Michael Eisenstein
type: channel
description: words and pictures for many occasions
date: 2020-05-29T22:26:46Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: And now for something completely different.
items: On bended knee
items: When The Guardian and Hitler agree, you’ve hit consensus
items: Dystrophin: The Reader’s Digest abridged edition
items: Why are whales so freakin’ big?
items: People Power
items: Requiem for a brown dog
items: Building steam in 2012
items: Oops
items: Graphic sex and violence

And now for something completely different.
type: item
creator: That freakin' guy
date: 2020-05-29T22:17:29Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Hm, let’s see when I last checked into this section of the website. 2015? Boy, that was only forever ago, huh? And yet, at the same time, it seems like just yesterday when I was bitching about how terrible 2014 was, and darn it, doesn’t that just seem hopelessly quaint right now. Science and reason […]
encoded: Hm, let’s see when I last checked into this section of the website. 2015? Boy, that was only forever ago, huh? And yet, at the same time, it seems like just yesterday when I was bitching about how terrible 2014 was, and darn it, doesn’t that just seem hopelessly quaint right now. Science and reason still largely prevailed over nihilism, I had virtually no reason to spend any time on Twitter, and I was still blissfully going to movies and crowded bars. I mean, Prince was still alive, so how bad could the world have been? I’ve tried not to let myself get too bogged down in the mire of the COVID-19 era, although obviously that’s a little tricky when my work increasingly revolves around pandemic research. And of course, as what passes for US civil society continues to erode, it can be increasingly hard to find things to be cheery about. But I managed to find one. <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" data-attachment-id="1109" data-permalink="https://www.eisensteinium.com/2020/05/29/and-now-for-something-completely-different/20200424_153923/" data-orig-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20200424_153923-scaled.jpg" data-orig-size="1244,2560" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"1.7","credit":"","camera":"SM-N950U","caption":"","created_timestamp":"1587742763","copyright":"","focal_length":"4.3","iso":"160","shutter_speed":"0.033333333333333","title":"","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="20200424_153923" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20200424_153923-146x300.jpg" data-large-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20200424_153923-498x1024.jpg" src="http://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20200424_153923-498x1024.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-1109" width="424" height="871" srcset="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20200424_153923-498x1024.jpg 498w, https://www.eisensteiniu…

On bended knee
type: item
creator: That freakin' guy
date: 2015-01-16T21:41:05Z
subject: navelgazing
subject: photography
description: On the whole, 2014 was at best unremarkable and at worst unpleasant (speaking personally – on the global scale, it was rather a shit year all around). But there was one most excellent thing that came out of it. This was improbable for a number of reasons. The highest mountains I ever actually climbed before […]
encoded: On the whole, 2014 was at best unremarkable and at worst unpleasant (speaking personally – on the global scale, it was rather a shit year all around). But there was one most excellent thing that came out of it. <img decoding="async" data-attachment-id="871" data-permalink="https://www.eisensteinium.com/2015/01/16/on-bended-knee/15447603791_91cec363dc_z/" data-orig-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/15447603791_91cec363dc_z.jpg" data-orig-size="640,428" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="15447603791_91cec363dc_z" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/15447603791_91cec363dc_z-300x201.jpg" data-large-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/15447603791_91cec363dc_z.jpg" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-871" src="http://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/15447603791_91cec363dc_z.jpg" alt="15447603791_91cec363dc_z" width="640" height="428" srcset="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/15447603791_91cec363dc_z.jpg 640w, https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/15447603791_91cec363dc_z-300x201.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" /> This was improbable for a number of reasons. The highest mountains I ever actually climbed before this were in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and therefore essentially qualify as speed bumps from a geological standpoint. I’m asthmatic. My primary form of exercise consists of dog walking and playing Ingress. And of course, there’s this – the primary reason my year sucked: <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" data-attachment-id="879" data-permalink="https://www.eisensteinium.com/2015/01/16/on-bended-knee/20131004_085615-360x640/" data-orig-file="https:/…

When The Guardian and Hitler agree, you’ve hit consensus
type: item
creator: That freakin' guy
date: 2013-03-18T22:56:12Z
subject: navelgazing
subject: tech
subject: writing stuff
description: I’m very selective (on the verge of Luddite) in my embrace of online tools and technology – somewhat unfortunate, given my line of work, as the road to freelancer success can be somewhat more smoothly paved for those of us who hurl ourselves vigorously into the blogosphere or Twitterverse whatever hackneyed ‘social media’ + ‘topographic […]
encoded: I’m very selective (on the verge of Luddite) in my embrace of online tools and technology – somewhat unfortunate, given my line of work, as the road to freelancer success can be somewhat more smoothly paved for those of us who hurl ourselves vigorously into the blogosphere or Twitterverse whatever hackneyed ‘social media’ + ‘topographic delineation’ construct you may prefer. There are many reasons I fundamentally dislike Facebook and Twitter, but it’s often hard for me to express them lucidly without descending into visceral “you’re a big doody-head” level arguments. I am, in fact, on Facebook. Furthermore, I go on every single morning, primarily because I’ve learned the hard way that it’s the only way to find out whether people I know are getting hired, fired, married, divorced, pregnant, exiled, executed or canonized. And it has that little birthday box on the right. But I would say that only a vanishingly small percentage of my friends know how to use Facebook the way I would want to use it – posting interesting, thoughtful articles and provoking stimulating discussion with people I wish I knew. Otherwise, it’s like a cross between the world’s longest no-cover open-mic night and the comments section of YouTube. Likewise with Twitter – I am not personally on Twitter, but I do use it to, for example, get ‘behind the scenes’ information from scientific meetings or product launch events. But then I have to roam through endless repetitive retweets and sad, sad attempts at “wit”. And god save us all from #hashtaghumor. This is why the idea of ‘social search’ scares me – even though tech pundits seem to love the concept so. So few people are looking for exactly what I want, and almost none of my friends does exactly what I do, and everybody’s idea of what’s ‘important’ and ‘interesting’ is miles apart from everbody else’s, with the convergence of this messy Venn diagram unfortunately landing squarely on lolcats and the Harlem Shake. If this kind of ‘digital democracy’ d…

Dystrophin: The Reader’s Digest abridged edition
type: item
creator: That freakin' guy
date: 2013-01-16T23:35:52Z
subject: cool research
description: In spite of a solid grounding in experimental practice and animal models, gene therapy has had a difficult road in the clinic. According to the Journal for Gene Therapy, over 1800 gene therapy-oriented clinical trials have been conducted worldwide since 1989, including 67 Phase III trials – typically the last stage in a drug’s journey […]
encoded: In spite of a solid grounding in experimental practice and animal models, gene therapy has had a difficult road in the clinic. According to the Journal for Gene Therapy, over 1800 gene therapy-oriented clinical trials have been conducted worldwide since 1989, including 67 Phase III trials – typically the last stage in a drug’s journey to the market. However, only one gene therapy product has been approved for use in patients: Glybera, from Dutch company UniQure, which uses a virus to deliver a replacement for a damaged gene normally responsible for fatty acid metabolism. Importantly, Glybera is only available in the EU, although the company seems confident that they’ll win approval from the FDA in short order. In other words, pharma and biotech companies are still feeling their way in this new land – but that’s not to say that there aren’t a lot of really cool and promising studies out there. A lot of neat stuff has been bubbling up around muscular dystrophy (MD), which encompasses a family of disorders arising from mutations of the gene encoding the dystrophin protein. Dystrophin is critical to the proper arrangement and stabilization of muscle fibers and, without it, muscle tissue wastes away until patients ultimately perish from failure of the muscles of the heart and/or respiratory system. Now, something you should know about dystrophin. It’s big – I mean epically big. Burj Khalifa big. Blue whale big. Let me put this in perspective: the median length of a human protein is 375 amino acids, but dystrophin contains a whopping 3,677. The DNA encompassed by the gene spans 0.07% of the total human genome, and the process of transcribing the gene into a protein-coding messenger RNA molecule takes SIXTEEN HOURS. This is a damn long gene – the kind that would make Marcel Proust or David Foster Wallace proud. It’s just slightly smaller than this picture, in other words. But here’s the cool part – you don’t need the whole thing. The dystrophin RNA needs to undergo a proce…

Why are whales so freakin’ big?
type: item
creator: That freakin' guy
date: 2013-01-11T22:13:15Z
subject: cool research
description: Short answer: because they can be. An interesting new article in PLoS ONE, by an interesting guy whose work I’ve just now become acquainted with… Aaron Clauset, formerly of the Santa Fe Institute and now at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who uses computer modeling and data analysis to investigate the principles underlying complex […]
encoded: Short answer: because they can be. An interesting new article in PLoS ONE, by an interesting guy whose work I’ve just now become acquainted with… Aaron Clauset, formerly of the Santa Fe Institute and now at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who uses computer modeling and data analysis to investigate the principles underlying complex systems ranging from the dynamics of social networks and terrorist cells (probably not as dissimilar as one might expect) to evolutionary biology. Clauset goes solo on this article, a theoretical piece simply titled ‘How Large Should Whales Be?‘ It’s essentially a follow-up to a study he published in Science in 2008, looking at the distribution of body sizes among terrestrial animals. In that earlier work, he and co-author Douglas Erwin plotted more than 4,000 land-dwelling bird and mammal species (both living and extinct) from the past 2 million years based on their body mass, and arrived at a curve that was heavily skewed toward the left (low body mass) with a long tail tapering off toward larger and larger body masses: (image from Science) This reveals a clear peak that appears to represent an optimal minimum size (approximately 40 grams) from an evolutionary perspective, below which remarkably few species seem to tip the scales. The great majority of species analyzed are considerably larger than this ‘peak minimum’, although true heavyweights are relatively rare. Clauset and Erwin arrive at a model that describes this long tail of bigger body sizes as the result of two competing forces. On the one hand, bigger animals are less likely to be eaten by predators and may be better capable of dealing with short-term changes in resource availability than their small-bodied colleagues. This tendency is described by an evolutionary principle known as Cope’s rule, which states that organisms in a given generation of a particular lineage will generally tend to be larger than their ancestors. On the other hand, excessively large animals bec…

People Power
type: item
creator: That freakin' guy
date: 2012-11-09T17:21:57Z
subject: research
subject: writing stuff
description: One of my two articles in the November issue of Nature Biotechnology looks at some of the cool stuff that’s going on right now with wearable wireless medical sensors that can track and transmit data about cardiac health, blood sugar and even brain activity to a smart phone for the benefit of patients, their family […]
encoded: One of my two articles in the November issue of Nature Biotechnology looks at some of the cool stuff that’s going on right now with wearable wireless medical sensors that can track and transmit data about cardiac health, blood sugar and even brain activity to a smart phone for the benefit of patients, their family members and their caregivers. Among the most commonly cited challenges in bringing these tools forward is providing adequate power to drive both the device and to enable routine data transmission to ensure that the wearer is getting a real-time ‘story’ of physiological changes. We all know that even while technology just gets more powerful and versatile, batteries have more or less continued to suck, and the folks who have been trying to create fully functional medical devices that are essentially small enough to be taped onto your body with a Band-Aid have really been grappling with this. Julian Penders at Belgium’s IMEC research institute is deeply immersed in the world of so-called ‘body area networks’, the design of wireless electronics for physiological monitoring, and a lot of his team’s efforts are particularly focused on this problem and in particular on the idea of moving away from conventional batteries altogether. He told me: “There has been quite a lot of work in terms of energy harvesting… the dream is to have wearable devices that can be used for an entire lifetime without having to charge them. We’ve been looking into thermal harvesting, radiofrequency harvesting and harvesting of energy from vibrations. We’re not at the point where we can have a fully autonomous system, but I would say that the gap between consumption and generation and harvesting of power is really shrinking. We are on the order of 1 milliwatt for a wearable electrocardiograph, and what we can generate in terms of harvesting is typically on the order of around 100 microwatts – we still have a factor of ten to bridge, but this gap has become much easier to cross.” Obviously…

Requiem for a brown dog
type: item
creator: That freakin' guy
date: 2012-10-02T02:49:09Z
subject: navelgazing
description: Just over a week ago, I lost my very dear friend Kern to a truly evil case of liver cancer. Given the (astonishingly low) frequency with which I update my website, and the (astonishingly high) proportion of dog-oriented content that those updates comprise, I want to take a moment to eulogize this sweet, odd creature […]
encoded: Just over a week ago, I lost my very dear friend Kern to a truly evil case of liver cancer. Given the (astonishingly low) frequency with which I update my website, and the (astonishingly high) proportion of dog-oriented content that those updates comprise, I want to take a moment to eulogize this sweet, odd creature who had been my buddy, my henchman and, in some ways, my alter ego for almost 12 years. For those of you who don’t feel like reading on as I wax sentimental, the rest is below the jump – as an alternative, perhaps you’d prefer Matt Inman’s very sweet ruminations on dog ownership over at The Oatmeal? The rest of you – follow me. I adopted Kern back in 2000, while traveling through the barren wastes of central California. My ex and I had stopped in a town called Kernville (near the Kern River, in Kern County), where there was supposed to be kickass whitewater rafting. Since we were dumbasses and went at the end of a long drought season, the mighty Kern River was nought but a feeble, muddy trickle. So we went to a pet store run by bikers, where we were charmed by this tiny reddish-brown lump of fur who was on display in the shop window, being terrorized by a nasty parrot perched overhead. I HATE parrots. So of course, we had to rescue him. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" data-attachment-id="666" data-permalink="https://www.eisensteinium.com/2012/10/01/requiem-for-a-brown-dog/kern1/" data-orig-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Kern1.jpg" data-orig-size="500,335" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":""}" data-image-title="Kern1" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Kern1-300x201.jpg" data-large-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Kern1.jpg" class="aligncenter size…

Building steam in 2012
type: item
creator: That freakin' guy
date: 2012-01-03T00:29:38Z
subject: navelgazing
description: Like most other Americans, I always plan to kick off each new year with a vigorous storm of self-improvement – grabbing every day by the lapels, smacking it in the face a few times and then striding down the street to celebrate with a cold beer. But more realistically, my year tends to begin like […]
encoded: Like most other Americans, I always plan to kick off each new year with a vigorous storm of self-improvement – grabbing every day by the lapels, smacking it in the face a few times and then striding down the street to celebrate with a cold beer. But more realistically, my year tends to begin like this: <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-626" data-attachment-id="626" data-permalink="https://www.eisensteinium.com/2012/01/02/building-steam-in-2012/sleepykern/" data-orig-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/sleepykern.jpg" data-orig-size="600,359" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"PC36100","caption":"","created_timestamp":"1325253856","copyright":"","focal_length":"4.92","iso":"110","shutter_speed":"0","title":""}" data-image-title="sleepykern" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" &#8220;2012, huh? Wake me when it&#8217;s 2013.&#8221; " data-medium-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/sleepykern-300x179.jpg" data-large-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/sleepykern.jpg" src="http://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/sleepykern.jpg" alt="" title="sleepykern" width="600" height="359" class="size-full wp-image-626" srcset="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/sleepykern.jpg 600w, https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/sleepykern-300x179.jpg 300w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" /> "2012, huh? Wake me when it's 2013." So I’ll spare you my roster of ‘resolutions’, which will in all likelihood be as far from binding as anything posted on the internet can be. But I will say that even though things look exactly the same in January 2012 as they did in December 2011, I’m hopeful that this is just the launching point for some fun and exciting projects and adventures. I’ve got a mountain of pictures to post, story ideas to develop and – most impo…

Oops
type: item
creator: That freakin' guy
date: 2011-11-10T15:45:01Z
subject: world o' journals
description: Apparently, I’ve been a bad dog-parent. My pup, now 11, still loves to chase his tail, and after 11 years, I still find this endlessly amusing and giggle-inducing. Yes, I like the simple things. But apparently I’ve been reinforcing his clueless behavior even while I mocked it, at least according to a new article from […]
encoded: Apparently, I’ve been a bad dog-parent. My pup, now 11, still loves to chase his tail, and after 11 years, I still find this endlessly amusing and giggle-inducing. Yes, I like the simple things. But apparently I’ve been reinforcing his clueless behavior even while I mocked it, at least according to a new article from PLoS ONE: “I gathered data on the first large (n = 400), non-clinical tail-chasing population, made possible through a vast, free, online video repository, YouTube . The demographics of this online population are described and discussed. Approximately one third of tail-chasing dogs showed clinical signs, including habitual (daily or ‘all the time’) or perseverative (difficult to distract) performance of the behaviour. These signs were observed across diverse breeds. Clinical signs appeared virtually unrecognised by the video owners and commenting viewers; laughter was recorded in 55% of videos, encouragement in 43%, and the commonest viewer descriptors were that the behaviour was ‘funny’ (46%) or ‘cute’ (42%). Habitual tail-chasers had 6.5+/−2.3 times the odds of being described as ‘Stupid’ than other dogs, and perseverative dogs were 6.8+/−2.1 times more frequently described as ‘Funny’ than distractible ones were… These findings highlight that tail-chasing is sometimes pathological, but can remain untreated, or even be encouraged, because of an assumption that it is ‘normal’ dog behaviour. The enormous viewing figures that YouTube attracts (mean+/−s.e. = 863+/−197 viewings per tail-chasing video) suggest that this perception will be further reinforced, without effective intervention.” I’m nothing but an enabler! Plus, you can apparently now do science while watching silly animal videos on YouTube. What an age we live in!

Graphic sex and violence
type: item
creator: That freakin' guy
date: 2011-11-04T19:03:47Z
subject: world o' journals
description: You don’t have to be a scientist to recognize that this is probably not the best abbreviation for ‘copper nanotubes’ or giggle like a 12-year-old at images like this, and that’s the beauty of the TOC ROFL Tumblog, a collection of silly, embarassing, unintentionally bawdy and just-plain-WTF graphical abstracts for chemistry research papers. It’s truly […]
encoded: Somebody set us up the bomb! You don’t have to be a scientist to recognize that this is probably not the best abbreviation for ‘copper nanotubes’ or giggle like a 12-year-old at images like this, and that’s the beauty of the TOC ROFL Tumblog, a collection of silly, embarassing, unintentionally bawdy and just-plain-WTF graphical abstracts for chemistry research papers. It’s truly got something for everybody (with a perverse sense of humor). And if you ARE a scientist or science writer, and you’ve actually seen figures and graphical abstracts like these before, well there’s just so much more to love. I remember the receptor complex slide I used to use in grad school that everybody but me thought looked like an angry robot, and my friend’s slide from his TB talk that showed a snapshot of a man sneezing where the dispersing vapor looked just like a giant breast… but these really take the cake. Just what were these editors thinking? In a world where young’uns hurl around the phrase ROFL with excess and reckless abandon, I must say I came pretty close to literally ROFL for some of these. Hat tip to ‘In The Pipeline‘ for bringing this to my attention. As Derek Lowe rightly points out: “I’ve no idea who this is, but they’re helping, in their way, to make the world a better place.”