iBiome

i agree with Wesley

This is a very cool photo

a face made for radio, a voice made for print

Last night I made my national tv debut, interviewed by Carolyn Jarvis on Global TV's 16:9 news magazine, on a segment about offshore wind energy. 

Fascinating how 30 min of interview gets reduced to 20 seconds of airtime.  My point was made though, so I'm happy.

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?

Still angry they gave that frakin' Apollo a new gig

So i bumped into this interview with Dirk Benedict in National Review Online, skimming through it, a lot about his individuality and how he doesn't need hollywood.  Stuff like this:

Benedict wants little to do with Hollywood anymore. Since leaving television, he has written two books and raised two sons as a single father.

and this:

Not being able to shy away from such politically incorrect opinions also might have had something to do with his decision to abandon Hollywood for Montana. And Benedict protests that he never had the pathological hunger for fame that characterizes Hollywood’s biggest stars.

“George Roy Hill [the legendary director of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid] said to me once, ‘You’ll never be a star,’ ” Benedict recalls. “He started inviting me to his house — which was really Paul Newman’s house, he was renting — and he said to me, ‘You’ll never be a star, and the reason is that you don’t have to have it.’ ”  

Seems like quite a maverick eh?  Then I get to this:

During his recent appearance on Celebrity Big Brother, a wildly popular reality-TV show in the U.K....

Celebrity Big Brother!  In the UK?  If that doesn't scream "somebody please notice me again" I don't know what does.  Sorry dude, all that Montana frontier conservative to-hell-with-what-they-think facade just flushed down the toilet.  I think someone is just cranky that he didn't get a job on new & improved BSG.

Canada's next top cephalopod

A reality shows finally gets interesting.  From Canada's next top model  :

It's a tough call, but I'd vote for the octopus.

the Evolution of Homer

This is fun, I stumbled across it at Blog Around the Clock.

Nice work if you can get it

I've often been curious about the business of contributing scientific expertise to movies and television - how one gets the work, do they listen, that sort of thing.  In "My life as an advisor to TV and film", Wayne Grody describes his work for the Nutty Professor and CSI, among others.

For both Eddie Murphy Nutty Professor movies, the studio's Art Department asked me for assistance in designing the set for Professor Klump's laboratory. They came to my research lab at UCLA and took lots of pictures, then we sat down with the Fisher products catalog and started on page one as I pointed out what they needed to order as "props" (with a budget of $50 million, money was no object)
....Sometimes my advice goes unheeded. Klump was supposed to be a biology professor at a small liberal arts college, but his laboratory occupied an entire soundstage on the Universal Studios lot -- about ten times larger than the best-funded faculty member at a major research university. And while we tried to make it look as much like a real-world molecular biology lab as possible (I brought my graduate students along with me to help "dress the set"), when the director arrived for the first scene to be shot there, he ordered some of the visually boring thermal cyclers and centrifuges replaced by flasks and tubes of bubbling green and purple liquids -- more reminiscent of Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory than a modern facility....
...Even on the dramas, however, a cherished scientific truth will sometimes have to be discarded in order to enable an essential story development, such as a normally three-week-long forensic DNA analysis that's fictionally done in one hour for the sake of plot pacing. In truth, few will ever notice these gaffs. As one TV producer told me, the number of Ph.D. scientists watching his show accounts for no more than 0.00001% of the Nielsen rating audience.

The bit about thumbing through a Fisher catalogue and budgets reminded me of a colleague ranting over beers about how the resources devoted to CGI on Finding Nemo dwarfed but at least one order of magnitude most large scale bioinfomatics efforts.  I think of a big project as something north of $5 million. But that's just walking around money for the film industry.  

cheaper to sequence his genome

A Titanic Discovery: the Body of Christ?

Apparently James Cameron thinks he has discovered the remains of Jesus Christ, and will reveal all on the Discovery Channel this Sunday.  Putting aside the likelihood of this Jesus being THE Jesus (I'm skeptical, to put it midly), this part of the article caught my attention:

The human remains were analyzed by Carney Matheson, a scientist at the Paleo-DNA Laboratory at Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada. Mitochondrial DNA examination determined the individual in the Jesus ossuary and the person in the ossuary linked to Mary Magdalene were not related.

You inherit your mitochondria from your mother only - it is in the ovum before fertilization.  So doesn't this only tell us that the two individuals did not have the same mother?  Couldn't they have the same father? Given maternal death rates in those days, it would hardly be unusual for a lot of families to include a variety of half-siblings.  Not sure what I'm missing here.