Science finally enters the 21st century with ZOMGSCIENCE.NET. Got a short attention span? Are you conditioned by blipverts to need your information jazzed up loud with big bold all-caps headlines and profanity? Is this article too long and subdued for you? Then you should read ZOMGSCIENCE.
Maybe someone will be offended by that, though. They need to take a lesson from Bill Donohue, who has a simple solution to any conflict between religions: everyone should convert to Catholicism. He calls that “inclusion”. I don’t think he knows what the word means.
I just got a copy of this paper in my email, straight from Santa Claes, and it’s a good thing, because when I checked our library didn’t have a subscription to PNAS NorthPole. I think it was sent to me because I’ve been such a good boy this year (oh, you didn’t get one? We’ve found the naughty children, then!)
They’ve associated a 7-character amino acid sequence (for instance, FALALAA or NAVIDAD) with a common Christmas carol (“Deck the Halls” or “Feliz Navidad”), and searched GenBank for all instances, and they’re calling this the Carolome. I know, that’s all Jonathan Eisen wanted for Christmas was another omics word.
The most recent version of the public genome database – GenBank – contains as of June 11, 2010 close to 3x 1011 base pairs. In line with studies attempting to identify all proteins derived from the database (proteomics), all metabolites (metabolomics) and all genes (genomics), we here have made a concerted effort to systematically identify all Christmas carols deposited in the sequence data. We here name this field of research Carolomics. The most abundant entry in the Carolome is ‘Deck the Halls’ (Deck the halls with boughs of holly, Fa la la la la, la la la la). We find this carol in 21 genomes. The second most prevalent carol in the Carolome is ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus’ found in 17 genomes including that of the wine grape suggesting a genetic link between mulled wine (aka Glögg) and Christmas celebration. Third most common carol in the Carolome is Ave Maria with 12 identified locations in the GenBank genomes. These findings establish a direct role for Christmas carols in the functional imprint and transfer of genetic information. In the future it will be essential for researchers to determine the presence of carolomes in sequence data; both to increase identified database constituents as well as to more fully and completely understand the proven transference of meme data between genomes.
Now maybe this means there’s a little bit of Christmas in all of us, except…when I scanned through the list of organisms carrying carol-associated sequences, I noticed a marked shortage of human sequences. In fact, none were listed at all. The christmasy organisms mostly seem to be bacteria, with a few fungi and protists thrown in, with one exception: “Ave Maria” seems to turn up in pigs and rats.
There is another little problem with the analysis. They used HTLCALI (“Hotel California” by the Eagles) as a negative control (it was found nowhere). It’s a serious flaw in the amino acid code in that there is no reasonable way to encode a 7 letter sequence for BAH HUMBUG, since you can’t use B or U.
Somebody is angling for an Ig-Nobel, I think. Apparently, it’s a Danish myth that you can absorb alcohol through your feet, so soaking your feet in a tub of spirits is a way to get drunk (they also mention that soaking your feet in beet juice will make your urine red, but they didn’t test that one, unfortunately). So the hypothesis that one can get drunk through your feet was thoroughly tested.
The participants abstained from consuming alcohol 24 hours before the experiment. The evening before the experiment they rubbed their feet with a loofah to remove skin debris. On the day of the experiment, a baseline blood sample was taken through a venous line. The participants then submerged their feet in a washing-up bowl containing the contents of three 700 mL bottles of vodka (Karloff vodka; M R Å tefánika, CÃfer, Slovakia, 37.5% by volume). Before each blood sample was taken the venous catheter and cannula were flushed with saline by a trained study nurse. Plasma ethanol concentrations were determined every 30 minutes for three hours. Blood samples were taken to the laboratory for immediate analysis by the study nurse. Plasma ethanol concentrations, measured as soon as possible in case of rapid and potentially fatal increases, were determined using a photometric method, with a detection limit of 2.2 mmol/L (10 mg/100 mL, corresponding to 0.010% weight/volume). Participants simultaneously recorded intoxication related symptoms (self confidence, urge to speak, and number of spontaneous hugs) on an arbitrary scale from 0 to 10.
The results: it didn’t work. Blood alcohol levels didn’t even rise to testable levels, and no one felt an urge to start hugging.
I’m sure you’re all disappointed now. If you’re disappointed because we don’t know what happened to the 2100 mL of vodka after the experiment, you should be worried about your possible alcoholism.
The authors left several questions open.
Many questions are still to be answered in the research specialty of alcohol transport across non-gastrointestinal barriers. This study has shown that feet are impenetrable to the alcohol component of Karloff vodka. Other stronger beverages, beetroot juice, or combinations of juices and alcoholic beverages may, however, cross the epithelial barrier of the skin. Moreover, new pastimes, such as “eyeball drinking,” have emerged. The significance of this activity is unknown. Rumour has it that it makes you drunk fast . . . and may damage your eyes.
Wait. Eyeball…drinking? What’s up with those Danes?
The horror, the horror. The war has spread to Jutland, where a rogue priest is rounding up elves and hanging them from the church eaves.
You bastards! They were so innocent and jolly! Now who’s going to make all the toys for Christmas?
The City Church of San Diego has a website with a fill-in-the-blank statement you’re supposed to complete, and they’re actually displaying the results, after they’ve been approved…and it looks like they’ve been reasonably liberal in their approvals. Help ’em out. Tell them what JESUS IS ______.
I said, “a myth”, but I also saw “a Jewish zombie” and “Placebo” and “very upset that you called him gay” appearing on the page.
Color me unsurprised. They are lovely young men and I’m sure many others here will enjoy the show.
A reader from Austria sent in a photo of a very special nativity scene. None of it is on my diet, but I thought maybe a few readers would appreciate it, and maybe even be inspired to recreate it in their holiday celebrations.
Is this another salvo in the War on Christmas? Or does reverence for bacon mean it’s actually acceptable?
Oh, no! It’s a trend!
Face it. Star Wars sucked. Even the original movie, which I remember fondly and vastly enjoyed watching, was horribly written — that George Lucas did not have an ear for dialog, and once he drifted away from a simple mythic archetype couldn’t put a plot together to save his life, was something that became increasingly evident throughout the series.
And Star Trek? Embarrassingly bad science, hammy acting, and an over-reliance on gobbledygook and the deus ex machina. There was maybe a small handful of episodes that were more than cheesy dreck.
So why do people adore those shows so fanatically?
Here’s one interesting explanation: cult movies plug into the same cognitive keyholes as religion does. The article is a bit superficial — comparing Star Wars to Catholicism, Star Trek to protestantism, and the recent Star Trek retcon/reboot to Mormonism is stretching the analogy way too much. But there’s something to it.
The Star Wars/Star Trek phenomena are a bit odd; I watch bad movies sometimes for entertainment, but I never lose myself in apologetics for them. They’re bad movies. They’re fun for the comic opera klutziness of them, and half the pleasure is being able to stand above them and outside them, and appreciate the sincerity of the exercise in slapping together a weird piece of crap in spite of little obstacles, like a lack of money or talent. But Star Wars/Star Trek have serious fans who devotedly study the lore and get into arguments about which is better, and even think they represent some high quality story telling.
I will boldly predict that some people will be arguing for that in the comments. Of course, they’re wrong. They sucked. Just like religion.
So the question is why do people cling to them…and it seems to me that our brains are equipped with a kind of ideological inertia, which is probably a good thing, since you don’t want to too casually flip-flop on ideas before you’ve worked out their viability. But sometimes we seem to be prone to a pathological degree of attachment, where because once we favored some strange object of worship, whether it’s Jesus or Spock or America or the Green Bay Packers, we can’t let go. Changing our minds would be an admission that we were wrong and could be wrong about something we regard as important in our lives, and there’s a reasonable fear that opening the door to that kind of uncertainty might lead to chaos.
There’s also a peculiar inability to separate the parts from the whole. You can like classical sacred music without endorsing the silliness about magic crackers and Original Sin, just as you can enjoy a light sabre battle on the screen without getting goofy over The Force.
So what is religion? It’s a parasite on a couple of useful features of how the mind works, its tendency to try and model the world around us as a coherent whole and its reluctance to abandon models that fail to work. It’s a particularly successful parasite because it can be introduced early, with mother’s milk, well before they get plonked down in front of the boobtube, and so it generally outcompetes Captain Picard…and it also gets relatively little pushback from the culture once the child leaves the breast to spend more time with outsiders, who are all praising the same mysterious being, and so far Yoda worship isn’t very common.
Last week, the CNN Belief blog published some transparently inane pseudoscience from Oprah.com; this week, it’s publishing some awesomely trivial tripe about where your dog goes after death (how does the author know they go to heaven? He dug up some Bible verses, of course.)
This is amazingly bad stuff. It’s as if there is some sneering, mocking atheist who has been put in charge of CNN’s religion section, and she gets up every morning on a quest to find whatever will make religion look profoundly stupid…and she succeeds three minutes after going to work, and spends the rest of the day sipping lattes and cocktails while writing scenarios for her nightly Dungeons & Dragons game.
There is a danger to thinking this way, though: pretty soon you’re wondering if Pope Ratzi isn’t actually some godless antitheist mole for the Global Atheist Conspiracy, because he’s doing such a good job of making Catholicism look evil, and every silly expression of faith begins to look like an intentional effort to discredit themselves. Either the world is dominated by a lot of atheist weirdos who get off on making everyone else look ridiculous, or religion really is this goofy. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, so I’m going to have to favor the latter.
