RaineWalker's Xanga

To the Author's Portrait

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 01:28:36 GMT

...
To breathe in rural peace, 
to hear the stream,
And think and feel as once the Poet felt.
Whate'er thy fate, 
those features have not grown Unrecognised 
through many a household tear                  
More prompt, more glad, 
to fall than drops of dew
By morning shed around a flower half-blown;
Tears of delight, that testified 
how true To life thou art, 
and, in thy truth, 
how dear!
                                                              
-William Wordsworth, 1830.

Sunrise

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 00:11:50 GMT

Until this morning I hadn't see the sun in over a week.

Here's proof that it rose over the bluffs this morning ...

(click to see larger image)

Thunder Snow

Sat, 24 Feb 2007 22:31:26 GMT

The winds picked up right around sunset last night.

About 10pm it began to thunder.

LOUD thunder.

With lightning.

About 10:45 I was drawn away from my work

to the back door

by the sound of still more

LOUD rumbling of thunder.

When I opened the door to the back deck,

This is what I saw:

Propagate or Eradicate? mutant vs. wildtype

Fri, 23 Feb 2007 22:41:03 GMT

wild type

The typical form of an organism, strain, gene, or characteristic as it occurs in nature, as distinguished from mutant forms that may result from selective breeding.

I went to leave a comment when Leonidas wrote about an interesting dispute between Monsanto and a farmer over an herbicide resistant plant seed.

But writing the comment got me to thinking and reminded me of a topic of discussion in a biotechnology lecture years ago with Kallas.

Talk about a case of not seeing the forest for the trees...

Shouldn't the inventor (Monsanto) who holds the patent for the mutant form of the organism be responsible for the consequences of having of the engineered strain growing "in the wild"?

If the patent holder accounts for control of distribution of the seed, should they also be held accountable for other propagation methods, and if so, eradication of unwanted, misplaced mutated forms, as well?

Unlike humans, plants have multiple sets of chromosomes and can reproduce by more than one method. Most higher plants can be propagated in at least 3 ways: pollen, seeds, and roots/rhizomes. In the case of plants, the reproductive consequences of planting genetically-modified organisms (plants with bacterial transformations, in this case) does not begin and end with the seed.

Here's the forest: all reproductive methods of the plant that carry the mutant genome (likely plasmid) have not been considered.

Monsanto is more than willing to accept financial responsibility for the control of one method of propagation: the seed.

With this in mind, it follows they should be held accountable, good or bad, for all other methods of propagation of the mutant plant form.

Since the pollen carries the potential for reproductive propagation, Monsanto bears responsibility for "controlling" the pollen of the patented strain to the area of the environment where they have intentionally planted the mutant by seed. If the mutant plant develops an invasive root system and migrates outside of the intended environment, Monsanto should be responsible for the eradication. Consider that plenty of states already have laws concerning "invasive" plant species.

The farmer should sue Monsanto. His field of "vintage" seed stock has been contaminated by the pollen of Monsanto's engineered Round-up-resistant-mutant plant. What's worse, the mutant strain of plant cannot be eradicated by application of conventional herbicides.

The mutant plant might be considered an "invasive" species when it unintentionally shows up in an adjacent environment.

Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) says this about invasive species:

"Invasive species can alter ecological relationships among native species and can affect ecosystem function, economic value of ecosystems, and human health. A species is regarded as invasive if it has been introduced by human action to a location, area, or region where it did not previously occur naturally (i.e., is not native), becomes capable of establishing a breeding population in the new location without further intervention by humans, and spreads widely throughout the new location."

Monsanto should have been responsible for eradication of the invasive plants from the neighboring fields.

Rethink...

Sat, 17 Feb 2007 02:14:31 GMT

This is so cool...

Winter Air and Hair

Fri, 16 Feb 2007 17:12:53 GMT

The temperatures finally dropped down to winter normal here after the year ended with relatively warm days. In these parts, 40's and 50's through December is somewhat odd.

A few days of below zero and the furnace works hard. That means dry air. I filled clean milk jug 3/4 full of water and set it next to the heat vent in my room, but I'm not sure it does much good.

I have a small crack on the inside of my little toe on my left foot. I healed it with raw vitamin E, but if I don't keep on it...man! Now my head itches, too...dry scalp.

Avocados were 68 cents each at the store last night so here's my remedy for my dry head (amounts are approximate) :

1 avocado, peeled and pitted
1/2 tsp. real lemon juice
2T. 100% Aloe Vera gel
2T. Real Mayo
12 drops pure Ylang/Ylang oil
12 drops pure Rosemary oil

Mix to a smooth paste. Warm in microwave for 60 seconds. Wet hair with warm water. Massage the paste into the scalp and hair. Cover head with plastic wrap for however long you desire ( I did about half an hour). Wash hair as usual.

I'll let you know if it makes a difference.

Humumentism

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 16:47:39 GMT

I love this art-poetry form.
It makes me want to visit used books stores...

Something to read...

Thu, 30 Nov 2006 10:37:12 GMT

The NYT 10 Best Books of 2006

FICTION

ABSURDISTAN
By Gary Shteyngart. Random House, $24.95.
Shteyngart's scruffy, exuberant second novel, equal parts Gogol and Borat, is immodest on every level - it's long, crude, manic and has cheap vodka on its breath. It also happens to be smart, funny and, in the end, extraordinarily rich and moving. "Absurdistan" introduces Misha Vainberg, the rap-music-obsessed, grossly overweight son of the 1,238th richest man in Russia. After attending college in the United States, he is now stuck in St. Petersburg, scrambling for an American visa that may never arrive. Caught between worlds, and mired in his own prejudices and thwarted desires, Vainberg just may be an antihero for our times.

THE COLLECTED STORIES OF AMY HEMPEL
Scribner, $27.50.
A quietly powerful presence in American fiction during the past two decades, Hempel has demonstrated unusual discipline in assembling her urbane, pointillistic and wickedly funny short stories. Since the publication of her first collection, "Reasons to Live," in 1985, only three more slim volumes have appeared - a total of some 15,000 sentences, and nearly every one of them has a crisp, distinctive bite. These collected stories show the true scale of Hempel's achievement. Her compact fictions, populated by smart, neurotic, somewhat damaged narrators, speak grandly to the longings and insecurities in all of us, and in a voice that is bracingly direct and sneakily profound.

THE EMPEROR'S CHILDREN
By Claire Messud. Alfred A. Knopf, $25.
This superbly intelligent, keenly observed comedy of manners, set amid the glitter of cultural Manhattan in 2001, also looks unsparingly, though sympathetically, at a privileged class unwittingly poised, in its insularity, for the catastrophe of 9/11. Messud gracefully intertwines the stories of three friends, attractive, entitled 30-ish Brown graduates "torn between Big Ideas and a party" but falling behind in the contest for public rewards and losing the struggle for personal contentment. The vibrant supporting cast includes a deliciously drawn literary seducer ("without question, a great man") and two ambitious interlopers, teeming with malign energy, whose arrival on the scene propels the action forward.

THE LAY OF THE LAND
By Richard Ford. Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95.
The third installment, following "The Sportswriter" (1986) and "Independence Day" (1995), in the serial epic of Frank Bascombe - flawed husband, fuddled dad, writer turned real estate agent and voluble first-person narrator. Once again the action revolves around a holiday. This time it's Thanksgiving 2000: the Florida recount grinds toward its predictable outcome, and Bascombe, now 55, battles prostate cancer and copes with a strange turn in his second marriage. The story, which unfolds over three days, is filled with incidents, some of them violent, but as ever the drama is rooted in the interior world of its authentically life-size hero, as he logs long hours on the highways and back roads of New Jersey, taking expansive stock of middle-age defeats and registering the erosions of a brilliantly evoked landscape of suburbs, strip malls and ocean towns.

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS
By Marisha Pessl. Viking, $25.95.
The antic ghost of Nabokov hovers over this buoyantly literate first novel, a murder mystery narrated by a teenager enamored of her own precocity but also in thrall to her father, an enigmatic itinerant professor, and to the charismatic female teacher whose death is announced on the first page. Each of the 36 chapters is titled for a classic (by authors ranging from Shakespeare to Carlo Emilio Gadda), and the plot snakes ingeniously toward a revelation capped by a clever "final exam." All this is beguiling, but the most solid pleasures of this book originate in the freshness of Pessl's voice and in the purity of her storytelling gift.

NONFICTION

FALLING THROUGH THE EARTH
A Memoir.
By Danielle Trussoni. Henry Holt & Company, $23.
This intense, at times searing memoir revisits the author's rough-and-tumble Wisconsin girlhood, spent on the wrong side of the tracks in the company of her father, a Vietnam vet who began his tour as "a cocksure country boy" but returned "wild and haunted," unfit for family life and driven to extremes of philandering, alcoholism and violence. Trussoni mixes these memories with spellbinding versions of the war stories her father reluctantly dredged up and with reflections on her own journey to Vietnam, undertaken in an attempt to recapture, and come to terms with, her father's experiences as a "tunnel rat" who volunteered for the harrowing duty of scouring underground labyrinths in search of an elusive and deadly enemy.

THE LOOMING TOWER
Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.
By Lawrence Wright. Alfred A. Knopf, $27.95.
In the fullest account yet of the events that led to the fateful day, Wright unmasks the secret world of Osama bin Laden and his collaborators and also chronicles the efforts of a handful of American intelligence officers alert to the approaching danger but frustrated, time and again, in their efforts to stop it. Wright, a staff writer for The New Yorker, builds his heart-stopping narrative through the patient and meticulous accumulation of details and through vivid portraits of Al Qaeda's leaders. Most memorably, he tells the story of John O'Neill, the tormented F.B.I. agent who worked frantically to prevent the impending terrorist attack, only to die in the World Trade Center.

MAYFLOWER
A Story of Courage, Community, and War.
By Nathaniel Philbrick. Viking, $29.95.
This absorbing history of the Plymouth Colony is a model of revisionism. Philbrick impressively recreates the pilgrims' dismal 1620 voyage, bringing to life passengers and crew, and then relates the events of the settlement and its first contacts with the native inhabitants of Massachusetts. Most striking are the parallels he subtly draws with the present, particularly in his account of how Plymouth's leaders, including Miles Standish, rejected diplomatic overtures toward the Indians, successful though they'd been, and instead pursued a "dehumanizing" policy of violent aggression that led to the needless bloodshed of King Philip's War.

THE OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA
A Natural History of Four Meals.
By Michael Pollan. The Penguin Press, $26.95.
"When you can eat just about anything nature has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety," Pollan writes in this supple and probing book. He gracefully navigates within these anxieties as he traces the origins of four meals - from a fast-food dinner to a "hunter-gatherer" feast - and makes us see, with remarkable clarity, exactly how what we eat affects both our bodies and the planet. Pollan is the perfect tour guide: his prose is incisive and alive, and pointed without being tendentious. In an uncommonly good year for American food writing, this is a book that stands out.

THE PLACES IN BETWEEN
By Rory Stewart. Harvest/Harcourt, Paper, $14.
"You are the first tourist in Afghanistan," Stewart, a young Scotsman, was warned by an Afghan official before commencing the journey recounted in this splendid book. "It is mid-winter - there are three meters of snow on the high passes, there are wolves, and this is a war. You will die, I can guarantee." Stewart, thankfully, did not die, and his report on his adventures - walking across Afghanistan in January of 2002, shortly after the fall of the Taliban - belongs with the masterpieces of the travel genre. Stewart may be foolhardy, but on the page he is a terrific companion: smart, compassionate and human. His book cracks open a fascinating, blasted world miles away from the newspaper headlines.

News Not Reported

Wed, 27 Sep 2006 22:29:23 GMT

This statue currently stands outside the Iraqi palace, now home to the 4th Infantry division.

It will eventually be shipped home and put in the memorial museum in Fort Hood, TX . The statue was created by an Iraqi artist named Kalat, who for years was forced by Saddam Hussein to make the many hundreds of bronze busts of Saddam that dotted Baghdad.

Kalat was so grateful for the Americans liberation of his country; he melted 3 of the heads of the fallen Saddam
and made the statue as a memorial to the American soldiers and their fallen warriors. Kalat worked on this memorial night and day for several months. To the left of the kneeling soldier is a small Iraqi girl giving the soldier comfort as he mourns the loss of his comrade in arms.

Do you know why we don't hear about this in the news? Because it is heart warming and praise worthy.
The media avoids it because it does not have the shock effect . But we can do something about it.
We can pass this along to as many people as we can in honor of all our brave military who are making a difference.
And please pass this on!

Saturday, October 22, 2005

Sat, 22 Oct 2005 03:05:18 GMT

This:

Under Mars
(click on link above)

in response to Leonida's

Obscenely Informed .

War is War, people.