Are all Republicans just hateful scoundrels who like to hurt people?

It sure seems that way. Minnesota has been thriving under Democratic leadership for the last several years, and we had a bit of moderate progressive legislation passed…but the Republicans got a majority in the last election, and are bound and determined to eradicate all the successes of the past. It’s as if they just don’t like people.

Progressive policies enacted in Minnesota’s largest cities in recent years are at risk from Republicans who control the state Legislature as they seek to block, undo or change local ordinances on everything from sick leave and the minimum wage to plastic bags and bike lanes.

Sick leave? Minimum wage? Bike lanes? They don’t like bike lanes?!?! They don’t have any kind of positive intent or agenda, so they’re just going to tear down what previous legislators accomplished. Their justification is also as racist as fuck.

“Clearly the cultural values of Minneapolis are drastically out of alignment with greater Minnesota, so there’s going to be conflicts,” said Rep. Pat Garofalo, R-Farmington, author of a bill that would block cities from passing their own labor rules.

Key words there: “greater Minnesota” is a phrase that refers to all of the state except for Minneapolis/St Paul. To put it in words more familiar to out-of-staters, he wants to block any support for the cultural values of those urban people, hint hint, nudge nudge.

He’s wrong, of course. There are a lot of us out here in “greater Minnesota” who have progressive values, and find these damned dumb regressive yokels to be an embarrassment.

We’ve got to work to kick these slugs out of office in the next election.

Excuses fit only for authoritarians

We’ve all heard about the disgraceful behavior of United Airlines and the Chicago police. I’m getting disgusted by the excuses made in the aftermath.

A few weeks ago, United made the news for kicking two girls off one of their flights because they were wearing leggings. United justified this because there were rules written down for United employees traveling on a pass, so a lot of people said that was OK, then — they were rules, after all, and rules must be obeyed.

Wait, why? Who made this rule, and for what reason? Presumably it’s because they have this corporate image that they want to enforce, so they’ve got this damn stupid rule written down by some prudish busybody — it’s certainly not for an objectively good reason, like safety — and now they insist on enforcing it, pointlessly, even if it is problematic for customers. And yet I saw people just accept the injustice because it was a rule.

Now likewise they have a rule that they can throw paying customers off the plane at the convenience of their employees and at the whim of a random number generator. People are doing the same thing! It’s a rule, therefore United has a right to abuse passengers who aren’t sufficiently obedient. Again, this is not a safety rule (if a passenger is endangering others, then yes, there should be an expectation of obedience and penalties for defying the airline), but one for the convenience of the corporation. They are permitted to act inhumanely in the service of purely capitalist gains.

And people accept that! Some, like Bill O’Reilly, even laugh at the video of the man being bloodied.

I don’t give a flying fuck if somewhere in United’s fine print they have written down that they get to club you senseless if they need your seat — it is an unjust rule because it prioritizes the convenience of an employee over the safety and health and rights of another human being. Having it written down does not make it right, it means that an immoral behavior is formally sanctioned in the corporate culture of United. That makes it worse.

Of course, there is even more heinous justifications. Would you believe journalists have rummaged in the victim’s past to find evidence of misbehavior? He was convicted of using his medical license to abuse prescription drugs in 2004. That’s bad, but not relevant — his punishment was to have his license to practice medicine suspended for ten years, a debt that has been paid. It does not mean that United, or anyone, is justified to punch him in the head any time they feel like it.

I find the callousness of big business disturbing, but find the willingness of too many Americans to condone it even more distressing.

Cincinnati, 16 June…whatcha doin’?

A student and I are going to attend the 2017 Midwest Zebrafish Meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio. We’re getting in on Thursday night, and the meeting schedule has us free all day Friday, until the opening remarks at 6pm.

Hmmm. What to do all day long? What embarrassing, horrible spectacle is there within a short drive of Cincinnati that could provide amusement?

You guessed it. I’m going to the Ark Encounter! I imagine there will be lots of developmental biologists and geneticists in town that day…anyone want to join us? Or if you’re not there for the meeting, but just idling about in the neighborhood, feel free to come along, too. It’s not as if you need a Ph.D. to laugh at the pseudoscience on display.

Also, if anyone wants to meet up for serious conversation during the conference, I’m up for that — as mentioned above, I’ll be there with a student who might be looking for a graduate program in another year, and I’d like to introduce them around.

Fun with the nasal cycle

Did you know that most of us have two nostrils? It’s strange — we have a single trachea, but it branches into two pathways up top, and furthermore, those two terminal pathways are elaborate and mazelike, with a network of sinuses and these convoluted turbinate bones taking up much of the space behind your nose. I’d always just chalked it up to a side effect of bilateral symmetry (eh, you know, developmental biologist), but at the very least, it does have physiological consequences. Among those consequences is that there is a nasal cycle. You don’t breathe in equally through both nostrils, there is an alternating rhythm.

Try it yourself right now. Consciously consider what you feel as you breathe in and out normally — you probably can detect that one nostril seems a little bit more open than the other (if you’ve got a cold or allergies, your perception of this phenomenon may be messed up. Sorry. Get better soon.) As I sit here, for instance, I can tell that my right nostril has somewhat freer airflow than my left. It’s not that I’m having any problems breathing through either, it’s a subtle difference, simply a small, barely detectable asymmetry that is unnoticeable except when I’m consciously thinking about my breathing.

MRI scans through a face

The cool thing about it, though, is that it alternates with a cycle length between about half an hour and 8 hours. The mechanism for that is that a portion of your septum and your inferior turbinate are covered with erectile tissue that becomes gradually engorged in response to sustained airflow, and relaxes as airflow is reduced, so your nostrils take turns getting aroused by breathing and then swapping off with each other to relax and recover.

You can measure the nasal cycle in a precise and continuous way with scientific instruments, if you’d like, but there’s also a rough and ready way. This weekend my wife and I drove to a meeting in Glenwood, and then on to Minneapolis, so we had a couple of long drives together, and we were talking about respiratory physiology, as one does, when I explained about this nasal cycle thing, and we decided to measure it. Since we didn’t have access to an electronics lab in the car, we did a subjective estimate: every half hour, we’d just try to be consciously aware of our breathing and report which nostril was doing most of the work. It beats playing Slug Bug, anyway.

So we did a day’s worth of crude measurements. One problem right away was that Mary was a bit congested and stuffed up, which meant the whole day went by with no change for her, which was a bit boring. She did finally detect a shift that evening, so her nasal cycle was estimated to be a bit longer than 8 hours. Another slight problem is that we also took our son and his girlfriend out to lunch, and mid-meal we had to announce “Nostril check!”, which meant we got some funny looks. But that’s OK, I’m used to getting funny looks.

As for me, I’ve gotten over a nasty cold that had been afflicting me for a while, so my face and sinuses and nasal erectile tissue were in fine fettle, and I was able to measure a couple of cycles, which were both about 3 hours in length.

Give it a try yourself. The obvious weaknesses with the way we were doing it is that the observations are personal and subjective, unlike those done with gadgetry that directly measures airflow, and since we were only doing a check every half hour our results were pretty chunky. The interesting thing about it, though, is that this is a rhythm our bodies express throughout your life, and most of us never even notice. It makes one wonder what other sneaky little patterns your organs are doing without your permission or control.

Kahana-Zweig R, Geva-Sagiv M, Weissbrod A, Secundo L, Soroker N, Sobel N. (2016) Measuring and Characterizing the Human Nasal Cycle. PLoS One 11(10):e0162918

Our ‘liberal’ media at work

Krugman nails it:

One thing is certain: The media reaction to the Syria strike showed that many pundits and news organizations have learned nothing from past failures.

Mr. Trump may like to claim that the media are biased against him, but the truth is that they’ve bent over backward in his favor. They want to seem balanced, even when there is no balance; they have been desperate for excuses to ignore the dubious circumstances of his election and his erratic behavior in office, and start treating him as a normal president.

You may recall how, a month and a half ago, pundits eagerly declared that Mr. Trump “became the president of the United States today” because he managed to read a speech off a teleprompter without going off script. Then he started tweeting again.

One might have expected that experience to serve as a lesson. But no: The U.S. fired off some missiles, and once again Mr. Trump “became president.” Aside from everything else, think about the incentives this creates. The Trump administration now knows that it can always crowd out reporting about its scandals and failures by bombing someone.

Every time I think maybe the media are growing a spine and showing some appreciation of their responsibilities: they see the prospect of a war that will boost their ratings, and suddenly they’re orgasming over missiles. I’m looking at you, Fareed Zakaria and Brian Williams. Fuck you all. Get off the air.

Clearly, humans are born with a natural love of cephalopods

Forget teddy bears — we’ve been representing the wrong species in our children’s toys. A hospital in Scotland has found that their premature babies like crocheted octopus toys — there’s even a group dedicated to providing them.

So, why octopuses? Well, apparently, the tentacles remind the baby of clinging to the umbilical cord in the womb, and this makes them feel safe and secure.

The hospital cares for approximately 1,000 premature babies every year, so that requires lots of octopuses for cuddling. Having the octopus close to hand can also prevent the babies from trying to pull out their tubes.

It’s not just humans, either. Our cat has a favorite toy, a crocheted octopus, of course, which she’ll drag around while making strange noises. There’s just something cute and adorable about octopuses.

Aaargh. It’s like watching the spread of a plague.

More noise from that perfectly respectable cephalopod RNA editing paper with the bad press release. This time it comes from Quartz.

It turns out these impressive abilities may originate at the molecular level. Researchers from Tel Aviv University in Israel and the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, published a paper on April 6 illustrating that octopuses and their relatives, squid and cuttlefish, can readily change the way they use their DNA. Rather than using their genetic code as a blueprint to build the proteins they need to survive, cephalopods use it more like guidelines.

“This may explain why they’re such good problem solvers,” Clifton Ragsdale, a neurobiologist at the University of Chicago unaffiliated with the paper, told Scientific American.

NO IT DOESN’T! If a paper came out that announced that neurons get more of their ATP from glycolysis (which is actually often the case), would you then declare that you’ve figured out how humans got to be so smart? No, you wouldn’t, because the mechanism is so far from the outcome. LeBron James likes Fruity Pebbles, that must be the secret of his basketball skills!

RNA editing is a mechanism that allows the proteins produced by genes (and also, and probably to a greater extent, the non-coding RNAs) to acquire different sequences over time, just like mutations to the nucleotide sequence would. It tells you nothing about the complex sequence of historical events that led to the emergence of greater intelligence.

Also, “Rather than using their genetic code as a blueprint to build the proteins they need to survive, cephalopods use it more like guidelines” is just wrong and implies so much nonsense. Who or what is following these “guidelines”? They make it sound like squid take their genetic output and consciously adjust it to suit some vaguely understood better goal. Post-transcriptional processing is chemistry, too!

I’m also chattering away to a tiny audience over on Mastodon (I’m @pzmyers@octodon.social, if you’re interested), so I figure I’ll also put my comments there over here, so you can argue with me.

It’s annoying because the study doesn’t address the question everyone thinks it does. It’s clear that most people are reading the press release, not the paper, and can’t understand the science behind it.

It’s a bad translation problem.

So now I’m wondering about #scicomm responsibilities. SJ Gould & Dawkins made masterful contributions to the public understanding of science, but they also separated everyone from the source material for their ideas, to the point everyone credits them completely for their evolutionary views.

You have to get down to the root to see the problems. Great communicators seem at their best explaining the twigs and leaves.