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I must say I thoroughly enjoyed the first two thirds, although the book is a tiny bit out of date.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.
Food pairing
I found a link on “En chokomans bekendelser” to an extremely interesting Belgian site on food pairing.
I must admit I don’t understand fully how they made it. What they write is this: “By comparing the flavour of each food product eg strawberry with the rest of the food and their flavours, new combinations like strawberry with peas can be made. The way to use is, is just to select a food product like strawberries. You will get a plot where you have strawberry in the middle surrounded by other food products. Take one of those other food products and try to make a new recipe by combining those two. The more flavours food products have in common the shorter the distance between the food products.”
It’ll be fun to test some of the wackier pairings they suggest.
What does a scientist cost?
I was flicking through the job ads in New Scientist today, and as usual, I was appalled by the salary levels. Some examples:
- Acoustic scientist in the navy: £25,000.
- Middle Atmosphere Scientist (PhD required): £29,360–£34,630.
- Post Doctoral Research Scientist (biochemistry): £24,200–£27,200.
- Scientist – Viral Vaccines: £20,575–£25,000.
- Postdoctoral Researcher Polymer Synthetics: £28,289.
At the same time, the government is frustrated because so few youngsters pursue science. No wonder! Doctors earn upwards of £100,000, as do many successful bankers, lawyers, broadcasters and so on. Why on earth would anybody pursue a career in science if it doesn’t pay?
MC1R
I’ve just seen on BBC that researchers have found out that some Neanderthals had red hair.
I find this immensely fascinating. It comes so soon after finding the FoxP2 language gene in Neanderthals. It’s like they’ve suddenly opened a long-lost book.
I find it interesting too that the MC1R gene differs slightly between humans and Neanderthals. It’s another piece of evidence that there was no mixing of the two species.
I still wonder whether mad scientists can forever refrain themselves from resurrecting the Neanderthals. Surely it can’t be much more difficult than doing the mammoths, and that’s already being considered.
Odds
In an article today I read the following:
The defence of the Liberal Democrat leader came as bookmaker Ladbrokes put him as the clear favourite at 1/7 to be the first party chief to leave his post. David Cameron was placed at 6/1 and Gordon Brown 8/1.“Young Turk” Nick Clegg was the 4/5 favourite to replace Sir Menzies while a rush of money over the weekend trimmed the odds of another possible contender, Chris Huhne, from 7/2 out to 3/1.
I know (thanks to my beloved Phyllis) that “x/y” means “if you bet y, you get x+y back”, but why this arcane system?!?
Why don’t they just do something decimal, such as stating the above odds as 1.14, 7.00, 9.00, 1.80, 4.50 and 4.00 (each number being what you’d get back from betting 1)? Is it just for historical reasons, or does it really work better if you bet a lot?
Metric time
Am I the only one who’s annoyed metric time was never introduced together with the metre, the gramme and the other metric units?
I think the basic unit should be the day, so that we’d have some nice units such as deciday (slight less than 2.5 hours), centiday (almost 15 minutes) and milliday (almost a minute and a half). Just a shame there’s no SI prefix for 1/100,000, because this fraction of a day is the closest one would get to a second (0.864s, to be precise). I guess people would just say “second” in everyday speech and mean 10µday, just as “minute” would be a sloppy way of saying milliday.
Looking at longer time scales, the decaday could replace the week, the hectoday the month, and the kiloday the year. It would of course have the slight drawback that holidays wouldn’t fall on the same point in each kiloday (because it wouldn’t be aligned with the solar year), but moslems already have a similar problem with their calendar, so I’m sure we’d get used to that quickly. A ten-day week would lead to different working patterns, I guess – seven days at work and a three-day weekend, perhaps?
To honour the people who introduced the metric system in the first place, I think kilodays should be counted from the start of the French revolution, that is, day 0 would be 22nd September 1792. That would make today day 78,524 (kday 78, hectoday 5, decaday 2, day 4).
It would be really practical! Given that I was born on day 516, kday 65, it’s so simple to calculate my age as 78,524 - 65,516 = 13,008 – in other words, I could have celebrated my 13th kiloday birthday eight days ago.
There’s more information about the metric day here, by the way.
4D-scanning
Filed under: da, family, featured, kids, love, photography, pregnancy, science
I dag troppede vi syv mand høj (os, børnene, Dougie og Ann) op på en privat scanningsklinik på Ingram Street.
De scannede Phyllis, og ikke blot sagde de, at det med 97% sandsynlighed er en pige, men vi fik også en DVD med hjem med utrolige billeder af pigen!
Er hun ikke smuk? Jeg kan næsten ikke vente til december! 