SALT: Craig Venter

Last Monday evening I was in San Francisco to hear J. Craig Venter talk on "Joining 3.5 Billion Years of Microbial Invention." (The talk was sponsored by The Long Now Foundation as part of their Seminars About Long Term Thinking, or SALT series). Here are my notes (with a minor amount of editing, including tracking down some links):

• Venter sees our knowledge of DNA as being both

1. Gathering (Reading)
2. Using (Writing)

• We humans differ from one other in our DNA by 1% - 3%, which is more than had been previous thought. (We differ from chimps by 4% - 5%.)
• The first human diploid (i.e., both chromosome pairs) genome sequence (called "HuRef") was published by researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) in the open access journal PLoS Biology (Public Library of Science).
  
• Microbes make up about one-half(!) of the Earth's biomass.

• In 2003, the JCVI did "shotgun sequencing" of microbes in the Sargasso Sea (published in Science).
• According to Venter, biologists had told him they would find no life, since there are no nutrients available. However, it turns out that these microbes contain proteorhodopsin, which allows them to convert sunlight into energy! (Note: this is not photosynthesis.)
• Interestingly, these are essentially the same sort of photoreceptor cells found in the human retina, but performing a different function.
  
• Even more interesting, different microbes have adapted to their environments by evolving sensitivity to different wavelengths: blue, in the Sargasso Sea; green in coastal areas.
  

• In 2004, JCVI launched the Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling (GOS) Expedition.
• For every 200 miles, the team found that 85% of the organisms sampled are unique!

• Each of us humans is a "microbiome" teeming with bacteria and viruses.
  
• During a single hour indoors, each of us comes in contact with 10,000 bacteria, and 100K viruses!
  

• As to the writing of genetic information, two Qs:
1. Can the chemistry permit synthesizing?
   
2. Can we boot it up?

• In January, JVCI announced the creation of the first synthetic bacterial genome, Mycoplasma genitalium JVCI-1.0. (See my earlier post.) The genome has more than a half-million base pairs, and was created by assembling a series of overlapping segments of increasing length: starting at 50 base pairs (bp); then 5-7kbp; then 24kbp; then 72kbp; then 144kbp; and finally, the entire 582,970 base pair genome.

• The JCVI team has demonstrated that it is possible to take the genome from one species and (via use of restriction enzymes which cut apart the host DNA) have it take over and reproduce itself in another -- literally changing one species into another. "True identity theft," Venter remarked. "The software makes its own hardware."
  
• Then there's D. radiodurans, an organism that, after absorbing 1.75 million rads of radiation -- and having its DNA blown to pieces -- is able to reassemble its genome in about 24 hours and live on.
  

• Venter said that solutions to issues such as fuels and climate are more likely to come from disruptive technologies.
• We are heading toward a future of combinatorial genomics, with the ability to construct thousands, or millions of genomes a day.

Q-A Session

• About 200 kg of material are exchanged between Earth and Mars each year.
• The space station used to vent waste into space; now, it is packed in an (aluminum?) tube and launched back into orbit (to burn up in the atmosphere). "Good shit from space!"
• Venter said that there are two common long term views of human survival:

1. Move to a new planet
2. Alter our genome to exist in a higher CO2 environment
3. Venter would add: Genetically alter the environment

• In commenting on the resistance to GMOs, Venter pointed out that agriculture has always been about mixing genes -- albeit blindly. He recalled a conversation with the leader of the German Green party, where Venter said told him, "If you ask me if I'm for or against [GMOs] I'll always come down on the "for." But, if you want to have an intelligent discussion about it, then I'll say that there were many things that should have been done differently.
  

• Near the conclusion, Venter remarked, "Eventually, science trumps ignorance."
  

Sidebar

• Stewart Brand's notes on this seminar may be found in this post at the The Long Now Foundation blog.
• The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is "a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource."
• Somewhere in the middle of all this, I remembered a classic Science Fiction short story (pub. 1941), The Microcosmic God, by Theodore Sturgeon.
• See the Ethical Considerations section of the JCVI's Synthetic Bacterial Genome press release for information on how the JCVI is dealing with societal issues surrounding the synthetic genome.
  

Asteroid Tagging

The Planetary Society yesterday held a press conference and issued a press release announcing the winners of its $50,000 asteroid tagging competition. From the press release:

The Apophis Mission Design Competition invited participants to compete for $50,000 in prizes by designing a mission to rendezvous with and "tag" a potentially dangerous near-Earth asteroid. Tagging would allow scientists to track an asteroid accurately enough to determine whether it will impact Earth, thus helping governments decide whether to mount a deflection mission to alter its orbit.

NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) co-sponsored The Planetary Society’s competition and will review the best mission designs offered. The winning designs will also be presented by The Planetary Society to other world space agencies.

The near-Earth asteroid, Apophis, was used as the target for the mission design because it will come closer to Earth in 2029 than the orbit of our geostationary satellites. (That’s close enough to be visible to the naked eye.) If it passes through a small “keyhole” as it travels by Earth, its trajectory could be diverted so that it will impact Earth in 2036. Current estimates do rate the probability of such an impact as very low.

The first place prize of $25,000 went to a U.S. team led by Spaceworks Engineering (Atlanta, GA) for their mission, named Foresight. European teams took the second and third place prizes ($10,000 and $5,000, respectively). Another $10,000 was distributed to the winners of the student competition.

The BBC News covered the announcement in this article.
[Thanks to georgef for the heads up on this one.]

The Biology that dare not speak its name

Evolution, the unifying principle of modern biology, can now be mentioned in Florida public schools! According to the AP story

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) -- Florida's public school science standards for the first time will use the word ''evolution,'' although the biological concept already was being taught under code words such as ''change over time.''

The new standards, part of a set of overall science changes adopted by the State Board of Education Tuesday on a 4-3 vote, require schools to spend more class time on evolution and teach it in more detail.
. . .
Opponents of evolution denied they had a religious motive, arguing that there are flaws in the scientific theory of evolution and that students should be allowed to explore them.

As a compromise, the standards refer to evolution as a scientific theory, explaining that a theory is a well-supported and accepted explanation of nature, not simply a claim.
. . .
John Sullivan, executive director of the Florida Baptist Convention, objected to calling evolution the only fundamental concept underlying biology. He wrote in an e-mail to Education Commissioner Eric Smith that Baptists firmly believe there's evidence of a ''Creator-initiated origin of life'' but did not object to teaching evolution. He argued, though, its scientific weaknesses should be taught as well as its strengths.

Among the standard tactics used by evolution opponents is to ensure evolution is labeled as (only a) "theory" -- which they recognize in common usage to mean, your guess is as good as mine. It's encouraging that the Florida standards "compromise" explains that evolution is a theory in the scientific sense -- which is to say, it is an explanation of nature that is well supported by known facts, and makes testable predictions. That this is a social, not a scientific, issue is quite apparent from the fact that evolution opponents spend no time lobbying against the germ theory of disease, quantum theory, or relativity theory to ensure that their scientific weaknesses be taught and that the competing claim that, simply, "God does it" be presented. After all, we know that the acceleration of gravity on earth is 9.8 m/s² (32.2 ft/s²), but beyond that, any explanation is "just a theory" and, if one allows supernatural explanations, it is just as plausible that God makes apples fall.

9/11 Conspiracy Theories

The 9/11 "Truthers" have apparently been harassing Michael Shermer on his book tour, due to Skeptic magazine's cover story (volume 12, number 4) investigating 9/11 conspiracy theories. (Here's a clip of Bill Maher's television show being disrupted by a "Truther.") James Meigs, editor-in-chief of Popular Mechanics, was interviewed on the Berkeley Groks radio show and the podcast is, I think, a good summary of the investigation by Popular Mechanics into claims that 9/11 was an inside job of the Bush administration. Even Noam Chomsky finds this too much to swallow! Skeptoid offers this more succinct analysis. I'm confident that the debate will continue long after I've shuffled off this mortal coil.

Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad (Bobby Fischer, Part 2)

[This is an addendum to an earlier post, Bobby Fischer.]

I just ran across this post, "Was It Only a Game?" on Dick Cavett's blog. I think Cavett's essay is just a beautiful piece of writing, and together with the clip of his first interview with Fischer (sumer of 1971, prior to the Spassky match) give a more nuanced and complex (and sympathetic) impression of an earlier, quite different intellect from the later raving paranoid Fischer became.
For those who choose not to read Cavett's post, I have to at least say that Cavett closes his essay by discussing those who did not have "a good death," and includes the closing lines from an E.E.Cummings poem, with no title but referred to by its first three words: “Buffalo Bill’s / defunct”:

Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what I want to know is
how do you like your blue-eyed boy
Mister Death

**********
Incidentally, the title of this post is, according to Wikiquote, an "Anonymous ancient proverb, wrongly attributed to Euripides."

Synthetic Bacterial Genome

I'm a little late with this, but here's the lead from the J. Craig Venter Institute press release:

ROCKVILLE, MD—January 24, 2008—A team of 17 researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) has created the largest man-made DNA structure by synthesizing and assembling the 582,970 base pair genome of a bacterium, Mycoplasma genitalium JCVI-1.0. This work, published online today in the journal Science by Dan Gibson, Ph.D., et al, is the second of three key steps toward the team’s goal of creating a fully synthetic organism. In the next step, which is ongoing at the JCVI, the team will attempt to create a living bacterial cell based entirely on the synthetically made genome.

Here's the Science article.

* * * * *
Craig Venter was a participant in the 2007 Edge annual summer event: Life: What A concept. A transcript of the event has been published by Edge as a downloadable PDF. Here's the introduction to his discussion:

I have come to think of life in much more a gene-centric view than
even a genome-centric view, although it kind of oscillates. And
when we talk about the transplant work, genome-centric becomes
more important than gene-centric. From the first third of the
Sorcerer II expedition we discovered roughly 6 million new genes
that has doubled the number in the public databases when we put
them in a few months ago, and in 2008 we are likely to double that
entire number again. We're just at the tip of the iceberg of what the
divergence is on this planet. We are in a linear phase of gene
discovery maybe in a linear phase of unique biological entities if
you call those species, discovery, and I think eventually we can
have databases that represent the gene repertoire of our planet.
One question is, can we extrapolate back from this data set to
describe the most recent common ancestor. I don't necessarily buy
that there is a single ancestor. It’s counterintuitive to me. I think we
may have thousands of recent common ancestors and they are not
necessarily so common.

[Here's a video of Craig Venter giving the Richard Dimbleby lecture, A DNA-driven world.]

"[T]he natural world around us does not care what we believe."

The intersection of two earlier posts (What have you changed your mind about? and Climate 'clearly out of balance' ) leaves us with these thoughts about climate change, from two very interesting minds:
In The Irrelevance of "Probability" Nicholas Nassim Taleb (author of The Black Swan) writes

As I said, consider that belief (i.e., epistemology) and action (i.e., decision-making), the way they are practiced, are largely not consistent with one another.

Let us apply the point to the current debate on carbon emissions and climate change. Correspondents keep asking me if it the climate worriers are basing their claims on shoddy science, and whether, owing to nonlinearities, their forecasts are marred with such a possible error that we should ignore them. Now, even if I agreed that it were shoddy science; even if I agreed with the statement that the climate folks were most probably wrong, I would still opt for the most ecologically conservative stance — leave planet earth the way we found it. Consider the consequences of the very remote possibility that they may be right, or, worse, the even more remote possibility that they may be extremely right.

In his essay The importance of doing something now about the environment Craig Venter (Human Genome Decoder; Director, The J. Craig Venter Institute) writes

Like many or perhaps most I wanted to believe that our oceans and atmosphere were basically unlimited sinks with an endless capacity to absorb the waste products of human existence. I wanted to believe that solving the carbon fuel problem was for future generations and that the big concern was the limited supply of oil not the rate of adding carbon to the atmosphere. The data is irrefutable--carbon dioxide concentrations have been steadily increasing in our atmosphere as a result of human activity since the earliest measurements began. We know that on the order of 4.1 billion tons of carbon are being added to and staying in our atmosphere each year. We know that burning fossil fuels and deforestation are the principal contributors to the increasing carbon dioxide concentrations in our atmosphere. Eleven of the last twelve years rank among the warmest years since 1850. While no one knows for certain the consequences of this continuing unchecked warming, some have argued it could result in catastrophic changes, such as the disruption of the Gulf Steam which keeps the UK out of the ice age or even the possibility of the Greenland ice sheet sliding into the Atlantic Ocean. Whether or not these devastating changes occur, we are conducting a dangerous experiment with our planet. One we need to stop.
. . .
Our planet is in crisis, and we need to mobilize all of our intellectual forces to save it. One solution could lie in building a scientifically literate society in order to survive. There are those who like to believe that the future of life on Earth will continue as it has in the past, but unfortunately for humanity, the natural world around us does not care what we believe. But believing that we can do something to change our situation using our knowledge can very much affect the environment in which we live.
[Emphasis mine]

What Have You Changed Your Mind About?

When thinking changes your mind, that's philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that's faith.
When facts change your mind, that's science.

The feature article in the current (2008-01-30) eSkeptic email newsletter is Michael Shermer's Response to the Annual Edge.org Question “What Have You Changed Your Mind About? Why?” Shermer's response concludes:

I have thus changed my mind about this theory of human nature in its extreme form. Human nature is more evolutionarily determined, more cognitively irrational, and more morally complex than I thought.

See the Edge Annual Question - 2008 to see read what 164 other contributers have changed their minds about, including:

• J. Craig Venter: The importance of doing something now about the environment.

• Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Irrelevance of "Probablility"

• Ray Kurtzweil: SETI

• W. Daniel Hillis: Try the Experiment Yourself
  

The most recent Annual Questions have been: What are you optimistic about? (2007); What is your dangerous idea? (2006); What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it? (2005). All of the annual questions and responses (back t0 1998) may be found at the Edge World Question Center.

"A Charge to Keep" or, "The Slipper Tongue"

A friend who heard the president's State of the Union address has drawn my attention to the 2d paragraph: "All of us were sent to Washington to carry out the people's business. That is the purpose of this body. It is the meaning of our oath. It remains our charge to keep." The emphasis is mine, and of course leads us back to this previous post about George W. Bush and his favorite painting -- which for the President depicts a Methodist circuit-rider with A Charge to Keep, but in the reality-based world apparently depicts a horse thief fleeing his captors who, "Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught."

[A discussion of the painting and its significance may be found on pp. 89-90 of The Bush Tragedy, by Jacob Weisberg (2008, Random House).]
* * * * *
Taxes, Terrorists, and Iraq
And speaking of the State of the Union address, The New York Times published a very interesting graphic showing frequency of the words that were used in this and each of President Bush's previous State of the Union addresses. This year's winning words were: Iraq/Iraqi(s); Terror/Terrorist(s); Tax(es), with the 2d tier finding Al Qaeda and Freedom(s). Popular words from previous addresses that were missing or out of favor this year include: Health Care; (Health) insurance; Medicare; Retirement(s); Social Security.
Other notables:

• Weapons of mass destruction/murder disappeared after 2006.
• Bin Laden, not mentioned until 2006, was mentioned once this year (the same as 2007).
• Surpluses was mentioned once this year, after being absent since being mentioned more than a half-dozen times in 2001.
  

Profits

Nothing really surprising here, but I was caught simply the juxtaposition of these two stories today:

Profit Declines 31% at Gannett
"Gannett, the country's largest newspaper publisher, said on Friday that its fourth-quarter profit dropped 31 percent because of a decline in broadcasting revenue and weak newspaper ad sales."

Exxon Sets Profit Record: $40.6 Billion Last Year
"By any measure, Exxon Mobil's performance last year was a blowout."

The company's sales, more than $404 billion, exceeded the gross domestic product of 120 countries.
Exxon Mobil earned more than $1,287 of profit for every second of 2007.
Like most oil companies, Exxon benefited from a near doubling of oil prices, as well as higher demand for gasoline last year. Crude oil prices rose from a low of around $50 a barrel in early 2007 to almost $100 by the end of the year -- the biggest jump in oil prices in any one year.

Climate 'clearly out of balance'

As reported last week by the BBC, the 50,000 member American Geophysical Union (AGU) has updated its policy position, first adopted in 2003, on Human Impacts on Climate. The policy position, "revised and reaffirmed" in December 2007 begins by stating:

The Earth's climate is now clearly out of balance and is warming. Many components of the climate system—including the temperatures of the atmosphere, land and ocean, the extent of sea ice and mountain glaciers, the sea level, the distribution of precipitation, and the length of seasons—are now changing at rates and in patterns that are not natural and are best explained by the increased atmospheric abundances of greenhouse gases and aerosols generated by human activity during the 20th century.

Here's James J. McCarthy, then president-elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), writing in March 2007 in a published letter to the New York Times

To the Editor:

The National Academy of Sciences, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorology Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have all issued statements stating that climate change is: a) occurring, b) largely caused by humans and c) likely to continue with large negative consequences for natural and human socioeconomic systems unless we rapidly decarbonize our global energy systems.

People who have evidence that contradicts these statements can publish their findings in scientific journals, after which the public might expect to see this work discussed in Science Times. In the meantime, if you feel obligated to publish what are simply opinions, please use the opinion pages rather than the science section.

James J. McCarthy
Cambridge, Mass.

The writer is the president-elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The current AAAS position is summarized in the AAAS Board of Directors Statement on Climate Change:

The scientific evidence is clear: global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now, and is a growing threat to society. Accumulating data from across the globe reveal a wide array of effects....
The statement was approved on 9 December 2006 and released on 18 February at the AAAS Annual Meeting in San Francisco.

I was at that AAAS Annual Meeting in San Francisco, and attended the plenary lecture by Susan Soloman, Senior Scientist at NOAA and co-chair of the IPCC Working Group I which "assesses the physical scientific aspects of the climate system and climate change." At the conclusion, I recall feeling that the evidence would certainly convince any reasonably thinking person. My notes from that meeting include:

• The IPCC doesn't do science; it assesses.
  
• The review process included two reviews, and 600 reviewers; there were 30000 comments received.
  
• We must distinguish between weather and climate; climate is non-local, and deals in averages.
• Analysis of: tree rings, corals, bore holes
• Attribution: Natural forcings that hold out anthropogenic causes do not match the observed data; when anthropogenic causes are included, the models match the data.
  
• Key Conclusions:
  1. Warming of the climate system is unequivocal
  2. It is very likely (>90%) that this warming is due to greenhouse gasses
  

If you want to check out the science, I'd start with the IPCC's Working Group I report, The Physical Science Basis, in particular the Summary for Policymakers (pdf) and Technical Summary (pdf).

Michael Shermer (founder of the Skeptics Society) wrote a column in the June 2006 Scientific American titled The Flipping Point: How the evidence for anthropogenic global warming has converged to cause this environmental skeptic to make a cognitive flip.

My own view is as follows:
At this point, the debate over anthropogenic climate change appears to me to have taken on the pattern of the creation-evolution debate, which I've been following for -- has it been 30 years now?!? By that I mean, at its core, it has ceased to be much of a scientific debate, but is rather a social issue. Yes, there is (some) uncertainty, but science is a very conservative enterprise, and yet there is broad and deep scientific consensus on this issue. It strains credulity to imagine a scientific cabal of this magnitude mindlessly worshiping Al Gore.
Anti-evolutionists chip around the edges of what is at this point one of the most strongly confirmed theories of science. The anti-anthropogenic climate change (aacc?) arguments seem to me to similarly chip at the fringes where there is debate and admitted uncertainty.
And again, it's not as if the science for this grew ex nihilo from atmospheric scientists after repeated viewings of An Inconvenient Truth. The IPCC was established 20 years ago. I've got Science News articles (yes, hard copy, in a manilla folder!) related to ozone layer depletion and global warming dating back to 1992.

There will be "greenwashing." There will be lazy and hyped reporting from the "Beast Without a Brain." But in the end, we should heed Richard Feynman's famous conclusion to his report on the shuttle Challenger accident: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

The IEM and the wisdom of crowds

I was going to post something about the Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM) and the presidential primaries, but this post on the Blog of the Long Now is much better than you would have gotten from me! Quoting from the blog post's introductory explanation:

The Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM) trades real money in bets on future cultural events. Prediction markets sell contracts for an easily decidable future event (someone wins an election, a commodity hits a certain price, a movie sells X number of tickets). If that contract comes true, the different between what the price of the contract was when bought and its full price will be pocketed by the winner. So if $1 contracts for Bill Clinton winning the election were selling for 35 cents when you bought them, you would have profited 75 cents [65 cents?!] after the election.

Outside of the IEM most US predictions markets trade with token money to escape uncertain gambling and investor laws, which may prohibit real money trades. But in all prediction markets the price of a contract is decided by the collective demand, or in other words, by the collective mind. Outcomes with low expectations earn a low price. If you are a contrarian you can buy low value, low-expectation contracts, and if conventional wisdom is wrong (at that time), you’ll gain.

But the odd thing is that in these markets, the conventional wisdom of the crowd is usually right.

It’s probably worth noting that the Presidential Election graph shown in the post is the “Vote Share” market (which currently quotes prices of .527 DEM and .488 REP). However, the “Winner Takes All” market has held at about 60-40 (DEM-REP) since early April 2007, though it has tightened a bit recently, to 58-42.

It fits in a manilla envelope

(Just for the record, I edit this blog on a MacBook Pro.)

George W. Bush's favorite painting

A friend alerted me to this blog post concerning George W. Bush's favorite painting. In browsing through the comments in response to that blog posting, it's interesting to me that several people defended Mr. Bush's right to interpret the painting any way he wishes -- because, after all, it's art. And on one level, of course any work of art "speaks" to us all differently. But there's that nagging reminder here of an administration of the most powerful nation on earth that actually believes "we create our own reality." Incidentally, Jay Rosen [see previous post] has written,

The only piece of political journalism ever to make me cry was Ron Suskind’s article, Without a Doubt, published in the New York Times Magazine shortly before the 2004 election. It was in that article that the famous passage appeared quoting a senior administration official on the myopia of the “reality-based community” when it came to understanding the government of George W. Bush.

Campaign news in the subjunctive isn't really news

These days, when you read anything about the next stop on the presidential primary local, as in this passage, even from a sharp observer like Michael Tomasky, you should run for the hills or head for the nearest bookie to plunk your money on a Giuliani loss: "It's also suddenly plausible that Rudy Giuliani, who I still think may be the party's strongest candidate for November, could elbow his way back into this thing. He's counting on a win in Florida, which votes on January 29."
-- Tom Engelhardt, in his TomDispatch posting of 20 January

A segue from my last post into this one, which offers a link to a Tomgram post by Jay Rosen titled The Beast Without a Brain: Why Horse Race Journalism Works for Journalists and Fails Us. Here's a teaser:

Who's-gonna-win is portable, reusable from cycle to cycle, and easily learned by newcomers to the press pack. Journalists believe it brings readers to the page and eyeballs to the screen. It "works" regardless of who the candidates are, or where the nation is in historical time. No expertise is actually needed to operate it. In that sense, it is economical. (And when everyone gets the winner wrong the "surprise" becomes a good story for a few days.) Who's going to win -- and what's their strategy -- plays well on television, because it generates an endless series of puzzles toward which journalists can gesture as they display their savviness, which is the unofficial religion of the mainstream press.

But the biggest advantage of horse-race journalism is that it permits reporters and pundits to "play up their detachment." Focusing on the race advertises the political innocence of the press because "who's gonna win?" is not an ideological question. By asking it you reaffirm that yours is not an ideological profession. This is experienced as pleasure by a lot of mainstream journalists. Ever noticed how spirits lift when the pundit roundtable turns from the Middle East or the looming recession to the horse race, and there's an opportunity for sizing up the candidates? To be manifestly agenda-less is journalistic bliss. Of course, since trying to get ahead of the voters can affect how voters view the candidates, the innocence, too, is an illusion. But a potent one.

As an example of bringing "new knowledge into the system," Rosen cites Charlie Savage and the Boston Globe in this December 2007 article. (You can examine a particular issue across candidates, or a particular candidate across issues.)

Rudy, Primaries, and Pander Points

On the eve of the Florida's Republican presidential primary, it would appear that Rudolph Giuliani's campaign has collapsed into self-parody. Last Wednesday, Timothy Egan wrote Giuliani's political obituary in a post titled Goodbye Rudy, Tuesday.

More broadly, you can summarize Giuliani’s problems in the line he no longer uses. When the World Trade Center towers came down, he turned to his loyal sidekick Bernie Kerik, and said he was glad George Bush was president.

Now, that line is a triple loser. Kerik, his police commissioner, is under federal indictment, in a sea of troubles. Bush is despised by two-thirds of Americans, and even a majority of Republicans want to go in a different direction. As for the big scare, give Senator Joe Biden credit for writing what may be Giuliani’s obit: “There are only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb and 9/11.”

---

In today's New York Times, Eleanor Randolph (Editorial Observer) writes

One of the strong contenders for the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney, oozes enthusiasm for the sun, the joy of Florida. The former mayor goes for New Yorkers' souls. He tells them that they must never, ever forget to worry.

Mr. Giuliani is not without the support of at least some transplanted New Yorkers, such as the 25-year-old librarian who said "I'm voting for him because he's a Yankees fan."

---

Gail Collins (Heeere's Rudy!) is rougher on the candidate, noting that

Many commentator have pointed out -- really very unkindly -- that the longer Giuliani stayed in Florida, the lower his standing in the state polls.

And recounting the latest variation on his theme of a noun, a verb and 9/11 she writes that

Giuliani has turned hurricanes into nature's way of saying Al Qaeda. ("All of us are subject to the impact of natural disasters ... and of course acts of terrorism, which I remember living through.")
...
Before the terrorist attack, after all, Rudy Giuliani was just a lame-duck mayor with abysmal approval ratings, a tabloidy personal life and uncertain job prospects. What 9/11 has given, 1/29 could taketh away.

Finally, I don't know if Collins gets credit for coining the term, but this was the first time I have seen the term pander-point, as in

Rudy was thrown off his game by the public's shift from worrying about terrorism to worrying about the economy, and a dwindling interest in hearing him talk about where he was when the terrorists attacked New York. He's tried to rebound by vigorously promoting a national catastrophe fund to reduce the cost of home insurance in hurricane-prone Florida. This is not in general, an idea that fiscal conservatives cotton to. It's so dicey, in fact, that even Mitt Romney has been hesitant about adopting it as a pander-point.

Google to buy New York Times?

Last Thursday's Daily Buzz included a segment titled If Google Bought the NYT, based on this article in realclearmarkets.com. The essence of it is that the Sulzberger family needs a shooter (like Google) if the Times is to survive against the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal.

Bobby Fischer

Bobby Fischer died last week. The NYTimes obit contains a link to a nice interactive graphic of Fischer-Spassky, 1972, Game 6. The New York Times Chess Viewer seems kind of cool; clicking the Game List button lists three games, all Fischer's, available for viewing.

Shut it down! [First Post]

Here we go.... To begin, I'll be posting some recent items; in the near future I should be more or less contemporary.
The shut-it-down of my URL is a reference to the film Dark City and the command given each midnight before the city's population is put to sleep and given new memories to begin the next day. (See Roger Ebert's review, and the Wikipedia entry.) Incidentally, I think the physical alteration of the city performed each night by The Visitors is "kuning" (not "tuning"). There is apparently at least one other source that agrees with me.
"I am a sick man" is, of course, the opening of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. (Did you know that there is film version?)