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I was watching JANE MCGONIGAL's   talk on New Yorker about games and using games to solve real word problems.   She predicts that by 2013 we will find ourselves living our lives inside of massively multiplayer games.  We're not talking about World of Warcraft type online games but real world or 'offline' games. She mentions car based games where your goal is get better mileage, ChoreWars  a game that applies gaming to household chores, and SharkRunner which integrates real data from actual sharks swimming around wild in the oceans. This reminded me of a paper i wrote in 2008 for a class at George Mason. The paper proposed merging social networks like facebook with the social networks of other species. Specifically the endangered Asian Elephant.       http://mason.gmu.edu/~mbrashie/IT304/The_Next_Step.html

My ancestors left Africa 50k years ago. They settled in the Middle East 45k years ago. They moved into southern central Asia 40k years ago.  Then they moved into cental Asia 35k years ago. About 30k years ago, as CroMagnon's they colonized Europe. Most people in modern Spain and Ireland carry the same haplogroup as me. Your Y-chromosome results identify you as a member of  haplogroup  R1b. The genetic markers that define your ancestral history reach back roughly 60,000 years to the first common marker of all non-African men,  M168,  and follow your lineage to present day ending with  M343,  the defining marker of Haplogroup  R1b. If you look at the map highlighting your ancestors' route, you will see that members of haplogroup  R1b  carry the following Y-chromosome markers: M168  > P143 >  M89 >  L15 >  M9  >  M45  >  M207  >  M173  >  M343 (Les...

In 2009 I decided to read more dead tree based content instead of web based content.  Here's a few of my favorites with a brief comment on each.  I also threw in some honorable mentions. Note, not all of these books were published in 2009.  I just got around to reading them in 2009. Under the Dome , Stephen King I love books with a premise that seems to come out of nowhere.  Giant dome isolates a small town in Maine does the trick.  The moral of the story: Liberals and conservatives got to stick together against the nut jobs. This book made me hate the villain, Big Jim Remmie.   The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work , Alain De Botton Work wasn't always equated with your happiness and life dreams.  It was merely something you did as quick as possible so you could eat and pursue your hobbies if you had any. Somewhat Malcolm Gladwell'ish and a great read.  The book describes, with great detail and insight, many dispa...

I'm kind of bummed. The Genographic Project failed to find my haplogroup. It's gonna take a couple more weeks. Your sample has completed the DNA analysis phase of testing. However, during quality control your initial results failed to clearly indicate your haplogroup. We must perform additional testing to accurately determine your deep ancestral lineage. This is not uncommon, but will delay the posting of your results by two to three weeks. We appreciate your patience. Please also note that this delay is a sign of the Project's success in increasing the diversity of samples in our database. If we find that there is a problem at any point during the processing of your sample, you will receive an updated message when you log in to check your status.

My DNA has been isolated. In a few weeks I will know the route my ancestors took in their migration out of Africa. I signed up for the Genographic Project. It's a great project run by National Geographic that is mapping the migration history of the human species by using the DNA of hundreds of thousands of people from around the world. A couple of weeks ago I swabbed the inside of my cheeks then put the swab in a solution and shipped it to NatGeo. They received it and started running their lab work. In their words: The cells are broken open by incubation with a protein-cutting enzyme overnight. Chemicals and the samples are transferred into deep well blocks for robotic DNA isolation. The blocks of chemicals and samples are placed on the extraction robot. The robotic DNA isolation uses silica-coated iron beads. In the presence of the appropriate chemicals DNA will bind to silica. The robot then uses magnetic probes to collect the beads (and DNA) and transfer them through several...

This thing is addicting. Send your own ElfYourself eCards

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