A Valentine for the geek in all of us: John Hodgman, "Aliens, love -- where are they?"

the brilliant John Hodgman, Daily Show correspondent, humorist, and -yes- "PC", shares a funny, touching look on love and aliens.

riding the subway through a blizzard to the dreaded "day job," feeling Valentine's day looming ahead... i laughed out loud at Hodgman's deadpan bafflement. and yes, i admit, got a little misty at his conclusion.

here's to all of us finding our other out there in the great beyond.

cool and a little bit creepy

The Times today had a fascinating story today on regenerating a mammoth, ala Jurassic Park, for a measly $10 million. Using DNA extracted from mammoth hair, who knew that museums and other places are holding mounds of hair- ew, scientists can reconstruct the mammoth dna. They say that most of the old problems with resurecting an extinct species have pretty much lifted in the last couple of years.
1- they can now abstract from hair, instead of bone which is tainted with bacteria
2. they have sequencers which can use the broken dna strains (they used to need full strains to reconstruct one)
3. they wouldn't have to grow the embyo from scratch.
here's where the creepiness sets in. they take a similar species, say in this case an elephant, and one by one, switch the differences in the dna strain. there are only 400,000 differences in a mammoth and an elephant. a new process may allow them to change 50,000 at a time. then an elephant could be implanted with the mutated elephant/mammoth egg.

super scifi: they can use the same process on neanderthals. and while there might be some "moral" issue with mutating a human egg, scientists note that chimps are 96% close to us. enough to use chimp dna and make a chimp-neanderthal hybrid! gross

a sad note on a day of joy

i make no secret of my geeky love of all things sci-fi, the high and the low brow. the murky inner workings of my brain are certainly colored with the creations of philip k dick, octavia butler, asimov, le guin, and gibson. so it is with regret for all the stories he had yet to write that i read today about the passing of Michael Criton

for me, his stories have always had a great balance of science (real or skewed) with fantasy that make you believe in the possibility of his words. that's why i love science fiction, it makes you think and forces you to imagine the consequences of how we live, naturally and artificially. his final book, "Next," deals with biotechnology and is one of his best.

one of my favorites, though, is his non-fiction book "Travels." i appreciate the wanderlust we shared.