More Enviro Crapola

"Germany's first offshore wind farm begins turning"

This, dear blog reader, is all a large load of manure. What is needed to power modern society is increasing energy density not diffuse wind power. That takes us backward several hundred years. (What would Don Quixote think of us fools?) As an astute commenter has already observed here, we have enough thorium for a thousand years. So why do we kowtow to at best misguided fools? Simply put:the agenda of radical environmentalism is to reduce the population. And there is big money behind this agenda. It doesn't take rocket science to see through the charade.

Goldman, Obama, Hedges, Pound of flesh

So let's see what is salient about Mr. Blankfein's testimony yesterday. First, I point to his fulsome adulation of Obama and his brand of  financial "reform." Maybe this explains why Obama was so heavily favored by Goldman's political contributions.  Of course, they were his top donor. (Even beating out George Soros.) But then Goldman always hedges their political bets in a thoroughly agile and timely manner, as the latest Wall Street psychobabble would put it. After all wasn't it Hank Paulson, he of Goldman stack who went on bended knee, hat in hand, crocodile tears and all to Pelosi and begged for a bailout? And Goldman got it too, didn't they? Straight from the Treasury to AIG to Goldman. Thanks Uncle Sam, you sucker! Of course, Blankfein says he would have got his pound of flesh anyway. Yes that's right. 200,000 teachers are being laid off now and Goldman, and the buggers on Wall St wallow in it. This simply is a noisome and odious disgrace and cancer upon the body politic which must be amended if we hope to ever truly prosper again.

Quantum Harmonic Oscillator Coherence Versus Quantum Random Fluctuations

If we submit ourselves to the mathematical description chosen by Heisenberg, et al, to represent so-called quantum processes, we are in essence submitting to a dogma of irrationality. The choice of  a matrix algebra of eigenstates based upon statistical probability is doubly unfortunate in this regard. Ah but the critic will respond that this choice of mathematics works. Actually, if one delves into the descriptive functions that are spliced in an ad hoc fashion time and time again in order to save the mathematical edifice from crumbling such as "operators" as an example, the fact is there is no necessity for embedding the fallacies of statistics and Grassmanian reductionism into the study of quantum physics. Rather, it is quite possible to envisage a wonderful coherence along the lines that Leibniz limns in his Monadology in the kind of superpositions that quantum systems evince. This, I believe, is quite the opposite to the gratuitous importing of the absurd into science which bled over into so much of the oeuvre of the "intellengentsia" during the twentieth century. Take Schopenhauer (please!) for instance.

Methinks the "Heritage Foundation" Doth Protest Too Much

Messer Robert Moffit of the Heritage Foundation (which name can only appropriately refer to the heritage of the likes of Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr,) takes to the rather sallow pages of the Washington (Com)Post to assure us that Messer Obama is attempting to gull us (mon dieu!) into believing that "Obamacare" is after all only in their (Heritage's) tradition. I say-- what a dainty dish to put before us all. Lord a' mighty! Who is the pot and who the kettle here is a truly delicious conundrum, don't you think?

Spiral Paths from Atomic Phase Change to Black Hole Star Systems

Illustration from:

Field Ionization of Cold Atoms near the Wall of a Single Carbon Nanotube

Anne Goodsell, Trygve Ristroph, J. A. Golovchenko, and Lene Vestergaard Hau

I have maintained consistently for some time now the primacy of spiral orbitals along the surface of horn torii as a toy model for Riemannian metastable shockwave transformations through the singularity at its center. This toy model serves not only to adumbrate physical transformations, but also the historical impact of revolutionary ideas upon the functioning of society. The research illustrated above where a super cooled rubidium atom spirals toward a highly charged carbon nanowire and is subsequently stripped of an electron that tunnels into the tube while the resulting ion is repulsed is, I believe, an elegant demonstration of this principle.

Spirals occur as radiative processes move through spacetime. Imagine the orbit of the earth around the sun as the sun orbits the galaxy as the galaxy orbits its own group, etc. Embedded spirals. Here is an illustration of a spiral from a joint black hole star system whose anomalous physics is not well understood.

However, there are few attempts to model these radiative pathways as a field. Penrose's Twistor Theory is one such. However, his attempt to locate consciousness as a quantum effect is as misguided as Descartes' the pineal gland is the location of the soul. 

The Quixotic quest for a physical location of mind or soul is a result of a teleology or search for a final cause which is simply wrong. The assumption that that there is a frankly rather magical yet undiscovered physical explanation for human consciousness is due to a mode of thinking that assumes that substance is equivalent to mere physical sensation. This should have been abandoned once and for all after Leibniz devastatingly proved that the mind is of a different order that physical substance. That is, the mind is an indissoluble whole having no parts. It cannot be divided. Physical substance, meaning everything other than mind that may be conceived on the other hand may be divided. (The seeming paradox of individual quantum states, notwithstanding. For the condition of superposition shows that these states too are divisible via decoherence because of the very fact they exist as divisible quanta.) The mind in this sense participates as a kind of non-other to use Nicholas of Cusa's term. As Leibniz determined the mind is a sort of miniature creator reflecting the universal creative process of becoming. Or what is in Christian terms called Imago Viva Dei. The problem is that the materialists like Penrose can't stomach these truths, the which are not self evident, they are proven. 

Lowly Proteins Are Much Smarter Than Sir Isaac Newton

As is well known, (in some circles) the hoaxer Newton believed in magical pairwise action a distance instead of Kepler's principle of gravitation based upon elliptical functions. This mathematical fakery of predicting paths of points colliding and interacting with other points led later to disturbing  problems for the whole reductionist scheme known as the three body problem. Riemann addressed this dilemma in formal mathematics through developing a tool known as a multiply connected manifold. This article on protein research at Johns Hopkins further elucidates why in the biological substrate, biospherical processes are ordered very elegantly and lawfully not by pairwise interactions à la Newtonian quackery but instead by multi-modal/dimensional biological functions. Therefor providing more evidence, if any were needed that life even at its most elemental level, in this case proteins are much smarter than Newton was.

Hopkins researchers put proteins right where they want them

Location, location, location determines a protein's role

		IMAGE: Takanari Inoue, Ph.D. is a researcher at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. Click here for more information.

Using a method they developed to watch moment to moment as they move a molecule to precise sites inside live human cells, Johns Hopkins scientists are closer to understanding why and how a protein at one location may signal division and growth, and the same protein at another location, death.

Their research, published Feb. 14 inNature Methods, expands on a more limited method using a chemical tool to move proteins inside of cells to the periphery, a locale known as the plasma membrane.

"Where a particular protein is activated and the timing of that activation influence how a cell responds to outside stimulus," says Takanari Inoue, Ph.D., an assistant professor of cell biology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "Our goal with this newly expanded tool is to manipulate protein activities in many places in cells on a rapid timescale."

Cells cleverly have resolved the predicament of needing to respond to a near infinite array of external stimuli — temperature, for instance — even though they employ only a limited number of molecular players. The notion is that a single protein assumes multiple roles by changing its location or altering the speed and duration of activation.

Chemical signaling inside cells connects protein molecules through complex feedback loops and crosstalk, Inoue says, so knowing exactly how each protein contributes to which signals at what locations requires the ability to rapidly move proteins of interest to specific organelles found in cells. These include mitochondria (the power generators of cells) and Golgi bodies (the delivery systems of cells).

The Hopkins team chose the signaling protein Ras as the molecule it would attempt to send packing throughout a cell's interior. A regulator of cell growth that's often implicated in cancer, Ras has been long studied and it's known to be a molecular switch. However, no one has had the ability to discern what Ras does at different locations such as Golgi bodies and mitrochondria, much less what happens when Ras is activated simultaneously at any combination of these and other organelles.

Working with live human HeLa cells and Ras under a microscope, the team used a dimerization probe consisting of a special small molecule that simultaneously attracts two proteins that wouldn't normally have an affinity for each other and binds them together. In this system, one of the partner proteins is anchored to an organelle and the other is free floating inside the cell. Adding a chemical dimerizer induces the free protein to join the tethered one.

Using scissor-like enzymes, the team sliced and diced the DNA of the paired proteins to change the molecular address of its destination. They cut out the "mailing address" — known as a targeting sequence — that formerly delivered the protein unit to the plasma membrane and replaced it with new addresses (targeting sequences) that shipped it instead to specific organelles.

"We were able to manipulate protein activities in situ and very rapidly on each individual organelle," Inoue said. "Ultimately, this will help us to better understand protein function at these critical cellular components."

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Unlimited Nuclear Fuel and Healthcare

So-called Progressives have been touting the Forster and Meadows "Limits  to Growth" screed for what seems like an eternity now. Remember, if you will --and if it doesn't make you heave--how the mawkish, grinning, and sweatered Jimmah Carter educated us dumb bunnies 'bout the "energy crisis?" Now, it just so happens that we have on this planet enough thorium resources for nuclear energy production to last at the current consumption rate for a thousand years. Now, of course, we are told that we have to cut back on "entitlements" by the usual suspects in the  Democratic and Republican parties' "think tanks." Why? Because of course, we have limited resources, don't you know. Our economy just can't support this inordinate spending on medical technology.  We can and we must bailout the too big to fail insane speculative schemers, on the other hand.Or so goes the Pete Peterson and his ilk's argument. Well, you can be a pessimistic sucker if you want. But just maybe you might want to be an optimistic human being. The choice is yours.