Second Day in a Row

I went hiking again today but this time I went by myself. Julie decided she wanted to have breakfast instead of tramping around in the woods. Silly girl!

I wanted to get pictures of some deer today and for that you have to either get an early start---or a late one. Since I was having trouble sleeping and woke up at 3am I decided to read for a few hours and then go after those deer that hadn't gone to sleep yet.

Isn't that first picture pretty? I love the green of ferns contrasted against dark shades of brown and black. The fallen log adds some contrast in this picture--as does the path though not quite as well.


Since I wanted to get a picture of a deer, I was walking fairly quietly---and I was lucky enough to approach this doe before she realized I was around.

She was quite a ways away and I had to use my camera zoomed all the way out. The only reason the shot worked was that the doe was standing in a bright spot in a clearing. Had she been in the shaded woods I'd never have been able to come up with a usable shot. I just can't hold a camera stable that's been zoomed out that far for a long exposure. But enough about my problems!


After taking a couple initial pictures I crept a little closer and she heard me. Her head whipped around but it still took her a few seconds to spot me. This picture was taken just before she was sure where I was.

If you look at the large version of the picture you can see that she's got her neck stretched forward as she's searching for the source of the sound she heard. I tried a few more shots after that but she had moved just a half foot or so, but it was enough so that her head was hidden by a branch.


This last picture was taken a few minutes later after I'd worked my way around the doe and started taking pictures on a different side. The entire time I was moving, the deer kept moving so she was facing the direction I was in.

She was a suspicious sort but she never ran away. After a few more pictures that didn't come out as well, I departed leaving her to eat in peace.

Early Start

We got off to an early start today. Woke up at 6am, out the door at 6:15, and on the trail at Duke Forest at 6:35. That's very early in the morning for us on a weekend.

The deer like that time of the day a lot more than we do. I take small country roads to cut across Alamance and Orange County to get to the Duke Forest trail. I have to drive slower but it's a much shorter route.

Well, in the weak predawn light, the deer are still out in force and I had to drive even slower than usual. We had deer bound across the road in front of us six times on the way there. And not even once on the drive back, when it was after 8am. Apparently once the sun comes up and traffic increases those deer make themselves scarce. Go figure.

I was a little surprised that we didn't see a single deer while hiking in the woods. On the other hand, we aren't exactly quiet when we walk...

That picture at the top was taken near the concrete bridge in Duke Forest. You can see how misty the air still is at that time. We were near the half way point in the hike and it was around 7:20am. You can see some water research equipment that Duke has along the trail there.

The next two pictures were taken earlier, around 6:50am, at the top of a rock face.

The middle picture was taken while leaning over the top and looking down towards the ground. And the last photo was while sitting on top of the rock face and looking towards the edge. With my trusty Wal-mart water bottle right beside me, I might add.

I took some pictures in the woods also but almost none of them came out. There just wasn't enough light and they came out blurred. Sad 'cause the light was wonderful to the eye, just not enough for the camera. And the flash made the colors change and become unappealing. *sigh*

Later today we plan on doing some cooking and baking. I picked up a couple of plantains that I want to try to play with a bit and there's a recipe I want to try that I saw on Food Network called Millionaire's Shortbread that Julie and I might make today.

Just not the Same

There's an interesting press release from McGill University today. Apparently some of their researchers (Dr. Morris Schweitzer, Dr. Bruce Gottlieb, Dr. Lorraine Chalifour and colleagues) have a paper coming out in the journal Human Mutation today which suggests that the DNA in white blood cells isn't the same as that of normal tissue.

"So what?" you say. Well, you have to understand that when we do research on genetics we usually don't have access to tissue since living people don't want their parts cut into. So we take a vial of blood, spin out the red blood cells which don't have DNA, and then extract DNA from the remaining leukocytes (white blood cells). Up to now it's been assumed that DNA in one cell of the body would be the same as in any other. So this puts into question any research or medical treatment that depends on genetic information from blood. Assuming the McGill University group is correct, of course.

Here's a quote from the press release:

“From a genetic perspective, therapeutic implications aside, the observation that not all cells are the same is extremely important. That’s the bottom line,” he added. “Genome-wide association studies were introduced with enormous hype several years ago, and people expected tremendous breakthroughs. They were going to draw blood samples from thousands or hundreds of thousands of individuals, and find the genes responsible for disease.

“Unfortunately, the reality of these studies has been very disappointing, and our discovery certainly could explain at least one of the reasons why.”

So much research, particularly biomedical research, involves DNA microarrays. These arrays are usually used with genetic material obtained from blood samples. If we're extrapolating from genetic samples that aren't actually representative of the subjects / patients, well, that's really bad. I'm hoping based on their not publishing in a top journal like Nature or Science that there's something hinky here.

Wordless Wednesday

If I Could

Last night Julie was talking about her kids and their journey on a train from NYC and she used the phrase "If I could, I would..." and I piped up "That's a song!" Julie then asked what song it was, and I blanked. I knew it wasn't the title but all I could remember of the song was that it played during a poignant moment in a made-for-tv movie that I saw in the early 1970s. And that the word "hammer" was used at least once.

So... in the past I'd never had a chance of finding out what song it was. No doubt I'd be cursing my memory for days before I finally gave up on trying to figure out what song it was. But today, with search engines like Google, anything is possible.

I'd rather be a sparrow than a snail.
Yes I would, if I could, I surely would.
I'd rather be a hammer than a nail.

Yes I would, if I only could, I surely would.

It turns out that the movie was titled "Voyage of the Yes", made in 1973 and it starred Desi Arnaz Jr and Mike Evans (Lionel Jefferson on "All in the Family"). The song is El Condor Pasa, made famous by Simon and Garfunkel in 1970. I'm not sure why I keyed in on Desi Arnaz Junior's version and not the one by Simon and Garfunkel---but there you go. The memory is a strange beast.

Also interesting is how much additional information the Internet can provide. I never knew that Simon and Garfunkel had accidentally grabbed the melody El Condor Pasa which was originally written by the Peruvian composer Daniel Alomía Robles in 1913. Apparently Paul Simon was listening to a musical group, "Los Incas", while they performed the song in Paris and Simon decided he'd like to use the melody with his own lyrics. Simon was told that the song was from the 1800s and not under copyright so he wrote the song and included it on the album Bridge Over Troubled Water.

However In 1970 Alomía Robles' son, Armando Robles Godoy, filed a copyright lawsuit against Paul Simon and demonstrated that the song had been composed by his father and that his father had copyrighted the song in the United States in 1933. Oops!

I'd never have known any of that if it wasn't for Google and Wikipedia. Gotta love the Internet. Thanks, Al.

BTW, Los Incas ended up performing on "Bridge over Troubled Water" and that album ended up being Simon and Garfunkel's last studio album. It managed to get the Grammy for best record that year and the title song got song of the year. Sweet.

Royal Pains is a pain

Anyone watch the USA Network show Royal Pains? It stars Mark Feuerstein, who I liked a lot in a show a few years back, Good Morning, Miami, as ER doc Hank Lawson who, due to some bad luck, becomes a concierge doctor for the rich and famous in the Hamptons. Also on the show are Paulo Costanzo (his annoying brother), Reshma Shetty (the cute PA with a great accent), and Jill Flint (the annoying love interest with no chemistry).

My take on this show is that while Mark Feuerstein is very endearing, he's just not enough to save the show for me. It's full of cliches, annoying characters--particularly the brother, and bad writing. Julie and I were making a game out of finding inconsistencies in the plotlines. It's like the writers don't read their own scrips! For example, they have the physician assistant, Divya (Reshma Shetty), supposedly hiding her interest in medicine from her parents. You see, they want her to marry well and be a trophy wife---and not be working or overly educated. Yet she's got a degree as a PA, which takes 2-3 years of study, and supposedly got the degree without her parents knowing. And did I mention the SUV crammed full of expensive equipment and supplies? It was a running gag in the first few episodes that she had every type of portable diagnostic equipment that "Hank" would need. We're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars here! Hard to believe that her parents haven't noticed this "hobby."

Anyway, inconsistencies like that really drive me bonkers and I've finally given up on the show. Let me know if you like it---maybe I'll try the show again later on.

Dying

I was watching a rerun of House the other night and it struck me that the guest star (Christine Woods) reminded me a lot of the actress (Robin Tunney) that plays Senior Agent Teresa Lisbon of the CBI in The Mentalist. The pictures of the two actresses are below.

The episode of House that I was watching was Dying Changes Everything, which opened the 5th season. That's the 3rd time I've seen that episode and each time it impresses me. The title also struck me as funny, in the coincidence way, because I happened to be reading a novel titled Everyone Dies that day. The book, written by Michael McGarrity, was pretty good. I'm reading his current novel now, Dead or Alive. The titles aren't thematic, it's just another coincidence that both are death related. Most of McGarrity's titles have a New Mexico theme, which is the location where his detective novels are placed.

Privacy and your social security number

Pretty much everybody in the USA has a social security number (SSN) and much of the private and public data related to us is attached in one way or another to that SSN. Not a bad system, you might say. After all, a more-or-less random 9 digit number is fairly secure.

The problem is that our SSN is anything but random. In fact, apparently it's pretty predictable. In a new study conducted by Alessandro Acquisti, associate professor of information technology and public policy at Carnegie Mellon, has shown that public information readily gleaned from governmental sources, commercial data bases, or online social networks can be used to routinely predict most and sometimes all of a person's SSN. The study findings will appear this week in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS)

Carnegie Mellon views this news as sufficiently serious to merit setting up a website solely for the purpose of educating people about security and SSN.

Acquisti and Gross tested their prediction method using records from the Death Master File of people who died between 1973 and 2003. They could identify in a single attempt the first five digits for 44 percent of deceased individuals who were born after 1988 and for 7 percent of those born between 1973 and 1988. They were able to identify all nine digits for 8.5 percent of those individuals born after 1988 in fewer than 1,000 attempts. Their accuracy was considerably higher for smaller states and recent years of birth: for instance, they needed 10 or fewer attempts to predict all nine digits for one out of 20 SSNs issued in Delaware in 1996. Sensitive details of the prediction strategy were omitted from the article.

Pretty scary stuff for younger people. People in my age group didn't get SSNs until we got jobs so we're less easy to predict. In cases where you can guess the complete SSN in 10 or less attempts---something that is essentially instant when using a computer program to automate coded number entries---using the SSN for security is a joke. Any hacker who bothered to get just a few items of data, easily found, like birthplace and hometown, can then hack into all sorts of supposedly private accounts.

I guess it might be a good idea to be a wee bit secretive about where I was born---and when. You might want to take that precaution too!

Evening Hike

I went hiking for a couple of hours this evening at Duke Forest. I started around 6pm and got back to my car just after 8pm.

It wasn't all that hot, low 80s, but it was very humid and I wasn't wearing clothes for hiking. On the other hand, wearing long pants, socks, and collared shirt probably helped keep ticks off me---and that's a good thing. The woods are full of ticks though not quite as bad as last year.

The first picture is from a descent that leads down to the river. The second picture is of the river about a half mile away from where I took the first picture.


It was so humid that by the time I got to the river I was pretty damp. Hell, within the first 20 minutes of hiking I was soaked with sweat and it probably never got much worse. The excess sweat just dripped off me and onto the trail.

You'd think a hike like that would have been unpleasant---but it wasn't. The mechanics of keeping the sweat out of my eyes was annoying but the hike itself was very nice. It's a very pretty area. I like walking the trails in Duke Forest and Eno River Park quite a bit.