"Who's the more foolish: The fool, or the fool who follows him?"

I am sure I'm not alone in being sick of Sarah Palin. I was sick of Palin when she was running for national office, and I really wish she would just go away. I imagined that quitting her day job, she would spend all her time hunting and fishing and patrolling the Russian border, and the thought made me happy. I now realize, on the other side of a media circus, that she may strike herself down, but it will only make her more powerful than you can possibly imagine.*

This Reuters article only made me more frustrated, and I have developed a proposal for your consideration, Nation.** Let's say I want to make a comment about someone's policy; maybe I want to "slam Obama's energy and environment plans." OK, what are my options? Well, I can write a blog post about it, I can bitterly whine about it to my friends, I can make a card-stock sign and parade around Capitol Hill, or I can dump a bunch of Tetley in the trash. Among the things I cannot do are call a press conference or schedule a TV interview. Why not? Because I'm just a regular citizen, and nobody cares what I think. And you know what? That's fine. It's better than fine: it's right and just and fair.

Now, granted, Mrs. Palin is still a state governor, so I suppose she does get to have her turn at the podium. For now. But once she steps down, can we please start ignoring her? A concerted effort would be nice. If she willingly gives up her public office, she doesn't merit regard in the public forum anymore. I know it's a fool's hope, because, if nothing else, Fox News will never stop smearing her pablum around the airwaves, but I really think we should have a Palin moratorium. No more caring what she says or thinks, no more caring about her abstinence-only soap operas. I don't want to hear a peep about Palin again.

The consequence of giving up responsibility is giving up privilege. Public regard should be earned by public service or on the merit of erudition in public matters. Now that Palin has given up on service, she is bereft of all qualifications for regard, and she should be paid no more heed than any other bloviating celebrity with ill-informed views.










*It pains me to compare her to Obi-Wan. It pains me even more that, upon googling the quote to make certain I had it right the first goddamn result is some right-wing blogger mourning Palin's resignation! Gah! Leave my Star Wars bloody well alone! This makes me feel better, though.

**The rest of it doesn't rhyme. Also, can I address the Nation, or is only Stephen Colbert allowed to do that?

Blame it on the DNA

Exactly what I was talking about yesterday:


[EDIT: And another one!]



Happy Friday!

Making duchesses of draggle-tailed guttersnipes

A scientific wager to be adjudicated by the Royal Society? Oh, smashing good fun, chaps!

In short, "Prof Wolpert bets that the following will happen. Dr Sheldrake bets it will not: By May 1, 2029, given the genome of a fertilized egg of an animal or plant, we will be able to predict in at least one case all the details of the organism that develops from it, including any abnormalities." [Boing Boing, via Detritus].

I'm afraid the good Dr. Wolpert is doomed to lose. The whole scenario reminds me of an essay titled "An Earnest Proposal" by Lewis Thomas (in his collection Lives of a Cell), in which he proposes that, tied to the big red buttons of the world's thermonuclear arsenal, we have program that prevents their launch until we've entered every single detail of the structure of a single microorganism: Mixotricha paradoxa, an intestinal bacterium living inside the guts of Australian termites. This at first seems like a ludicrously minimal safeguard against nuclear holocaust, but the essay goes on to explain that M. paradoxa is really rather more complicated than one might expect. Its flagella are fully-formed spirochetes themselves, its cytoplasmic organelles are bacteria with enzymes that break down cellulose, and its centrioles are yet a third kind of unique creatures. Thomas imagines that, at the end of a decade of superpowers racing to collect the required information and, presumably, angrily growling at each other all the while, some hapless government scientist will finally input everything they've learned, only to receive the message: "Request more data. How are spirochetes attached? Do not fire!"

It's a charming essay, featuring Thomas' typically brilliant prose, but why do I bring it up here? Only to say that life is infinitely more complex than we tend to realize. I imagine that when 2029 rolls around, and the fine port is aged to delicious perfection, Dr. Wolpert will triumphantly present his genomic databanks and his predictive algorithms based on amino acid sequences, and Dr. Sheldrake will only need to find a single aspect left unexplained to win the case of Quinto.

Now, I happen to agree with Sheldrake on principle, too. I think that an organism's genes are the central determinant of the majority of its features, but that there are too many environmental factors involved in growth and development to comfortably state that nucleic acids are the be all and the end all in determination. Granted, a simple enough organism bred under strict laboratory controls may fit Wolpert's criteria-- in which case, I hope he enjoys his rich beverage.

I worry, too, about the implications of developing a paradigm of genetic determinism, as biology guided by such principles has the potential to be misused in some spectacularly errant ways. Being able to "blame it on the genes" could be a rather dangerous proposition for human beings in particular, as would, I believe, any model that permits us to take less responsibility for our own condition and actions. Not to say that we should shy away from the answers to these questions, any more than we should be blaming Darwin for Social Darwinism (or Nazism, as some wingnuts take great delight in doing). But we must, as ever, proceed with prudent acknowledgment of the possible repercussions of scientific research.

From the Motherland

Two tidbits that caught my eye, both from the land of Muscovy, both meriting skepticism:



1. Back in the 1920s, a Russian scientist by the name of Sergei Brukhonenko managed to keep a dog's severed head alive by hooking it up to the autojector device (a sort of rudimentary heart-lung machine, but with a more bad-ass name). At some Meeting of the People's Distinguished Physiological Laborers in '28, Comrade Brukhonenko managed to get the head to respond to stimuli and fed it a piece of cheese, which apparently popped right out the back end of its truncated esophagus.

So... an adept of Abdul Alhazred? Latter-day Vaucanson? Something else entirely?



2. In today's Russia, what's a listless petro-mogul, bored ex-KGB mafioso, or washed-up Olympic athlete who's been fraudulently elected to the Duma supposed to do for fun? I mean, you can only gamble at Red Square's swanky Kазино SoL so much, and the hookers on Nevski Prospekt all start to look the same after a while.

Enter Pirate Hunting. Yep, that's right. For a modest fee ($5970 a day), any Йосеф шесть-водок can go cruising along the coastline of Somalia, trawling for pirates. When the buccaneers arrive, it's open season: "AK-47 rental on the pirate cruises is apparently just $5 per day, with 100 rounds costing $12 and just in case things get out of control, a squad of ex special forces troops is on hand."

Just... wow. Many believe this to be a hoax, but if it's true... I'm really lost for words. I guess it's worth remembering that General Zaroff was Russian.

Happy Birthday, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz!

In honor of his special day, do some calculus, science, philosophy, law, theology, philology... heck, do anything! After all, Leibniz could.

Or, just go out and purchase some Leibniz Butterkeks from your local retailer of fine foods, and check out a former blog of mine, The Leibniz Projekt, in which a colleague and I attempted to photograph every member of the the Princeton History of Science department eating said cookies.

Formic acid is thicker than water

"But it now appears that billions of Argentine ants around the world all actually belong to one single global mega-colony."

Whoa.