Parents still don't matter as much as you think An LA Times story talks about a study that finds up-to-date textbooks and lots of testing are the best way to get kids to succeed. Parental involvement, money and collaboration with teachers, not so much. From Freakonomics.  ¶ 10:42 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  A truly touching memorial (not!) I am always mystified by the piles of toys and dolls left outside a home for a dead child. Do they all go to charity or are they gathered up for some kind of dusty shrine in the house?

Anyway, people feel very strongly about this. So sorry in fact, they got out the fuzzies for a chicken. And from the BBC. And the Telegraph.  ¶ 10:05 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  I passed 8th grade math (Phew!)

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

  ¶ 2:44 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Swoon 115 - October 24, 2005 Gescom - Go Sumo (Clear)
Swayzak - Snowblind (Mathew Jonson mix) (K7)
A. Matsumoto and DJ Yoshi - Dreamer (MFA mix) (Precinct)
Ellen Allien - Come (Bpitchcontrol)
Yoshimoto - Do What U Do (Trentemoller mix) (uno)
Solid Groove - This is Sick
2 Dollar Egg - Naxos (Someone Else's Beaver mix) (Nummer-Schallplatten)
Matthew Dekay - Bad (DK)
Telepopmusik - Into Everything (MFA dub)
Bedrock - Heaven Scent (POB Seismix dub) (Bedrock)
Slam - This World (Wighnomy Bros. mix) (Soma)
Autechre - Surripere (Darkarma mix)
Goldie - Timeless (Rabbit in the Moon's Vocalic City mix) (ffrr)
Marmion - Schoenberg (Man With No Name mix) (Hooj)
Ladytron - International Dateline (Ryko)
Idiotpilot - Moerae (The Locust) (Jel remix) (Reprise)
Balil - Rosary Pilots (Rising High)  ¶ 9:35 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Arrest those scumbags! "A cleaner New York is a safer New York." Well, probably true. Watch out, posterers, two guys were arrested for putting up signs advertising a concert. Cops forgot to take their phonecam.  ¶ 4:29 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  High school band plays DJ Shadow This is absolutely great. DJ Shadow's Endtroducing album is one of his famous early works. It is entirely based on many, many different samples, and was basically made by one guy at home in his studio. So, a high school band in Minnetonka turned it all around, and had an eight-member percussion ensemble perform two of its track, "Building Steam With a Grain of Salt" and "Changeling" live. Basically, they've taken sampling to a bizarre new arena, where one artists takes a load of obscure samples, puts them together, and then has his work exploded outwards again, with the sampled, cut-up, being performed real-time by multiple musicians.

This must have been very difficult. You can see in the video they're all looking at music, and they must have transcribed it themselves. This must have entailed listening to the song over and over, in pieces and in toto. Most people would give up after a very short time, so they deserve extra credit for sticking it out.

Big ups to the conductor/music director too, who led them through such a great idea.

They do a very good job. There's one rough patch around 4 minutes, but otherwise it's much like the original.

I love the white shirts and black pants. That's exactly like my high school orchestra days.

High School Band Plays DJ Shadow (2005)The Minnetonka High School Percussion Ensemble recently destroyed all jokes about band nerds when they performed DJ Shadow's "Endtroducing."

  ¶ 11:03 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  New RASC Niagara website My astronomy club, the RASC Niagara, has a new website. Lots of cascading style sheets, new photogalleries, and so on. Definitely worth checking out.  ¶ 11:50 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Junk DNA: not quite a scrapyard I have always been fascinated by junk DNA. I first learned about it as an undergraduate biology student in the early 90s. Junk DNA is "extra" DNA in our genomes, and it doesn’t seem to do much of anything. It doesn’t make protein, which is what DNA is mostly for, it’s not involved in regulating how proteins are made and used (although this is looking less likely), but it does seem to contain occasional degraded (pseudogenes) genes which have lost their functions. In total, I was taught that it is literally useless junk.

This poses an evolutionary problem. Why is 97% of our genome not used? Remember, this is 3,174,022,061 base pairs out of 3,272,187,692 that aren’t being used for anything. Natural selection should quickly eliminate all these extras, since a lot of energy must be wasted on its replication into each cell.

A new study in Nature (subscribers only link) has examined the changes in junk DNA in two fruit fly species, and has found that evolution is definitely affecting the junk regions. What does this mean? Well, it means that although junk DNA goesn’t seem to be doing anything we have yet identified, natural selection is clearly favouring some forms of it. Peter Andolfatto found that in the common laboratory fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, the junk DNA regions that don’t make protein are evolving more slowly than regions that do make protein, due to a selection pressure to remain the same.

Then he compared these junk regions that aren’t evolving much with those in a related fruit fly, Drosophila simulans. This time he found a large amount of divergence between the two species’ junk sequences. He says his data show the regions are being subjected to adaptive evolution and purifying selection. Or more simply, natural selection is taking out the trash. Therefore, he says, the junk DNA is performing some kind of function, since selection is operating on these regions in understood ways. Otherwise, random mutations would take over, leading to a slow degradation of these areas of the genome.

Most studies have compared organisms by looking at their protein coding sequences. Now that Andolfatto has shown that junk DNA also varies a lot in non-random ways, it may affect how similarities between species are measured, especially if it someday shown that junk DNA is involved in the regulation and expressions of proteins. “Protein evolution has traditionally been emphasized as a key facet of genome evolution and the evolution of new species,” says Andolfatto in a press release. “The degree of protein sequence similarity between humans and chimpanzees, and other closely-related but morphologically distinct taxa, has prompted several researchers to speculate that most adaptive differences between taxa are due to changes in gene regulation and not protein evolution. My results lend support to this view by demonstrating that regulatory changes have been of great importance in the evolution of new Drosophila species.”

It is important to note that the fruit fly already has a small genome, with 132,576,936 base pairs, and there is not much room for junk, so it is not surprising to find that natural selection is having an effect on it. However, in humans (and onions) the genomes are much larger, and the amount of junk DNA is higher too, and it remains to be seen if something similar is happening in us.

So, to summarize, junk DNA isn’t a scrapyard. If it was, this kind of evolution wouldn’t be happening.  ¶ 1:14 PM 5 Comments Links to this post

  How Intelligent Design debates should or might happen In November my alma mater, the College of Communication at Boston University, will be hosting its Great Debate. This year, the topic is "Should Public Schools Teach Intelligent Design Along with Evolution?" Perhaps the debate will end like this, which would be quite pleasing.  ¶ 10:02 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Scary Swoon on Halloween I realized that Swoon will fall directly on Halloween this year. So, I will be having a themed show, of spooky, eerie, and downright scary tracks. Expect material from Aphex Twin, Freeform, Nurse With Wound, James Bernard and others.

I dare you to listen to the whole show with the lights off!  ¶ 9:44 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Mars at brightest next few weeks The planet Mars will be big and bright the next few weeks. Look for it in the east after dark. After 9 p.m. it should be quite easy to see. It is bright, sort of orange-yellow, and there is nothing else near it to confuse you.

If you want to see it through a telescope, this Saturday, October 22, my astronomy club will be holding a public starnight and will have telescopes there to show people Mars and other things. Directions are here. You can show up any time after sundown. Obviously (or maybe not, given past events) you shouldn't come if it's cloudy.  ¶ 2:11 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Swoon - October 22, 2005 - Funky Electronics As One - Shambala (Balil remix) (New Electronica)
Scannerfunk - Cosy Veneer (Sulphur)
Monolake - Ping
Neotropic - 15 Levels of the Empire State (Ntone)
Rechenzentrum - Slate (Mille Plateaux)
Plastikman - Lasttrak (Plus8)
Aphex Twin - Windowlicker (Acid Edit) (Warp)
Junior Boys - More Than Real (Domino)
Beef Terminal - Out of Step (Noise Factory)
Momma Gravy - Sizzling Finch (Fabric)
Global Communications - The Groove
Blue Man Group - Synaesthetic (Blue Man Group)
Himiko - Wake Up! (Haunted)
Ladytron - The Last One Standing (Ryko)
Andrea Parker - The Swamp (Quatermass)
Orbital - You Lot (ATO)
Future Sound of London - Omnipresence (Virgin)
Coldcut - Timber (Ninja Tune)
Richard Devine - Lens, Align (Warp)  ¶ 9:36 AM 1 Comments Links to this post

  Migration today I am hoping to move this weblog from cogeco to philipdowney.com today. There might be problems. Hopefully, the new link to the weblog will be working soon. I am hoping all the swoon posts will be left behind on cogeco, and this will serve as a redirect.  ¶ 11:15 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Throwing away influence The New York Times recently changed its totally free website. It now has a few sections where you must pay to read it, mostly of their op-ed columnists. Of course, it's very hard to get people to pay for what is formerly free, without offering actual improvements. (Sirius and XM Radio both offered improvements -- no commericals over regular radio -- and that is a good example of an improvement.) I bet they will learn that very quickly.

The dailykos has this nice graph of how weblog citations of their columnists. How fast before they hit zero? via Gordon Watts at Quantum Diaries.

  ¶ 11:50 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Serenity movie review I saw Serenity earlier this week. It was good. This will be a short review, because I don't want to spoil things. I haven't seen every episode of Firefly, but I knew the characters and the series' outline, and knew who was who. Even so, I don't think you need to be familiar with the show to figure out the movie.

The movie was quite a bit bleaker than the tv show. Yes, there were a few jokes there to keep the faithful happy, but the point of the movie is to put the characters through the wringer, which Joss Whedon certainly does. The movie centres on Mal, the star, and River, one of his passengers and more mysterious character from the tv show. (There are lots of interesting characters, but it's only a two-hour movie, and I think he picked the right ones to follow.) Basically, they are running from things that catch up to them. For Mal it's hatred and disappointment of the government, for River, it's the government scientists who messed with her mind.

Lots of fighting ensues, some characters die, others don't. At some point everybody is hurt. This is probably Firefly's last gasp, unless there is a huge groundswell that turns it into a cable series. It could happen.

Summary: good movie, not great, but certainly better than the average space action movie.  ¶ 3:55 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Homeless or Jesus? I only got 260, which is pretty poor. See if you can do better at determining who is homeless and who is Jesus.  ¶ 3:05 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Doug McKenzie, Chachi, Super Dave Osborne and Aileen Wuornos Watching Arrested Development last night, I thought it was 1983, with Dave Thomas, (same hometown as me) best known as Doug McKenzie, Scott Baio, best known as Chachi, and Bob Einstein, best known as Super Dave Osborne. But it was nice to see them all, Bob Einstein had the best role.

Throw in Charlize Theron as Rita, and you have the best (American) (comedy) show on tv.  ¶ 4:24 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Einstein's New Clothes Here's a great post from Jochen Weller on Einstein's discovery of general relativity, and how it has helped understand our universe. It's the universe in a nutshell, covering space time, dark matter, dark energy and extra dimensions.  ¶ 11:34 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Swoon 113 - October 3, 2005 Casino Versus Japan - It's Very Sunny (Wobblyhead)
Plaid - Diddymousedid (Warp)
Mike and Rich - Mr. Frosty (Rephlex)
Static - Spawn (City Centre Offices)
Crouched Head - Scratch for Papa
Deadly Wiz Da Disko - Game (!K7)
Maldoror's Gambit Remix (Thirsty Ear)
Autechre - Montreal (Warp)
Shout Out Out Out Out - Nobody Calls Me Unless They Want Something (Normals Welcome)
Black Dog - Further Harm (Warp)
Anthony Rother - La Bete (psi49net)
Kraftwerk - Tour de France Live (EMI)
Tim Tetlow - Matasuro (Planet mu)
Clothesline Revival - Crawdad Song (Paleo)
Wechselspannung (Fax)
Kiss Me Deadly - Track 7 (Alien8)
Lobby - Kurmbox
Datacide - Data Haiku (Fax)  ¶ 9:45 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Satire is not for stupid people Well, the title of the blog is 90 Percent True, so take it with a grain of salt. In any case, this is the funniest post I have read in a long time. At least until the terrorist bit.  ¶ 11:56 AM 0 Comments Links to this post