Large Espresso Mayhem

Liz Lemon's boyfriend Dennis (Dean Winters) from 30 Rock. How is he so funny?

Adventures in Very Recent Evolution

I recently came across an interesting article in The New York Times telling the story of recent changes in human DNA. No matter how stubborn we think our genes may be, human beings are still a species under construction, a species aiming toward something better, perhaps? Here is a snippet from the article:

Ten thousand years ago, people in southern China began to cultivate rice and quickly made an all-too-tempting discovery - the cereal could be fermented into alcoholic liquors. Carousing and drunkenness must have started to pose a serious threat to survival because a variant gene that protects against alcohol became almost universal among southern Chinese and spread throughout the rest of China in the wake of rice cultivation.

The variant gene rapidly degrades alcohol to a chemical that is not intoxicating but makes people flush, leaving many people of Asian descent a legacy of turning red in the face when they drink alcohol.

The spread of the new gene, desceibed in January by Bing Su of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is just one instance of recent human evolution and in particular of a specific population's changing genetically in response to local conditions.

Scientists from the Beijing Genomics Institute last month discovered another striking instance of human genetic change. Among Tibetans, they found, a set of genes evolved to cope with low oxygen levels as recently as 3,000 years ago. This, if confirmed, would be the most recent known instance of human evolution.

Many have assumed that humans ceased to evolve in the distant past, perhaps when people first learned to protect themselves against cold, famine, and other harsh agents of natural selection. But in the last few years, biologists peering into the human genome sequences now available from around the world have found increasing evidence of natural selection at work in the last few thousand years, leading many to assume that human evolution is still in progress.

"I don't think there is any reason to suppose that the rate has slowed down or decreased," says Mark Stoneking, a population geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

The full article, "Adventures in Very Recent Evolution," by Nicholas Wade can be found here.

Splice T-Shirts

I don't think I had the same reaction to the film Splice as most people did. It pushed ethical boundaries. It had disturbing sex scenes. It raised questions. People walked out before it was over. But after the film, I had this incredible urge to dress exactly like Adrien Brody.

A bunch of the t-shirt ideas actually came from Superbug, a shop made available by Cafe Press. If you're anything like me then you'll want to check out Brody's Evolution and Clone This t-shirts at Superbug's Splice hub. If I can only find the awesome fingerprint t-shirt from the film I'll have claimed a hat trick of delight.

Y: The Last Man

Whenever issues of politics or religion come up, the most likely situation is that some interlocutor will make some broad stroke statement and say something like, "If we wiped religion off the face of the planet, we wouldn't have these problems anymore." Y: The Last Man is a comic book series written by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Pia Guerra in which a catastrophe wipes all men off the face of the planet save for a man-child named Yorick and his pet monkey Ampersand. I've thought long and hard about whether I felt I could recommend this series to everyone I know. On the one hand, the adventure is interesting and humorous and filled with references, but this doesn't really make it stand out. On the other hand, the issues and statistics surrounding gender issues are incredibly interesting, and in comic book form this series makes deep and difficult topics easily accessible to any reader. Vaughan is not trying to pin all the crimes of humanity squarely on the shoulders of the male gender, but at the same time he's certainly not giving men a get out of jail free card. (I'm supposed to insert a Catholic joke here, nyet?) I think you'll be hooked on Y: The Last Man pretty quickly if you just pick up a volume or two.

Get Stop Ticket "B.F.V.P.A.F.S."

What Is A Poet?

What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music. His fate is like that of those unfortunates who were slowly tortured by a gentle fire in Phalaris's bull; their cries could not reach the tyrant's ears to cause him dismay, to him they sounded like sweet music. And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.'

- Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt. You may know him from the hit television program 3rd Rock From the Sun or from his films Brick, (500) Days of Summer or Inception. This dude is super-good at acting, incredibly underrated, and he has an amazing fashion sense. If I ever wanted to dress up really nice, I think I would do whatever I could to look like Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Inception. My girlfriend says he has a nice butt, and I feel like I can't live up to that, but I think he's cool nonetheless.