Tree of Life, Revised, Redux

Tree of Life

In my previous post about this, I complained about that the legend was uninformative. Carl Zimmer corrects that failing with this cogent explanation:

The red dots represent species only known from DNA gathered from the environment. “Isolated” means that someone was able to actually observe the whole organism, typically by culturing it in a lab.

Video

Tube Compressor
Video compression is all done in software, so no cool pictures.

Dug up an old post this morning looking for something I had written. Found the post, but the video I had included was missing. Well, we can't have that, so I undertook to replace it. First task is to find a copy.
    Took a little effort to track it down, especially since I hadn't bothered to label the video, and the text in my post doesn't provide much of a clue. The YouTube id got some hits with the search engine, Yahoo in this case, but no cigar. The Wayback Machine got me the YouTube page, but no video. The YouTube page has the video title, and searching for that string got me to an East Asian site, Korean, I think, that did have the video.
    Okay, let's download it, since the internet obviously cannot be trusted to save anything for more than a couple of nanoseconds. I've downloaded videos before and it's generally worked pretty well. Simply ask the search engine for 'download video' and pick the first one that pops up. Not this time. The first half dozen or so all wanted to sell me something, or download an app, or register. Wasn't until I got to ClipConverter that I got something that would just download the video.
    ClipConverter offered a choice of video formats, and since Blogger has not always been the most accommodating video host, I thought I could pick something common, like mp4. It downloaded fine but the video quality was piss-poor. Ok, let's try the default format, after all, the video I'm trying to steal is crystal clear. Better, but not still not there. Fine, let's try the format with the largest file size. Larger means less compression which means better video quality, right? The file type is 'flv', which I have never heard of, but Blogger has handled the first two okay, so let's give it a try. It downloads and Blogger accepts it. The video quality is better than the first two, but still not up to the original.
    The video isn't all that great, but it irritated me that it had vanished. It took so much effort to track it down that I thought I better record my efforts, because it will probably happen again, and having these notes might save me some time.

Tree of Life, Revised

Tree of Life

Not too long ago, there were three branches to the tree of life:

• Eukaryotes, which are all the things that have a macroscopic existence,
• Bacteria, which are everywhere but too small to see without a microscope, and
• Archaea, which are bacteria which live in places were no normal kind of life can live.

There were three branches and all was well. But then some wise guys started poking around, stirring up shit, and found that there were a hell of lot more bacteria than they had realized. Now someone has condensed all this new data into this drawing and we find the part that we consider important, the part that contains us and all our animal friends, is just this one branch growing off to the side. Just goes to show that if you make enough microbes eventually one of them will grow up to be somebody. Story in The New York Times. Via Detroit Steve.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I don't understand the key on this drawing, to wit:

Major lineages with isolated representative - italics
Major lineage lacking isolated representative - (red dot)

I can understand having an isolated representative of a particular thing, and I can understand having a representative of a group or class of things, but having an isolated representative of a big group doesn't make any sense to me. Does this mean you have a single representative of a large group, but it is isolated so we don't know if it is really representative or not?

And if we are lacking an isolated representative, does that mean we have no representatives at all? Or we have a whole bunch, but they are so different we can't call them representative?

I know microbiology has their own lingo, but these two lines need translating.

GDSH

HP Printer, DIYPC case with mystery innards, Samsung monitor, Dell keyboard and mouse.

I have put aside my Chromebook and gone back to Linux and Firefox. It was getting annoying navigating through Google Drive every time I needed a file, there are some programs that won't work on Chromebook, or not without some kind of special monkeyshines, and you can't unzip a zip file.

Not a problem, I have a Linux box I can use. It has a largish disk so I can copy all the stuff from my external hard drive onto it, so now I have two local copies of my nine zillion files. Everything works pretty well, and I have a printer connected so I can print things with a point and a click rather that a complicated bit of fiddling with two computers. I was so thrilled I printed a page today, just because I could.

But now I'm running into some petty, annoying problems. The Page Down key is my goto button for reading long documents, that is, anything longer than one screen. It doesn't work. Press it once and it takes you to the next screen. Press it again and it takes you back to the top. But it only does this on some web pages. On some web pages it works correctly. Is this a problem with the browser (Firefox), the OS (Linux Mint), or the web page? I didn't have problems like this with Chrome.

I am still using Gmail, but I am wondering if I am being forced to choose sides in the browser war. I just tried to pull a phone number out of my Gmail Contacts and I couldn't. Normally you click on the name and you get a panel that displays all the info and you can copy and paste to your hearts content. Now all I get is a loading... message. Well, maybe there is another option, let's see what we've got. Hey! Here's Export, let's try that. It works, it generates a short file I can open with the text editor, but the phone number isn't in there! How can this be? I finally resort to retyping the phone number.

I know, a lot of effort to avoid typing a phone number, but dad gum it, that's why I have an address book, so I don't have to type stupid contact information over and over again.

On the plus side I can pay my bills using my bank's website on Firefox, something that had become kind of hit and miss with Chrome.

The mouse is kind of annoying. It isn't as precise as I think it should be. It often appears to off by millimeters in it's thinking. I want to move the edge of a window and the little icon that shows you can move the edge doesn't appear until you are well off the edge.

And playing Minesweeper I often have to click twice to get what I want. Seems like good mouse control would have been worked out a long time ago. I don't understand why it is still such a blatant mess.

I'm beginning to think that personal computers have gotten too complicated for their own good. I was watching a video of a defense attorney this morning explaining why you shouldn't talk to the police, One of his reason was that the Federal law books run to 50 volumes and no one knows what all is in there. I mean you can't, and even if you did, something will have changed.

The software running on personal computers suffers from a similar problem. I think Google tried to fix this with Chrome, but the market is changing so fast, and so many new things keep popping up that can't keep all the variations corralled, and if you are using a desktop, well, you are obviously obsolete and nobody cares.

P.S. Any links I click on in Gmail open a new tab, but that's as far as it gets because FIrefox blocks the link, so if I want to see the page I have to click on allow. Now you might think that there would be some kind of "preference" or "setting" that could be modified to stop this, but I haven't been able to find it. It's probably right up front, I just don't recognize it because I've spent too much time in Google-land and can no longer recognize a Firefox control panel.

Land Locked Boat Builder

Uniberp got me started with a video about building a steel hulled sailboat. These videos are a little longer than my usual fare. They run 11, 14 and 9 minutes. I enjoyed them thoroughly.


Sandblast Profile Comparator
They start out with technical discussion of surface preparation but then wander off into all kinds of various metal working, which got me to wondering just who are these guys? Which lead to this:


DIY Boat Propeller - Part 5 - The Success

Casting is one of those things that kind of gets glossed over whenever people are talking about machinery. Conceptually simple, you just pour molten metal into a mold, let it cool, and presto, there's your part. In practice there are a whole lot of details that have to be dealt with. I am sure that somewhere else in their series of videos they explain where the pattern comes from.

This boat is under construction in Tulsa, Oklahoma, of all places. How are you going to get it to the ocean? I mean it is obviously a deep water boat. Turns out Tulsa has a port. (No way, dude!) No ocean going ships, but plenty of barge traffic, and the waterway connects to the Mississippi and so to the Gulf of Mexico and all the oceans of the world.


Tulsa Port of Catoosa

Continental USA Inland Waterways

The Eastern USA is riddled with navigable waterways. The West Coast, no so much. I could not find a good map. This one is small and blurry. All the others either included some commercial distortion or were missing pieces. This one at least includes all the important parts.

Suburban Pics

Opened the hood on the Hyundai, just to give it a once over, and noticed this part attached to the engine with both KIA and Hyundai trademarks. Who'd a thunk two competing car manufacturers would be in cahoots?

Walked by this pond the other day and it was perfectly clear. Today it was covered with algae / pond scum. The farther pond was still clear.

Is that a beaver dam? Or just some debris jammed into a restricted space?

Local Graffiti

What does this say? Gingsley? Cingsby? Oh! It's Grigsby!

The Sugar Conspiracy

The Production Of Sugar

The Sugar Conspiracy is a great story about the foibles of men who are supposed to know better. Via Detroit Steve. Just for grins I put a together a list of all the actors in this psycho-drama, there are so many.