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Carbs were key in wolves’ evolution into dogs – latimes.com
Long ago, some brazen wolves started hanging around human settlements, jump-starting events that ultimately led to today’s domesticated dogs. Now geneticists say they have identified one of the key changes that turned wolves into the tame, tail-wagging creatures well-suited to living by our sides — the ability to digest carbohydrates with ease.
The report, published online Wednesday by the journal Nature, found signs that dogs can break down starch into sugar, and then transport those sugars from the gut into the bloodstream, more efficiently than can wolves. Comparing dog and wolf DNA, the authors pinpointed several changes in starch and sugar-processing genes that would have made early dogs better able to digest the scraps they scavenged from dumps in early farming villages, helping them to thrive as they gave up the independent life of the pack to entwine their lives with ours.
“That food was obviously the same kind of food that we were eating,” most likely a mix of roots, porridge and possibly bread along with bones containing meat and marrow, said study leader Erik Axelsson, an evolutionary geneticist at Uppsala University in Sweden.
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How I Failed, Failed, and Finally Succeeded at Learning How to Code – Atlantic Mobile
What happened instead is that I burned out after a week. The text itself was dense and unsmiling; the exercises were difficult. It was quite possibly the least fun I’ve ever had with a book, or, for that matter, with anything at all. I dropped it as quickly as I had picked it up.
Remarkably I went through this cycle several times: I saw people programming and thought it looked cool, resolved myself to learn, sought out a book and crashed the moment it got hard.
For a while I thought I didn’t have the right kind of brain for programming. Maybe I needed to be better at math. Maybe I needed to be smarter.
But it turns out that the people trying to teach me were just doing a bad job. Those books that dragged me through a series of structured principles were just bad books. I should have ignored them. I should have just played.
Nobody misses that fact more egregiously than the American College Board, the folks responsible for setting the AP Computer Science high school curriculum. The AP curriculum ought to be a model for how to teach people to program. Instead it’s an example of how something intrinsically amusing can be made into a lifeless slog.
Where I’ve Been (to Feb 2 2013)
Approximate Reading Time: 2 minutes
