April, fools...

At this time of year I like to entertain ridiculous get-rich-quick fantasies. This equates to my hopeless preoccupation with the Nenana Ice Classic, since I have no other plans to get rich. This will be the 5th year I've thrown my guesses into the red cans around Fairbanks' grocery stores, bars, and gas stations. Every year I do 8 guesses. I figure since it is "wagering" contest, I should curb any possible predilection toward bad addictive behavior by keeping a steady $20 cap on my "charitable contributions" to my favorite road-system village. As long as the tickets are $2.50 each, I'll spend $20.

I'm actually going to be a little more serious in a future post, since I'll be thinking about this all month... bu for this first post, I thought I'd just lay out in an easily interpretable Table just what a poor guesser I am... apparently you're gonna have to click on it... sorry... In any case, the deadline for guesses is April 5, which is also the deadline for my summer Adjunct Faculty position application...hence a very important monetary date for me...

OK, more Ice-Classic blogwash to come...



P.S. I'm not feeling clever today. Don't bother looking for a "joke" in this post other than the obvious ones...

Nanook of the south...

A record was broken today that I think will get some national and international attention. OK, what is one of the most important issues facing modern civilization? Global Warming/Climate Change. And, what is one of icons of this issue? The Polar Bear. So, what happened today? A Polar Bear wandered into Fort Yukon, an Athabaskan village in Interior Alaska that's 250 miles from the coast. That's as far inland as a polar bear has ever been documented in the state. That's very interesting. What happened to it? Well, a local gunned it down with an assault rifle. Unfortunately, that act is going to get a lot of attention and hubub, and while that may not have been what I'd personally like to have seen happen, I think it may distract from the far more interesting thing. What the heck was a "marine mammal" doing in the middle of the state?

Last fall, while way up on the Dalton Highway for a caribou hunt, a friend, who had recently moved to Interior from Southeast, asked a reasonable question. "Do polar bears ever come this far south?" With the kind of foolishly assured bravado that even 10 years of science training still hasn't purged me of (but should), I said "Nah... Prudhoe and Deadhorse area, sure, but not this far down into the foothills of the Brooks range..." Never say never. We were in the Happy Valley Area, a good 80 miles from the oil complexes on the coast where I assumed polar bears were invisibly tethered to there sea-ice habitat. A few short weeks later I found myself in a discussion with a hunter. Now I can't remember how it came up, but he volunteered that yea, actually about 5 years ago he and his partners came across a polar bear feeding off a caribou carcass just off the Haul Road, literally, in the Toolik Lake area, a good 125 miles south of the coast. Wow, OK, I guess I was wrong, oops, my bad. But was such southern meandering common then? No, not at all. Apparently, until today, that instance was the farthest inland documented polar bear in Alaska. That 2002 lost bear was a bit luckier than today's, as assault rifles are rather uncommon weapons in the Dalton Highway hunting corridor... it's surmised, I think, that the bear mosied on back to the ocean...

OK, so let's be blunt. Are there links between Global Warming and a polar bear in Fort Yukon? Well on a number of grounds I object to the question being raised at all... but let me be circuitous in giving an answer to my own blunt question. First, not all the results are in. Apparently there's a minsicule chance the bear is a polar/grizzly hybrid. A hunter in April 2006 shot a polar bear with odd brownish spots... hmm... couple tests later... and the DNA don't lie, momma and papa, well, shouldn't have got along as well as they apparently did... But in fact, hybrids do occur (and in fact are reportedly fertile) and perhaps have enough anatomical, physiological, and behavioral traits that could sometimes allow them to do well in grizzly country... i.e. terra firma. This fact, hybridization potential brings up two related issues, or rather two related views... one view back on polar bear history, one forward on polar bear future. Basically this is a fascinating evolutionary tale with some policy implications I think.

The oldest known fossil of a polar bear is only 100,000 years. I say only, even though that's a long time. I mean, start counting to 100,000 and tell me how far you get. That's a lot of years. But in evolutionary and geologic time, not so much. To put it in perspective, the dozen or so bear species on earth today shared a common ancestor that branched off from other carnivores 38 million years ago or so... by that clock, the polar is a brand new bear. But it might not even REALLY be a new bear. The folks at Alaska Department of Fish and Game who are going to verify whether or not this is a hybrid bear, are likely going to look at it's teeth, particularly the molars, and in a couple days there'll probably be some DNA results. A close look at that DNA, whether mom and pop were the same species or not, holds a fascinating tale. Recently, researchers, in comparing DNA from polar bears to that of brown/grizzly bears from various populations, uncovered a really fascinating story. Some brown bears are more closely related to all polar bears than they are to other brown bears. Think about it. Get it? By a lot of scientists' definition, polar bears can't even be considered their own species. They're just a really unique sub-species of brown bear. In fact, just 10,000 - 20,000 years ago, from the fossil evidence, those teeth that are today diagnostic, weren't all that distinctive... that's how rapidly the polar bear has adapted to it's sea-ice habitat and specialized diet... it's a very different way of life, and selection has resulted in some very fast evolution to form earth's largest living carnivore and current icon of change in the north. In a way, it's rather fitting. Change, at this moment in time, is happening at potentially unprecedented rates in the North. And, low and behold, our chosen icon is this crazy species who itself shape-shifted in the blink of a geologic eye into our beloved Nanook...

OK, finally... looking forward and the policy implications... Clearly, no matter how quickly the polar bear evolved, or how genetically distinct it is, there is nothing else like it. I say it is worth treasuring and fighting to save at whatever the cost. If we can't muster the will to care unconditionally about the polar bear, do we have any hope for caring at all, for saving anything? I can certainly see a couple of the above mentioned facts, wielded in the wrong hands, being used in a case against the polar bear. I'm going to play devil's advocate, and leave the last word with the devil. There are certainly rebuttals, and rebuffs to those rebuts, but I'll leave it open... "If it's not even really a real species, why should it be considered for listing as a Threatened Species?" (I actually don't know about this, perhaps sub-species can be...). And, relevant to today's event... "If a polar bear can make it down into Interior Alaska and remain healthy [untill gunned down with an AR-15], doesn't that show potential that they could adapt well to a world without summer sea ice? I mean, they evolved so quickly in the past, perhaps they'll just adapt to the new regime... " What do you think?

How to starve in the arctic...

Being relatively new to the sport, I'm still not sure exactly what qualifies as good blog fodder. I think I'm trying to tackle a little much per post... Last post: the relevance of the human genome... this one: starvation in the arctic... These require books, or shelves of books, to adequately treat... but no, I'm chiming in… my two cents cannot be held back... don’t even try… For this post, I'm afraid, I’m about to embark on a 3,500 word essay of sorts into a topic of which I have only a tad bit of experience-born empathy... but hey, I can say that about almost anything, so here goes…

So last night Trystan and I attended a talk by one of Fairbanks' beloved Cole brothers, Terrence Cole. He's a Professor of History and the Director of the Office of Public History at UAF. He’s not to be confused (unless you’re new to town) with his twin brother Dermot, of Fairbanks Daily NewsMiner fame... Terrence did parenthetically mention that most of Dermot’s good ideas are actually his own though... (to no audible objection from the audience, so either Dermot was not in attendance or tacitly agrees). Well the title of Cole’s talk, and thus the size of the crowd, was “Murder, Mutiny, and Cannibalism.” Apparently there had been recent Easter dinner familial discourse over whether the words “Mayhem” and “Beastiality” were warranted; they weren’t, which is good, because I don’t think the Fire Marshall would have been pleased with the turnout coming from all cracks and crannies of Fairbanks and hilly environs had those words made the cut… but it was an amazing turnout nonetheless. People are fascinated by this stuff… and Cole spins an engaging, if quintessentially tangential tale. People hate chronological history anyway. He’s perfect, unless I had to figure out what to do to get an A on a midterm of his or something. In any case, in thispost, I’m just going to add a couple of my own tangents to the tale he told.

The talk was basically on the ill-fated arctic expedition of A.W. Greely. I suppose ill-fated arctic expedition is cliché. Oh well. And that’s Army Lt. Adolphus Washington Greely to you... Um… The point of the expedition, like many-to-most ill-fated arctic expeditions, was scientific. I’d argue that this one was more than just nominally “scientific” though. It was conducted under the aegis of the First International Polar Year (not sure if it was called the “First” at the time…) of 1881-1884. Don’t trip up on the obvious singular/plural issues… suffice it to say that sometimes scientific research goes into planned overtime… (e.g. I’ve been doing a two-and-a-half year Master’s degree for well on four years now)… Cole’s talk was given because we’re currently in the very middle of the Third International Polar Year, which is March 2007-March 2009. Yep, after one year, we, as a world, are halfway through the Year. OK, I can only beat that horse for so long… Anyway, the science conducted way back then actually resulted in some incredibly valuable (and beautiful) products. Check out http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/aro/ipy-1/. Incidentally, I’m being paid on IPY 2007-2009 grant funds as I write this… (not to write this, but as I write this… shhh… my adviser is in Washington DC right now…).

So, our hero: A.W. Greely. Hero? Well, yeah and nah. Unfortunately, though his other accomplishments through life were many and notable, his singular arctic expedition is certainly the outstanding, catastrophic low point. When 16 of your 22 men die, some with bellies full of the last guy to go… well, that’s not considered successful. In seriously sh%$ty times, a certain kind of person is really, really needed. One with “emotional intelligence deficit” (Cole’s words I presume) isn’t the kind of leader to roust the spirits of starving survivors. And though I’m not real acquainted with his biography, I’ve seen the bulleted points. As a kid he was uber-patriotic, and on his third try they let him join the ranks and he thence saw some serious Civil War action; well after the arctic affair he laid thousands of miles of telegraph line as a Signal Officer, including all over the American empire (Puerto Rico, Philippines, etc) and notably 4,000 miles into Alaska (beginning in 1904, news arrived to Nome in hours not months,); he was the military governor of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake; and, I’m told, was commander during the “Ute Indian Rebellion.” You know, Ute as in Utah. Apparently the rebellion was ‘bloodless.’ Wow, now that’s different. Kudos Adolphus. For these and other accomplishments, he got the Medal of Honor late in life. Not sure what was mentioned at the awards ceremony mentioned about the arctic trip…

Yes, so back to those miserable stretch of months during the early 1880’s. Basically the mission was going well until a series, yes series, of resupply ships didn’t show. The fault did not lie with the men in the arctic. The fault lay with dudes behind desks and, one can relatively safely assume, weather (I’m assuming that was at least an excuse, as it can always be). The ship that finally picked up the sorry mess of remaining men only came at the persistent behest of Henrietta Greely, the lieutenant’s wife (this seems like another theme in arctic exploration tales…). These men we’re principally concerned with one thing for an ungodly long time: food. Before things got desperate and they struck out on foot across the sea ice retreating south, they stationed at a place called Fort Conger on Lady Franklin Bay, Ellesmere Island. (Go ahead Google Earth it). In Cole’s talk, he said they were certainly well supplied… that is, before they weren’t resupplied. Cole showed a neat picture of a very orderly looking “game rack” bedecked with provisions… One thing he didn’t emphasize (mention?) was that even during those good times, they were seriously living off the land. Over two years Greely’s 24 men ate a lot of wild game. (Notice something? Earlier I said 22 men, now I’m saying 24… the numbers puzzled me for a bit today… It was only a one hour talk, but I think Cole could have mentioned the 2 “Esquimaux” that swelled the mens ranks and perished with them – or at least one did from the primary source I’m looking at contained in Polar Journeys, the role of food and nutrition in early exploration by Robert E. Freeney - which come to find out, I actually have owned since last August… bought during a FMNB store frenzy). So, what kind of game is aplentiful in those parts up there? Well, apparently muskoxen are. Those couple dozen men consumed a whopping 17,500 pounds of muskoxen. Which equates to a ration of 16 ounces per day, per man. With “other game” adding a measely 0.8 oz a day, 60% of their protein came from muskox (the remainder was from food they brought). In all, they shot 103 muskox. Derived from Greely’s meticulous, scientifically minded records, the average yield per ‘ox was 77kg (169.7 lbs). This yield is lower than other estimates for muskox (e.g. 118kg average of 5 animals from another arctic expedition, or 114kg in another ). Peter Lent (in Muskoxen and Their Hunters, from which I’m getting these numbers) says perhaps the low average is due to waste or feeding dogs. I’d think that the latter would be noted by Greely, and I just can’t fathom or forgive the former. Perhaps they were getting some little ‘uns in there, bringing the average down… It’s absolutely amazing to me, but I actually have the ability to weigh-in (pun intended) on this issue from recent personal experience. My very own Nunivak muskoxen, which is now lying in neat saran-wrapped bricks in my and my brother’s chest freezer, weighed 182 pounds (82.6kg). Alaska Airlines made me, and Bank-of-America, very aware of that… So, 182 pounds is the weight after field dressing, but before de-boning. Basically it’s the weight of all the meat plus scapula, humerus, femur, tib-fib, radius-ulna, and canon bones. I’m not a vertebrate anatomist. Some of those names ain’t technically right I’m afraid… Anyway… point is, I know I didn’t waste an ounce of meat during processing, and so far haven’t fed any to dogs. (Though I do have a ziploc of scraps earmarked for a particular furry friend of mine). So, I really don’t know. My muskox was a young bull, probably 3 or 4 years. Although my sample size is 1, I think he might be “average.” However, the taste, oh, the exquisite taste. Let me digress. Muskox, I discovered on March 14, 2008, is my favorite red meat. My good friend Travis (I’m trying to think of a better word than hunting “mentor”…), has eaten wild game meat, and eaten widely, all his life. He has had muskox before, in Greenland actually (prbably closely related to those Greely’s guys ate), and he agrees that this muskox which the gods bestowed upon me, is some of the best meat… ever. Some Sandhill Crane rivals it, Travis says. I don’t know, I can’t vouch, I haven’t had. But muskox is delicious. Especially mine. I kind of regret not eating some of my muskox while still on Nunivak. My first bite of it was back in Fairbanks, all alone one evening, and still in a sort of adventure post-partem depression. I wish I could have had shared some with my Alaska Native host. Granted, I paid James Whitman, a Mekoryuk village Cupik eskimo, the big bucks to transport me into the field. It’s not exactly the communion that I wanted to share, but the perspective. When I shot the muskox I made a mistake. It was the wrong one, or rather not the one I intended to shoot. This meaning it didn’t have the largest horns in the group (OK, it had the smallest). The first thing James said when he walked over after the kill was “That’s going to be good table fare Ian. Don’t worry, you’re young. You can get the big one next time.” I really don’t know if there will be a next time, but I think he was being not merely conciliatory... Though he also, when introduced to Cliff Bar’s that day, deemed them delicious. Who knows... In any case, I wonder how Greely’s men would have ranked my muskox, (or even Cliff Bars for that matter)? I’d heard mixed reviews on muskox. I think it can in some circumstances, season, or to some palates be atrocious... the Greely men had no choice if a particularly musky one was shot one week… Often, for a few days or weeks after a big-game hunt I’ll eat a pretty highly protein rich diet… I’m not sure I’m ready to adhere to a Vilhjalmur Stefansson all meat (plus eggs/dairy) diet for a year, but I’m probably a decent candidate…though not prime… actually I'll confess that after eating quite a little bit of muskox for lunch and dinner for just a few days straight last week, a friend’s all-veggie spicy soup concoction was an extremely satiating change. I’ll bet the Greely guys would have agreed. Anyway, bottom line after all that… the Greely guys’ diet for a good while was definitely OK, since muskox was a big component… However… after those resupply ship(s!) were no-shows… the crew tragically decided to retreat south…

So Greely’s crew left Fort Conger and the muskox herds. And they started taking two steps forward for every one (or two) back on the perniciously (northward) shifting sea-ice. They did end up back on land, farther south, but not quite at anything like a final destination (except in the morbid sense of that phrase). They began consuming, for months aparently, quantities of tripe de roche (a dry lichen that grows on rock for those of you that don’t parle vous France) and their own sealskin garments and gear… At some point, at some really really bad bad point, another, grimmer item appeared on the menu… for some at least… I don’t know the who’s, or when’s, but for some there was something new on the menu... for others, yep, they were what was on the new menu… you know, there are very few things a human being can do, even depraved sexual things, that can result in as much stigma as eating from another human, no matter what role one played in that human's death. When the rescue party unearthed the shallowly buried soldiers to take them back for quote-unquote civilized, Christian burial, some grisly observations, were, well, obvious. “Some of the men had been little more than skin and bones when they died, but the little flesh they had was gone in some places, as on the calves of the legs, on the hips, thighs, and arms” wrote Naval Officer Winfield Scott Schley in his unambiguously titled report, The Bodies Were Mutilated. Interestingly, he mentions that “the body of the Esquimaux was not mutilated to any extent.” It’s not clear to me, with the scant research I’m putting into this post today, what happened to the other Eskimo… but the really, truly disgusting-on-so-many-levels, question begs, why not eat the native? I won’t even suggest my own ideas, since I don’t have any good ones, really. Though racial biases, and/or actual differenes in palatability would be among the totally dismal possibilities.

A couple other interesting things can be said about the ordeal. Afterwards, some serious rationalization ensued in attempt to thwart as best possible the paralyzing stigma “the six” endured. Interestingly, since this was an army affair, the stigma bled over onto the US government, no doubt exponentially multiplied by the bureaucratic blunderings responsible for the need that resulted in enlisted men eating each other. One chief bureaucrat was the guy who ran the War Department, and thus funded the army. This guy, historians say, apparently couldn’t care less about the arctic while the expedition was underway, but seriously needed to concoct rationalizations to sanitize the national guilt aftwerward. This guy was Robert Lincoln. Yes, Robert Todd Lincoln, son of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln. This poor fellow. He has to be one of the most pathetic, jinxed figures in all of American History. After the Greely debacle, as Sarah Vowell says, he “had frozen blood on his hands.” It actually strains credulity to know that this guy was at (as in eyewitness at) his own father’s assassination, AND the assassination of president James Garfield in 1881. ASTOUNDINGLY, he was also at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, NY when president William McKinley was assassinated (though this time he didn’t witness it directly). As someone who doesn’t believe in luck, I would have to say this poor guy was the most unlucky figure in American history to be in any way whatsoever associated with. Considering he was the son of his mother, who held séances in the White House for his dead brothers, I would say Bob Lincoln probably felt some kind of real curse on his life. I digress some, but I’d like to say parenthetically that if you happen to know of a good history of the post-Abraham, Lincoln family, I’d like to read it… Wikipedia says that Robert’s firstborn was Abraham Lincoln II, aka “Jack,” and that the last direct descendant of the greatest leader of the greatest nation in the entire history of humanity (my own brazen claim there, hehe) died in 1985. Geeze. Is that as horribly depressing for you as it is for me?

OK, back to the arctic and cannibalism. One of the more ridiculous attempted sanitizations that Robert Lincoln and his counterpart, the secretary of the navy, again as Sarah Vowell puts it, was “announcing that the reason the bones of the dead had been mangled by knives was that the survivors cut up their comrades’ flesh to use as ‘shrimp bait.’ That’s how ugly the scandal was – that turning human flesh into shrimp bait was the positive spin.” W.S. Schley in his report apparently rebutted his boss (through a little forensic logic that I won’t get into) that “there seems, from the condition of the bodies, that there was no concerted action on the part of those remaining to sustain life in this way [fishing for shrimp with them]…[instead] is seems that the perishing men went to the bodies when hunger became unbearable and supplied themselves as best they could… terrible scenes must have been enacted by the famishing men in the Greely camp…” No S&%t. But did that “suppl[ing] as best they could” help? A particularly interesting concept, from a nutrition standpoint, is what’s known as “rabbit starvation.” This is kind of like the conundrum where you’re stuck on a raft adrift in the ocean and have no water except the limitless ocean all around. You’re screwed because it’s salt water, and it will do your body more harm than good. The idea of “rabbit starvation” as outlined by Stefansson, was that some kinds of game that are particularly lean, like rabbit (and definitely not like muskox), and are not going to offer adequate energy to sustain life. Lean meat is mostly protein, which has to be broken down to it’s constituent amino acids, which then have to be converted to glucose via gluconeogenesis and only then used as energy. I have no idea what the energy balance-sheet looks like for all that breaking down and converting (though I can think of at least two people I know who I could consult on this). Basically, one needs fat and carbs, molecules rich in carbon bonds to ready to crack for their energy. Still it’s not clear to me whether this lean meat situation is exactly analogous to drinking sea water, where the net benefit is definitely in the red. Steffansson said “some think a man will die sooner if he eats continually of fat-free meat than if he eats nothing, but this is a belief on which sufficient evidence for a decision has not been gathered in the North.” That was well over half a century ago. I should really consult a modern Nutrition text, or my friend Susan, a registered dietician, or my cousin Merra, studying nutrition as an undergrad at UW Laramie… anyway, it is also possible that we don’t know for sure… it’s not the easiest thing in the world to do scientific studies that involve starving people to death. Some Nazi quack-science was certainly performed, to the disgrace of the entire human race… but we may truly only know theoretically or based on lab rats (which we may someday determine are not identical to little humans), about “rabbit starvation”… Basically though, the idea at the time of Greely’s rescue was that perhaps the survivors could be exonerated of the stain of cannibalism, if perhaps those who did not eat their emaciated and nearly fat-free companions were thereby healthier and thus lived to beccme the stalwart, surviving group of "the six." (I have no idea what they had to say for themselves later in life). It is a nice idea, certainly. There would be some cosmic justice in that scenario, but who knows what the physiological basis for such a claim may or may not be. Oh, another aside: well over a century before Stefansson’s time, and half a century before Greely’s, another world traveler was making similar observations about meat. “Yet the Gaucho on the Pampas, for months together, touches nothing but beef. But they eat, I observe, a very large proportion of fat, which is of a less animalized nature; and they particularly dislike dry [i.e. lean, I’m guessing] meat, such as that of the Agouti. Dr. Richardson, also, has remarked, ‘that when people have fed for a long time solely upon lean animal food, the desire for fat becomes so insatiable, that they can consume a large quantity of unmixed and even oily fat without nausea.’” The observant twenty-something explorer who made those remarks was an english guy named Charles Darwin. The Dr. Richardson he references is Sir John Richardson, who himself had some arctic exploration experiences to write home about… and, which I think I’ll do a future post on… again, amazingly, a story that will allows me to weave a thin fibre of my own experience into it… but not now…

So, wrapping up… the title of this post is “How to starve in the arctic…” Yes, it’s irreverently sarcastic. I mean no insult to Greely or his men, I just wanted to catch your attention, duh… nevertheless, I’ve presented some clear answers to the question. One, put yourself WAY out there, farther North than any prior humans, and simultaneously trust really unlucky and distracted bureaucrats with your resupplies (i.e. your life)… And there are some less clear answers… e.g. eat human flesh… which may or may not help you... which perhaps nobody knows…

PostScript: I can remember one particular day (though the date eludes me) on one of my longer excursions from humanity… it was about midway on a 440 mile Noatak River float trip. It was a few days or a week or so since my brother and I had seen another human. What were we doing that day? Why, what we did every day. Rowing. Rowing. Rowing. Rowing… Rowing… Rowing… And, lord have mercy, eating lunch. Savory, delicious, precious lunch… Smoked gouda cheese, dry Italian salami, Sailor Boy pilot bread. Rationed out, in almost religious reverence by Trystan and myself to each other while we quietly floated past no-one. Then me, chewing, silently masticating that last bite, way longer than necessary, almost melancholic at the thought of its presence leaving my forlorn taste buds… then swallowing… then thinking for the next five or so hours, to the near exclusion of all the beauty, all the river, all the sun, all the tundra… of dinner. Hot, life sustaining, dinner. While I don’t think I lost that many pounds really during those few short weeks, the trip, once really underway, was really just the time between meals… I begrudged that. Why such an animal? Yet, despite my disproportionate flipped-focus, never…ever… even once, did Trystan look even vaguely appetizing. For that utter lack of ability to empathize with Greely’s men, I am infinitely grateful.

"I could care less..."

So, though it's been a couple weeks, I should probably not be blogging at this precise moment. I've got some rather pressing things to do, namely I need to put together a talk for a branch meeting this Saturday (American Society for Microbiolgy, AK Branch). It'll be a rather small affair, one invited speaker, a famous microbiologist I've not hear of, and well, a bunch of locals. Despite that dis, I really like this meeting. This year, basically I will have 20 minutes to convince - mostly people from my lab- that I've made progress in the last 6 months. I guess I'm as curious as they are really...

In any case, no, I don't want to work on that right now... what I want to do is tell sundry things to the whole world (or those handful of individuals that will read this in no particular hurry relative to my urge to write it). Aside: The etymology of "Blog" is pretty well established, being a very recently born word... it's a portmanteau of weblog. But I'd argue it's also onomonopoetic. I don't know if anyone has yet to argue that blog is onomonopoetic. I don't want to know, so I won't Google it. I would like to think this afternoon that I'm the first person to be struck that Blog has connotations similar to burp, or belch, barf, other b- words. Like... like.. the sound that verbal diarreah makes when it can't be held back from the keyboard. We all have to blog at times, just let's try not to do it in public or more than we abosolutely have to.

So, despite that introduction, I'd like to announce that I have nothing particularly well thought out or formulated for you today. Don't get your hopes up (ever...), it's just that my fingers get to itching, and I feel like I may suffer consequences if I don't write together the loose threads of thought that seem like they might be braided into something emergent. (I'm seriously swapping/mixing metaphors here, sorry... am I braiding or barfing? not sure)... In any case, today's meandering musings will be on: science training, scientific success, apathy, causation vs. correlation, and beer. Or maybe something else. Oh, and the Gray Lady, the New York Times . She'll make a couple cameos. She's always invited... poor Gray Lady, she probably get's blogged on more than almost anyone else...

So, my title... So, today I sub tought a science course lab for a friend who is out of town. It was a computer lab, and I arrived early to set up the projector. Two students, who having never seen me before, were having no reason not to speak candidly. "What the hell are we doing in lab today?" asks one to the other a few yard away from me (diligently futzing with the projector setup, which I thought might have been a good clue). "I have no idea... I could care less." Right... Actually, I think it might be telling (about me) that the first thing that entered my own private thought baloon was: "Could NOT. You could NOT care less!" A reaction of secondary intensity was the more obvious mild annoyance at the blase attitude. It turned out later these were a couple rather sharp students... but that's immaterial... I've been through enough educational institutions to know that blase is cool someplaces (Turlock High School, I was VERY cool...) and the antithesis of cool elsewhere (At Berkeley, I was, well, sort of cool... I think, but don't quote me on that)... In any case... the first thing I did in lab was have everyone discuss a recent article in the NYT by Amy Harmon. She covers a lot of DNA and genome issues. You can email her at dna@nytimes.com. 'Nuff said. Nick Wade is good too. Read his book: Before the Dawn. Um... OK. So the article we read (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/health/research/04geno.html)
deals with the story of the first millionaire to pay a commericial outfit to sequence his genome. He forked over $350,000. If you'll allow me to do some math that I believe is original to me and not something Ms. Harmon figured... we have the following:

Equation 1.

three hundred fifty thousand [dollars] divided by six billion [approximate base pairs in a diploid human genome] times 100 [pennies in a dollar]

I kid you not: if you copy and paste the above into Google (sans brackets and included text), it will duly crunch those words and spit out: 0.00583333333. That's right. Folks, by my calculation this guy bought his own "book of life" for 0.005 cents per letter. So, is that a "good deal"? It's a ridiculous question of course. Amy Harmon reports the conceit of comparing the total price tag to a new Bently. Old Jim Watson is then quoted as saying to him it's a toss up between a Bently and one's genome sequence. He of course had his genome sequence a bit back now, for the price tag of $1.5 million... not out of his own pocket though. Jim think's the Bently is a "nice car," but hey, he's already got his genome sequenced... he's looking forward to the day of the "Chevrolet genome." And that's of course the point of the article... the price is dropping... someday... soon... we, me and you, will have the option, or doctor's recommendation...we'd better figure out whether we could care more or less, 'cause soon we'll have to start making some decisions... In fact, there's a whole slate of things to talk about regarding that, but I have two very discrete things I meant to be on track for with this post. First, I wanted to use a slightly different conceit than the luxury car metaphor... how about the more apt metaphor of a book. I'd argue that the story contained in a human genome is the single most interesting story that the universe has ever produced. Woaa, that sounds pretty bold now that I'm looking at it... I'm wanting to hedge now- my natural instinct is to say incredibly declarative brazen things and immediately hedge- but no. I do think this. The human "book of life" says more of interest than any other single record that has ever existed. I believe that. So how does the price compare... Well using the following Google Search

"average book new york times bestseller 'number of words'"

The hit that I liked occured midway down the first page and stated:

"Most nonfiction books average about 50,000 to 80,000 words."

OK, rigorous research done. Let's say 60,000. I'm going to say that $30 is average for hardcover. Please, don't argue... you'll see why...

So, Google, tell me... 30 [dollars] divided by sixty thousand [words] times 100 [pennies per dollar] = [drumroll] 0.05 cents. (finishing touch to the fuzzy math is that the average word has 10 letters, I have no reason other than my own desire to believe that is true... but hey.)

Wow. So I'd say the current rate of a genome is about the same as a new hardcover book on a per letter basis. Or within an order of magnitude one way or another. So, I think IT IS a good deal... And only getting better as the paradigms shift... So, can I ask you "Could you care less?" I know I could. A lot.

Ian

P.S. I just blew an hour on this digital back of the envelope blog and it's math. I'll try to stay away from even my brand of fuzzy math in the future... But, having worn myself out, I'm going to save my musings on the relationship between scientific success and beer and the Times article that goes with that for another day soon. I'll keep you posted. Hey, but I'll put up a couple quotations to end this particularly bloggy blog entry...


"Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance."
- Will Durant

... a lot of quotations say about the same thing, to varying degrees of pith, but they're all true...


"Against logic there is no armor like ignorance."
- Laurence J. Peter

... yep... but wearing armor couldn't be bliss... that crap looks uncomfy at best...


"Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew and for several days we had to live on nothing but food and water."
- WC Fields

... this will segue nicely into my next post on scientists and beer and causation vs. correlation...

Two dialogues...

A couple perenial favorites of discussion in Alaska are energy issues, and firearms. In the last 24 hours a couple snippets of conversation on these subjects struck me as, well, interesting. I'll try to reproduce them more or less here.

First Dialogue.

Setting: the audacious fireplace at Barnes & Noble, 8pm. Speakers: a father, early 40's, leather jacket, jeans, local union baseball cap, 5 o'clock shadow. A son, 4 or 5, leather jacket, jeans, no cap, no facial hair.

Son looks up from a picture book at the fire, and asks his magazine-reading father "Dad, are those logs made out of real wood?"
"No. They're um, imitation logs..."
"How come they're not real?"
"... Well I suppose 'cause they'd have to have somebody keep adding logs if they burned real wood."
"Oh."
"... so, instead they can use propane... er... natural gas, you know..."
"Oh."
Long pause here.
"... Dad, what's inside fire?"
Longer pause here.
"... well... I guess, you see... there's energy... it's energy, fire is essentially made outa energy..."
"Oh."
"You ready to go?"
"OK Dad."

Second dialogue.

Setting: the West Ridge Cafe, UAF, 9am. Speakers: college aged cashier, blue polo shirt, conductor style cap. Grad student. late 20's, long-hair, bushy beard, carhart jeans, black fleece (me).

I put a strawberry yogurt on the counter.
"Just the yogurt?"
"Yep."
Rings it up. I'm grabbing a spoon made of recycled corn when he asks:
"So how's you're day shaping up?"
"Um, good, yea."
"So what's on your plate for today?"
"Um, well, let's see... "
At this point I think, yea, sure, I'll tell this friendly/nosy dude what I got going, why not?
"I guess I'm going to work on my programming homework for a couple hours, then go to the range, then come back for a class and a meeting with my advisor this afternoon... yea."
"Man, I wish I could go to the range."
"... yea, I'm thinkin of using my brothers Remington 870 with a slug for a hunt I've got comin up..."
"But I can't. Not allowed to anymore. Can't have a gun."
"Oh... right..."
"I guess that's what happens."
"..." huh?
"You know, since the restraining order and all..."
"Oh... yea, of course... well, you know..."
"But that's OK now... Big misunderstanding... Anyway, good thing is I get to leave town next week."
"Yea, me too, spring break."
"Yea, I can hardly wait to get out."
"Cool man, enjoy your break..."
"See ya."

March

It's March. Marvelous, miraculous, mad, March. Choose your alliterative adjective. March is on most Alaskans' short list of their two or three favorite months... other favorites are likely to vary depending on whether you consult a gardener, hunter, backpacker, paddler, painter, fisherwoman, or all or none of the above... perhaps May, June, July, August, September are on the list. A few will want to impress their toughness or your softness by saying they like the less friendly winter months… But March is almost certainly on their favorites list too… Of course there are qualities to those other months... I’ll conceded that no month is without some redemptive values. I just don't see any problem with showing favoritism. Go ahead, play devil’s advocate and tell me why I should like October more, or that November and December have days we've agreed on to celebrate, take off from work, and that makes them inherently special... I agree. But, but... in March, bright rays of permeating beauty don’t need any rationalization. ... March is the winter month we wait all winter for... it's the last month of winter, and most years, come March, I feel like I would be OK if it were the only month of winter. The sun is back - in force. During the last week there is finally more day than night. Celestially speaking, winter is over then...however, the ground is slow to catch up to the sky, and because of this, all the best of both adjacent seasons are married together for a few short weeks. Sun, warm air, snow. That equates to heaven... April and May are the true spring months of course, when the sluggish earth catches up to the sun’s persistent forcefulness and things spring quickly from slushy to muddy to riotous green... those months are infused with high energy, electric reawakening energy... yet ironically, in spite of all that pent up fervor those months precipitate, they are full of frustration... the transportation arteries of much of Alaska, our states colossal venation of rivers, are swollen and angry -- in breakup turmoil... floods, crushing rafts of ice, jams... spring is a time of not traveling. However... before then, there is March. March, ample March, with it's 31 days... brimming with day and days. March is arguably the best month of the year for travel. Snowpack is at it's maximum. Rivers are frozen thickest. The mountains call many. Those who spend any time outside get some skin pigmentation back... it's the best full month for loving and living in the snow...

On March 1, I celebrated the new month by getting out to the river to ski. My companion, 12 year old Jake, flatcoat retreiver, expressed his interest in coming along, so we went out together. Despite my above fawning description of the month, the day felt a little more like February 30th than March 1st. A pissed-off looking sun reached under frowning clouds low on the horizon. Thick pastels, fuchsias, violets, mauves, and good old fashioned reds and pinks painted the west. It was well after 6pm before I started. I had the guilty pleasure of having sort of blown off another commitment that evening… for no good reason really… just really needed the feeling of playing hooky… and to do something only me and this furry companion were privy to… I’m fairly near the bottom of the skate skiing talent curve. Hopefully outing number three on these skis will put me significantly higher, but for now the river offers the immeasurable benefit of being as flat as one can get around here, with blessedly wide trails… As I got into a rhythm, the universe relaxed into its transcendental state, that state that only honest exercise and fresh air can induce. The state where thoughts come in waves, and …oh, yes, of course, of course, this part of my life I’ve been fretting over is so clearly passing, and that part over there I’ve been neglecting is so clearly permanent and worthy of treasuring. Priorities crystallize. Ideas emerge. Thinking becomes lateral. Myopias vanish. In those couple of hours, I decided, yes, this is probably the meaning of life. This is what life may really be about. Traveling into the sunset on a frozen river with the unwavering companionship of a loyal animal. Life is good. I have had a good life. I am having a good life.
… At some point other thoughts of importance and immediacy began materializing at the periphery of my revery. Thoughts like, “geeze, my cheeks are feeling pretty stiff right about now,” and “hmm, that’s kinda weird that my left eyeball feels distinctly colder than the right.” And, “hmm, let’s see, yea, I can still feel a couple toes, good, good…” That’s when I noticed the wind had really picked up with sunset, and silly me, part of my easy progress had been due to the fact it was a direct tailwind. So, just about dark, a stiff breeze blowing downriver, and Jake beginning to wonder about our exact goals that evening… we turned around. Expansive, big-picture, meaning-of-life, thoughts were replaced by the pure singularity of journey-destination thoughts. Progress was slowed by a good fraction, I poled considerably harder, my feet got downright cold, and I got sorta miserable… and elated. I knew exactly where I was. I knew exactly how much real danger I was in (not much). And I knew that dinner and bed would be all the sweeter… and they were. Life is a journey… March is a month for travel… short or long… destination or no…