One of the most clever XKCD comics I've seen recently (not that they're not all good):









Microsoft should take a cue from the industrial economist, Clarence Edwin Ayres, who said
"A little inaccuracy saves a world of explanation."

Reverse Evolution?

The New York Times has an article questioning if evolution can run backwards.

The Belgian biologist Louis Dollo was the first scientist to ponder reverse evolution. “An organism never returns to its former state,” he declared in 1905, a statement later dubbed Dollo’s law.

To see if he was right, biologists have reconstructed evolutionary history. In 2003, for example, a team of scientists studied wings on stick insects. They found that the insects’ common ancestor had wings, but some of its descendants lost them. Later, some of those flightless insects evolved wings again.

Yet this study did not necessarily refute Dollo’s law. The stick insects may indeed have evolved a new set of wings, but it is not clear whether this change appeared as reverse evolution at the molecular level. Did the insects go back to the exact original biochemistry for building wings, or find a new route, essentially evolving new proteins?

What follows next is a fairly high-level summary of Dr Thornton's U of Oregon research on changing protein receptors. Basically, what he found was he could change forward "ancestral" proteins by altering a limited number of receptors. However, to change backward modern proteins, additional modifications needed to be made. He deduced that during evolution, in addition to specific changes to ancestral proteins that actually account their ability to do new things, there are also "silent" changes (that evolved by chance along with the significant changes) that don't actually affect the behavior of the modern ones. However, they do prevent the modern proteins from going back to the original function (unless they too are removed). Since the ancestral proteins can go forward with or without the silent changes, but the modern proteins only work in the ancestral form without the silent changes, reverse evolution is far less likely to occur.

In other words, if our kids start having tails, it's not because we are not going back to monkey-style tails, but rather whatever new configuration happens to be most beneficial to our survival. Sorry, Jonathan Coulton, but we're not De-Evolving.

Mass Transit fights to protect its information...

...from people making applications that would improve use of and increase ridership on trains.

Schedule Use
Second Avenue Sagas writes about how the MTA, New York City's mass transit authority, has been trying to force/scare people away from making unaffiliated applications. For instance, Chris Schoenfield "wrote an application with the Metro-North schedule data." However, the MTA

ordered him to cease selling the iPhone application. This charge rested on the claim that the MTA owns the copyright to the schedule data and that Schoenfeld’s use of the data violates that copyright.

Unfortunately for the MTA, the charge

has no basis in legal reality. As the Supreme Court held in the seminal case Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service, 499 U.S. 340 (1991), pure facts are not copyrightable, and train schedules have long fallen under this rubric of pure fact. The MTA can claim a copyright on the presentation of its train schedules, but the train schedule information itself falls under Feist.

I thought I had read (perhaps on Fat Knowledge?) about the Frankfurt train system (or some other German city) doing the same type of thing, but I can't find that story anywhere.

Use of Images

The MTA could come after me for putting this 7 in a purple circle on my blog without their permission. And it wouldn't even matter if I changed the color to green: judging by the case of a guy in San Francisco trying to poke fun at his own city's mass transit system, the MTA seems to think they own the rights to every letter contained in any color circle. Nevermind that (according to Wikipedia's legal department anyway) "text in a general typeface and simple geometric shapes are not protected by copyright."

There may be hope. The New York City Council has written a letter to the MTA urging them to open their scheduling data for application developers, and the Muni T-shirts are back on sale, but this is one big Copyfraud put on by the MTA.

Mapping the 7 Deadly Sins

Wired reports on series of maps that folks at Kansas State put together to show the distribution of the vices across America. While you may have qualms with their definitions of Gluttony or Sloth (and some Christian clergy are questioning the "science" behind it), it makes for an interesting look.

What I noticed right away was that many of the Devilish spots are simply the densely populated areas, and many of the Saintly regions are the "fly-over states" (well, the northern ones anyway). If I had the data, and was good at mapping software, I would make some sort of map that took into account population density. Instead, I just took a density map and made it alternate with the sinfulness map for each of the vices. (Please check the article first so you know how they define all their sins.)

• Greed - This one is probably the best correlated with density, which makes sense because cities generally have more poor and really rich people than the countryside or suburbs.
• Envy - Correlates pretty well with density, except that the Northeast gets off rather unscathed. And holy crap Pacific Northwest! Is everyone stealing each other's bikes, coffees, and chai teas?
• Wrath - Surprisingly uncorrelated. I was especially surprised at the saintlyness of LA / San Diego and Illinois / Indiana / Ohio.
• Sloth - This one doesn't really tell us much except that the western Montanas really like to go out and see shows.
• Gluttony - The extreme concentrations and lack of saintlyness makes this map kinda suspect. Could San Antonio and Odessa, TX, a select portion of Appalachia, and greater greater Virginia Beach really have so many more fast food restaurants that the differences in the rest of the country don't merit a green-to-white gradient?
• Lust - Another vice unrelated to density. The Deep South and Rapid City, SD have enough STD cases to mask any indication of metropolitan areas.
• Pride - It would be very interesting if some other form of "state pride" or "proudness of being American" could be mapped.
  

Cash for Clunkers

One of the most talked about "green initiatives" passed so far this year has been the Cash for Clunkers program, aimed at getting people to trade in their old gas-guzzlers for more fuel efficient cars. There has been a lot of bashing that the efficiency-improvement requirements to get the cash incentive are too modest (22 mpg min. for new car, 4 mpg improvement for $3500 rebate, 10 mpg for $4500). However, according to the Freakonomics Blog, most people are upgrading more than the minimum.

The average vehicle being traded in gets about 15.8 miles per gallon (6.33 gallons per hundred miles), and the average new vehicle that replaces it gets about 25.4 m.p.g. (3.94 gallons/100 miles).

There is substantial fuel saving in this. As Fat Knowledge has pointed out (and Edward Glaeser agrees),

The jump from 10 to 20 m.p.g., for example, saves more gas than the one from 20 to 40 m.p.g. The move from 10 to 11 m.p.g. can save nearly as much as the leap from 33 to 50 m.p.g.

Mr Glaeser goes on to say that this is better than high-speed rail because the savings start immediately. But it reinforces our car dependent way of life. And as the Wall Street Journal points out, it's really expensive.

In a nutshell, getting older cars off the road and substituting them with more fuel-efficient models appears to cost about $365 for each ton of carbon-dioxide emissions that are saved. ... The government estimates of the cost of carbon emissions ... are in the neighborhood of $28 a ton. So, Mr. Knittel asks, could the program ever actually be cost-effective, environmentally-speaking? Sure—if all the clunkers had stayed on the road, racking up mileage and emissions year after year for 60 years each, then it actually makes sense.

Buying more fuel-efficient cars does "save money" for the drivers, but the bill only benefits people who can afford to drive. Since in general, people that drive to work are wealthier than those who take public transit, the Cash for Clunkers program, in general, does not help the people that need it most. One even greener rider for the bill that would help the less wealthy would be to allow the $4500 credit to be used for mass transit passes.

Sexual Predators

Many vocal conservatives get mad whenever sexual predators are given the least bit of leeway, so there are many laws passed that severely restrict the lives of the convicted. As NPR reports, Miami bans "sex offenders from living within 2,500 feet of schools, parks, bus stops and anywhere that children congregate." So not only does this effectively make it impossible for released convicts from using public transportation, it also leave very few places in the city where they are legally allowed to reside. There is one increasingly popular option, though.

"They told me that I had to live up under the Julia Tuttle Causeway," says Barclay. "I said, 'How come I have to live under the Julia Tuttle Causeway?' They said, 'If you want to go home, this is where you got to go.' "

Barclay has a driver's license issued to him at the time of his release. His address is listed as Julia Tuttle Causeway.

Like many of the sex offenders on supervised release, Barclay is required to be here between 6 p.m. and 7 a.m. During the day, many of the felons leave for jobs or to visit their families.

Bill O'Reilly can rejoice that in Indiana, however, there's one less predator on the streets. One Mr Daniels was arrested during a "meet-up", thinking he was going to score big with three girls, only to find that all of them were undercover cops (who didn't know each other).

And maybe parents need to listen to the advice of an ex-pedophile to protect their children.

Crete

I know that this blog is in no way a travel blog, but I just returned from a trip to Crete, and share some of my observations of that island.

Geography and Climate

Apart from some coastal plains that stretch not more than a mile inward, Crete is solid mountains. This makes for some pretty complicated road engineering to reach the little towns that seem flung throughout the hills.

Most communities are small, and spread across the island's many fields of olive trees and orange trees. Many of the coastal plains are full of greenhouses for tomatoes, cucumbers, and other veggies. The crop that "covers" the greatest part of the island is also one of the least noticeable: honey. Even in the rocky crags far above the habitat for trees, bees from apiaries seek out flowers from wild thyme and other high-altitude shrubs.

The soil is often rocky, but the farmers have one benefit from Crete: the weather is extraordinarily consistent. From December to March, it will rain about every second day. Otherwise, it is completely dry and for the most part sunny. Many farmers have cisterns that fill with water during the wet season.

Religious Buildings

In addition to churches and a few mosques and monasteries, two notable additions to religious structures in Crete are the ubiquitous chapels and shrines. The chapels are gathering places for 5-20 people, often in geographically interesting (i.e. cave) or remote (i.e. the top of an 860 m mountain) places. They're usually dedicated to a specific saint, and used just a couple times a year. Shrines look like miniature chapels and seem to be every couple km on every road on the whole island.

What is this? A center for ants? How can we be expected to teach children to learn how to read... if they can't even fit inside the building?

Energy

Given Crete incredible amount of sun, it comes at no surprise that some forms of solar power are used. While I didn't see a single PV panel, almost every building had solar water heating, either in the form of a big black tub on its roof, or the standard off-the-shelf heat pipe variety. It works so well that most places just have electric "backup" for hot water and rely mostly on the sun.

The other thing to notice in the left picture is all those metal rods sticking out of the roof. That's because this building isn't "finished". Oh sure, it's occupied and there's all that water infrastructure on the roof, but the owners are still "planning" to add another floor. The tax laws in Crete state that a building that is not "completed" is assessed at a lower value or subject to a lower rate (I'm not sure which). Either way, the taxes for an "unfinished" building are less. Therefore, it seemed like 3/4 of all 1-3 story residential buildings are "designed" to be one story higher, complete with extra-long reinforcing members, but then stopped for some reason "part way through".
One renewable electrical source being used is wind. I saw two wind farms on top of ridges and a third being built. The turbines probably have a pretty good capacity factor if the consistency of wind is anything like that for sun.

Ancient Crete

I stayed near ruins of the ancient city of Falasarna, built in 335 BC. The city had a fortified harbor, and the rest of the buildings were built up a steep hill and protected by a stone wall. These defenses held up for 300 years, but were no match for the Roman fleet that destroyed the city after it became a haven for pirates.

But even without the Romans, Falasarna would not have remained a thriving port forever. You may have noticed that there doesn't actually seem to be that much water around these buildings. That is probably due to a big earthquake that actually raised the land elevation 6 meters, bringing all the docking infrastructure high and dry. The left picture shows the long peninsula on which Falasarna was built. On the right, the dark lines on the distant cliff show the previous level of the water.

On the horizon in the left picture, you can just make out another land mass. This is the island Antikythera, home to 44 people. Apart from being the 2nd least populous district in Greece, the island is most famous for a sunken ship that was found nearby. Scientists found on this ship the Antikythera mechanism, that clock-like device that kept track of planetary movement

The device is remarkable for the level of miniaturization and for the complexity of its parts, which is comparable to that of 18th century clocks. It has over 30 gears. When a date was entered via a crank (now lost), the mechanism calculated the position of the Sun, Moon, or other astronomical information such as the location of other planets. Since the purpose was to position astronomical bodies with respect to the celestial sphere, with reference to the observer's position on the surface of the earth, the device was based on the geocentric model.

As Wikipedia says, the mechanism is many centuries ahead of its time. Therefore, many people, such as Erich von Daniken, have claimed that it's proof of alien interactions.

The device was clearly a navigational instrument used in alien spaceships, which "tells us how little we know about the wisdom which the gods whispered into the ears of their darlings".