The only issues that we seem to be having is a slightly constipated kitten and another cat who won't use his own damned litter box. It's a territory thing I think. That doesn't make it less annoying when we have to clean Chaucer's ginormous shits out of the tiny kitten-sized litter box. Oh, and the fact that for the last few days they wake us up in the wee hours of the morning. Most of the time it starts because Mal will get up to use the box and Chaucer will get up and scare him in the bathroom, which then becomes Mal chasing Chaucer and Chaucer turning around and chasing Mal around the house. This morning it was just Mal, who was enjoying racing up the bed, onto my night table, then back down the bed as fast as he could.
I've forgotten how fun and tiny kittens are. When we got Chaucer he was already almost 4 months old, so he was never teeny to us. Mal, according to the vet, was under the 10 weeks they told us he was at the shelter, and he's just a little 2.5lb ball of energy. He never walks. I mean, why walk when he can run, right? He jumps onto us, and onto the couch, and onto Chaucer's tail. He stands by your feet and begs you to pick him up, and when you do he snuggles up close to you like he never wants you to put him down again.
In non-cat-news, Eddie and I did the jump from 2g to 0g jewelry. Ouch. It's a hurty jump.
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An interesting twist: this poll is trying to skew the Catholic church's decision to withhold social services if Washington D.C. supports same sex marriage into a moral issue…with the church taking the high ground!
The D.C. Council is considering a law forbidding discrimination against those in gay marriages. The law would apply to all groups that have contracts with the District, including Catholic Charities, one of the city's largest social services providers. The Archdiocese of Washington says that because of the Church's opposition to same-sex marriage, it would have to suspend its social services to the poor, the homeless and others rather than provide employee benefits to same-sex married couples or allow them to adopt.
Should the city require the Church to follow a law it considers immoral?
Yes 18%
No 82%
Why should what the church considers immoral to be a relevant factor? I could consider the wearing of pants to be immoral, or even better, going to church to be immoral…but it doesn't make it so.
Read the comments on this post...| Etsy: Your place to buy & sell all things handmade medvssa.etsy.com |
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Neighborhood Watch Kitteh sees someone jacking your car but doesn’t really care
Picture by: dunno source Caption by: bab0406 via Advanced Lol Builder
My little laptop is functional again, so at least I'll be able to blog these Sunday morning IGERT sessions in real-time. I still have to transcribe my notes from yesterday; I'll plan on getting that done on the plane this afternoon.
Kristi Montooth: Mitochondrial-nuclear epistasis for metabolic fitness in flies
How do physiological systems evolve to maintain metabolic fitness? This is a process that involves interactions between two genomes, the nuclear and mitochondrial. Energy metabolism is important and is the target of mutation, but the same players are found all across the tree of life, suggesting that there is also strong selective pressure to maintain a common system.
Montooth is looking at inducible gene expression: is there an energetic cost to switch genes off and on? She's using respirometers that can measure the metabolic rate of single flies or larva. Flies are subjected to heat shock, which switches on HSP70. Flies normally have 6 copies of HSP70; they have mutants with 12, and they show a much greater rise in metabolic rate in response to heat shock.
Mitochondria are the source of the energy for this response. Mitochondria also have a high mutation rate and show strong linkage (no sexual recombination to cover for errors that arise). She's arguing for selection for compensatory evolution in the nuclear genome, and the accumulation of intergenomic epistasis. To dissect the effects of coevolution of mitochondria and nuclear genomes, she transplanted mitochondria from different species into Drosophila melanogaster. These have between 18 and 100 amino acid substitutions from the Dmel sequence.
She plots mitochondrial genome in order of increasing divergence against measured fitness (she used a competition assay that she did not describe in detail). There is no correlation seen at all. Also, high fitness X/mtDNA genotypes in one sex can be low fitness genotypes in the other sex. Interactions between the X and mtDNA can maintain variation in both genomes. All of the fitness effects, with one exception, are subtle.
Some of the transgenomic effects have very strong effects on female fecundity, developmental rates, and locomotion. But adult metabolic rate shows no difference! The idea is that there are lots of homeostatic mechanisms that maintain metabolism very tightly, which then have secondary effects.
Johanna Schmitt: Adaptive evolution of Arabidopsis flowering pathways in different climates
Schmitt does ecological development, looking at the timing of plant development in different environments. How does phenology respond and adapt to climate variation? We expect evolution to adapt to variation in seasonal timing. The signaling pathways in Arabidopsis are well known; they respond to hormones, photoperiod, and ambient temperature by way of a fairly complicated set of pathways she showed us in a slide...sorry, no way I can reproduce it here!
Across its range, it shows a great deal of life history variation; one pattern in the Mediterranean, another in colder northern climes, and yet another in Northern Scandinavia, varying in how much time they spend in vegetative rosettes vs. bolting and flower production. Questions: are there are genetic variants associated with different life history patterns, can they identify the genes, and can they perturb them?
The experiments involved massive plantings in different sites in Europe with different climates, with different mutants. Is natural variation in candidate genes involved in variation in flowering time? They studied FRIGIDA, a gene that effects the vernalization pathway. When you lose FRIGIDA, you should see much more rapid flowering. Loss of function in this gene has evolved multiple times in northwestern Europe. The effect depends on the timing of planting and climate.
The effect of the mutant varies across geography, and they have a photothermal model of flowering time. The plants are tracking light and temperature, and the different mutants are counting up these inputs in slightly different ways. They can use this model to make predictions on the effects of FRIGIDA on flowering time with changes in germination timing, and then test these in the next year with plantings at different times and in their different geographical sites, and the model is working accurately.
They are also plugging in predicted future climate change from NOAA, and asking what we can expect to see 100 years from now; she showed maps of expected flowering times in 2100. They are also making predictions of the expected distributions of FRIGIDA alleles over time, and they hope to do the same for many other alleles in Arabidopsis.
Artyom Kopp: How the fly got its sexy legs - the origin and evolution of Drosophila sex combs
The sex comb is a male specific structure on the front legs which most Drosophila species lack -- it's a fairly recent innovation. How do you evolve a novel structure?
It's limited to the melanogaster and obscura species groups, with quite a bit of diversity in different species, varying from 2-50 teeth, location, and arrangement. How do you go from sexually monomorphic state of a generically hairy leg to one with a specific bristle arrangement in males? The sex comb in males is homologous to a subset of bristles also found in females; in males, that patch of epidermis rotates 90° and the bristles enlarge. He showed a very pretty developmental series of this epithelium undergoing cell shape changes that move the bristles to a new location. Other species show similar morphological remodeling, but sometimes with some significant differences: D. kikkawai doesn't do the rotation, but instead the bristle precursors arise in their final position. These modes do not cluster together phylogenetically, so these are examples of convergent evolution, generating similar structures with different mechanisms.
They are taking apart the genetics and regulatory inputs of sex comb development. Basically, it involves just about everything. It seems to arise by an interaction between Hox and sex determination genes. Spatial modulation of Sex combs reduced controls sex comb position. Scr in pupa; stages is only expressed in a limited domain in the leg, and ectopic expression of Scr produces multiple sex combs. Expression is also sexually dimorphic, with no upregulation of Scr in female legs. In D. ficusphila, which has enormous sex combs, Scr levels are elevated yet further to 7 times the levels found in D. willistoni.
The sex determination gene Double sex is also spatially patterned, and is refined and elevated to high levels in the area around the developing sex combs. Ectopic expression of Dsx induces ectopic sex combs.
How can a new developmental pathway evolve? In the ancestral condition, Scr is controlled by spatial cues to produce segmental patterns of bristles; in the sex-comb carrying species, Scr is coupled to Dsx. This explains the spatial pattern of gene expression, but it also needs to acquire new downstream targets to, for instance, regulate epidermal rotations.
Drosophila are old, and many of these species differences are millions of years old. They are now looking at more recently diverged species with differences in sex comb morphology, and are looking for correlations between Scr and species divergence.
And with that, I have to run for the airport shuttle. Good talks, and I unfortunately have to miss Rudy Raff's wrap-up of the meeting.
I found it stuck to the fuel card in a Streetcar. My personal guess is that it rips data off your other credit cards if you're foolish enough to put it in your wallet with your other cards.
Anyone else got any idea?
Just recently, Stephen Fry achieved the landmark of one million followers on twitter (I have less than 1% of that). Apparently, that's the threshold for achieving a personal singularity.
Read the comments on this post...One day, I decided I liked onions.
One day, I stared at depression, and said "no".
One day, I stopped being ashamed of myself.
One day, I put an orange shirt on and thought, "you know, that's not bad."
One day, I stopped having anything to say about who I am, and everything to say about what I do.
Who am I? Who really cares?
I know what I am, and it's not as solid as I thought when I first went searching. And so the search lost something.
However, I do keep finding myself in the same place, screaming, at the top of my lungs, to an empty auditorium. That's what I do. That's what I'm good at. And that's what I'll keep doing.
Ehem.
Speaking of which, here's a lovely faq from the Democratic Socialists of America (to avoid confusion, I identify as an anarchist, however anarchists ARE socialists). (And yes, really, I wish everyone I know would see my point so I can shut up about this.):
Democratic socialists believe that both the economy and society should be run democratically—to meet public needs, not to make profits for a few. To achieve a more just society, many structures of our government and economy must be radically transformed through greater economic and social democracy so that ordinary Americans can participate in the many decisions that affect our lives.
Q Doesn't socialism mean that the government will own and run everything?
Democratic socialists do not want to create an all-powerful government bureaucracy. But we do not want big corporate bureaucracies to control our society either. Rather, we believe that social and economic decisions should be made by those whom they most affect. Today, corporate executives who answer only to themselves and a few wealthy stockholders make basic economic decisions affecting millions of people. Resources are used to make money for capitalists rather than to meet human needs. We believe that the workers and consumers who are affected by economic institutions should own and control them.
Social ownership could take many forms, such as worker-owned cooperatives or publicly owned enterprises managed by workers and consumer representatives. Democratic socialists favor as much decentralization as possible. While the large concentrations of capital in industries such as energy and steel may necessitate some form of state ownership, many consumer-goods industries might be best run as cooperatives. Democratic socialists have long rejected the belief that the whole economy should be centrally planned. While we believe that democratic planning can shape major social investments like mass transit, housing, and energy, market mechanisms are needed to determine the demand for many consumer goods.
Q Hasn't socialism been discredited by the collapse of Communism in the USSR and Eastern Europe?
Socialists have been among the harshest critics of authoritarian Communist states. Just because their bureaucratic elites called them “socialist” did not make it so; they also called their regimes “democratic.” Democratic socialists always opposed the ruling party-states of those societies, just as we oppose the ruling classes of capitalist societies. We applaud the democratic revolutions that have transformed the former Communist bloc. However, the improvement of people’s lives requires real democracy without ethnic rivalries and/or new forms of authoritarianism. Democratic socialists will continue to play a key role in that struggle throughout the world.
Q Won't socialism be impractical because people will lose their incentive to work?
We don’t agree with the capitalist assumption that starvation or greed are the only reasons people work. People enjoy their work if it is meaningful and enhances their lives. They work out of a sense of responsibility to their community and society. Although a long-term goal of socialism is to eliminate all but the most enjoyable kinds of labor, we recognize that unappealing jobs will long remain. These tasks would be spread among as many people as possible rather than distributed on the basis of class, race, ethnicity, or gender, as they are under capitalism. And this undesirable work should be among the best, not the least, rewarded work within the economy. For now, the burden should be placed on the employer to make work desirable by raising wages, offering benefits and improving the work environment. In short, we believe that a combination of social, economic, and moral incentives will motivate people to work.
Q If so many people misunderstand socialism, why continue to use the word?
First, we call ourselves socialists because we are proud of what we are. Second, no matter what we call ourselves, conservatives will use it against us. Anti-socialism has been repeatedly used to attack reforms thatshift power to working class people and away from corporate capital. In 1993, national health insurance was attacked as “socialized medicine” and defeated. Liberals are routinely denounced as socialists in order to discredit reform. Until we face, and beat, the stigma attached to the “S word,” politics in America will continue to be stifled and our options limited. We also call ourselves socialists because we are proud of the traditions upon which we are based, of the heritage of the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas, and of other struggles for change that have made America more democratic and just. Finally, we call ourselves socialists to remind everyone that we have a vision of a better world.
There is more here
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