links for 2010-01-12

This former Guantanamo guard, ashamed of having held innocent men hostage in wretched conditions, tracked down his former prisoners on Facebook to apologize to them. The video interview is great. These former prisoners are just a couple of regular Brits who went to Afghanistan to visit, maybe smoke a little dope…and wound up being accused of being two of the most dangerous men in the world, held captive for two years without evidence or charges, during which they were held in cages and beaten.

This iPhone app simply logs data. Give it a unit of data—a temperature, a height, a weight, a number, whatever—and it will record it, along with the latitude and longitude and the current date and time. You can graph it or export it. It's incredibly simple, but I love the concept. I'd buy it, but I worry I'd use it. A lot.

Somalis took to piracy to drive off illegal commercial fishing trawlers that were depleting their waters of fish, the very fish that Somalis rely on to live. And it's working—fisherman say that there are many more fish now that the trawlers have been scared off.

Somebody asks here if she's the only one who doesn't like talking on the phone. There are over 100 responses, and just about everybody says that they, too, hate talking on the phone. I wonder if this is a new thing, an internet-era change in preferences, or if a lot of people have long disliked talking on the phone?

This critter absorbs chloroplasts from algae, engulfs them within its own cells, and spends the rest of its life eating the energy produced by the chloroplasts when they're exposed to the sun. It's midway through swapping genes with that algae, evolutionarily speaking—they've got photosynthetic genes that they stole from the algae, which they can use to create chlorophyll to resupply their chloroplasts. While totally amazing, that's less amazing than eukaryotic animals, which are much farther down that road. We do the same thing with mitochondria. What was once bacteria, captured by our own cells in the same way as sea slugs, are now passed down to offspring during the reproductive process. The result of this is that, amazingly, mitochondria don't even share our DNA. mtDNA is basically proteobacteria DNA, but living in most every cell in our body.