My wife, being an adopted little one has no information on her ancestry.  Back in November, I saw where you can have your DNA analyzed to find out your heritage and a bit more.  So, we purchased a kit and since they gave a 20% discount on a second one, I opted to have mine done also.

I received my results back shortly after Christmas and found my heritage was mostly European; which I already knew, since both of my parent’s ancestry came from Europe at one place or another.  But the information also revealed a great deal of health and human trait info.  Just a sampling of mine:

• Male (absolutely correct)
• Likely brown eyes (close enough)
• Straighter hair than average (correct)
• Decreased odds of male pattern baldness (my wife says I have a blonde spot)
• Not Malaria resistant (damn!)
• Likely O type blood (correct)
• Greater tendency to overeat (no argument)
• And I am much less efficient at learning to avoid erors (surely not!)

It also lists information on how susceptible I am to various hereditary diseases, medications and bad habits.  No need to go into that here.  Suffice to say I need to watch for things that may crop up in life.

Shortly after sending in our spit samples, the all-knowing FDA, with its common sense reasoning, decided companies like the one we purchased our kit from, should not be giving us our health information.  So anyone purchasing a kit after that time would only receive their ancestry and not the health info.  We were in the grandfathered section sort of speak, so we got the whole nine yards.    …  Déjà vu?

from Wikipedia

As I scan through all the information, ancestry, health issues, traits and nuances; I realize the information given is well above my IQ grade.  There are words I’ve never heard.  Ever hear the word: genome? Or haplogroup? Genotype?  Promethease, pyrimidines or purines?  Don’t bother looking them up in Wikipedia.  It just gets more complicated.  I found out my mother came from haplogroup K, circa 500 years ago, before the era of intercontinental travel.  And Pop came from haplogroup R1b1b2.  … Yeah, thank goodness for “cut & paste”.

I talked my mother into doing her DNA also and had a kit sent to her house.  She commented she didn’t know if she could spit into the little tube or not.  I had to question her on that, as she is almost 95 years old and doesn’t know how to spit?  I learned to do that when I was a little boy in parochial school with a big sister.

We are used to seeing shows where they send DNA to the crime lab to bring the killer to justice.  Simple as fingerprints I thought.  After all, we have seen the little miniature spiral that represents our DNA, and how much info could that microscopic thing have?

Well, I downloaded my raw data to store away in case I decided to dig deeper into it, and was astonished to find it was 960 thousand lines of text!  Got that?  960,614 lines of text, just under a million.  From a microscopic spiral!

You know, at times like this I think the Creator knows a bit more than we do, and I am reminded of the words:   For what seems to be God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom …

I bow to Him.

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We have been very busy lately.  Was told we are the busiest Embassy in the World right now with all we have going on, and at the same time I’m trying my best to stay healthy to get through the winter.  They say warmer weather will be here after March.  Not a month too soon.

With all our household belongings in the apartment, I spend the weekends getting my office set up the way I want.  I have several boxes of computer and electronic parts on the floor, and about a dozen boxes of books waiting on me to get a bookshelf set up.

Throughout my life, I have collected many electronic parts which I feel is a crime to discard.  When someone came up to me and said, “Hey Dwaine, do you have a …”  “I sure do!” was my reply.  But back in 2007, we sold our house in Texas and moved to Moscow to work.  I told myself it was time to grow up and part with the majority of my precious toys.

I remember well the day I backed my truck up to the landfill and tossed out my valued treasures, fighting back the tears.  Didn’t matter whether they worked or not, because you never knew when one might need the flyback transformer from a 12” monochrome CRT.  Or an IBM motherboard with a full 640k memory on it.  There was a box of capacitors taken from old radios that I salvaged.  Many years ago, I dismantled an old mainframe computer for the wonderful parts.  Coils and solenoids, motors and fans.  Wire harnesses and terminal blocks and lights galore!  It was wonderful!  On top of that, I had a brother that would send me old parts from commercial mainframes that had gone bad.  And all those … were tossed too.

There was a flat box with about a hundred compartments, that I had separated my scrapped electronic components into groups so I could find them quicker.  I could not get myself to just toss it out like a farmer feeding the hogs, so I gently laid it on a pile of garbage like I was putting a child to sleep.

And as I drove off with my nose running from the tears, or maybe the stench and dust, I looked in the rear view mirror just in time to see the monster compacting machine rolling over all my belongings, smashing the crap out of everything.  I think I saw an evil grin on the driver’s face.  To this day, I feel it was Satan.

Well, as nature would have it, I am still collecting electronic junk, only now, I haul it from country to country.  And it is all setting on the floor not far from me as I type this.  During the past decade, I have upgraded from desktop computers to laptops, and gone to more powerful operating systems.  What I have ended up with, are three old laptops that I didn’t know what to do with.  Throw them out, you say?  Ah, no.  I don’t think I can handle the tears again.

Then about a month ago, I saw an article on the Web about using old computers to work on scientific projects from your home.  So, I did some checking and found an amazing site that you can set up your computer to work in conjunction with literally thousands of other personal computers around the world.  The idea was to use your computer when it was idling, like when you go get more coffee, or watch another episode of Wedding Chapel Blues, or Bait Shop Hussy or whatever they have these days.

So, I sat the three machines up and tied them to the Internet and got them all updated.  Downloaded a program called BOINC which is a part of the University of California at Berkley, and chose three different projects and assigned one to each of my little machines.

One is running a program called Rosetta, which helps determine the 3-dimensional shape of proteins as part of research that may ultimately contribute to cures for major human diseases such as AIDS / HIV, Malaria, Cancer, and Alzheimer’s.

Another is running Docking, which is a project that aims to further knowledge of the atomic details of protein-ligand interactions and, by doing so, to facilitate the discovery of novel pharmaceuticals.

And the third is running a program called eOn Client, which works on a common problem in theoretical chemistry, condensed matter physics and materials science is the calculation of the time evolution of an atomic scale system where, for example, chemical reactions and/or diffusion occur.

As you may have guessed, I had to cut and paste all that as most of it went over my head like a bird in a windstorm.  But look!  These machines are proof that you should never discard things of beauty!

At night as I lay in bed, I can hear these computers running in the other room with their fans working hard to keep them cool.  Sometimes in the middle of the night, if I get up to pee and get a drink of water, I will wonder into the office and check up on them like a mother checking her babies.  Satisfied, I go back to bed dreaming of the success of hording electronic junk.

Keep kicking.  D.

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