Drugs are how we get through meetings, though

While I’m off absorbing knowledge, entertain yourself with this video of drug-treated spiders. I’m going to be the one on caffeine, I think.

SICB update: last night was a social evening, and I got to meet John Lynch for the first time. In person, he’s actually exactly like he is on the blog: friendly and talkative, and he paid for my beer. Definitely an appeaser, in other words. Grrl Scientist was mysterious and prettier than the two of us put together (again just like her blog). Me? I was just surly and hateful, standing up every once in a while to deliver a ranty denunciation, just like the blog. They’d better agree with me, too—I get peevish with these people who always say I’m milder mannered in real life than they expect, and I might have to denounce them rantily, or have them put in a concentration camp and sterilized.

As for today, I can tell this is one of those meetings where there are long juicy sessions that suck me in for long periods of time. I’ll be parking my butt in room 103B for the symposium on “Linking Genes and Morphology in Vertebrates”, and I might not move all day, other than staggering out for coffee now and then.

The new geo-historical curriculum

We’ve got conflicting chronologies: a young earth history that is virtually all relatively recent human history, and a scientifically accurate one that encompasses 4.5 billion years of geological and biological change. How to reconcile them? Well, if we just divide everything in geology and biology by about a million and splice it together with modern history, we get this vastly entertaining timeline. Here’s a sample:

  • A.D. 1066: William the Conqueror invades England by walking through northern France.
  • A.D. 1215: Mega Fauna force King John to sign Magna Carta
  • A.D. 1304: Plate armor introduced ; Velociraptor hunted to extinction.
  • A.D. 1324 T.Rex becomes most popular Mongol Barbecue item after Golden Horde discovers gunpowder.
  • A.D. 1384: Dante describes Medieval Warm period in Inferno, his account of a field trip to the core-mantle boundary.
  • A.D. 1444: Flowering plants appear; War of the Roses commences.
  • A.D. 1484: Leonardo da Vinci designs Archaeopteryx.
  • A.D. 1492: Panama’s rise from sea thwarts Columbus’s discovery of Japan.
  • A.D. 1522: Sneak asteroid attack by Hernan Cortez smashes Aztec Empire

My namesake is also in it, and there are some interesting echoes in there.

  • A.D. 70: Paul, formerly Saul the Tarsier, develops opposable thumb and writes Epistle to the Cephalopods.

But of course! That’s the first thing he would do.

It all makes so much sense—and think of the money the schools could save by combining earth science and history into one class!

The Thorist’s Reply

Somebody warn Dawkins about his analogy!

Athorism is enjoying a certain vogue right now. Can there be a productive conversation between Valhallans and athorists?

Naïve literalists apart, sophisticated thoreologians long ago ceased believing in the material substance of Thor’s mighty hammer. But the spiritual essence of hammeriness remains a thunderingly enlightened relevation, and hammerological faith retains its special place in the eschatology of neo-Valhallism, while enjoying a productive conversation with the scientific theory of thunder in its non-overlapping magisterium.

Militant athorists are their own worst enemy. Ignorant of the finer points of thoreology, they really should desist from their strident and intolerant strawmandering, and treat Thor-faith with the uniquely protected respect it has always received in the past. In any case, they are doomed to failure. People need Thor, and nothing will ever remove him from the culture. What are you going to put in his place?

I’ve been tempted to use it myself, but it has great dangers, as you can find graphically illustrated on this page.

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At least the audience of commenters at Newsweek is split between cheering rationalists and bewildered Christians, with no axes in play yet. Now if he presented this idea in Kearny, on the other hand…

This one is for the bearded mo-bio types out there

The rest of you might be totally lost. Here’s a soon-to-be-classic paper on the characterization of the Hoho2 gene (292K pdf)—the Santa phenotype seems to represent an optimization for an arctic niche. They suggest the allele might have had an origin in Neandertal populations, but then they also show its effect in reindeer and E. coli (yes, they have beardy bacteria). It’s a very confused paper.

In this paper we unequivocally identify and characterize the genetic determinant of the famous white beard of Santa Claus to be the ortholog of human KRT6B. The newly discovered gene is named Hoho2 for Human ortholog for hair ougmentation 2. The Santa gene Hoho2 is synthesized and codon optimized for codon expression. Successful heterologous protein expression is shown in three separate systems; E. coli, reindeer, and human. We further show that the bearded phenotype is tissue specific in mammalians, but not in prokaryotes. A Hoho2 specific RNAi knockout was constructed and shown to specifically disrupt the facial beard phenotype. Trans-complementation of the gene could be achieved using a synthetic RNAi resistant variant, indicating that the phenotype is truly a direct consequence of the Hoho2 gene and not due to indirect or off-target-effects on the phenotypic display.

The profile photo of that Wilkins guy looks like he might be a carrier—I just know he’ll gag over Figure 4, though.

P.S. I’ve categorized this one as “Molecular biology” and “Humor”. Do you know how rarely those two come together?

P.P.S. Everyone who reads the paper is probably going to come back and tell me why they don’t go together very often.

Claes S, Reindeer R, Nicolas S, Tomte NE, Sridhar D, Elf J (2006) Heterologous expression and functional characterization of the Santa Hoho2 gene. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. Northpole 12:25-31.