The Scientist's View

10.26.2007

Beef - This is what's for dinner

I posted a separate furry Friday beef below for Jimbo - for those of you who like your beef sans fur I give you some tender morsels.



Yeah....





Hell yeah!






This is what Hot Mama is looking for...










And strangest looking box I have seen in awhile....

Friday beef - All Ben Cohen





Nice satellite image


There is a very interesting pattern in the ConUS at the moment. I have attached an enhanced satellite image which shows the cloud formations across the middle third of the continent.

First of all you will note the technicolor popcorn piled up over the Southeast. This is a classic Fall cold front that is producing much needed rain from Florida up into the Northeast. While the back edge of the moisture is not a perfectly sharp line, the edge between the dry air west of the applachains and the moist air to the east is evident. This whole mess will be moving north during the weekend to make a damp and breezy weekend in New England - if the leaves aren't off the trees yet - they will be by Monday.

A more unusual feature rests over Memphis. This is a closed-off low pressure that has made for a raw few days in the Mississippi Valley. At one point it was associated with the messier weather on the East Coast, but they have technically separated from each other. This closed off low has been spinning for days and drifting west and north slowly as the associated weather on its east side has drifted east on its own. It has little significant precipitation associated with the closed low - just showers and low clouds. The closed lwo will actually move north today and bring fog and drizzle to the Upper Midwest (including the DSM which has had SPECTACULAR fall weather this week).

Neither of these low pressures (the east coast mess or the closed off low in the Mississippi Valley) are in any hurry to go anywhere east or west. This is a bit unusual for Fall because most weather tends to move briskly along a west to east axis.

This is likely part of the La Nina effect setting up in the Pacific. This phenomenon brings cooler waters to the eastern Pacific which leads to a shifting in the jet stream across the ConUS. La Nina tends to shift the brunt of the moisture hitting the Pacific Coast northward and tends to make for warmer and dryer conditions across much of the US in the winter. You can definitely see a nice streak of moisture across the Pacific Northwest which is a powerful jet stream bring moisture across Oregon and into Montana and up into Canada. This shunting of the jet well to the north leaves much of the rest of the country without a driver to move the weather.

The pattern does not appear to shift dramatically in the near future...the trend is for the two lows to move gradually north and east leaving the rest of the country relatively dry and warm. Some arctic air may slip into the Great Lakes and Northeast in the early period of next week which will create the first lake effect snows of the season - particularly in the Upper Peninsula of MI and around Erie PA.

I don't mind the stagnant pattern one bit - we will have highs in the mid to upper 60s in the DSM this weekend and bright blue skies.

Maybe I can find a lawnmower to replace the one that mysteriously disappeared from our garage. Everything else is in place but I went to mow the lawn on Sunday and the mower was gone. Oh well....I just watched football the rest of the day!!!

10.21.2007

Sunday Fun







Uh-oh

Well I am in the doghouse. Looks like I have developed an allergy to wine (which is bad news for those of you who know me) - by process of elimination (and Bubba thinks that I have no commmon sense) I have deduced that my evening congestion and morning sniffles are not due to the dog or the cat or the house or anything else. It would appear that it is wine - and red wine in particular. The conclusive proof arrived last night as I had a few glasses of Sangiovese Rose (horrible horrible horrible) which is not techincally red wine but it does possess more tannins than white and less than red.

So I was blogging and sipping and after a glass, I started to sneeze. Now I have not sneezed/wheezed in the evening (or morning) for some time. The last time it was noticeable was when my parents were here and we drank alot of red wine. So it got worse as the evening went along - and now I know. I am probably allergic to the tannins....some people get headaches, other intestinal drama, and I sound like I am getting the flu.

Well you can imagine that I do not make a good bed partner in this condition...Bubba was kept up by me much of the night and is not pleased with me today. Looks like my red wine days are numbered!

Bubba is currently at the Des Moines Marathon....he is going to watch the elite runners. I am still sneezing and wheezing and trying to get enough energy together to get to work for a few hours.

I am flitting about the net this a.m. trying to figure out when it begins to snow in Iowa. Some say Halloween can be white and others say that it is usually around Veteran's Day - definitely by Thanksgiving. The web was of no use in this regard....where are all the weather queens when I need them???

So I decided to look at more smutty blogs and found this funny comic from some porn-centric blog on Jimbo's blogroll.



I also happened to find a snappy blog with a great name: Faggoty-Ass Faggot. Give it a read.

Let's hope that I get out of the doghouse soon - its starting to get cold and I need my evening snuggles.

10.20.2007

Larry Summer vs. Jim Watson

Jim Watson and Larry Summers. Or, how I learned to hate radical academic activism because it is a crock of shit with no spine.

Both have waded into areas of pop culture that ought to be verboten to anyone who is trying to convey a complex idea to gotcha journalists - who tend to be not terribly smart, as a rule, and their focus is not to educate or inform, rather to create soap opera level drama to sell some newspapers.

I thought that Larry Summer's scalp was won only for the advancement of the very silly ideas that men and women ought to be identical. Feminists of the more radical ilk are prone to assert that women can do anything a man can. If that were all they would state, I would be all for their activism and agree whole-heartedly with them. Their overt statements of capability would be noble and pure and beyond disagreement. However, they use the guise of equal capability to project the idea that "equality" (note they are using a sleight of hand to switch capability with equality) is only achieved by mathematical representations of 50% men and 50% women. Until that measure is met - there is some sort of discrimination at work and you can fill in the blank as to who or what causes that sort of inequality. In academics, this "proof" of inequality is borne out by more men than women faculty in a department.

The reasons for disproportions in the gender representations at the faculty level are varied and complex. But I have yet to find anyone in my generation to say that capability has anything to do with the matter. Larry's point (which should not have been gender specific) was that women often have not achieved parity in percentage of representation in most academic departments because they may be confronting a complex stew of issues that includes their gender, societal norms, and personal value structure. He clearly stated that it is unfortunate that faculty people must work 80 hours a week to be successful and is there a way to develop a work-life balance where women who want to have children and be a responsible and available parent could (and should) also be successful in the academic world.

When men talk about women and their "tendencies" towards being responsible adults in terms of child-rearing as causes for disparities in gender representation in academics- the feminists turn red and start frothing. Larry's intention was right on the mark (aside from the gender specificity) - people (not only women) should be able to do good science and be good parents (or, by extension, have outside interests that they can pursue if it is not children). But his mistake was talking about women in particular. So the feminists went to town on him with every incendiary tactic they could devise. Capability (which Larry never talked about) was brought to the fore. The radical feminists and their minions never did address the 80 hour a week problem that Larry was trying to address - and that was startling in its omission in my humble opinion. The workload is the real problem here at a human level - not a gender level. No, these feminists chose to spin the argument that Larry was making the sin of talking about how women who fall away from academics because they are also wanting to raise a family and be a good parent. And I will be the first to assert that many men also fall away for the same reasons.

In an interesting aside, there are a number of areas where women and men have achieved proportional parity in academic departments. Some examples:

If one goes into any engineering school of any reputation, one will see that women are under-represented in some areas and equally represented in other areas. One clear example might be to compare electrical and chemical engineering. I graduated from NC State in Chem E. NCSU is a top ten school in Chem E. In all of my Chem E specific classes, including Thermodynamics I and II, Transport, Control, and the intro sets of 200 level classes, women and men were roughly in equal proportion. This is interesting given that NCSU has more men than women overall, and that Engineering is not supposed to attract women. But the fact remains that there were still 40-50% women in these classes. One of those women, my lab and study partner for 3 years, would regularly get a 100% on her tests - a true curve buster. But if you wandered across the street and went into the Electrical Engineering (double E), there were very few women.

Another great example: When I was at UVA as a grad student in Biomedical Engineering - women everywhere. Not only were they there, but they were publishing at an astonishing rate.

Another great example is veterinary medicine - Davis now has 70% women in any given class which is a complete change in demographics from 30 years ago when there were very few.

I'll bring up another example in biology - go to the Plant Biology dept at Davis (where I got my PhD) which is among the best in the world and you will find equal numbers of men and women - both genders succeeding using all measures.

This diversion is only to point out that there really is no bias in academics against women, per se, rather it is that women (in my opinion) who are pursuing an academic position may be focused in certain areas. Why that is - I haven't a clue. But I firmly believe that it has nothing to do with institutional bias and everything to do with a very complex mixture of choices that women confront that is probably not even on the radar screen of men. And this supports my hypothesis that women and men are equally capable in the diverse areas of science but probably are not comparable in how they approach their career choices.

A feminist would be quick to say that this disparity is because some gender-biased societal structure dissuades women in subtle ways from the sciences. But I would point to those getting a Chemical Engineering degree (widely held as among the hardest of degrees to obtain) and that, in my experience, this approaches a 50-50 split. Same goes for Plant Biology or Pediatrics or Psychology. None of those are a cake walk but all have tons of women who are top in their respective fields and equally represented in academic and working circles. But if you compared those three choices with Plant Breeding, Orthopedics or Neuroscience - these later three scientific fields (which are similar in their respective area but different in focus) are lacking in proportional representation of women.

My examples are specific to scientific areas and only to show that, maybe just maybe, women might be more selective in their interests in the sciences. Conversely, it may be that societal norms are at play here and many capable women are steered away from certain areas of academics by more sinister forces. As you could probably predict from the previous paragraph, I favor the former idea and frown upon the later.

So moving on from the diversion and Larry Summers, we now have to confront the more troubling character of the two. Jim Watson.

Here is an excerpt from CNN:

The controvery began with an October 14 interview Watson gave to the Sunday Times, which quoted him saying he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says not really."

Watson also asserted there was no reason to believe different races separated by geography should have evolved identically, and he said that while he hoped everyone was equal, "people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true."


Now first of all, it is hard to find the statement by Watson in its entirety on the web. That alone tells you that the journalists, whose job is to inform, are more intent on making sure they have distilled the issue to its "key" points (remember its all a soap opera to sell papers).

But Jim Watson should have known that the old days of his ability to make cynical remarks which draw, at most, an eye roll are long gone. The new world of instant scorn via the web are at hand. Particularly when making a really really really dumb set of statements.

His apparent intention was to discuss how evolution affects intelligence as, purely, a genetic trait. His idea was that geographical isolation allows for localized adaptation and that, by his estimation, intelligence, absurdly defined as a purely genetic trait, would be unequally distributed among these discrete populations. I have a number of problems with this. But I shan't build a house of cards just to knock it down. Let's just get to the heart of the matter - intelligence is a trait that has a very strong environmental component and the genetics of it are just one factor. Anyone who is gay will understand the fundamentals of this (i.e. the genetics of same sex attaction, much like intelligence, is present in every population but its ability to be observed is highly dependent upon the environmental factors that are at play.....more simply put, gayness and intelligence are never purged from a population but they can be masked or promoted using all kinds of societal devices).

A proof that intelligence is subject to environmental whims would be that there may be a fetus with all kinds of genetically favorable alleles that would confer high intelligence, but, if said fetus was residing in a mother who smoked crack all through the pregnancy, does any geneticist think that the posited "purely" genetic trait of intelligence would overcome a hostile environment? Another example might be if a very gifted child is raised in a family where he/she was fed a continuous diet of crap food and no books might become the next Einstein? Environment most likely trumps genetics again. We can play these hypothetical games all day and night and we will still get the same result - the phenotype (observed trait) for intelligence will always have a genetic as well as a environmental component.

Watson's first problem was asserting that intelligence is a genetic trait that has no environmental influence. Am I to believe that a Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry (geneticists is usually lumped into either this category or in Medicine) who has spent his whole life in genetics and molecular biology can wantonly ignore the environment as a major component in complex traits, including intelligence? He argues that geographic isolation is the factor that matters. I would argue that the horrors of colonialism and subsequent despotism has made the African continent such a mess where few can get adequate nutrition, much less an education, would preclude a meaningful comparison of intelligence between a rich and educated Westerner and a poor and starving Ethiopian. Jim's point was that "testing" supposedly proves his hypothesis. Testing of what? You actually expect me to compare a population, using a written test, of people who have enforced education (incidentally along with high rates of adequate nutrition, vaccination, preventative care, etc) against a population of people who have to deal with famine and totalitarianism daily?

As if this sin were not bad enough, he then rubs salt into the wound by asserting that African Americans are collateral evidence. Ouch. If the victimization specialists, namely, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, were ever needed to expose a legitimate institutional bias, they have been handed enough hate to work with for the next few years. Mike Nifong is small potatoes compared with Jim Watson.

Here you have a person who has used Federal funds for most of his career to advance his scientific interests and he is now spouting this non-sense rhetoric during the late autumn of his illustrious career in genetics and molecular biology - and on a book publicity tour no less. Jim is now on forced leave while the board at Cold Spring Harbor Labs (CSHL) decides his fate. What decision needs to be made? We have a preeminent geneticist who cannot put together a logical thought about how environment affects a complex trait, namely, intelligence. Said geneticist then layers on pure racial bias as "proof" of his argument. The Federal Government ought to halt all monies to CSHL immediately and continue this spending freeze until Jim Watson has been stripped from any project using Federal funds that he is even remotely associated with. This move would be good politics and better ethics. To allow someone of his stature, and I would argue coddling, to spew a fundamental flaw in basic genetics and then use racist tenets to support his flawed argument is beyond the pale - particularly when his institute operates disproportionately on Federal funds paid for by you and me.


If Barak Obama were sharp, as I think he is, he could use this as a very useful opportunity to frame a discussion about how the second largest class of entitlement benefactors of Federal dollars in America (namely, academics - the first being the military) should have their speech regulated. I refuse to accept that anyone on the Federal dole should be allowed to spout hate (and use the language of science as the method of pontification) to continue to receive funding.

And where is the outrage against Jim Watson from all the feminists who so quickly excoriated Larry Summers? Where are they? What are they doing? Probably still scratching their heads about how geographic isolation drives the evolution of traits. If they are so "informed" about gender neutrality of complex traits, shouldn't they be burning someone's bra over this? Racial bias and gender bias have the same origin. As a gay man, I would posit that homophobia could be included right along with the two previously stated forms of bias.

Larry's sin was to forward a nuanced discussion about developing a work-life balance that would allow women (and, as he failed to mention overtly, men) to succeed in academics. Jim Watson, on the other hand, projects a flawed hypothesis about the evolution of intelligence in genetic terms while ignoring the environmental factors and uses racist tenets as his support.

It is a sad day for academics. And a sadder day for radical activism. Jim thought that he could couch the discussion in genetics and get away with it....and he really has if we don't see a meaningful response from the academic zealots. For if they don't see the very real advancement of hate and racial bias that has been presented, then their PhDs are useless.

10.16.2007

Tasting notes

The parents were in town this past weekend. Dad likes wine while Mom has never been a big fan. But suddenly Mom has become a Pinot Noir drinker - she had a knee replacement recently and a subtle dry wine settles the pain at the end of the day without upsetting her stomach.

While I shy away from American Pinot Noir - it is always a crap shoot - I REALLY shy away from California Pinot for it tends to be thin and harsh on my palette. Additionally, the price point is too high for me to continue to wager on one disappointment after another. And why bother when generic Sonoma Zin offers such a burst of the best of CA wines???

However, Dad and I stopped by a wine shop on the way back from my workplace on Friday and picked up two bottles of wine, one being a Pinot Noir from CA and the other a Riesling from the Finger Lakes. The Pinot was truly superb - and a bargain at 15 bucks.

Tasting notes:

2005 Angeline Pinot Noir from Russian River Valley




Wine was clear and bright - a diluted burgundy hue.

Bouquet has a sharp alcohol component mixed with generic berry - I suspected the worst at this point.

Taste: Sharp notes of smoke and cherry that was front and center - the wine snapped your tongue to attention without being harsh. Strong alcohol component worked nicely with the smoke and cherry notes and filled the mouth with a warm body - it filled the mouth without coating it. Finish was dramatic in how quick the strong notes left and the subtle note of oak lingered on. Tasteful use of oak at this price point (particularly with Pinot) is rare indeed. Very easy to drink - this is not silky but the wine is very, very smooth.

Would pair perfectly with herbed pork or a tangy grilled chicken.

Quick summary: Cabernet Sav Lite - all the best that a Cab Sav varietal has to offer in a breezy, light package. A perfect wine when having company over. Pinot this integrated, at this price point, and from CA is a rare trifecta.



2006 Dr Konstantin Frank Semi Dry Riesling




Color was a clear strawish with a hint of light green

Bouquet was light in acid and green notes, it gently wafted up the nose

Taste: Very soft and even across the palette - the light notes of muscat and berry were delicate and nuanced but definitely not wimpy. The wine had a warmth that lingered long and a sweetish finish of granny smith apples. This is not a crisp wine. Thankfully, the acid lingers in the background to give some tension. A wine that lures you back for another taste so you can put your finger on what it is that is so good. Dad couldn't get enough of it.

Paring would definitely be with a milder cheese or quiche and could stand up to a grilled scallop nicely. Too delicate and ephemeral for substantial food, but perfect for a brunch with fag food on a warm Sunday morning.

Summary: Where Granny Smith meets Gala

Back in the Saddle again....

Lord...things have been busy.
I have been on a travel binge of late. Part of my promise to myself, upon coming to Iowa, was to get into a more normal lifestyle. And for me, travel is an important component of living a full life.

I was back from Rehomo just long enough to get some work done before I had to jet back out to the East for a trip to the Finger Lakes. Hot Mama's neck of the woods.

I visited some friends there who live in Ithaca and they were wonderful hosts. Lots of dinners and drinks. We did a wonderful wine tour along the west shore of Lake Keuka - purported to be the prettiest of the Finger Lakes.


While I would not venture an opinion on that given this was my first trip to the area, it was definitely a pretty day and a wonderful time was had by all. We had a nice trip to Bully Hill Vineyards....the dry Riesling was enchanting. Then up to Dr. Konstantin Frank for some really outstanding wines....Riesling was phenomenal. The tasting room was simplicity and very relaxed. Small groups did tastings over the course of 20-30 minutes and there was no rush. A view from the deck of the vineyard.

I fell in love with Finger Lake Riesling right then and there. Then down the way to Heron Hill which was much more of a rush and much less enjoyable....but damn if they did not have a fantastic Johannisberg Rielsing.

We toured the campus of Cornell, saw waterfalls, had a nice drive through the countryside and did some leaf peeping...although the leaves were still in the early stages of changing.

All in all, a fantastic way to spend 3 short days. Upon my return, my parents came for a visit a few days later and spent the weekend. We had a nice visit and ate very well. They seemed to enjoy their time in Des Moines.

This week is all about getting back into the swing of things. I had two papers accepted in the past week which was a relief. These two outstanding manuscripts were my last clear link to my academic life. Having them accepted led me to feel that I am bringing things to completion and that, finally, I could move on to focus on other areas of my life.

Bubba is enjoying his new job....his new boss is a golf fanatic. Bubba has already been golfing twice with the new boss. I think that this is good for Bubba's professional development to golf with the work crowd and it is good for him to get back into a normal rhythm of life.

So it appears that Fall is going to bring us back to a very normal lifestyle of work all week and relaxing weekends of watching football and doing house stuff. I could use some predictability!

Hot Mama will be moving to Des Moines in a few short weeks....she is rather excited about starting a new position and, probably more exciting, emerging from the academic mire. I look forward to talking with her about this major transition that we both have made. It should make for some interesting blog entries!

Linus continues to thrive in Iowa - he is just happy as can be chasing rabbits and protecting us from chipmunks. He's become so butch!

I should be providing more regular entries for the foreseeable future and there is alot to explore!