The recent ruling by the FDA specifying that warning labels are not required on cloned beef has caused angst among some people who don’t understand the process or results of cloning. 

When a plant or animal cell reproduces, a process called “mitosis“, elaborate bio- and micro-chemical processes occur which (far more often than not) lead to the double-helix of the original DNA splitting into two identical halves.  These halves, as they are being ”unzipped” from the helix, are each copied perfectly by enzymes in the cell body.  The result is two flawless copies of the original DNA double helix molecule - each containing half of the original DNA molecule.  Other intracellular “machinery” then facilitates the splitting of remaining cellular components, including the “energy factory” mitochondrea organelles and eventually the “goop” (cytoplasm) in which cellular structures and molecules swim and the cell boundary itself.  When all components have been duplicated and/or split apart, the result is two identical cells. 

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Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates has a ski-resort.  It also has winter daytime temperatures in the 80′s.
It takes a huge amount of energy to cool an indoor ski resort in the Dubai “winter”.  The resort stays open in the summer, demanding a correspondingly more vast supply of cooling energy.  Dubai is not an oil-rich nation (though they had a spurt of it in the 60′s and 70′s); it is essentially a small kingdom on the shores of the Persian Gulf, with little in the way of natural resources.  Today, oil accounts for only 10% of Dubai’s economy.
This tiny nation, essentially a city-state, has a diverse economy and a very liberal society. The literacy rate is about 80%, women hold high positions in corporate and national governance, and religious social conflict is slight.  Dubai is currently (2007) building the tallest building in the world (at least until the next claimant comes along).
It takes a huge amount of energy to turn a patch of dessert into a modern paradise, replete with gardens, higways, posh residential islands, high-end shopping, luxury hotels, a ski resort and a thriving trading port (artificially dredged).  It also takes a huge amount of highly educated citizens to keep the capitalism, the engineering and the innovation racing into a self-determined bright future.

It also takes a huge amount of cheap and relatively unskilled labor, some of it coming from people stuck in effective slavery or surfdom.  Most of these laborers come from other contries, and exist as indentured servants to those who sent, or brought them.

I propose that Dubai is an almost perfect microcosm from which we can all learn important lessons about what makes a nation-state viable, prosperous and progressive.  Many of these lessons have been touched on previously, but Dubai provides a fantastic context in which to reiterate, delineate and summarize them.  To wit: (more…)

I wrote this in response to the Carl Sagan blog-a-thon also mentioned here.  The Carl Sagan Tribute site is wonderful as well.

When I was a young teen in 1980 there were three televisions in the house: One was in the small family room, and was typically shared by my parents. Another was in their bedroom – used primarily by my father to watch Kansas City Chiefs football games on crisp fall weekends. In my own inner sanctum – my bedroom, I had a little 13-inch GE black-and-white set, which I mostly used for watching PBS and Star Trek. It was on my little television that I learned about the coming premiere of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.

Cosmos so intrigued me that I was motivated to leave the electronics and Lego and book-strewn confines of my own bedroom in search of a color television. I knew I needed to see stars and galaxies, nebulae and molecules in vivid color. I persuaded my parents to let me use their bedroom color television to watch the series, no small task given their dubious view of science-fiction, their abhorrence of evolution and general mystification regarding science. I eventually won the argument with assurances of the series educational value and reassurance of “non-sinful” content. Every week, I’d find myself plopped on my parents white king-sized comforter, propped-chin-in-hands, waiting for the next astonishing (my favorite Cosmos word) installment to propel my mind far from my pedestrian Ozarks home. (more…)