Nothing kills a good mood like writing a few letters to people on a dating website.

Two people I think about

I miss Magic Eyes.  I told her when I first started seeing her that after we stopped that it would be difficult for me to start seeing other people because I form attachments slowly and lose them even slower.  For example, the last time I saw her, I found her to be the most attractive person I knew.  Later she said that she did not want to see me again, ever.  I was okay with that because I knew that I was at fault.  But every time I then went out I was thinking about her.  It has been months and last Sunday I went out to a local festival thing and I spent most of the time thinking about her and wishing that she was there.  But I don't miss her a lot.  I try not to miss her at all.  I started reading again, something I have not been able to do since More Passive Than Rain.  

MPTR still calls me.  She tells me disturbing things and expects me to keep them under my hat.  She told me that her Boyfriend has set up a camera in the woods outside her house with a motion detector that takes pictures when ever movement is detected.  He does this because he does not trust her.  He told her that he does not want her having visitors, nor does he want to her to leave the house.  He set the camera up to monitor who comes and if she leaves too.  He says that he will pack up his kid and leave if he sees her leave the house or someone he does not like, me, come to visit.  She also tells me that he has been commenting on news reports where a man kills his girlfriend or wife, by saying, "I wonder if she cheated on him?"  As if that is a valid reason to kill anyone, as if cheating is a valid reason to do any violence.  I asked her why she puts up with it?  But then, why do I bother; I named her More Passive Than Rain for good reason.   So I told her friend.  I will tell her family members.  I will tell you all.  But I will not go over there; he owns a gun and I think if I show up on the camera he will use it, twice.  

Magic Eyes, I miss you.  I see you reading my blog every once in a while, I stopped using SimCity and tumblr, because I did not see the point anymore.  But I do not want to be part of your life, I just want to miss you, that is it.  What I said about trans women loving lesbians holds water still.  I don't hate you, I never will, I never have. I want the best for you.  

If anyone of you knows MPTR, please go over there and talk some sense into her and knock that camera out of its tree.

Hunger Games and Midnight Riot

Hunger Games, the book.  Written for young adults but not really for young adults.  Maybe if they were in class and reading it together as a unit it would be good, but there is a lot of subjects that should be talked about in a group setting. 

Together they were a fast read, not very gripping as a whole but there were parts that I had difficulty putting down.  Book one was the best.  The second book was mostly good, only like a lot of second books the main character dropped down to a reluctance level as they had in the first book.  Also the second book might have been better if it had focused on the second main character Peeta, because he was a more likable character, which is a departure from what I usually like to read.  The third book was strained and at times the plot felt rushed, but mostly the pre climactic sequence did not match with the ending; it was like the climax was dropped from the book.

I read a series once that was like this series, in the way the quality of the story held up.  First books every one has time, time to write, time to imagine, time to kill, basically time to get it right.  The second book, the ideas are fresh and fame has not happened, perhaps the book has only just hit the presses and you have time and the novel is still good.  The third novel, you have fame, you have money, you have pressure, the ideas are not flowing, you feel that you could go in two directions.  The first direction is to knuckle under and get the story out as fast as you can so you can duck out and relax, maybe go to see how the movie is going and let's face it, it is finished, but it is not up to the quality of the first book.  Or, you can tell your publishers that if they want a good finale, they will have to wait.  You expand the plot line you lengthen the book, instead of three hundred pages it tops out at five hundred, but in the end it might take you an extra year to write and publish , but it is a better book.  Suzanne Collins took the first route; parts of her second book are trash and the whole ending of the third book.  Mockingjay my ass, Mockingbook.

And then I read Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch.  WoW.  A contemporary magic police thriller whodunit.  Magic like Harry Potter?  Yes and no, the difference is this is real.  Okay no broomsticks though.  Actually the world is London, England and the Chinese Celestial Bureaucracy is in full force, gods, nymphs, trolls, goblins, vampires and mages, well only one wizard.  Back in the sixties all the mages assumed that technology was going to replace magic and all the wizards decided to pack it in without realizing that magic and technology can coexist together.  

Midnight Riot was a much tougher read, the print was smaller and the use of big words and plenty of London specific acronyms made it confusing and an exercise for my mind to read, unlike the Hunger Games.  Still I plowed through it on a holiday and a half day off in a few sittings, basically thirty hours minus eating and sleeping and being friendly to the locals.  I will be getting the sequel Moon Over Soho as soon as I can.   

Sexual recombination basic

Sexual Recombination is the process that creates the sex cells, i.e. eggs and sperm.  It is the coolest thing in biology, bar nothing, hands down.  

In high-school I learned that your DNA separates into your fathers contribution and your mothers contribution and these get doubled and then doubled again.  This creates four sperm in males and two in females, only two because the egg keeps the entire cell with the cytoplasm and all the mitochondria, so that when it joins with a sperm cell it becomes a whole cell.  The sperm is not a viable cell on its own and thus dies shortly after it is created.  Interestingly enough, it is because of the manner of these differences that have allowed us smart humans to track the history and diversity of humanity, because only the egg has the mitochondria and mitochondria is a separate species that lives within all of our cells.  The mitochondria all come from our mothers and from their mothers and their mothers until we shared the same mothers.  And since the mitochondria DNA mutates ate a consistent rate we can track the divergences across humanity to determine who is related to whom and how far back in history we can co before the populations converge.  And the answer is that humanity had a common source about one hundred thousand years ago.  But this pales when compared to the awesomeness of Sexual Recombination.

So it is true that half your DNA comes from you mother and half from your father, but it is also true that one quarter of your DNA comes from each of your grandparents and one eighth of your DNA is from you great grandparents, one sixteenth from their parents and so on.  So it is not as clear cut as high-school claimed, but we knew that we just did not get to see behind the curtain to see the wizard working.

When normal DNA splits to create a new cell, to build up your body or to replace damaged cells, your DNA copies itself completely and the two sets split up the cytoplasm and the mitochondria and then e cell walls pinch and there are two cells instead of one.  It gets more complicated than that, the DNA splits the two copies are split apart and the nucleus splits apart separates so the cell can divide evenly.  In sex cells they do this too, but then the magic happens.

So for the people that don't know what is in every single cell in their body, each cell has a blob in the center called the nucleus.  In the nucleus is a copy of all the chromosomes in your body, how many chromosomes does not really matter because it does not have an affect on the creature that has them, some creatures have more than humans and som have less.  I think the fruit fly has eight chromosomes and humans have twenty-three, but a fruit fly has more genes than us.  We have one set of chromosomes from each of our parents and  each set of chromosomes has one copy of our genes.  

The genes are obviously in pairs and not every copy of the gene is identical; a lot of them are different and that is why everyone looks different.  For any particular gene, there may be many different versions of that gene, like for eye colour.  Most people's eyes are brown, but some are light brown and others dark brown, some are nearly black.  Some eyes are blue, light blue through dark blue, then there is green and hazel and there are variations in those colours too.  These are controlled by genes and the variations within a family unit, or the lack of variation is an example of the interplay between the differences.  My father has hazel eyes, my mother has hazel eyes, my sister has hazel eyes and I have blue eyes.  Both my parent have one copy of the gene for blue eyes and a copy for hazel eyes and since the hazel copy is more powerful than the blue, it is dominant.  So every pair of genes a person has falls into a double dominant or double recessive or a dominant and recessive pair.  My parents have a dominant/recessive eye trait, I have a double recessive blue eyes and my sister has either double dominant or dominant/recessive eye colour trait.  And there is this type of relationship for many genes in our bodies.

So, you receive one set of genes from each of your parents and these genes are combined in you to make you unique to your parents and all your siblings, unless you have an identical twin.

Your father gives you a set of genes that I will call Yellow.  Your mother gives you a set of genes that I will call Blue.  Some of your Blue genes are dominant over your Yellow genes and vise-versa.  Your genes are Yellow and Blue.  When it comes to sexual recombination, your genes get copied and split as the above mentions.  Then your chromosomes get sticky and stick together, your chromosomes look like a line that splits down the center, lengthwise, one side yellow and one side blue.  The chromosomes are stuck where some of the genes begin and end, not all the genes just some of them randomly, by chance.  Where the genes get sticky, the break, either before or after the gene. The broken chromosomes then switch and heal the break.  And it happens all over each of the chromosome pairs at the same time.  When the process is finished you have two chromosomes that are a checkerboard of blue and yellow with the opposite is similar, yellow where blue is in the other and blue where yellow is in the other.  They, the two chromosomes split and become sex cells, two sperm cells or one egg and one dead egg, because the dead egg does not have the cytoplasm an egg needs.

So in recap, your mother gives you one blue chromosome and your father gives you a yellow chromosome, so that you can have two of each set of genes.  Your sex cells are green, a mix of all the yellow and blue genes you have.

Rule 34 finIshed

I play this game called Exalted.  I have not played it for a while, partly because no one played it in Boonieland and partly because the only other person who played it insulted me (the person told me he never liked playing it, but then he continued to talk to me about playing it with other people all the time).  Anyways the guy who wanted to play, but not with me obviously, always wanted to play the bad guy as hero position.  I did not want him to play that style, mostly because I knew him and he could not play the bad guy if he tried, really really hard.  When he thinks bad guy he thinks robbing a bank.  They guys he wanted to play don't think like him.  The think like this: to make a smoothie take a blender add two small kittens, make the little girl you took them from watch.  From the chair she is tied to with her eyelids taped open.  For best results do not use a lid.

My friend thinks he has a bad side and it is really dark, but I know his darkside shines as a beacon when surrounded in the depravity that exists.  What is my point besides shock value and an example of how evil I make villains?  My point is that I was only half way through Rule 34 and now I am done.  The villain in that story would make a whole chorus of children watch and then tell them it was their turn to make smoothies. So if you can't handle really sick stuff there is your warning.  Luckily there were no such smoothies made during this story.

Oh by the way, my view on sick villains is that it is more fun to squish them if they are really despicable.  I also view role playing as something that should give you thought, hacking down an opposing army made from conscripted farmers should give a good guy a quandary, but mowing down a true villain should be done with no second thought.  Letting a villain go because he holds a village hostage, so that he can kill again, is another great story hook ….