All posts by Wan Kong Yew

Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (May ’10)

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Four articles this month with three of them related to human biology. We’ll start with the biggest scientific news of the week however, which I suspect will also be the most important news of the year, about the creation of what is considered to be the first example of synthetic life.

This particular news has been reported in many outlets of course (though strangely I failed to notice it in any local publications) but the particular piece I’m linking to is from the BBC. The team responsible was led by Craig Venter who has already established his place in scientific history for being one of the winners of the race to sequence the complete human genome. This particular project involved creating a synthetic version of an existing bacterial genome and transplanting the result into a non-synthetic host cell. This new cell then replicated itself over a billion times, proving that the synthetic genome worked just as well as the natural one to regulate the bacterium over its life cycle.

Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (May ’10) →

Fun

Map of touristyness

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Not much to write about at the moment, so here’s a link to the publicized map of how “touristy” different parts of the world are. What’s interesting about this is that the data is more fine grained than just tourist arrival numbers sorted by country. You can actually see which specific hotspots tourists are flocking too. Of course, it’s all automatically generated based on Panoramio so there’s obvious selection bias in the data. I wouldn’t imagine that many tourists from China for example use the site.

Rather shocking how western Europe is basically one huge tourist hotspot, but some parts of Malaysia are right up there in popularity. You can check out the full map on Google Maps as usual. It seems Google had nothing to do with this. It was just someone’s cool idea to link Google Maps with data from the Panoramio website.

Religion

Excommunication of Catholic nun

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This is latest piece of news throwing the archaic morality of the Catholic church into the spotlight. To summarize, a pregnant woman was discovered to be gravely ill and the doctors decided that if she continued with the pregnancy, both her and her baby would almost certainly die. The patient therefore agreed to an abortion. The problem was that she was too sick to be moved and the hospital she was in was a Catholic one.

After some hesitation, an administrator at the hospital, Sister Margaret McBride, gave her approval for the abortion. The patient was duly saved at the cost of the fetus. But when the bishop heard about it, he declared that the nun was automatically excommunicated. According to the church, this was because it is not permissible to do evil even to bring about good as the end does not justify the means and abortion is unequivocally evil. The official church position is that the correct thing to do would be to allow both the mother and the fetus to die.

What’s even more infuriating about all this is that the patient was only 11 weeks pregnant, so the fetus had absolutely no chance of survival independently of the mother. Predictably, critics have compared this harsh and immediate judgment with the church’s tolerance of child sexual abuse by members of the clergy. It seems that according to the church, an abortion is a mortal sin that cannot be tolerated, regardless of the context and circumstances, while pedophile priests are to be sympathized with and forgiven.

Science, Science Fiction

The end of the space shuttle

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A timely post on QT3 today reminded me that the venerable space shuttle is scheduled for retirement this year. The current mission by the Atlantis is its last one. The last mission for Discovery is in September later this year and the last mission for Endeavor will be in November. Huge crowds are expected at Cape Canaveral for these final two launches. After that, NASA will be relying on Russian spacecraft for its missions until the alternatives currently under development by private companies like SpaceX and Orbital Sciences come to fruition.

It’s sort of hard to believe that the space shuttle has been in service for close to 30 years now given that it’s such a icon of technology and humanity’s ambitions for space. Reading through its extensive Wikipedia page however, it’s sobering to realize how much of it is still based on 1970s technology. Its computers are probably less powerful than the cheapest netbooks you can buy today. Until 2007, the shuttles could not even be used in missions that started at the end of December and ended in January of the next year as the software couldn’t handle the transition to a new year.

Yet back in the 1980s, the space shuttle seemed like only a foretaste of greater things to come. I remember newspaper articles crowing about space habitats and colonies, complete with artists’ renditions of such wonders as torus-shaped stations large enough to create their own gravity and grow their own crops. It’s pretty humbling how far back we’ve scaled our ambitions since then. In an age when governments are busy dealing with economic recessions and unemployment, it seems that even keeping the International Space Station from falling out of the sky is an achievement.

Even my own views on space exploration have come a long way since I was a kid. Back then, I’d have happily voted for any big ticket space project, regardless of cost. Nowadays, I see that these projects yield relatively few benefits other than prestige and that actually useful scientific work can be better performed with unmanned spacecraft and at far lower cost. It’s clever stuff like the Mars Pathfinder that is the future of NASA while the development of manned spacecraft should depend on its ability to sustain itself financially through space tourism.

Of course, the space shuttle has more than earned its place in history even if it did cost too much and didn’t do as much real science as its boosters like to pretend. It’s so recognizable and has fueled so many dreams that it simply can’t be otherwise. I understand that one of the shuttles is to be given to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum while the two others will be sold off to private collectors. It would be interesting to see in whose hands they end being.

News & Politics

European hypocrisy in Greek crisis

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So Greece is getting a bailout amounting to 750 billion Euros despite Angela Merkel swearing up and down that it wouldn’t happen. At least she’s getting some serious heat in Germany over it and it looks as if her days in political office are numbered. Apparently she gave in because she did not want to go down in history as the Chancellor who caused the Euro project to fail.

In the meantime, American commentators, such as Paul Krugman, have been talking up the disadvantages of the European currency union, which seems a bit mean spirited, unless you recall that the Europeans made similarly snide remarks about the health of American capitalism in the wake of the sub-prime mortgage blow up. What a difference a year makes!

More fun stuff:

  • Remember when the ratings agencies were blamed for the financial crisis and accused of conflict of interest issues due to rating CDO products too leniently? Now, they’re being blamed for rating European sovereign bonds too harshly. The rationale given is that the agencies are American, hence they must hate Europe.
  • European leaders have been outdoing each other attacking speculators for bringing about the current crisis in the first place, yet the Belgian finance minister has boasted that his country would make a profit on the loans it would make to Greece due to the spread between the rates Belgium pays for loans and the rates Greece needs to pay. As The Economist notes, it looks like speculation is not evil so long as governments are the ones doing it.

I’ve been previously been of the opinion that unified currencies are great. They should reduce cross border transaction costs and free central banks from government meddling. The corollary however is that governments then lose access to the toolbox of monetary policy to influence the economy. This should be okay, provided that governments are able to responsibly use the fiscal p0licy tools still available to them but I guess asking that governments be fiscally disciplined is too much of a pipe dream. This is why governments are forever hooked on the easy ways out of problems by playing with interest rates and devaluing their currencies.

Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (April ’10)

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A little late this month because I chose to write something about Ip Man 2 first this week. Four articles this time around with three of them on biology and the last one on astronomy. We’ll start with the more innocuous of the three biology articles first.

This is an article that appeared in Discover and concerns itself with gut bacteria, specifically those found inside of Japanese people. The Japanese as we all know, eat quite a lot of sushi and one of the main ingredients of sushi is seaweed. What most of us probably don’t know is that sea algae such as seaweed is a bit different from land-based plants and contain special sulphur-rich carbohydrates that are difficult for most of us to digest.

Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (April ’10) →

Films & Television

Ip Man 2

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Despite all of the bad things that I had to say about the first film, Ip Man was still genuinely enjoyable due to the freshness and authenticity of its martial arts scenes. I am sad to say that this is not true of the sequel. While there is certainly a frisson of thrill as one anticipates the showdown between Donnie Yen and Sammo Hung, the overall quality of the fights in the sequel is dramatically lower, making it a thoroughly average martial arts film.

One of the reasons why the first film was so exciting was because it featured martial artists with styles that were visibly and palpably different one from the other, even to the inexpert eyes of martial arts laymen. This was possible because the film frequently used full body shots of the actors and long camera takes. This contributed to the feeling of the fights being authentic and grand, making every punch and every kick feel real and visceral.

Continue reading Ip Man 2 →