Thingumbobesquire

John Quincy Adams' Prophetic Speech that We Violate at Our Nation's Peril

2012-02-12T08:31:00.000-08:00

"She [America] well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom."

These words delivered by Adams as Secretary of State in 1821 to Congress speak for themselves to anyone left with a scintilla of integrity and perspicacity in this God forsaken land.

Evidence for Uniqueness of Our Solar System in the Milky Way?

2012-02-11T13:11:00.000-08:00

The recent startling discovery that there is a lower percentage of oxygen beyond our solar system's heliosphere from the data analysed from the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) satellite confronts us with the question of whether this unexpected abundance in the solar system might be a precondition for life. One hypothesis is that the solar system may have been formed when it inhabited a more oxygen rich region of the Milky Way. Given that it has there evidence for a correlation for periodic extinction events on earth as the solar system bobs closest to our companion Andromeda galaxy, it seems to me rather premature for astronomer Geoff Marcy to state that this IBEX discovery has no bearing upon the habitability of exoplanets simply because there is plenty of oxygen being produced by stars in the galaxy.

Monetarist Lunacy vs. Physical Economy

2012-02-11T10:23:00.001-08:00

Money does not and can ultimately never equal the production of goods and services which benefits society. Although money is a claim upon these benefits. The proper role of money is to facilitate increasing the productive power of society to sustain itself at ever higher standards of living. When this function is subverted crises result, such as the one we are currently experiencing. What is described here has nothing to do with bettering humanity, precisely the opposite. These types of detrimental gambling games should be abolished just as were the "bucket shops" of yesteryear. Anyone who would argue otherwise is either a fool or charlatan.

Ultrafast Trades Trigger Black Swan Events Every Day, Say Econophysicists

The US financial markets have suffered over 18,000 extreme price changes caused by ultrafast trading, according to a new study of market data between 2006 and 2011

KFC 02/09/2012

22 COMMENTS

On 6 May 2010, shares on US financial markets suddenly dropped on average by around 10 per cent but in over 300 stocks by more than 60 per cent. Moments later the prices recovered.

The event mystified economists because they had never seen anything like it (and have enough trouble explaining the ordinary workings of markets). Econophysicists have since blamed this so-called flash crash on the automated behaviour of ultrafast computer trades, which take place in periods measured in milliseconds.

These kinds of trades appear to generate emergent behaviour that has nothing to do with the actual value of a company. Instead, these events are unavoidable properties of the system itself.

That raises an important question: how can authorities prevent flash crashes and price spikes in which billions of dollars can be won and lost?

The answer is that nobody knows, not least because econophysicists do not yet understand the nature of flash crashes nor how they emerge in complex systems.

Today, however, Neil Johnson at the University of Florida in Miami and a few pals reveal an important insight into what's going on. These guys have found evidence that the behaviour of financial markets changes dramatically on timescales shorter than a certain threshold level. This threshold, they say, is more or less exactly equal to the human reaction times.

The implication is clear. When humans trade and when they monitor the behaviour of machine trading, they can step in to override any unwanted behaviour. In that regime, markets behave in a specific way.

But when human oversight becomes impossible, because the trades take place faster than humans can react, a different behaviour occurs. That's when flash crashes and rises set in.

The evidence comes from Johnson and co's study of stock price movements between 2006 and 2011. These guys looked for extreme changes in a stock price, which they defined as a change greater than 0.8 per cent, over timescales shorter than 1.5 seconds.

Since human reaction times are about a second, this spans the regime when trades begin to occur faster than humans can monitor and react to them.

The first thing they discovered is that flash crashes and rises are not at all rare. Johnson and co found over18,000 of them, that's more than one a day on average. They call them black swan events, using the terminology developed by Nassim Nicolas Taleb in his book The Black Swan.

Curiously, they found that that change in the occurrence of crashes occurs at timescales shorter than 650 milliseconds, while the transition for price spikes occurs at 950 milliseconds.

Johnson and co say this can be explained if humans are more alert to crashes than to price rises. They point out that 650 milliseconds is about the fastest a human can react to any warning sign, so it's no surprise that the transition occurs here for crashes.

Price rises, on the other hand, are usually beneficial and so require no immediate action, which is why the transition in behaviour occurs at slightly longer timescales.

They also say that the ten stocks most susceptible to flash crashes and rises are international banks. This, they say, “hints at a hidden relationship between these ultrafast ‘fractures’ and the slow ‘breaking’ of the global financial system post-2006.”

The work also hints at a solution: to somehow reproduce the effect of human oversight at ultrafast scales. How that can be done with regulation alone isn't clear but there is no disputing the urgency with which this matter should be addressed.

The markets are clearly changing. The need to outperform competitors is currently driving a multibillion dollar investment in machine trading at rates even faster than milliseconds. In one project, traders are financing the construction of a dedicated transatlantic cable that will shave just 5 milliseconds off the time it takes to trade stocks.

Unless it is tackled in the near future, just what kind of behaviour this race-to-the-bottom will generate, is anyone's guess.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1202.1448: Financial black swans driven by ultrafast machine ecology

Why Rembrandt and Not Mannerism Was the True Successor of Raphael

2012-02-05T07:35:00.000-08:00

Just as Beethoven's breakthroughs in contrapuntal composition surpassed even the genius of Mozart, so too Rembrandt's mastery of ironical visual "entrainment" and allegorical use of light went beyond even the artistry of Raphael.

The Florentine Renaissance celebrated man as in the image of a living Creator or "Imago viva Dei." Thus the depiction of an aesthetic physical form for humanity akin to the sculptural Greek ideal of Praxiteles, et al. is quite harmoniously lawful. For the rebirth of such classical forms along with the method of Socratic dialogue from the vantage point of Christianity's opposition to the decadence of the Roman Empire is the essence of what motivated the towering contributions of Nicholas of Cusa. Raphael's opus captures the drama of this ongoing polemical stance of the challenge to the then oligarchical order in Europe.

Just as there was in music an attempt to escape from the zenith of Mozart and Beethoven's implicitly pro American masterpieces into mere showy apolitical chromaticism of Liszt, so the display mere surface illusion of the Mannerists was the equivalent escapism in the visual art of that period.

This is why Rembrandt represented the continuation of Leonardo and Raphael's legacy. For he went further in developing a method of composition the evoked an inner light and beauty of humanity independent from mere outward formal beauty as it struggles to imitate that which is truly divine.

Eatiology: Well Tempered Cuisine

2012-02-05T06:20:00.000-08:00

Eatiology: Well Tempered Cuisine: In response to the Economist's article: "Synaesthesia-- Smells like Beethoven" There is a coherent reason why sound is organized by pitch...

Nobody Here But Us Crackpots

2012-01-31T04:48:00.000-08:00

"Crackpot 'Theory of Everything' Reveals Dark Side of Peer Review"

"A "theory of everything" from a scientist at Case Western Reserve University got a lot of attention for positing that inanimate objects, from planets and water to strands of DNA, are alive. Not only is the assertion bunk, but the scientific and media phenomena surrounding the study reveals how sometimes crackpot ideas can get traction."

These days it's hard to tell the crackpots without a scorecard. How about a multiverse in which an almost infinite number of parallel universes coexist? This is acceptable physics establishment non-crackpot string theory dogma...Sorry for having so little regard for the published "referees" on what constitutes "peer review." It's very hard to see much difference in acceptable crackpottery or the unacceptable. Perhaps though my mind has imperceptibly drifted into another multiverse and I have lost all perspective...

Michelle Obama, Agent Provocateur? Oh My...

2012-01-30T08:47:00.000-08:00

Did Barack perhaps have his wife Michelle in mind when he recently opined thusly: "Nobody envies rich people, everybody wants to be rich. Everybody aspires to be rich, and everybody understands you've got work hard to be successful. That's the American way."

I can only marvel, once again, at the prescience of these Beatles' lyrics:

"Everywhere there's lots of piggies
Living piggy lives
You can see them out for dinner
With their piggy wives
Clutching forks and knives to eat their bacon."

Another Modest Proposal For Misbehaving Physicists

2012-01-30T05:51:00.000-08:00

Sure, I have a suggestion. Since I am certain that this whole braneworld "hypothesis" is pure fantasy, I think it would be helpful for the researchers to smoke some peyote until they can visualize the "little green men" of their braneworld delusion with no other meta-materials required.

Artificial Braneworlds Made to Collide In Lab

Physicists have simulated two universes colliding inside a metamaterial

KFC 01/30/2012
1 COMMENT

One interesting way in which our cosmos may have formed is in a collision between two other universes with extra spatial dimensions called braneworlds.

In this scenario, known as the ekpyrotic model of the universe, our cosmos is just a small four-dimensional corner of a much more complex space.

The ekpyrotic model is interesting because it leads to a flat universe like our own without the need for inflation, the period just after the Big Bang in which our universe supposedly swelled by many orders of magnitude in the blink of an eye.

Without inflation, our universe is just too big to have been formed in a Big Bang-type event. But nobody knows what might cause such a dramatic increase in size. Hence the interest in another way of explaining our existence.

If you're wondering what actually collides in the ekpyrotic version of events, the answer is Minkowski domain walls, essentially the edges of universes with different spatial dimensions.

It's easy to imagine that Minkowski domain walls are entirely theoretical. And indeed they were until now.

Today, Igor Smolyaninov and Yu-Ju Hung at the University of Maryland, in College Park, say they've created Minkowski domain walls in the lab for the first time and even used them to simulate the collision of two braneworlds.

The trick these guys have used is a formal analogy between the mathematics of space time and of electromagnetic spaces. Physicists have known since Einstein's day that it is possible to bend and distort the fabric spacetime—our universe appears to be distorted in just this way on various cosmic scales.

But it is only in the last ten years or so that they've learnt how to do the same on a much smaller scale with electromagnetic spaces. What's triggered this is the development of metamaterials: artificial substances that can bend light in almost any way imaginable.

Smolyaninov is fascinated by one version of this stuff called hyperbolic metamaterial. Inside this substance, monochromatic light propagates in a similar way to massive particles in a Minkowski spacetime, where one spatial coordinate takes on the role of time.

Hyperbolic metamaterials are essentially a series of metal layers separated by a dielectric. Smolyaninov has used this stuff to simulate a number of interesting aspects of cosmology including the Big Bang itself.

The collision between universe's is a variation on this theme. “The “colliding universe" scenario can be realized as a simple extension of our earlier experiments simulating the spacetime geometry in the vicinity of big bang,” he says.

He simulates an expanding universe using concetric rings of gold separated by a dielectric. "When the two concentric ring (“universe”) patterns touch each other (“collide”), a Minkowski domain wall is created, in which the metallic stripes touch each other at a small angle," he says.

Being able to recreate these exotic events in the lab is certainly interesting but it is beginning to lose its novelty. The problem is that this work is not telling us anything we didn't know--the universe behaves the same way inside a metamaterial as it does outside.

What Smolyaninov needs is a way of using his exotic materials to do something interesting. In other words, he needs a killer app. Any ideas?

European Financial Oligarchs Seek Great Wall of Money at Great Wall of China?

2012-01-29T11:05:00.000-08:00

"China Closer To Bailing Out Europe" reads a headline from Forbes toady. The article goes on:

"China is closer to bailout out Europe, China Daily reported from Davos on Switzerland.

The leaders of Denmark and Finland said China is “willing” to contribute to International Monetary Fund efforts to bail out debt-ridden southern Europe, within limits. Speaking at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, prime minister of Denmark, and Finnish Prime Minister Jyrki Tapani Katainen stressed the need for China and the European Union to cooperate on some form of bailout from the IMF.

Both sides are “in the same boat”, according to Katainen. “China will suffer from the worsening economic situation in Europe, and vice versa, so it would be good for China to use part of its foreign reserves surplus through the IMF to finance countries in trouble. This would not be free. It would always be conditional,” he said.

Song Zhe, who until about a month ago was China’s ambassador to the EU, said: “China will never be absent when it comes to global efforts to rescue debt-ridden European countries."

So it would seem that these delusional financier chaps seems to think they will somehow get their aforementioned wall of money by begging at the Great Wall of China. They have just now managed to provide China (and Russia) a gift of exclusive Iranian oil. One supposes they will use a similar tactic they were ever so successful with Iran, i.e. "Give up or we will shoot ourselves in the head!"

A theodicy that coheres with science

2012-01-28T13:52:00.000-08:00

Given the rash of recent ballyhoo in the media regarding the so called Anthropic Principle versus atheism, I wish to propound a simple observation. To wit: the issue of the proof of a Creator is indissolubly part and parcel of the advancement of science, period. G.W.F. Leibniz' opus being the case in point. Newton, on the other hand is a mere cat's paw for the sorcerers of the black nobility.

The question is whether in this almost infinitesimally minute segment of of space and time we refer to as human history, it has been sufficiently demonstrated by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, et al. that no matter how much we discover the inner workings and interrelationships of the physical, biophysical, noetical domains, there will forever continue to be more to discover. This is the only coherent and valid sense that one can claim any intuition of infinite extension. Everything else as far as a putative cosmology is concerned, including such masturbatory whoppers as the stringy landscape, is pure phantasmagoria.

Who believes in time travel?

2012-01-28T13:50:00.000-08:00

The quantum mechanics of time travel through post-selected teleportation

Seth Lloyd, Lorenzo Maccone, Raul Garcia-Patron, Vittorio Giovannetti, Yutaka Shikano

(Submitted on 15 Jul 2010 (v1), last revised 19 Jul 2010 (this version, v2))

This paper discusses the quantum mechanics of closed timelike curves (CTC) and of other potential methods for time travel. We analyze a specific proposal for such quantum time travel, the quantum description of CTCs based on post-selected teleportation (P-CTCs). We compare the theory of P-CTCs to previously proposed quantum theories of time travel: the theory is physically inequivalent to Deutsch's theory of CTCs, but it is consistent with path-integral approaches (which are the best suited for analyzing quantum field theory in curved spacetime). We derive the dynamical equations that a chronology-respecting system interacting with a CTC will experience. We discuss the possibility of time travel in the absence of general relativistic closed timelike curves, and investigate the implications of P-CTCs for enhancing the power of computation.

I believe the probability of being paid for purveying similar arrant non-sense may be calculated in a Monte Carlo simulation that would operate as a perpetuum mobile money making machine. Oh, sorry I forgot about the so-called "rocket scientist" quants on Wall Street that gave us the exotic derivative products. Hmm... is it just chance or could there be a connection here?

Gang/Countergang

2012-01-28T13:46:00.000-08:00

The colonialist "great game" that Jonathan Swift lampooned in the Lilliputian chapter of Gulliver's travels of gang/countergang manipulation of tribal conflicts is the social control mechanism of choice of the multinational resource cartels(the new face of colonialism, but the same oligarchic families that were in control before.)

Big Bad Wolf and "Wall of Money" a Twisted Fairy Tale

2012-01-28T12:59:00.000-08:00

This from today's NY Times:

"DAVOS, Switzerland — World leaders turned up the pressure on Europe on Saturday to erect a more formidable wall of money against the sovereign debt crisis, warning that the euro zone continues to pose a severe threat to the global economy."

What, pray tell, is a "formidable wall of money?" Is it delivered by the wheelbarrow full like it was in Germany in the last century? Or from a helicopter by Ben Bernanke like the water for dousing a raging fire? Or perhaps the little piggies are going to build their financial houses out of walls of money, but what if the big bad wolf of inflation huffs and puffs and blows their houses down? What then NY Times piggies?

Have you seen the little piggies

at the NY Times?

Repeating piggy lies--
Clutching forks and knives to eat your bacon...

(With apologies to George Harrison)

Curious Poe Quote Attacking Free Trade and Literary Piracy

2012-01-28T11:19:00.000-08:00

"And in literature, as in piracy, the free trader always "runs up" the best at his fore; but had we done this, we should blush at our own impudence in knowing that we had been guilty of one of the most bare-faced pieces of literary swindling of modern days."

Perhaps, dear reader, this somewhat now historically blurry allusion requires some passing note of explanation. You see, the recent 1812 war with Britain which Poe's grandfather, who had been a quartermaster general and dear friend to Lafayette, in his eighties had lately fought in, was all about the British doctrine of "free trade" "impressment" of American sailor citizens as British property. Back then, Poe's audience would have immediately made the connection. For HRH East Indies Company was quite rightly reviled by American patriots such as Poe. The Chinese bore the brunt of Great Britain's geopolitical game then by being forced, in the guise of free trade, to submit to the shipment and infliction of the opium trade from Britain's Indian colony upon its haplessly addicted populace. That is until they declared war...Further, it was the Boston Brahmins with their Yankee clipper ships, the kissing cousins of our enemy in that war, that cried ever and anon for a piece of that very same free trade piracy. Not only this, dear reader, but the very same who were sponsors of sundry radical literary pursuits that Poe continuously decried. Especially the Young America cabal in and around Boston that Poe referred to as Frogpondians. (The very same Young Americans that later supported the confederacy. The article from which the above quote is taken refers to the slanderer of Poe, one Rufus Griswold, who pretended to oppose the Young America "movement.")

Unfinished Thingumbob Rhyme During the Late London Riots: What Are My Bids Sothebys?

2012-01-28T06:27:00.000-08:00

London Town is burning down
But Lords and Ladies never quail
If rot and ruin do them assail
They may rue to move from town

More Tales of the Grotesque

2012-01-28T06:00:00.000-08:00

Sir, If you find Leonardo raving about alchemical sorcery anywhere, then perhaps you have a point. Until then, please be aware that the quackery of Newton's "dot" calculus fraud, his stealing from Hooke's mere reworking of Kepler's discovery of the laws of gravity, and his sponsors' motives for keeping Leibniz out of England are well known to those of us who cannot be fooled all of the time.

To former students and other friends in the Washington, DC area. I would love to see you at the lecture,

Patterns in Creativity: Leonardo and Newton – Corcoran Gallery of Art.

on December 7 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. These two transformative geniuses share many traits, and differ in many others.

I plan to weave into the talk the late “Great Steve Jobs,” who died two months ago and is already on the fast track to achieving secular Sainthood.

Many would consider it insane to speak of Jobs in the same breath as Leonardo or Newton, and, of course only time will tell if Jobs’s contributions come anywhere near those of Leonardo and Newton. Because of the unprecedented pace in the development of information technology, however, hundreds of millions of individuals have already seen his influence. His personality was more like that of Newton — confident, irascible, recalcitrant, remorseless, and unable to suffer fools well — but unlike Newton, he was not reclusive. I plan to use my iPad connected to a projector to show slides, and my iPhone as a remote to control the iPad. IF these two device are unable to ‘recognize’ each other, I will be the first to demote Mr. Jobs.

All Secrets Revealed

2012-01-27T07:44:00.000-08:00

"Serious Flaw Emerges In Quantum Cryptography"

"The perfect secrecy offered by quantum mechanics appears to have been scuppered by a previously unknown practical problem, say physicists."
The secret is-- the only thing that these fine mathematical fellows have worth concealing is not worth a farthing. It, like Ozymandias' statue, will be stone cold dead 'neath the sands of time ere long ...A grave secret indeed.

Foreign Entanglements Are Killers

2012-01-26T21:39:00.000-08:00

Remember Kissinger? (The same beknighted (sic) Sir Henry who ominously just held court with Vladimir Putin.) The one (and perhaps only) thing that Christopher Hitchens had right was his aim to indite Henry for war crimes. Rios Montt, currently on trial for genocide, was a Kissinger project, for instance, one among a whole host, really. (Not to say that Heinz really cared about Oliver North and the Full Gospel Men's Fellowship, except perhaps to escape from his wife Nancy) But why go into details? It's all out there for anyone who cares to let their fingers do the searching.

There is a sound reason that George Washington was not sucked into Thomas Jefferson's soft spot for the blood thirsty enragée mobs in France. Alexander Hamilton was wise to the snares of the Empire's geopolitics. He saw through the bait that was being used to morally destroy the fledgling Republic...An easy monkey jar target for dumb colonial backwoods utopians by the likes their ever so literary utopian pro sans-culottes varieties in jolly olde England, like Wordsworth, the man of plain English and the mob. You see it really doesn't matter which side you are on in the geopolitical great game, so long as the United States gets sucked into the quagmire flavor of the day. And the raison d'état is eroded.

This is why that failed haberdasher Truman was such an easy mark for bombing Hiroshima and setting off Churchill's iron curtain world government gambit of mutually assured destruction of Dr Strangelove Kissinger. This is what Viet Nam was all about: a nice little colonial bloodletting every now and again lifts the spirits. And now under the big top, for your entertainment, we have Al Qaeda. Let's see if we can stampede the ugly (and dumb) Americans to give up their constitution, shall we? (Obama, so far is doing splendidly, but we must have insurance, just in case. There's always the Israeli nuclear option, don't you know, for the Armageddon loving Bible belt Republicans.) See how those nice Libyan and Iraqi chaps we installed of late, are wallowing in blood and gore. Capital, that. Doesn't really matter which party is in (big enders or little enders) in the end as long as we can count on the Empire telling them who the "bad guys" are this time. Certainly not their most special relationship British cousins bearing gifts like drugs and that old fashioned Rock and Roll. Pay no attention to that man behind the geopolitical curtain...

Yet More Arrant Gobbledygook

2012-01-25T03:50:00.000-08:00

Talk about inscrutable patois of ivory tower quakademia. Here is but a small sample of their nonsensical newspeak. Now, it's not that one can't decode such psycho-babble easily enough --this is a latter day apology for the "democratic party" juridical inquisition and murder of truth. Which is to say that of Socrates and Christ.

" Self-interest frequently causes individuals engaged in joint enterprises to choose actions that are counterproductive. Free-riders can invade a society of cooperators, causing a tragedy of the commons."

Awakening From the Magic Spell: A Work in Progress

2012-01-24T22:36:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, yours truly, is driven by a seemingly ungovernable impulse to set forth...even well past a reasonable hour. The difference between "getting" something about the hidden wellsprings that "make history" and merely behaving like a sightseer "viewing events" as a sort of hobbyhorse pastime (or perhaps, which is in essence the same thing, as a tenured profession) is like lifting a veil of cherished yet unexamined illusions.

Such is the stuff of mind control. Why does a Svengali or Mesmer hold such a fascination? Because dear hearts, at the root of civilization lies some very basic and unchanging principles. Most of us are continuously being snookered by the likes of modern day P.T. Barnums. This is why the fulsome questioning of one's assumptions as a society by what Leibniz called the principle of sufficient reason is always and necessarily transformative for that very same society. Just as there is for one's own life a method of vicariously undoing the missteps made and recovering a purpose and mission, so too with peoples and nations.

This is why the process of discovering truth is immortal. Further, it is the only meaning of immortality that is not mythical. For either we are in thrall to the mistaken and superstitious belief that society is inescapably governed by "them" (i.e. the Empire of-- fill in your chosen "opinion of who "they" are) or we awake and escape from the control of the puppet masters in the cave that Plato immortally limned once upon a time.

For the experimental creation of social movements upon these American shores is whether it is the Transcendentalism, Ayn Rand, or the Hippies is always for the simple reason to return us to "mother" Great Britain. Because there is only self government for the benefit of as yet unborn generations or there is the empire of the manipulated mind ((and perhaps one surfeited with "pleasurable" pastimes like being a sightseer at one's own (and one's country's) demise.))

Denying these quite simple truths herein is only a form of rather muted hysteria for some of the people some of the time.

A Modest Suggestion

2012-01-24T07:57:00.000-08:00

"How Neutrons Might Escape Into Another Universe"
"The leap from our universe to another is theoretically possible, say physicists. And the technology to test the idea is available today"

Regarding the headline above, as a layman, dear reader, may I make a modest suggestion? I believe to find an alternate universe instead of a neutron bottle, a crystal ball or Ouija board would be more apropos...and perhaps some peyote.

Good Science Bad Politics

2012-01-23T10:56:00.000-08:00

Everything goes through the PC lens of climate change change these days. Sort of like the the cosmological gravitational lens, it creates spots in the front of your mind...Reminds one of traveling to a cave to have a very disturbed wild girl pronounce gibberish because of fumes from poisonous gases and call her an oracle. Anyway on the front of ATP some progress is for real. By the bye, I only use Michelangelo's depiction because it was the one state of mind knew.

Rape of Boudicca

2012-01-22T15:40:00.000-08:00

Don't really know why I picked up this historical bit o' bric o' brac unless it has something to do with my allergy to "Great" Britain....If only your defenders--Pefide Albion!,--knew what a rape of America they commit by defending your "charm." They would surcease from sorrow. (With all due apologies to all and sundry.)

That's Entertainment

2012-01-22T10:21:00.000-08:00

The Superbowl mania is rather reminiscent of Walpurgisnacht. Scream your heads off fanatics it's the American way...that and Beatlemania

The Imp of the Paradox: President without a Country

2012-01-22T09:54:00.000-08:00

It is reported Obama must prove he is a citizen in a Georgian court before Judge Malihi. But can a President rightfully claim citizenship who has just signed away the constitutional guarantee of a citizen's right to Habeus Corpus? Doesn't this make him a man without a country? Would Obama have accorded the right to a fair trial at Nuremberg for crimes of genocide of the Nazis? Churchill (who ordered Obama'a grandfather to be tortured) wanted no trial; instead the Act of Attainder like today's NDAA was urged by him. What would Justice Robert Jackson think of the promulgation of the NDAA?

Even Miguel Cervantes' Sancho Panza as governor of an imaginary island knew better how to employ mercy than Obama...

Yes Virginia, the Roman Pantheon Was Purified Evil

2012-01-22T07:54:00.000-08:00

Remarkable that a civilization that had such a refined degree of inventiveness could at the same time devolve into such a thoroughly evil empire.

Looking Inside a Reconstructed Roman God

By Susan Lansing Maish and Eduardo P. Sánchez on January 19, 2012 under Antiquities, Behind the Scenes, Conservation, Getty Villa, International, J. Paul Getty Museum

The J. Paul Getty Museum and the Bibliothèque nationale de France are collaborating on the research and conservation treatment of the Berthouville Treasure, the extraordinary Roman silver hoard from the Bibliotheque’s Cabinet des Médailles.

Antiquities curator Kenneth Lapatin with in the antiquities conservation studio at the Getty Villa with the statuette of Mercury from the Berthouville Treasure (Roman, 100 B.C.-A.D. 200. Silver, 14 5/8 in. high. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des monnaies, médailles et antiques, Paris).

Almost one hundred objects arrived at the Getty Villa in December 2010, and technical examination, analysis, and photography of the individual artifacts continued throughout 2011.

One of the most intriguing objects is a small silver statuette, about 14 inches high, of Mercury, the Roman god of travel and commerce. The statuette was found in fragments, which were entrusted in the 19^th century for restoration to Alexi Joseph Depaulis, a well known artist who worked in metal.

Knowing what has been done to the sculpture over the years, and what is inside it, is the first step in understanding how to properly conserve it. Close visual analysis along with X-radiographs have revealed much about this history.

X-rays revealed that Depaulis employed an armature of small metal rods with twisted wire. Wax was used to construct a stable support structure to hold the individual silver fragments. Analysis by our colleagues at the Getty Conservation Institute has established that the wax is natural beeswax.

Our study also suggests that the silver used to create the Mercury statuette was manufactured by hammering silver to a thin gauge sheet, but the left hand is solid and seems to have been made separately and to have been attached to the wrist of the right arm by sliding its wrist portion into the hollow arm. Traces of gilding on the wings of the god’s helmet are also preserved. The support rods appear to be solid and stable, so we have no plans to remove them.

Our work on this statue was one of what we hope to be many more interesting findings with this project.

Tags: antiquities conservation, Berthouville Treasure, Mercury, silver

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One comment

Thingumbobesquire
January 22nd, 2012 at 7:49 am
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Remarkable that a civilization that had such a refined degree of inventiveness could at the same time devolve into such a thoroughly evil empire.

Wherein Thingumbob Answers the Ludicrous Charge that Poe Hated Boston

2012-01-21T08:38:00.000-08:00

Dear madam,

I'm afraid you err in thinking that somehow Edgar Poe hated the city of Boston. What he disdained were the Boston Brahmins (the predecessors of today's Vault.) Especially the idle rich that took up ignominious literary fads (and plagiarism.) Boston was the epicenter of our revolution, as such, Poe being a thoroughgoing self professed patriot would have nothing against Beantown per se--only it's later becoming (along with Newburyport traitors) the staging ground for the despicable Tories that became the junior partners of our enemy's British East Indies Company in forcing opium consumption upon hapless victims in China.

Yours truly,
Thingumbob Esq.

The Race for the Presidency: The Bathetic Versus Tragedy

2012-01-20T03:36:00.000-08:00

Currently, we are witnessing the lawful collapse of an unreal facade in America. While the world hurtles toward thermonuclear incineration like a patient in a coma, seemingly unable to alter the governing belief in the sanctity of mere fictitious money, we are nightly salaciously entertained by the tawdry send up a la Hollywood of the Presidential race. Newt Gingrich was apparently blithely unaware of his unintended irony when he proclaimed in last night's debate that the media by its fixation on lurid scandal makes it impossible for a serious candidate to enter the race...Ah, but some people will brook any sort of egregious humiliation for fame and mere money. Right Newt? Right Barack?

Oh yes, Barack--let's not forget him as he performed at the Apollo on stage that very same night a bar or two of falsetto. Oh, how many times he must have preened before the bathroom mirror and sung those lines to himself, perhaps with one of his daughters tittering in the hallway. This the man who wantonly sees fit to rip up the constitution to remake America in the image of our only real adversary Great Britain. They have their Official Secrets Act, we now have the NDAA. Habeus Corpus is dead and so with it our Constitution. We should all have Ben Franklin's warning ringing in our ears, except that we are so besotted with bling and circuses, that most of us haven't a clue as to what exactly he warned...Many years ago there was a popular counter cultural comedy troop called Firesign Theater and one of the titles of their albums has presciently come home to roost,as it were: We are All Bozos on this Bus. But now we need off this magic bus so tragically careening into the abyss.

Real Science for a Change

2012-01-18T03:51:00.000-08:00

To this I say: bravo. As I have noted the remarkable feature of the ATP synthase engine in the past is that it rotates clockwise or counterclockwise for aerobic or anaerobic synthesis for the creation of cellular free energy. Now, a new feature is discovered that this wonderful enzyme also is capable of switching from use of ionic hydrogen and sodium at the extreme thermodynamic boundary condition in the "methanogenic archaeon Methanosarcina acetivorans." It is precisely in the study of these types of such extreme anomalous domains that true scientific progress is secured.

Promiscuous archaeal ATP synthase concurrently coupled to Na⁺ and H⁺translocation

+Author Affiliations

^aMolecular Microbiology and Bioenergetics, Institute of Molecular Biosciences, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, 60438 Frankfurt am Main, Germany;
^bTheoretical Molecular Biophysics Group, Max Planck Institute of Biophysics, 60438 Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and
^cCluster of Excellence ”Macromolecular Complexes,” 60438 Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Edited* by E. Peter Greenberg, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, and approved December 2, 2011 (received for review September 27, 2011)

Abstract

ATP synthases are the primary source of ATP in all living cells. To catalyze ATP synthesis, these membrane-associated complexes use a rotary mechanism powered by the transmembrane diffusion of ions down a concentration gradient. ATP synthases are assumed to be driven either by H⁺ or Na⁺, reflecting distinct structural motifs in their membrane domains, and distinct metabolisms of the host organisms. Here, we study the methanogenic archaeon Methanosarcina acetivorans using assays of ATP hydrolysis and ion transport in inverted membrane vesicles, and experimentally demonstrate that the rotary mechanism of its ATP synthase is coupled to the concurrent translocation of both H⁺ and Na⁺across the membrane under physiological conditions. Using free-energy molecular simulations, we explain this unprecedented observation in terms of the ion selectivity of the binding sites in the membrane rotor, which appears to have been tuned via amino acid substitutions so that ATP synthesis in M. acetivoranscan be driven by the H⁺ and Na⁺ gradients resulting from methanogenesis. We propose that this promiscuity is a molecular mechanism of adaptation to life at the thermodynamic limit.

Attack on Randomness from an Emergent "Kant Wholist?"

2012-01-16T04:28:00.000-08:00

In the category of history repeating itself as farce emerges upon my desk(top) today a rather peculiar arxix.org paper. "No entailing laws, but enablement in the evolution of the biosphere." Note the use of the word "biosphere." Nowhere does the author credit Verdnadsky the inventor of the concept. This is a "tell' Is the author(s) Mr Kaufman , et al. even aware from whence that term derives? Not from his portentous hero Immanuel Kant, that much is certain. Leave aside the jarring read for anyone slightly familiar with the English language who inwardly must wryly smile that this trio of estimable and serious emergent theorists do not know that the singular of dice is die...But never say die, (forgive me) they clumsily sally forth. Here's a neologism emergent screamer of a word "unprestatable." One must pause to rub one's eyes like the stout Cortes!

Did you know that in Kant's salon a favored special guest was the lunatic hoaxer Swedenborg? I may have in these pages renounced randomness as jiggery pokery, yet nota bene thst Mr. Poe (inter alia) had already pre-disposed (to coin a word) of such Kant--for all this paper does in the end is drop upon the all unsuspecting public complete and utter undigestable twaddle from the emerging Kant whole.

Navalny: An NED Used Up Man

2012-01-15T06:03:00.000-08:00

"Swat aliens like flies?" Really? Is this the best that the National Endowment for Democracy, after having spent millions of taxpayers dollars, let alone whatever George Soros slushed in, that they can come up with? What a moronic joke.

MED hit man Navalny comparing aliens to swatting flies. America is this a good way to spend your hard earned tax dollars?

John Lennon "Devil's Own Child" versus Jimmy Carter

2012-01-14T16:24:00.000-08:00

Little Richard called John Lennon the "devil's own child" after he claimed to have urinated from his hotel window in Hamburg on nuns passing by. Lennon later reportedly renounced his peace and love gig during the presidency of the born again "I have sinned in my heart" Jimmy Carter.

An associate of mine in 1975 during Carter's presidential primary campaign confronted Jimmy on his ties to Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission of Henry Kissinger et al.. Jimmy abruptly said he never heard of that and proceeded to smilingly autograph the New Solidarity newspaper being waved at him. Later, he appointed only members of said commission to his cabinet. Carter was what used to be known as an idiot savant (today we call this autism spectrum disorder: (shout out to my PC son.)) One fine day, for no apparent reason, Jimmy began to belt out a list of diseases--So you decide, who was more screwed up Jimmy Carter or John Lennon? Certainly our country is still rockin' and reelin' ...

Newton's Alchemy Apologists Unmasked

2012-01-14T13:05:00.000-08:00

The discovery by Keynes that Isaac Newton was a dedicated kook in extremis is always rather blithely dismissed by his adulators with a wink by the pat formula that they were all doing magic nonsense back then. Hmm...really? Was Newton's adversary Leibniz a benighted necromancer as well? Hardly. In fact, read his point by point refutation of John Locke's "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" and you will find just the very opposite.

On the other hand, if you have the stomach to read the lengthy tome The Anatomy Of Melancholy by Robert Burton, you will laugh at all sorts of malarkey about magic stone cures, Rosicrucianism and witchery ad nauseum. See Keats Eve of St Agnes. Rather like the new age kookery from the hippies decades ago. Did you know that Edmund Spencer's Fairie Queene was inspired by Kabalistic magic, and that Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice scene of the choosing of the caskets is right out of the Cabalistic legerdemain. The marriage counselor of Henry VIII was the Venetian Cabalistic monk Giorgi, aka Zorzi (he read auras.)

Leibniz attacked Newton's magical belief that the universe was set into motion by a fatherly clock maker who must then stand back and impotently watch the entropic magical action at a distance mayhem ensue. Descartes' momentum he proved is not equivalent to force. Descartes and later Grassman's vision of a manifold of empty space where we can only describe an algebra that locates mere dead points. The very belief today that according to the much worshiped Second Law of Thermodynamics humanity is doomed to run out of energy and that technology is evil is the epitome of cultish kookery today centered where? In the "British" monarchy's Worldwide Fund for Nature (which really isn't English at all, Leibniz in fact would have been prime minister for the Electress of Hanover, Sophie Charlotte upon her succession, had she lived) --that's where! So now Greenpeace and green this and green that and earth this and earth that are called science. Gaia worship is all it is. The same crowd that subverted Vernadsky's rigorous evolutionary concept of Noosphere Teilhard de Chardin. The same lunacy of the futurologists singularity Omega point garbage that wag Newt Gingrich's mouth. And who pray tell was the biggest addicted opium eater (laudanum back then) of them all old boy? Queen Victoria that's who.

Friday follies

2012-01-13T06:22:00.000-08:00

From a political blog today:

"So whaddaya think: should we put truthtelling back up there at number one?"

This question, I can only presume, is quite deliberately tongue in cheek, right?

Bravura Performance by Ever Wiley Shimon Peres

2012-01-13T03:51:00.000-08:00

From today's Jerusalem Post:

"President Shimon Peres on Thursday denied that Israel was involved in the killing of a nuclear scientist in Iran on Wednesday. During an interview with CNN, Peres was asked whether Israel was involved in the killing of a university professor and department head of a uranium enrichment facility in Tehran to which he answered: "Not to the best of my knowledge."

""I know that it is fashionable that whatever wrong happens in Iran, it is the United States and Israel. There is nothing new in this approach," said Peres."

Reviewing these few comments delivered apparently off the cuff by Mr. Peres, one might easily have missed the exceptional irony therein. I believe that these words were chosen with a very high degree of precision to deliver a very intentional message. The key phrase is "whatever wrong happens in Iran..." Now my question is does Mr. Peres truly believe that this killing is something that "went wrong?" Isn't that a somewhat ambiguous and rather curious turn of phrase? And look at the masterful pairing of "the United States and Israel" following hard upon the heels of that said extreme ambiguity. Thus I think my title dubbing this as a bravura performance that only someone of Mr. Peres' proven ability to weather all political vicissitudes is capable.

Scientists recreate evolution of complexity using 'molecular time travel'

2012-01-09T03:48:00.001-08:00

The real issue is that mere pairwise mechanical interaction in supposed entropic space and time cannot account for the willful noetic identity of mankind.

Barack Insane Obama, Tebowing, and HRH Rocketman

2012-01-09T03:29:00.000-08:00

Obama would be quite happy, I would think, were he to spend the rest of his days on a basketball court at some nondescript mental institution...dribbling. Here is a man who carries out the invidious mission of ending the manned space program and average Joe six pack hardly notices. Instead we watch football on bigger and crisper boob tubes, or is it 3D LEDs or plasmas? All to make the world go away. And, if that weren't enough, to make matters worse, we are force-fed the crisp anti technology lyrics of Sir Elton John 24 hours a day.

What Did Mr. Shakespeare Actually KNOW About Machiavelli?

2012-01-08T18:11:00.000-08:00

"When first we practice to deceive"
Niccolo Machiavelli was one of the foremost partisans of the future American experiment (whether he knew it or not.) It is undeniable, for any fair reading of his "The Prince," inter alia, that Niccolo was squarely on the side of humanity. For-- the abject idiocy of set piece warfare slaughter, according to Hoyle, as it were, old chap, had come a cropper.--Merely mow the red rapscallions down from behind the thickly forested New World "City on the Hill." Easy pickin's, eh what?
But for Shakespeare, Machiavelli, that evil malevolent angel, was downright pure calculated evil. It is simply too easy to pooh-pooh Shakespeare's supposed insouciance literary licence in this instance as just the touch of dumb stage management, as it were...He, just picking up on the dumb touchstone of popular opinion then reigning. Really? Shakespeare-- forgiven as literally all too naive? He, the king of the double and even triple entendres-- simply a babe in the woods? Hmm... hard to believe, somehow.
But what if the vaunted literature of ye Jolly Olde England be tainted be with the whiff of something else?
To be continued... with p'raps my head tucked underneath my arms, if I know what's good for me...

My Midnight Confession

2012-01-07T16:51:00.000-08:00

Your honors: it being only 6PM or so EST, (let alone GMT) that title above must be forgiven as "poetic license" I pray, if it so please your honors, begging your pardon.

Here goes. How comes it that we baby boomers-- thrust out naked-- a la Schopenhauer, as it were, into the brave new world, as we were, have all seriously collectively "come a cropper?" Harrumph says I (if my trusty spell checker be not awry on that word.) Could there be some telltale anti-genetical predisposition p'raps...some non-Mendelian inheritance a la Big Mama psychology? Whatchamacallit in the argot of tenure-dumberer babble designated as "epigenetics?" Hold onto your Google cursors ye twits, if ye know what's good for ye...

Well, if I haven't just witnessed the biggest whitewash (tho' Robert E. Lee was namedas role model, if but in passim) ever. A PBS, la dee da ((generic historical Ken Burns (huckster, dare I say, extraordinaire) inspired insipid piano quasi-patriotic mood music biopic)) on Harry S Truman, the man without a middle name, tho' they left that minor (see no period on letter S, yet why is he accorded one on PBS?) detail out.

(In his autobiography, Truman stated, "I was named for ... Harrison Young. I was given the diminutive Harry and, so that I could have two initials in my given name, the letter S was added. My Grandfather Truman's name was Anderson Shippe [sometimes also spelled 'Shipp']Truman and my Grandfather Young's name was Solomon Young, so I received the S for both of them.) (Sorry, dear heart the Wikipedia has at least this tale of forgotten lore right, tho' it pains me to aver...)

Now Harry was the biggest middlin' flop/bankrupt that ever was 'til he got picked up as a "war hero" for screaming at the dough-boys in that "war to end all wars" to "stop running you Irish sons of bitches" by boss Pendergass. (Which by no mere happenstance became S's favorite cuss word (SOB.)

So, after watching this mealy mouthed and mawkish tribute to "give em hell Harry" the patsy of Fritz Kissinger's and Robert MacNamara's Starngelovian M.A.D.-- Hiroshima and Nagasaki A bombs antics--what does yours truly take away? Why that we are all big momma's boys after all... We nuked Japan cuz we had to stop the GIs from gettin' komikazied (after all we had already carpet bombed civilians along the way, in WWII, no biggie...) So as we could get down to makin' real money...or if that didn't float your boat there was always the emerging psychomimetic avant-garde scripted by the Ford Foundation/CIA/MI6 funded "Congress for Cultural Freedom."

I was born after this sordid stuff had played out. Dirty Bertie Lord Russell had come a cropper on his WAPWoG mission to nuke Russia and instead now the next best plan was to deaden the mission which JFK had pronounced "We shall go to the moon." Whence Barack "Insane" Obama and all his Republican allies

today grovelling for contributions, to a momma's boy just like them at NBC/Fox TV, sitting in the City o' London...

Why Rembrandt Like Keats Understood The Ironic Beyond the Grave

2012-01-07T10:48:00.000-08:00

Viewing the really marvelous (magnifiable) National Gallery online Ecce Homo by Rembrandt, it is evident that his genius for espousing truth is his only motivation in this piece. For he took a subject that had been part of the regular pantheon of traditional artistry and ironically elevated it to a commentary against the oligarchy then ruling the Netherlands, soon to be inflicted upon Britain and of course the world.

(Compare Bosch's great Ecce Homo)

The bust of the Emperor hovers over the staged scene. What irony is here just in that very arrangement. It is not Pilate or the Hebrew audience whence the order is given for the crucifixion, it is Rome! (Or perhaps, better yet, the Isle of Capri.)

The bust of Homer is just as ironic, yet in a different way. And this is the nature of multiple levels of irony known only to the genius of poetic truth. But irony is not mere pedestrian stuff. For it is clear as day that Homer's bust can "see"-- from the light exudes from him. Just as it ironically does in his Philosophe Lisant, ythe life of Christ etchings and needless to say the ever quite literally optically moving self portraits. Yet Aristotle is evidently utterly blind though he claims that the senses are all. For Rembrandt knew the nature of precisely what lives on beyond the grave...He knew how to "cap the imagination" of supposed kiings and like Keats could well have written lines like these- were he not primarily a composer in paint:

The living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed--see here it is--
I hold it towards you.

The Creative Mind Versus Neurology

2012-01-05T04:05:00.000-08:00

Today I came across this research title and winced: "Is there a neurobiology of the free will?Can neurobiology help to resolve the age-old discussions about freedom, cause and chance?"

What has been known to the creative power of mind since the age old epic of Prometheus--since Heraclitus posed the ironical paradox of constant change as substance--is that the composition of the mind of mankind is like the greatest fugal music that can never, never be reduced to mere mechanical machinery; no matter its complexity.

That is the essence of all that will ever hold the beauty of truth.Those that argue otherwise are all unknowingly quite ugly. As Goya so wonderfully illustrated there are those whose faces deserve to be covered by trousers.

Billions of Tons of Fresh Water...Yet We Still Die of Thirst. Why?

2012-01-05T00:15:00.001-08:00

NASA Finds Russian Runoff Freshening Canadian Arctic

Increasing freshwater on the U.S. and Canadian side of the Arctic from 2005 to 2008 is balanced by decreasing freshwater on the Russian side, so that on average the Arctic did not have more freshwater. Here blue represents maximum freshwater increases and the yellows and oranges represent maximum freshwater decreases. Credit: University of Washington
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January 04, 2012

PASADENA, Calif. - A new NASA and University of Washington study allays concerns that melting Arctic sea ice could be increasing the amount of freshwater in the Arctic enough to have an impact on the global "ocean conveyor belt" that redistributes heat around our planet.

Lead author and oceanographer Jamie Morison of the University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory in Seattle, and his team, detected a previously unknown redistribution of freshwater during the past decade from the Eurasian half of the Arctic Ocean to the Canadian half. Yet despite the redistribution, they found no change in the net amount of freshwater in the Arctic that might signal a change in the conveyor belt.

The team attributes the redistribution to an eastward shift in the path of Russian runoff through the Arctic Ocean, which is tied to an increase in the strength of the Northern Hemisphere's west-to-east atmospheric circulation, known as the Arctic Oscillation. The resulting counterclockwise winds changed the direction of ocean circulation, diverting upper-ocean freshwater from Russian rivers away from the Arctic's Eurasian Basin, between Russia and Greenland, to the Beaufort Sea in the Canada Basin bordered by the United States and Canada. The stronger Arctic Oscillation is associated with two decades of reduced atmospheric pressure over the Russian side of the Arctic. Results of the NASA- and National Science Foundation-funded study are published Jan. 5 in the journal Nature.

Between 2003 and 2008, the resulting redistribution of freshwater was equivalent to adding 10 feet (3 meters) of freshwater over the central Beaufort Sea.

The freshwater changes were seen between 2005 and 2008 by combining ocean bottom pressure, or mass, data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites with ocean height data from NASA's ICESat satellite. By calculating the difference between the two sets of measurements, the team was able to map changes in freshwater content over the entire Arctic Ocean, including regions where direct water sample measurements are not available.

"Knowing the pathways of freshwater is important to understanding global climate because freshwater protects sea ice by helping create a strongly stratified cold layer between the ice and warmer, saltier water below that comes into the Arctic from the Atlantic Ocean," said Morison. "The reduction in freshwater entering the Eurasian Basin resulting from the Arctic Oscillation change could contribute to sea ice declines in that part of the Arctic."

"Changes in the volume and extent of Arctic sea ice in recent years have focused attention on melting ice," said co-author and senior research scientist Ron Kwok of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., which manages Grace for NASA. "The Grace and ICESat data allow us to now examine the impacts of widespread changes in ocean circulation."

Kwok said on whole, Arctic Ocean salinity is similar to what it was in the past, but the Eurasian Basin has become more saline, and the Canada Basin has freshened. In the Beaufort Sea, the water is the freshest it's been in 50 years of record keeping, with only a tiny fraction of that freshwater originating from melting ice and the vast majority coming from Russian river water.

The Beaufort Sea stores more freshwater when an atmospheric pressure system called the Beaufort High strengthens, driving a counterclockwise wind pattern. Consequently, it has been argued that the primary cause of freshening is a strengthening of the Beaufort High, but salinity began to decline early in the 1990s, when the Beaufort High relaxed and the counterclockwise Arctic Oscillation pattern increased.

"We discovered a pathway that allows Russian river runoff to feed the Beaufort gyre," Kwok said. "The Beaufort High is important, but so are the hemispheric-scale effects of the Arctic Oscillation."

"To better understand climate-related changes in sea ice and the Arctic overall, climate models need to more accurately represent the Arctic Oscillation's low pressure and counterclockwise circulation on the Russian side of the Arctic Ocean," Morison added.

For more on Grace and ICESat, visit: http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/ , http://grace.jpl.nasa.gov/ , andhttp://icesat.gsfc.nasa.gov/icesat/ .

JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Indefinitely Detained

2012-01-04T23:30:00.000-08:00

I once had a country whose name was hope-
But the name became fetid and blasted
And the light that was sought now flickered
And smoke and ashes stood in its place
For the horrible ghastly fear that remained
Gave a mocking lisp of a smile
To the petty and fiendish crowd of gawkers at the gate
Of the tomb which was hope, now palsied and mute
Into a pit where forever a gnawing takes hold
On the source of a light once thought glorious and bold

The tale is an old one --it lulls into sleep
The forlorn remains
Of the feast that we still keep
In the mind fast receding
To its final repose
As the quenching of mission is tortured with sleep
Far too damning to be mere fantasy's prison
All thought of future--a crime now become

The law newly minted says much of this race
Of cowardly forlorn life -- without grace.

"Evaporating blackholes" sounds like an apt metaphor for the economy to me...

2012-01-03T08:59:00.000-08:00

Physicists propose test for loop quantum gravity

January 3, 2012 by Lisa Zyga

Enlarge

Artist's illustration of loop quantum gravity.

(PhysOrg.com) -- As a quantum theory of gravity, loop quantum gravity could potentially solve one of the biggest problems in physics: reconciling general relativity and quantum mechanics. But like all tentative theories of quantum gravity, loop quantum gravity has never been experimentally tested. Now in a new study, scientists have found that, when black holes evaporate, the radiation they emit could potentially reveal “footprints” of loop quantum gravity, distinct from the usual Hawking radiation that black holes are expected to emit.

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In this way, evaporating black holes could enable the first ever experimental test for any theory of quantum gravity. However, the proposed test would not be easy, since scientists have not yet been able to detect any kind of radiation from an evaporating black hole.

The scientists, from institutions in France and the US, have published their study called “Probing Loop Quantum Gravity with Evaporating Black Holes” in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.

“For decades, Planck-scale physics has been thought to be untestable,” coauthor Aurélien Barrau of the French National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics (IN2P3) told PhysOrg.com. “Nowadays, it seems that it might enter the realm of experimental physics! This is very exciting, especially in the appealing framework of loop quantum gravity.”

In their study, the scientists have used algorithms to show that primordial black holes are expected to reveal two distinct loop quantum gravity signatures, while larger black holes are expected to reveal one distinct signature. These signatures refer to features in the black hole’s energy spectrum, such as broad peaks at certain energy levels.

Using Monte Carlo simulations, the scientists estimated the circumstances under which they could discriminate the predicted signatures of loop quantum gravity and those of the Hawking radiation that black holes are expected to emit with or without loop quantum gravity. They found that a discrimination is possible as long as there are enough black holes or a relatively small error on the energy reconstruction.

While the scientists have shown that an analysis of black hole evaporation could possibly serve as a probe for loop quantum gravity, they note that one of the biggest challenges will be simply detecting evaporating black holes.

“We should be honest: this detection will be difficult,” Barrau said. “But it is far from being impossible.”

He added that black holes are not the only possible probe of loop quantum gravity, and he’s currently investigating whether loop quantum gravity might have signatures in the universe’s background radiation.

“I am now working on the cosmological side of loop quantum gravity,” Barrau said. “This is the other way to try to test the theory: some specific footprints in the cosmic microwave background might be detected in the future.”

Hail Fellows--Well Met!

2012-01-03T08:07:00.000-08:00

Christmas Eve was ushered in by Obama with the "disclosure that the administration would sell $30 billion in fighter jets, munitions, spare parts and support services to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia."

Top: Israeli Fighter Jets Bottom: Saudi Fighter Jets

OBAMA'S NEW YEAR DICTAT: HOPE YOU DON'T GET INDEFINITELY DETAINED!!

2012-01-03T00:56:00.000-08:00

Leonardo's Enemies: the Undead

2012-01-03T00:46:00.000-08:00

If Leonardo’s study of vortical filamentation as the basis of the non entropic ordering principle inhering in substance is not science, then science is utterly a worthless fraud.

A Fool's Errand

2012-01-03T00:26:00.000-08:00

Now one thing has become exceedingly clear,
It is impossible to assassinate the character
of these self styled candidates
today--from Obama to Paul,
for none of them have any character at all.

The Standard Model of Physics and Edgar Allan Poe

2012-01-02T08:07:00.000-08:00

I have remarked a short while ago that Poe, had he not been killed, would have come to reject the fraud of Isaac Newton's supposed genius. As Webster Tarpley, has so thoroughly documented Newton was but a cats-paw for the morally and intellectually dead souls then known as Il Nuovi in their feud over the fate of England's succession with the true founder of modern physics Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

Today, we have a replay of the nonsense of Newton's "method" for the calculation of the infinitesimal, which Charles Babbage so devastatingly mocked as the "dotage" of the British educational system, or what was in the nineteenth century passed off as such. The issue of what the particle theorists call perturbation theory brings us foursquare back into the realm of infinite (and infantile) regression of what Leibniz justly rejected as the wrong headed tilting at windmill's of the riddle of the nature of the labyrinth known as the continuum. Poe had a hook into this rather tenebrous domain via the sensational issue of Francis Bacon and Shakespeare. (By the way, it is entirely lawful that Georg's Cantor's mental breakdown went hand in hand with his involvement in both the continuum hypothesis and Francis Bacon is Shakespeare hoax!!) For it seems that Poe's contemporary litterateuse Delia Bacon, was the inspirator of this stuff.

How one could be so muddled as to somehow take the plays of Shakespeare as equivalent to the noxious neo-Aristotelian Francis Bacon speaks for itself. But this was unfortunately widespread back then and unless one had the weltanshauung of a detective like Poe did, much of the crux of such creepy crawly philosophy went unremarked. Even the man to whom Poe dedicated Eureka, Alexander Humboldt, otherwise a giant upon the world's stage, had been horns-waggled by the Newtonians. Now, this is not to deny that it is perfectly reasonable to suggest that Shakespeare's plays were a platform to provoke the public politically. They were preeminently so. This is what Fredrich Schiller's aesthetics was very much all about.

To conclude these musings upon the spot here, had Leibniz defeated the hoaxer Samuel Clarke and been made Prime Minister of England, perhaps there would have been no British Empire and the revival of rank oligarchic empire-icism of Hume, et al. And Mr. Poe's enemies would not have stopped him from what his alter ego, Andrew Marvell so marvelously punned as "making time run." So this morning it seems that the image Poe's unfinished work "The Lighthouse" grips my attention. For today, we should ony hope to be in the situation of a keeper of a lighthouse for the existential crisis that plagues the world. Hoping against hope that we will come to our collective senses. And not those of the Hoggian kind...

Time IS Relative

2012-01-02T06:42:00.000-08:00

As my dear departed friend Kraft Ehricke so thoroughly and beautifully made the point-- the extra terrestrial imperative is the only honorable future for humanity. And once we are off this watery rock, the factor time is indeed very much relative. Wouldn't you agree dear reader?

Powering a Journey to Another Star

Posted on January 1, 2012 by andrewu

Based on Kepler‘s results, our galaxy contains one billion planets that can supportlife. There’s only one problem: these planets orbit other stars, and even thenearest star is quite far away. Science, through Einstein’s Special RelativityTheory, does provide at least one way to reach these planets within a traveler’s lifetime. Unfortunately, the necessary technology has yet to be developed.

One of the big barriers to traveling to and colonizing planets around other stars is the energy required. Special relativity provides a way to get there, but this way requires acceleration to near light speed. This acceleration requires substantial energy inputs. In fact, the energy required is so large that a starship likely won’t be able to carry the needed fuel onboard. (Technically this is because the starship’s kinetic energy must exceed its rest mass energy for significant length contraction and time dilation effects to occur.)

One option for powering a trip to another star might be staged rockets using high-energy-density fuel such as antimatter for matter-antimatter annihilation. There are two problems with this: we don’t know how to produce and store antimatter in such large quantities, and such a rocket would have to shed stages including some at very high speed. Staging would also be very inefficient.

Another option is beamed power. The simple version would be power beamed from the source or destination. A more advanced version would add power beamed from waystations enroute. For nearby interstellar destinations these waystations would be based on planetary or subplanetary bodies or perhaps even free-floating; for more distant destinations some of these waystations would be based around enroute stars. These waystations would generate power by various means according to their location — nuclear power might be one common option.

Establishing and maintaining beamed-power waystations poses interesting economics questions. Will they be unmanned or manned? Assuming manned to support long-term maintenance, how will their staffs be motivated to maintain the beamed-power service. The client ships will be unable to stop and dock at these waystations; to do so would defeat the purpose of the waystations. This means the waystation staffs will have to be paid by other means. This likely means that the waystations will have to be physically self-supporting over periods of many years. Manned waystations will have to be small colonies of their own.

In the “Leave a Reply” section below, please share your thoughts on beamed-power waystations for interstellar travel. Should they be manned or unmanned? How will the economics work? What other issues are important?

A New Year, Professor Krugman The Butt of My Squib Again

2012-01-02T06:20:00.000-08:00

One needn't be bothered by the mere reading of the redoubtable professor's comments upon this occasion in order to dismiss them, aforethought, out of hand. Why? Because our so very heralded and brave doctor is one of those wise men, whether they be on the left or right is of no consequence. These so very wise men, you see, actually believe in the utterly insane notion that there is intrinsic reality, nay value in the power of money. I.e, they believe in magic. But, of course, they are well paid to blabber their esoteric formulas that in the end mean less than nothing.

To wit, an economy is but an instrument to the continuous improvement of humanity's mastery over nature. Go back, you of disordered mind, and read, yes actually read Benjamin Franklin on the subject of paper money and next Alexander Hamilton's reports to the Congress on Credit and Manufacturing. And if you are still not cured of the lunacy which Dr. Krugman so richly exhibits, then woe be unto you. You are quite evidently a quack.

Oh and if you must read this bilge with your fish and chips. Have at it:

Nobody Understands Debt

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: January 1, 2012

REPRINTS

¶In 2011, as in 2010, America was in a technical recovery but continued to suffer from disastrously high unemployment. And through most of 2011, as in 2010, almost all the conversation in Washington was about something else: the allegedly urgent issue of reducing the budget deficit.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Paul Krugman

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Blog: The Conscience of a Liberal

Times Topic: United States Economy

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¶This misplaced focus said a lot about our political culture, in particular about how disconnected Congress is from the suffering of ordinary Americans. But it also revealed something else: when people in D.C. talk about deficits and debt, by and large they have no idea what they’re talking about — and the people who talk the most understand the least.

¶Perhaps most obviously, the economic “experts” on whom much of Congress relies have been repeatedly, utterly wrong about the short-run effects of budget deficits. People who get their economic analysis from the likes of the Heritage Foundation have been waiting ever since President Obama took office for budget deficits to send interest rates soaring. Any day now!

¶And while they’ve been waiting, those rates have dropped to historical lows. You might think that this would make politicians question their choice of experts — that is, you might think that if you didn’t know anything about our postmodern, fact-free politics.

¶But Washington isn’t just confused about the short run; it’s also confused about the long run. For while debt can be a problem, the way our politicians and pundits think about debt is all wrong, and exaggerates the problem’s size.

¶Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.

¶This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.

¶First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation.

¶Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.

¶This was clearly true of the debt incurred to win World War II. Taxpayers were on the hook for a debt that was significantly bigger, as a percentage of G.D.P., than debt today; but that debt was also owned by taxpayers, such as all the people who bought savings bonds. So the debt didn’t make postwar America poorer. In particular, the debt didn’t prevent the postwar generation from experiencing the biggest rise in incomes and living standards in our nation’s history.

¶But isn’t this time different? Not as much as you think.

¶It’s true that foreigners now hold large claims on the United States, including a fair amount of government debt. But every dollar’s worth of foreign claims on America is matched by 89 cents’ worth of U.S. claims on foreigners. And because foreigners tend to put their U.S. investments into safe, low-yield assets, America actually earns more from its assets abroad than it pays to foreign investors. If your image is of a nation that’s already deep in hock to the Chinese, you’ve been misinformed. Nor are we heading rapidly in that direction.

¶Now, the fact that federal debt isn’t at all like a mortgage on America’s future doesn’t mean that the debt is harmless. Taxes must be levied to pay the interest, and you don’t have to be a right-wing ideologue to concede that taxes impose some cost on the economy, if nothing else by causing a diversion of resources away from productive activities into tax avoidance and evasion. But these costs are a lot less dramatic than the analogy with an overindebted family might suggest.

¶And that’s why nations with stable, responsible governments — that is, governments that are willing to impose modestly higher taxes when the situation warrants it — have historically been able to live with much higher levels of debt than today’s conventional wisdom would lead you to believe. Britain, in particular, has had debt exceeding 100 percent of G.D.P. for 81 of the last 170 years. When Keynes was writing about the need to spend your way out of a depression, Britain was deeper in debt than any advanced nation today, with the exception of Japan.

¶Of course, America, with its rabidly antitax conservative movement, may not have a government that is responsible in this sense. But in that case the fault lies not in our debt, but in ourselves.

¶So yes, debt matters. But right now, other things matter more. We need more, not less, government spending to get us out of our unemployment trap. And the wrongheaded, ill-informed obsession with debt is standing in the way.

Holy Armageddon

2012-01-01T09:01:00.000-08:00

It seems that Rick Santorum truly has the credentials. If elected he promises to bomb Iran and start WWIII. How very electable and certifiable all at once!

The Only Thing Wrong

2012-01-01T08:19:00.000-08:00

The only thing wrong with the news media is their utter and incurable insanity...

Ron Paul's Schizophrenic Stance on the Constitution

2012-01-01T07:10:00.000-08:00

Paul is absolutely correct when he states that we gave Nazi war criminals fair trials, yet we now under Obama have a "law" the National Defense Authorization Act that gives US citizens less rights than we accorded those that committed the atrocities.

However, when Paul claims that Social Security is unconstitutional, he shows that he knows less than nothing about the purpose of this nations' founding. Thus the dilemma...

China Adopts the Mantle for Humanity

2012-01-01T04:48:00.000-08:00

With China's announcement of its plan to put a citizen on the moon, they have acted as the bastion of humanity upon the world's stage. It is with great shame and dishonor that America is disgraced now with the mean spirited irrationality of Obama and his cohorts as they turn their backs to the only "hope and change" that is worthy of mankind.

The Way Out: A Reflection Upon The New Year

2011-12-31T08:29:00.000-08:00

To be (a nebish) or not to be (a nebish)... That is the underlying issue for a conscience that makes cowards of us all. Thus we are brought via an internal dialogue of disparate voices, whether it be in the course of our currency or rather in the vast reaches of imagination of upheaval into which history has molded our assumptions toward a pathway out of this crisis.

For it is as evident now as ever that proceeding to pay homage to a failed monetary system leads humanity nowhere but to death and the limitless woes of a new new dark age. If we assume that the world can not accommodate the creation of an alternative to the diseased outlook of an imperial control by technocratic enablers of austerity then we assume that our own existence is a species indistinct from dumb biology. That is indeed what the bilge that is being daily delivered and indoctrinated as if by a wink into the acceptable public newspeak and so-called education system.

If this mentality is not uprooted then we are mere spectators to the unfolding tragedy upon the stage of this world. So it is either the demise of an unofficial oligarchy wielded most notably as financial control that now has a death grip upon futurity or the way out by taking up arms (though they be but words) and putting an end to the tyranny that usurps our true and immortal mission.

Look upward, oh child of creation and the answer is there...We were made to move off this isolated watery rock upon mental pinions that make us in the likeness of evolution's Creator. America used to be that mission as a flank against the baleful dark age on Europe's demise. Now the flank is the frontier beyond the old new world. It is only in the movement and endeavor forever out in space that we can once more to our own selves be true.

Even More Lunatic Than I Might Have Imagined

2011-12-24T05:19:00.000-08:00

Following up on my previous post, I find this computer game never never land of scientific fakery exceeds my wildest expectations. In the Pensees of Blaise Pascal (who was the true forerunner of Leibniz' development of calculus) there is a trenchant and provoking analysis of why the reigning "king" requires to fill his days up with idle (or should one rather say idol) pastimes. It is to lull and numb his senses such that the king is never forced to deal with his own mortality. This is the essence of what an oligarchical system seeks to do with the the inventions of mankind--turn them into the baubles of escapism of an entertainment "industry." This kind of "thinking" need not be plotted out conspiratorially; it is merely axiomatic for any society ruled by the principle that would degrade humanity into the equivalent of dumb bestial behavior:

Cheating Spreads Like Infections In Online Mulitplayer Games

If you have friends who cheat, you are more likely to become a cheater, according to computer scientists who say this can be used to label you as a potential cheater

KFC 12/23/2011

1 COMMENT

Online gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry that serves millions of gamers around the world. But it suffers from a problem: cheating. Some players give themselves an unfair advantage by using 'cheat software' to see through walls or to automatically shoot moving characters.

Cheat software is banned but in the sophisticated economies that have evolved in these worlds, cheaters can generate a significant income by using it. The developers of multiplayer game APB Reloaded, estimate that cheatmakers can make up to $50,000 per month.

The trouble, of course, is that cheats poison the experience for legitimate players. The temptation is then for all players to cheat which leads to an uncontrolled escalation of illegal activities and the eventually destruction of the gaming environment.

So gaming communities invest significant resources into finding and stopping cheaters. In the Steam Community, for instance, which has some 30 million users, cheats are clearly labelled so that other users can see them and so that servers can prevent them playing games from which they are banned (although they can play other games).

Cheaters cannot easily start new accounts because the games they buy are linked to their old accounts and access is non-transferable.

So an interesting question is how cheaters behave in this social network.

Today, Jeremy Blackburn at the University of South Florida in Tampa and a few buddies study a social network of about 12 million gamers on the Steam Community of which some 700,000 are cheaters.

What they find is interesting. First up, cheats stick together. The data shows that cheaters are much more likely to be friends with other cheaters.

Cheating also appears to be infectious. The likelihood of a fair player becoming labelled as a cheater in future is directly correlated with this person's number of friends who are cheaters. So if you know cheaters you are more likely to become one yourself. Cheating spreads like flu through this community.

Finally, being labelled as a cheat seems to significantly affect social standing. Once a person is labelled as a cheat, they tend to lose friends. Some even cut themselves off from friends by increasing their privacy settings

Blackburn and co say they've even seen newly labelled cheaters commit 'social suicide' by cutting themselves off from all their friends.

While this work gives a unique insight into the social behaviour of cheats, Blackburn and co say it also points to a new angle of attack for gaming communities hoping to stamp out cheating.

Their idea is to use the structure of the network to predict the likelihood that a given player will become a cheat in future. In other words, the number of friends who are cheats determine how likely this player is to becoming infected with the 'cheating virus' in future, so to speak. They say they expect to do more work on this in future.

Nobody knows exactly how the Steam Community developers detect and label cheats now. The details are strictly guarded, as would be expected in this kind of cat and mouse game.

But however it is done, the new method is a kind of pre-crime detection rather like the movie Minority Report. That's a dangerous avenue to tread. The labelling of individuals as potential cheats itself has significant moral, philosophical and legal implications that will need to be teased apart and examined before it can be employed in the real or virtual worlds.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1112.4915: Cheaters in the Steam Community Gaming Social Network

The pathway out of this nightmarish quagmire has already been developed in the writings of Friedrich Schiller in his aesthetics. In great art the love of beauty and freedom from such an oligarchy can be instilled via drama and poetry of what Shelley called great and passionate conceptions regarding man and nature. This is what shines through in the works of Plato and Aeschylus, for instance. And with Shakespeare we aver that the play truly is the thing to capture the imagination and subdue the machinations of the would be kings. The current wizards of the "City" and Wall Street are but the latest flareup of diseased state of mind otherwise denominated as an empire.

The Bad Guys, Ripping Up the Constitution, and Video Games

2011-12-23T08:51:00.000-08:00

Something seemed more than a little off kilter during the first Gulf War when I first heard talking head ex-military and the head of the joint chiefs talk to the camera about "killing the bad guys." "Oh, oh," a voice inside me seemed to be warning, "this reminds me of hyper-active post puberty children playing some fantasy war games far after they should have been past that stage." Today, we have millions of overgrown children engrossed in similar delusions through video games role playing these "fantasy games" the Internet. The very same Internet created under the auspices of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Now the "all volunteer" army is training using special versions of these games. We "fight" the bad guys using "drones." Hmm...

But now it seems the bad guys are us. This is the meaning of a new law called NADA that would give our illustrious leaders the power to kidnap and "render" American citizens (in name only) to a "friendly" third country in order to get them to "talk." Of course, Americans, if they have even paid attention are likely to console themselves inwardly by the mantra that this would "never happen" to them. Dear citizen, tell that to the death row inmates reprieved at the twelfth hour by DNA evidence...And so with nary a feeble whimper from the vast majority of us the Constitution is thus shredded. We were too busy playing games online to bother. Hmm...

More Fish Tales for Christmas

2011-12-23T08:12:00.000-08:00

Another Miraculous Fish Story : Masaccio's Version of Peter's Catch

Garbage in = garbage out! Need I say more?

2011-12-23T07:36:00.000-08:00

A group of three researchers from KEK, Shizuoka University and Osaka University has for the first time revealed the way our universe was born with 3 spatial dimensions from 10-dimensional superstring theory in which spacetime has 9 spatial directions and 1 temporal direction. This result was obtained by numerical simulation on a supercomputer.

Anyone not scarfing down the fish oil may be at risk!

2011-12-23T06:50:00.000-08:00

In Thingumbob's rather fishy crusade this just in:

Fish oil may hold key to leukemia cure



		IMAGE: The compound shown above is D12-PGJ2, which closely resembles delta-12-protaglandin J3, or D12-PGJ3, a compound that targeted and killed the stem cells of chronic myelogenous leukemia, or CML, in mice... Click here for more information.

A compound produced from fish oil that appears to target leukemia stem cells could lead to a cure for the disease, according to Penn State researchers. The compound -- delta-12-protaglandin J3, or D12-PGJ3 -- targeted and killed the stem cells of chronic myelogenous leukemia, or CML, in mice, said Sandeep Prabhu, associate professor of immunology and molecular toxicology in the Department of Veterinary and Medical Sciences. The compound is produced from EPA -- Eicosapentaenoic Acid -- an Omega-3 fatty acid found in fish and in fish oil, he said.

"Research in the past on fatty acids has shown the health benefits of fatty acids on cardiovascular system and brain development, particularly in infants, but we have shown that some metabolites of Omega-3 have the ability to selectively kill the leukemia-causing stem cells in mice," said Prabhu. "The important thing is that the mice were completely cured of leukemia with no relapse."

The researchers, who released their findings in the current issue of Blood, said the compound kills cancer-causing stem cells in the mice's spleen and bone marrow. Specifically, it activates a gene -- p53 -- in the leukemia stem cell that programs the cell's own death. "p53 is a tumor suppressor gene that regulates the response to DNA damage and maintains genomic stability," Prabhu said.



		IMAGE: Penn State researchers initially tested a compound produced from fish oil on a type of leukemia found in mice called the Friend Virus. This slide shows a Friend Virus Leukemia... Click here for more information.

Killing the stem cells in leukemia, a cancer of the white blood cells, is important because stem cells can divide and produce more cancer cells, as well as create more stem cells, Prabhu said.

The current therapy for CML extends the patient's life by keeping the number of leukemia cells low, but the drugs fail to completely cure the disease because they do not target leukemia stem cells, said Robert Paulson, associate professor of veterinary and biomedical sciences, who co-directed this research with Prabhu.

"The patients must take the drugs continuously," said Paulson. "If they stop, the disease relapses because the leukemia stem cells are resistant to the drugs."

Current treatments are unable to kill the leukemia stem cells, Paulson noted. "These stem cells can hide from the treatment, and a small population of stem cells give rise to more leukemia cells," said Paulson. "So, targeting the stem cells is essential if you want to cure leukemia."



		IMAGE: Penn State researchers Sandeep Prahbu (right) and Robert Paulson (left) sketch out a delta-12-protaglandin J3, or D12-PGJ3. The compound, derived from fish oil, targeted and killed the stem cells of... Click here for more information.

During the experiments, the researchers injected each mouse with about 600 nanograms of D12-PGJ3 each day for a week. Tests showed that the mice were completely cured of the disease. The blood count was normal, and the spleen returned to normal size. The disease did not relapse.

In previous experiments, the compound also killed the stem cells of Friend Virus-induced leukemia, an experimental model for human leukemia.

The researchers focused on D12-PGJ3 because it killed the leukemia stem cells, but had the least number of side effects. The researchers currently are working to determine whether the compound can be used to treat the terminal stage of CML, referred to as Blast Crisis. There are currently no drugs available that can treat the disease when it progresses to this stage.

###

The researchers, who applied for a patent, are also preparing to test the compound in human trials.

Roasting the London Economist's Chestnuts

2011-12-16T06:29:00.000-08:00

Today, the London Economist sententiously opines on Christianity and America, except they have left something out. I hereby charitably reprove them:

Alexander Hamilton before being killed by Burr had proposed to outflank the venal Burr's takeover of the Federalist party by founding a Christian Constitutional Society. Now, the sort of Christianity that Hamilton would have supported can be best gleaned from his stark attack on Adam Smith's doctrine of free trade in his Report on Manufactures. The recognition that the City of London's (and Wall Street's) East Indies Company's practices were (and are, still today) the true successors of that evil Roman Empire that ordered Jesus' crucifixion, is the true lesson in anything decent, whether nominally Christian or otherwise, which has arisen on these shores from the time of the Massachusetts Bay Charter. The object of all men of good faith must be to eradicate the modern day Leviathan of "global governance" and return to the principle of a harmony of sovereign nations that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had envisaged when he admonished Churchill that the U.S. would no longer tolerate the rot of British Empire's colonial methods.

The Least of These

2011-12-15T05:34:00.000-08:00

The BBC reports (crocodile tear fashion) today on the ongoing looting of the U.S. by the chicanery of the financial "families" interests (longtime endowers of the BBC, don't you know) in an article entitled "The scandal of the Alabama poor cut off from water."

But the story is a paradigm of how illegitimate speculation takes its toll from the very weakest. Social Darwinism in the 21st century is named derivatives speculation. And there is no bottom to the descent into a new dark age so long as we shamefully tolerate this state of affairs...

Financial Comic Relief

2011-12-14T16:42:00.000-08:00

According to Reuters today, a regulator, heading the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's review of the MF Global debacle, Jill Summers, not intendimg any irony, declared, "Now it's just finding out which ones of those transactions are legitimate and which ones of them are illegitimate."

Now, of course, in any sane world, the whole kit and caboodle of these hedge funds activities selling financial futures would be prima facie illegitimate. But, dear friends, we apparently live in some strange corner of a delirious mathematician's nightmarish sort of multiverse where "all is permitted." The never never land where financial leverage may legitimately be used to take down the very means of sustaining the future well being of our nation. So long as it is done according to the tune of the statistical formalae spewing from Wall Street's idiot savants otherwise known as "quants."

The Age of Space: the Launching of a Wonderful Flank Attack

2011-12-14T11:42:00.000-08:00

The dream of a new home far from the clutches of the empire of Moloch has been ever and anon the aspiration of humankind. Its constitution has been indelibly written upon the pages of the Epimethean giants of history. Thus did Nicholas of Cusa summon a council in Florence his call for ecumenical peace among nations and a declaration of the universal rights of freedom to create society fit for humanity free from the shackles of feudalism.

Nicholas of Cusa

Thus did Cusa befriend and collaborate with the Florentine mapmaker who inspired Columbus, Toscanelli to nurture the possibility of a new and unfettered haven upon these shores.

Toscanelli

And it is therefore in the spirit of this mission that we cannot but proceed to the new worlds that will complete the triumph over the age old enemy of civilization. For it is in that undertaking that we come into further agapic filiation, as Cusa would have it, with our past and future.

Columbus

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

JFK

"Roll-up" Demystified

2011-12-12T10:12:00.000-08:00

500 Year Old Global 'Roll-Up' Founders?

Saturday, December 10, 2011 – by Anthony Wile

Anthony Wile

And another one gone, and another one gone ... Another one bites the dust − Queen
"Is it possible that the biggest roll-up in history is foundering?
What roll-up? Well ... roll-up, of course, is a money-industry term of art. It means that someone − an enterprising banker backed by big money − begins to buy up mom and pop shops to turn them into one large industry with "economies of scale" and an intrinsic value that is larger than its individual moving parts.
In this case, the roll-up that is taking place is of nation-states.

The bankroll comes from central banks."

Silly me, I thought of the term "roll-up" as in the Tavistock/MI6/Occult Bureau's Beatles lyrics "Roll up for the Mystery Tour." Of course, the Magical Mystery Tour promotion of the present day multi-billion dollar drug counterculture was in the tradition of that bulwark of drug trafficking East Indies Company. In fact, the City of London/ British Empire was quite in the tradition of John Dees 007's Occult Bureau/MI6 asset and Beatles' hero Aleister Crowley's Order of the Golden Dawn. Why, such untrammeled money laundering of drug profits by the City today might do "old Adam" Smith proud.

Our Financial Overlords and Aristotle's Definition of Art

2011-12-12T06:37:00.000-08:00

If you wish to undergo the hardship of tuning into the sickening claptrap of Wall Street oracles on the Internet or television, you will hear the growing chorus of demands that the world must save the financial system by sacrificing the weakest of its members to more and more savage austerity. Thus, the pantheon of "superstars" of all that we are told by the selfsame mass media that we must worship as the measure of worldly success will be safeguarded. The 2 and sometimes 3-D colored pictures transmitted via a digital code to our latter day "cave walls" prove to us that this is the way of the world. After all, isn't all that can be seen with our own two eyes common sense reality? Or should we perhaps heed the lessons of "classical" antiquity and once more break free from the mentally self inflicted shackles that bring us to the present crisis?

But how can we solve this crisis if our very vision for futurity is the captive of and governed by nothing but ugliness? Has it ever come to your mind that "human nature" will have to be elevated once and for all out of the superstition of its fearful obeisance to the powers that be if we are ever to bring about the exploration and colonization of space? Yet look at the Hollywood depictions of the future and what is there but the rankest fear mongering of "science" fiction? Why? What is it that has caused such forlorn and childish pessimism such that the vaunted and ordained "geniuses" of astrophysics can declare that alien civilizations would of course desire to eliminate humanity? What other than the worldview imposed by age old belief that we are ruled by the whims of unfathomable chaotic forces that can only at best be temporarily appeased?

That our "entertainment" must be restricted to a kind of purgative for our emotional disturbances in the face of such irrational fears that we mere mortals are "subject" to? And this "ideal" for "art," dear reader, traces back to the subject of today's "blog": Aristotle. Everything that is deemed monetarily valuable as "modern art" today is nothing more than an extension of Aristotle's dogma of the apotheosis of the fear of the irrational. Of course, this doctrine did not originate with Aristotle, it is actually as old as the superstitious worship of the muck of "mother earth" in whatever "civilization" it rears its ugly head, be it Erde, Gaia, Isis, or Bhudevi.

Ah, but it has its equivalence in supposed "Christian morality" as well. And it appears most starkly in the slavish worship of the invisible hand magic of the marketplace, otherwise personified as (old) Adam Smith. For it was the Smith who so sententiously opined that ours is not to fathom the why and wherefore of the irrational and arbitrary passions that move history. "We cannot foresee the consequence of these, only god (sic) may do so. Why it would be hubris to suppose otherwise, would it not? Nay, we may only know that the frailties of human nature will ever be such and learn to profit (quite richly) from that knowledge."

Raphael's Polemic of Plato versus Aristotle: Beauty in Truth or Irrational Fear?

Michelangelo's Paean to the Superstition of the drugged up Delphic Sibyl

Leonardo (who is honored as Raphael's model for Plato above) humorously condemned Michelangelo's representation of the human form for its resemblance to a bag of walnuts!

Question For Our Illustrious Legislators

2011-12-11T06:55:00.000-08:00

If one questions the constitutionality of a law (Senate Bill 1867) that promotes indefinite detention of its citizens who are "substantially aiding" terrorists, couldn't that act be regarded as a substantial aid of terrorists in and of itself? And who is to decide this? Will there have to be secret Star Chamber courts set up rehaps modeled on the practice of renditions?

Today's Political Pawns And Edgar Allan Poe's Enemies of Yore

2011-12-10T23:49:00.000-08:00

With the current break up of the world's monetary system the chessboard is being toppled and many human pawns are being sacrificed now by "hidden hands" the world over. Such as the so-called progressive hedge fund billionaire George Soros. The pawns' twittered opinions of what is motivating them to act out is of little moment in the geopolitical Great Game of divide and conquer...

Queen Victoria and her Literary Knight Benjamin Disraeli

The British empire's East Indies Company's nineteenth century Great Game was not waged just in the cockpit of the Caucasus but the world over. This emphatically included the sponsorship of radical social movements. At the time that Edgar Allan Poe waged a literary battle with the likes of Transcendentalist's Margaret Fuller, AKA Marchessa Ossoli. Fuller went to London where another of Poe's enemies Thomas Carlyle introduced her to "Young Italy's" Guiseppe Mazzini. The Young America that supported the Confederacy was part and parcel of the same "strategy of tension."

Moloch Incarnate Walks Among Us

2011-12-10T16:41:00.000-08:00

Lord Russell: "War, as I remarked a moment ago, has hitherto been disappointing in this respect, but perhaps bacteriological war may prove effective. If a Black Death could spread throughout the world once in every generation, survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full. There would be nothing in this to offend the conscience of the devout or to restrain the ambition of nationalists. The state of affairs might be somewhat unpleasant, but what of it? Really high-minded people are indifferent to happiness, especially other people’s."

Russell thus presaged the existence of the moral equivalent of black holes. Sucking all the light and decency out of humanity...

And today with baited breath we watch as "the markets" are cheered as governments hurry to make compacts to efficiently immiserate their sick and elderly.

Lord Russell in Hell

2011-12-10T16:02:00.000-08:00

London bridge is falling down...pity, that. Lord Bertrand Russell’s world government nightmare yclept WAPWOG is crumbling… "well what of it?"

(Reuters) - The chairwoman of U.N. climate talks urged delegates to approve a compromise deal on fighting global warming in the interests of the planet, but an accord remained elusive on Sunday and rich and poor states traded barbs over the limited scope of the package.

South African Foreign Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane said the four separate texts represented a good outcome after two weeks of sometimes angry debates in the port city of Durban.

"I think we all realize they are not perfect. But we should not let the perfect become the enemy of the good and the possible," she told the conference.

Much of the discussion has focused on an EU plan designed to push major polluters -- from developed and fast-growing emerging economies like China and India -- to accept legally binding cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions.

EU negotiators had accepted "legal instrument" in one draft as a phrase implying a more binding commitment. But the latest version spoke of a "protocol, another legal instrument or a legal outcome," the sort of weak phrasing that almost collapsed the talks on Friday.

Asked if the latest language was acceptable, Karl Hood, who represents an alliance of 43 small island states, said: "No it's not. Never was and never will be. It's too broad a statement."

His alliance colleague MJ Mace, added: "You need a legally binding instrument. You have legal outcomes all the time. A decision is an outcome. You need something treaty like."

"BLACKMAIL"

The discussions took an increasingly bitter turn as they headed into Sunday, a second extra day that made the negotiations the longest in two decades of U.N. climate talks.

Venezuela's climate envoy Claudia Salerno said she had received threats because of her objections to the draft texts.

"In the corridor, I have received two threats. One, that if Venezuela do not adopt the text, they will not give us the second commitment period," she said, referring to an extension of the Kyoto Protocol, the only global pact enforcing carbon cuts.

"The most pathetic and the most lowest threat... we are not going to have the Green Climate Fund," which is designed to help poor nations tackle global warming and nudge them towards a new global effort to fight climate change.

She did not say who had made the threat and delegates heard her allegation in silence.

Among the sticking points holding up a deal were an extension of the Kyoto Protocol. The draft text says the second Kyoto phase should end in 2017, but that clashes with the EU's own binding goal to cut carbon emissions by 20 percent by 2020.

U.S. VS CHINA AND INDIA

But behind the back and forth over language and technical details, the talks have boiled down to a tussle between the United States, which wants all polluters to be held to the same legal standard on emissions cuts, and China and India who want to ensure their fast growing economies are not shackled.

The fractious late night exchanges punctured the earlier mood of cautious optimism which had suggested agreement on the four separate accord in the package was possible.

Should the talks collapse on Sunday, that would represent a major setback for host South Africa and raise the prospect that the Kyoto Protocol could expire at the end of 2012 with no successor treaty in place.

Scientists warn that time is running out to close the gap between current pledges on cutting greenhouse gases and avoiding a catastrophic rise in average global temperatures.

U.N. reports released in the last month warned delays on a global agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions will make it harder to keep the average temperature rise to within 2 Celsius over the next century.

A warming planet has already intensified droughts and floods, increased crop failures and sea levels could rise to levels that would submerge several small island nations, who are holding out for more ambitious targets in emissions cuts.

A Search for the Higher Dimensional Non Linear Manifold or Aesthetic Intelligibility

2011-12-10T07:13:00.000-08:00

The tool that Bernhard Riemann adopted of n+1 multiply connected manifold affording an instance of a kind of phase space degree of freedom is really but a mathematical metaphor for the underlying reality of ongoing non linear development of the universe. It is therefore quite disheartening to see the gruesome distortion that the Royal Society's so-called M Theory makes of supposed extra dimensional strings. These folks seem to have gone down the proverbial rabbit hole of Lewis Carroll and never come back. The very same Lewis Carroll who was in reality as Charles Dodgson a dedicated hater of the revolution that Riemann and collaborators created.

Today I came across a remarkable work of mathematical biophysics that for most layman would seem utterly incomprehensible.It is the development of method for mapping the non linear molecular motion of protein "metadynamics in the conformational space nonlinearly dimensionally reduced by Isomap."

However it is in essence no more mysterious than Brunelleschi's building of Il Doumo in Florence or his revolutionary development of perspectiva in the fifteenth century.

I have for some time now on this blog remarked that the quality of multi-dimensional connectedness of biophysics is uniquely suited for a treatment by Riemannian methods. The manner in which biophysical processes known as proteins interact on the level of the "proteome" wonderfully illustrates this. It has further been my keen interest in certain anomalous types of phases of living, non living, and intellectual substance that has led me to share new examples in these pages with you. The model of the way in which in Renaissance emerges from a dark age in the history of humanity I have likened to a shockwave that is meta-stable in acting upon economy and culture. It is analogous to a long lived soliton in its power to transform the practice and thinking of humanity. The creation of the radically new and singular occurs as a culmination of a lawful development of preceding ideas. The closest we can come to the emotion associated with this is in the music of Beethoven, especially his Fidelio Overture No. 3 conducted by Furtwangler, late quartets and piano works.

I find the fact that the network of molecular motions illustrated from the referenced paper is in the form of a horn torii is lawful. This is precisely what I have hypothesized as a model for non linear development in these pages. If this direction is synthesized with the class of higher least action Abelian physical functions, one of which called the catenary that the aforementioned Brunelleschi used to solve the construction, then humanity may once again create a Rennaisance out of the current nightmarish abyss into which we seem to be hurtling like a somnambulist.

Three-dimensional Isomap embeddings of trans,trans-1,2,4-triﬂuorocyclooctane. Each ball represents one of 8375 conformations of the molecule. Each conformation was connected to ten nearest neighbors (measured as RMSD) to form a graph, which is shown as sticks. Threedimensional Isomap embeddings were obtained by multidimensional scaling of pairwise geodesic distances between points measured as the shortest paths on the graph. Isomap embedings were rotated by angle (0.00, 2.40, –0.55 rad) for better clarity