"Isn't that just a join?"

At the dinner table:

d: What's on your to-do list that you're stressed about? Is there anything I can do to help?

D: [touched] Thanks for asking, but I don't think so. I've got a small pile of things to do for flgbtqc, their mailing list cleaning-up at the top of the list- it's being more complicated than I thought it would be.

d: What's that involve?

D: Mostly, removing 200 names from a list of 900, where we have a separate list of updates for the 200.

d: Isn't that just a join?

D: Well, yes, sort of. The program I wrote does compare the first and second columns in the two lists; but I'm not doing it with SQL, so-

d: [interrupts] I should point out that I've never written a line of SQL in my life. And also, that phrase, "Isn't it just a join," has turned out to be quite useful a few times when I'm talking about databases to people who do understand them.

D: ... [laughs]

d: But you have to admit, it's a useful phrase.


Why yes. Yes, it is. And now we all know your secret. *evil cackle*

Human evolution

Conventional wisdom is that human natural selection has dropped off and evolution is slow in modern humans, because there's fewer selective pressures. By analysis of Haplotype Mapping project data, UW-Madison anthropologist John Hawks says that's backwards- we've been evolving 100 times faster over the last 5,000 years than any previous period in human history.


The researchers found evidence of recent selection on approximately 1,800 genes, or 7 percent of all human genes.

[...]

Genetic changes are now being driven by major changes in human culture. One good example is lactase, the gene that helps people digest milk. This gene normally declines and stops activity about the time one becomes a teenager, Hawks says. But northern Europeans developed a variation of the gene that allowed them to drink milk their whole lives — a relatively new adaptation that is directly tied to the advance of domestic farming and use of milk as an agricultural product.

The biggest new pathway for selection relates to disease resistance, Hawks says. As people starting living in much larger groups and settling in one place roughly 10,000 years ago, epidemic diseases such as malaria, smallpox and cholera began to dramatically shift mortality patterns in people. Malaria is one of the clearest examples, Hawks says, given that there are now more than two dozen identified genetic adaptations that relate to malaria resistance, including an entirely new blood type known as the Duffy blood type.

Another recently discovered gene, CCR5, originated about 4,000 years ago and now exists in about 10 percent of the European population. It was discovered recently because it makes people resistant to HIV/AIDS. But its original value might have come from obstructing the pathway for smallpox.



Seen via gmsv_feed.

(And hey! I can follow this article; some of melted_snowball's explanations of what he does for a living may have rubbed off on me after all.)