Things that make me sad

1. Michelle Bachman agrees that slavery was sad, but at least it kept African American families together. Aside from the times it forcibly separated them, of course.

2. The USA citizenship test is awful. It forces you to memorize their one (often incorrect) answer for nuanced questions with many possible answers.

3. But it does allow for nuance in one area: you can list both slavery and state's rights as causes of the civil war.

Biological fact of the day.

Did you know that heritable, as in h^2, the scientific measure of heritability, has a very little in common with what we would think of as genetic determinism? Heritability is simply the measure of how much offspring resemble their parents, relative to the range in the population. Not even how predictive a parent's trait value is for their offspring, just how similar they are.

This has a bunch of weird consequences. For example, in the Netherlands, skin tone has a higher heritability value in the winter, because in the summer young people tan more and it destroys the correlation between their tone and their parents'. Even more counter intuitive, sex has a heritability value of 0, because everyone has a parent of each sex.* Number of arms at birth is barely heritable, in that there are certain heritable defects that make you more prone to having less than two arms, but they're so rare they barely create a range for us to consider.

Also, and this is important, heritability is only valid in the environment it is measured. A given trait is more heritable when the environment is more consistent. So when you see adoption studies saying parenting doesn't matter that much, what they mean is that across the variations in parenting seen in families that adoption agencies found worthy, parenting style doesn't matter much.

*This absolutely has to be true as a consequence of how sex is defined biologically, regardless of the gender identity of either parent.

One mistake and now you'll never be a lawyer

For me, the coolest story in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks was just how virulent her cells had become. A good number of other human cell cultures had either never been truly successful, or had been contaminated and outcompeted by the HeLa cells, driving them to extinction. There were hints of this very early on, but it couldn't be conclusively proven until genetic marker identification became available. When it did, it showed that a lot of research that researchers thought they were doing on specific tissue-type cells (e.g. liver cells) had in fact been done on cervical cancer cells. Oops. If this were true, it would have completely invalidated thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands, of peoples life work. So they did what any human being would do under the circumstances and denied it was a problem. (Spoiler: it definitely was, and their lifes work was invalid).

The fact that one little mistake could invalidate everything someone had done from age 22 on is a side effect of how specialized scientific research has become. You spend years in general education, then field education, then your tiny tiny subspeciality. Then you spend all your time working on one little problem, probably with one method because learning new methods or new problems just takes too much time.

Contrast this with the scientists in The Enlightenment, which I am an expert on because I read Quicksilver, a fiction book about many of them. Admittedly they wasted a lot of time on ideas that later information revealed to be batshit insane, and they were constantly worried about being scooped by one another, but they had substantially fewer eggs in any one basket. If your calculus proof was scooped by Leibniz, you still had your study of lenses to feel good about. And the guy you beat to lenses can feel good about founding cell biology. It was in many ways a more humane system than our current one, which requires such specialization that you're boxed in by necessity.

I feel like this might be tied in to how insane competition for schooling has been. You have to get into the gifted kindergarten so you can get pre-calc in middle school so you get calc in high school and finish your engineering pre-reqs by sophmore year so you can begin to specialize. It's painful to those involved and I don't even think it's that efficient.

He is lucky he is unbelievably adorable even for his breed.

Do you know where the phrase "Natural Selection" comes from? Darwin was attempting to distinguish the artificial breeding managed by humans from what was going on the wild. No where is this clearer to me then when I look at my cat Pan, a being that would last about five minutes in the wild. It actually says that in the breed description "Do not let them outside. Their only defense is a quizzical stare." These cats have had every bit of fight bred out of them, and replaced with pure love. It's not a bad strategy, as these things go. But Pan may have taken it too far.

First there is feeding him. I had three different types of food on a plate in front of him, all of which are things he has likes, topped with whipped cream, which he loves. Wouldn't touch it. Whined for food, wouldn't touch it. I place a small amount of food in a different bowl, warm it a bit, and place it next to the plate. Suddenly he's all about the original food on the original plate. It's worse right now because he's feeling icky, but even at the best of times it takes more work to feed him than mother nature is going to put in.

He's only just getting some weight back on after May's shitting blood/refusing to eat episode, and now we're entering a pissing (minute quantities of) blood/frequent vomiting phase that is bad enough he's locked in the bathroom when I'm not watching him. I just got the results back from the vet that clearly something was wrong with his bladder but they needed more tests to determine what. Fingers crossed for a UTI that is making him vomit from pain, which is a single cause we can easily fix.

My point is, don't get purebred cats out of the discount bin.