brandon. Obs. rare. Also brandom.

brandon. Obs. rare. Also brandom. (a. F. brandon burning wisp of straw, etc.: com. Romanic: - L. type *brandon-em, f. Teut. brand, burning)

1. A torch. lit. and fig. (frequent in Drummond) a. 1649 Drumm. of Hawth. Shadow of Judgm., Her right hand swings a brandon in the air. -- Poems 14, His [Cupid's] Darts... all for nought starve as doth his Brandom.
2. A kind of French rustic dance (see Littre) 1755 Gentl. Mag. XXV. 175 The Brandons were celebrated in many cities in France the first Sunday of Lent, round bon fires of straw, whence they had their name.

-- Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed.

Beauty-Speak

Beauty products have a special vocabulary unique unto them. A glance at the papers can easily tell you what the language and iconography of their advertisements is aimed at achieiving: either the appearance of scientific endorsement (white-coated beauty practitioners working amid flasks and test-tubes with fantabulistic instruments to diagnose and treat all manner of aesthetic defects) or the impression of wholesome natural origins (reference to 'organic' or 'herbal' ingredients, earthy tones, and botanical imagery).

Likewise with the language used in their advertisements: scientific terms are bandied about with little or no understanding of the concepts behind their use. Let's translate some terms pulled at random from posters, flyers, and magazines:

• Pure Extract of Thermal Plankton = Pureed pond scum


• Dermabrasion = Sandpapering skin


• Collagen solution = Boiled-down bones


• Intense pulsed light therapy = Blinking lamps


• Natural herbal infusion = Garden weed tea


• Herbal collagen infusion = Bak kut teh


• Traditional Javanese massage = Bump 'n' grind


• Moisturising applicator = Damp towel


• Rejuvenating essence = Boiled infant blood

It is, indeed, worth investigating all such claims with a sceptical eye. The beauty industry thrives on easily suggestible, gullible, and insecure dupes with inadequate knowledge of science and technology, who, come to think of it, comprise a sizeable portion of the populace. They could do little better with their present advertising strategy, except perhaps to recruit Richard Gere as a celebrity spokesman.

A New Genus of Monkey

An article has appeared in Science Express, an online publication of Science magazine that publishes articles online before they appear in the print edition, delimiting a new monospecific genus of African monkey. The monkey was originally described as a new species last year, based on photographic evidence, but the team that described it has since obtained a carcass from a local farmer, and based on molecular evidence, has defined a new genus, Rungwecebus to accomodate the species, now called R. kipunjii.

The monkey was originally accomodated by the genus Lophocebus, but genetic material obtained from the specimen allowed molecular analysis showing that genetically, this new species is closer related to baboons than other monkeys, even though morphologically (that is, in terms of form) it is quite unlike a baboon. While I am usually cautious about taxonomic judgements based on molecular data alone, it is still worth highlighting how much we do not know about the primates, our closest relatives. Despite them being large and active mammals in which people naturally take an interest, a new species can still be found, and even more tantalisingly still, turn out to be a new genus altogether. If we do not even know about what is out there in the wild, how can we be confident about the completeness of our biological knowledge? Therefore, in purely empirical terms, field biology is a superb field for observation-based research, where all one needs are eyes to see with, ears to listen with, and patience and tenacity to pursue with. For less money and possibly more satisfaction (and a good workout, too) one can be just as productive as in other hot fields of research. Imagine, if a huge-ass noisy monkey can be so elusive, what abundantly more is there waiting to be found in the mesoscopic and microscopic level!

What a Friend We Have in Jesus

At church on Sunday, the choir sang this hymn as the anthem. As an experiment to enliven the traditional service, we had only three men sing, accompanied by guitars and banjo, to give it a country and bluegrass feel. Later on, we heard the very same song being sung again after the service, this time with drums and electric guitar backing it up, which turned out to be the youth ministry rehearsing this hymn, along with other contemporary songs, in the hall upstairs.

Hearing the same song being used by two different groups in my church brought to mind how different and yet how similar are the needs and worries of the adults and the youth. They might seem very divergent to begin with: the adults with their problems in the workplace, with raising a family, earning enough to feed them and clothe them, and not letting everyday distractions interfere with their spiritual walk, while the youth are beginning their process of socialisation in school and with their friends, struggling with parent problems, learning about life's disappointments and basically wondering what's out there waiting for them in their lives to come.

No matter what problems may assail us, though, this hymn points us to something that cuts through all of them, namely the privilege and comfort of being able to 'carry everything to God in prayer.' And it's true that we have many times had (to paraphrase the refrain) peace forfeited and needless pain borne because we think we are strong enough to solve our own problems with the ways of the world when our strength is never enough. Indeed a youth thinking about the future and how ugly the world can be might despair save for having our Saviour who is 'still our refuge', and an older person might feel worn down and tired from all the stress and demands on his person, but he 'should never be discouraged', if he 'take(s) it to the Lord in prayer.'

Ultimately, though, one major reason that we turn to the Lord for solace is because of death, and our fear of when and how it might come. The third time I heard the hymn on Sunday was while I was walking out to the MRT station to go home, and passed a void deck where a wake was being held. The mourners were closing their eyes and slowly swaying and I could feel that the tune and words were heartfelt and earnest. When we really do experience grief, then, we can trust that 'in his arms he'll take and shield thee; thou wilt find a solace there.'

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. (Matthew 11:28-30 NIV)

What a Friend We Have in Jesus

What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear!
What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer!
O what peace we often forfeit,
O what needless pain we bear,
all because we do not carry everything to God in prayer.

Have we trials and temptations? Is there trouble anywhere?
We should never be discouraged; take it to the Lord in prayer.
Can we find a friend so faithful
who will all our sorrows share?
Jesus knows our every weakness; take it to the Lord in prayer.

Are we weak and heavy laden, cumbered with a load of care?
Precious Saviour still our refuge; take it to the Lord in prayer.
Do they friends despise, forsake thee?
Take it to the Lord in prayer!
In his arms he'll take and shield thee; thou wilt find a solace there.

Richard Gere: Latter-Day Imperialist or Tourist Dupe

Richard Gere stars in a television and billboard ad campaign for the credit card company Visa, which goes something like this:

Gere is touring a hustle-bustle oriental Indian market with his turbanned minder and overhears a conversation a little girl has with a shopkeeper. She tells the shopkeeper that brother is going on a journey, and wants to buy a caged bird to release on his departure, for good luck. Of course she can only afford one bird with the handful of tinkly coins she offers up, but Gere steps in after she leaves and whips out his all-powerful Visa card, and probably buys up the whole shop, because when the girl runs back to where her brother is leaving and when she holds up her single caged bird a whole flock just swoops into the air behind her and everyone is amazed. She looks back and Gere just looks around pretending not to know anything about it. A sitar-riff and the commercial ends.

Some people have complained about the colonialist and orientalist imagery in this advertisement. From how everyone seems to be wearing turbans and traditional dress, to the bustling chaos of the bazaar, to the quaint local customs (releasing birds before a journey), the setting is doubtlessly exoticised (and also sanitised -- where are the houseflies?). Richard Gere, dressed in a white outfit, is the Great White Man taking on his eponymous burden, and flashing his modern symbol of power -- the credit card -- to benevolently help a poor little girl in sad penury. As a result, they see it as offensive to the Indians depicted in the ad.

What I see, however, is a meticulously planned and marvellously successful scam pulled off to get Richard Gere to spend his money buying something he does not need, i.e. Richard Gere is the dupe, not the oppressed former colonial race. The tell-tale signs are all quite obvious once you look out for them.

1. He has a local guide to bring him around the market. Most tour guides have private deals with shopkeepers to bring sightseers to their door, and accept a cut of the profits from the increased patronage. Gere's guide is probably no different. Look at his turban! It's the same colour and style as the turban worn by the bird-shop owner. Doesn't that tell you something?


2. The girl happens to speak English to a shopkeeper even though they're both Indian. Conveniently, she does this right in front of Gere. I'm sure that hospitality to tourists doesn't extend to speaking their language in front of them even when the conversation is no business of theirs. Here, of course, it is Gere's business. More precisely, they want to get Gere's business.


3. The guide helpfully explains to Gere the quaint local tradition of releasing birds, and throws in the key point: more birds, more luck. If one bird was enough, would Gere bother to buy the whole flock? No he'd have, at the most, paid for the girl's single bird. But that'd be poor business for the stallholder.


4. Visa is accepted in an open-air street market stall. Yet another point of suspicion. The only reason why I think this could be so is that the stall is in a tourist market and obviously only tourists would use a credit card with small purchases -- even the girl used coins.


5. The flock of birds are all of the same breed, and roughly the same healthy condition. You'd expect a small market stall to have a small number of birds of each variety rather than a single huge flock of white columbiforms. Conclusion: they were all prepared beforehand, and fairly recently too, in anticipation of Rich Tourist whom the stallholder's cousin/business partner/local tour guide tipped him off about.


6. Finally: the girl doesn't get to release the bird before Gere lets his flock loose. Obviously she keeps the bird to re-use with every new tourist dupe that comes around. It's tame and won't fly off. As for the others, they've probably been trained to fly back again after a while. Brilliant.

Look at the evidence! It is undeniable. Richard Gere is a typical Tourist Dupe. Let this be a lesson, all you credit-card wielders, drunk with the pecuniary power you hold in your wallet. Do not let such elaborate schemes fool you, when you travel to some far off exotic place expecting to treat the local populace with benevolence.

New method for synthesising Tamiflu

Elias Corey, the 1990 Nobel laureate in Chemistry, and two of his students have worked out a new synthesis pathway for the anti-flu drug Tamiflu (oseltamivir).

The new method requires simpler starting compounds, namely 1,3-butadiene and acrylic acid, both of which are used in common industrial reactions for producing polymers, whereas the commercial method used by the pharmaceutical company Roche requires shikimic acid, which is extracted from the spice plant star anise. Furthermore, the yield for the new method is good, explosive intermediates (which pose a danger in the manufacturing process and hence drive up costs and production time/bulk) are avoided, and the use of what the authors call "a novel SnBr4-catalyzed bromoacetamidation reaction which was completely regio- and stereoselective" (between products 9 and 10 in the diagram) eliminates the problem of undesired enantiomers, i.e. similar molecules with the same parts oriented in the wrong way. In pharmaceutical compounds, molecular shape is important because drugs work through molecular recognition and binding, which would not occur if the chemical formula is correct but the wrong stereoisomer is used. More commonly, both the 'correct' and 'incorrect' form are produced simultaneously by synthetic methods which do not differentiate between the two forms, thus producing a mixture. In rare cases the wrong isomer might even have toxic effects, while the chemical similarity of the two isomeric forms make them hard to separate from each other. Therefore, a regio- and stereo-selective catalyst is a very fortunate discovery.

In their paper, the authors Yeung, Hong, and Corey are optimistic about scaling up the process to industrial level. Hopefully, this might reduce the cost of Tamiflu production and make it more accessible to poorer countries where the threat of bird flu is greater. It's also worth pointing out that they did their work independently of Roche, which manufactures Tamiflu, save for obtaining a sample of the compound for comparison and identification of their product. In problems of great import, perhaps such a problem-solving model is more effective, viz. welcoming solutions from private individuals and academia alongside commercial and government agencies, because as the proverb goes, more hands make light work. It's ironic, and a little bit sad, that the Age of the Amateur has not really taken off despite all the opportunities for communication and the widespread availability of information around the world today. Most of us are pretty passive about the technologies and processes that affect us, and very few people take an interest in tinkering and working to find better solutions for themselves, more adapted to their local and personal situations. It's easy to blame commerce and industry, which produce neatly packaged, tamper-proof products that consumers treat like black boxes: they see the input and see the output but don't really care about what goes on inside to change one to the other. In the case of computer and software technology, tinkering is actually discouraged by commercial interests, who have taken the appellation 'hacking', which originally referred to enthusiasts toying with and modifying computer code, and made it into a fearsome nebulous term that is equated with malicious infringement of privacy and wilful wrongdoing. More people should take an interest in how things work, so that with the vast quantity of untapped intellectual potential out there (people whose intellects are underemployed, or who have free time to pursue hobbies and interests), a form of distributed computing can be applied to the thinking populace and a culture of innovation can develop.

Ellen Pompeo is hot

Doesn't anyone else agree that Ellen Pompeo, who plays 'Meredith Grey' in Grey's Anatomy, is hot? So she's 37, but those pretty eyes, that smile, that voice... she's certainly my McDreamy. ;)

Deep Ocean Trawls, Flat Land Crawls

The Census of Marine Zooplankton, a part of the Census of Marine Life has quite literally netted some results that were reported in the media today. The key messages of the study, as with almost every biodiversity study ever done, are that there are many new species out there awaiting discovery, that more collection will surely throw up more new discoveries, and what we have already found is only incompletely understood.

One bugbear I have, though, and it's a really big tardigrade, is how DNA sequencing is being touted as a "quick and easy [way] to identify species". Call me a stick in the mud, but I believe that there is more to species uniqueness than DNA sequence uniqueness. The relationship between the numerical difference in DNA sequence and the taxonomic level of difference (be it individual variation within a population, variation between two divergent populations, the difference between two species, genera, etc.) is incompletely known. The difference between two species might not even show up as a different sequence, specifically where polyploidy is the mode of speciation, for instance in plants. Simply put, for a biologist to make a judgement call and call an entity a 'species' is for him or her to propose a hypothesis about the reason for that taxon's uniqueness. There is no simple formula to calculate whether two taxa are different species, simply by counting the number of nucleotide-pairs which are different between the two genome sequences. DNA 'barcodes' are a very attractive idea, partly because of the convenience that the name calls up: one imagines that one can simply scan the DNA like one would scan the barcode a supermarket counter, and in an instant determine the species name.

I am not against the practice of gathering genetical data on the organisms that are being trawled up by these research hauls. They represent a valuable resource for all biologists to make use of: for comparative studies, for tracking down homologous genes, for studying genetical variation in large populations. I am, however, opposed to the misleading concept of DNA 'barcoding' that is often advertised. Personally, I feel that if we only use this DNA data for crunching numbers and generating barcodes, then we are underutilising their potential. There is much biology behind the genetic consequences of speciation and variation that we can learn by putting DNA and morphological data together. For instance, two individuals might be morphologically indistinguishable but hugely divergent in their DNA. This might represent either a cryptic (hidden) species difference, or a single species with a large degree of hidden variation. In the first case, many questions can be asked, for instance how speciation can occur between two populations that look the same: is there a behavioral or physiological basis, is the morphological analysis insufficiently fine, and so on? In the second case, one can ask what is the nature of the sequence difference that we are looking at: different alleles, chromosomal rearrangements, how interbreeding can still result in a cohesive individual genome if the parental sequences are so different. On the other hand, it is also possible for speciation to occur simply by changes in a few genes, barely detectable above the 'noise' of individual variation within a species, for instance if those genes control key aspects of mating behavior, of foraging (because that determines the ecological niche that a species occupies), even of coloration, and (in the case of strongly pleiotropic and developmental genes), the overall form of the organism. In that case one might be justified to ask whether the large morphological differences should be interpreted as difference in species, given that the genetic difference is so small: might it not be possible that they still interbreed? And interbreeding, is in itself another host of questions to be answered. Summing up, all these possible questions, I feel, is more valuable than Procrustean barcoding. I'm certainly not accusing the biologists involved in this study of not thinking of all these things: I'm sure they've got way more ideas and interpretation than I can ever muster, but promising a 'barcode' of life is something that seriously rankles me.

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In other news I have felt the awful feeling of running out of steam. During today's twice-weekly run in camp I started off fairly fast but got overtaken by a few folks and at the end lagged quite far behind. The strangest thing was, when I was trying to run faster to catch up, my legs couldn't respond by increasing their stride or rate of movement even though I wanted them to. I'm not used to that sort of feeling, and I think the food and inactivity during the long break has gotten to me. I had a bad dream some time ago, that might have recurred because it gave me the strongest sense of deja vu, where I was walking, but when I had to run I simply forgot what running was. I couldn't move and tripped over my legs, and I didn't understand why.

I hope it's not a premonition of things to come.