Halloween is for scary stories

Salon has a small collection of tiny horror stories for Halloween. The only rule is that they can only be two sentences long: so you can go for Hemingwayesque brevity or a Joycean ramble, but you’re only allotted two periods.

So I wrote one. They’re easy!

Christmastime

We had lost electricity, gas, and supplies months ago, so no sound disturbed the gentle hiss as the flakes fell, no movement marred the scene, and our houses in this sleepy little town all looked like picturesque Kinkade cottages pillowed with untrammeled snow, except that there was no curl of smoke from our chimneys, nor any ruddy glow behind the windows. Behind those dark windows rimed with ice, we all stared admiringly with hollow eyes in gaunt faces at our neighbors’ lovely homes, and with cold-numbed fingers we loaded shotguns and sharpened axes, and we thought simple, homely thoughts of wood, and fire, and warmth, and…barbecue.

Now, it’s your turn. Leave a two-sentence horror story in the comments. I’ve got a morning of teaching ahead of me, but when I get some time around noon, I’ll promote the best of them up top.

Ooh, I thought of another one!

Evanescence

Scientists had mastered immortality, but there was no way around the limitations of the human mind. By the end of the century, the world was ruled by ancient old men who had shed their oldest memories, and lacked even the faintest recollection of their mothers, their childhoods, their first kiss…

So many stories…here’s a short subjective sampling from the comments.

From texasskeptic:

Alicia was already bored, “you don’t have an PlayStation or anything?” she asked.
“I know a game we can play,” Danny said, running to his dad’s nightstand, “You can be the robber!”

From Crip Dyke:

His unfamiliar hands put down knife and fork with a bright clink that pierced me painfully even though my migraine had largely subsided, and then my date etched in my memory his admission, “Yes I’m that John Loftus, but you shouldn’t let what you’ve read concern you: I’ve learned so much lately. Have you heard of the Men’s Human Rights Movement?”

From Jonathan, der Ewige Noobe:

We stared up at it, watching the teeth dig in, the dark mass spread, rootlike, over its meal, and for a moment we imagined that we might be able to stop it.

Then someone (I can’t remember who) realized that, given the speed of light, this had happened eight and a half minutes ago.

From Rey Fox:

There are no jobs. Next, climate change.

From UnknownEric the Apostate:

Jack the MRAtheist was sitting in his hotel room, writing short misogynist screeds on Twitter, when there was a knock at the door. A voice on the other side said, “Hi, It’s Rebecca Watson.”

From dianne:

I knew it was over before I even got to the hospital: the pain was terrible and the bleeding worse, my fever was 103 but the contractions weren’t coming. The nurse came into the room beaming and said, “Great news: there’s still a heartbeat and we will treat you both with love!”

From ledasmom:

I rolled over in my husband’s arms to kiss him. I put my hand up to cradle his head and against my fingers felt the back of his face.

From miserlyoldman:

As I sit finishing reading some alarmist tripe about how a fungus like Ophiocordyceps unilateralis was in a position to turn zoonotic, driving people into open fields for spore release and some other miserable dreck that would never have the standing to be published any place respectable, I mourned the rise of clickbait journalism. I need to get away from this electronic glow for a bit, enjoy the beautiful crisp autumn air, feel a little nip in the wind in a place where I can cloudgaze for a while; it’s been forever since I’ve visited the park…

From stillacrazycanuck:

Looking down on her decaying corpse, the rotting flesh already falling from her bones, maggots crawling within her mouth and her eyes bulging from their sockets, I gave thanks that at least her pain was no more. Then she blinked.

From strangerinastrangeland:

The wiggeling mass of tentacles handed over the large bundle of dollar bills to the little boy and they shook hands – or better hand and slimy appendix of the netherworld – on their deal before it disappeared again into the darkness under the boy’s bed.

“Daddy, Daddy, there is a monster under my bed, you have to come and look and help me”, cried the boy, with a little smile on his face while counting his bounty.

Teaching is so easy, anyone can do it!

This guy, Anthony Seldon, works at a teaching school, and he has just politely dissed teachers everywhere on the pages of the Guardian.

Schoolteaching is a profession, but it’s not like becoming a doctor or a vet. No one would want to be operated on by an amateur who hadn’t had years of experience. The prospect of going to the dentist and being confronted by somebody with a lifelong passion for teeth but no university background or training would alarm all but the most steely. For that reason, there is no Teeth First, though we do have Teach First, albeit with intensive training.

Nick Clegg and others who argue that teachers must first be qualified are fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of the profession. The teacher’s role is much more akin to that of a parent. It is a great loss that governments worldwide have made teaching much less like being a parent than an impersonal civil servant. No job is more important than parenting, yet no one is suggesting parents go off for a university course to qualify as a parent. Parents pick it up as they go along, and that’s exactly the way great teachers are forged.

May I be the first to suggest, then, that maybe parents would be better for it if they actually had to prepare for the responsibilities? There are an awful lot of terrible, horrible parents out there who end up abusing children by neglect or intent.

But no, I’m a teacher, and it’s nothing like being a parent. (I’m one of those, too, so I do have rather solid grounds for a comparison.) Maybe preschoolers need a more parental nurturer, but everything beyond that…teachers are bearers of knowledge that they must communicate to their students — their diverse students who may be hostile, apathetic, or enthusiastic, who may be coming into the class unprepared or thoroughly ready, who may be disciplined or disorganized. And they damn well better understand their material.

One of the first things you learn when you start teaching is that you have to know the content inside and out — it’s simply not enough to know the bare minimum that you expect the students to master, because as a teacher, you need to push just a bit farther to get them up there. You need to be able to lead them to knowledge, and you need to be able to point off in the distance to all the cool stuff they can learn if they continue. How can you inspire if you’re not drinking deeply from the Pierian Spring yourself?

And teaching itself is a skill. It requires constant work and adjustment. In my introductory classes, I’m comfortable with the content and it requires only a little attention to keep up to date on the science, but I’m constantly fretting over how to communicate concepts better this time around. There actually is a teaching literature, you know, perhaps Mr Seldon is unaware of it. There are always new and better ways to instruct coming out and being tested, and there is academic knowledge behind it.

One of the terrible secrets of college teaching is that it fits Seldon’s ideal: most of us get almost no instruction in education as grad students, and then we’re thrown into being in charge of a class for the first time when we’re hired as faculty. And let me tell you, it sucks for both the teacher and the students. My first year was terrible. I had no idea what I was doing, I was frantically struggling to all hours of the night to figure out what the heck I’d be doing the next day, and I pity my poor students from that time.

I could dig up my evaluations from back then if I wanted a reminder of my misery. My student evaluations were bottoming out my first year; I had colleagues coming in and giving me pages and pages of advice. Those evaluations steadily rose until I had people praising me as one of the best teachers in my department…but it took five years of hard work on the job.

So Seldon compares teaching to surgeons and says, “No one would want to be operated on by an amateur who hadn’t had years of experience.” No one in their right mind would want to be taught by someone who hadn’t had years of teaching experience, either. I’d go further and say you ought to demand that your teachers be well-qualified, because you’re trusting your children to them, and they are usually only going to get one shot at learning and growing.

But Seldon thinks there is no expertise to teaching, only passion and enthusiasm.

And then there’s this.

Those who care more about themselves, are time-watchers, and place pay and conditions above caring for the young will never make it. Teaching is a vocation as well as a profession.

Do not diminish the importance of a profession standing up for self-interest. It’s true that people go into teaching because they love it, but it is entirely in the interest of the paymasters to scorn the self-respect of teachers and tell them they shouldn’t care about pay and conditions. Teaching is one of the most important professions in our society, deserving of the greatest respect, but somehow, the bureaucrats and administrators have decided that it’s not worth paying for, and that teachers who demand appropriate acknowledgment of their contributions are compromising “caring for the young.”

Nice racket. I know who’s side Seldon is on, and it isn’t the teachers’.

Double take

Elvira (Cassandra Peterson) goes for a drive with Ru Paul.

I found this on Joe. My. God., where I saw this commentary:

It’s very hard to believe that Elvira is 62.

My first thought was, yes, she looks amazing, and I was surprised that she’s that old. But immediately after I saw her birthday — 17 September 1951 — my second thought, my shocked realization, was…she’s only a few years older than I am.

Goddamn. When did that happen?

I should have Cthulhu teach my classes

Now you too can grasp the great Lovecraftian insights into biology. They’re pretty simple: you’re going to die, and the universe doesn’t care.

By the way, the article is from the makers of Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land, which happens to be one of only three games that I have on my iPad. It’s grim and bloody and horrible, and I’ve made it through every level except the last one, where the Leng Spiders and Cthulhoids turn my team into a rotting smear of decaying jellied flesh. Which seems fitting.

What I’d be telling my kids nowadays

I’m one of those people who is hopelessly addicted to babbling on the internet, and even I don’t understand this statistic.

the leading cause of death for teenage drivers is now texting, not drinking, with nearly a dozen teens dying each day in a texting-related car crash.

You cannot type and drive, or read and drive, at the same time. It’s really that simple. So why are people trying?

Missing an opportunity

Given that computer science is one of the majors with the best job prospects, that it’s still a growth industry, how do you account for these proportions?

Computer science is an incredibly promising major, especially for a young woman. That and engineering are among the college degrees that can offer the highest incomes and the most flexibility — attributes widely cited for drawing many women into formerly male-dominated fields like medicine. Writing code and designing networks are also a lot more portable than nursing, teaching and other traditional pink-collar occupations. Yet just 0.4 percent of all female college freshmen say they intend to major in computer science. In fact, the share of women in computer science has actually fallen over the years. In 1990-91, about 29 percent of bachelor’s degrees awarded in computer and information sciences went to women; 20 years later, it has plunged to 18 percent. Today, just a quarter of all Americans in computer-related occupations are women.

Something is dissuading women from pursuing careers in computer science. I wonder what it is? Maybe it has something to do with bro culture.

He was supposed to be immortal

Lou Reed, dead.

Lou Reed was subversive. I first encountered his music while reading the school bus in junior high, which is a strange place to listen to the Velvet Underground, I tell you. There I was, bored out of my skull, trapped on those uncomfortable bench seats, on my way to a suburban public school that I detested, and the driver would just turn the radio to the local pop station and turn it up loud to keep us distracted. And so I’d sit there, listening intently to a guy singing about the wild side of New York, wondering if the administrators at school had ever listened to these lyrics, because they made me feel funny inside, and want to get out and go get a cheap Greyhound ticket and end up in a different kind of bus station in a big city on the other side of the continent.

And then, once we arrived at school, they always played some conservative anecdote by that colossal douche, Paul Harvey. My poor brain, whipsawed between Reed and Harvey. I knew which one spoke truth, at least. But still, I think I figured out quickly that no, the principal of the school never listened to the lyrics of the songs we liked. Reed. Cooper. Joplin. Zappa. If he did, that bus would have gone silent.

He’s one of those people who pounded at the conventionality we were supposed to be molded into. I have to thank all the people who have done that over the years.

Western culture does have something to contribute to the world!

Everyone who has read Guns, Germs, and Steel knows that one of the central themes of Diamond’s book was that New Guinea tribesmen were in no way inferior in human ability to Wall Street bankers (ooh, bad choice of an example: it’s pretty easy to argue that Wall Street bankers are some of the lowest examples of humanity.) So here’s a story of New Guinea tribesmen using Facebook. Also, it tells of a documentary that was made that switched stereotypes: instead of sending the Harvard professor to New Guinea to comment on their lives, they brought over a group of New Guinea tribespeople to gawk at us.

The company I worked for didn’t have a good reason why they could not, so we pitched it as an idea and got it commissioned.  That’s when I was brought in.  Worried that their visit might pollute their culture with modern ideas, or perhaps make them terminally envious of a world beyond their reach, I talked to some experts on Papua New Guinean tribes, and at that point exposed myself for the blinkered bigot that I was.  “How dare you,” said one anthropologist, “to imagine, without question, that a Sepik tribesman would be envious of your culture.  That’s one of the most arrogant things I’ve ever heard.  These people are supremely proud of their own culture.  They have a much more rewarding lifestyle than the majority in the West.  Mark my word, they won’t want anything you can give them.”

Oh, burn. That’ll put us in our place.

Except…we did have an advantage or two.

But the anthropologist was wrong about one thing; they did take something back: the idea of putting feathers on arrows. In the second week of their visit, I took three of the tribe to watch an archery club shoot at targets in a local community center. One of the archers was a fanatic and made his own arrows from willow, spruced with turkey feathers. The tribesmen were fixated on the feathers. “Why these feathers?” they asked. “It makes them fly straight,” said the enthusiast. And after a few practice shots, the tribesmen discovered that it certainly did. Their eyes lit up. Back home (presumably for thousands of years), they had been making arrows that were three times the size and weight of these feathered arrows, because without feathers an arrow needs to be weighty in order to fly true through the air. Just adding feathers would mean that they could carry three times the number of arrows out on hunts, and shoot three times the number of feral pigs. Of all the ideas in England, this was the one that could have an immediate and significant impact on their lives.

So what has the West done for the rest of the world lately? Well, there’s feathered arrows. And…facebook? Maybe we should stop right there.

How to make a funny-looking mouse

I’m going to tell you about a paper that was brought to my attention by some poor science journalism, so first I have to complain about the article in the Guardian. Bear with me.

This is dreadfully misleading.

Though everybody’s face is unique, the actual differences are relatively subtle. What distinguishes us is the exact size and position of things like the nose, forehead or lips. Scientists know that our DNA contains instructions on how to build our faces, but until now they have not known exactly how it accomplishes this.

Nope, we still don’t know. What he’s discussing is a paper that demonstrates that certain regulatory elements subtly influence the morphology of the face; it’s an initial step towards recognizing some of the components of the genome that contribute towards facial architecture, but no, we don’t know how DNA defines our morphology.

But this is disgraceful:

Visel’s team was particularly interested in the portion of the genome that does not encode for proteins – until recently nicknamed “junk” DNA – but which comprises around 98% of our genomes. In experiments using embryonic tissue from mice, where the structures that make up the face are in active development, Visel’s team identified more than 4,300 regions of the genome that regulate the behaviour of the specific genes that code for facial features.

These “transcriptional enhancers” tweak the function of hundreds of genes involved in building a face. Some of them switch genes on or off in different parts of the face, others work together to create, for example, the different proportions of a skull, the length of the nose or how much bone there is around the eyes.

NO! Bad journalist, bad, bad. Go sit in a corner and read some Koonin until you’ve figured this out.

Junk DNA is not defined as the part of the genome that does not encode for proteins. There is more regulatory, functional sequence in the genome that is non-coding than there is coding DNA, and that has never been called junk DNA. Look at the terminology used: “transcriptional enhancers”. That is a label for certain kinds of known regulatory elements, and discovering that there are sequences that modulate the expression of coding genes is not new, not interesting, and certainly does not remove anything from the category of junk DNA.

Alok Jha, hang your head in shame. You’re going to be favorably cited by the creationists soon.

But that said, the paper itself is very interesting. I should mention that nowhere in the text does it say anything about junk DNA — I suspect that the authors actually know what that is, unlike Jha.

What they did was use ChIP-seq, a technique for identifying regions of DNA that are bound by transcription factors, to identify areas of the genome that are actively bound by a protein called the P300 coactivator — which is known to be expressed in the developing facial region of the mouse. What they found is over 4000 scattered spots in the DNA that are recognized by a transcription factor. A smaller subset of these 4000 were analyzed for their sequential pattern of activation, and three of these potential modulators of face shape were selected for knock out experiments, in which the enhancer was completely deleted.

The genes these enhancers modulate were known to be important for facial development — knocking them out creates gross deformities of the head and face. Modifying the enhancers only leaves the actual genes intact, so you wouldn’t expect as extreme an effect.

One way to think of it is that there are genes that specify how to make an ear, for instance. So when these genes are switched on, they initiate a developmental program that builds an ear. The enhancers, though, tweak it. They ask, “How big? How high? Round or pointy? Floppy or firm?” So when you go in and randomly change the enhancers, you’d expect you’d still get an ear, but it might be subtly shifted in shape or position from the unmodified mouse ear.

And that’s exactly what they saw. The mice carrying deletions had subtle variations in skull shape as a consequence. In the figures below, all those mouse skulls might initially look completely identical, because you aren’t used to making fine judgments about mousey appearance. Stare at ’em a while, though, and you might begin to pick up on the small shifts in dimensions, shifts that are measurable and quantifiable and can be plotted in a chart.

Attanasio-face-enhancers-9

This is as expected — tweaking enhancers (which are not, I repeat, junk DNA) leads to slight variations in morphology — you get funny-looking mice, not monstrous-looking mice. Although I shouldn’t judge, maybe these particular shifts create the Brad Pitt of mousedom. That’s also why I say that implying that we now know exactly how DNA accomplishes its job of shaping the face is far from true: Attanasio and colleagues have identified a few genetic factors that have effects on craniofacial shaping, but not all, and most definitely they aren’t even close to working out all the potential interactions between different enhancers. You won’t be taking your zygotes down to the local DNA chop shop for prenatal genetic face sculpting for a long, long time yet, if ever.

Attanasio C, Nord AS, Zhu Y, Blow MJ, Li Z, Liberton DK, Morrison H, Plajzer-Frick I, Holt A, Hosseini R, Phouanenavong S, Akiyama JA, Shoukry M, Afzal V, Rubin EM, FitzPatrick DR, Ren B, Hallgrímsson B, Pennacchio LA, Visel A. (2013) Fine tuning of craniofacial morphology by distant-acting enhancers. Science 342(6157):1241006. doi: 10.1126/science.1241006.