Ever notice how things that "everybody knows" are usually wrong? Here's another one (from here, concerning this paper):

It is an established fact that 98 percent of the DNA, or the code of life, is exactly the same between humans and chimpanzees. So the key to what it means to be human resides in that other 2 percent.

Argh. Actually, it's an established fact that this meme, or trope, or whatever you want to call it, is bollocks. Individual human genomes vary by about 0.08% at the single-nucleotide level, whereas human and chimpanzee genomes differ by about 1-1.5% at the same level. This is misleading, because single-nucleotide comparison means aligning comparable sequences base-by-base and counting the differences. In order to line up the two sequences in the first place, however, you have to introduce gaps into each sequence to allow for insertions and deletions. Like this:

actgccggctaac-----gtaccTgtcaactggcatgcatgcaagtacc
actgccggcGaacggtccgtacccgtcaac--gcatgAatgcaagtacc

In this made-up example, three bases out of fifty are different (6%) but the gaps account for a further 7 bases' worth of difference (14%). Do this with enough regions of each genome to get a representative sample and you can estimate the degree of sequence identity between the two genomes. Of the optimally-aligned sections of our genomes, we share about 98.5-99% with chimps, but taking the gaps into account produces a rather lower figure of about 95%, something Roy Britten showed in 2002.

What both figures overlook, and tend to obscure, is differences in the organization of large sections of the genetic information: duplications, inversions, recombinations between and within chromosomes, insertions of retroviral sequences, and so on. I wrote earlier about a method that allows us to measure such differences. Variation between individual humans on this scale seems to run at about 1.5% (cf. 0.08% at the nucleotide level); it will be interesting to see a ROMA-based comparison between humans and chimps. It is on this organisational scale that the real clues to the inscrutable Decree will be found.

Corner Seat

Suspended in a moving night
The face in the reflected train
Looks at first sight as self-assured
As your own face—But look again:

Windows between you and the world
Keep out the cold, keep out the fright;
Then why does your reflection seem
So lonely in the moving night?

Museums

Museums offer us, running from among the buses,
A centrally heated refuge, parquet floors and sarcophaguses,
Into whose tall fake porches we hurry without a sound
Like a beetle under a brick that lies, useless, on the ground.
Warmed and cajoled by the silence the cowed cypher revives,
Mirrors himself in the cases of pots, paces himself by marble lives,
Makes believe it was he that was the glory that was Rome,
Soft on his cheek the numbus of other people's martyrdom,
And then returns to the street, his mind an arena where sprawls
Any number of consumptive Keatses and dying Gauls.

Aubade

Having bitten on life like a sharp apple
Or, playing it like a fish, been happy,

Having felt with fingers that the sky is blue,
What have we after that to look forward to?

Not the twilight of the gods but a precise dawn
Of sallow and grey bricks, and newsboys crying war.

The Sunlight On The Garden

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.

(Amanda: the unaltered originals of those shots, and a couple of others, are here. Apart from cropping and resizing, the only things I did to the smaller versions above was sharpened them slightly and altered the levels a little. If you don't have the requisite software I'll be happy to make whatever alterations you want to the larger versions.)

Our friend Mollie is president of the Ozarks Literacy Council, who just had a large and costly window broken by small and worthless scumbags. The intricate iniquities of insurance companies and landlords have conspired to land the council with the full cost of replacement, which they need to raise by Tuesday so as not to conflict with the annual United Way blackout period (whatever that is -- I have no idea, go ask Brad).

So, if you have five bucks (or five hundred; hey, you don't know for certain Steve Jobs doesn't read this) to spare, please consider helping out a friend of mine and her worthy cause.

Observant readers will have noticed the spousal unit's new project, Portland Public Art, on the blogroll. Portland has a lot of public art, thanks in large part to a (city? state?) law that says 1% of all building budgets must go to support the arts. The spousal unit went mad and decided to catalog it.


The title is a sneaky segue to our latest acquisitions, two miniatures (about 2.5 inches square) by local artist Bernard O Gross, "Three Cedars" and "Red Oak Hillside". These snaps don't really do them justice. (Man, do I feel like an artwanker now.)