An Idea Whose Time Has Come

If you enjoy literature, politics and satire, you'll love ShakesPalin.

After inventing the word "refudiate" and subsequently comparing herself to Shakespeare as a wordsmith, Twitter is abuzz with posts bizarrely fusing quotes from the Bard on Avon and the Thrilla From Wasilla. Here are some of the better ones:

Alas, poor Couric, I read them all.

But soft, what light from yonder window breaks? It is the East, and I can see Russia from my front porch.

Here's my personal favorite:

Be not afraid of mavericks: some are born mavericks, some achieve maverickry, and some have maverickness thrust upon 'em.

Scientists Drawn By Seventh-Graders

Children draw and describe their perception of scientists before and after visiting FermiLab. Quoting from the project description page:

Few young people have never met a scientist or engineer and most have an opportunity to see where they work. In 1985, middle school teachers asked us if they could bring their students to Fermilab. They helped us develop Beauty and Charm so that those students who came to a working research laboratory would come with a purpose.

Roger Ebert is a sarcastic genius

Some choice words from Roger Ebert's review of Sex and the City 2:

Some of these people make my skin crawl. The characters of "Sex and the City 2" are flyweight bubbleheads living in a world which rarely requires three sentences in a row. Their defining quality is consuming things. They gobble food, fashion, houses, husbands, children, vitamins and freebies. They must plan their wardrobes on the phone, so often do they appear in different basic colors, like the plugs you pound into a Playskool workbench.

It doesn't slow down from there. My favorite thing about this movie is the contempt and sarcasm that it inspires in Mr. Ebert.

R Graphics Parameters That I like

Reproduced here so that I don't lose them:

par( lwd = 1.5 )
par( mgp = c(3,1,0) )
par( mar = c(4,5,3,2) )

Rethinking Paper Money

Michael Tyznik has a great post in which he suggests new designs for American currency:

Graphic Design: Dollar Redesign by Michael Tyznik.

The best part is that rather than filling the reverse side of bills with a smorgasboard of random eyes and famous buildings, Tyznik's designs use tasteful pictures of important people in history and famous quotes from them.

Refusing to Stop

I just finished reading a story about Jure Robic, a Slovenian soldier who excels at ultra long-distance bike races. His races are characterized by mental instability, he frequently hallucinates and uses his hallucinations to motivate himself to work harder. It's very compelling to read the stories of how he and his racing team manage the intense demands that the racing exerts on both his body and his mind.

From Danny Coyle's article in the New York Times titled
That Which Does Not Kill Me Makes Me Stronger:

In a consideration of Robic, three facts are clear: he is nearly indefatigable, he is occasionally nuts, and the first two facts are somehow connected. The question is, How? Does he lose sanity because he pushes himself too far, or does he push himself too far because he loses sanity? Robic is the latest and perhaps most intriguing embodiment of the old questions: What happens when the human body is pushed to the limits of its endurance? Where does the breaking point lie? And what happens when you cross the line?

The brain is a machine made up of hundreds of billions of interconnected neurons, and when machines are pushed to their limits they can begin to malfunction. This story make me wonder how much potential exists in all of us to push harder in our jobs and our hobbies, and what the cost of such exertion would be.

Duffy-negative humans at risk from Plasmodium vivax

There is a blood group called Duffy-negative that provides increased resistance to infection by Plasmodium vivax, the parasite that causes malaria. The Duffy antigen is a protein that can't displayed on the surface of blood cells, and people in the Duffy-negative blood group do not display the Duffy antigen. It has been known for many years that vivax enters blood cells by leveraging the Duffy antigen, and the absence of this Duffy antigen on the surface of blood cells makes it more difficult for the parasite to enter blood cells.

To understand this paper better, I looked up some statistics about malaria and they were very shocking. There are between 350-500 million cases of malaria per year, and one to three million people die per year from malarial infection. There is still not an effective vaccine for malaria, although the Gates Foundation is funding work in this area.

A recent paper in PNAS gives evidence that vivax may be evolving its way around the requirement for Duffy:

Plasmodium vivax clinical malaria is commonly observed in Duffy-negative Malagasy people

The striking sentence from their abstract is this:

"In Madagascar, P. vivax has broken through its dependence on the Duffy antigen for establishing human blood-stage infection and disease."

The authors investigated popluations of people in Madagascar without malarial symptoms, 72% of whom are in the Duffy-negative blood group. Using PCR and microscopy, the authors found that 8.8% of people Duffy-negative patients were infected with vivax. After isolating parasite samples from these people, polymorphic markers in the parasites were genotyped to see if this ability to infect Duffy-negative people was from a single clonal population. The markers suggested that the parasites infecting Duffy-negative people were from distinct genetic backgrounds, which is consistent with the idea that the ability to infect Duffy-negative humans has arisen multiple times in evolution.

While the authors don't know the molecular basis of infection for these parasites with novel infection mechanisms, that will certainly be the focus of new work. The paper is very interesting, and has very important implications for how we treat one of the most devastating diseases in the world.

Unfortunately, people must be subscribers to PNAS to read this article. Here's a link to a recent ScienceDaily news article summarizing the study:

Duffy-Negative Blood Types No Longer Protected from P. Vivax Malaria