Moving around on the political spectrum

Charles Murray likens Obama and the progressive left to Pauline Kael (who famously said of President Nixon, “How can he have won? Nobody I know voted for him.”)

Included in the article is a fascinating graph demonstrating that while most of the non-Latino white population in the US has been moving slightly more conservative, the progressive left (defined in the article as at the 95th percentile of income and with a graduate degree, but a lawyer, academic, scientist (hard or soft) outside academia, writer, in the news media, or a creator of entertainment programming (film and television) has jumped massively left.

Writing the other

An excellent essay on writing (and being) the other at Justine Musk's livejournal.

Excerpt:

Before you can get into anybody else’s head, you have to get out of your own.

She discusses the halo effect of beauty, what it was like to realize she didn't live in the same world that men do, why some movies work in their depiction of women and some don't, and how women are allowed and encouraged to become like men but men becoming like women is taboo-level transgressive.

Changing education

Laura at Apt. 11D responds to Thomas L. Friedman'sopinion piece on restarting the economy through educating people better (starting with kids, of course). She says school can't do it, not only do they have enough to do already with reading and writing but they don't do a good enough job of that:

Schools were set up to create a homogeneous mass of unthinking workers. That's what they do best. They reward kids who sit motionless in seats, draw inside the lines, and have neat desks.

And they punish kids who are self-directed, curious, and determined to find out the truth.

Changing out a quote

It's time to change out one of my sidebar quotes. This one is going away for a while:

There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Ed Howdershelt

It's a quote I like, but I'm ready to move on to saying the same thing a different way. I'm substituting this one:

Oppressors can tyrannize only when they achieve a standing army, an enslaved press, and a disarmed populace. James Madison.

Which Genes from Which Parent?

Apparently it matters. A Patchwork Mind discusses how some of the genes we get from each parent are imprinted to work differently. It's not as simple as "half from mom, half from dad, and the recessive gene only works if there's no dominant gene." Maternal genes "turn off" for some characteristics, and paternal ones for others:

it seems that maternal genes play a more important role in the formation of some brain areas, such as those for language and complex thought, and paternal genes have more influence in regions involved in growing, eating and mating.

When the turning off, or imprinting, goes wrong, this fault in how the different genes express causes some rare illnesses:

Among the rare disorders that result from imprinting errors is Angelman syndrome, which affects one out of 12,000 to 20,000 children in the world. Children with the syndrome are hyperactive and often smiling and laughing. In addition, studies suggest that more than 40 percent of affected kids suffer from autism spectrum disorders as well—experiencing great difficulty with language and social skills. The syndrome is marked by a reduction of maternally expressed proteins in a small section of chromosome 15, which is also usually paternally imprinted. In other words, genes from Dad are silenced as usual, but Mom’s genes are also imprinted by mistake—they are not as active as they should be to balance Dad’s imprinting effects. The brains of these children develop abnormally: their cerebral cortex is slightly smaller than usual, and a 2008 study in mice showed that cells in the cerebellum are also atypical.

Scientists are exploring whether gene expression issues may also be the cause of more common problems:

Badcock and evolutionary biologist Bernard Crespi of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia have since developed this theory, having most recently published an essay in Nature on the potential role that genomic imprinting plays in autism and psychotic disorders. “These disorders are opposites to one another, and imprinting is one of the mechanisms that can mediate that opposing feature,” Crespi posits. Although imprinting usually builds a balanced brain, if one parent’s contribution outweighs the other’s, then autism spectrum disorders (the result of too much net paternal influence, they argue) or psychosis (the result of too much net maternal influence) may instead develop, they say.

Alzheimer's and Tourette's also seem to be affected by maternal or paternal genes expressing differently from expected. There's no evidence from studies yet, but the concept is interesting. If we can prove that gene expression causes these problems, we may already have some tools to treat them:

If imprinting is solidly linked to the development of common mental disorders, then it may one day be appropriate to treat patients with drugs that manipulate gene expression. One method could be dialing down the activity of targeted genes, using a therapy called RNA interference—because it interferes with gene expression.

Not really about politics.

I sometimes discuss political subjects on this blog, but I'm not really that interested in politics. Much like a lot of people, apparently, as The Monkey Cage reports on a survey finding:

Percent who have not heard of Glenn Beck: 42%

Percent who have heard nothing about the Baucus health care bill: 45%

Percent who have heard nothing about the ACORN prostitution scandal: 43%

Percent who have heard nothing about the 9/12 rally in Washington: 40%

Some people treat politics as a hobby. I'm not really one of them...or, if I am, it's a hobby I only rarely pursue.

A minimum recommended dose?

Of radiation? Maybe. Isegoria links to a study reporting on the result of an accidental Cobalt-60 contamination incident that exposed 10,000 people to 9 to 12 years of chronic radiation.

If the linear-no-threshold (LNT) model constructed based upon data from the atomic explosions in Japan is appropriate for evaluating chronic radiation, such excessive doses received by the contaminated apartment residents could induce at least 35 excess leukemia and 35 solid cancer deaths after 21 years. However, actually no increase cancers were observed. On the contrary, the spontaneous cancer deaths of the residents totaled 243 over 21 years based upon the vital statistics provided by the Taiwanese government. The mortality rate from these cancers dropped to only 3% of the general population as shown in the following graph.

There were also fewer hereditary defects in the children of exposed persons.

Scientists may be able to produce a radioactive vaccine to prevent cancer.