I feel the sudden urge to flaunt my failures and shortcomings on this website in the form of rejection letters from publications and places of employment. It may be indulgent, masochist and most probably pointless, but so is blogging.
Let’s start off with the most recent. Today I applied via email for a part-time “contract” position at the Musculoskeletal Clinic as a medical writer. The reply broke a record for the speediest rejection thus far (10 minutes). In a way that’s great and efficient, but in another way, I must have been so obviously not the right person for the job, that of a science writer, I wonder what my fancy education in science writing is actually worth–10 minutes of consideration?
Dear gillt,
Thank you for applying to the Medical Writer position. I have reviewed your CV. Unfortunately your profile does not correspond to our criteria as we are looking for someone with extensive clinical experience.
I forgot to mention in my resume that I was a human guinea pig on numerous studies and therefore have clinical experience from the “other side” of the examining table.
Tarantino made a movie about Nazis and WWII. It has Brad Pitt–the pothead from True Romance–”Ryan the temp” from TheOffice, and Schweiber from Freaks and Geeks hunting Nazis. Revealing Schwieber quote via Freaks and Geeks “I’m Jewish. That’s no cakewalk either. Last year, I was elected school treasurer. I didn’t even run!”
More importantly, why did Tarantino embark down this particular beaten-like-a-dead-horse path? Because we need one more film on WWI and zee Nazis, especially after the two I haven’t seen in 2008? Why apply the trademark Tarantino vortex of verbosity and ultraviolence to an already overwrought and violent genre? Judging from the trailer alone, I think QT has remaked ripped-offAldrich’s The Dirty Dozen with a dash of Kelly’s Heroes. That’s not to say QT is the Shepard Fairey of film. Even at his least Tarantino is no hack.
True Romance, From Dusk Till Dawn, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill and Deathproof were hailed as pumping new life into and redefining their respective genres: Drama, subgenre: romance; Horror, subgenre: creature feature; Crime/Gangster, subgenre: heist/cop; Action, subgenre: kung fu and western; Grindhouse, subgenre: psycho-killer and car chase. Even the widely panned Jackie Brown was still seen as an ultimately failed yet bold reimagining of the crime drama. Perhaps QT has bought into the hype of his own legacy: tarantinorizing every movie genre. Like any good theory, mine should have predictive power. Some movie title suggestions for genres QT will at some point in the future redefine:
One impression of the NHGRI sponsored seminar: has the once mighty Drosophila become so blase as to not even get a tip of the hat at a genetics seminar? I would expect as much from a bunch of paleontologists or ecologists, but shame on you geneticists. I wouldn’t interpret this as model bashing, because Mus and Danio had bit rolls in a few of the talks. I think the message is that genomics has moved on. We are now at a stage where researchers are becoming intrepid Victorian specimen collectors, chasing down rare and exotic flora and fauna for their private collection. I thought the smartest point made was that now even humans are a model system, or, rather, everything is a model!
Second: Genetic drift got short shrift. Mutation and random fluctuations in the frequencies of alleles or haplotypes seem like a worthwhile topic when discussing Darwin’s legacy. I would have liked to see more on theory incorporated into the discussion. On a related note, one of the speakers stated that negative mutations were the most common form of mutation. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt that he either mispoke or I misheard him.
David Kingsley talked about skeletal genes. He made the point that changes in regulatory regions rather than coding regions allow for dramatic phenotypic variation, while keeping it confined to specific tissues. For example, the same genes involved in embryonic development in sticklebacks also regulate armor plating and melanin. Mutations in the corresponding genes in mice and humans are often lethal. Sticklebacks are probably not a lab animal: being anadromous I doubt they can breed them in the lab yet, so all the work is done in hotel bathrooms in Alaska.
There was a bit of junk DNA bashing from Elaine Ostrander, but that’s what makes these events fun. I’m sure if Larry Moran was there, he’d show her what snarkyness really is:
David Haussler was the third of six speakers at the Darwin @ 200 seminar. Since I saw at least one phlogenetic twig during the presentation, I would hope that the arborist would tackle Haussler’s talk.
A quick note though, either one of the two Davids or Ajit Varki speculated that humans as a species may be immunizing ourselves against the tooth and claw logic of natural selection. I’m not suggesting that natural selection is a tautology, but by what means might have reason to suspect that “natural” selective forces are quantitatively decreasing across the species from Bangor to Bangladesh is a mystery to me. I suspect that what is being put forward is a semantic rather than a real argument.
What is it with humans and our existential insecurities? Rapture this global warming that. Apparently, the price of an oversized cortex is a steep one. It means we make movies, Mad Max, Night of the Living Dead, Day After Tomorrow and Idiocracy and write books, Left Behind, The Stand, Oryx and Crake, and The Road , slapping ourselves on the wrist over our transgressions to god and mother Earth: one-size fits all diatribes. Even behind the cheap laughs of Idiocracy and bravado of Mad Max stands akimbo a stern-looking Miss Wormwood telling us to sit-up straight, take notice and recycle, say our prayers, and stop being such greedy little bastards. (Shawn of the Dead being an obvious exception.)
Adding to the pantheon, is a movie (The Age of Stupid) due in spring, and a TV series (Remnants) with no release date. If the movie is anything like its trailer below, it’ll be an uninspiring hour and a half of non-sequiturs backdropped against post-production cgi. If the series is anything like its trailer, it’ll be the Office after the global pandemic. Though these two genre vehicles have similar subject matter, they are somewhat opposite in their approach to that material.
Everyone’s favorite Leech Blog, BdellaNea, discusses a leach-powered storm-stracking system on display at the Great Exhibition at London’s Crystal Palace in 1851. “The device required a leech in each of 12 jars. The glass was to be transparent so that the leeches could “see each other” and so agree amongst themselves as to their prognostication. If any leech climbed up and into the escape tube, its weight would dislodge a piece of whalebone, releasing a hammer that would ring the bell thus announcing the onset of inclement weather.”
Eugene C. Scott & Glenn Branch writing in the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach have a wonderful article addressing a common misconception. Their title says it all: Don’t Call it “Darwinism”
ABSTRACT: Evolutionary biology owes much to Charles Darwin, whose discussions of common descent and natural selection provide the foundations of the discipline. But evolutionary biology has expanded well beyond its foundations to encompass many theories and concepts unknown in the 19th century. The term “Darwinism” is, therefore, ambiguous and misleading. Compounding the problem of “Darwinism” is the hijacking of the term by creationists to portray evolution as a dangerous ideology—an “ism”—that has no place in the science classroom. When scientists and teachers use “Darwinism” as synonymous with evolutionary biology, it reinforces such a misleading portrayal and hinders efforts to present the scientific standing of evolution accurately. Accordingly, the term “Darwinism” should be abandoned as a synonym for evolutionary biology.
When we see someone in the MSM getting things horribly wrong we howl in savage delight. Like a pack of African Wild Dogs, we’ll zero in on lame creature, seperating it from the false safety of the herd–all the while yipping for others to join in the hunt–tire the hapless prey and run it to ground, then bite and tear off large dripping chunks as it thrashes instinctively, helplessly. Those of use who don’t partake in the slaughter revel in watching the macabre unfold.
Every so often, thought, we must admire our quarries vim and vigor, paying respect to a spirit of vitality. Take a moment to read this strong editorial in the Guardian on “the greatest Englishman since Newton.”
In a democracy, citizens should respect each other’s beliefs; and citizens have a right to express their beliefs. But in a democracy, a newspaper has an obligation to what is right. The truth is that Darwin’s reasoning has in the last 150 years been supported overwhelmingly by discoveries in biology, geology, medicine and space science. The details will keep scientists arguing for another 200 years, but the big picture has not changed. All life is linked by common ancestry, including human life. The shameful lesson of this 200th anniversary of his birth is that Darwin’s contemporaries understood more clearly than many modern Britons.
I couldn’t resist posting this track by Baba Brinkman. It apparently was created as part of the Darwin Bicentennial celebrations. As a warning, it’s both anti-creationist and anti-theistic to some degree. It’s very rare for an academically themed song to be any good. I’m impressed.
The National Endowment for the Arts plotted a curve based on percentage of 18 to 24 year old’s who read “literature.” Their idea of “literature” must be quantitative, because I’m pretty sure the release of Harry Potter accounts for the 2002 uptick.
When I was in undergrad fulfilling the requirements for a Biology and English Literature degree, there were, to put it nicely, a few bureaucratic brambles along the way. For instance, I had two advisers from different planets. My biology adviser only knew, and was only interested in knowing, the requirements for a biology degree. He thought the “Poetics of Dynamic Text” was a chapter on blood formation. The same gaping knowledge hole afflicted my English Lit adviser as well. This Confederacy of Dunces said I needed a statistics course, one especially geared toward my degree program. That meant two semesters of redundancy on a rather dry subject. As you can imagine, the Humanities stat. requirement was orders of magnitude more basic than the one for biology. Anyway, I had to take both, and so I resented both. I didn’t do so hot, but I learned enough to spot when someone is blatantly manipulating data in a graph. Dear reader(s), can you flush out the egregious, almost laughable, attempt to skew the data in the following graph from the National Endowment for the Arts?
Poor old National Endowment. They’re always the first, followed by education, to have their funding slashed when we feel the need drop bombs or bail out some captain of industry. Can you really blame them for propagandizing such benevolent government initiatives as increasing literacy? You betcha!
<a href="http://blogs-r.us/bioblog/files/2009/02/neagraph2.gif"><img src="http://blogs-r.us/bioblog/files/2009/02/neagraph2.gif" alt="Revised Graph" class="size-full wp-image-225" height="311" width="500" /></a>
I made a new graph that righted two fibs. First, the spacing on the x-axis from 1982-85 is almost the same distance as it is from 2002-08. One is a three year gap and the other a six year gap. The NEA can judge what constitutes literature but they can’t count. By shortening the 2002-08 gap, they skew the percent increase in their favor. They even admit as much: “this dramatic turnaround shows that the many programs now focused on reading, including our own Big Read, are working [!]” I fixed that.
Second, unless you have a good reason it’s usually a good idea to have percentages start at zero. Not doing so may make the graph prettier, but also less accurate. I fixed that, too.
Graphs act as visual aids to a list of numbers, teasing out otherwise hard to detect trends. They are supposed to represent the data, not your interpretation of the data. If the NEA is lying by graph, what’s to stop them from fudging the data their fudged graph is based on?
I plotted their graph correctly, but am having problems importing it. (Was that a C or B I got in CS 101?) C’est la vie.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=48ec0f60-9e33-4a5f-bb70-70c8109d68df)
Poor old National Endowment. They’re always the first, followed by education, to have their funding slashed when we feel the need drop bombs or bail out some captain of industry. Can you really blame them for propagandizing such benevolent government initiatives as increasing literacy? You betcha!
<a href="http://blogs-r.us/bioblog/files/2009/02/neagraph2.gif"><img src="http://blogs-r.us/bioblog/files/2009/02/neagraph2.gif" alt="Revised Graph" class="size-full wp-image-225" height="311" width="500" /></a>
I made a new graph that righted two fibs. First, the spacing on the x-axis from 1982-85 is almost the same distance as it is from 2002-08. One is a three year gap and the other a six year gap. The NEA can judge what constitutes literature but they can’t count. By shortening the 2002-08 gap, they skew the percent increase in their favor. They even admit as much: “this dramatic turnaround shows that the many programs now focused on reading, including our own Big Read, are working [!]” I fixed that.
Second, unless you have a good reason it’s usually a good idea to have percentages start at zero. Not doing so may make the graph prettier, but also less accurate. I fixed that, too.
Graphs act as visual aids to a list of numbers, teasing out otherwise hard to detect trends. They are supposed to represent the data, not your interpretation of the data. If the NEA is lying by graph, what’s to stop them from fudging the data their fudged graph is based on?
I plotted their graph correctly, but am having problems importing it. (Was that a C or B I got in CS 101?) C’est la vie.
