Another Move From The Bush Playbook?

CTV: PM, press gallery draw battle lines on the Hill

"The Press Gallery at the leadership level has taken an anti-Conservative view," [Prime Minister Stephen Harper] said Wednesday in an interview on A-Channel TV in London, Ont.

He added: "I have trouble believing a Liberal prime minister would have this problem.

The article goes on into great detail about the current squabble between Prime Minister Harper and the Press Gallery who cover him as well as covering a lot of history (all the way back to the 1950s).

What Came First - The Chicken Or The Egg?

CNN claims that Chicken and egg debate unscrambled:

Now a team made up of a geneticist, philosopher and chicken farmer claim to have found an answer. It was the egg.

Put simply, the reason is down to the fact that genetic material does not change during an animal's life.

Therefore the first bird that evolved into what we would call a chicken, probably in prehistoric times, must have first existed as an embryo inside an egg.

This is a very compelling argument. However, I'm not sure that I can agree with it.

The Natural History Museum in London has a marvelous exhibit on Darwin and Natural Selection. (There is an online section about Evolution, but it is much briefer than the actual exhibit). In particular, it has a discussion about how new species are created. In species X, individuals will differ genetically due to the various possible combinations in genes that are possible, and these variences and combinations will expand over time due to mutations in the genes (whose utility and survivability are determined by environmental factors). Eventually, a subset Y of individuals of X, will only mate (reproduce) with other members of Y, and not the rest X, possibly due to factors such as geographic isolation. Consequently, this subset Y will (can) diverge more and more (genetically) with the rest of X as time goes by and more mutations occur. Eventually, individuals from Y will no longer mate with members from X (even if the other factors, such as the geographic isolation are removed). i.e. The members of Y now see themselves as different from the rest of X (due to their genetic differences with X that have grown over time). Hence, Y is now a distinct species from X. So for chickens to be different from the pre-chicken birds (PCB) from pre-history you need a bird to decide that it is not a PCB, but is instead a chicken. Thus, the chicken came before the egg.

If that was too confusing, try this argument: Suppose the egg came first and begot the first chicken (as suggested by the CNN article). This chicken is the first chicken. So how is she going to reproduce and make more chickens? The Mrs. Chicken needs a Mr. Chicken to make some baby chickens. But how is Mrs. Chicken going to do this if she's the first (and, likely, only) chicken? (She was created by random genetic mutations. So in all likelihood she is the only chicken). The answer is that she won't be able to reproduce! So there will be no baby chickens and, consequently, no chicken species. Hence, Mrs. Chicken will be the one and only chicken ever. She will have died off long ago in pre-history and no will have ever heard of chickens. Therefore, the egg cannot have come first. Per Sherlock Holmes, It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth., it now follows that the chicken preceeded the egg.

How To Be Silicon Valley

Another interesting Paul Graham essay: How To Be Silicon Valley (via Slashdot).

His link to an urban sprawl photo (and the photo's caption) made me laugh.

Assorted Interesting Articles

• I finished reading The World Is Flat this weekend. I thought it was good book. So I found BBC's brief comparison of China and India (as well as the US), which shows things like GDP, population, literacy, etc. with projections out to 2050, interesting.


• The Chess Olympiad started this weekend in Turin. I can't find any results on the "offical" website, but an Austrian site has a good level of detail - Team Canada Results shows them at 1-1 after 2 rounds and the individual results are given for each round.


• New York Times: Slim Margin Seems to Signal Montenegro's Independence. The EU and Serbia & Montenegro decided to use 55% as their threshold for separation. This reminded me about the whole debate surrounding 50% + 1 during Quebec's last referendum.


• Slashdot has an article Bloggers are the New Plagiarism complaining about bloggers who quote large blocks of text and don't add value. Sometimes I do that [1], but most of the time I do not [2 and 3]. My thinking is that I only quote blocks from the original article, when I think it's an valuable article, but it's from a news article that is likely to disappear (i.e. Checkout all the broken links to the LA Times in [1]). Without a copy of the pertinent parts of the article the post has no context or value. Is that a reasonable rationale?

An Inconvenient Truth

The documentary An Inconvenient Truth comes out in a couple weeks. I want to go see it. It's about lectures Al Gore has given about climate change and the enviornment. The BBC has a short article about it: Politician Gore appears at Cannes.

Disappointing Movies

I haven't had much luck picking movies the past couple weeks. Everything I've seen has been disappointing.

When I saw a preview for Coffee and Cigarettes at Princess Cinema a couple years ago, it looked novel and full of potential . But it was just a bunch of vacuous and dull vignettes. Nothing in it was compelling. Normally if a movie is bad, I'll still watch it. I thought about turning it off, but instead caught up on my e-mail while it ran to completion.

Uncovered: The War on Iraq wasn't bad. But, nothing in it was new or enlightening and, like most other people, I have fatigue from listen to same Iraq stories over and over. Also, I thought their presentation on certain things could have been a lot stronger. i.e. They showed the clip of the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency stating the Niger uranium documents were "not authentic", but did not mention the date, even though the timeline is very compelling. It was February 2003. One month before the war started and one month after President Bush referenced these documents in his State of the Union address. It was also the same month that the US and UK failed to convince the rest of the Security Council and the World to go to war. It should be clear why the rest of the World was skeptical and it is an obvious demonstration of how the US government and US media mislead the US public prior to the war. But the documentary didn't bring this up.

Domino should have been good - part action, part biography; Keira Knightley is hot. But the story was clearly all made up and it really covered only a couple days. So none of the biographical aspects were there. And making up things like "Hollywood Hostages" and sticking in some 90210 characters is strange and subpar for a B-movie. It's more like C- or D-movie. Also, I am not really a fan of Tony Scott's style, which didn't help. (Aside: I liked Man on Fire. I'll credit Denzel Washington and not Tony Scott for that though).

I wouldn't describe myself as a "fan" of Nicolas Cage, but he makes his characters interesting and I generally like dramas, so I had great expectations for The Weather Man. The story was novel and a little dark. Nicolas Cage made his character compelling and I liked the Michael Caine character. But the pace of the movie was too slow. Hence, it was only a "3 star" movie, when I had been expecting "4 stars".

The Thin Red Line had great cinematography and decent acting. But there was no context, no plot, and a lot of characters, who never really interacted with each other. Plus it was really long. So I couldn't really get "into" it.

Good Night, and Good Luck is next in my Netflix queue. I have great expectations.

Wallace Falls

Photos from last Saturday's hike to Wallace Falls.

Dolphins Have Names

BBC: Dolphins 'have their own names'

Dolphins communicate like humans by calling each other by name, scientists in Fife have found.

Cool.

Waterfalls

Nandu also recommends hiking to Wallace Falls. After Googling this and Twin Falls, I've discovered that (a) there are lots of detailed websites about waterfalls and (b) Washington state has some of the "best" waterfalls in the World.

So I also want to try hiking to Sulphide Creek Falls and Colonial Creek Falls. Both are in the North Cascades. Depending upon whom you consult they are the 12th and 49th best in the World [World Waterfall Database], the 4th and 8th best in North America [Ask Men], or the 1st and 13th best in Washington [Waterfalls of the Pacific Northwest], respectively.

Twin Falls

Last Saturday I went hiking with Suor to Twin Falls, 40 minutes east of Seattle. The trail wasn't too difficult and after 1.5 mile lead to a bridge above and behind the falls. There was also lookup point facing the falls. I've posted twenty-one photos with some more details in the accompanying descriptions.