The Futile Cycle

Looks neat and slick! Very much in keeping with the new iPod aesthetics.

I was really interested in the new gesturing features that Apple included on the trackpad, but looking at the website, I’m very very confused about the user interface. It’s backwards!

Consider our current setup (on MacBooks and MacBook Pros). With two-finger scrolling, moving the fingers up scrolls up, moving the fingers down scrolls down. The way to think about it is that you’re moving the scrollbar. That’s fine; it’s a nice generalization of using the mouse pointer.

But with these new gestures, there’s some sort of inconsistency. For the new pinch and rotate gestures, the fingers move as if you’re manipulating the objects on the screen. But for the new swipe gestures, you move left to see left, move right to see right. You’re not manipulating the pictures anymore, you’re back to moving the scrollbar! On the iPhone, on the other hand, swiping left moves you to the right, because you’re moving the stuff on the screen to the left (take a book and swipe left on the right-hand page; you’ve just turned to the next page, right?). So it gets confusing; what’re you moving? When are you moving what? Are you scrolling, pointing, manipulating, what?

Another example. Take Coverflow. On my MacBook Pro, when I use two finger scroll and move them to the right, the scrollbar moves right, which means the icons move left. That’s fine, I’m used to it. On the iPhone, if I swipe my finger to the right in Coverflow mode, the icons move right; that’s fine, because I’m swiping the pictures right, and so they should move right. What if, now on the MacBook Air, I were to swipe right on the trackpad? I’ll be back to moving the icons left! Confusing? It is!

So, in a way, I’m a little disappointed by the trackpad gestures (of course, their use is optional), as they seem to break consistency with the other products in Apple’s lineup. Ah, for the days when Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines were brilliant innovations in computer-human interaction.

Terra Sigillata has word about an NIH open letter on cell culture line identities. Over the years, some cell lines have been shown to be contaminated by other cells (particularly by HeLa cells, those immortal, nearly indestructible cervical cancer cells popular with many cell biologists), and verifying the identity of cell lines has become a problem, many times, especially since there’s no easy cut-and-dry method to verify a cell line. The NIH is still pushing for such verification, apparently, because otherwise the research is difficult to believe.

Wikipedia has an nice list of possible cell line contaminations.

My current lab works mainly on primary fibroblasts that we isolate ourselves, so we don’t have as many problems with cell line contamination, but I’m curious as to how many other labs are affected by this.

There’s a neat blog experiment here for blogs to vow to only post about science, at least one post each day, between February 4th and 8th. I’ve signed up. Will you?

The Seven Stones has a good post on recent controversies on how Drosophila create their early embryo morphogen gradients; more specifically, how Bicoid’s gradient is set up. Turns out, the simplest model may not be the correct one (shocking, isn’t it?).

UPDATE: There’s also a nice paper (free PDF) by Stas Shvartsman on still another theory about the origins of the Bicoid gradient (not for the math-phobic) in Developmental Biology.

Abel Pharmboy has a link to a really neat article concerning primate geophagy (dirt eating). The authors of the article noticed that chimps tend to eat dirt right before they eat leaves of Trichilia rubescens, a plant that contains anti-malarial substances. The really cool part is that they found that something in the dirt might enhance the anti-malarial activity of the plant substance! Chimps may have evolved (culturally or biologically) to do some pharmacy! Now that’s cool!

Another comment about trends in the literature:

It’s been a very long time since I’ve read a scientific paper that used an exclamation point (!). Science bloggers use them all the time when talking about science, because they get excited and passionate. Scientists love science!

So, why is it that when scientists report their results in journals, they have to become all dispassionate and emotionless? Is it to invoke some sort of image of utter logic and rationality? What’s wrong with showing that you think something is exciting? I want exclamation points back in science journals, dammit.

I vow in my next paper (my first paper…), I will do everything possible to insert an exclamation point at the end of an excited sentence. It’s my duty to the scientific world!

(By the way, the title refers to both the T. S. Eliot poem “The Hollow Men” and the practice of programmers to refer to exclamation points as “bangs.”)

Boston’s Mayor Thomas Menino apparently thinks that in-store health clinics (such as MinuteClinic) are unethical because they (gasp) make money off of sick people!

Wait, so what about pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers, health insurance companies, doctors, nurses, ambulance workers, hospital staffers, and scientists who do research on clinical diseases (among others)? Maybe they shouldn’t be making money either! That would really encourage them to succeed in helping others!

And farmers shouldn’t be driven by profits, because they’re making money off of hungry people! And homebuilders shouldn’t be driven by profits, because they’re making money off of people looking for shelter!

To think that Boston would have a mayor so economically and morally illiterate.

Lately, authors lists have been becoming incredibly long. Just a few days ago, when Nature Genetics put online their advanced publications (i.e. papers accepted, but not yet cleaned up and formatted for mass consumption), the shortest authors list was for ten authors. The longest, of course, had 68, and the average was 33 authors.

Admittedly, the problem is probably worse in genetics than other fields, because these days a lot of genetics requires massive amounts of work, from computational to experimental. Genetics used to require lots of work in the past, too, but publications back then tended to be on more tractable organisms, like bacteria or flies, where maybe one would have two or three authors. Nowadays, it’s not unusual to see massive experiments in mice, or even huge population studies in humans.

Still, I gotta wonder. These authors lists, even the super-long ones, weren’t organized alphabetically or anything. The order was definitely something someone thought about; so how do they get organized? What’s the difference in credit between the 20th and 21st author?

Here are even more extraordinarily amusing videos, the first courtesy of Harvard grad students and the second two from Princeton’s grad students:

For context in the next video, Trudi Schupbach is an extraordinarily nice lady, head of the Princeton Molecular Biology department’s admissions committee:

Via Eurekalert, apparently having ultra-low cholesterol can be bad for you. Is this that surprising?

See, what I thought was really surprising was that other studies had, up until now, shown that having extremely low amounts of cholesterol (via high doses of statins) didn’t cause health problems. Cholesterol is an essential molecule in the body, and lowering cholesterol to less than natural levels seems like it would do harm…and now, apparently it does.