Eureqa!

... is a really neat tool for finding relationships in huge piles of data. Plus, it automatically does held-out data for validation. Do you have inscrutable data? Check it out at Cornell Creative Machines!

Desk work just got a lot more intimidating

Spam musubi

We accompanied my grandmother to Hawaii for her birthday this year! It was beautiful, but surprising in some respects - like food.

Hawaii is a complicated place where food is concerned. There are plate lunches that consist of macaroni salad, rice, and spam, all swimming in gravy; there are fantastic restaurants with excessively authentic food from any nation in the orient; and there are strange hybrids like the Hawaiian hamburger, made with teriyaki sauce and a pineapple slice on the burger.

None of these can compare to spam musubi.

We saw them first in the grubby hands of two boys waiting at a bus stop, and thought they were some sort of ice cream sandwich, but no! That band around the center was seaweed, and the sandwiched portion was rice and spam. I finally found musubi presses in a grocery store in Waikiki, and I'm beside myself with joy.


SPAM MUSUBI: delicious, filling, and conveniently portable.

Ingredients:
1 can SPAM
Rice. Sushi rice, sticky rice, brown rice, whatever
Seaweed
Seasonings - teriyaki sauce, soy sauce, furikake, ginger, pepper, whatever you want

- Slice the spam, as thick or as thin as you'd like it, and fry. Straight up is fine, or with teriyaki sauce (use low-sodium spam because the sauce is v salty)
- Make rice. Sticky rice is better.
- Put your press on a sheet of seaweed; korean roast seaweed seems better because it's more brittle and breaks when you bite down, so the rice doesn't squirt out the end when you try to eat it.
- Smash rice into the press.
- Add a slice of spam.
- Add more seasonings, vegetables, fried egg, whatever.
- Smash more rice into the press.
- Push the musubi down with the plunger while lifting the mold up.
- Wrap the seaweed around the musubi and moisten the ends to stick them together.

Best served hot.

Utilitarian plastic bag sculpture

I don't know how these things happen.

Icy winter morning

On the validity of animal research

Unpleasant though it may be, the truth is that wide swathes of advances in the sciences are based on animal research. Animals are used in fields ranging from immunology, where 'anti-goat' or 'anti-rabbit' antibodies are a standard tool, to medicine, where the efficacy of new treatments is tested first in lab animals, to neuroscience, where nearly everything we know about the visual system comes from cats.

I won't address questions of morality here, but rather questions of validity: is animal research telling us what we think it's telling us. Scientists over the years have raised numerous complaints with respect to potential confounds in animal research. A few examples:

1) Genetic strains. Animal research is significantly easier than human research in the immunology-related fields because the experimenter's level of control is far greater than is possible with human subjects. Environment, diet, social interaction, and chemical exposure, any of which may influence immune reaction, are all within experimenter control, and can be made identical across subjects. This leaves a single major potential confound: genetics. If your rats are genetically dissimilar, differences observed between treatment groups could be due to differences in treatment or differences in genes.

Suppliers of lab animals solve this problem, or rather ameliorate it, by inbreeding mice and rat strains to yield sets of animals that are as genetically identical as possible. This makes interpreting results from these animals a little bizarre, because you have to ask - are they truly representative of their species, or are the effects you find complicated by many generations of inbreeding? Are all mice dumb, or is it just that your mice are mentally retarded due to distinctly unnatural inheritance?

2) Circadian rhythms. Rats are nocturnal, so studies of cognitive function in rats with respect to drugs, environment, social interaction, or any other possible influencing factor really ought to be done in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, humans are diurnal, and the average workday of a human researcher varies around nine to five. This means that time of day with respect to the rat 'daytime' is usually ignored (or, upon occasion, grad students end up in the lab at 4am).

This little issue is very, very rarely addressed in publications, but nevertheless calls into question results of studies of any nocturnal animal that was performed during the animals' native sleep time. Damn near everything varies with circadian rhythms; immune function, hormone release,

3) Environment. Not long ago, the concept of neuroplasticity was so much voodoo, but now it's taken for granted that an animal's environment can influence its cognitive abilities. Mice, rats, monkeys, cats, anyone raised in an "enriched" environment with objects to explore and things to do are better off on every scale than creatures raised in barren surroundings. Can We Trust Research Done with Lab Mice? is an interesting discussion of aberrant behavior observed in lab animals in poor environments.


This last point in particular has complex implications for humanity, but I'll save the discussion for a later post.

I've heard of knitted brows, but this is ridiculous

Anatomically correct knitted brain.

"In this case, for me, there are two humorous aspects: one is simply to undertake such a ridiculously complex, time consuming project for no practical reason; the second is the idea of making a somewhat mysterious and difficult object - a brain - out of a 'cuddly', cheerfully coloured, familiar material like cotton yarn."

Color me impressed! Zow.