Edward the happiest hamster in the world bar none

Fluorescent monkeys

It's pretty obvious why model organisms are needed for genetic and medical research. Fluorescent monkeys are interesting not because having bright green feet helps in understanding disease, but because the genetic basis of creating this sort of primate allow successful gene insertions and knockouts. In a way it's a circus, but a circus that proves a point.

Personally I find the news (that New World monkeys will now be a more popular model organism for health and medicine research) very sad because it will mean my monkeys being used in research that will cause them a great deal of pain and suffering. But the rewards for mankind are potentially rich and although I don't enjoy the prospect of the testing, it will be for the greater good.

What would be really good is if this clears the way for more research on/into platyrrhines. Unfortunately I doubt it will.

More edward

PHOTOSHOP MASTER SKILLZ

My trip is fantastically unexciting. I wake up, I get a coke, I get a taxi to the museum, I go up four flights of stairs, I digitise 8-10 skulls, I stop for a mcdonalds lunch, I go back to work for about 5 hours, I leave, I walk back to the hotel and maybe grab something hot or some snacks from seven eleven, I eat and watch tv, and go to sleep. The next day is the same. I have done this 7 times, and will repeat it four more times.

Two things about America strike me as worrying:

1) paper towels are quadrupal layered- what a waste of trees

2) all the relatively unskilled jobs are done by 'ethnic minorities' and never whites, and skilled jobs seem to be taken by white folks. No matter how much things change, they always stay the same.

And now for some bloody ace photoshops of my pet hamster

I'm in Chicago, good old us of a

I am in chicago at the moment and, whilst chilling in a xanax haze (more of a fluffy tint to be fair) I wanted to write about something that has struck me as really weird: the violence of their reality tv.

Now a lot of up-their-own-arse commentators harp on about reality tv as death of good programming and all this other shite, but if you take it for what it is (sugar water) then it is perfectly entertaining and enjoyable: I like reality tv. But what has taken me a bit sideways about American programming is the overt aggressiveness. Over here we have some semi-standards, things you just don't do or say. But here there simply don't seem to be any rules.

I have seen two shows back to back. In the first show there is a reunion show for some daft looking program called 'tool school' where really idiotic boyfriends and their painfully stupid other halves had to stop being "tools" for the chance to win 100k. Across the hour show two men were physically hit by their partners, one guy went crazy and trashed a room (wwf style), one man challenged another to a fist fight, and a lot of very nasty things were said between people. Now, what the fuck is that all about??? The presenter said/did nothing. I assume no complaints will be made. All this crap was just part of the product.

I thought perhaps it was just a very over the top anomolous show. But the next show, no idea what it's called, goes one further. It appears there are two teams living in the same house, doing tasks, but also setting up all sorts of silly alliances with someone occasionally having the chance to evict a person. All a little silly, but then one group gets pissed off about losing. So one women starts screaming in the face of another (sitting down, minding her own business) "you look like a fucking turtle you stupid ugly bitch, i fucking hate you" and then another joins in, just as bad with the insults, screaming in her face. Then one of said nasty women goes and starts throwing the belongings of a room mate around- when he tries to stop her a bunch of men flood in trying to fight the guy. One moron storms into the room and threatens to kill the man! And afterwards he looks into the camera and screams "I don't know what the fuck he did but I will fucking kill him man".

What the bloody hell is going on?????????

How is this even mildly acceptable? Maybe it's just all fake-reality, over the top, but quite a few of them appear to be on drugs as well and the whole thing is just bloody insane, especially with the screeching French stripper.


It's just so mad the whole thing.

Anyway, I'm now waiting for 'the real world' to start in half an hour. The house has a lot of good eggs with an iraq war vet (who indicates whilst he might not have PTSD he definitely has deep psychological wounds), a transexual too lazy to apparently do anything around the house, several gay and kind of possibly gay folk, a model who brings a different woman home every night, a not very pleasent women with both a fiancee and boyfriend who seems to be on the phone all the time, a utah mormon who wears daft glasses and a bow tie and wants to be a tv presenter. But the sad story is that (based on the advertisement) said iraq war vet, who really does seem like a good guy, is celebrating like crazy as Obama gets nominated President (cue pictures of him stumbling around drunk out of his facedressed as uncle sam) with him declaring “that means I’m not going back to Iraq”. You’ve surely guessed the next scene: he gets a phone call telling him that his call up papers to go back to Iraq have just arrived in the post.

Otherwise there seem to be a million and one other reality shows, of varying violence levels and quality. But it is sort of scary that a country that has so many violent deaths each year seems to have reality tv (which should be light, silly, fun) with undertones of overt violence. It's just crazy.

What are New World monkeys?

I figured it was about time I got back to what I'm moderately good at- science

The New World monkeys (also known by their more scientific name of platyrrhines) are a diverse and species rich group including all known primates native to central and south America. Their current geographic range spans tropical and subtropical forests from Southern Mexico to Northern Argentina, with fossil material discovered as far as Rio Gallegos in Southern Argentina and the islands of Cuba, Jamaica and the Dominican Republic. All platyrrhines are arboreal (tree based) with no terrestrially adapted species and are, except Aotus, exclusively diurnal (active during daytime). Early hypotheses linked platyrrhine origins to ancient North American prosimians (non-ape/monkey primates), but the shared presence of postorbital closure in Old and New World monkeys and molecular evidence for a long shared ancestry between these groups separate them from tarsiers, lemurs and lorises. Clearly platyrrhines represent a single monophyletic lineage (that is, they are a single group sharing a single origin) that split from the Old World catarrhines (monkeys, humans and apes) in the middle Eocene either before, after, or during and as a result of, their assumed raft journey across the Atlantic. Throughout their existence the platyrrhine lineage has experienced multiple adaptive radiations (a rapid evolutionary change with likely new forms coming into existence as a result of natural selection and/or environmental change) to create the rich phylogenetic diversity found today.

Good blogs

Harry's place is a great centrist-left blog with many guest posters, a big following that leads to lively & interesting discussion in the comments section, and a focus on the British left, Israel, anti-semitism, Islam and a lot of other stuff.

False dichotomies is a very well-written blog by a londoner living in modern day zion, spanning his experience in the IDF through to current hiphop playlists.

Jeffrey Goldberg of the brilliant Atlantic magazine has a frequently updated blog dealing with American and international politics.

And yes, the underlying theme is that of commentary on Israel and the attack from the bizarre couple of radical islam (who despise freedom, human rights, democracy etc.) and the left wing (who used to stand for freedom, human rights, democracy etc).