Welcome to the 104th edition of the Tangled Bank blog carnival (a biweekly showcase of good biology posts selected by the authors themselves). Rigorous calculations and archaelogical research have revealed that this is the Tangled Bank’s 4th birthday. In the birthday spirit, several people sent appropriately themed presents.

Chris gave some great gifts (with a few caveats); a protien to resist radiation (may cause cancer), an enzyme to live longer, slimmer and stronger (but anti-socially and so far only in mice), and a transcription factor that can reverse skin aging (also in mice).

Even more microbiological gifts came in. steppen wolf wrapped up a nice box of cancer-fighting microRNA while Nimravid added some surprisingly robust bacterial gene networks. Finally, Ed chipped in a giant symbiotic bacteria with 40,000 copies of DNA and some influenza virus (straight from the flu’s tropical Asian source) and I contributed some cancer fighting bacteria.

I’m running out of synonyms for “give” and ways to twist submissions into presents, so let’s leave the birthday party behind and see the rest of the submissions.

First some plant related posts. Ocean Rambles has a bunch of nice pictures of the endangered Garry Oak ecosystem (and spring flowers) on Vancouver Island. Also concerned for plants, rENNISance woman links to the new idea of plant dignity (and a very odd stem cell comment thread).

On cultivated plants, Jeremy warns that relatively little money is being spent on farming research, especially for developing countries that need it most, and urges farmers to stop being pushed around by an agricultural corporation that sounds like the RIAA of farming (plus health effects).

Continuing the topic of corporate machinations, Biotunes describes an article (and personal experience) about bias in medical publications. On the lighter side of medicine, you can play doctor in space with a cool little flash game from the BBC.

Moving on to scheming of the creationist sort, Greg theorizes why physics doesn’t have argumentum ad Nazium documentaries and points out that biology at the molecular scale is difficult to comprehend. Monado gives an example of this difficulty by comparing creationist drawings to a real electron micrograph of a flagellum. Late update: On the topic of pseudoscience, Podblack Cat asks “are women more superstitious?” (and throws in quite a literature review for the topic).

As an antidote to that intelligent design, Alvaro has details on making new neurons and a bunch of interviews of neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists.

Finally, 10,000 Birds (the only returning blog from Tangled Bank #1 [this post if you're curious]) describes coots (the bird, not the elderly).

I hope you enjoyed this Tangled Bank. The next edition is at the Beagle Project. You can email submissions to the hosts directly here or here or to the standard host@tangledbank.net before May 14th. Here’s to four years of biology blogging carnivals and hopefully many more.

MESSENGER Images of Mercury

The Messenger space probe passed by Mercury recently. I hadn’t realized that most of Mercury has never been seen. It’s pretty cool that we get to see images of a new world almost as quickly as the scientists working on it.

That Stupid Bigfoot on Mars

This one has been going around the internet. If you missed it, there’s a rock on Mars near one of the rovers that looks like Bigfoot. The “Bigfoot” thing is pretty silly (although Sasquatch was the first thing I thought when I saw the picture) but that post shows the really cool and huge panorama it came from.

Donald Knuth and LaTeX

I like LaTeX so I found this bit of history about Donald Knuth coming up with the software pretty interesting.

Bioluminescence and Squid Video

I just found out about all these TED talks being online. Pretty handy when you don’t have a TV. This one is about five minutes long and has a bunch of videos of squid, octopuses and things that glow in the depths.

Pulgasari: The North Korean Godzilla

This is another one resulting from not having a TV. Definitely a less than B grade monster movie but it does provide a good comparison to Cloverfield. The story of Kim Jong-Il kidnapping the director and his wife and forcing them to make the thing sounds like a better story than the movie itself (not that it’d take much). For the impatient, there’s decent monster bits around 27:30, 47:30 and 1:03:00.

Soldering Tiny Components

This is a great video tutorial on how to solder tiny electronic components. Really nicely filmed and very closeup. You can really see what’s going on and the guy sure makes it look easy.

NerdKits

A nice idea by a couple college students to sell kits for learning how to use microcontrollers. They “guarantee that you’ll get your first program written and running”. Unfortunately they don’t have a USB version yet. Sort of a homegrown alternative to EasyPic4.

That’s it for now. That was pretty quick and fun to put together so I’ll probably do some more of these in the future. I hope something on there is interesting for other people too.

I was skimming Simon Willison’s blog (I know his uncle) when I came across this cool idea for automatic avatar generation. Well to tell the truth, I took one look at the title “Visual Security: 9-block IP Identification” and deleted the link from my RSS reader but the next day a link based on that idea came up for generating a unique monster avatar for each user that did catch my interest. After all if it’s got monsters, it has got to be interesting.

Anyway it turns out that Don Park decided to use a commenter’s IP address to generate a random (but persistent for each user) geometric image to associate with each user. This means that without needing external images or sites, each user can have a unique picture associated with them. Even better if several sites were to use the same algorithm for generating the image, the image would stay associated with the user across sites without any cross site communication. Andreas Gohr ran with this idea and decided to generate monsters instead of geometric images and use email addresses instead of IP addresses. So that brings the story here, since these two real programmers had already done all the hard thinking and programming, I thought I would make a quick and dirty WordPress plugin to incorporate MonsterIDs easily into other blogs. So here is WP_MonsterID. It’s my first real WordPress plugin so it may not be pretty but it seems to be working OK here (see monsters in the comments below). Edit: If monsters aren’t your thing, I have another plugin using just Don Park’s geometric shapes.

Features

• Monsters
• Dynamically generated avatars for each commenter
• Consistent on any blog
• Gravatar support
• Theme edits no longer necessary

Current Version:

WP_MonsterID v2.12

Installation instructions:

Unzip monsterid.zip. Upload wp_monsterid.php and the monsterid folder. Make sure the monsterid folder is writable. That should be it. Monsters should now appear beside your commenters’ names.

You can add CSS for img.monsterid in your theme’s style.css to adjust the appearance of the images or adjust the size in the MonsterID control panel (your old monsters won’t be deleted until you clear the cache). You can also turn on Gravatar support and clear the MonsterID image cache in the Control Panel.

Tai has translated the installation instructions to Japanese, 5lineas translated them to Spanish, and Dennys has installation tips in Chinese (although these are a bit out of date as of Version 1.0).

Change Log:

• v2.12 05-18-2008:
  • Fixed missing WP 2.5+ builtin avatars
• v2.11 05-17-2008:
  • Fixed recent comment widget double monsters on single pages
  • Added support for WP 2.5+ builtin avatars
• v2.1 03-04-2008:
  • Improved default CSS for MonsterID Recent Comments Widget
  • Added custom CSS editing for widget and MonsterID’s
  • Optimized artistic monsters to only loop through the square region containing the part
• v2.04 2-14-2008:
  • Removed smaller MonsterID option
  • Added Recent Comments (with MonsterID) widget (since default Recent Comment Widget doesn’t provide commenter email)
• v2.02 2-13-2008:
  • Removed monsterid from admin menus when using smaller MonsterIDs
• v2.01 2-12-2008:
  • Add size to img attributes to avoid resizing page as loaded
  • Added option for smaller MonsterIDs on non-post page (like the Recent Comment Widget on the home page)
• v2.0 2-05-2008:
  • Added artistic monsters (thanks to the great artwork of Lemm)
  • Artistic monsters are a bit tough on the server so limited generation time to a max of 5 seconds (unless the user is an admin)
  • Changed to object-oriented monsterid although not completely OOP
  • Added options for greyscale artistic monsters or old fashioned monsters
• v1.02 1-03-2008:
  • Fixed sizing bug (thanks to Daniel)
  • Added size attribute to icons so page doesn’t resize as loaded
  • Removed a couple minor bugs
• v1.01 12-21-2007:
  • Fixed automatic placement in unwanted places (again thanks to Shamus)
  • Switching download link to WordPress Extends
  • Fixed version numbers in plugin file
• v1.0 12-19-2007:
  • Added option to use show gravatars if they exist and fallback to MonsterID
  • Theme edits no longer necessary (doesn’t hurt if you already did edit it) (This and the previous thanks to Shamus’s nice Wavatar plugin)
  • Cleaned up Options page and error checking
  • Caught possible infinite loop if user selects really dark or light body colors
• v0.61 12-12-2007:
  • Changed to wiki pseudocode version of Mersenne Twister
  • Changed bitshifting to mysql queries since many php versions only have 31 bit integers while Mersenne requires 32
  • Sort part lists to keep things consistent on different servers
• v0.6 12-11-2007:
  • Changed to pure PHP version of Mersenne Twister to allow consistent random numbers across servers
• v0.511-14-2007:
  • Added reminder to clear cache after setting options
  • Added option to switch to white outlines for dark backgrounds
  • Added a few minor parts
• v0.42 8-17-2007:
  • Fixed unintended white background on one pair of legs
• v0.41 8-1-2007:
  • Fixed lower limit in monster_mt_array_rand
  • Readded back.png to parts
• v0.4 7-30-2007:
  • MonsterID’s should now be consistent across servers (by changing rand to mt_rand)
  • Now checks the lightness of body color to make sure monsters aren’t too dark
  • Added some more new monster parts and changed the size slightly on a few older ones
  • Minor bug and WP standards fixes
• v0.3 1-25-2007:
  • Added option to make background transparent. Just set the background color to 0 0 0 for Red, Green and Blue. Note that IE6 does not like transparent png and will turn the background grey.
  • Changed get_bloginfo('url') to get_settings('siteurl') to avoid problems when Options > General > Blog address (URI) is not default
  • Added a few new monster parts and increased the size slightly on a couple of older ones
  • Fixed incorrect link in plugin information
  • Increased length of email hash substring used to generate monster. Should increase possible combinations into the billions.
• v0.2 1-23-2007:
  • Important note: Changed base function from build_monster to monsterid_build_monster for WordPress function standards (I don’t suppose there’s any other plugins building monsters out there but better safe).
  • Incorporated Adrean’s new extra monster parts and random body coloring and a few parts of my own.
  • Added a random background coloring and the option to set the coloring in the MonsterID menu.
  • Added a test section to the MonsterID menu.
  • Monster building automatically finds monster parts now so the users can add custom monster parts or delete parts they don’t like.
  • Added option to output only image url to monsterid_build_monster: monsterid_build_monster($comment->comment_author_email,$comment->comment_author,false)
• v0.11 1-21-2007:
  • Got off to a pretty inauspicious start with a faulty wordpress page, a couple of immediate small bugs and a faulty file name.
• v0.1 1-21-2007:
  • First version.

For Advanced Users

If you want more control of where MonsterID’s appear, disable the Automatically Add option and find the comments.php of your current theme (it should be in the folder wp-content/themes/[currentThemeName]/). Open it up and look for something similar to foreach ($comments as $comment). Inside this loop there should be code that displays the comment author’s name or metadata like <p class="comment-author"> or <p class="comment-metadata">. Just before all this enter:
<?php if (function_exists("monsterid_build_monster")) {echo monsterid_build_monster($comment->comment_author_email,$comment->comment_author); } ?>

If you would prefer to base the monsters on the commentor’s IP address instead of the commentor’s email just replace $comment->comment_author_email in the above with $comment->comment_author_IP.

Customization:

If you want to customize the monster parts used in your version of WP_MonsterID just go to the wp-contents/monsterid/parts/ folder and delete any parts you don’t like. If you’d like to add your own parts, there is a Gimp file included in that folder containing a layer for each current part which should make constructing new parts easy. Save the new parts following the same conventions bodypartname_initial(s)#.png (e.g. arms_S1.png). If you come up with any good ones, feel free to send them to me and I’ll include them in the package.