Epigenetics - leading to a personal crisis about free will (coming soon)

(....tackling the small issues today, hey Lexskigator....)

I'm reading a book on epigenetics. Some reviewers of this book think it's a bit technical for a non-bioscience audience, but I find it absolutely enthralling. It's a summary of the exploding research field, where science is gradually getting a grip on the magnitude of the complexity of interaction between genes, junk DNA regulating gene operation, epigenetic 'tags' regulating gene operation, and a person's physiology, behaviour, habits and life trajectory. And bioscience is starting to realise that if they mess with any of it, the downstream effects are multiple, complex, and not really predictable.... although drug companies don't usually let that do more than slow them down a little bit.


My summary of epigenetics from this book follows - from the very beginning, as fast as I can!

For all earth lifeforms with cells which have nucleii and reproduce sexually:

• 
  
• Every nucleus in an organism has the same DNA. The DNA of cells in identical twins is also the same. DNA is a double helix: a dual-chain linear chemical base-4 code, notated in A, C, G and T.  Each letter denotes a chemical in the chain, and they always pair up to the same partners. A (adenine) always connects to T (thyamine). C (cytosine) always connects to G (guanine).
• The bulk of our DNA sequence is contained in the chromosomes, which are twisted-up little squiggles in the nucleus of each cell of our body. Each chromosome is a big long string with two ends. The ends are called 'telomeres' and they have repeating sequences which get shorter as you get older.
• Chromosomes look like this under an electron microscope:
• You can see that chromosomes come in pairs, joined like four sausages twisted at the middle. Most people know that half of your DNA comes from your mum, half from your dad. More specifically, one out of each chromosome pair comes from your mum, and the other one from your dad. This is common to every organism that reproduces sexually, including flowering plants.
• The only exception to chromosomes in identical pairs is the non-identical X and Y chromosome "pair". Your mum has two X chromosomes and she gave you one of them. Your dad has an X and a Y chromosome and he either gave you his X - making you female - or his Y chromosome - making you male. Only one X chromosome functions in any cell at any given time. So this means that in every cell of a female organism, one of the X chromosomes is switched off (it is apparently 'gaffa taped' up in methylation, hangon a sec I'll get there...)
• As cells do their daily work, sections of the DNA chromosomal strands are constantly being unzipped, being copied by mRNA, and zipping up again. One protein unzips the strand. A special little DNA-copier called messenger RNA (mRNA) walks along the strand matching up the base pairs to their partners, and producing the matching half of the strand. Sometimes this is for the production of a new piece of mRNA. Sometimes for the production of proteins. Sometimes this is to exactly replicate the entire chromosome for cell division. Sometimes this is for we-don't-know-exactly-why-yet. 
• There are also tiny fragments of DNA outside the nucleus of each cell, which are called mitochondrial DNA. Unless you are a honeybee or a mussel, you would have got them from your mum.
• DNA are too small to see directly with anything except an electron microscope or a particle accelerator. We can't see them in action at all. X-ray crystallography has been used to image DNA for decades but you have to know what you are looking at to see it. The people who work on the how and why of the zipping and unzipping are extremely clever.
• Within the chromosome, specific sections are identified as genes, meaning that they produce proteins. We know where they are because they are all a similar length, have a known starting sequence (intron), and a known stopping sequence (extron). 

 For humans specifically:

• We are genetically remarkably like a bunch of other species. In the 1990s, we expected to have more genes than, say, mice, because our chromosomes are bigger and have many more base pairs (Human: 3.08x10^9 vs Mouse: 2.64x10^9). But we have just about exactly the same number of genes (20,000), just bigger non-coding sections of DNA in between them.
• There are long sections of chromosome which are called non-coding DNA but they used to be called junk DNA, back when geneticists didn't know what they did. Now, some sections are called regulatory DNA because the mRNA copiers tend to look there before they go make a protein from a gene. The rest is still a puzzle.
• Anthropologists can trace ancestry along the male line using the Y chromosome, and mitochondrial DNA along the female line. Both mutate very slowly. The idea was clever, but the results were fabulous. Here is the genetic tree up to the Roman Empire. I might get to mention other stories later.

Epigenetics is:

1) A chemical explanation of why, if every cell has identical DNA, how does it know to be a skin cell and not a liver cell - ie, why don't we grow liver on our skin?

Methylation is a process which explains how a fertilised egg (a 'totipotent' stem cell) splits into two parts, the 'pluripotent' embryonic mass and the placenta, and then over the pregancy, differentiates into all the various parts of a perfect little baby. In each stage of cell division, the cells become more specific. More genes are 'methylated': a methyl molecular fragment is stuck to the cytosine at the intron of the gene. This prevents that gene ever unzipping and being copied, and in practical terms 'switches it off' for that cell forever, and for all its descendent cells (except sperm and egg cells whose methyl bonds get mostly erased). If you look at any single cell in a mammal body, somewhere between 60% and 90% of the genes on that cell's chromosomes are methylated.... but any particular gene may be active on a different type of cell elsewhere in the body. So only the liver cells maintain active genes to produce bile, blood plasma etc. Skin cells have those genes permanently switched off.

I imagine the chain reaction in a fertilised egg cell to be a microscopic version of this, where triggers cascade to a single outcome and subsequently cannot really be set back up again within that cell. Nifty video, anyway.

Epigenetics is:

2) A chemical explanation of how parts of the body can change the extent to which they do certain kinds of things, over time or under certain environmental conditions - ie. How come my 13YO cousin grew 6cm last year as he hit puberty, or alternatively how did an uncle of mine develop pancreatic cancer at age 89 and not before?

Methylation is more or less permanent-ish. Other epigenetic tags come and go under different environmental circumstances. In particular the book describes in detail how histone bonds allow a partial activation/deactivation of certain genes to change the level of, for example, cortisol in a neglected baby mouse's bloodstream. Histone bonds also are involved in time-dependent activation/deactivation of particular genes, for example in puberty, aging, and developing age-related illnesses such as certain types of inherited cancer. Histone mechanisms are also implicated in obesity. And schitzophrenia, And violence and autism and depression and just about anything our bodies or minds do. Most of the data comes from first animal studies and then human twin studies. The nice thing is that these tendencies are not fixed, they can be "up regulated" or "down regulated" on a sliding scale, cell nucleus by cell nucleus, and rockstar geneticist Dr. Tim Spector said recently on the radio in a hand-wavy way that roughly 60% of most traits have these kinds of genetic/epigenetic origins and 40% is up to you to change.

Methylation and histone bonds are not simple up- and down-regulators either. A histone bond can cause higher expression of a gene. Or it can cause expression of a section of DNA which produces a tiny fragment of mRNA (a micro RNA, or miRNA) which blocks a protein from exiting the cell. Or it can cause expression of a section of DNA which then makes a methyl group attach elsewhere and deactivate something else. 

It's a complex system. Don't lose heart. I'm getting there. Honest. You can see how much the book captivated me.

Identical twin studies also provide a lot of rich data about epigenetics. Identical (monozygotic) twins grow from the same fertilised egg, in the same placenta, and are born and grow in very visually similar ways. But as they age, the differences between their epigenetics (histone and methyl bonds) increase, and their psychological and medical characteristics and their life paths diverge. The book "Identically Different: Why You Can Change Your Genes" is supposed to discuss this in more detail and it is on my reading wishlist.

Epigenetics is:

3) A chemical explanation of a multi-generational, non-genetic source of individual differences - ie. how come we look and act so differently to each other when 99.99% of our DNA is identical? How can I be affected by how my parents and grandparents lived?

In certain regions of the genome, methylation and histone bonds can be modified within a cell responding to the environment, and these changes can not be erased but they can persist for generations. The paper "Persistent epigenetic differences associated with prenatal exposure to famine in humans" links previously studied growth and weight gain habits following a famine with an identified epigenetic marker. In other words, sixty years after being born in the first year after a famine, a particular cohort of people were overweight and had always struggled to lose weight because of a periconception or in-utero methylation of a growth gene IGF2. The subsequent rat experiment of exposing a male rat to a high-sugar diet, which triggered methylation of this gene, showed that the expected BMI gain was actually passed down to 4 generations of descendents, and that the change was less pronounced each time.

So this is the technical background to my recent existential crisis. I will post on the actual existential crisis shortly.

Prefixes and Standard Non-Scientific Measurements - What fun!

coco
seca
kilo
milli
mega
micro
giga
forever ever more
nano
tera
pico
femto
exa
peta

When I was a young Physics student, I was convinced that the SI system of measurement was a critically important component in the collective understanding of the universe. Combined with the standard prefixes used by the Presets in the lyrics above, just about anything could be described in SI, and scientists and laypeople everywhere could comprehend size, mass, energy, and just about every possible dimension in the universe.

Hah. 

Apparently there are different units of measurement which are more practical for ordinary people, according to science, journalism and communications, and popular culture. Sometimes they are silly. Sometimes they are intuitive. Sometimes they are critical to ongoing scientific progress.
I figured this contradiction was worth a post.

Silly: The large African herbivore as a measure of mass or dimension

This is strange to me for two reasons. 

Firstly, animals do not have standard weights. A tram weighs as much as 30 rhinos? How about that! Hangon, which gender? Which species?

Rhinos range in mass from the smallest, the Sumatran, averaging 800kg, to the largest, the Greater One-Horned Rhino averaging 1900kg. The males of both species are typically 130% the weight of the females. 

The second problem is lack of familiarity with large mammals.

Rhinos are endangered. I do not live in a rhino habitat. I have seen no more than a dozen rhinos in my life, in various zoos. In a 500km radius of my house, there are only about 6 rhinos, all at the Werribee Open Range Zoo. 

On the other hand, there are 6 trains an hour on my local tram route, outside peak times. 12 trams during peak times.

(Trams do not have standard weights either. The chock-full peak hour tram is clearly going to be heavier than the 11AM tram with only the two feral kids wagging school and the smelly hobo lady with the trolley who is talking to herself.)

So how is it that a poster which compares a completely unfamilar, and highly variable, large mammal with a very familar form of transport can in fact help people better understand how a tram stops?

Also in common use are:

"... as tall as [n] giraffes"

"... [n times] as fast as a cheetah"

And not so commonly used, but I do find it quite upsetting when I hear this standard non-scientific measurement of money:
"... [a/b proportion] of the [black market size/per kilo cost] of [rhino horn/elephant tusk/tiger spleen/other endangered African or Asian mammal body part]

The animal thing just doesn't work for me.

Intuitive: The local football stadium as a measure of population

Our iconic local football stadium is the MCG, with a capacity of 100,000. So when a million people are rendered homeless by a natural disaster, or infected with a nasty disease, the 6PM news presenter invariably says "... the equivalent to ten full MCGs...". 

 

When we lived in Toulouse, France, the local stadium only had a capacity of 35,000. So all the news disaster estimates were out by a factor of 3.

Then living in Newcastle, New South Wales, the Hunter stadium can only hold 27,000 people. We had to recalibrate again. 

Neurologically, this makes more sense than the rhino thing.

Human brains are not built to deal with large population numbers.

According to a British anthropologist called Robin Dunbar, human cognitive capacity can only conceptualise and cooperate with about 150 other human beings. To think about more people than this is hard. And to feel sympathetic emotions about anything over 150 people is harder than empathising with one individual's story. In fact, a detailed personal account is always much more compelling to other people than any numerical population statistic. So in order for the news to be watched, it must evoke concern and sympathy for lots of strangers, and this requires use of specific emotive analogies. For most urban or suburban humans, a full stadium is about the largest mass of other humans they are likely to see, and the nice thing about a home crowd is that everyone is screaming in support of the home team at full volume, they are all bonded by a powerful common emotion: CARN THE KNIGHTS! (or whoever).

Thus the way to convey human feeling and meaning following a natural disaster is to remind TV viewers of the largest group of people they have ever had a powerful sympathetic feeling in common with, and then multiply that population by a small integer, less than 20. And then get a presenter to follow it up with an on-the-ground personal account of some kind.

Silly: The "If we laid all the [objects of a type] in the world [end to end/side by side/one on top of the other] it would reach [around the world/to the moon/to the sun] n times" ie distance as an analogy for quantity

In my view this is mental sloppiness. I have what I begin to understand as uncommon familarity with large numbers of objects. In Grade 5, I folded six hundred paper cranes - it took me another 2 years to get to the 1000. I have counted 15,050 white stripes on the road during an overnight bus trip from Chicago to Houston. I have helped in stocktakes by emptying and counting packets of 500 capacitors for numerous consecutive days. Ten thousand components fill a medium bin. I can think and convert between massive scales with reasonable fluency.

I begin to understand that this is not a universal talent. Terry Pratchett has a joke about dwarf counting, which applies to all of us at some breakpoint. It goes like this:
One

Two 

Three

Many

Many-one

Many-two

Many-three

Lots.

My 2 yr old bugs out at 20 objects - which is pretty good for a 2 yr old. That's when she hits "lots".

A friend of mine gets bored after a million. She's a good woman, not numbers-minded, and she reads the glossy magazines and says'wow' about very rich people. But after a million she loses track. A million is "lots".

As for me, I automatically convert money into what they could do: 1 million is of the same order of magnitude as your basic civil works project: building a big roundabout normally costs about 3 million. Ten million is the annual turnover of a company of about 15 people. A hundred million will almost buy you half a desalination plant. A billion is a modest defense budget. Ten billion dollars is a year's space program.

I bug out not very far past that.

Where a large number of dollars (or occasionally objects) is involved, and the science journalist is concerned that the raw number loses impact, how exactly does it help to calculate the linear length of all the crayons/blood vessels/bottles/dollar bills in your question, and then convert them to earth circumferences? Is it as simple as taking a more-or-less-incomprehensible large number and converting it to a smallish integer multiple of a marginally-comprehensible large distance? OK every person has something in common, we all live on the same planet with an equatorial circumference of about 40,000km (24,000 miles), but my brain has no real concept of how far that really is. If I piloted an aircraft or sailed a boat across, say, the Pacific Ocean, it might have a little more tangible meaning.

In India, where the gap between rich and poor has been mind-bendingly large for a very long time, there are handy words for dealing with large amounts of money.
A lakh is 100,000 rupees.
A lac is a million rupees (although a proportion of people explaining it on the web get this wrong - indicating that this is the "lots" point for many people)
A crore is 10 million rupees.

And these can be multiplied. A lakh lakh is 10^10. A lakh crore is 10^12, which I call a trillion, but this is not a consistent global definition.

And a crore crore is "lots".

So I ask all those science journalists again:

How, exactly, does it help your readers understand large numbers to mentally stack up US$1 bills and measure the height of an unfeasible tower? Can't we just get the community accustomed to the perfectly adequate larger-number definitions of lakh, lac and crore?

Critical for scientific progress: The selective use of a prefixed SI unit as a framing mechanism

Scientists struggle like anyone else when trying to conceptualise numbers in context. Throughout the history of science, as a new unit was invented it was often disconnected from other units - and after some experimentation and often a heated academic argument, some retrospective conversion factor brought it into line with the other units. Often these are named after the grand old gentleman who "discovered" them (the link goes back to a previous rant of mine). In time, a proportion of these personalised measurement units were found to be redundant, while others have been accepted for ongoing use with SI.

In science, the unit selected always has a framing function. The progress of scientific research is highly dependent on funding from public grants and private patronage, to whom scientists must pitch. Raw numbers with a (x 10^ something) don't immediately give general scientists a meaningful reference point on the field-specific small-to-big scale - and when nuclear physics grants are being evaluated by marine biologists and industrial chemists on the grants committee, lack of an appropriate unit can be the death of a whole field of research. Massively successful science programs always always always use snappy and exciting units of measurement.

For example, back in the 18th century, a new unit was invented to pitch the steam engine: "So that an engine which will raise as much water as two horses, working together at one time in such a work, can do, and for which there must be constantly kept ten or twelve horses for doing the same. Then I say, such an engine may be made large enough to do the work required in employing eight, ten, fifteen, or twenty horses to be constantly maintained and kept for doing such a work…"

The framing function of the choice of unit was a large component of the marketing success of steam power.
Unsurprisingly, there was much quibbling over the breed and gender of the horses in question. Retrospectively, the SI value of one horsepower finally stabilised at 746 watts.
But for electrical motors and internal combustion engines, power is still always measured in horses.
I am, for reasons I won't go into yet (hi Geoff!), watching the Ninja Mega Kitchen System telemarketing ad. They are advertising the power of the blender as two horses. Not 1400 watts. Who counts up to 1400? Only geeky engineers who actually make electric motors. Anyone who has to sell one measures it in horses.

 

Here's another example. The Large Hadron Collider team chooses to measure particle energies in 7 tera electron volts rather than 1.12 microjoules. Same energy value, but 'tera' sounds big and 'micro' sounds small. And for a particle, one electron volt is a normal number. 7 tera is indeed a lot.

I unequivocally support the selective use of standard non-scientific units to market scientific research. I would like undergraduate science and engineering students to be taught this in a marketing subject. I also look forward to the retrospectively standardised rhino-stop replacing the kilogram meter per second to measure the linear momentum of a tram.

But Geoff, I am still not buying the Ninja Kitchen System.

Ten non-stuff things that you could have got your kids for Christmas (not including a World Vision goat)

We got stuff for Christmas. Good stuff, but it's all stuff.
So many people were driving around with so much stuff in the boots of their cars yesterday. And pushing each other at checkouts to get all the stuff they were obliged to buy for all those other people who were going to give them stuff too.
The cost of unwanted Christmas presents in Australia has been estimated in the order of AUD$1B every year since 2010.

SO for next time, maybe don't get them stuff.
Don't simply get them a World Vision goat certificate. While there appear to be lots of happy kids with baby goats, one of the key objectives of Christmas is that your kids are happy too.

Here are ten alternatives.

1. Tickets to live music (anything from the Wiggles to a rock festival to a folk festival depending on the age of your kids)
2. A creative writing workshop, community theatre, a music or painting course (these run for even very young kids, and most people have a latent dream of becoming an ar-tiste of some kind.
3. Hot air balloon ride, glider flight, light plane flight, hovercraft ride, fishing charter etc.
4. Membership of an organisation or subscription to a magazine of interest. "Horrbile Histories" for an 8 year old boy, or you could cover bee-keepers club fees, or pay for a subscription to a rock magazine, New Scientist, or even contribute to their membership fee to a professional organisation
5. A tray of tree seedlings so they could plant and nurture their own forest - either on your land, on your nature strip (choose plants to match the power lines please!) , or in a public or pseudo-public place (see Guerrilla Gardening)
6. Surfing lessons, horseriding lessons, kung-fu lessons, ballet lessons etc. over summer, or for the next year.
7. A cheese-making course, a salami making course, or your local equivalent
8. A trip to somewhere they've always wanted to go. For young kids this might be the Zoo, or the city fire station. Or a museum of special interest. Ring these kinds of places and see what latitude they have for a 'special tour' for a 'super fan'. You could travel further - My 5 yr old wants to go fossil hunting at Lake Mungo in southern NSW. The neighbour wants to go caving at the Jenolan Caves. White-water rafting on a local river is also on his list.
9. Do any of the above as a family. It's more 'bonding' that way.
10. Give them cash. Paper money. In a red envelope for good luck. Not a gift certificate but a nice crisp paper sheet (although paper money is actually plastic with a clear window in it here).

Just a thought.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Five Extremely Dangerous Words

"Fact":

There is a gulf between an opinion and physical reality which few people notice. The frequently-used phrase “... the fact that....” makes our brains feel reassured, calm and comfortable in the confidence of the speaker, but it is so rarely true that the statement ought to trigger at best wariness, and possibly a bit of panic. Physical reality is complex, multi-layered, frequently contradictory, and extremely hard to describe in facts. Even a simple 'fact' statement: “The sky is blue”, is bound to a geographic definition (here, where I am looking at it), a temporal definition (during daylight hours, provided there are no clouds, and air pollution is below a certain limit) and a subjective definition (as seen by my eyes which have receptors for light in the blue part of the visible spectrum; other eyes may not recognise it as 'blue'.).

You can tell when someone really knows the reality of their subject matter, because their phrasing is always buffered by definitions and exclusions, and they refuse to give 'yes' or 'no answers. Top scientists often talk like this, and they often are very careful to avoid the word 'fact'.  This indicates to me that those who are too sure of their correctness either are ignorant of the parameters within which it holds and outside which it does not, or are spouting opinion and trying to make it sound like fact.

"The Truth":
Truths are multiple and often contradictory, and are also bound to geographic, temporal, cultural and subjective definition. But truths can be slipperier and more dangerous because sometimes, very occasionally, they can be true. And when they're not true, they are almost impossible to disprove.
Inside a truth is part fact, part personal perception. And it is such a heavy, ponderous, heart-stoppingly important word.
Today I happened to overhear a mother telling off one of her children, which is not a good template for how to resolve sibling arguments, but it neatly encapsulates the problem with truth.
"You stole that from your sister. Give it back."
"No. She gave it to me." 
"Don't lie to your mother. Tell me the truth." 
"The really true truth is she gave it to me."
"I so did not give it to him. He snatched it."
"You gave it to me, you did, you truly did."
"Stop arguing you two, or the truth is that I will make sure you both regret it."
Three different people, four different truths in two minutes. This is pretty typical. And at the core of the argument was a physical reality (the transfer of an object from the girl to the boy) and an accidental or deliberate misunderstanding of posession.
So when the legal system decided to abandon the search for truth, and constructed the idea of "beyond reasonable doubt". it was one of the best strategic moves in the development of credibility for any profession. (Up there with the Hippocratic Oath, anyway.)
It is not a new philosophical idea to abandon the search for The Truth when you recognise the multiplicity of relative truths. But outside theoretical philosophy we cling to Truth. We are just not very good at perceiving and enjoying and using the diversity of truths out there.

"It's [His/Her/Your/My/Their] Fault":
Don't we love having somebody to blame for everything that goes wrong! There must always be someone at 'fault'. Let's look at a compelling use of 'fault': motor vehicle accidents in Australia.
According to a Big Ideas on ABC radio national, in 2012 and 2013, only 45% of fatal accidents and 10% of non-fatal accidents included alcohol, drugs or speeding. A high proportion of all those other accidents were failures of the driving system: road infrastructure, environmental conditions, car technology, road rules, human limitations. At some point some human usually does something sub-optimal right before a collision, but the underlying cause is usually a property of the rest of the system, which was set up in a particularly disastrous way.

Punishing the guilty is fun. Crime stories, courtroom dramas, talkback radio, decades of research into monkey psychology and human economics, and now FMRIs and blood/saliva hormone tests involving the above show that our brains really do enjoy enforcing social norms by targeting and punishing those who break the rules. We get a dopamine hit from blaming somebody. And another one from punishing them ("Off with her Head!"). A dopamine rush feels very nice, and it is addictive. This is why it is so easy to hook us on the trigger for the dopamine. Even very young children like to play the game: "It's [His/Her/Your/My/Their] Fault".
Fault can be real, but it is not always the important thing to look for. We are far too quick to blame - and some of us to take the blame - when the important question should be "What does this mistake represent?" "How do we not make that particular mistake next time?" and then  "How do we change the particular system to move away from this bad configuration?"

Just about every time there is somebody at "fault" - bad driver, financial embezzler, serial rapist, mother whose child died in a hot car - the structures around them had more to do with 'causing' the events than they did. The use of the word "fault" indicates that the speaker is not interested in prevention or improvement of the underlying structures. They just want a dopamine hit and someone's head on a plate.

"Insight":
This is a new dangerous word, but it's becoming more popular. Having more or less rejected 'closure' as not particularly useful, it seems we are collectively hankering after 'insight' instead.
To have a moment of insight is to stand on the cusp of change or discovery. This is the moment when you see that your world, or another person's world, is not as you imagined it. It feels profound. The trouble with 'insight' is fourfold:
1) Psychotherapy created the word 'insight' and has successfully marketed it as an end in itself, which journalistic media has picked up nicely. Psychotherapists are primarily interested in helping someone traverse a cusp, and turn around their mental or emotional pathway to achieve whatever change they needed when they walked into the therapist's room, getting to 'insight' is in fact a goal of psychotherapy. It is not any kind of goal in life. It is only an intermediate step towards understanding, and eventually wisdom.
2) Insight feels better than wisdom or understanding. Insight feels like a profound change, a pivotal moment in your being when the world opens up a set of new possibilities. But when the 'insight' perspective is actually integrated into your being (ie understanding) and you are in a position to use it well (ie wisdom), it feels like nothing, because it is normal now. So much import is given to the possibility of change, none to the hard work of ongoing adaptation that brings the change into your being.
3) A moment of insight is hard to hold onto. It is an aberrant set of synaptic loops (an engram) which your brain structure isn't conditioned to accept. We need to get many moments of the same insight in order for it to stick, that is, in order for the engram to get strengthened. It is quite normal for a mind to test out thousands of observations and ideas at any given time subconsciously, and discard most of them as not-useful. That magnificent wash of 'insight' is simply a neurochemical bookmark for an idea: "Oh that might be handy, let's watch to see if we can use that again". And if you don't, no big deal, your brain will just re-wire any spare synapses to something more useful, eg flirting or looking for food.
4) When applied to other peoples' experience, insight can be a convenient proxy for empathy or inter-human understanding. Making statements like "That gives me an insight into what you might be experiencing" are much easier than if you actually allowed your sympathetic nervous system to feel the feelings that the other person's experience evokes. It's an intellectual rather than an empathic connection, and a very neat way to cut off the confronting conversation - leaving the other person feeling a bit more understood. But they're not understood. 'Insight' gets used to fob off the hard people and things to understand.

"The Only Option":
Don't tell me that anything is the only option. There are always other options. Always. They may not be good ones, or they may be much better ones hidden in plain sight. "The Only Option" is a way to keep me obedient. People who routinely see the other options are visionary, or from the other perspective too powerful and too dangerous. Just see:
Mahatma Ghandi (satyagraha), Mohammed Yunnus (microcredit), Nikita Kruschev (social, military & economic reforms within Russia plus a fabulous political tap-dance during the Cuban Missie Crisis).

But other options do not have to be big to be confrontational. Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls presented a nifty TED lecture about crowdfunding their albums, which she tried after she refused to take the 'only option' of signing with a record label. I am still looking for a link to back up this marvellous story that a reality TV show was made about bride kidnapping (with consent from all families), which, when screened around villages in central Africa (you get a lot of "oh somewhere in central Africa" when asking white people in mostly-white single-nation-continents like here) caused a crash in the cultural approval for, and incidence of, kidnap-marriages. I wish I could find it. It is such a clever idea to bring a personal experience of bride kidnapping into public scrutiny by making it reality TV.

If you're in a tight spot, are you really out of options? At any point, you can break off mid-sentence and start singing a Puccini aria or get up and dance to 'Campdown Races'. Sometimes this actually helps, like when I tried it with 3 kids under 5 in a long supermarket queue on a particularly hideous Easter Thursday evening. Possibly not so useful in the traffic queue for the police breathalyser after New Years Eve, if you're driving a bit drunk. Opera in an engineering meeting? Could work. Ever thought to try it?

The greater your decision-making responsibility, the more people there are with vested interests or fixed habits who would seek to convince you that the "only option is...", but paradoxically, the greater your financial resources, the greater your degrees of freedom.
Consider the following large-scale options. Some of these may not be palatable or executable for a number of reasons, but they are alternatives which exist. Stop illegal refugee boats arriving by setting up the Coast Guard to set up a discount ferry service for refugees - cheaper, more effective, more humane. Want to increase public transport use? Bulldoze key arterial roads, or else hire male and female models to be "railway hosts", serving beverages and offering headphones to passengers. Their mere presence will make people feel safe (hey, it worked for air travel....). Want to eliminate homelessness? Provide extensive shelters for short-term homeless and buy houses for long-term homeless. I am being glib, of course, but even glib options are options.
Here is the risk. Sweeping revolutionary changes have poor track record when executed as government or high-level organisational policy (Mao's GLF and Cultural Revolution are classic examples). Outside options have quite a good track record when developed and refined in small areas in context, by people who know the terrain. Examples include Bromley-By-Bow community entrepreneurship, or women holding sex strikes over a particularly important local issue, or even the September 11 2002 attack on the World Trade Centre.
Maybe we all have much broader degrees of freedom than we see when it comes to "other options".
But don't ever tell me that anything is my "only option". I might start singing opera at you.

Learning to draw

I could cry for places where weeds don't grow - but that doesn't mean I am encouraging weeds everywhere

I love weeds. They are the rebels of the plant world. I love their relentless tenacity, their live-fast die-young lifestyle, I even admire their "f- you" attitude to the rules about where
to grow, their disregard for the presence or absence of things like soil and nutrient, I am fascinated by their diversity of shapes, colours, textures, spikyness. But above all I love the complex insect and bird life systems that weeds bring.

My own lawn is small and messy. We have bindi. We do not plan to eradicate it. The TV series Gardening Australia has a forum on how to eradicate bindi. Check out the mutagenic sideaffects of the chemical solution proposed, MCPA. Urgh.
We also have tiny blue and orange flowering weeds which fascinate the children.
And dandelions and nasturtiums. I put them in salads.
Did you know how many edible weeds there are? Several of them are in my lawn.

Our city council is a bit slack in the mowing and poisoning department right now. Our nearby highway verge has nifty spiky little roadside weeds and idyllic meadows of golden dandelions on the nature strip, for kilometers. And the weedy, overgrown grass hums quite loudly, louder than the cars sometimes. Native bees harvest nectar and pollinate. Grass flies rise in clouds. Cicadas leave their brown husks on the grass stalks and sing and beat in stereo. Birds gorge themselves on insects in these weedy verges. And most magpie nests have managed to raise 2 or 3 chicks on the insect feast this spring.

A funny aside about the cicadas. One hot day, a week or so ago, I was with my two younger kids in a very cicada-noisy place, and we were having a blast collecting the dirty brown vacated shells from all the trees. I had a plan to spray-paint them silver to decorate the as-yet-unsolved Christmas tree problem.
I saw a tangle of waving green cicada-y legs at the base of a tree. "Hey kids, come and see a living cicada!" I shouted over the very noisy white noise. The kids trundled closer. I put my hand out and the gently waving legs grabbed it. (Cicadas don't bite in my area, although their feet have hooks and tickle a bit.) And out of the bark came.... the front half of a cicada. My middle son came out with "Oh look mummy, he has no bottom, what happened to his bottom? And is that dark stuff his blood coming out all over your hand?"
I had to explain that a bird found this fellow first and bit him in half, and ate up his bottom, and now he can't sing anymore. My youngest laughed and laughed, and kept saying "Bottom!" and pointing to mine, then the cicada, and then mine.
We put the half-cicada back on a tree, and in a few minutes found another one - a complete one this time - which obliged us by singing like a chainsaw on my hand. The kids didn't see when a crow hopped over to the previous cicada and crunched up the rest of it.
Later at the shopping centre, my middle son took delight in telling everyone he saw about the cicada that had its bottom bitten off by a bird. And my youngest would punctuate the story by pointing at my backside and saying "BOTTOM!". The lady at the deli and the butchers' apprentices thought it was hilarious. The passers-by on the street looked a bit bewildered.

So back to marvellous weeds.
Weeds grow almost anywhere and they grown fast. They flower fast, and keep flowering throughout a season, either on a single plant or in a few generations. They provide food for bees. Especially wild bees.
And bees are so very important to us.

Long grass provides home for grass flies and caterpillars and all kinds of small beetles and soil invertebrates.
These provide food for skinks and larger lizards and frogs.
My garden has skinks and larger lizards and frogs in it. Most gardens in my street do. There is an annoying cricket that makes popping sounds like a tin roof expanding in the heat, who lives near our chook shed and has been known to scare the b'jeezus out of me by suddenly singing on hot nights.
Our garden is alive and you can tell because it is noisy. The highway verges are alive and you can tell because they are noisy.
Have you listened to your garden? Have you got weeds? Is it noisy? Have you seen a lizard in it?

Or do you live in a weedless, skinkless moonscape which you must maintain with either herbicides and pesticides or an obsessive weeding regime? Are you a lawn person?

I just discovered this book and although it might be a little extreme, it has a point. It proposes that the ownership/leasing and maintenance of a property with a lawn change who you are.
That the pressure of a social expectation to keep turfgrass weeded and mowed and groomed and monocultured can actually cause individuals to use chemicals which they know their dogs and children have allergic reactions to, which they know contribute to the poisoning of the ecosystem and that means killing weeds and directly or indirectly also killing cicadas, bees, worms, lizards, frogs etc. That owning a lawn predisposes your brain to blindly trust Big Business and its marketing with everything, inclusing your safety. That maintaining a lawn well is symbolic of your virtue as a contributing, hardworking, properly behaving consumer, a good citizen in an increasingly anxious and prescriptive Americanised society. That within that society, a Nature Aesthetic is defined by uniformity and flatness; not function, resilience and diversity. That this prescriptive aesthetic can infect the rest of your life and make you crazy in your pursuit of order and symmetry, and intolerance of metaphorical weediness, in other parts of your life.

(Honestly. It's in the e-book. I've just summarised. They've jumped the shark. It's not me.)




At this point I want to point out that my love for weeds is not unconditional.
There are identified introduced plants which have growth habits that are highly destructive to aspects of the rest of the ecosystem.
The department of primary industries has a list of noxious weeds.

A large number of them, like star thistle, are classified as weeds because they compete with pasture grasses on marginal land, so they are noxious primarily from the perspective of the farmer and her ruminant animals. Fair enough. But I'm not totally convinced that they are evil. Many of these are great for bees and insects, they live fast and die young, and they tend not to thrive on good pasture anyway. Here was a very beautiful star thistle near my work.

A number of weeds are truly noxious. These have been helpfully marked "State Prohibited" in the list.

For example, Water hyacinth chokes waterways, killing off native plants, leaving no room for native fauna like fish or platypus, and encouraging mosquito larva.

Giant knotweed and Japanese knotweed cover creek beds and eliminate other vegetation. When the leaves die back over winter, the now-bare slope erodes.


Giraffe thorn is a large, extremely spiky, fast-spreading African tree species which is only really food for giraffes. It could be quite invasive here and we have no giraffes.

I do not love these kinds of weeds. There are others in the list which I do not live.


Nonetheless, I feel that the definition of 'weed' requires a social re-think. What is the designated weed actually harming? A suburb of lawn peoples' obsessive urge for symmetry and conformance - or can you identify measurable damage to the whole ecosystem? What might the weed actually be helping? Is it preventing erosion on marginal land, or causing it? Does it harbour and protect insect and animal life, or does it poison it?


Near my work, there was a fenced-off carpark and building site which had earth heaped up on it. Weeds had been growing there for two years. It hummed. I was pleased that whoever owned it had not built another glass and steel high-rise. And then, just as the flowering gums were growing buds, a bulldozer came and took away all 'my' weedy dirt.
I was pretty disappointed.
"Oh that's much better, it's so much neater," a colleague said to me, as we were looking down from the 7th storey glass wall of our corporate cube. That made me furious as well.

Now two weeks later, the architecturally sanctioned gumtrees are flowering and there are no bees. There is no sound.
There are tiny brown finch-type birds in the area. They were busy in the weed field, and I located one nest in the tree near my carpark. Yesterday there was a dead almost-fledged chick on the ground under the nest. I tried not to wonder if it had starved because the insects had gone. The adults are still around but they travel further each day. Maybe they are migratory, and would move on anyway.

Where there are no weeds, I guess life moves on.

The seasons, according to our family

From the shortest day of the year, we count the seasons like this:

• Getting Sick season, or Big Windy Storms Rolling In from the South season
• Navel Orange Season
• First Spring Flowers Season HOORAY!
• Mega Hayfever Season
• Nut Season, which is also Spring Lamb Season
• Queensland Strawberry Season
• Start of the Sailing Season HOORAY!
• Start of Victorian Strawberry Season
• Stone Fruit Season HOORAY!
• Christmas Party Season which is also Summer Bogun Season
• Christmas/New Year, or Commissioning Season #1
• Beach Picnic Season, which is also University Grant Season and Music Festival Season and Blackberry Season HOORAY!
• Fresh Apple Season, which is also Corn Season HOORAY!
• Easter, or Sacred Music Season, or Commissioning Season #2
• All the Summer Boguns Leave Us Alone Season
• Are there Mushrooms Yet? Season
• End of the Sailing Season
• Wild Mushroom Season HOORAY!
• Cold and Wet and Tired Season
• Travel to Somewhere Where it's Not Winter? Season

and back to the shortest day of the year.

It is funny when people ask my kids about the seasons and they reply "Corn season" or "Blackberry Season". But is this not a more interesting and intuitive way to count the season?