Barisan on the bandwagon

Holy cow. Barisan politicians are really jumping on the blogging bandwagon now. Hm, I wonder if it's got anything to do with BN's stunning loss of four states (plus failure to recapture Kelantan) and its two-thirds Parliamentary majority to the Opposition in a strongly Internet-driven upset, after years of insulting Malaysian bloggers as stupid and seditious? (Lim Kit Siang's had his own blog for quite a long time. Teresa Kok, the DAP MP for Seputeh who's been blogging since 2006, is quite funny because the title of her blog is "Sassy MP".)

For instance, the ex-Health Minister Dr Chua Soi Lek has turned to blogging. He has more free time these days after resigning from his Cabinet and MCA posts, since he was caught on video demonstrating safe sex. Alas, he uncreatively picked "drchua" as his sub-domain name on Blogger, and then found that there were already 8 "drchuas" on there. So he's drchua9.

Mohammad Ali Rustam, the Chief Minister of Melaka, wanted to get into the Malaysia Book of Record as the first CM to have a blog. Then he found out that his skin was too thin to take criticism, especially over a post implying that state governments allowing Chinese to farm their dirty pigs was a special concession that we should be endlessly grateful for, and deleted all comments and disabled future ones. However, not only did Malaysiakini archive the comments on the controversial post, TWO mirror blogs with comments enabled popped up rapidly. (Melaka sucks, by the way. If you believe all the stuff they tell you in school about how it's the nexus of history, you will be heartbroken as I was by how horribly run-down all the beautiful old buildings are.)

Muhammad Muhammad Taib (no, that's not a typo) the ex-CM of Selangor who was given a senator post as a consolation, is also jumping in. Ironic, considering he once lodged a police report against Raja Petra Kamarudin for insulting the King in a post on Malaysia Today. At least he was smart enough to buy his own domain name and hasn't started deleting comments - yet.

What I think is really interesting about all this, is that blogs and alternative news sites like Malaysiakini and Malaysia Today (I prefer "Today" over "'Kini" since it's free, although they don't quite cover the same ground) have had a really active part in turning the tide in this past election. Unlike in the USA where bloggers are merely observers and commentators, Malaysia is a small country and communication through the Internet only reinforces the "everybody knows everybody" atmosphere. By allowing people to see how many others were frustrated with Barisan Nasional, blogs, alternative news sites, and yes, Facebook allowed individuals to overcome the apathy of "Barisan is going to win anyway" and gave them the impetus to go out and vote. Barisan just didn't see this coming.

I'm no political pundit and I can't stand people who go on about it all the time, but I'm a citizen of a democratic nation with eyes and ears and emotions, and I unabashedly find recent developments incredibly cool.

The flayed rabbit

This is how I feel a lot these days:

Yesterday I came home to find a number of clumps of fur on the carpet. Last summer the cat brought home voles and chipmunks on a regular basis, so I thought I would find either a dead or hiding chipmunk with some chunks torn out of its tail. No big problem. The dead prey always seemed to have been killed cleanly, and the live ones were usually in good enough shape to run away once I caught them and tossed them out the window.

There was something with big eyes hiding under the fridge. I grabbed a pair of rubber gloves and told Steve to shut the cat in the bathroom so I could prod it out with a stick. I still thought it was a squirrel until the edge of an elongated ear appeared, but something still seemed wrong after it was identifiably a bunny, a baby rabbit about five inches long.

Half the skin had been flayed off its back.

I have no idea how many hours it crouched under there, terrified, suffering with every movement of air on its skinless flesh. As it hopped miserably to the wall below the window, I could see that the muscles over its left shoulder were torn. Steve came up behind me. "Should I take it to the vet school or kill it?" I asked, almost more for rhetoric than anything else. "Kill it," he said. "There's no way it can live like that." I sent him outside for a stick while I crouched over the bleeding animal in my designer tights, covering its face to keep it calm.

Steve opened the window from the outside and handed me a short piece of half-inch-thick branch. "Shh, bunny," I whispered, laying the stick down on its neck. It wriggled a bit as I took hold of the hind legs, but didn't struggle too much since I wasn't touching the agonized skinned flesh. Grasping the legs firmly, I pulled straight back while pressing the stick down with my other hand.

You can feel several small things snapping when you do that, the ligaments holding skull to spine. The bunny convulsed, kicking out those big hind feet that hadn't been fast enough to keep it away from Lina. It flopped a few inches across the floor. Worried that I hadn't broken its neck properly, I caught it and pulled with the stick again, and felt more ligaments break. The head flopped freely from the body, and after a few moments, it stopped kicking. And breathing

Of cervical dislocation, the AVMA Guidelines on Euthanasia have this to say on its downsides:

Disadvantages—(1) Cervical dislocation may be aesthetically displeasing to personnel. (2) Cervical dislocation requires mastering technical skills to ensure loss of consciousness is rapidly induced. (3) Its use is limited to poultry, other small birds, mice, and immature rats and rabbits.

By the book, then.

---

It's thrown me into a tailspin, emotionally. At first I was wringing my hands, reconsidering the ethical implications of letting my cat out. I've always held, and still hold, the position that cats and dogs are adults of their own species and it's not only inhumane but ridiculous to treat them like human infants. But owning a cat means that I am responsible for what it does, not only for potential damage to other humans, but also for potential pain inflicted on other animals. I am responsible for the flayed rabbit.

I also still consider that Lina killing chipmunks and voles is not a big problem; all the dead ones I've observed were cleanly killed, as mentioned above. What I think happened this time was that she took on (and actually hauled into my apartment) something that was too big and strong for her, but not enough so to escape.

The best solution I can think of is to not let her outside unsupervised (when I'm not at home) until mid-summer when there are fewer baby rabbits. Although, I'm in agreement with my coworker Willy who said "Cats are vicious animals" and Terry Pratchett, who wrote that if cats looked like frogs we would hate them.

---

Anyway that's resolved now. But I still feel like...the flayed rabbit is a good metaphor for how I've been feeling these last few months, skinless and sensitive to everything, crippled.

Forcing me to think about animal welfare and ecology is forcing me to think about bioethics which is forcing me to think about philosophy...and I hate philosophy. (I got into a fight with a previous boyfriend when I said this once. He majored in math in college and went to grad school for theology, so the clash wasn't surprising.) Back in high school and in the first couple of years of college I used to be a deeper thinker than I am now. But at some point it all got entangled with the Americans' "culture wars" bullshit and my brain started feeling like it was going to explode. The only way I could get any peace was to stop thinking.

It's really strange. I have a fairly cold, abstract response to things that most people would respond emotionally to, and an emotional response to things that other people find abstract. Touching a bleeding wild animal and killing it with my hands didn't bother me as much as the sheer guilt of knowing that it was my fault. It was funny, I could feel myself putting on an act of physical distress for Steve, the grimaces, the stiff posture, the trembling hands - the same way you act interested to a boring person or act polite to a boor. Because, you know, a girl should be frightened and disgusted by finding a half-dead rabbit in her house, and need her boyfriend to comfort her.

But I really wasn't. I'm frightened and disgusted by myself.

It's funny because a few months ago, I would have told you I was a happy person, and I have every reason to be. These past weeks, though...these past days, there's a constant current of rage running through my body, seeking excuses, opportunities to be angry at anything and anybody, to lash out mentally if not in fact.

It's partly low blood sugar, especially near the end of the day, but a full stomach only blunts the anger, not abolishing it completely. Peace comes only from total escapism - in novels, or in total immersion in physical activity - riding, lab work, playing with the cat, woodwork, necking. I don't want to think, it burns.

---

There's an undergraduate student who comes into our lab part-time whom I dislike because he's a loudmouthed little braggart who goes around telling everybody he's found a cure for HIV when he doesn't even have basic lab skills. But what disturbs me is that he's started a student group to invite speakers to give talks on regenerative and anti-aging therapies, including one guy who's regarded as a crackpot by most other scientists who claims that aging is a disease and that with the right treatment, people could live practically forever. A couple of issues ago, WIRED magazine ran an article on another longevity buff that got under my skin.

Again, it's funny though. The thing that I'm disturbed by isn't what you might expect, the religious angle - it doesn't. After all, for those who take the Bible literally, some people might have lived close to a millenium.

I'm irritated by their sheer stupidity in mistaking quantity for quality when it comes to life. Part of the joy of life does come from the things that can hurt you - food and other sensual indulgences, simply relaxing, and even doing things that put you in physical danger. What's the point of living to a hundred and fifty, or two hundred, if you spend those years eating like a beggar, exercising like an Olympian, acting like a monk, and taking fifty pills a day?

The other reason I find it all ridiculous is that, at this point, I can not imagine wanting to not die.

I just want to assure anybody reading this that I'm not suicidal or interested in hurting myself. As described above, life is great in other respects, and certainly I'd rather live to a ripe old age and pass away with a minimum of discomfort. But right now I feel like I'm starting to go crazy, and it's unbearable being angry all the time and afraid of screwing up in front of everybody. I'm like the rabbit with no skin on. Everything hurts. If someone told me I would die tomorrow and there is no God but oblivion after, that would still be fine.

It's so easy to imagine how something like that could happen: the slip from a blowout or an errant pebble; the long, sickening moment of falling sideways; and finally a brutal impact with several tons of metal. Cervical dislocation. Or something.

---

This too shall pass. Someday I'm going to have to stop running away from my mind.

Immunology ain't English

Immunosurveillance is now an official English word, along with, apparently, "hellazpoppin'". Yay!

Microsoft Word spellcheck really hates scientific literature. I have the "check spelling as you type" option turned off on computers I use, otherwise any work-related writing becomes a sea of red.

Quantity of fluff

This is a pretty good description of my own cat, too:

see more crazy cat pics

Also, since I Can Has Cheezburger now takes all submissions through The Cheezburger Factory, the uncaptioned image files are on their servers, which lets you recaption other people's LOLcats. So like this:
see more crazy cat pics

becomes this:
moar funny pictures

Christus Apollo

[EDIT: Somebody pointed out in the comments (and I would REALLY appreciate your leaving some clue as to who you are or how to contact you, if you're trying to be helpful rather than just snippy) that this poem is under copyright as Bradbury is still alive, so I can't reproduce it here. Given that an awful lot of poetry is available on the internet, I didn't think about copyright - please don't call me a thief as if I'm purposely trying to deprive him of income or attribution. So I'm just going to quote a few of my favourite bits.]

[Originally posted on 26 March] Two days ago on Easter would have been a more appropriate time to post this, but I happened to be listening to Jerry Goldsmith's musification of it tonight.

A couple of years ago when the PhYW were trying to revive the Phases Young Writers community with a new website, Tee Shern Ren and I were doing the science section and I wrote this essay about what implications First Contact would have for Christ-followers. What do people think?

Thanks to Teacher Rowie for originally posting the full text of the poem. (Unfortunately she didn't include the breaks between stanzas and I don't have a copy of I Sing the Body Electric to check...) It's such a great poem that I'm surprised to find it so hardly on the Internet.

In some far universal Deep
Did He tread Space
And visit worlds beyond our blood-warm dreaming?
Did He come down on lonely shore by sea
Not unlike Galilee
And are there Mangers on far worlds that knew His light?
And Virgins?
Sweet Pronouncements?
Annunciations? Visitations from angelic hosts?
And, shivering vast light among ten billion lights,
Was there some Star much like the star at Bethlehem
That struck the sight with awe and revelation
Upon a cold and most strange morn?
On worlds gone wandering and lost from this
Did Wise Men gather in the dawn
In cloudy steams of Beast
Within a place of straw now quickened to a Shrine
To look upon a stranger Child than ours?
How many stars of Bethlehem burnt bright
Beyond Orion or Centauri’s blinding arc?
How many miracles of birth all innocent
Have blessed those worlds?
...
For in this time of Christmas
In the long Day totalling up to Eight,
We see the light, we know the dark;
And creatures lifted, born, thrust free of so much night
No matter what the world or time or circumstance
Must love the light,
So, children of all lost unnumbered suns
Must fear the dark
Which mingles in a shadowing-forth on air.
And swarms the blood.
No matter what the color, shape, or size
Of beings who keep souls like breathing coals
In long midnights,
They must need saving of themselves.
So on far worlds in snowfalls deep and clear
Imagine how the rounding out of some dark year
Might celebrate with birthing one miraculous child!
A child?
Born in Andromeda’s out-swept mysteries?
Then count its hands, its fingers,
Eyes, and most incredible holy limbs!
The sum of each?
No matter. Cease.
Let Child be fire as blue as water under Moon.
Let Child sport free in tides with human-seeming fish.
Let ink of octopi inhabit blood
Let skin take acid rains of chemistry
All falling down in nightmare storms of cleansing burn.
Christ wanders in the Universe
A flesh of stars,
He takes on creature shapes
To suit the mildest elements,
He dresses him in flesh beyond our ken.
...
Yet, still unsure, and all being doubt,
Much frightened man on Earth does cast about
And clothe himself in steel
And borrow fire
And himself in the great glass of the careless Void admire.
...
Christ is not dead
Nor does God sleep
While waking Man
Goes striding on the Deep
To birth ourselves anew
And love rebirth
From fear of straying long
On outworn Earth.
...
New Wise men Descry
Our hosts of machineries
Which write immortal life
And sign it God!
Down, down Alien skies.
And flown and gone, arrived and bedded safe to sleep
Upon some winters morning deep
Ten billion years of light
From where we stand us now and sing,
There will be time to cry eternal gratitudes
Time to know and see and love the Gift of Life itself,
Always diminished,
Always restored,
Out of one hand and into the other
Of the Lord.

Blood

I have too much of a taste for gore sometimes. I spent all of this afternoon sampling blood from chickens and while I didn't enjoy the heat, the smell, or the ache in my legs, there's something very satisfying about seeing the red stuff flowing smoothly into the syringe, or in garnet drops down the white feathers...

(Somewhere in between last Tuesday's draw and today's, they crossed the line from being baby chicks to young chickens. I had no idea feathers could replace fluffy down so fast, enabling three-foot leaps out of the hands of exasperated scientists. It gives you an appreciation of the progress between Velociraptor to Archaeopteryx.)

Also, I just finished a novel by Natsuo Kirino about a bunch of Japanese housewives who find themselves cutting up a series of dead bodies, stalked by a sadistic murderer, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

And finally, last week I spent some time on eBay and acquired McFarlane Toys' seriously perverted version of Little Red Riding Hood:
Is there anything about this figurine which is not, as the Americans say, Kick Ass? (In case you can't tell, the blobby thing at the bottom of the Big Bad Wolf's entrails is Grandma.)
She occupies the place of pride on my bookshelf, above where another McFarlane figurine, my old friend the xenomorph hangs. (The Alien quadrilogy is a whole another level of gore...)

Hey, at least I don't pretend to be a vampire and write emo poetry!

Excel hell

I don't get most of the jokes on The Daily WTF, which is a humour/horror story site for IT professionals, but I go there for the stupid user stories and funny screenshots (examples here).

But there was this one story about Microsoft Excel that resonated quite well with my experience (or the experience of nearly anybody who's had to work with a lot of tabular data on a modern PC, come to that). One of the complaints in the comments thread particularly sounded familiar. Click here and scroll down to "2008-04-04 11:28 • by maldrich".

The root of all this: Excel makes things that look like tables, and tables are useful for data. There is no other program that is as widespread AND makes things that look like tables, so people use Excel to make tables of data. And it's in fact really, really bad at that. It was designed for ad-hoc numerical analysis and got appropriated as a database loading and reporting tool.

I think it's actually damaged the GNP of whole nations, this Excel program. It'd be interesting to know how badly.

Back in 2006 when I was back in Malaysia for a few months, my idiot cousin Jerng talked me into applying for a "data analyst" job with the company he was working for at the time, a multinational human resources consulting firm. Despite my protest that a) I didn't like office work and b) I didn't have any experience in data analysis except for running ELISAs, eventually I gave in, which was a big mistake. After less than two weeks, I decided that sitting in front of a computer all day, plus the corporate culture of "stay till 8pm even if you're not busy because everybody else is and you'll look lazy if you leave on time" were driving me nuts and I quit. I felt really bad about it since I'd told the guy who hired me that I was a serious worker, but I'd been prepared to actually WORK, not hang around half the day with nothing to do and then suddenly have stuff dumped on my desk shortly before knocking-off time.

The way they stored data was really weird though. We were working on a big fat report of the salaries and benefits offered by several hundred Malaysian clients. They would make up these forms in Excel and then email them to the clients. When the forms came back, first the "data analysts" had to "validate" them by calling up the clients' HR departments and bugging them about the fields that weren't filled out properly. Then the data were manually copy-pasted into more Excel tables.

Clients' employees job descriptions were assigned numerical codes - there were several hundred different numbers, categorized by industry sector. The problem was, that year they had switched over to a new set of codes...but some of the current year's data had been entered into worksheets that were using the old codes and therefore couldn't be put into the report yet... A lot of my work for the 3 weeks I was there ended up being converting entries to the new codes. At first I tried to make some lookup tables to do it. But then it turned out that some of the code-to-job-description info was hidden by macros. So my supervisor showed me how to unhide them. Then I got most of the old entries replaced but some still came up null because a few of the old codes weren't where they were supposed to be. Then my super dug them out of some old file that she'd forgotten about...

It was all extremely ad hoc and I can't help wondering now why a bloody fancy company like that couldn't get a few people who knew how to use proper database software.

Anyway, it's also slightly entertaining but very alarming to learn why you shouldn't use Excel to store microarray data.

A default date conversion feature in Excel (Microsoft Corp., Redmond, WA) was altering gene names that it considered to look like dates. For example, the tumor suppressor DEC1 [Deleted in Esophageal Cancer 1] [3] was being converted to '1-DEC.' Figure 1 lists 30 gene names that suffer an analogous fate.

There is another default conversion problem for RIKEN [4] clone identifiers of the form nnnnnnnEnn, where n denotes a digit. These identifiers are comprised of the serial number of the plate that contains the library, information on plate status, and the address of the clone [5]. ... For example, the RIKEN identifier "2310009E13" was converted irreversibly to the floating-point number "2.31E+13." A non-expert user might well fail to notice that approximately 3% of the identifiers on a microarray with tens of thousands of genes had been converted to an incorrect form, yet the potential for 2,000 identifiers to be transmogrified without notice is a considerable concern. Most important, these conversions to an internal date representation or floating-point number format are irreversible; the original gene name cannot be recovered.

Seriously, I would cry if that happened to my data.

Stupid frigging Microsoftware and its tendency to assume it knows what you want better than you do. Try typing the names of recombinant DNA constructs or viruses into Word. It thinks you hit Caps Lock by accident and converts "rNiV" to "Rniv" - unless you turn off the "Correct accidental use of Caps Lock" AutoCorrect function. Gah!

The Braided World

Just finished writing an Amazon review of a good book (The Braided World) I read a couple months ago. Had to rant about two annoying characters though.

I picked up Kenyon's latest, "The Bright of the Sky" from the new sci-fi shelf in the local public library and loved it so I went looking for more of her work.

The book takes place in the aftermath of a cosmic disaster which somehow "stole" information from Earth, including information in the form of genetic diversity. As a result, the human race is slowly dying off due to a lack of resistance against various infectious diseases. A mysterious message is received, giving directions to a planet in another star system. A small expedition funded by a wealthy retired singer, Bailey (forgot her surname) goes off to check it out.

They find a very Earthlike world, inhabited by humans with one startling difference: they, and other mammals, are not viviparous. They don't get pregnant. Males and females both eject their gametes into "birthing pools" and the babies grow inside symbiotic waterplants. Eventually we learn that this planet was created as a giant seed bank by some other extraterrestrial Good Samaritan to preserve Earth biology till after the passing of the "dark force" and the strange reproductive system was set up to speed up the restocking.

Sex, being totally dissociated from reproduction, takes place casually and publicly between friends (however, penetration is considered disgusting), which startles the visitors from Earth at first. The rest of the book is an exploration of how human culture might develop with such drastically different reproductive biology, while the original mission to recover Earth's lost genetic diversity becomes almost peripheral.

Despite the beauty of this planet - "The Braided World" refers to both the riverine kingdom of the Dassa and the interdependency of humans and the birth plants - it's no utopia. The Dassa and their neighbours are just as flawed, brutal, and prejudiced as Earth humans. Occasionally girls with fully functional reproductive systems are born as throwback mutants, called "hoda". Upon their discovery at menarche, their tongues are cut out and they become mute (or so we think at first) slaves for the rest of their lives. Hoda's lib becomes a passionate subplot and a personal mission for Bailey.

Readers who enjoy SF with good world-building will like this book. Although Kenyon's skills aren't as mature as in "The Bright of the Sky", the braided world is a fully fleshed-out planet. You know it's good when you wish it was a real place you could visit. Like Octavia Butler's works, this is a more bio-driven SF rather than the majority physics-driven type of story. Kenyon doesn't get in over her head with the science or let it drown out actual plot. My only quibble is that the plant-dependent reproduction is at different points in the book said to be faster than normal pregnancy OR much less efficient.

The only two major characters I found unconvincing and annoying enough to somewhat mar the book were the anthropologist Nick Venning and the biologist Cai Zhen, who are both horribly stereotypical. Venning goes from being a wide-eyed kid who wants to go everywhere and do everything against the commander's advice (think Daniel Jackson in Stargate: SG-1) to being a raving murderous bigot after incautiously taking several doses of a psychotropic drug.

Zhen was annoying on two levels: one, that she's simply a mean person and every sentence that comes out of her mouth is a snipe. This could have been justified if her dialogue was humorously sarcastic instead of just plain vicious, or if she contributed something to the plot. I kept expecting some sort of shocking revelation, like her being impregnated by one of the Dassa, but no such luck. I felt like I had been led on since the other characters make a big deal of protecting her, as the only fertile Earth "hoda" - Bailey is postmenopausal. Even her extremely minor role in the story, sequencing the DNA of native organisms, could have been filled by a friendly robot (and I mean this literally; back here in the 21st century there already are robots that do that sort of thing). The other thing is that Kenyon seems to have subconsciously written in the stereotype of the ice-cold Chinese dragon lady. I'm not accusing Kenyon of racism (the diversity of cultures and persons in her novels is beautiful and honest), but of a worse crime for a novelist: writing a BORING CHARACTER.

Before anyone comments, I'm highly aware of the irony of a Chinese female biologist complaining about a book character who's a Chinese female biologist who complains too much... I'll stop now. Read it, it's a good book.