Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus

Paul Davies, writing in the Grauniad, has thought of a way to approach a cancer cure. The clever bit is, Professor Davies is a noted physicist - nay, a cosmologist, yet - who was asked to think about cancer from a non-biologist perspective, to "think outside of the box", as it is termed.

In the article, Cancer: The beat of an ancient drum? he says,

Two years ago, in a spectacularly enlightened move, the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) decided to enlist the help of physical scientists. The idea was to bring fresh insights from disciplines like physics to help tackle cancer in radical new ways. Twelve research centres were created to focus the effort, and I was approached to run the one based at Arizona State University.

With no prior knowledge of cancer, I started asking some very basic questions. What struck me from the outset is that something as pervasive and stubborn as cancer must be a deep part of the story of life itself. Sure enough, cancer is found in almost all multicellular organisms, suggesting its origins stretch back hundreds of millions of years.

So far so good.

A century ago the German biologist Ernst Haekel pointed out that the stages of embryo development recapitulate the evolutionary history of the animal. Human embryos, for instance, develop, then lose, gills, webbed feet and rudimentary tails, reflecting their ancient aquatic life styles. The genes responsible for these features normally get silenced at a later stage of development, but sometimes the genetic control system malfunctions and babies get born with tails and other ancestral traits. Such anomalous features are called atavisms.

Charles Lineweaver of the Australian National University is, like me, a cosmologist and astrobiologist with a fascination for how cancer fits into the story of life on Earth. Together we developed the theory that cancer tumours are a type of atavism that appears in the adult form when something disrupts the silencing of ancestral genes. The reason that cancer deploys so many formidable survival traits in succession, is, we think, because the ancient genetic toolkit active in the earliest stages of embryogenesis gets switched back on, re-activating the Proterozoic developmental plan for building cell colonies.

That's "Haeckel". And the plot appears to be from the X-Files, although I think the Cigarette Smoking Man was also involved somewhere along the way. Biologist PZ Myers at Pharyngula has a blog post showing where Davies is wrong, he's wrong, and where he's right, biologists have already thought of it. (They had a head start, after all.) One clue - Haeckel, who came up with his theory in the 1860s, wasn't exactly correct. Ontology does not actually recapitulate phylogeny.



Anyway, the 'theory' doesn't actually include much physics. So I have a better one for you, Prof. Davies. You know how biologists in the 1600s knew that sperm have a little homunculus sitting in the head which, when implanted in a womb, develops into a child and then into an adult? Well, why don't you invent a sort of micro-MRI that you can use to scan the homunculi, and if they have tiny cancers, cut them out using a small knife...a "gamma knife" sounds small, that'll do...and then fertilize eggs with the cured sperm that will grow up to be cancer free adults?

That's "thinking outside the box" for you!

We can share the Nobel.

Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard - Poly Styrene, RIP

In 1976 I left home for London to go to university. My new pals mostly listened to well-spoken young men from Canterbury who took acid and punted up and down the River Cant, or whatever the hell it is, being twee, idyllic and musicianly.

Not everyone, though. One day someone put on Oh Bondage Up Yours, instantly scaring away the bucolic scenes conjured up by people who all, in retrospect, seemed to have been Phil Manzanera. It was fun, and liberating. Yes, I used that word. It used to mean something, in a woolly short-life-housing, yoghurt-weaving sort of way.

Between the Slits' angry and dynamic female punk and that of Poly Styrene's X Ray Spex, the seventies made it possible for women to get on stage and tell it like it was. (I bought and read Patti Smith's memoir of her time with Robert Mapplethorpe [Just Kids] yesterday, and she mentions auditioning guitarists for her band in late 1974, when "none of them warmed up to a girl being the leader", until she found Ivan Kral.) Now Ari Up of the Slits is dead and Poly Styrene is dead as well. She probably doesn't mind, being a Krishna Consciousness devotee, but I mind.

Rather than the raucous Oh Bondage, I think I'll start listening with Germ Free Adolescent, which in a way was less part of the last of punk and more one of the first few things of the eighties. I can remember hearing this on a day much like today, sunny with birds singing, and with cheese sandwiches avec mustard in the kitchen, except days like that are much more rare in London than in So Cal.

Yes, their songs got on Top of the Pops.

And Identity:

And here's a long punk medley that will last the rest of this quiet and bright, almost Canterbury-esque day. [Link alas decayed]

Wars.

Told you so:

Britain sending military team to Libya.

Told you so too, although I didn't think it would be less than 24 hours between the two:

Libyan rebels support having Western troops help evacuate civilians.

The Kills

I'm off to see the Kills in Nashville on Friday.

I couldn't resist seeing them in San Diego last Friday with my friend LOT. Beautiful day to be there.

Due to a certain amount of hangover, I wasn't up to writing a review of it, but I enjoyed the show very much. Next week I'll be seeing them in Nashville with LOT and Aquamarine.

The House of Blues was much more congenial than the last time I was there - or maybe there isn't such a high percentage of twits at a Kills concert compared with Dead Weather fans. The tickets came with a signed picture of the Kills, and on mine Jamie has put his "x" over his own face. I guess he got bored with signing them all.

No, I didn't actually get the set list. Barry Benchpress, the eight foot tall 250 pound security guard with gigantic rocklike pectorals that got into every photo I took, along with his hair, fluorescent earplugs and craggy visage, passed it to the young women beside me and I took a photo of it as I left.

The hangover was due to starting early in the hotel room, I guess. House of Blues certainly made it difficult to drink. Last time I was there they had waitress service, but this time, I went to the bar and the bouncer made me go upstairs to show my ID at the door again and get a wrist band (and who wants to do that trek when you have a spot at the barrier and you know it could close up at any instant), and then I came back down and bought two drinks, and the bouncer stopped me from coming out with them and said I had to drink them at the bar....! I said, 'You could have told me that first!' He just shrugged. So I drank one and the nice barman kept the other one for my friend while we saved her spot, but of course we didn't dare try for a second drink. Next time - nylon hip flask! It's got to be done.

My friend said the problem with the Naked and the Famous was that they were neither naked nor famous. Perhaps that will change and we can look forward to them in all their glory later.

Satellite acoustic, which is apparently non-embeddable.

And the current radio medley, You Don't Love Me/Steppin' Razor is also non-embeddable. This attempt to figure out who is watching the videos will backfire in the end, as when I'm not drunk I'm perfectly capable of pseudo-embedding them. But for today, do click the link.


Edit: Here's You Don't Love Me/Steppin' Razor

Koi

Also at the Mission, SJC - koi in the fountain, with rain and palm tree reflection.

Mission visit

We went to the SJC mission the other day. For no apparent reason they had a Lewis and Clark exhibition. Or the Corps of Discovery...are those two different things? Surely Southern California wasn't a big part of the Lewis and Clark deal?

Anyway, they had activities for kids, so we did them.

Brief catch up

I haven't posted anything on here in a month. No excuse really. Just nothing heartening to post about. Japan suffered a massive loss of life, there was a Chernobyl-level nuclear incident, and the world discovered that the budget deficit is not due to the recent incredible increase in the difference between the wealthiest and the ordinary people in America, where the top 1% take home 20% of the money, but no longer pay their share of taxes, and was not due to things like bankers selling worthless credit swaps to each other until the music stopped and government had to bail them out to the tune of trillions of dollars, but was in fact caused by unionized folks who insist on taking the pensions they've paid into all their working lives and old folks who've been paying Medicare taxes who now, selfishly, want to use Medicare. But now we know, and our agreeable president seems to ... agree and is off to fix the budget accordingly.

He also showed he was one of the boys by starting yet another expensive and hurty war. He completely fell down on the illegality part of it his predecessors were so good at, though. This is technically a legal war. Luckily for his place in history, this one has the potential to go full-Vietnam. You know:

Let's have a no-fly zone!

Um, telling him not to fly isn't working. We're going to have to use planes.

I guess we have to hit anti-aircraft targets on the ground too?

I suppose we better hit that tank convoy as well, even though it's not technically flying anywhere.

Damn, we hit civilians. Well, let's kill twice as many gov't forces to make up for it.

The rebels aren't exactly winning. We'd better send them some weapons.

We need people on the ground to call in air strikes.

We'd better send the rebels some advisors.

Maybe some of our advisors should fight?

Better send in some Marines.

Is the army doing anything else right now? Oh.

How does everyone feel about the draft? Oh.

Let's not put the draft thing in the form of a question this time.

Getting Biblical Inerrancy right

This one would be 'wrong'.

It's funny because the same book in the Bible forbids tattoos.

Leviticus 19:28 "Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the LORD."

Seen via makinglight.

Jack White and Third Man Records at SXSW

Ok, this is what comes out of the Third Man Rolling Records Store when it stops:



It's Jack White with a couple of iconic performances - Not Fade Away followed by Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground followed by Seasick Steve bringing it all back home, or at least back to SXSW which is sort of home.

And dig all the young people texting their appreciation in the front row! What bands may need is an Applause App so at the end of each song the performer knows we're not all talking about Shah-Lin-Da and how she's like totally into that weird dude, but actually keeping half an eye on the band.

Jack White is up to stuff

My childhood, several centuries ago, was enlivened with stories of English rock bands and their touring vans, which were cramped and unheated and full of battered cheap gear that musicians these days would give an arm and a leg to obtain - and how often these beat groups got sick on the road, and how often the bands got laid in the back of those vans. Paul Kossoff, the druggiest of Free, was the best driver in that group and would cheerfully drive the length of Great Britain without a protest or a problem. Jimmy Page, touring with a combo of now-mostly-forgotten rockers in a van, famously got sick from Glandular Fever (Mono, in US-speak) and retired from touring forever at the ripe old age of 19 (or something), vowing to spend the future as a session musician. (I believe he went back to touring with some group or other later, when he preferred charter jets with fur-topped beds in the cabin.) The rivalry between those groups who preferred the Bedford van and those groups who preferred the legendary Transit van is the stuff of sagas.



So now Jack has translated the full musical van-experience from live music to vinyl, transferring the romance of the touring troubadours of rock to the staff of the record store. Four or fewer Lovable Moptops (Ben Swank) will soon arrive at our doorsteps to personally provide us with sounds at whatever cost to their selves, their relationships and their health.

One hopes Jack has taken to heart the tales of all those English boys tested - and so many of whom were broken - by the stress of having to get to Bradford St. George's Hall by 1 pm next day after the Hammersmith Odeon gig last night, in the freezing fog with the top two gears f*cked and the brakes a bit slushy and a slapper in the back seat who's forgotten her shoes. If not, we'll no doubt hear these epic tales of struggle and victory from Third Man in their tweets and web-updates.

Actual footage of a fictional group race between a Bedford and a Transit. You don't want to know the movie it comes from.

Also, the first person to glom/glue/clamp/magnet a GPS on the underside of this sucker at SXSW and tell us where it's headed in future will win my undying appreciation.

Vanalden Cave

Last Sunday, inspired by a post on boing boing, we went to Vanalden Cave. This is in Tarzana, Los Angeles. It's a relatively easy half mile hike, although it was quite slippy on the trails that day. If you follow the directions on the internet, it will tell you to get out of the car when Vanalden Avenue dead ends, and follow the trail to the cave. They also state that when you come to the place where you don't know which way to go, go right. This very psychedelic description is quite fitting, as apparently Vanalden cave is where the 'shroomers hang out, but it's not very useful as there are at least two places where you don't know which way to go.

At the first one, go left.

At the other one, go right.

I'm used to great sweeping limestone caves like Gaping Gill, so Los Angeles' sandstone cavern seemed very different to me.

It's dry and warm inside, although there are a lot of holes in the roof where it rains in when it does rain.

What makes it interesting is generations of people have carved the soft sandstone inside, and painted the walls outside. It's like an Angelino Lascaux or Tassili.

This was a fun trip, especially as I also got to eat a double-double at In 'n' Out Burger.

Surfing teh interwebs

On a Sunday morning, surfing teh interwebs is my favorite activity. Today I spent a couple of hours reading about a fascinating controversy over whether a cabal of writers known as the YA Mafia really do have the power to crush aspiring writers who negatively review their books on the internet. Thrilling stuff, brought to my attention by adult and YA writer John Scalzi's blog, where he protests too much that he and all of his YA writing friends could never find time to fuck with anyone's careers. I read all the source material...well, not all of it. There's reams of blog posts. Hundreds of them. And tens of thousands of comments.

After that I headed off to Fandom Wank to see if the YA Mafia had made the grade to be discussed there and found that it had not. Slow off the mark, FW! At FW, I learned that My Little Pony posts had so overwhelmed 4 Chan that it had been forced to start banning them to avoid being broken. If anything was going to break 4 Chan, I guess it had to be My Little Pony. And then I read some other wanks, mostly about someone called Misha and a rhino. [Fandom Wank has disappeared and links have broken, alas. 10/2017]

Yessirree, surfing the nets is the way to go.

Then I followed up on my google alerts, and one of them - for the Dead Weather - turned up a picture of me! Yes, me, on the internets! Here I am.

That's probably too large to display properly, but you could save it to your hard disk and treasure it. I'm the one on the very far left of the picture. Go me. That was at the Roxy in Los Angeles, and I mostly remember being very impressed with Little Jack Lawrence's trousers, which were of a much thicker and costlier schmutter than I thought they would be. Reminded me of Coleridge- 'as if this earth in fast, thick pants were breathing'. One of poetry's greatest lines, I always thought.

False alarm

I thought I didn't have any emails from work. But I took the battery out of the BlackBerry and put it back in again and now I have about ten irritating questions from work to answer. Let this be a lesson to you. If you aren't getting emails from work, then the mantra "Switch it off and switch it on again" should not be applied until Monday morning.

All Quiet on the Western Front

My bastard work BlackBerry ran out of juice yesterday and I finally managed to charge it up today and it when it woke up it registered zero - zero! - emails from work. The last one was Saturday evening.

I've no idea how that happened as the work guys seem to work in relays to shovel things to my door on Sundays. Thought I'd finished reviewing standard operating procedures? Surprise! Here's another five I finished on Saturday at 11 pm. It's a work BlackBerry. I don't have a phone. I have this one purely because work wants me to have a phone that lets me know if I need to work at night or during the weekend.

No emails at all on Sunday. That's actually quite odd. Either all the others have developed civilized attitudes to work, or...

Or I don't have an alternative. The world ended and nobody told me?

Recipes: The Other Dismal Science

My other half says cooking is hard. I say cooking is easy. He cites the lack of proper standard operating procedures, and, even where they are available, the preponderance of phrases like "beat until well mixed", "cook until done" and "heat until hot".

I bought a joint of meat today and the helpful instructions on the peel-off tag read, in full:

Cooking Instructions:

Place roast, fat side up, on rack in shallow roasting pan. Do not add water or cover. Remove roast when thermometer registers 135-140°F for medium rare, 150-155°F for medium. Let roast stand 15-20 minutes. Roast will finish cooking and be easier to carve.

If I followed those instructions, I'd have a piece of beef sitting on a kitchen counter forever, because of course the kitchen never (I hope) reaches 135°F. It's usually around 70°F, in my estimation. If the kitchen was one day to set on fire, I would afterwards come in and take the roast out of the shallow roasting pan and let it stand.

The tag does not mention anything about using an oven or a grill, or what temperature it should be set at. A novice might guess from the instructions, if you realized you needed a heat source, that it should be from 135°F to 155°F, depending on which one you want to obtain, but I think most of us know that's not the case. The options range from 350°F to 550°F, so a hint might be a good idea. There isn't even the slightest estimate of time, so if we want to roast potatoes or vegetables, we can't begin to estimate when to add them to the pan.

And this is a professionally-written label for the meat. On the internet the situation is far worse, as everything seems to be written by amateurs, or possibly pranksters, with the exceptions of recipes ripped off of Madhur Jaffrey without regard to her copyright. Something that tasted right to some beery lunatic in Mississippi or Essex and, after being misremembered, incorrectly typed on to the internet three days later, gets copied and re-copied on to every recipe site. This means that a Google search will bring up seventy recipes for say, butternut squash ravioli in BBQ sauce, and 69 of them will be identical, but surrounded by slightly different ads for a local housewife who has discovered One Trick Of A Tiny Belly, and, amazingly, ads by another local housewife who has discovered One Trick Dermatologists Don't Want Me To Know!

Some of these recipes have missing ingredients. You assemble everything in the ingredients list and then gamely try to follow the drunk instructions until you hit "grate the onion finely" or "add the chopped artichoke hearts". No onions were specified in the ingredients, never mind artichoke hearts. Others are missing steps, so that you are to add the ingredients you blended in step number four, except step number four is to simmer for four hours. Is it safe, then, to just blend those ingredients? Who the hell knows?

The 70th one will inevitably be copied from a 1953 Good Housekeeping and include food ingredients that are no longer legal, such as kerosene, whale oil and maraschino cherries.

For a moment there I went into a dream where the Food and Drug Administration controlled food labeling in the same way they control drug labeling. The package insert would be 40 pages of 6 point type and include every possible interaction, contraindication and side effect. Dosages of the meat for persons under 18 would have not been established, and parents would have to prescribe the food for their kids off-label, risking severe penalties, malpractice suits and civil money penalties if Medicare or Medi-Cal was involved.