iBiome

So long to Caribou Spice. You betcha.

Peggy Noonan bids farewell to Sarah Palin in the Wall Street Journal. A Republican ex speechwriter for Nixon and Reagan, Noonan turns words with economy and humour.  She crafted some killers for this column.

A Farewell to Harms:

In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn't say what she read because she didn't read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough.

and

"The elites hate her." The elites made her. It was the elites of the party, the McCain campaign and the conservative media that picked her and pushed her. The base barely knew who she was. It was the elites, from party operatives to public intellectuals, who advanced her and attacked those who said she lacked heft. She is a complete elite confection. She might as well have been a bonbon.

"She makes the Republican Party look inclusive." She makes the party look stupid, a party of the easily manipulated.

Ouch.  That's going to leave a mark.

Green Power in China

When I think of China's energy's future, I usually think coal. Or Three Gorges. Or both.  But as this article in the NYT (via Balloon Juice) highlights, China is positioning itself as a global leader in renewable energy.  

Green Power Takes Root in the Chinese Desert

This year China is on track to pass the United States as the world’s largest market for wind turbines — after doubling wind power capacity in each of the last four years. State-owned power companies are competing to see which can build solar plants fastest, though these projects are much smaller than the wind projects. And other green energy projects, like burning farm waste to generate electricity, are sprouting up....

....But in March of last year, as power companies began accelerating construction of wind turbines, the government issued a forecast that 10,000 megawatts would actually be installed by the end of next year. And now, just 15 months later, with construction of coal-fired plants having slowed to one a week and still falling, it appears that China will have 30,000 megawatts of wind energy by the end of next year — which was previously the target for 2020, Mr. Li said.

30,000 MW!  By way of comparison, Canada's installed capacity is expected to reach 3000 MW by the end of 2009.

Researchers estimate 9 million bacterial genes in the human gut

Another reminder that the world,us included, belongs to bacteria.  A human is a bacterial/mammal hybrid.  This is relevant at even a behavioural level. How often does our digestion affect our actions?

From MicrobeWorld -

A new concept is to consider human as a super-organism containing those microbes in or on human body as well [7]. There are more than 100 trillion bacterial cells in human gut, which are about 10 times more than cells in human itself [8]. Those bacteria can help digest food and harvest nutrition and energy that otherwise cannot be collected by the human body directly [9]–[11], i.e., human has obtained many genes needed for itself though these genes did not evolve in human genome."

the man behind the idiot

Caught by Josh Marshall at TPM, a great backstage moment between Stephen Colbert and John Kerry. First time I've ever seen Colbert out of character.  Does he do this with everyone?  Making sure they are in on the joke?

Fish food

my 8 yr old likes to play with her breakfast

Exile: Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who died in 2006, was arguably Indonesia's greatest writer and one of the world's most engaging novelists.  I don't feel like I am reading his works as much as wrapping myself in them.  I named one of my children after a character in Bumi Manusia (This Earth of Mankind).

Following the 1965 coup that saw Suharto take power, Pram was imprisoned  for decades, much of that time on Buru Island.  

Exile is an account of conversations with Pram not long before his death.  The topics run from politics to literature to Indonesian and Javanese culture.

Pram's pain and disappointment at the course of Indonesia's development is obvious in his cutting reflections on culture, government corruption, and the dominance of the US.  He rightly lays a great deal of blame for Indonesia's ills on the Suharto regime - understandable given the years of imprisonment he suffered at Suharto's hands, as well as the very real corruption and misgovernance that characterized the New Order, particularly in the final few years.   

I found his reflections on culture and his view that the Javanese propensity to submit to authority figures shackles Indonesia's development fascinating.  He is clearly a fan of Sukarno - time and distance allow him to ignore or gloss over Sukarno's profound failings in the later years of his presidency.  All was well, in Pram's view, before the coup, and if Sukarno had been allowed to continue Indonesia would have proceeded to a bright future.  

 Exile is a valuable complement to his other published works.  It's not as compelling as the Mute's Soliloquy, his account of imprisonment on Buru and elsewhere, and these conversations sadly reveal far more unhappiness and far less hope about his homeland than I expected.  For all the faults he describes, Indonesia has made a relatively peaceful transition from authoritarian rule to democracy, vacated East Timor, and avoided the large scale sectarian bloodbaths that have claimed other nations at a similar stage of development.  Terrorism seems to have been brought to heel and the world's largest muslim nation remains a reliable U.S. partner.  Civil society continues to roll, sometimes lurch, along and renew with every turn of the monsoon.  I guess Pram remained an exile until the end.

  

World Oceans Day

Is today.  Lots of relevant links at Blogfish's Carnival of the Blue. Also there is DFO's page, the Suzuki Foundation, and the Vancouver Aquarium (who are celebrating the week).

Get wet.

 

a colony of bees in the garden

Last weekend we were treated to an unusual wildlife encounter. A colony of bees, likely in the process of locating and founding a new hive, settled in our garden on Saturday afternoon.  After trying out a branch in our plum tree, they dropped to the ground and settled for the next 24 hours or so.  Individual bees, perhaps scouts, shuttled in and out of the cluster until sunset and then again throughout Sunday morning.  Finally on Sunday evening they rose in one great cloud (well, they did leave some stragglers) and made their way to Pacific Spirit Park.   

It's great to see honey bees around and, it seems, in good health.

nerd girl blogs swine

Jennifer Gardy  notes the seeming disparity between the apparent mortality rates in Mexico and the U.S. / Canada. Since she posted this, a comparative analysis of the genomes indicates that the strains in Mexico and Canada are identical.  So why the Mexican deaths?

Some researchers suspect that pre-existing health factors in the Mexican population might have influenced the disease's outcome, while one leading theory suggests that the increased mortality has to do with the Mexican patients' delays in seeing a physician.

I would also speculate that the number of deaths in Mexico could be the numerator over a very large denominator.  That is, the number of low level swine flu infections could be quite large among the Mexican population, but underreported due to poor access to health care and other confounding issues like the prevalence of other infectious diseases, with similar symptoms, among the poor.  In populations wracked with chronic respiratory and gastrointestinal infection, would low to moderate swine flu infections be distinguishable?  In that context, the actual mortality rate might be much lower than media reports.

Other good stuff in her post about tracking the outbreak by following money, and the sequencing efforts.

The Joy of Conflict: the Five Dysfunctions of a Team

I don't typically read management / self help literature. The few times I've tried I tune out in Chapter 1, usually after the first venn diagram or matrix or list of x ways to do y.  Despite these past failures, on the recommendation of a colleague I waded into The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable, by Patrick Lencioni.  Well written, slim, and brisk, it focuses on the simple fact that in organizations, teamwork matters. A talented, supportive, and accountable team offers a company a formidable competitve advantage, while companies can fly apart if dysfunctional team dynamics are allowed to take hold.  Without retelling the entire book, the interesting bit for me was the discussion of trust and conflict.  Conflict in a team can be healthy and is an indicator of trust among colleagues.  This resonated with me. The most effective groups I have worked with interact with candor and transparency.  While consensus is rarely acheived, the airing of differences and working through to resolution binds team members and promotes buy-in for even the toughest decisions.  While it can be challenging to manage constructive conflict, the alternative - silent disengagement - is far worse.