeless efforts.

Sure, the same is true in the States. We also pay for our neighbors’ mistakes. But here, the cost is broken up among individual insurance plans, various types of taxes, and even the workers comp insurance paid by our employers. The system in Canada makes the connection between neighbors much more obvious.

Which brings us back to the magic potato chips. The Canadian half of the shiny label reflects a somewhat more realistic version of the real world because the Canadian government pays for every case of heart disease. It has every reason to tell consumers the truth about their food.

This might also explain why Canadian cigarette packages have for years carried the world’s most disturbing full-color warnings.

A government by, of, and for the people — the one in Washington, D.C. — should do everything it can to at least help its citizens learn about the health consequences of their actions. Unfortunately, so long as “the people” includes such citizens as Mr. Cod, Ms. Goose, and Mr. Lay, government will need a little nudge in order to do right by those of us with a pulse. Single-payer health care installs that nudge into the political system.

Alas, the result could be a less wonderful world. No longer will Canadian parents be able to spare their childrens’ health simply by carrying junk food south of the border. Is the health of all Americans worth the loss of this miracle?

Some idiots at Cornell^* proposed in Nature this week to “re-wild” the American Great Plains with mega-fauna. Their argument is “justified on ecological, evolutionary, economic, aesthetic and ethical grounds,” they say. So they’re going to bring in creatures from around the world, including Bolson tortoises, Asian wild horses, bactrian camels, elephants, lions and cheetahs. The authors say, “[H]umans were probably at least partly responsible for the Late Pleistocene extinctions in North America, and our subsequent activities have curtailed the evolutionary potential of most remaining large vertebrates. We therefore bear an ethical responsibility to redress these problems.”

But why stop there? After all, the real victims are the animals we drove out and replaced. I have a better proposal, similarly justified on ecological, evolutionary, economic, aesthetic and ethical grounds. Let’s truly atone for our crimes; let’s bring back the mammoth. This isn’t ridiculous, after all. There’s probably plenty of available mammoth DNA. They only were wiped out 10,000 years ago, and plenty of nearly intact carcasses have been preserved in ice. Now that the Siberian permafrost is thawing and massive numbers of mammoth carcasses are unfreezing, there should be ample opportunity to recover mammoth DNA and to reconstruct the mammoth genome. Actually, given the sample of DNA likely available, we should be able to recover a substantial fraction of mammoth genetic diversity. Thus we should be able to reconstruct a very robust mammoth population, and if we continue seeding it with individuals for several generations we should maintain a healthy amount of variation. Such a population would already be well-adapted to the North American climate. Providing, of course, that they aren’t killed off by global warming in the first few decades.

In fact, this scenario provides for even better ethical opportunities, viz., poetic justice. Hopefully, after we resurrect the mammoth, we ourselves will be wiped out by plague, drought, or some other type of holocaust. Somewhere down the line, mammoths will then develop intelligence and civilization. Eventually, when faced with their strange history, and that of their destroyers/re-creators, they’ll have to ponder the conundrum of whether they should resurrect us (using DNA from bodies preserved under layers of snack-food-cake wrappers). And when they ultimately decide, “No, they’re better off dead,” a big bell will ring somewhere to signify how beautifully ironic this really is.

…

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of conservation efforts, and I think human beings should indeed keep an eye out for the health of other species’ populations. But there’s some hard realities we just have to acknowledge. Foremost is that we ARE a cancer on this planet. We are a scourge that MUST destroy other species. It’s simply impossible for us to consume the level of resources we consume and not affect the balance of life. Especially for megafauna, which require elaborate webs of creatures spreading beneath them to sustain their bulk. For all their size, they’re delicate, and our voraciousness means they cannot survive. Period.

The other is that the past is past. Justice does not mean merely undoing the mistakes of the past. Time only flows in one direction; it can’t be made to turn around. What’s justice is learning from the past and living better now and in the future because of it.

Life WILL survive on this planet. And whenever we happen to die off - whether in a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand or a million years - life will continue. Living things will continue to evolve, and grow. And grow larger. That’s inevitable. That’s happened many times in the past - massive extinction events followed by regrowth. Of a different flavor, to be sure, always fresh-faced. But that’s the way life works. Death, rebirth, growth.

If, on the other hand, we want to be around to see it, the way to do that is not to attempt to unravel the skein of history. It’s simply to be less voracious.