My favourite Apple moment

In light of today's news here's my favourite Mac, the original iBook.

In many ways, it wasn't the machine itself so grabbed me (cool as it was), it was the experience of unpacking it when it arrived in my office over a decade ago. In the box with the computer and the mains cord was a disc about the size of a hockey puck (on the right in the image above). I looked at it and wondered what on Earth it was. It looked like a giant yo-yo, with cable wrapped around instead of string. Then the penny dropped — it was the power supply. You plugged the mains cord into the yo-yo, then unwound just as much cord as you needed (oh, and when you connected it in to your iBook the plug glowed orange if the battery needed charging, green if it was fully charged). The child inside me squealed with delight (being a grown up I laughed out loud, rather than actually squealing).

The iBook still works (the battery is long dead, but plug the yo-yo into the mains and it still works), and it manages to run an early version of Mac OS X.

If anybody has to ask why people love Apple products, it's not because of the "brand", or the "exclusivity", it's because of the joy they can invoke. Someone cared enough to make the most mundane task — plugging a laptop into the mains — into a thing of beauty.

Taxonomy - crisis, what crisis?

Following on from the last post How many species are there, and why do we get two very different answers from same data? another interesting paper has appeared in TREE:

Lucas N. Joppa, David L. Roberts, Stuart L. Pimm The population ecology and social behaviour of taxonomists Trends in Ecology & Evolution doi:10.1016/j.tree.2011.07.010

The paper analyses the "ecology and social habits of taxonomists" and concludes:

Conventional wisdom is highly prejudiced. It suggests that taxonomists were a formerly more numerous people, are in 'crisis', are becoming endangered and are generally asocial. We consider these hypotheses and reject them to varying degrees.

Queue flame war on TAXACOM, no doubt, but it's a refreshing conclusion, and it's based on actual data. Here I declare an interest. I was a reviewer, and in a fit of pique recommended rejection simply because the authors don't make the data available (they do, however, provide the R scripts used to do the analyses). As the authors patiently pointed out in their response to reviews, the various explicit or implicit licensing statements attached to taxonomic data mean they can't provide the data (and I'm assuming that in at least some cases the dark art of screen scrapping was used to get the data).

There's an irony here. Taxonomic databases are becoming hot topics, generating estimates of the scale of the task facing taxonomy, and diagnosing state of the discipline itself (according to Joppa et al. it's in rude health). This is the sort of thing that can have a major impact on how people perceive the discipline (and may influence how many resources are allocated to the subject). If taxonomists take issue with the analyses then they will find them difficult to repeat because the taxonomic data they've spent their careers gathering are under lock and key.

Ayu ting Ting Alamat Palsu

Nama Ayu Ting Ting mendadak begitu terkenal akhir akhir ini. Siapa yang tidak kenal dengan lagu Ayu ting Ting Alamat Palsu yang sering diputar di radio dan juga di televisi. Lagu Alamat Palsu ini memang sangat meledak beberapa waktu ini, mulai dari orang tua hingga anak muda hafal dan sering menyanyikan lagu Ayu ting Ting Alamat palsu ini.

Ayu Ting Ting sendiri sebenarnya tidak terlalu menyangka akan mendapatkan popularitas yang begitu tinggi dari lagu Ayu ting Ting Alamat palsu ini. Hal ini dikarenakan sebenarnya lagu Salah Alamat ini sudah cukup lama mulai beredar, tepatnya sekitar tahun 2007 lalu namun entah mengapa baru terkenal sekarang ini. Untuk anda yang ingin mendapatkan lagu Alamat Palsu, silahkan download di4shared.

Profil Ayu ting ting

• Nama : Ayu Tingting
• Tempat/tgl lahir : Depok, 20 Juni 1990
• Profesi : Penyanyi dangdut, presenter, model
• Tinggi badan : 160 cm
• Berat badan : 45 kg
• Prestasi : Bintang sari ayu 2006, Putri Depok 2006, Mojang Depok, Presenter Kuis (ANTV), Album Dangdut (Geol Ajep2)
• Album : Dangdut (Rekening Cinta), Goyang Sejati (ANTV), Dangdut Yoo (TPI), Kamera Ria (TVRI), Dangdut Pro (TVRI) Foto Ayu Ting Ting Alamat Palsu

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How many species are there, and why do we get two very different answers from same data?

Two papers estimating the total number of species have recently been published, one in the open access journal PLoS Biology:

Camilo Mora, Derek P. Tittensor, Sina Adl, Alastair G. B. Simpson, Boris Worm. How Many Species Are There on Earth and in the Ocean?. PLoS Biol 9(8): e1001127. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001127

the second in Systematic Biology (which has an open access option but the authors didn't use it for this article):

Mark J. Costello, Simon Wilson and Brett Houlding. Predicting total global species richness using rates of species description and estimates of taxonomic effort. Syst Biol (2011) doi:10.1093/sysbio/syr080

The first paper has gained a lot of attention, in part because Jonathan Eisen Bacteria & archaea don't get no respect from interesting but flawed #PLoSBio paper on # of species on the planet was mightily pissed off about the estimates of the number:

Their estimates of ~ 10,000 or so bacteria and archaea on the planet are so completely out of touch in my opinion that this calls into question the validity of their method for bacteria and archaea at all.

The fuss over the number of bacteria and archaea seems to me to be largely a misunderstanding of how taxonomic databases count taxa. Databases like Catalogue of Life record described species, and most bacteria aren't formally described because they can't be cultured. Hence there will always be a disparity between the extent of diversity revealed by phylogenetics and by classical taxonomy.

The PLoS Biology paper has garnered a lot more reaction than the Systematic Biology paper (e.g., the commentary by Carl Zimmer in the New York TimesHow Many Species? A Study Says 8.7 Million, but It’s Tricky), which arguably has the more dramatic conclusion.

How many species, 8.7 million, or 1.8 to 2.0 million?

Whereas the Mora et al. in PLoS Biology concluded that there are some 8.7 million (±1.3 million SE) species on the planet, Costello et al. in Systematic Biology arrive at a much more conservative figure (1.8 to 2.0 million). The implications of these two studies are very different, one implies there's a lot of work to do, the other leads to headlines such as 'Every species on Earth could be discovered within 50 years'.

What is intriguing is that both studies use the same databases, Catalogue of Life and the World's Register of Marine Species, and yet arrive at very different results.

So, the question is, how did we arrive at two very different answers from the same data?