Links 15/02/13

All over the internets and every kind of news media: a large meteor streaking across the early morning sky of Western Siberia.  The New York Times has many video clips, and an explanation for the ubiquitous dashcams in Russian vehicles that took them:

Psychopaths are abundant on Russian roads. You best not cut anyone off or undertake some other type of maneuver that might inconvenience the 200-pound, six-foot-five brawling children you see on YouTube hopping out of their SUVs with their dukes up. They will go ballistic in a snap, drive in front of you, brake suddenly, block you off, jump out and run towards your vehicle. Next thing you start getting punches in your face because your didn’t roll up your windows, or getting pulled out of the car and beaten because you didn’t lock the doors.

These fights happen all the time and you can’t really press charges. Point to your broken nose or smashed windows all you want. The Russian courts don’t like verbal claims. They do, however, like to send people to jail for battery and property destruction if there’s definite video proof.

And here's an image of the meteor's vapour trail, taken from orbit.

Sort of related to intrusions from outer space, the uncanny valley of incredibly life-like David Bowie dolls.

Throughout her career, the famous biologist Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) argued that the world of microorganisms has a much larger impact on the entire biosphere—the world of all living things—than scientists typically recognize. Now a team of scientists from universities around the world has collected and compiled the results of hundreds of studies, most from within the past decade, on animal-bacterial interactions, and have shown that Margulis was right. The combined results suggest that the evidence supporting Margulis' view has reached a tipping point, demanding that scientists reexamine some of the fundamental features of life through the lens of the complex, codependent relationships among bacteria and other very different life forms.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-bacterial-world-impacting-previously-thought.html#jCp

Throughout her career, the famous biologist Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) argued that the world of microorganisms has a much larger impact on the entire biosphere—the world of all living things—than scientists typically recognize. Now a team of scientists from universities around the world has collected and compiled the results of hundreds of studies, most from within the past decade, on animal-bacterial interactions, and have shown that Margulis was right. The combined results suggest that the evidence supporting Margulis' view has reached a tipping point, demanding that scientists reexamine some of the fundamental features of life through the lens of the complex, codependent relationships among bacteria and other very different life forms.

Throughout her career, the famous biologist Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) argued that the world of microorganisms has a much larger impact on the entire biosphere—the world of all living things—than scientists typically recognize. Now a team of scientists from universities around the world has collected and compiled the results of hundreds of studies, most from within the past decade, on animal-bacterial interactions, and have shown that Margulis was right. The combined results suggest that the evidence supporting Margulis' view has reached a tipping point, demanding that scientists reexamine some of the fundamental features of life through the lens of the complex, codependent relationships among bacteria and other very different life forms.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-bacterial-world-impacting-previously-thought.html#jCp

The adventures of Florida Man.

Something Borrowed

It's that time of year when British authors and anyone else who makes a book - authors, illustrators, photographers, translators, editors of anthologies - receives their Public Lending Right payments for books lent in the library system.  Twenty-eight countries have a form of PLR.  In the UK, the amount earned by each registered title is based on payment of 6.2 pence per loan, and an estimate of the number of borrowings of each registered title using data from a number of typical libraries.

And very welcome it is too, for most recipients - although not for Horrible Histories author, Terry Deary.  He's the seventh most-borrowed children's author, and because the maximum PLR payment is capped at £6,600, to ensure that best-selling authors don't scoop up most of the pot. he reckons he's out of pocket by some £180,000. And that's not all:

'But never mind my selfish author perception – what about the bookshops? The libraries are doing nothing for the book industry. They give nothing back, whereas bookshops are selling the book, and the author and the publisher get paid, which is as it should be. What other entertainment do we expect to get for free?'

According to Deary, libraries are Victorian institutions which have outlived their usefulness, giving people the undeserved entitlement that books should be available at the expense of the book trade and the local councils which fund them.

It's pernicious stuff. Most authors, like me, don't earn anything like the amount Deary reckons he's lost thanks to the perfidious PLR scheme. In fact, the average earnings of British authors - and I'm average, in this respect - is somewhat less than the national average wage. So while the PLR payments may be peanuts to someone like Deary, they are an important source of income to many authors.  As are sales to libraries of hardback books. Back in the day, my publisher, Gollancz, made a good chunk of its income from selling hardbacks to libraries: the famous yellow jackets ensured that its crime and science fiction titles stood out on library shelves. For many midlist authors, sales to libraries are still important, and cutbacks in library funding are a serious threat to their careers.

Borrowing books and buying books are not mutually exclusive, and every book borrowed is not, as Mr Deary imagines, a lost sale. There's no basis for that kind of like-for-like calculation. As for his assertion that bookshops are closing down because libraries are giving away books for free, libraries and bookshops have managed to coexist for a century and a half. The trade in printed books is currently under threat not because of people borrowing books, but because they are buying more books online, and are increasingly buying more and more ebooks. The decline in the amount of money spent on books is due in no large part to the proliferation of massively discounted ebooks, with heavily promoted bestselling titles going for as little as 20 pence. It's this, rather than the 'free' books in libraries, which is threatening to devalue books.

Far from doing nothing for the booktrade, libraries buy massive quantities of books and through the PLR scheme pay authors a tithe on book borrowing, and most importantly they encourage reading. Many people who start out borrowing books from libraries got on to become lifelong readers and book-buyers. I type this in a room lined with about 3000 books, part of my personal library. A good proportion of the older titles are books I once borrowed from libraries, and bought so that I could read them again. Would I have become a writer without access to a library stuffed with books I could freely borrow? Probably.  But my local library was vastly enabling, because it fed my growing book-reading habit, and allowed me to graze on a vast selection of titles, and to read authors I might never otherwise have encountered, and generally provided me with a literary education.

In short, libraries are invaluable gateways, much like Mr Deary's rather wonderful Horrible History books. What a pity he doesn't see that.

Red Queen's Race

Getting hard to stay ahead.

From Nature's news blog:

 Synthetic biologists have developed DNA modules that perform logic operations in living cells. These ‘genetic circuits’ could be used to track key moments in a cell’s life or, at the flick of a chemical switch, change a cell’s fate, the researchers say. Their results are described this week in Nature Biotechnology.


From Gardens of the Sun:

The window looked out across a huge spherical chamber carved out of the native ice and lit by a point source hung at the apex of its ceiling like a drop of incandescent blood. Its walls curved down to a floor creased with smooth ridges, and the top of each ridge was streaked with dark eddies and swirls and littered with dense copses of half-melted candles, phalanxes of tooth-like spikes, heaps of tangled wires or curled scrolls like spun sugar,meadows of brittle hairs, pods of paper-thin fins breaking out of the ice. All these growths stark black in the ruby light, apart from a large candle-copse close to the observation window that was clearly dying from the inside out, its lumpy spires crumbling into pale ash.
 
‘Vacuum organisms,’ Loc said. ‘A garden of vacuum organisms.’
 
He’d been expecting something truly exotic. A clone farm of superhuman babies. A wonderland full of weird plants and animals. A city of intelligent rats or raccoons. But these growths weren’t that much different from the vacuum organisms cultivated on the naked surface around every city and settlement on the moons of Saturn.
 
‘They look like vacuum organisms,’ Sri Hong-Owen said. ‘But they are not. They are not constructed from bound nanotech, but are spun from intricate pseudo-proteinaceous polymers. I call them polychines. If commercial vacuum organisms are synthetic analogues of prokaryotes - bacteria, Mr Ifrahim - these are analogues of the ancestors of prokaryotes.’
 
‘You want to give me a lecture,’ Loc said. ‘It would be easier if you cut to the chase, and told me exactly why these things are worthless. They certainly look worthless.’
 
Sri Hong-Owen ignored his sally, and told him that the chamber contained a methane-hydrogen atmosphere at minus twenty degrees Centigrade, far warmer than Mimas’s ambient temperature. ‘As for the polychines, they do not possess a pseudocellular structure; nor are they generated by the systematic execution of a centralised set of encoded instructions. Instead, they are networks of self-catalysing metabolic cycles created by interactions between specific structures in their polymers.’
 
‘Like carpets, or suit-liners.’
 
‘Very good, Mr Ifrahim. But although halflife materials are self-repairing and can even grow when fed the correct substrate, they encode only a very simple set of on/off instructions and can express only one morphology. The polychines are far more versatile. They are non-binary logic engines that use a form of photosynthesis to transform simple chemicals to complex polymers. They can reproduce, and they can even exchange information, although that information is entirely analogue in form. And they possess a limited set of components which obey a limited set of self-organising rules capable of generating new instructions, and, therefore, new properties and even new forms. Once I completely understand how those rules operate in every possible combination, it will be possible to manipulate the polychines to produce predictable states.’

Human Mystery

Found in Ray Monk's huge, and hugely lucid, biography of Robert Oppenheimer, Inside the Centre, a contender for footnote of the year:

It is impossible to tell how much of this story is true. Can one believe that Oppenheimer deliberately dropped his suitcase, intending it to hit the woman? Did he really kiss her? And, perhaps most improbably of all: can one really imagine him travelling third class?