Tag: science

operation moderne baroque

The mitoWheel is a graphical representation of the human mitochondrial genome which allows you to browse the sequence or search for a nucleotide position, gene, or sequence motif.

The gunpowder mess in my house continues to melt away, impasse by impasse. As money comes in, so do solutions. More shelves will be next, maybe some IKEA knock-off for the front closet that will let me clear space elsewhere. Once that’s done, I’m hoping to have a hall again, an effortless way to walk in to the rest of the apartment. As is, we clamber slightly past boxes stumbling tall full of unwanted things we’ve sorted out – culinary extras, cheese graters, emptied spice racks, plates, bowls, and home supplies we have no need of, as well as books, CD’s, and movies we’ve seen too many times – and do our best to stay confident that victory will soon be ours.

I was given a mirror this week, three feet by two. Heavy glass the colour of water and lead, framed in greasy, porridge white plastic lined in dental blue. I’ve been painting it a mild, warm gold the same tint as Tanith‘s eyes, and expect to put it up in my room this week. High, too high to work as a mirror generally should, striking, yet off in a corner. I expect when winter comes, it will capture the wholesome light that drips in from the window and help drown the SADS, another change for the better. As it goes up, the spangled sari above my bed comes down, as will the lights at my window, and the french-style Czech absinthe poster. I want to air out my room, shake it, change it, clear it out. I’m going to see what I can do about shuffling the cards of my decor, queen of hearts, jack of trades, and finally placing the thick collection of art and photographs I’ve been collecting in a drawer. Aces, all aces. Frames will be needed, glass, hooks, and drywall screws. I might paint the top of my chest of drawers gold, too, depending on how much paint I have left. I am tired of cozy. Now I want light.

Astronomers have uncovered an extreme stellar machine – a galaxy in the very remote universe pumping out stars at a surprising rate of up to 4,000 per year.

working a temp job from nine to five

Researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa compared the feet of people from different cultures plus 2,000 year old skeletons. The skeletons had the healthiest feet (at least when they were alive), followed by the modern population that normally goes barefoot.

“Natural gait is biomechanically impossible for any shoe-wearing person,” wrote Dr. William A. Rossi in a 1999 article in Podiatry Management. “It took 4 million years to develop our unique human foot and our consequent distinctive form of gait, a remarkable feat of bioengineering. Yet, in only a few thousand years, and with one carelessly designed instrument, our shoes, we have warped the pure anatomical form of human gait, obstructing its engineering efficiency, afflicting it with strains and stresses and denying it its natural grace of form and ease of movement head to foot.” In other words: Feet good. Shoes bad.

Justifying, wonderfully, what I’ve been telling everyone since I was at least six years old. Never again will I attempt to look meek when someone berates me on my lack of footwear, instead I shall raise my head high and declare quite gladly that science is on my side. I have citation!

he says, “Today’s vocabulary word is “proprioception”.”

from jwz:

Mixed Feelings:

For six weird weeks in the fall of 2004, Udo Wächter had an unerring sense of direction. Every morning after he got out of the shower, Wächter, a sysadmin at the University of Osnabrück in Germany, put on a wide beige belt lined with 13 vibrating pads — the same weight-and-gear modules that make a cell phone judder. On the outside of the belt were a power supply and a sensor that detected Earth’s magnetic field. Whichever buzzer was pointing north would go off. Constantly.
“It was slightly strange at first,” Wächter says, “though on the bike, it was great.” He started to become more aware of the peregrinations he had to make while trying to reach a destination. “I finally understood just how much roads actually wind,” he says. Deep into the experiment, Wächter says, “I suddenly realized that my perception had shifted. I had some kind of internal map of the city in my head. I could always find my way home. Eventually, I felt I couldn’t get lost, even in a completely new place.”

On a visit to Hamburg, about 100 miles away, he noticed that he was conscious of the direction of his hometown. Wächter felt the vibration in his dreams, moving around his waist, just like when he was awake. […]

When the original feelSpace experiment ended, Wächter, the sysadmin who started dreaming in north, says he felt lost; like the people wearing the weird goggles in those Austrian experiments, his brain had remapped in expectation of the new input. “Sometimes I would even get a phantom buzzing.” He bought himself a GPS unit, which today he glances at obsessively. One woman was so dizzy and disoriented for her first two post-feelSpace days that her colleagues wanted to send her home from work. “My living space shrank quickly,” says König. “The world appeared smaller and more chaotic.”

[…]

During a long brainstorm session, they wondered whether the tongue could actually augment sight for the visually impaired. I tried the prototype; in a white-walled office strewn with spare electronics parts, Wicab neuroscientist Aimee Arnoldussen hung a plastic box the size of a brick around my neck and gave me the mouthpiece. “Some people hold it still, and some keep it moving like a lollipop,” she said. “It’s up to you.”

Arnoldussen handed me a pair of blacked-out glasses with a tiny camera attached to the bridge. The camera was cabled to a laptop that would relay images to the mouthpiece.

I cranked up the voltage of the electric shocks to my tongue. It didn’t feel bad, actually — like licking the leads on a really weak 9-volt battery. […] I walked around the Wicab offices. I managed to avoid most walls and desks, scanning my head from side to side slowly to give myself a wider field of view, like radar. Thinking back on it, I don’t remember the feeling of the electrodes on my tongue at all during my walkabout. What I remember are pictures: high-contrast images of cubicle walls and office doors, as though I’d seen them with my eyes. Tyler’s group hasn’t done the brain imaging studies to figure out why this is so — they don’t know whether my visual cortex was processing the information from my tongue or whether some other region was doing the work.

The author also has a blog about this stuff: sunnybains_feed.

wish I heard his voice more often

BABIES AS WEAPONS is the most twisted thing you will see today, even if you’re a regular at ModBlog. It’s the inelegant site of XenoSapien, a man in the States who believes he is “suffering from deep feminist-culture side-effects.” I hope he never discovers gifs, as the flame motif is bad enough already. (Warning: for reasons unknown he plays inappropriate music very loudly). The front page has a pencil sketch named MyPain of a woman dressed as a stripper about to whip a prostrate man with a baby that’s still attached to her by an umbilical cord that snakes from between her legs. For added wtf, the diapered baby seems to be angrily shouting into a microphone. The entire thing gives me the quesy feeling he watches Wicker Man and touches himself on Friday nights.

  • “NASA can no longer afford the future.”
  • Plans for making a Jacob’s Ladder from readily available parts.

    Today has been full of unexpected phone calls, disco light moments, when the blare of music fades into almost silence at the exact moment you see her face. Theatre people, friends, night and day. Someone’s finally read my pen written letters, public transit edited. A long distance shout from an ex-lover, three defeated countries away, sunburned voice peeling across the lines, unexpected and welcome and a little puzzling. I love him, but why now? Little mirrors refracting light, circling in the room. Another chrome ring, pick-up-the-phone – a potential investor, in town from Memphis, surprise, someone I’ve been considering handing the project off to once I get it up on its feet and properly connected to my city. (We all know I want to leave.) I’m cancelling my plans this evening so as to see him.

    Just as a reminder: Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo opens tomorrow at The Western Front. Further details here. I’m going, are you? Especially quick comments have a chance at a comp.

    • last night my lover’s brother stripped for me. it broke my internet. never let that happen again

    It’s possible to encode an entire image’s worth of data into a single photon, slow the image down for storage, and then retrieve the image intact.

    While cleaning out a jewellery box today, I came across a flat jade heart from my childhood. It’s Asiatic, about an inch wide, and doesn’t fit with anything else here. I’ve never worn it, though it has a hole for a slim chain. It’s from Grade three.

    It was lying dusty in the gravel of the school field at recess and I felt clever for having found it, such a small thing in that wide place. I held it in my pocket all morning, an odd treasure, I didn’t even like it, and wondered where it came from. I don’t remember the girl who accused me of stealing it, only that she had black hair.

    When she claimed it was from her father, I immediately decided she had to have it back. Fathers were large chaotic things to me then, disastrous and violent, to be wary of, not to be ignored. People at school didn’t know what my home life was like, they only saw a very small, awkward girl who read too much and never knew what was cool, (you try talking about Boney M or the Talking Heads to New Kids on the Block worshippers). She didn’t understand my sudden distress. She took it for denial and began to hurl insults at me, accusing me of stealing it from envy. Her words were like bile. I’d never been falsely charged with fault before. She reversed my decision immediately, which is why I still have it, though I don’t care for it and never have.
    Into the Free Box little thing. Into the Free Box and away.

    A pulse of light can be stopped, transported, and restarted again using a cloud of super-cold atoms.