Friday, September 27, 2002
Learning more on Iraq...
Today I discovered this Washington Post site giving a quickie overview of Iraq's history, geography, and economics.
I'll have to get to this site later for an overview of the 1991 Gulf War. It's produced by OPB and, on initial scans, seems to be a victor's view of the war. It should be a good place to start but I don't know if it will be helpful understanding the politics of the current situation.
I browsed over this timeline yesterday which charts a political history of Iraq from 1900 to 2000.
</Aurelius> <!--9:59 AM-->Thursday, September 26, 2002
Read about this site in the Portland Tribune. I like the idea of "releasing" books into the wild. I don't know if I'll release any books soon (though I have a few that are just taking up space.) I've patronized book exchanges through the library as well as passing books on to friends and family. I think the thing that I'd be most fascinated by is tracing the journey that a book might take and how it affects the people along the way, something along the lines of the movies, The Red Violin or 20 Bucks. There's got to be some fascinating stories there...
</Aurelius> <!--1:56 PM-->According to National Geographic, humans and chimpanzees may not be as closely related as believed. It has widely been acknowledged (and I had been taught in my anthropology classes) that humans and chimps have 98.5% genetic similarity. (Any two humans, by contrast, share 99.9% similarity.) This original assertion rests on experiments that showed that 98.5% of DNA sequences are shared by human (homo sapiens) and chimps (pan troglodytes). This was measured by methods that focused on evolutionary change caused by substitutions in the DNA sequences.
The new assertion by geneticist, Roy J. Britten at the California Institute of Technology in Corona del Mar, comes after using methods that not only look at the evolutionary change brought about by substitutions but also at deletions and/or insertions of sections of DNA into the existing sequence, a change known as indels. By looking at known nucleotide sequences for both substitutions and indels, a divergence of 5% was calculated. making humans and chimps only 95% similar.
Not being a geneticist, I'm not sure exactly how they calculate similarities. I imagine that when looking for substitutions they basically take parallel nucleotide sequences from human and chimpanzee DNA and see where the nucleotide sequence matches (by parallel, I mean that it would have to occur on the same place in the genome and be of matching length). A one-to-one correspondence of nucleotides in the sequence would be expected. But when looking for indels, one has to look at the patterns of nucleotide sequences and figure out where something may have been added or deleted from the larger sequence. Seems like a helluva job to me. The significance is subject to scrutiny because there's no consensus about how to count numbers of insertions or deletions.
I'm also not quite sure what significance this really has. The researcher himself stated, "Increasing the number is mostly a technical matter though; we are still the same distance away as we were before, and that is about five million years."
</Aurelius> <!--11:06 AM-->Middle East
So I know very little about the Middle East and it's been a bit of a hinderance in trying to wrap my mind around current events in the region. So starting today, I'm trying to increase my knowledgebase and the first thing to do is to orient myself. So here's a fine map that I found at, http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/middle_east_and_asia/middleeast_ref01.pdf
Click image for a nice PDF file
A couple of initial observations:
- I had no idea that's where Syria was
- Iraq seems very small
- Iran shares a border with both Afghanistan and Pakistan
- Wow, Russia is really close to the Middle East
- If I remember my world history correctly, the cradle of civilization is in Iraq
Next up...trying to get a historical orientation...
</Aurelius> <!--10:16 AM-->It occurs to me that, in spite of my gregarious porn watching as of late, I don’t really know what a “reverse cowgirl” position is. I need to be enlightened…
And the answer is…
it should’ve been obvious, but I needed confirmation. The reverse cowgirl is a woman-on-top position where, instead of facing towards her partner while riding (cowgirl), she faces away from him offering a view of her posterior. I’m actually a great fan of this position (and any that offers a view of a woman’s ass.) I like doggie-style for the same reason. Info was from http://www.datingfun.com/sex/positions/ which also compiles a list of various other positions. Very enlightening