Eat it

Busy day, so here is something fluffy to distract me (and you, potentially). I came across this food meme earlier. Are you an experienced eater? The foods I've eaten are below, bolded.


1. Venison
2. Nettle tea - No, but I've seen Survivorman make it.
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile - Alligator, once
6. Black pudding - Somehow I missed this one in London.
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich - My lunch today
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle - But never enough to really appreciate, that stuff is expensive!
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes - I think I've had some terrible rasberry wine.
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese - This isn't actually the brain, I think people think it's the brain.
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar - Cognac, no cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O - unfortunately
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat - Many other curries, but no goat.
42. Whole insects - Ants, as a kid.
43. Phaal
44. Goat's milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu - No, but I dare my brother to try it when he moves to Japan.
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald's Big Mac Meal - Again, unfortunately.
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S'mores
62. Sweetbreads - Mmm, thymus glands.
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs' legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini - I think I had really bad caviar once, so maybe
73. Louche absinthe - Recently, actually. Totally overrated
74. Gjetost, or brunost - Tried to find it once, but failed.
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake
101. Elk
102. Ostrich
103. Moose
104. whole hog BBQ
105. wine that costs more than $400.00 a bottle
106. Home made bacon and sausage
107. chocolate and chiles
108. chittlins
109. moonshine - No, surprisingly
110. quail eggs

That's 66/110, 60%. Not bad, I've had variations on some of the non-bolded items (such as steamed lobster, sans thermidor treatment), and some are prohibitively expensive for a poor twenty-something student.
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Tuesday morning links

For your perusal.

Inside brain surgery

Wild dolphins tail walk

Face your Manga

The neuroscience behind magic tricks (may post more about this later)

NSFW chimpanzee video of, erm, tool use

Finding NYC bagels in Beijing

Free 3D modeling program Google Sketchup (may also post on this more later)

Brief discussion of free will vs. determinism (again, more later)

Russian Proton rocket launches big satellite

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Olympic Dopes

In case you hadn't heard, the Olympics are in full swing. I can't seem to turn the television on without seeing Bob Costas's rigorously-coifed head. My recent post on cloning has gotten me thinking generally about bioethics, a topic with clear relevance to sporting events. Last week's issue of Nature has an editorial about drug testing and the anti-doping industry. It's interesting, because they point out that like the War on Drugs, which many argue in some cases has increased drug trafficking via clever, motivated smugglers, the rise of drug testing in sports in the 1960s has stimulated an arms race between those regulating and those that attempt to cheat. The authors call for a reevaluation of the anti-doping strategy because it doesn't prevent cheating, only necessitates more sophisticated cheating techniques. When a world-famous athlete like Marion Jones can appear to win several gold medals fairly, only to have them revoked years later upon confession of cheating, there's a problem.

John Tierney at the NYT discusses a mostly serious argument for eliminating anti-doping laws altogether, in a sense opening up sports to a free market of performance enhancement. With the prospect of "gene doping," which involves inserting theoretically untraceable strength-enhancing genes into an athlete's DNA, and other sophisticated techniques, it's clear that more people will be able to cheat undetected in the future.

The point is, the legitimacy of sports hinges on the assumption that everyone is playing fair. The reality is that what the public may view as fun and games, the coaches, team owners, company affiliates, and even athletes see as business (Example: China has spent ~46 billion on the Olympics), and are prepared to do whatever is good for business. Wins equal media attention, advertising dollars, national/political pride, etc - valuable commodities that have nothing to do with the purity or *fun* of the game.

It's interesting to think what sports would be like if the competitors were allowed to do whatever possible to win. I'm not much into sports now, probably for a lot of cynical reasons, but I think I could get into a game featuring genetically modified athletes. Who knows, maybe in twenty years we'll be watching the 1st Mutant Olympics.



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Internet Memes

Check out this cool internet meme timeline. It's interactive! Zoom down to the month scale to see them all. After the jump.





This makes me nostalgic for those *simpler* days when I had to sign into AOL with my 56.6K dial-up modem to see the internet. My family was a little late to adopt internet usage, our first serious computer purchase was around 1996, if memory serves. I definitely remember the Dancing Baby meme, though that memory might be from something similar in an episode of Ally McBeal. Notable high school memes included the Blair Witch Project, Hamsterdance, Homestar Runner, and (unfortunately) Bonsai Kitten. From college, the Ashlee Simpson lip-sync snafu, Chuck Norris facts, Ask a Ninja, I Can Has Cheezburger, and (again, unfortunately) OK Go memes stand out in my mind.

I feel both young and old.

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Cute Science: Commercial dog cloning

South Korean researchers at Seoul National University and RNL Bio have produced the first commercial dog clones, a litter of five pitbull puppies. The customer is a Californian woman who lost her dog Booger two years ago. Skin cells from Booger's ear were used to produce the cloned embryos, which were then gestated in surrogate dogs. Pet cloning is prohibitively expensive, upwards of 50-100K per animal, so the market for this is small. Top police dogs and other valuable animals are being reproduced around the world for noncommercial applications. RNL Bio isn't wasting any time getting the word out about this new business. CEO Ra Jeong-Chan was quoted saying they would produce 300 dogs for wealthy owners over the next year and "will consider cloning camels for rich people in the Middle East."


Seoul National University, in collaboration with RNL Bio, a biotech firm, has been responsible for many recent cloning advancements and scandals. SNU cloned the first dog, an Afghan hound, in 2005. It was also at SNU that Hwang Woo-Suk famously fabricated data in papers claiming the cloning of human embryonic stem cells.

















LOLclones, anyone?

Of course, this will spark renewed debate over the ethics of cloning. Humane societies have already come out in opposition of RNL Bio's actions, claiming that the money for cloning new animals would be better used to save thousands of sick and stray animals, animals that are already alive. The cloning process is still rather crude, they point out, requiring many attempts to get successful implantation, which requires many surrogate animals. Human cloning is even more complicated, and many see these continued animal-research successes as a slippery slope that ends with replicated humans, genetic engineering, and eugenics. After Dolly, in the mid-1990's, there was a firestorm of political debate on the issue. It even trickled into popular culture (see GATTACA and The 6th Day for one good and one horrible movie take on cloning, eugenics, etc). A lot of the controversy over cloning is focused on research that doesn't actually involve full-formed clones, but rather stems cells, gene manipulations, and the production of chimeras for medical benefit. This sort of tinkering with nature scares people.

I think many understandably have a gut "ick" reaction to the possibility of human cloning and related research. There are few issues with more moral and ethical ambiguity. Cloning brings to question all sorts of philosophical quandaries - personhood, continuity, existence - and forces people to think about what makes them who they are, which is a difficult introspective task. Is a person meaningfully described by their DNA? How much of you do you need to still be you? How much of you is a product of your environment? It's not an easy issue for people to deal with, and it never will be, but the public's apprehensiveness to cloning research is primarily based on fear of its misuse. People will always fear abuse of scientific knowledge (often justifiably, just look to the Manhattan Project's spoils, or bioterrorism) but the mere potential that one day someone will exploit cloning at the pain of others does not preclude need for the fundamental research, the potential benefits to society are too great.

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Aptostichus stephencolberti

Jason Bond, a biologist who recently named a spider species after Neil Young, has named a new spider after Steven Colbert. This adds to the list of things already bearing Colbert's name, including a bald eagle from the San Francisco Zoo. Colbert reacts, talks to Bond in the hilarious video clip below.




Here's another awesome trapdoor spider video.



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Page Edit

In a small attempt to make this page a little easier to read, if not a little more structurally sophisticated, I've added a Blogger hack that limits the amount of a post that show up on the main page. Now, if you come directly to the main page, and not from an RSS reader, you will see truncated posts. This cleans up the main page and it should load faster (I don't really know if page loading is an issue for anyone anymore). Also, this allows me to use blogspeak such as "below the fold" and "after the jump."



Someone on the Blogger discussion forums directed me to this site. It has tons of helpful tips for blogging on Blogger, particularly for those who don't know anything but the simplest HTML, CSS, etc. I've also added a widget at the bottom of each post that shows links to posts with the same labels. I tag a little too liberally though, these lists might get long.

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