e pur si muove

I’m still away, so I will (unfortunately) still be unable to answer comments.

I only briefly mention a new ranked index, this one measuring the “peacefulness” of a country according to a wide basket of soft indicators. According to Vision of Humanity’s Global Peace Index. Singapore is the 29th most peaceful country (out of 141) in the world.

One of the factors contributing to its peaceful nature I found significant were its <1% (reported as 0%) migration rate. One of the factors counting against Singapore is the moderate levels of distrust of non-Singaporeans amongst the general Singaporean populace. Isn’t that interesting?

I just hope I’m reading too much into this as being suggestive of Singapore being a mildly xenophobic country…

Canada’s National Parks system beats the pants off the US National Parks System. There’s no fight when restrooms are equipped with self-sterilizing waterless urinals and sorted recycling bins and solar panels for deployment without running power lines all over the place.

Oh, and Banff, Jasper, Yoho and Glacier National Parks are so incredibly beautiful, my eyes hurt. Did I also mention that Banff is just barely two hours by car from Calgary?

Off to the Okenagan wine country tomorrow, and Vancouver in the evening.

Presenting the rapping Singaporean Lao Zha Bor:

She also has a non-subtitled version here.

Youtube « Lao Zha Bor (老查某)

If you’ve ever heard of researchers creating mutant green rabbits or some kind of (insert animal name here)/jellyfish chimera and wondering what on earth is going on, you’ve probably stumbled upon some variation of a molecular biology study using green fluorescent protein (GFP).

Alex Palazzo at the Daily Transcript has a nice writeup about how GFP is the other major revolution in molecular biology (other than RNA interference), made famous by Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz of NIH. The main idea is that if you want to follow a certain protein in a living thing, one of the easiest ways (now, at least) is to splice the gene that expresses that protein with the GFP sequence and voila! you now have a green glowing tag on that protein when the organism’s all grown up. This, coupled with the remarkable advances in imaging techniques at the cellular level, makes this the molecular biology equivalent of going into a cell and labelling a particular thingybob with a permanent ink marker: “I’m here!”.

The widespread use of GFP today would not have been possible if not for several fortuitous factors. Read the rest of this entry »