Genetic engineering of fruits
Am I the only one who loves the taste of pineapples and mangos but finds them a pain?
Pineapples are far too complicated to get into, and mangos have this horrible big stone in the middle.
All fruit should either be very easy to peel, like bananas, or have edible skin, like apples, and they shouldn’t contain any stones or seeds.
Why are the genetic engineers wasting their time on making wheat resistant to herbicides and other boring projects, when they should be developing pinanas (pineapples with banana skin) and pangos (mangos built like a pear, without a stone and with edible skin)?
The technology surely is there, so bring it on!
Electoral systems and systems of measurements: A very British mess
It’s impossible to tell which electoral system that is used in the UK, because almost every single election uses its own system: First-past-the-post for Westminster, AMS for the Scottish Parliament, STV for Scottish council elections, and d’Hondt for the elections for the European Parliament.
I think the intention originally was to test out different systems and then to introduce the best one everywhere, but at the moment there seems to be no urgency to do so.
Similarly, the metric system was introduced in schools and in many other contexts decades ago, but the imperial system is still found in lots of places, for instance for buying beer and milk, and for measuring heights and weights.
So the situation is that kids actually only learn to use the metric system, but they still use stones, inches, pints and so on all the time without actually knowing how to use them.
It’s ridiculous, but again the UK seem to pause halfway through the introduction of a new system, instead of biting the bullet and going all the way (or reverting to the original situation).
Why is that? What is this national obsession with never finishing anything?
I guess it’s good the UK never decided to switch to driving on the right, or we would have been stuck with a situation where motorways and roundabouts and half the cars were for driving on the right, and the rest were still for driving on the left!
(PS: Do click on the photo to read its description. It’s the pub that saved the pound, kind of.)
More about metric time
I’ve blogged about metric time in the past, but it’s nice to see that I’m not alone.
There are many more details about metric time in this guide than I managed to squeeze into my old blog posting, so it’s well worth a read.
Be aware, though, that he’s only advocating metric units to replace hours, minutes and seconds, while I’m in favour of replacing weeks, months and years as well.
Best of all, he has a page with JavaScript clocks that you are allowed to adapt for your own purposes, so I’ve modified one to show the complete day and time decimally – have a look at the top of the right-hand sidebar.
It feels so much more tangible when you can see the metric seconds ticking away, doesn’t it?
Metrification now!
I’ve blogged about metrification before, but I’ve now come across the subject twice in the past 24 hours.
Firstly, I brought a book called Measuring America: How an Untamed Wilderness Shaped the United States and Fulfilled the Promise of Democracy
And then today, I came across the website of the UK metric association. It’s good to see there are people out there campaigning for the UK to give up its bizarre mix of imperial and metric.
Do go to their site and read the arguments, and consider joining!
Burying trees
A scientist called Ning Zeng is proposing to bury trees (in Danish, scientific article in English here) to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
In many ways it’s a fairly obvious idea, given that coal and oil are the result on plants having been buried millions of years ago, so basically burying plant material now is just creating fossil fuel for the far future.
There’s something slightly weird about digging up ancient plants in the form of oil, gas and coal and burning them while burying modern plants to compensate, though.
Why not just stop using fossil fuels instead? Just because it’s more convenient to burn oil than a fir tree?
Happy New Kiloday!
If metric time had been introduced as I suggested, today would be the beginning of kiloday 79.
So Happy New Year (or should that be Happy New Kiloday?)!
Fact and fiction
I’ve almost completed reading Brian Sykes’s The Seven Daughters of Eve.
I must say I thoroughly enjoyed the first two thirds, although the book is a tiny bit out of date. It’s one of those nice examples of popular science that actually gives you a feel for how things happen in the engine room, rather than just presenting the results.
However, towards the end he starts writing fictional stories about the seven “clan mothers” of Europe, and this is definitely the weakest part of the book.
He assigns hair colour and other physical characteristica to them, although he obviously doesn’t know this.
Also, to make the descriptions seem realistic, he strays into areas about which he clearly has little knowledge.
For instance, he writes about one of them that their “language was not elaborate, but quite sufficiently developed to impart [...] basic information.” As a linguist, I know this is nonsense. All human languages, whether spoken by hunter-gatherers or by invest bankers, are equally elaborate and highly developed.
So read the first part of this book, but skip the seven fictional chapters.
Those strange Finns
A genetic map of Europe. Some abbreviations: DK=Copenhagen, UK=London, DE1=Kiel, DE2=Augsburg, FI=Helsinki, NL=Rotterdam, HU=Hungary, IT1=Italy, IT2=Marche (Italy), FR=Lyon.
There’s an article in Videnskab (in Danish) about some researchers who’ve made a genetic map of Europe.
It shows that Finns very much are the odd man out, but the Italians and to a certain extent the English also display some differences.
Unfortunately, they haven’t sampled any Scots. And I wonder where Anna would show up, with her mixture of Scottish, Danish and South German genes – would she look Dutch? 
Given that Finnish is a non-Indoeuropean language, I’m not overly surprised that they’re genetically different, but given that their language is related to Hungarian, it’s a bit more surprising that the latter seem to fit right in – did they mix more with the previous population?
Periodic table of mixology
This poster (”The Periodic Table of Mixology”) that I once bought for my sister is hanging outside my parents’ bedroom (click on it for a more readable version).
As its name implies, it’s presenting cocktails in a format similar to the periodic table of elements.
When I first saw it, I thought it was great. However, the more I study it, the more annoyed I get.
The real periodic table is systematic, but the only feature resembling a system here is having tequila-based drinks in the first columns, vodka-based ones in the next ones, and so on.
As far as I can see, nothing else is systematic. Column 1 is not different from column 2 in any systematic fashion, and the rows don’t display any regular differences at all.
Somebody should redo this properly.
First of all, I think a higher number should imply a stronger drink. That is, cocktail number 1 should be almost non-alcoholic, number 2 should be slightly stronger, and so on.
Second, there should be similarities both horizontally and vertically. I wouldn’t necessarily order it by spirit, but perhaps rather by appeareance or taste.
It won’t be easy, I realise, but surely it would be a worthwhile research project for some inebriated chemistry students…?
Biofuels are not the answer
There’s an interesting comment in The Guardian, arguing that the world needs to produce more food and not waste it on biofuels.
There is an interesting bit of information in it:
The grain required to fill a [95 litre] tank with ethanol would feed one person for an entire year.
It so clearly demonstrates why biofuels aren’t the answer, as it means driving a car means many people can’t eat – it’s not as if your car could run the whole time on the left-overs from dinner.