Honk if You Feel Crowded

So the Department of Defense, the Director of National Intelligence and the FBI (among others, I'm sure) are looking for software that can sniff out criminal activity among the oceans of social media postings. To the extent they already do that sort of thing they may have noted the article you are reading right now, though it would be due purely to keyword matches, not the volume of readership.

So we'll have a few more netizens eating up the meager bandwidth left over after the junk e-mailers and web crawlers have had their fill. I'm not much of a social mediaphyte, so I have little objection to their pawing through what my friends of friends have seen already. I usually roll my eyes when people cry "privacy!" the moment Facebook, Twitter or Google burp out a new policy; such folk are at the very least naive if not disingenuous. If they wanted a private conversation, there are many methods available that pre-date the web.  No, I'm more concerned (though just barely) about their clogging of the information superhighway with more traffic.

Frankly, I'm still amazed that I can download in a second or two what it used to take over a minute just to save on a floppy.

(If you don't know what a "floppy" is, then you are too young to be reading this blog.)

Beware the Yeast of the Naturalist

A couple of weeks ago a paper was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that claimed to illuminate how single celled organisms began their evolutionary trek towards multicellularity. They applied strong selective pressure for weight on a culture of brewer's yeast cells for 60 days and found that the yeast formed clusters of cells and that some of the cells within a cluster exhibited "apoptosis," that is, they would die, making room for other parts of the cluster to grow. The hype surrounding the article is that it shows the "ease" with which the jump to multicellularity can occur.

All of this is predicated on the assumption that such a change did occur in the distant past. By conventional evolutionary reckoning, such a change occurred roughly 25 times independently in the past. The authors wonder why it didn't happen even more often given how easily they were able to provoke it in their laboratory. Hmm. A clue that perhaps their presumption is off?

Apart from the interpretation, the artificial selection of yeast generations showed some interesting yeast behavior, but certainly not something I would describe as a multicellular organism except by the most trivial of definitions. There were groups of cells that stuck together (as yeast cells commonly do anyway, just not often in such large clumps). Admittedly the authors would not claim they showed the full transformation either, but they do little to caution readers against wild extrapolation. Their claim of apoptosis is premature, since they have not yet determined the mechanism behind the cell death. There may have been a genetic mechanism involved, but there might also be a more mundane reason, say mechanical or chemical stress. Even if it were shown to be true apoptosis, it is doubtful that it came from something that was absent from the yeast at the outset.

So there is still a big question about just how "multicellular" these yeast really are. There is an even bigger question about how much further the yeast could be pushed toward multicellularity. An interesting follow-on experiment would be to remove the selective pressure and see what happens to the yeast globs. Do they persist or do they revert back to their less glommy former state? And what if there were a few of the "loner" yeasties still around? What would the neighborhood look like in a few generations? Would there be a predominance of yeast hotels, or would there be more single cell dwellings?

Going up

Two evenings ago a large pole shed went up in flames just a couple miles from where we live. I saw the billows of black smoke just off to the south of the highway as I drove home from work. A brief glance through the trees gave the hint of an intense fire. We found out through Facebook just an hour later that it belonged to a neighbor of someone who goes to our church. According to the newspaper report, the fire started in a car that someone was repairing. The shed was fully engulfed by the time the fire trucks arrived, so they focused on saving the nearby house and keeping the (full) 500 gallon propane tank that was behind the shed from exploding (apparently it did get hot enough to vent some gas, which promptly combusted). Everything in the shed was lost, which included vehicles and yard equipment. Fortunately no one was injured.

I read another FB posting today of a spaghetti dinner benefit for a man whole lost his entire home and a dog to a fire last fall.

Things can change quickly. I hope the family's neighborhood, friends and church (if applicable) show support in some way. Insurance can help replace the stuff; a more personal touch is needed to help with the emotional aftermath.

The Path Between the Seize

Several characters loom large in the tale of the Panama Canal, told aptly by David McCullough in his book "The Path Between the Seas". Ferdinand de Lesseps, Philippe Bunau-Varilla, Teddy Roosevelt, John Stevens, George Goethals. Movers and shakers. Entrepreneurs. Go getters.

To many they were heroes, willing to go up against tremendous challenges, staring Goliath in the face and not backing down. Each displayed different strengths. de Lesseps was the consummate ambassador, able to whip up a crowd one person at a time as well as en masse. Bunau-Varilla was a chess player, moving political and technical pieces, and sacrificing pawns if necessary. Teddy Roosevelt was, well, Teddy Roosevelt and at least as far as the Canal operation was concerned, he was a visionary and a power plug. John Stevens, while less interested in politics, nevertheless was able to match the tool to the job unlike any before him.  Goethals both relished the power given to him and dispensed it with great effectiveness, meeting every setback with dogged determination.

Along with their strengths came some weaknesses, of course.  They were human.  And the greater the power, the greater the opportunity for it to be misused and for collateral damage, intended or not.

How does one draw lessons from such people? Many details of their lives are lost to history, or at least greatly dimmed by the fog of time and variant opinion.  The context for their behavior cannot be fully known, as it can not be known even for our closest friends.

Perhaps it is best just to paint with broad, brush strokes and keep the pointing fingers in our pockets.  After all, God has already given us the lessons we need to learn and the canal we need to travel. Staying in the Water of Life is the surest way of getting from this life's sea to the next.

Taking It To Heart

I'm sure you've been told, probably more than once, some of the amazing statistics concerning the human heart.  It beats over 2.5 billion times in the average life span, moving around 1800 gallons of blood a day. There are many others.  My plunge into the wonders of the heart began 12 years ago when I switched jobs to work for a medical device company that makes pacemakers and implantable defibrillators. During that time one of the things that has impressed me most about the human heart is its ability to keep functioning to some degree in the face of all sorts of insult and injury. Starve it of oxygen by clogging arteries. Kill off some of the tissue. Poison it with chemicals.  Stick some wires in it.  It still keeps on beating.  Maybe a little slower, maybe not quite so coordinated, maybe part of it goes nuts for a while. But it can still move some blood around.

It's a good thing too, because when it quits, you quit (unless you happen to be on the operating table getting a transplant).  So we exercise and try to eat right to keep our hearts fit and keep the plumbing open to ease its job of moving blood around, bringing oxygen to our brain and tissues.

There is another heart that we talk about sometimes, the heart of our mind. The inner sanctum of our will. That place that Jesus talks about so much. The thought strikes me: is my spiritual heart as resilient as my physical heart? How much spiritual exercise am I getting, and what sorts of spiritual food am I taking in?