John McCain will die soon

August 24, 2018 • 12:30 pm

This is very sad but it was in the cards from the outset. Glioblastoma is a very serious cancer, and few recover from it. Now, according to CNN (click on screenshot), McCain has resigned himself to the inevitable and will soon, like Ted Kennedy, succumb to brain cancer.

Click on the screenshot to read the story.

Last summer, Senator John McCain shared with Americans the news our family already knew: he had been diagnosed with an aggressive glioblastoma, and the prognosis was serious. In the year since, John has surpassed expectations for his survival. But the progress of disease and the inexorable advance of age render their verdict. With his usual strength of will, he has now chosen to discontinue medical treatment,” the family of the Arizona Republican said in a statement.

The statement from McCain’s family went on to say, “Our family is immensely grateful for the support and kindness of all his caregivers over the last year, and for the continuing outpouring of concern and affection from John’s many friends and associates, and the many thousands of people who are keeping him in their prayers. God bless and thank you all.”

McCain’s wife and daughter both put out additional statements on Twitter

Cindy McCain, the senator’s wife, wrote in a tweet, “I love my husband with all of my heart. God bless everyone who has cared for my husband along this journey.

The senator’s daughter, Meghan McCain, said in a tweet, “My family is deeply appreciative of all the love and generosity you have shown us during this past year. Thank you for all your continued support and prayers. We could not have made it this far without you – you’ve given us strength to carry on.”

McCain was a war hero, and, though I disagreed with many of his views, he was a Republican not afraid to cross his party, and would have been a salutary influence had he remained in the Senate. He was a good man.

As for McCain’s Senate seat, when he dies, Doug Ducey, the Republican governor of Arizona, will appoint a replacement Senator to fill in until the 2020 elections. And of course it will be a Republican—probably one more right wing than McCain.

 

My WaPo review of David Quammen’s new book on evolutionary trees (and a comparison with other reviews)

August 24, 2018 • 11:00 am

I’ve just reviewed David Quammen’s new book, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life, for the Washington Post. Click on the screenshot to see my review. (Note that the original title, which was a bit misleading, has been changed to the new one below.) It will be in the paper version of Sunday’s Post.

Since the topic of the book is evolutionary trees, in particular their reality (or nonreality, according to Quammen), I asked that my piece be illustrated with Darwin’s famous “tree sketch” from one of his pre-Origin notebooks:

Charles Darwin’s sketch of the “Tree of Life” illustrates his theory that species evolved from a common ancestor. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

The point of Quammen’s book is largely that the “tree of life” isn’t treelike, and that’s because of endosymbiosis (e.g., the creation of eukaryotic cells that harbored mitochondria and chloroplasts by ingesting and using other microbes), and, mainly, because of “horizontal gene transfer” (HGT): the movement of DNA between rather unrelated organisms.

Besides this point, Quammen’s protagonist is Carl Woese, who discovered that life really comprises three distinct domains: Archaea, Eubacteria, and Eukarya. Because the book consisted of several distinct stories, I chose to concentrate in my review on what seemed to be Quammen’s main point: that the tree of life is simply “wrong” (his words), and can’t really be represented by a tree. The Tangled Tree falls into the “Darwin was wrong” genre of books.

I disagreed about the unreality of trees, especially in the Eukarya, where assumptions of branching trees have worked well in reconstructing the history of species, despite occasional movement of genes between branches. Even in microbes Quammen isn’t completely correct: while HGT is more common among microbes than eukaryotes, it hasn’t, for instance, completely effaced phylogenetic relationships between bacteria, and of course didn’t prevent Woese from discovering, via DNA sequencing and biochemistry, that Archaea is a separate “domain” from the other two. With a limit of 1200 words, I had to largely ignore the stuff about endosymbiosis and Woese’s discovery to concentrate on the main point of the book: the “hook” that was used to sell it.

You can read my review at the link, or, if you’re paywalled, you can get a copy by judicious inquiry.

I’ll also add one correction to my review. Here’s part of what I wrote:

More remarkably, more-complex species can simply incorporate genes from the environment. Microscopic rotifers, for instance, dehydrate in dry conditions; when they rehydrate, the absorbed water can contain bits of DNA from nearby species, so that the rotifer genome can become riddled with “found” DNA segments from groups like fungi and plants.

The rotifer story now appears to be not at all a case of HGT at all, but of contamination by DNA from other species during sequencing. That was revealed in an article published in Current Biology on August 6, and which I didn’t know about until my article was in press (thanks to Matthew Cobb for pointing that out to me). So even that famous example of HGT is wrong. Some biologists think that most evidence of HGT in eukaryotes is due to contamination of this sort, but I remain open-minded. We already know, as I said, that HGT is not sufficiently frequent in multicellular organisms to efface their evolutionary ancestry.

I want to say a few words about three other reviews that have appeared about Quammen’s book. The first two are at the New York Times (click on screenshots to go to articles):

Seghal is a literary critic, and it shows: she criticizes the book as a piece of writing (she likes it) but doesn’t at all tackle the science. In fact, she admits, if not flaunts, ignorance of the science:

In 1977, Woese and his colleagues at the University of Illinois announced their discovery of a “third domain” of life — single-cell microbes they called archaea — genetically distinct from what were thought to be the only two lineages of life: prokaryotes, which include bacteria, and eukaryotes, which include plants and animals. (It’s O.K., I might have missed the memo, too.)

Missed the memo? If you know the least bit about biology, you know about Archaea. And if you don’t, you shouldn’t be reviewing this book. And there’s this:

But this new knowledge — that we are genetically a mosaic — challenges our conception of human identity. What does it mean to be an “individual,” if we are such composite creatures?

Quammen raises and rushes past these existential questions; like the White Rabbit, he spends some sections in a bit of a mad rush. There’s a “Montana blizzard of facts” he wants to shepherd us through; a dizzying array of scientists, past and present, he must introduce. (Please don’t ask me if I can tell my Norton Zinder from my Oswald Avery.)

This is simple parading of the critic’s ignorance to excuse her inability to discuss the science. It is in fact embarrassing. And she doesn’t grasp the science: there’s not a peep about whether the concept of evolutionary trees are, as Quammen claims, pretty useless.  Seghal’s review is a paradigm for why science books should be reviewed either by scientists or by people who know a fair amount about the science at issue.

Erika Hayden, on the other hand, is qualified to review the book: she’s a science journalist and director of the Science Communication Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. And her review is better than that of Sehgal, although again she doesn’t weigh the evidence for the existence of evolutionary trees; she takes Quammen’s conclusions at face value.

But Hayden has her own beef: she sees the book as antifeminist:

But if Quammen is writing for the ages, his prose at times risks feeling dated. His book spans nearly three centuries and mentions more than 160 scientists by name. Of those, by my count, only 11 are women, and Quammen often dismisses their scientific credentials and achievements or portrays them as appendages to men in the story.

Lynn Margulis, for instance, fundamentally revised our understanding of eukaryote evolution, elucidating how nature’s most complex cells, including our own, arose when simpler cells joined together. She is the only female scientist who is called out and gets significant space in Quammen’s book. But we hear just as much about her pregnancies, motherhood and marriages as we do about her science.

In contrast, Quammen doesn’t really spend equal time exploring the family arrangements of the male scientists in the book. It’s a classic failure of the Finkbeiner test, formulated by the journalist Christie Aschwanden, which posits that a female scientist’s gender is not her most salient characteristic. If scientists’ family lives are important, journalists should write about the families of both male and female scientists. Otherwise, we perpetuate the stereotype that a woman scientist’s primary responsibility is to care for her family, while men should float free from such pedestrian concerns in their pursuit of research.

As for the imbalance between male and female scientists, that simply reflects the gender composition of the field at the time the work was done. In that sense the book is dated, but not unfair.

I reread those sections, and that on Margulis, to see if Hayden had a point, and concluded that she’s wrong. Margulis’s work was discussed in detail, with her science occupying far more space than a few sentences about her family life, including her marriage to Carl Sagan. (The spouses of male scientists aren’t ignored, either, and I don’t think that the women scientists, who are often praised, are given short shrift.) Quammen’s brief mention of Margulis’s family was meant only to show that she accomplished much of her work when she was a single mother of three children and holding down another job, and was meant to laud her accomplishments during a difficult period of her life. (Margulis, of course, was problematic in other ways, being a 9-11 truther, and someone who pushed her theory of endosymbiosis much farther than she should have. She wrote a book on speciation with her son, for instance, that was so bad that it was the only book I’ve ever refused to review for a major venue. It wasn’t even wrong.) In general, then, I don’t agree with Hayden calling out the book for sexism, but you can draw your own conclusions.

Finally, there’s this review from the New Republic (click on screenshot). Gaffney is identified as “a physician and writer with a focus on health care politics, policy, and history. He is an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a pulmonary and critical care physician at the Cambridge Health Alliance.”

 

Gaffney’s review is good for what it is: a recounting of what the book is about. But it again falls short in evaluating Quammen’s thesis, and says only this (besides a long bit on the transfer of antibiotic resistance among bacteria by HGT):

Ultimately The Tree of Life is merely a metaphor, but I think a pleasant one: It connects us to the lineage of all living things, all the way back to the bag of chemicals—or maybe the single molecule—that one day coalesced in the primordial muck. Yet like all metaphors, the “tree” falls short of reality. For in biology, all boundaries are blurred: between species, sometimes even between individual organisms, and probably between the living and the non-living.

No, not all boundaries are blurred. Homo sapiens doesn’t interbreed with any other species of primate, nor do many, many other species. And really, is the line is blurred between, say, Jerry Coyne and Meryl Streep? How? As for the “unreality” of trees, I disagree. So long as species arise from the transformation of populations, usually geographically isolated ones, the history of life is indeed largely treelike. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t be able to reconstruct the history of life. Yet we can!

Now Quammen’s book has its good points. For one thing, it tells you the nitty-gritty about how science is done, complete with rivalries, jealousies, and backbiting. Quammen did his historical homework. And it’s a well-written story. But as you’ll see from my review, I think his report on the demise of Darwin’s tree is greatly exaggerated.

 

h/t: Stephen

KentPresents report: Day 3

August 24, 2018 • 9:30 am

The last day of KentPresents Ideas Festival 2018—a meeting I went to in Connecticut last week—was a great sendoff. (See earlier reports of Day 1 and Day 2). The schedule is here, and I learned earlier in the meeting that the presenter at the first talk, Robert Lang, was a reader of this website (we had a long talk at the speaker’s dinner the first night). What I didn’t know was that he’s also one of the world’s great origami artists, and his talk, a Q&A with biologist Harold Varmus, was called “Origami: The Art and Science from a Master.”  (Lang will take commissions; his website, with many fantastic creations, is here.)

Lang (left) and Varmus in conversation.

Robert showed slides of many of his creations, nearly all made with a single sheet of paper. These days origami artists often use math and computers to design the folding pattern (Robert was a physicist before he realized he could make a living from his beloved hobby), but there’s always an element that can’t be preplanned. Here are some of his works.

A turtle:

Stag beetle:

Praying mantises (in copulo, I think):

Another beetle:

A lovely owl (look at those feet!). Robert goes to Japan to teach people origami; he says that the art was slow to gain acceptance because it started as a pastime for children.

A really hard one: an organist. I’m not sure if this is one piece of paper or more.

This cactus is from a single sheet of paper, and Robert said it was the hardest origami he ever folded. He had it sitting around for eight years as he couldn’t be arsed to keep folding all the spines:

Lang told me that one of the hardest animals to fold is a cat, as it’s hard to capture the essence of the beast in paper. D*gs, in contrast, are dead easy. (See a Lang cat here.)

Here’s a short video from Lang’s website:

As for the science, Lang has used his skills in unexpected ways, for example helping experts design space telescopes that could fold and unfold properly:

. . . and to design a portable kayak that fits in a backpack:

He even showed how one could fold DNA itself (using a method I can’t remember, but the reference is here) into funny shapes:

I missed some of the “North Korea versus the US” talk as I got caught up in a conversation when it had already started, but the discussion featured Nicholas Burns (former U.S. ambassador to NATO and Greece, now a professor at Harvard), Christopher Hill (former Ambassador to South Korea, Iraq, Poland and Macedonia), and David Sanger (chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times and a Pulitzer Prize winner). Hill doesn’t appear to be in the photo, but was apparently replaced, and I can’t recall who replaced him. Nor can I give many details of the talk, but it will be online. In the meantime, the slide behind the discussants paints a grim picture.

One of the best discussions I heard was “Wrongful convictions in the post-DNA era”, featuring Nina Morrison, Ekow Yankah, and Robert Jones. Yankah is a law professor at Cardozo and on the Board of the Innocence Project, an initiative that aims (with great success) at exonerating criminals who have been wrongly convicted. Morrison is the Project’s senior attorney, who has helped exonerate many innocent people, some on death row.  Yankah and Morrison talked for about twenty minutes, and their indictment of the criminal justice system, where prosecutors often ignore exculpatory evidence and defendants, even if innocent, are urged to take plea bargains, was scathing. Many men have had 20 or 30 years cut out of their lives by such bargains, and a disproportionate number are black and can’t afford a lawyer. Overworked public defenders simply can’t give these cases proper attention. The result: imprisonment of the innocent, and racial injustice caused by poverty. 

Morrison (right below, with Yankah on the left) had some gruesome tales about miscreant prosecutors, and it was a fascinating if sobering lesson about the flaws in our justice system:

They then introduced Robert Jones, one of their success stories. Jones was wrongfully convicted at age 19 (the prosecutor willfully withheld exonerating evidence), and was sentenced to life plus 121 years in Angola Penitentiary in Louisiana, one of America’s most horrible prisons. He served over 23 years—in the meantime getting his degree and acting as a jailhouse lawyer—before he was completely exonerated. There’s a civil suit filed in which Jones hopes to collect substantial remuneration for the lost years of his life, and perhaps establish a precedent (not yet existing) in which prosecutors can be made to ante up for engaging in habitual misconduct like withholding evidence on purpose.

As someone who once worked as an expert witness for the lawyers who founded the Innocence Project (I testified against government misuse of the statistics associated with DNA evidence), I was once again reminded at how tilted our justice system is. While there are honest prosecutors, many merely want to get a conviction, for district attorneys are judged on their ability to convict people for horrible crimes. Public defenders, on the other hand, simply need to show that there is reasonable doubt in a prosecutor’s case, and they almost never withhold evidence. I remember how often I had to go up against a prosecution who knew better but was determined to discredit me. They were interested not in justice but a conviction.

At any rate, Jones is on the right below, and gave heartbreaking testimony, sometimes in tears, at how he fought for exculpation and release (somebody else did the crimes of which he was accused). He’s now a judicial activist and speaker. And he got a standing ovation—the only one I witnessed during the whole three-day meeting:

Jerry Saltz, the art critic for New York Magazine and a new Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism, spoke about “The contemporary art world; the good, the bad and the very bad; tips, lessons, and warnings.” (Saltz had agreed with me at Thursday dinner that the Isenheim Altarpiece was one of the world’s best pieces of art.) Since most of the attendees were either gallery owners, collectors, or somehow connected with the art world, Saltz’s talk was directed at them, and he dropped many names that I didn’t know. His talk was akin to a comedy routine—as if Woody Allen was delivering art criticism—and was hilarious in places, but I was unable to discern how Saltz winnowed bad from good art. To be fair, he said that his talks usually last longer than two hours, and he had only 35 minutes.

Saltz:

The last talk I went to, before I delivered my own, was a discussion of “Sexual Harassment and Assault in the #MeToo Era”, featuring Lisa Bloom (civil rights attorney and television presenter), Marjory Fisher (The Title IX Coordinator at Columbia University), and moderator Faye Wattleton (former CEO and President of Planned Parenthood, and a well known feminist activist and speaker).  It was a good discussion, and I don’t think anybody here would disagree with the panel’s conclusion that we need to fight harder against the misuse of power to leverage sexual harassment and assault.

I did have two quibbles with Fisher’s statements (she’s on the left below, with Bloom in the middle and Wattleton at the right): she seemed to favor the current standards for adjudicating harassment/assault cases in colleges, which simply calls for a greater likelihood of guilt than of innocence, whereas I’d favor a stronger standard, more akin to the “beyond reasonable doubt” standard used by the courts. Further, she mentioned Emma Sulkowicz (“Mattress Girl”), a highly publicized case that took place at her university (though not, I think, under Fisher’s watch), implying that Sulkowicz was a victim without mentioning that Sulkowicz’s accused “assailant” was found not culpable by Columbia and the school has given him an undisclosed settlement.  On the other hand, Fisher gave an excellent response to a questioner who asked, “Why does the University have to adjudicate these cases? Why can’t those claiming assault go to the police?” (A: The police can’t do stuff like remove an accused assailant from campus to prevent him meeting the alleged victim).

As I said, I think my own talk went fairly well, and was almost entirely about the evidence for evolution. But several people pushed back on my statement that religion was responsible for creationism, including an angry (and to my mind, misguided) Jesuit priest. I answered with my take on why evolution (and science in general) was incompatible with religion, and recommended that people read Faith versus Fact to learn more.

The wrap-up talk was wonderful: the great jazz musician and composer Wynton Marsalis (founder of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Program) had a conversation with Darren Walker, President of the Ford Foundation. Marsalis would illustrate some of his points by playing the trumpet, accompanied by pianist Sullivan Fortner. Despite his prodigious talent, Marsalis seemed like a really lovely down-home guy, and, drawn out by Walker, told some fascinating tales. He played not only New Orleans style early jazz, but finished by performing one of his own compositions, called “Goodbye”. I made a small video of a snippet, but the whole thing will be on the KentPresents website, and that piece is worth the price of admission. Here’s Marsalis with Walker and a portion of the music.

And goodbye it was—to a great meeting. Thanks to Ben and Donna Rosen, Julia Benedict, and Sam Cournoyer for their invitations and assistance.

Readers’ wildlife photos

August 24, 2018 • 7:30 am

Reader Rik Gern sent a number of photos of opening sunflowers, and they’re lovely. I have too many to post here, but will spread them out over the next few weeks. Here are his notes:

 Here are some pictures for consideration in your Readers Wildlife Pictures collection.

This is more like mildlife than wildlife; these are common sunflowers (Helianthus annuus) that pop up in my back yard every year. I decided to do a series of “portraits” of the flower heads as they transitioned from tight buds to flowers to dried out husks.  I love the fact that something as common as a weed can provide so much beauty, and all for free; all you have to spend is a little time to observe and appreciate.

The pictures were taken with a Canon SD PowerShot 400 and processed in Photoshop CS6.

Friday: Hili dialogue

August 24, 2018 • 6:30 am

I can’t believe the week has flown by so fast: it’s Friday, August 24, 2018, and National Peach Pie Day. Now that’s a fine pie, especially when made with fresh peaches and served warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. It’s also International Strange Music Day.

Breaking news sent by Grania (click on the tweet to go to the article.  The “care home” was run by a Catholic organization, of course:

This is an eerie echo of a similar mass interment at a Catholic institution in Ireland (click on screenshot to go to article):

On August 24, 79 AD, Mount Vesuvias erupted, destoying the cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, Stabiae, and nearly all their inhabitants. However, Wikipedia notes that “this traditional date has been challenged, and many scholars believe that the event occurred on October 24).” To compound the Roman misery of this date, in 410 the Visigoths began their sacking of Rome, and exactly 45 years later the Vandals did the same thing.  On August 24, 1456, the printing of the Gutenberg Bible was completed. This was the first book printed in movable metal type, inaugurating the era of the printed book, which is now beginning to pass. 49 copies of the complete Bible exist; here is one:

On this day in 1891, Thomas Edison patented the motion picture camera, also inaugurating a new age of information (and entertainment). On August 24, 1981, Mark David Chapman was sentenced to 20 years to life for murdering John Lennon. He’s still in jail, having been denied parole ten times.  On August 24, 1989, Pete Rose, manager of the Cincinnati Reds after a long career as a player, was banned from baseball by the Commissioner of the game.  Finally, exactly 12 years ago the International Astronomical Union pulled a fast one, redefining the word “planet” and declaring Pluto a “dwarf planet.” I decry that as ableism. Pluto is just “planetarilly challenged.”

Notables born on August 24 include Max Beerbohm (1872), Duke Kahanamoku (1890), Jorge Luis Borges and Albert Claude (both 1899, Claude a Nobel Laureate in biology), Yasser Arafat (1929), Anne Archer (1947), Tim D. White (1950), Stephen Fry (1957), Cal Ripken, Jr. 1960), and Marlee Matlin (1965).

Duke Kahanamoku was a championship Olympic swimmer and the man who revitalized the ancient Hawaiian sport of surfing. Here he is with his board, equipment that’s changed a lot since this photo was taken in 1920:

And here’s a video biography of Duke: an appearance on the television show “This is your life.”

Notables who died on this day include Thomas Chatterton (1770), Simone Weil (1943), Julie Harris (2013) and Richard Attenborough (2014).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej makes a funny:

Hili: What are these windmills producing when there is no wind?
A: Subsidies.
Hili: Co dają te wiatraki jak nie ma wiatru?
Ja: Subwencje.

A tweet from Heather Hastie via Ann German. The first is a real rarity! “Best wishes, God.”

https://twitter.com/sunkisseeddd/status/1031692823870038016

Tweets from Grania. The first is horrific Facebook practice, and Grania comments,

“Multiple people on Facebook have had pictures of gravestones of loved ones pushed in their faces in recent years by an algorithm that picks a photo from your albums based on the amount of interaction / likes to remind you of, so you would think that this would have warned Facebook not to do something extra tasteless and stupid by adding animations to this weird and pointless function.”

There’s nothing cuter than a pile o’ kittens (except, perhaps, a group of newborn ducks):

https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/1032655066291953665

A lovely Aby:

https://twitter.com/aww_cats/status/1032160442536345600

Poor kitty!

Here are three people on free speech, all on the right side. And that includes Glenn Greenwald:

https://twitter.com/IonaItalia/status/1031854958973530113

Will the Internet make this behavior obsolete?

From Matthew Cobb: A stephanid, or parasitoid wasp. As Wikipedia notes,

Stephanids are noted for their ocellar corona, a semicircular to circular set of projections around the middle ocellus, forming a “crown” on the head.

You can see the lovely video itself here.

 

A sign of the racism that persists in America

August 23, 2018 • 2:39 pm

The story of Emmett Till, a 14-year old black boy from Chicago who was lynched in 1955, is a shameful chapter in American history. Many of you know about it, but I’ll briefly give the salient facts. Till was visiting relatives in Mississippi when the white wife of a local grocery-store owner told locals that Till had entered the store and whistled at her, flirted with her, and grabbed her. (Details vary, and she admitted later that she made at least part of the story up. It may be entirely fabricated.)

Flirting with a white woman was effectively a capital crime in the South at that time, and two white men, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, abducted Till, beat him severely, shot him, and then tossed his body, weighted down with a fan, into the Tallahatchie River. His disfigured corpse was recovered three days later and returned to Chicago for the funeral. His mother, Mamie Till Bradley, insisted on an open-casket viewing so that people could see what had been done to her boy (you can see a photo of the battered body here).  Here is Till’s mother weeping at his coffin:

As for the killers, both were acquitted after a deliberation that lasted barely an hour. (One juror reportedly said, “If we hadn’t stopped to drink pop, it wouldn’t have taken that long.”) In 2017 it was revealed that the woman who accused Till had admitted years earlier to fabricating most of her testimony. After his death and funeral, Emmett Till became a symbol of brutality and oppression of blacks, and was a powerful inspiration for the civil rights movement.

The latest incident, reported by the Washington Post, deals with a sign put up by the Tallahatchie River to commemorate where Till’s body was found. The headline tells the tale (click on the screenshot to see the story):

This is one of eight markers put up at sites connected with Till’s lynching, including the now-dilapidated grocery store where the story began. This marker was torn down ten years ago, and a replacement sign was subsequently shot up with more than 100 bullets. Here’s that sign in 2016:

Another replacement was put up in June of this year, and by July it had been shot up again, as you can see in the picture under the headline. Four bullets had been fired into it only five weeks after it was dedicated. There are plans to put up a stronger, bulletproof sign, one donated by a company from New York.

But I’d leave the shot-up sign standing, and perhaps put another one next to it pointing out the bullet holes. For, as sure as the Sun comes up every day, those who fired bullets into Emmett Till’s memorial are racists, cowards who expressed their bigotry with rifles in the night, just as Till’s murderers did 63 years ago. If you could pick something to show the persistent racism of America, the bullet-riddled sign will do as well as anything.