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<RANT>

Okay. For all you holier-than-thou smarty-pantses out there, here’s a question. If an average-sized couch cushion were to hit a brick wall at 15 mph, would you think at first glance that the brick wall might be damaged?

I thought not.

So leave me the FUCK alone with your judgmental snippetiness about how YOU would have aborted the launch (let alone how you would have even seen the insulation incident they only saw on video LATER) and how could I even THINK that maybe Mission Control didn’t think they had sufficient reason to effectively waste a large chunk of what little funding they had because “human life was on the line.” Human life is on the line every time you get in your car, but that doesn’t stop normal people from driving to work. (No, I’m not normal. Thanks for asking.) Human life is on the line every time a new medication gets sold to any demographic outside who it was originally tested with, and it’s a hell of a lot more people at risk, with a lot less knowledge of what they’re getting into, than the seven people on board the shuttle. Yes, it was a tragedy. Yes, it was technically preventable. And yes, hindsight is 20/20. So, as I said, get off your high horse. There’s too many of those around lately and it’s getting hard for a good objective fact-finding scientist to breathe.

</RANT>

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I’m beginning to understand why someone would jump out of a bathtub and go streaking through the streets with a fantastic new idea. Recently, in the shower, my brain decided it wanted to write a graphic novel. The day after, it worked out a genetic explanation of channeling in the Wheel of Time universe. If you haven’t read any Robert Jordan, or if you don’t know basic genetics, this won’t make a huge lot of sense. If you’ve read some but not all, be warned that this explanation contains information you may not have reached. None of it is serious, but if you’re a fanatic about not being spoiled, watch out. I’ll break the article before I get into speculation that people might not have heard or want to hear.

Here’s my model. There are three factors controlling channeling ability: whether you can do it, whether you have the spark or can learn, and how strong you are. Strength and sparkiness don’t seem to be related, and neither seems to be related to sex. What I propose is that basic channeling ability is a recessive, sex-linked trait. There are variations of a gene on both the X and Y chromosomes, X’ and Y’ to borrow from Katherine Kurtz, that enable awareness of, respectively, saidar and saidin. In order to channel, someone has to have this variation on both their sex chromosomes. So an X’Y male can’t channel, but an X’Y’ can. X’X women and X’Y or XY’ men can’t even sense the Source. The elegant part of this is that it explains why men who can channel or learn can sense when a woman is channeling: they have the X’. It also explains why channeling-capable men can only tell other men can channel when they do it, while women have an easy time telling when other women can channel (sensing other Aes Sedai, seeing the glow, knowing who’s sparky), since they have double sensitivity to saidar.

Sparkiness is easy compared to that. It seems to be a simple dominant-recessive or absent-present allele situation. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say there are two possible places on non-X-or-Y chromosomes that the allele (call it “spontaneity,” S for absent and s for present) can appear. If someone has one, and all other genetic markers are in order, he/she is a learner; two means he/she has the spark. This makes for a very easy Punnett square giving about twice as many sul’dam as damane.

I won’t address strength, since it’s not a black-and-white issue and probably involves a lot of genes that most people just don’t use, not having the right matchups in spontaneity or sensitivity. However, I do want to look at what happens when you examine a few special families…. Continue reading →

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Driving back from the Tori concert, fortified with Frappuccinos, we were trying to figure out the distribution of songs per album. Kelson commented that there were several from singles, and that she could probably release an album of just B-sides and have it sell well, which prompted us to start naming all the B-sides we could. At one point we were stuck, and then we came up with her version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I started singing the chorus, Tori-style, and a few seconds after I stopped, Kelson said, “You know, it just proves how out of it I am……right after you started, I was about to try to turn up the volume.”

I definitely need to sing more.

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Listening to Hubba Hubba Zoot Zoot at work just feels like it should be illegal. That and Weird Al and stuff from the Cardcaptor Sakura soundtrack CD. And, now that I think about it, posting this message.

Just thought I’d share.

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My desk is going to file a work comp claim of its own one of these days. I’m forcing it to hold more than anybody else’s desk, except maybe this one woman on the other side of the office. That’s a continuous trauma for excess loadbearing, and a psyche claim for unequal treatment by a superior. But it’s not going to win…..it attacked me first. Just stuck out its drawer and took a chunk out of my shin. And I’d like to meet the attorney who can get a desk to rebut my testimony that I never hit it…….