Short note on the Cantor "event"

Eric Cantor got knocked off his elevated podium by an unknown college professor who has virtually nothing going for him. David Brat, an economist of little academic distinction at Randolph-Macon College, won the primary by a stunning 12 points. Pundits from across the board, left, right and middle have theories from the elaborate to the simplistic citing immigration, economics, the health care reforms, etc. They’re all wrong.

Cantor lost because this was a primary that no one paid attention to. He was assumed to be a shoe-in and Brat nothing more than a minor annoyance. But the right-wing talk-show carnival didn’t see it that way. The wackos of talk radio, led by Laura Ingraham, jumped on the Brat-wagon and it had, because of the nutty nature of off-year primaries, a dramatic impact. The Teapartyers, following their gurus on the AM airwaves, block-voted for Brat.

When only 17% of eligible voters show up a rabid, ideological wolf-pack can have an impact well outside of its true demographic status.

So, chalk one up for Ingraham and her colleagues. They may just have done the Democrats a favor. No more Cantor and, who knows, maybe even a Democrat taking the district. Brat’s going to be a pretty easy target. His first comment on the minimum wage was that he hadn’t yet formed an opinion (kind of weird for an economist) won’t fly in the general election. And just wait till the media gets ahold of his “Princeton” comment implying that he’s Ivy League. He graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary which shares only one thing with Princeton University — they’re both in the same New Jersey town.

Another note of admiration: For Anthony Bourdain and CNN (yeah, CNN)

CNN’s latest offering, Anthony Boudain Parts Unknown, is an hour-long travel, food and commentary show. It’s a break-through for CNN. For a full hour, once a week (plus reruns, of course) we get to see something new, something not based on Anderson Cooper’s hard-chiseled face or Wolfie reporting on the latest “breaking news” on the missing Malaysian Flight 370!

Most reviewers are calling this show a travel and food show. It is but calling it that is like saying that Moby Dick is a novel about a sea captain and a whale. The seductive element in the show is that Bourdain goes to places that few do that are within places that many do and he layers each setting with his own personal vision which, depending on local politics, history, current affairs and cultural attitudes can be acerbic, embracing or distanced.

The search is always for the food and the culture — the food that marks the place and its connection to the culture. For Bourdain these cannot be separated, nor can one (or, better perhaps, “should one”) distance them from history. In Sicily it is pig and cheese and farming and the Mafia. So we have a pig shot, shaved, bled, butchered and cooked — every last muscle, organ and tissue-shred because that’s what they do with pig there. We also have Bourdain getting snookered into “catching” his own invertebrates for a meal only to discover that while in the water looking for a tasty, fresh cuttlefish the bay is suddenly full of dead octopuses and equally deceased relatives which are being tossed from a boat for the tourists to snag as their catch for dinner. The experience depresses him and we hear about it! We also get an earful about the continued role of the Mafia and the way in which Sicilian tour-guides drum the legend of the Corleone family into every visitor.

In  South Africa it is, again, the food (unusual and, apparently, delicious) but the show vibrates with social commentary, extended looks back at the Boer War, Apartheid, Mandela’s role and the modern struggle to overcome a horrific past and a difficult present. The food, the scenes from villages and cities is all interleaved with commentary. In the Mississippi Delta the food is inextricably woven with slavery, cotton and Jim Crow. Some may not like this. They would like to eat their grits in funky joints drenched in southern charm, but not Bourdain — and not me.

In the Punjab, India we get the Partition with Pakistan, the residue of British rule, Gandhi, the Sikh culture, vegetarians, democracy today, food from the streets, the corner restaurants, the homes of people Bourdain meets. In all this he manages to convey the hopes of a crazy-quilt land overrun with people, cars, tiny winding streets, brilliantly colored fabrics, traffic rules that few know or obey if they do. How does a land so chaotic function as well as it does? Perhaps it is the rich culture with its social system and, of course, the food.

And so it goes … in Vegas Strip Five Star food is balanced with off-road surprises in various ethnic restaurants. In Mexico corruption and drug wars blend with astonishing dishes; in Detroit scenes of inner city decay flicker with the glory days of the American automobile interspersed with barbeques and papusa; in Tokyo we get the lurid and exotic melded with sublime sushi. Perhaps only in Lyon is Bourdain so captivated by the nouvelle cuisine tradition that grew up around chef Paul Bocuse that politics and social commentary are left behind.

Any bitching? Yeah, a bit. Bourdain occasionally gets tiresome in a relentless focus on some narrow aspect of a city or country. He gets caught up sometimes in trying to be cooler than he is — please, AB, stop calling people “dude.” He can, I am sure, piss people with a more individualistic political philosophy (read, “conservatives”) off. It’s only been on the air for a bit over one year (first episode aired in April, 2013) and its already garnered a Peabody and two Emmys and maybe, just maybe, CNN is ready to overcome its current and embarrassing obsession with that damned, doomed plane and give us some serious TV.

A note of admiration for Svante Pääbo

Two very interesting people have given the quality of my life a little tick upward. Svante Pääbo and Anthony Bourdain. Pääbo here. Bourdain in the next post.

Svante Pääbo (no, I don’t know how to pronounce it either; I think the ä is flat like the ‘a’ in ‘cat’ or ‘shat’ and there’s probably a subtle hiccup between them), one of the world’s leading geneticists, recently published a truly wonderful book, Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes. It’s the tale of his struggle to decode the genome of our long-extinct cousins, the Neanderthals. Pääbo’s writing is direct and uncluttered. His prose is sharp and clean as he relates this three-decade long search.

He is also remarkably forthcoming about his own life. He drops a couple of revelations about his family, his sexuality and a life-threatening illness along the way and does so in a matter-of-fact way that feels like he was telling you about the time he wondered just how much he liked licorice. Let’s cover the personal stuff first. From my perspective, it’s nowhere nearly as fascinating as the science but, for those who like gossip, here goes:

Pääbo is from a rather unusual family with a solid scientific pedigree. His father, Sune Bergström (who died in 2005), was a Nobel Prize winning Swedish physiologist whom Svante rarely saw other than short visits apparently confined to Saturday afternoons. His mother is an Estonian chemist and Pääbo was the result of their affair which is why he uses his mother’s name. Pääbo has a half-brother, Ririk Bergström, a successful Swedish businessman who didn’t realize that he had a half-brother until after the publication of the Neanderthal genome and Pääbo became one of the world’s most recognizable scientists. Interestingly, they were born in the same month. Even more interestingly, they’ve become friends.

Pääbo also drops little tidbits about his long-standing attraction to men. in fact, he tells us that he always assumed he was gay until a young geneticist named Linda Vigilant arrived, on a motorcycle, at the Berkeley lab where he was doing research as a post-doctoral fellow. It took some time including Vigilant marrying another geneticist who just happened to be a friend and collaborator of Pääbo’s, an affair with Vigilant, a child, a divorce, a renewed friendship with Vigilant’s cuckolded ex, a marriage, another child and what I can only assume is and will continue to be a happy little clutch of Pääbo-Vigilants.

Pääbo also drops other little bombs like relating how some hours after being discharged from hospital after a bout of pneumonia he is summoned back with great urgency. Upon examining the X-rays of his chest the doctors discovered a cluster of several blood clots in his lungs. Had these pulmonary obstructions, he tells us with the even tone of someone concluding that he does, in fact, not like licorice, arrived as one large clot he would almost certainly have died. He is put on heparin to clear the clots and discovers, to his surprise, that his father had done much of the critical early work on the prostaglandins that play an important role in anti-coagulants like heparin. There are other personal tidbits but for me the real joy of this book is that it is about science for as he tells us after the clots clear, he’s not ready to die. He has much work to do.

It is the best book about how science is actually done I have ever read. In some ways it reminded me of James Watson’s Double Helix in that it traces step-by-step the process of discovery. But it is so much better than Watson’s rather snippy book with its negative asides when the mistakes of others like Linus Pauling who wandered down a scientific garden-path give Watson a thrill down his leg.

Pääbo traces for us an extended effort to unravel, as in the title, lost genomes, most pointedly that of extinct hominids which finally happens when, in 2010, his research group publishes the full sequencing of the Neanderthal nuclear DNA. The Guardian had two very nice pieces outlining what this discovery means. One is an interview with Pääbo. You can find it here. The other reviews the book and can be found here.

There’s a good bit of science in the book. Genetics has become, in the last half-century, a deeply complex and rich field. It is not an area for the quantitatively challenged. Pääbo does his best to tone it down for that elusive critter, “the intelligent layman” (layperson?), but for those who know little or nothing about genetics, just skip the details. It’s the story that counts and the wonderful descriptions of how real discoveries are made in modern science. If you’re a creationist, read this book. It will cure you of your disorder.

I spent much of my life running a lab studying human cognition, examining such topics as the origin of consciousness, language acquisition in infants, unconscious cognitive functions, intuition and how implicit or tacit knowledge functions in everyday tasks. I know the pains and joys of the life of a researcher. I know all too much about the ups and downs, the idea that felt so brilliant when you first cooked it up late last night only to watch it swept away like morning mist by the only god we worship: the data!

If you like this kind of thing you will love this book. Pääbo goes into delicious detail about how the lab was run, how deeply committed he was to a democratic atmosphere where everyone, including first-year graduate students had equal voice. Ideas and theories, methods and techniques, data analyses and interpretations were valued on their merits and not on who offered them — though there were one or two times when Pääbo finally, though reluctantly, puts his foot down (he is, after all, the Director of one of the world’s leading genetics laboratories at Leipzig’s Max Plank Institute).

He details the intensity of the research, the struggle with problems that erupt seemingly on a daily basis. Samples are contaminated. What was first thought to be ancient DNA turns out to be the result of bacterial action or an inadvertent touch by another person who left modern DNA behind. He builds a “clean” room that is free from contamination. No one other than the scientists working on samples that day may enter. Technical difficulties swarm around them all. Sequencing is so slow that it seems like the job will never be done. Then, miraculously, a company contacts him with novel procedures they’ve developed that allow for high speed replications of the base material extracted from samples. They agree to collaborate.

And, yes, there is competition among scientists, often intense and always passionate. A once-promising relationship with geneticist Ed Green goes sour when Pääbo becomes convinced that the technique Green is using won’t work. Green refuses to change and Pääbo, reluctantly, breaks the collaboration. Green emails him a provocative note saying he will get there first and that he is on his way to “get more bones!” Later Pääbo, just ready to get his hands on a highly desirable Neanderthal bone, discovers that this precious fragment has just been sent “to your friend Eddy Green.” Pääbo’s people double-down worried that Green will publish first.

Then the media and the journalists get involved. As Pääbo and his group feel like they’re almost there they announce at a major meeting that they will have the full Neanderthal genome sequenced by next year. As the clock runs the tension builds. They’re close but problems pop up, data are messy, sequences have contaminants. Pääbo has days of anticipation, days of disappointment and worry, days of progress and, of course, days of palpable regret where he really wishes he hadn’t made that announcement. It’s bloody good fun.

When they complete the full sequence it is as spectacular a finding as they anticipated. Suddenly an whole new area of research opens. In a recent TED talk Pääbo outlines some of these. Insights into the origins of our species, a deeper understanding of the manner in which we migrated from Northern Africa to spread across the planet, a grasp of the nature of our interactions with other hominids that left Africa before us … all become clearer. And, yes, in case you’re curious, our ancestors did have sex with Neanderthals. Between 1% and 2.5% of the genome of everyone (except those from sub-Saharan Africa) is the unambiguous residue of early homo sapiens’ matings with Neanderthals. And, just to make things even more intriguing, natives of wide areas of Southeast Asia including Papua New Guinea and Australia also carry DNA from another hominid discovered just recently, the so-called Denisovans who lived in the Altai mountain areas of Siberia. And, yes, they mated with Neanderthals too.

If you want to get a feel for how science is really done, not the pablum that Hollywood dumps on us, not the closer but still misleading scenarios from shows like NCIS and CSI, but the real thing done by real people who love what they do, pursue it with passion and vigor, search for truth and understanding and, importantly, really want to get that truth and understanding before someone else does and reaps the rewards, the accolades and the grants, read this book.

How I got 2nd place

I took 2nd in a 300+30 NLH tournament recently. It was one of the more interesting tournaments I’d ever cashed in and, as described here, remarkable in that three of the last four finishers were women. But what was so intriguing is that I went deep with no cards. I mean none. I was card dead the entire tournament. It took me some time to go back over what transpired in the intense 8-hours to examine what happened and unpack how it all unfolded. What I found are some poker lessons. I’ll share them.

The Basics: It was a “Turbo” tournament with short 15-minute levels. The starting stacks were 15,000. There were no re-buys or add-ons but re-entries were allowed for the first hour. We ended up with a  total of 67 entries. Turbo’s have a larger luck element than more measured tournaments. They require patience which most players lack. They see the rapid rise in blinds and antes and feel they have to play fast and get involved in more pots than they should.

As noted, I was card dead the entire tournament. I did have A,A once and doubled up a modest stack with it but that was it for “pockets.” The only other pairs I saw were 4’s and 6’s — both several times. I never flopped a set. I had A,K once and dumped it when there was a raise, re-raise and a shove before it got to me. I spent most of the eight hours looking at K,3 followed by 9,4 which arrived just before 7,2 which was followed by Q,6 and so forth. My modal hand was paint followed by a squeezed baby off-suit. I never flopped a straight, a flush, trips and only flopped two pair once.

So, how did I get 2nd place with this kind of dreck? This way:

I played tight — which was easy to do. Gradually my table image was established: I was the tightest dude in the room and could steal more effectively.

Second, I picked my steal spots very carefully. I aimed at strong players who were paying attention and would give me “respect” and medium-to-small stacks who worried that I could bust them. The best spots were the standard ones, the hijack seat and the cut-off but my main considerations were always who was left to act, what their stack sizes were and how they were viewing me.

I had good reads on people. I dumped that flopped top-two when certain I was looking at a set. I was.

I got lucky in that almost all my steals were made against what turned out to be hands that could not call. We often do not realize how important this factor is in these situations. We tend to only think we “got lucky” when we hit our 3-outer but luck’s most compelling role is in these more mundane situations. We re-raise bluff and are believed; we make a steal-the-blinds move and no one has a hand that warrants a call.

With these simplistic gambits working, I managed to stay just a bit below average stack size while the field got winnowed down. I kept reminding myself that my real weapons were patience and an understanding of the game. I knew I was not going to knock myself out.

I got moved to a table over which a woman was running roughshod. She was on a heater like I’ve rarely witnessed, mowing down opponents and building a huge stack. I laid low and let her do her thing. She had the rest of the table on tilt and people were making insane calls trying to get back at her.

Then I hit two miracle cards. Anyone who has played tournament poker even semi-seriously knows that you have to hit a couple of these if you’re going to go deep. One was when I tried one of those all-in steal moves with T,9 and, after some intense muttering got called by A,9. The flop and turn were no help but the river brought the magical T and I doubled up and reduced the field. The other was when I rapped in the BB with 8h,5h and shoved on a flop of 8c,3s,2h. Alas, the SB snap-called with 8,7 and I was in deep trouble — till the turn and river came down Jh, Kh and I filled my backdoor flush, knocked out a dangerous opponent and moved up the pay chart.

We were now down to six players. Five of us together had about 20% of the chips. The other 80% formed an unbreachable wall in front of Ms. Heater who was still catching cards. I continued playing the same way as before, trying to stay out of her way and watched as she took out the other four in ways that still seem unworldly. On one hand she shoved with two black 3’s on the button and got insta-called by the BB who showed two red Q’s. The flop had two spades and the turn and river were spades and Ms. H.’s flush knocked the guy out. Another: she raised UTG with 8,7 suited and got re-raised all-in by A,A. There was an 8 on the flop and the turn was a 7 and she faded all eight outs to take down the other remaining player.

At this point I had about 50k in chips facing Ms. H’s 950k or so. She agreed to carve off a couple of hundred from the 1st place prize and we ended it there.

You will, I hope, cut me a little slack if I state that I am pleased with how I played. The tournament supervisor told me he couldn’t remember seeing someone finish so high with absolutely no cards. I also learned an important lesson about poker tournaments and patience. I’ll see you in Vegas in a couple of weeks. I’m ‘rolled for the WSOP.

Overstreet not running

As I’ve blogged on occasion, one of our representatives to the Washington state legislature in Olympia, Jason Overstreet, is not among my favorite politicians. Go here for one reason why. Recently Underroad surprised us all by announcing that he would not run for re-election. There’s the usual scuttlebutt about why, with some local pol-watchers assuming it’s because he felt he wasn’t able to make any headway with his agenda and others, perhaps more realistic, concluding that his abysmal record made him unelectable. In his two terms he did, indeed, carve out new ways to be “abysmal.” Not one single piece of legislation he offered or sponsored ever made it out of committee. Now that’s a record that can only be tied.

In fact, his reputation was so bad that when I was working with a local government agency to develop a minor “text amendment” (i.e., a simple rewording of a clause in the state’s code) I suggested that we should ask all of our local representatives to sponsor it. The agency’s lobbyist cringed at this. “Well, we can approach the others, but not Overstreet.” “Why not?” I asked. “Because,” he said, “as I learned early on, if Jason sponsors a bill it is functionally equivalent to having it backed by Kim Jong Un. No one will consider anything he sponsors.”

But all this speculation aside, the deep question is why did he really decide not to run? We’re all tired of the “want to spend more time with my family” gambit but, guess what. That’s exactly what we got. Only we got it in a manner that was classically Overstreet — and it made my blood run cold. Here is the first sentence in his statement:

“It’s time for me to spend more focused time with my growing family, raising them in the fear and admonition of The Lord ….”

Could someone please call Family Services.