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The best of the New York Times’ writers tackle the increasingly fuzzy world of genetics, epigenetics and all the still-as-yet-undefined complexity that surrounds DNA and how it operates. At work Monday, I got the 30,000 foot view of epigenetics from one of Fox Chase’s leading researchers, but yesterday’s Science Times really gets into how awfully, horribly complex this all is.

Carl Zimmer (who moderates a panel next week at The Franklin) sifts through the shifting science of epigenetics.

Andrew Pollack examines the hidden life of RNA.

Benedict Carey comes up with another reason to blame your parents’ genes, mental health.

Natalie Angier questions the very meaning of the word gene.

Since I don’t get the print edition of the Times, I’m clipping all these with Evernote now (someday I’ll get Leopard and be able to use the desktop version of Evernote, but its web app for now). This is one of those times I wish that newspapers in the US would subsidize those e-ink ereaders like they do in Europe. The devices hover around $300 retail, which is just a bit too much for me to justify on yet another gadget (no matter how much I really, really want one, Santa).

Its like Christmas for Perverts!

My spider, let me show you it, to the left and above, in squishy banner form. Not a great picture, by any means, but it is all that I have at the moment.

That little feller was found hanging out on a lamppost in New Hope — one of my favorite Fall burgs — the other week. Fall is a good time for spider hunting in New Hope. I assume they are there to catch bugs coming off the river breeze. I assume it isn’t just an autumnal behavior, just that by the time Fall rolls around the shopkeepers have given up on cleaning off the old webs and have embraced the enwebbed look for the season.  They seem to be everywhere along the store fronts this time of year.

Halloween is great. Its the capper to the perfect season. Around here Fall is warm, frequently brisk and often sunny and blue. Halloween marks the point where the season decays into pre-winter.

I’ve never been a gore fan, but I’ve always dug monsters, ghost stories and candy. Lovecraftian space gods and zombies are my ideals of perfect monsters.  I got the zombie bug a few years back when I paneled on the living dead at a Philcon, but I never got around to writing the definitive zombie story. Needless to say it would have involved parallel arrays of Ditch Witch trenchers mounted on slow-moving Caterpiller 740 Ejector articulated dump trucks. No waiting behind barricades for the food to run low. Not me.

It sounds like my new motto, but it is, in fact, a line from this great old safety poster that caught my eye during a tour of the old Collider Experimental Hall (where electrons and positrons used to smack into each other…for science!) at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (click to embiggen):

I can’t find it anywhere online, except one reference to the poem (reprinted below) in a university material safety document. The date in the lower left looks like it was revised 5-87, but it could just as likely be ‘67.  I wish I knew who Marshall Peterson is/was. And what, for that matter, is an A.M.A. (American Medical Association, Against Medical Advice, American Music Awards, etc.)?

What I do know is that the poster makes me more likely to want to see Mr. Scruffy Canister go off in as violent manner as possible, not less.

A Sleeping Giant

I am a compressed gas cylinder. I weigh in at 175 pounds when filled.

I am pressurized at 2,200 pounds per square inch (psi).

I have a wall thickness of about 1/4 inch.

I stand 57 inches tall.

I am 9 inches in diameter.

I wear a cap when not in use.

I weaer valves, gages, and hoses when at work.

I wear many colors and bands to tell what tasks I perform.

I transform miscellaneous stacks of material into glistening ships and many other things — when properly used.

I transform glistening ships and many other things into miscellaneous stacks of material when allowed to unleash my fury unchecked.

I am ruthless and deadly in the hands of the careless or uninformed.

I am too frequently left standing alone on my small base, my cap removed and lost by an unthinking workman. Then I am ready to be toppled over, my naked valve can be snapped off — and all of my power can be unleashed through an opening no larger than a lead pencil.

I am proud of my capabilities — here are a few of them:

I have been known to jet away faster than any dragster.

I smash my way through brick walls with the greatest of ease.

I fly through the air and reach distances of half-a-mile or more.

I spin, ricochet, crash and slash through anything in my path.

I scoff at the puny efforts of human flesh, bone, and muscle to change my erratic course

I can, under certain conditions, rupture or explode — your read of these exploits in the newspapers.

You can be my master only under my terms:

Full or empty, see to it that my cap is on, straight and snug.

Never — repeat — never leave me standing along. Keep me in a secure rack or tie me so that I cannot fall.

TREAT ME WITH RESPECT — I AM A SLEEPING GIANT.

–Marshall Peterson A.M.A.

Trader VIc’s…why yes, I am in heaven…

There it was, sitting on the shelf like it was a perfectly normal thing to be sitting on a shelf at Target: the Asus eee . As soon as I saw it, I thought, man, I’d love to take that with me to Palo Alto this weekend for the conference.

I just might buy a netbook. Maybe not the Asus, although its the perfect size and has, in general, decent specs. Why a netbook? Well, I’d do my current job a bit better if I operated out of the office. I could bring my Macbook to work, but carrying even that tiny thing around gets annoying eventually. I need something smaller. (One of those convertible-style OLPC s might work — they make exception ebook readers, as I’ve seen with my own eyes– but I hear bad things about performance and how well they stand up to abuse. )

I’ll probably settle for an Acer Aspire On e (or something similar), which is slightly wider and about $30-60 bucks more than the eee Target carries.  It does, however, have an actual 160 GB hard drive. In theory, a solid state drive would be better for a fellow who bikes to work, but 4 GB is so incredibly small and, while I’m not a speed queen, applications tend to run much slower. I’d dump XP and add the Ubuntu netbook remix. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be pretty good. Brad Linder, of WHYY fame, has a website devoted to netbooks…liliputing …(I think he was hoping that lilputer would stick, but that’s before the term "netbook" received its official blessing from Intel, sorry Brad).

Now, I know what my perfect mobile computing device is: a 7-10 inch tablet computer, something like the iPhone, but bigger with a detachable keyboard. Something that would make a great ebook reader, internet device and occasional typer-uponer. However,  I’m fairly skeptical Apple would ever build a device so amazing, despite the constant rumourmongering .

A netbook is a good substitute, mostly because they actually exist.

Of course, as soon as I buy a netbook, Apple will immediately release my dream device. No matter how good said device is, my sense of guilty practicality would forbid me from purchasing it, ensuring great despair. Therefore, all you Apple nuts — especially if you hate me — ought to get me a real good deal (heck, free) on a netbook, ASAP.

My thinking has always been that space is big, there’s room enough for everyone. So congrats to the Indians and the successful launch of their Chandrayaan-1 mission to the moon. Its not just bopping across the aether to the moon, but its taking along 12 separate scientific instruments (6 from foreign countries, including the US) in one neat 60 kg package.

As a side note, NASA hopes to use some of their findings when launching their Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter sometime next year.  They hope to give the LRO some good spots to look at with its radar in order to scout out some possible landing sites.

Chandrayaan, as the news reports love to tell you, is Yiddish Sanskrit for "Moon Craft," which causes me to ask why the ancient Sanskritians Indians had a word for moon craft. (Hmmm…ancient Indian moon craft, someone tell Richard Hoagland!) It also brings to mind one of my favorite 20th century scientists, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar , whose last name, wikipedia tells us, is a commen Tamil name that, in Sanskrit, means "Holder of the Moon." NASA’s Chandra X-Ray observatory was named in his honor, although the word Chandra, of course, means "moon. "

Here’s a link to a transcript interview of Chandrasekhar by the American Institute of Physics. It has the curious warning:

This transcript may not be quoted, reproduced or redistributed in whole or in part by any means except with the written permission of the American Institute of Physics.

Reproduced and redistributed, I can get, but I can’t quote this? At the great risk of personal and professional ramifications, I simply must.

Weart:

I see. What sort of feeling did people have in your home towards science? Your grandfather had been a professor of mathematics.

Chandrasekhar:

Well, there was always an atmosphere of science. You know, my father’s brother is the famous Indian physicist (Chandrasekhara Vankat ) Raman, who got the Nobel Prize.

Weart:

Oh, I didn’t know that.

So there. Bite me, AIP . (Of course, I’ll immediately drop to my knees and beg for forgiveness at the first sign of a cease and desist order.)

Oh wait, that’s C.V. Raman he’s talking about, a Nobelist and discoverer of the processed noodle Raman scattering , which describes how the frequency of light can scatter once it bounces off another object, depending on that object’s composition (I think, I’m a little hazy on the topic). I’d imagine that would be handing for things like, I dunno, analyzing the minerals on the surface of, say, the moon.

Whoa.

Here’s a web-friendly version of a grasshopper I got to know last weekend while planting some Japanese holly (nigra, if you need to know). I had to tire him out a bit, the poor guy, before he’d let me take his picture. He wasn’t hurt and made it home fine.

I love the Macro feature on my camera.

On Sunday, the family went to the Abington/Bryn Athyn portion of the Pennypack watershed , and I used some of the pics from the day as headers. (I’ve been meaning to switch the headers since the Spring, just never got around to it. )

Pennypack is nice, if you ever get a chance to go. On the Abington side, they’re replanting the meadows and, from the top of the hill, you’d easily forget you’re in the middle of suburban sprawliness.

We stumbled across two separate flocks of turkey, with about 8-9 birds in each flock.

We also found this nasty-looking gator. Some clever hiker has too much time on his hands.

While I’m in the skeptical mood, a nice post from Steve Novella of the New England Skeptical Societ y Harriet Hall:

“Alternative” medicine is by definition medicine that has not been scientifically proven and has not been accepted into mainstream scientific medicine. The question I keep hearing is, “But what about acupuncture? It’s been proven to work, it’s supported by lots of good research, more and more doctors are using it, and insurance companies even pay for it.”

It’s time the acupuncture myth was punctured – preferably with an acupuncture needle. Almost everything you’ve heard about acupuncture is wrong.

And he she goes on to say why. Worth reading.

UPDATE: Bad, lazy Greg. Sorry Harriet. In my defense, Science-Based Medicine looks so much like Steve’s NeuroLogica Blog, that I forgot where I was. Same colors and template. That’s what I get for trying to post a few bits while on the morning coffee break.

Another UPDATE: You can read more about (and from) Harriet Hall from her own site, SkepDoc.

…string up some garlic and plant some crosses on the front lawn, because she’s so much the swirling vortex of suck she’ll drain you dry.

Yes, Jenny McCarthy has gone from vacuous comic bimbo to vacuous spokesperson for a corrupt, potentially deadly pseudoscientific theory.

Stop Jenny McCarthy

Also, stop Sylvia Browne , while you’re at it.