evil does not announce itself

It was a week or so ago and we were feeling self-congratulatory. The comically bad SOPA bill had been stopped by popular appeal to the Congress.

Google, Inc. was a notable advocate against the bill and used their considerable voice to drive people to be aware of the issue, come to their own decisions and petition their government for redress of grievance. Google was congratulatory of the 7'000'000 US citizens who stood with them to defeat this in the name of "liberty".

But back in Google's own yard, liberty was being threatened not by the Congress but by Google themselves. In a strongly worded statement to a poster on YouTube, Google used language I'd not previously seen used by the firm whose motto had been "Don't be Evil.":

the second great depression

You usually find the seed-crystal of a complex of ideas in the most unlikely places. The other day I overheard an old rant by Penn Jillette where he made a passing reference to the First Great Depression implying that there was or would be a second. Within the last hour I've seen multiple G+ posts about the reported troubles and closures of Sears Holdings stores, and over the last few months I've been thinking about #Occupy, over the last 4 years about the Second Great Depression, and over the last 20 years about what has happened to the global society that has brought us such malaise.

Even if the Fed cannot bring itself to say so, we are in the Second Great Depression; naming the phenomenon something else is just a rhetorical game.

So in the context of all that, I found myself reading the most profound book review that I can recall. As no clear-headed thinker could dispute the simple, self-evident truth of Darwin's explanation, this little book appears to reveal the fundamental cause of what we have allowed the 0.05% to do to the entire world in my lifetime.

I can't read this review for you, and I've not fully wrapped my head around it yet, but this is big, requires no conspiracy, no secrets, no deep cleverness. You may, like me, have to gloss over the initial football analogy, but I'm not even sure that Denning grasps the importance of this.

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This post was ripped in its entirety from my post on Google+ because there is little permanence to be found in streams. I still have not fully understood the implications of the idea contained therein, but there are hints of this being an explanatory framework that can be applied to systems larger than just Wall Street.

a snail trapped in a man's body

Ever since I was a child, I've been filled with the certainty that I wasn't like other boys. When other boys wanted to play baseball, I felt that bi-pedalism was just not right for me. When told it was bath time, I felt only dread that my protective mucus coating would be stripped from me and I worried yet more about the salt content of the bathwater. When teased by classmates, I tried to retract into my shell only to be frustrated to discover that I didn't have one. But perhaps the most cruel insult was the discovery that did not have both a penis and a vagina and the gonads to match. Fortunately, with the assistance of a support group and a surgeon sympathetic to my plight, I am scheduled for experimental shell transplantation as soon as a suitable donor is found. If you think this is hard to read, think about what it must be like to know that you've been born into the wrong phylum.

Except you can't think about what it is like to be transphyletic, not only is it philosophically problematic, it is a patently absurd claim to even make. So too are the claims of people who believe themselves to be transgender; to say that they are mistaken is generous because to merely be mistaken assumes there could exist a world in which they were correct.

many rivers to cross

Update: Dr. Mesibov was kind enough to review my amateur analysis and has filled in some guesses I'd had to make with hard data. Please see his comment attached to this posting. As the primary point of my note here — the role of hyperbole in popular science writing — seems uncontested I am leaving the post as it was until I can better incorporate his well received corrections.


Someone asked about a story posted in the Science News Blog with the enticing title Mysterious Border Between Two Millipede Species Runs for Over 140 Miles. I've never been able to understand why headline writers need to spice up what is actually interesting science as if someone who is going to read about carrion eating millipedes really needs to be titillated into paying attention. A quick search of the Science News Blog article title shows that the story has already been picked up by multiple outlets.


The article summarizes a paper describing a methodology for gathering data. Although the observation by Dr. Mesibov is of the form “that's a slightly surprising result, I wonder why?” the Science News, like too many popular science accounts tries to sex up a rather mundane story (which is kinda funny for a class of animals that are most easily distinguished by microscopic examination of their penises).

Assuming Mesibov's data are correct (and Mesibov certainly knows his Tasmanian millipedes) it is just a notably  long measurement of the well known phenomenon of parapatric speciation.

As usually happens when a parent species splits into two, hybridization between the species is severely penalized by selection because the mixed genes don't work together as well as those of either species separately. A common example is the human guided hybridization of horses and donkeys to produce mules which are almost always sterile (where sterility is the ultimate penalty in natural selection). Humans have to cause the interbreeding because although horses and donkeys share a common ancestor and are so closely related that they can produce viable offpring they don't — of their own free will — interbreed. In the course of their speciation, selection retained preferences in each that made them want to mate with their own and not across species lines.

I expect Mesibov's preliminary discovery is a result of a few factors: The total range of T. compitale is small (125 hectares, or about the size of a US single family farm) so the ability to gather specimens is particularly good. Contrastingly, although a zone of parapatriation of 100m may sound narrow to us, to a 15mm millipede that's a long distance. 

There isn't a ton of data on home ranges of small earth dwellers because it's kinda difficult to catch-mark-release-repeat with bugs the size of a fingernail. Picking the beetle Abax parallelepipedus as a reasonable arthropod stand-in (biased by ecology to likely having a larger home range than tasmaniosomans) our friend the Black Ground Beetle never makes it much father than 10m from where it hatched over the course of its entire life. So, if you are a Tasmanian millipede with extremely goal directed ancestors, it could take ten generations or more to cross that 100m boundary zone. This multi-generational journey would be rather difficult because somewhere in the middle you're going to have one hell of a time finding a mate.

Is it interesting? Sure. Is it “mysterious”? No. “As yet unknown” is a more accurate description of the phenomenon that Dr. Mesibov reported.