Those sneaky gingers pop up everywhere

gingers

I have a brother with red hair. I also have a son with red hair. Once upon a time, my beard and mustache contained many red hairs among the dominant browns. If you’ve ever wondered how these gingers appear all over the place, Petra Haak-Bloem offers a good explanation (although it needs some editing: how many different ways can they spell pheomelanin?).

The shade of hair color is determined by the amount of melanin, or pigment, in the hair. Your DNA not only encodes what kind of pigment you have, but also how much of it. “For white people the shades are dependent on two sorts of melanin: eumelanine (black pigment) and pheomelanine (red pigment). Hair cells of dark haired people only contain eumelanine. Blondes have less eumelanine. And redheads’ hair contains mostly pheomelanine,” Haak-Bloem says.

“More than a decade ago, researchers discovered that one gene (MC1R) on chromosome 16 plays an important part in giving people red hair. MC1R’s task is making a protein called melanocortin 1. That proteine plays an important part in converting pheolmelanine into eumelanine,” Haak-Bloem tells me. “When someone inherits two mutated versions of the MC1R-gene (one from each parent), less pheomelanine is converted into eumelanine. The feomelanine accumulates in the pigment cells and the person ends up with red hair and fair skin.”

The unexpectedly red beard is the effect of the same mutation in the MC1R gene. When you only have one mutated MC1R, red hair can appear in (unwanted) places. But even Haak-Bloem wasn’t completely sure of the mechanism. Having a deviant red beard has never been linked to any deadly diseases, so it’s pretty low on the research priorities list.

[Read more…]

The GOP is rotten to the core

trumpuke

Let’s spell it out: in their desperate effort to achieve relevance through stridency, the Republicans have turned their backs on half the electorate. Brilliant move, guys.

It’s nice to already know the Republicans’ strategy as they lurch toward the long and bumpy road to someone else’s presidency. Removes the mystery.

Their new mantra, in GOP-speak: So long, ladies.

I’ll give them this: They’re no longer pretending to care about us. Yay for them for ending that charade. They don’t want us, and apparently they’ve decided they don’t need us. Or, as Jeb Bush put it on Tuesday: “I’m not sure we need half a billion dollars for women’s health issues.”

[Read more…]

We aten’t dead

atentdead

I’ve been reading the obituaries. So many people, friends and foes alike, have expressed their confidence that Freethoughtblogs is dooooooomed, because Ed Brayton has left. It’s all going to fall apart without his iron hand ruling this motley crew! Without him, no one could possibly be interested in reading anything on this network! They only ever read the old white men here anyway, so losing one is an irreparable loss!

Let me explain a few things about how FtB works. These people don’t have a clue.

  • Ed never actually “ran” this place — no one did, or does. This is one of those pinko commie anarchies. He managed the books, arranged for the ad services, that sort of thing, but all of the blogs here are autonomous. No boss. Get it? If you’re an authoritarian, maybe not.

  • The kind of minimal, managerial oversight needed to keep the lights on has fallen into the hands of the executive committee, a small subset of the people here who handle mundane issues that affect the whole network. Just to let you know how busy the executive committee is, we initially proposed to meet once a month. I don’t think we’ve met in over a year.

  • The network is not a vanity project for the white men who set it up. It’s an anti-vanity project. The whole purpose of the network was to leverage our traffic into creating a space for a diverse group of bloggers. They’re still here! Ed and I could drop dead on the spot, and it’ll still keep ticking along.

  • Building a diverse network also produces a robust network. There is no single point of failure. By design and by diffusing the leadership all along, there’s no way to take it out with loss of a single blogger (we’ve lost and gained bloggers all along, you know).

  • We do have to worry about maintaining a volume of traffic to maintain ad rates. But this is a group that does not prioritize making money off their writing (although it sure would be nice…) but on maintaining independence. I’d be writing for free — I was writing for free years ago — and what money we do make is distributed among the bloggers by traffic. There is no central authority skimming off the profits.

  • I do have one serious worry about an ongoing failure. That’s all you people who say you only came here for the PZ and Ed show. You’re doing it wrong — I’m not going to object to you reading my stuff, but the whole point of the network is to give all those other voices a platform. You should go read them.

So here’s some suggestions.

Go look at the main page. See all those bloggers?

Go look to the left, at the sidebar. See all those bloggers?

Scroll down on the sidebar, and look for the “Latest Posts Around FtB”. See all those bloggers who have recently posted stuff?

Broaden your horizons a bit. Go read one or more of those links.

Don’t trust me. Go read Miri, who is saying exactly the same thing.

You can also stop annoying us all with the ill-informed doom-talk.

It’s a mystery!

Magnus-Pyke-shouting-Science

I have a question for the partnered gay and lesbian couples out there. I know you get the question, Which one of you is the “man”, and which is the “woman” from ignoramuses who are unable to think beyond their narrow sexual biases, but I’m wondering about a subtler, messier question.

Do you ever get asked, Which one is the mysterious one with incomprehensible desires? I’m curious because the BBC aired one of those science of sex shows titled, The MYSTERY of the Female Orgasm, which seems to be the standard question. Woman is mysterious…must seek out a pick-up artist to explain the cheat code (it’s up-up-left-down-down-right).

[Read more…]

Another Bangladeshi blogger murdered for atheism

niloyneel

Atheists neither need nor want martyrs, so could the mindless fanatics of the world please stop creating them? Niloy Neel has been hacked to death with machetes in Dhaka.

Imran H Sarkar, head of the Bangladesh Blogger and Activist Network, told the BBC that Mr Neel had been an anti-extremist voice of reason.

“He was the voice against fundamentalism and extremism and was even a voice for minority rights – especially women’s rights and the rights of indigenous people,” he said.

[Read more…]

Did you miss the Republican debate last night?

This is an unfair comparison to clowns.

This is an unfair comparison to clowns.

You are either lucky or wise. It was a terrible portent of worse to come as this nightmarish campaign season progresses.

But if you want to figure out what was said without the agony of watching those ratfkers writhing on stage, this summary by Robin Marty is good. A sample:

As the dust settled from another struggle between Fox and Trump, somewhere in there Rand Paul was asked a question and I missed it, but the answer was that “I don’t want my guns or my marriage registered in Washington.” You can insert your own big government question yourself and likely be close enough. Soon after there was a literal 20-second dash in and out of the #Blacklivesmatters debate, where Walker answered that we need to better train police officers then danced away without actually discussing racism or police violence.

The answer still probably had more depth than Governor Mike Huckabee’s next answer, which was that trans people should not be allowed into the military because, “The point of the military is to kill people and break things. It’s not a social experiment.” Maybe Huckabee should tell that to the 15,000 trans military members currently serving.

There was so much more: Paul and Christie bellowing at each other about who had hugged the most right people, everyone agreeing to defund Planned Parenthood, that fanatical gleam in Huckabee’s eye, Carson’s tax plan that is modeled after tithing because “God is a pretty fair guy”, the terrible moderators, and the amazing ability of the ‘debaters’ to dodge questions completely.

And it ended with Megyn Kelly asking the candidates if God talks to them. What do you think the answer was?

Computer security I can manage!

I mentioned before that my wife has betrayed me by getting one of those accursed Windows PCs. One thing I’ve been worried about is those filthy viruses that infect PCs — I can cope with my Mac, with years of technical experience, but no, I am a novice when it comes to Windows.

So you can imagine my relief when I learned how easy it is to keep Windows computers virus free. All I need is a malachite crystal!

malachite

So easy…

Reconstructing a brain

spiny

Every once in a while, I get some glib story from believers in the Singularity and transhumanism that all we have to do to upload a brain into a computer is make lots of really thin sections and reconstruct every single cell and every single connection, put that data into a machine with a sufficiently robust simulator that executes all the things that a living brain does, and presto! You’ve got a virtual simulation of the person! I’ve explained before how that overly trivializes and reduces the problem to an absurd degree, but guess what? Real scientists, not the ridiculous acolytes of Ray Kurzweil, have been working at this problem realistically. The results are interesting, but also reveal why this work has a long, long way to go.

In a paper from Jeff Lichtman’s group with many authors, they revealed the results of taking many ultrathin sections of a tiny dot of tissue from mouse cortex, scanned them, and then made 3-D reconstructions. There was a time in my life when I was doing this sort of thing: long hours at the ultramicrotome, using glass knives to slice sequential sections from tissue imbedded in an epoxy block, and then collecting them on delicate copper grids, a few at a time, to put on the electron microscope. One of the very cool things about this paper was reading about all the ways they automated this tedious process. It was impressive that they managed to get a complete record of 1500 µm3 of the brain, with a complete map of all the cells and synapses.

[Read more…]