Drosophila geneticists have always amused me.  They do lots of serious work developing models of human diseases and teasing apart the complex interactions of genes that happen throughout the lifecycle of the fly, then when the time comes to submit the paper they sit around and see who can come up with the worst pun describing the mutation; there’s a list of some of the best ones here.  There’s one particularly important one for my day-job’s purposes in there: the human homologue of the fly ether-a-go-go gene, hERG, is the new hot anti-target in drug discovery; if your promising new compound blocks hERG it’s not going anywhere near the clinic because this activity is associated with adverse cardiac events.  Human gene names are usually more utilitarian, e.g. BDKRB1 (bradykinin receptor 1), MAPK14 (MAP kinase 14, or more commonly p38 alpha, so named for its molecular weight), KCNA1 (voltage-gated potassium ion channel 1… and even that’s a homologue of the Drosophila shaker gene; guess what the mutant does?).  There are rare outbreaks of humour: the human homologue of the Drosophila gene hedgehog is called sonic hedgehog.  Of course, if any of these genes turns out to be disease-related, this can lead to some interesting patient-doctor discussions, a subject that is currently a hot topic over at HUGO; should potentially offensive gene names be changed?  The obvious answer is yes, for the patients’ sake, but this generates a headache for people researching the area due to the proliferation of synonyms for what is essentially the same thing, albeit in different species.  This is already complicated enough, because usually about three different groups find a gene at about the same time and each will independently name it and proceed to publish papers about it for several years using the name they made.  Eventually one will win out in a betamax vs. VHS stylee (rather than after a knife fight at a conference), but there’s still all those early publications out there.  At a push everything could stay as it is and clinicians can just use the gene symbol when discussing the disease - I doubt everyone with a mutated Ras gene is told that they have a mutation in their Harvey rat sarcoma viral oncogene homolog.  However, I’m sure that having to hide information from patients is not a good thing, and these days the first thing everyone does with a disease is look up more information up the internet, so they’re going to spot any comedy Drosophila homologues anyway.  This would mean that perhaps the fly guys and gals should choose less potentially offensive gene names.  I’m not sure what conclusion to come to here; personally I’d mourn the loss of a little corner of silliness in science, but with all this information now being freely available on the internet it would perhaps pay to be a bit more circumspect.  Though somehow the idea of having a mutation in one’s lunatic fringe does lend a certain levity to disease…

Kind of following on from the tritone paradox post, here’s a little test of pitch recognition.  I scored 80.6%, so apparently I’ve got “excellent musical abilities”.  Well, it’s nice someone thinks that, even if it’s just a flash game.

I was in Cornwall this weekend and read on the front page of the local rag that a war of words between Devon and Cornwall was brewing over which county had made the first pasty. Kyla and I joked that it was the kind of crap story that was bound to make the nationals, and here it is. I’d always thought that the theory that the pasty was invented to miners to avoid poisoning themselves had a ring of truth to it, but I’d also heard that the miners had to discard the crimped end of the pasty to avoid angering the ghosts of workers killed in the mines, so you shouldn’t take me as a reliable source.

There seems to be an explosion of high-street pasty vendors at the moment; the West Cornwall pasty stand at King’s Cross has for the past couple of years provided a welcome alternative to Burger King for those last-train-home-from-London evenings out, but now Cambridge high street has a whole W. Cornwall shop, joining the Pasty Presto that’s been open for a year or so. I’d prefer it if there was a decent baker/patisserie somewhere, but it seems that Cambridge City Council insists on increasing the city centre rents up to the point that only nation-wide chains can afford to run a store there. Pasties today; I wonder what regional dish will be commercialised next. Lancashire Hot Pot? Melton Mowbrays?

The Tritone Effect is an interesting page demonstrating an audio illusion, which is the audio equivalent of the Necker Cube.  (On a side note, the psychology course I took in the second year of my degree had a brilliant Necker cube practical - the demonstrator handed out glow-in-the-dark wireframe cubes, then turned the lights out.  Holding the cube, we rotated it left and right; all was fine.  Then we were instructed to force our eyes to choose the other interpretation of the wireframe, so the front and rear faces were perceptually reversed.  Now when rotating the cube left, your eyes told you it rotated right, and vice versa.  This made your arm feel wrong.)  The tritone effect is based on Shepard’s Tones (that link is to another page on the same site).  Here’s an explanation:

Although pitch discrimination cues have been carefully removed from Shepard’s Tones, proximity information remains. Two consecutive tones are always separated by a single semitone. So although you can’t really determine which is higher based on the tones alone, your choice is that the second tone is either one semitone higher or eleven semitones lower in pitch than the first. It is natural for the smaller distance to be automatically selected.

In the case of Shepard’s Tones, what would happen if the proximity cue was removed? In other words, what would you hear if the second tone played was either half an octave higher or half an octave lower than the first? (The midpoint of the octave is called the tritone, hence the name of the current illusion.)

What tickled me is that I experience the 110Hz illusion in the opposite way to what most people hear, so I think tone 1 is lower than tone 2.  I also can’t do what Kyla could, which force myself to hear it the other way around.  Besides being further evidence that I’m weird, the illusion is mainly of interest because apparently it is very repeatable in a non-time dependent manner; the way you hear the illusion today is the way you’ll hear it in a year’s time, which would indicate that everyone has perfect pitch.  Perhaps I’ll find some freebie ear-training software and see if improving my pitch recognition turns out to be useful.

The bands I’ve played in haven’t been big enough to demand anything from anyone; usually we’re pleased if someone else is doing the sound.  As for mic preference, the majority of the “professionally”-supplied sound set ups I’ve used at May Ball gigs have just mic’ed everything with SM58s, and we’re lucky if the sound guy actually remains at the desk for the entire show.  As for green rooms, these mythical places are normally so stacked with other bands’ equipment cases that there isn’t room for beer, let alone chairs.  Iggy and the Stooges’ rider [Ed - link now fixed!] leaves none of that shit to chance.  (Found via rfb.)