Better off Ted: a step closer to "blobby" the meat blob.

In the article “Tuck into some soggy pork, straight from the lab” scientists have made the first draft of meat in a vat. We’ll take a leaf from Better off ted and nickname the lab grown meat “Blobby”. Blobby is a step closer to reality:

They have not tasted the product, but it is believed the artificial meat could be on sale within five years.

Mark Post, a professor of physiology at Eindhoven University, said: ”What we have at the moment is rather like wasted muscle tissue. We need to find ways of improving it by training it and stretching it, but we will get there.

”This product will be good for the environment and will reduce animal suffering. If it feels and tastes like meat, people will buy it.”

I mean people buy (and allegedly eat) the amusing named meat substitutes like: fake bacon (“facon”?)..

Mmmn.. Real bacony goodness it ain't!

fake tuna (“tuno” I kid you not)..

Just say no. Tuno is not tuna.

fake sausages (affectionately known as “fagsnags”?) and even tofu turkey (tofurky).

Tofu made to look like Turkey. Apparently one of the most horrible creations ever according to a vego friend.

But some are still not satisfied:

However, the Vegetarian Society said: ”How could you guarantee you were eating artificial flesh rather than flesh from an animal that had been slaughtered?”

Jesus some people are morons.

How do you know your organic carrot wasn’t used to stab a cute little bunny rabbit through the eye? Or your tofu used to smother kittens before it was stuck in the plastic wrapper? Or the organic tofu wasn’t created from soy beans grown on clear felled, slashed and burnt rainforest?
That’s right, you don’t magically know. But perhaps it is labelled as made in a lab vs “real” so you can tell and you have to trust that the standards are in place to ensure stuff isn’t mislabelled just like everything else. Just like Halal/Kosher are marked so that we know which meat came from cruelly-slaughtered-via-slit-throat-to-appease-barbaric-religious-beliefs animals vs non halal/kosher ones put down as quickly and painlessly as possible (don’t get me started on this concept!).

More likely people will largely ignore the ethical qualities would want to have non-grown in the lab stuff and there’ll be a push to give consumers the information about whether it was from a cow/pig/chook or from a lab. So perhaps for a while there there’ll be people buying burgers that have lab grown stuff snuck in there (thus an “all beef patty with extra ethics”) but isn’t it better regardless that SOME of the content not be from slaughtered animals? Let’s say you could cut down the actual slaughter count for McDonalds to half current numbers? Isn’t that a good thing?

And that old crackpot Prince Charles:

The breakthrough will concern the anti-GM lobby. Prince Charles, a fierce opponent of genetically modified food, said last week that people were creating problems by ”treating food as an easy commodity rather than a precious gift from nature”.

Believes in some good stuff, but a load of garbage (homoeopathy for instance). Take any statement with a spoonful of highly diluted tincture of crap.

I suppose he’d know about easy commodities, being the leftover of the inbred concept of royalty who are born and instantly gifted with a taxpayer funded (previously serf served) life of.. well.. royalty.
Yes, food is an easy commodity: that’s part of the way we’ve come to drag ourselves out of constantly foraging/hunting/preparing food enough to support pale, white collar professions that revolve around arranging bytes on computers into ever more complicated ways.

Anyhow, there are a number of advantages I think of separating out the “meat” from the rest of the cow. Parasitic infections (e.g. ticks/lice/worms), unintended contamination (e.g. cow drinks glowing green nuclear waste but doesn’t get super-cow powers or perhaps gets treated/dipped with something nasty) could be kept under control better when the stuff is just raw inputs into a big conveyor belt in a lab type set-up.

Chemicals/nutrients in.. Meat out. Just without the having to kill something in between.

Anyhow if this grown in a lab version means we can dispense with piling as many animals in stinking cages their whole, short, miserable lives: then I’m all for it.

Well, that’s not completely accurate, but it is roughly along the lines of “The Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy” in which the dilemma for vegetarians is solved by genetically engineering a creature who wants to be eaten or else feels pain.

In this NewScientist article: “Pain free animals could take suffering out of farming” there’s some discussion of how various findings could be used to lessen the discomfort of farmed animals. So not quite “animals that want to be eaten”, but animals that don’t so much care about pain.

I think the better solution is to step back from the ultra-packed in “factory farming” that seems to be the norm in the USA and parts of Europe and let the poor animals roam around a bit. I grew up in a rural area and I’d have to say any animals I came across appeared to have a pretty good existence:

• nice big open paddocks for the cows or long sheds for the chickens
• farmers keeping away predators and providing healthcare (sounds better than the deal most US citizens have currently)

With modern slaughtering techniques there’s an attempt to minimise the pain/discomfort at the end of the animal’s life, well, except for the barbaric Jewish and Muslim “halal” and “kosher” slaughter.
(Start religious rant)Those religious slaughter techniques are nearly as barbaric today as they were thousands of years back. Still not sure why animals have to continue to have their throats cut and bleed to death slowly today when they could just get the bolt gun to the head (as per the more humane “normal” slaughtering technique). All because some people think that their superstition needs extra suffering to appease some sky god.
(end rant)

I guess the ultimate would be growing meat in a vat though. I mean if it doesn’t have a brain or nervous system then it probably can’t really be in a state of pain as per any reasonable definition. Or perhaps we could reduce the number of farm animals via some sort of human recycling a la the movie “Soylent Green”.

Soylent green.. is PEOPLE!

After all if we’re going to say it’s ok to eat other animals, we should at least be fair about things right?

TED stands for “Technology, Entertainment and Design. TED talks, in case you haven’t heard me rave about them (or watched one in a previous post) are short talks given by people on interesting ideas. Their motto is “Ideas worth spreading”.  TEDTalks came from TED conferences (I’d love to attend one one day) where a bunch of people get together to share ideas.

Here’s a quick handful that give you an idea of some of the incredible things that people present at TED talks. About the only ones I think fairly consistently suck are the song and poetry ones. Haven’t yet found a good one of either of those categories.

Mike Rowe celebrates dirty jobs
Captivating, engaging talk about how dirty jobs get a bad image.

Gever Tully teaches life lessons through Tinkering
Kids doing what they used to do before helicopter parenting and the death of fun.

Josh Silver demos adjustable liquid filled eye glasses
Amazing idea on self optometry for the masses.

Robert Full: Learning from the gecko’s tail
Nature is an incredible thing with surprising lessons for Engineers coming out about why the gecko needs a tail.

Jane Poynter: Life in Biosphere 2
I remember watching the Biosphere 2 people heading into the structure. Interesting to hear how things played out.

Aubrey de Grey says we can avoid aging
Aging need not be inevitable. Reasons why we should strive to beat aging. I first came across this idea under the banner “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS)“.

Jay Walker on the world’s English mania
English really is the international language. Scarily so!

Johnny Lee demos Wii Remote hacks
Unashamed geekery: making cool stuff with the wiimote.

Hans Rosling shows the best stats you’ve ever seen
Statistics done right!

Ed Ulbrich: How Benjamin Button got his face
Interesting technology used to age Brad Pitt.

Although my current job is a little lacking on presentations, I’ve ended up over the years with a bit of an appreciation for presentations (that’s why TED talks are pretty interesting to see various styles).

I liked his presentation for the part with the paper plane as a “prop” then a very real world way of comparing the energy output of different sized kite wings. Lots of good linking with analogies. Not the world’s best speaker (I still rate Bill Clinton for impeccable noise word free delivery), but the end effectiveness of the talk is the sum of the parts.

I’ve talked previously about China possibly solving global warming. It’d be fitting if they did this in part with one of their inventions: the kite.

Disclosure requirements

I think this idea raises some important questions about the need for journalistic standards among bloggers. Disclosure of payment for mentions/reviews etc is very important from an ethical standpoint and to avoid destroying reader confidence in the blogger.

I remember being approached a few years back to promote an enterprise software product by the marketing firm (“we have a small budget to spend on marketing, so we’re looking at blogging to promote our product”). I politely refused because I knew nothing about it and would be polluting the things I wanted to talk about with ad postings indistinguishable from the normal content. Something akin to a technique I’ve noticed on sporting and radio broadcasts where the hosts of the program segue headlong into pimping a product.

So if someone was going to go down the path of pay per post: they’d better clearly disclose that that’s what they’re doing.  Otherwise they’re burning credibility for dollars.

The spam equivalence

People don’t want to be tricked into receiving ad content for the same reason they dislike spam. Spam is advertising trying to sneak into your brain via donning the clothing of meaningful content in your inbox for those people too silly to get a gmail address. One could argue that all advertising is this really, but the majority of advertising is forced to play by the rules: ads on tv are generally fairly easy to separate from shows, ads in magazines are forced to be different enough from content (e.g. the pretend article ones have a notice along the top) and web ads are generally any element on the page that’s macromedia flash animations of monkeys or anything poker related.

Polluting the social networking sphere is most definitely on the minds of advertisers. When the pollution is done through content creators themselves (rather than banner ads) they know very well that it becomes harder to tune out. So to be fair to readers/viewers the best idea would be to ensure that a blurring of the normal and advertising content does not occur.

The TV show in question: review

Now onto “Lie to me” the TV show. Disclaimer: I didn’t receive payment for this blog although I’d very much like to.

It’s produced by Fox to round out their offerings with a fictional show about lies. This is to go nicely with that prick Bill O’Reilly’s show (which if you haven’t seen it is pretty much non stop lies and bullshit insane bullying but thankfully occasionally cops a spanking).

I think it’s an interesting show, good set of actors and original spin on the “detective” genre. Unlike other attempts at “incredibly insightful detective” series this one doesn’t stoop immediately to “complete and utter bullshit” like say ones involving psychic powers, number crunching, talking to ghosts etc etc and appears based on something real from law enforcement.

The story is based around a lead guy (Tim Roth as Dr Cal Lightman) who is a world famous facial and body expressions/microexpression reading ninja who naturally trained deep in the jungles of Indonesia/deserts of Morocco before some sort of colossal cock up resulting in his fall from grace at a government agency (allowing him to start a very expensive consultancy firm doing more of the readings that presumably lead to the big mess in the first place). These microexpressions are involuntary movements of various muscles in the face or other body language. Think a cheese lite version of David coruso (sans sunglasses) meets House with a tiny dash of Californication (the ever so mature father daughter relationship).

Some things they do well in the series so far:

• They pour scorn on lie detectors which appear useless
• they emphasise the notion that different people have different types of cues to pick up on for lies
• they show off some technology to do voice stress analysis (from my experience: insurance companies are starting to integrate this into their call centres)
• they’ve obviously spent a lot of time getting the actors to work on their expressions
• Not too much “Pan right and pull back. Stop. Enhance 34 to 46″ video gimmickry (bonus points for anyone who knows where that is from?)

On the idea of microexpressions, try a test here to see how you go: http://www.cio.com/article/facial-expressions-test. There’s something similar that pops up in the series in the first or second episode. There’s a healthy spattering of footage of politicians and celebrities lying (according to the microexpressions anyhow). I’ve watched a documentary on these microexpressions in the past (again picking on politicians: in particular Bill Clinton) and it seemed consistant with what I remember of that.

Anyhow, it’s a series I’ll watch more of and I didn’t get paid to say anything good about it. Although if anyone wants to send me money now that I’ve plugged the show, by all means.

This view of the night sky is not the sky I grew up under back in Australia, it’s missing a few familiar constellations and has a few bright stars in unfamiliar places. But with my (albeit quite limited) knowledge of astronomy and physics I have a rough but reasonable  idea of what each of those points of light in the sky can represent (as much as anyone can comprehend the dimensions and physics of stars and galaxies). But it strikes me just how different a set of eyes I look out on the night sky with compared to those who born in a time or place where science hadn’t had a chance to open their eyes from the clenched shut state we’re born with. To some eyes the night sky was a universal illusion: a curtain hung just beyond the clouds to prevent anyone from seeing beyond.

The difference in view is understandable but it’s quite a sad view of the world to so convince yourself that the almighty power of the universe is nothing more than a stage magician (or magicians). Under cover of night they dart around behind the scenes holding up a diamond encrusted cloak at night so we have something pretty to look at. Hidden behind the curtain the powers that be play cosmic scale games of chance with the lives of people below.

A world run by a stage manager deity who maintains things via smoke and mirrors in between tugs on the puppet strings of divine determined fate. The sad implication though that is that we’re nothing more than wooden puppets or unpaid extras on stage as eye candy. There to be tossed, prodded and pushed at will; little hope for anything good except to keep our heads down to avoid an early demise or eternal damnation for some indiscretion or stray thought.

Trouble is that this notion still exists, albeit moved on from stars in the sky and onto some other aspect of scientifically explainable but often supernaturally associated area. Now the gaps in knowledge to argue along are incredibly niche in comparison. No longer able to point at the sun and say “what makes that shine” and yell “ah-ha! See, god must be doing it”, the things to try this silly game with are ever so minute in scale or far distant in the past.

Science generally has some very good ideas on anything and everything or is in the process of confirming or discarding ideas (as it has always been doing). The real problem is that the information doesn’t seem to get through sometimes. Instead nonsensical cosmic witchcraft is the pre-chosen and preferred option of the literalist, orthodox, fundamentalist, creationist or “true unwavering believer”.

All I can hope is that education finds a way to open the eyes of everyone. Every single human being on the planet because solid education undermines the efforts of the current and future people who blunder through science seeking new niche areas of the universe to belittle into smoke and mirrors so that their magician god has a place in it all. Along the way it sweeps aside irrational prejudices and superstition.  The view of the world is so much clearer without such a pointless distraction from the amazing nature of the universe the more we understand it.

So banish the irrelevant magician out the back door: we’ve a much better show on stage now and better with each night’s new additions to the vast body of science. There’s room out back in the reject bin with the other fairytale creatures if he really needs a place.