Recessive genetic diseases can be useful!

Misha Angrist, who is having his entire genome published online, argues that extricating genetic diseases from the population can have unintended consequences:

“… the genome is a dynamic thing, and a balancing act. Sickle cell trait has persisted because carrying it protects one from getting malaria. Who’s to say that carrying one copy of a cystic fibrosis mutation doesn’t similarly protect us against cholera or various diarrheal illnesses? If we eliminate those mutations from the population, are we opening the door to a future of intestinal problems?
–Misha Angrist in an interview with Maud Newton, A Conversation with Misha Angrist, Publisher of His Genome

(via: The Daily Dish)

Minorities working together

One night in Georgia in the summer of 1962, Dresner and King were trapped with other activists in a house surrounded by hundreds of members of the local White Citizens Council.

While they were waiting for help, King told Dresner about the Passover seder he’d attended that spring at a Reform synagogue in Atlanta. He particularly recalled reading the Haggadah and hearing the phrase “We were slaves in Egypt.”

“Dr. King said to me, ‘I was enormously impressed that 3,000 years later, these people remember their ancestors were slaves, and they’re not ashamed,” Dresner said. “He told me, ‘We Negroes have to learn that, not to be ashamed of our slave heritage.’”
— Fishkoff (2010) in A half-century later, rabbis recall marching with Martin Luther King

Prejudice is one the major themes that’s come up in our discussions of the novel The Chrysalids. Students raised the idea that different minority groups might band together to fight for rights. I offered the examples of Jews in the civil rights movement in the 1960’s. Just in time, Sue Fishkoff has an article on rabbi’s who worked with Martin Luther King Jr.

The rabbis who joined these efforts were arrested, jailed and sometimes beaten, protected by the color of their skin from the worst physical dangers, but nonetheless threatened on a daily basis.
— Fishkoff (2010) in A half-century later, rabbis recall marching with Martin Luther King

The positive side of teasing

Teasing, under some circumstances, might actually help people bond. At least according to Dacher Keltner of the Greater Good Science Center.

Teasing can be a way to diffuse embarrassing situations, but its effect depends very much on the context and the culture. The outstanding question is how we differentiate positive teasing among friends from verbal attempts to bully. Part of the answer to this question lies in the effect: does the teasing contribute to group cohesion, or does it isolate and exclude?

Food and Nutrition

Darya Pino from Summer Tomato has a cute little flow chart to help you identify “Real Food” in the supermarket. It takes the conservative approach to eating shared by Michael Pollan, who recommends only eating thing your grandmother would have recognized as food, and Food Politics‘ Marion Nestle’s interdiction against foods with more than five ingredients.

POV-Ray: 3d rendering

Giles Tran’s amazing rendering of glasses on the counter inspired me to check through my own POV-Ray generated library. Nothing nearly as good, but some of it is still might be useful.

Demonstrating the axial tilt of the Earth, this image shows the Earth at the northern hemisphere's summer solstice.
Rotating Earth at the northern hemisphere's winter solstice.

You build 3d models in POV-Ray and then export 2d images from whichever point of view you want, so once you have the model set up you can easily change the perspective or even move objects to create animations.

POV-Ray does not have any useful sort of user interface; you’re usually creating your models with computer code. It can therefore be challenging to use, and, as with any 3d programming language, a bit of geometry, trigonometry and algebra are needed.

However, the final results can be impressive. I’m continually amazed each year by the quality of the work added to their Hall of Fame.

For much easier, quicker and not so sophisticated 3d results, I use VPython, which is also a great way to learn programming that outputs 3d images.

Genetic testing: What it can do, and where we are.

“On average we found that each of us carries two or three mutations that could cause one of these severe childhood diseases.”
–Stephen Kingsmore, physician, Children’s Mercy Hospital in Greenfieldboyce (2010), New Genetic Test Screens Would-Be Parents.

NPR’s All Things Considered had two related articles on last night that deal with the specific topics we’re covering this week: genetic disease and recessive alleles.

The first one is about the latest in genetic screening technology, for determining if potential parents have recessive alleles that could combine to produce children with genetic diseases. Recent research has made this much easier.

The second touches on the ethical consequences of genetic screening. It could lead to an increase in abortion rates and leads us along the slippery slope of eugenics.

Beggars in Spain, by Nancy Kress
What if we engineered for intelligence?

This second story would make an interesting basis for a Socratic dialogue. As would, I think, the movie Gattica, which deals with the consequences of genetic screening and genetic customizations. I see it’s PG-13 so we may be able to screen it. Similarly, I may recommend Brian Stableford’s War Games to my eight graders who might like a military science fiction book that deals with genetic optimization. Alternatively, Nancy Kress’ Beggars in Spain might offer another interesting perspective on this issue.

Shake the dust revisited

Today in working on extending our thinking about texts we revisited Anis Mojgani’s “Shake the Dust“. We started by reading and thinking about the text, then had a group discussion. I played the video at the end.

After we watched Mojgani, I asked the students to write down if, and how, his presentation changed what they thought about the issue they were most interested. Mojgani’s presentation is forceful, and it emphasizes different issues than you can gleam from a dry reading of the poem. Doing it this way, I think, allowed students to see that there are multiple ways of interpreting the same texts.

Still life

Image by Gilles Tran.

What makes art? Frank Wilson points out that:

art … never simply transcribes what is “out there,” but selects certain details and arranges them into a harmony that transfigures them.
— Frank Wilson (2010) in “Still life and the alchemy of art“.

We might see arrangements like the stuff sitting on the counter every day, but the image/photography/painting becomes art when the collection is view from a specific perspective that transforms them and highlights details.

Aside from its obvious beauty, what really intrigues me about this picture is where it was taken: In the living room of the Menchers’ apartment, just a few feet from where I was standing. I would never have guessed.

When Eric told me that, I turned and looked, and could see where the vase and the other objects had been placed. But the setting was altogether different from the picture. The living room is a perfectly nice and neat space, and I had just been sitting there, but when I looked at it again there was absolutely nothing about it that would have brought to mind that photo.

Such is the alchemy of art.
— Frank Wilson (2010) in “Still life and the alchemy of art“.

Note: The image at the top of this post is computer generated Gilles Tran, using the free, open-source, 3D rendering program POV-Ray. I’ve played around with POV-Ray and it can be a bit tricky, but you can do interesting things.