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."

###

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.

3D view of SuperNova

It almost seems as if the question in my previous blog called star gazing about what the universe looks like now all at once is partially being answered here. Thanks, Chandra, you almost read my mind.

Cassiopeia A: 3-D Model: A Star From the Inside Out

Subversion Masquerading as Science

Here is a somewhat lengthy quote from a National "Science" Foundation article that should convince anyone who is skeptical about the social engineering subversion of so-called climate science.

"FAIRFAX, Va., March 29, 2010—In a time when only a handful of TV news stations employ a dedicated science reporter, TV weathercasters may seem like the logical people to fill that role, and in many cases they do.

In the largest and most representative survey of television weathercasters to date, George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication shows that two-thirds of weathercasters are interested in reporting on climate change, and many say they are already filling a role as an informal science educator.

“Our surveys of the public have shown that many Americans are looking to their local TV weathercaster for information about global warming,” says Edward Maibach, director of the Center for Climate Change Communication. “The findings of this latest survey show that TV weathercasters play—or can play—an important role as informal climate change educators.”  

According to the survey, climate change is already one of the most common science topics TV weathercasters discuss—most commonly at speaking events, but also at the beginning or end of their on-air segments, on blogs and web sites, on the radio and in newspaper columns.

Weathercasters also indicated that they are interested in personalizing the story for their local viewers—reporting on local stories such as potential flooding/drought, extreme heat events, air quality and crops. About one-quarter of respondents said they have already seen evidence of climate change in their local weather patterns.

“Only about 10 percent of TV stations have a dedicated specialist to cover these topics,” says University of Texas journalism professor Kristopher Wilson, a collaborator on the survey. “By default, and in many cases by choice, science stories become the domain of the only scientifically trained person in the newsroom—weathercasters.”

Many of the weathercasters said that having access to resources such as climate scientists to interview and high-quality graphics and animations to use on-air would increase their ability to educate the public about climate change.

However, despite their interest in reporting more on this issue, the majority of weathercasters (61 percent) feel there is a lot of disagreement among scientists about the issue of global warming. Though 54 percent indicated that global warming is happening, 25 percent indicated it isn’t, and 21 percent say they don’t know yet.

“A recent survey showed that more than 96 percent of leading climate scientists are convinced that global warming is real and that human activity is a significant cause of the warming,” says Maibach.  “Climate scientists may need to make their case directly to America’s weathercasters, because these two groups appear to have a very different understanding about the scientific consensus on climate change.”   

This survey is one part of a National Science Foundation-funded research project on meteorologists. Using this data, Maibach and his research team will next conduct a field test of 30-second, broadcast-quality educational segments that TV weathercasters can use in their daily broadcasts to educate viewers about the link between predicted (or current) extreme weather events in that media market and the changing global climate.

Ultimately, the team hopes to answer key research questions supporting efforts to activate TV meteorologists nationwide as an important source of informal science education about climate change."

More Information Theory Voodoo

Let us allow quackery unabashedly to speak for itself, thusly:

"At the heart of their idea is the tricky question of what happens to information when it enters a black hole. Physicists have puzzled over this for decades with little consensus. But one thing they agree on is Landauer's principle: that erasing a bit of quantum information always increases the entropy of the Universe by a certain small amount and requires a specific amount of energy.

Jae-Weon and co assume that this erasure process must occur at the black hole horizon. And if so, spacetime must organise itself in a way that maximises entropy at these horizons. In other words, it generates a gravity-like force."

Shakespeare's Magic

It's hardly surprising that one could entertain that Shakespeare was involved in the black arts, when so much of his overt subject matter is just that.   I.e., Midsummer's Night Dream, Prospero, etc. I have long maintained that Hamlet himself was a student of the black arts in Wurtemburg. Interesting that in Turgenev's speech, Hamlet and Don Quixote, he compares Hamlet to Faust. Anyway, I was just reading LaRouche's latest writing about Venice's takeover of Britain's monarchy via agents like Zorzi (aka Giorgi, whose Harmony of the Sphere's is parodied in Swift's isle of Laputa, as in the whorish false scientists) when I came across the issue of Cabbalism in the Merchant of Venice and the startling visual reference to that in the Globe theater. England at the time was overdosed with the occult. Robert Burton's depiction of the Rosicrucian's romp through jolly old England in his mystical book Anatomy of Melancholy gives a flavor of this. This continued unabated til the present, Isaac Newton's later alchemical magic wasn't a fluke. John Dee was at that time the real cabalistic 007head of British "intelligence," whose use of magic and drugs culminates today in the current British unleashing of the Crowleyan "Do what thou wilt" counterculture at her Satanic Majesty's request.

Globe theater and the Kabbala's Sephirot

You Can't Make This Kind of Crap Up

So it seems Obama's new appointee to head up Medicare/Medicaid Donald Berman has much in common with Sir Mick Jagger. (Please refer to blog below for more on this.) It is proudly proclaimed in his CV on his organization's website (given the Orwellian misnomer of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement): "In 2005, he was appointed “Honorary Knight Commander of the British Empire” by the Queen of England in honor of his work with the British National Health Service." How very N.I.C.E. -- as exampled in the following reportage:

"Cancer Groups to Appeal against NICE’s Decision to Rule out Use of Vidaza

The Cancer groups are going to appeal against a declaration made by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, which will deny the NHS patients in England and Wales an access to a drug called Vidaza, which is used for the treatment of bone marrow diseases.(...)"

and

"Tens of thousands of NHS workers could be sacked and thousands of hospital beds lost under plans outlined by strategic health authorities, it was reported.

The plans could also see procedures such as hip replacements scrapped and patients encouraged to email doctors rather than visit surgeries, according to the Daily Telegraph.

Proposals were drawn up by the 10 English strategic health authorities for productivity and efficiency savings.

The plans come after NHS chief executive Sir David Nicholson spoke of the need to make between £15 and £20 billion in productivity efficiency savings over three years. The Department of Health said it was "committed to protecting the NHS frontline". But the Telegraph has seen documents from SHAs which show how the cuts could fall on hospital services."

A Proclamation of a New Dark Age?

"Across the globe today people will be turning off all their lights for an hour starting at 8:30pm local time tonight for the World Wildlife Fund's annual Earth Hour campaign."

Right on cue, like some modern day Zeus, the Worldwide Fund for Nature, more commonly known as the British monarchy, has issued this démarche to their loyal subjects: Let there Be Darkness. Is it any wonder that Mick Jagger was knighted by what he too truly proclaimed to be Her Royal Satanic Majesty?

Frozen in Time

Did you know dear reader that there is living in our world a 17 year old girl who is still developmentally an eleven month old infant! She has never aged past infancy and seems frozen in time, it is amazing that this is not a tremendous cause célèbre. Although, on second thought, most of what passes for successful celebrity these days is the most banal nonsense imaginable. 


What if our media were focused upon bringing before our populace questions of signal import like unraveling whether there exists an underlying regulator of biological development? This would surely promote the general welfare, don't you think?

"A case study of "disorganized development" and its possible relevance to genetic determinants of aging

Walker, Richard F.; Pakula, Lawrence C.; Sutcliffe, Maxine J.; Kruk, Patricia A.; Graakjaer, Jesper; Shay, Jerry W.

Mechanisms of Ageing and Development (2009), 130(5), 350-356 CODEN: MAGDA3; ISSN: 0047-6374. English.

In 1932, Bidder postulated that senescence results from "continued action of a (genetic) regulator (of development) after growth ceases (maturation occurs). " A 16-yr-old girl who phys. appears to be an infant has not been diagnosed with any known genetic syndrome or chromosomal abnormality. The subject's anthropometric measurements are that of an 11-mo-old. Coordinated development of structures for swallowing/breathing has not occurred resulting in dysfunctional digestive and respiratory systems. Brain structure, proprioception and neuroendocrine functions are infantile. Dental and bone ages are pre-teen, while telomere length and telomerase inactivity suggest a cellular age at least comparable to her chronol. age. Sub-telomeric microdeletions known to be responsible for developmental delay and chromosomal imbalances are not present. Findings suggest that the subject suffers from "developmental disorganization" resulting from spontaneous mutation of Bidder's putative "regulator" of development, thereby providing an opportunity to locate and identify developmental gene(s) responsible for ensuring integrated and coordinated change in form and function from conception to adulthood. If their continued expression beyond maturation erodes internal order to promote senescence then further study of her DNA and testing of homologous genes in animal models may provide clues to genetic determinants of aging and human life span."

The Ironic Universe: updated

"Distant galaxy clusters mysteriously stream at a million miles per hour along a path roughly centered on the southern constellations Centaurus and Hydra. A new study led by Alexander Kashlinsky at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., tracks this collective motion -- dubbed the "dark flow" -- to twice the distance originally reported."

This dark flow motion together with cosmological electromagnetic anisotropy (or birefringent polarization) together seem to point to some sort of directed universal evolution of even supposed inorganic matter that no sanitized purely mathematical model can account for. It is evidence that no matter how long one attempts to achieve a so-called unified field theory the universe will always present us with some unexpected singularities due to its continuing evolution. We will forever be baffled by the fact that the universe always seems to surprise us.

Here's yet another irony in the news:

"Sunspots are supposedly rooted to the bottom of the belt," says Hathaway. "So the motion of sunspots tells us how fast the belt is moving down there."

He's done that—plotted sunspot speeds vs. time since 1996—and the results don't make sense. "While the top of the conveyor belt has been moving at record-high speed, the bottom seems to be moving at record-low speed. Another contradiction."

Could it be that sunspots are not rooted to the bottom of the Conveyor Belt, after all? "That's one possibility" he notes. "Sunspots could be moving because of dynamo waves or some other phenomenon not directly linked to the belt."


March, 2017:

Running away from Einstein

"This 10 million light year-wide ring made up of small galaxies is expanding rapidly like a mini Big Bang. The team believe our neighbouring galaxy, Andromeda, once flew past our own galaxy at close range, creating a sling-shot of several small galaxies.

Dr Hongsheng Zhao, Reader in the School of Physics and Astronomy and co-author of the paper, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society by Oxford University Press, said: "If Einstein's gravity were correct, our galaxy would never come close enough to Andromeda to scatter anything that fast.""


November, 2019

"Scientists are finding that galaxies can move with each other across huge distances, and against the predictions of basic cosmological models. The reason why could change everything we think we know about the universe."

April, 2020

The fine structure constant has a directional anisotropy.

"And it seems to be supporting this idea that there could be a directionality in the universe, which is very weird indeed," Professor Webb says.

"So the universe may not be isotropic in its laws of physics - one that is the same, statistically, in all directions. But in fact, there could be some direction or preferred direction in the universe where the laws of physics change, but not in the perpendicular direction. In other words, the universe in some sense, has a dipole structure to it.

"In one particular direction, we can look back 12 billion light years and measure electromagnetism when the universe was very young. Putting all the data together, electromagnetism seems to gradually increase the further we look, while towards the opposite direction, it gradually decreases. In other directions in the cosmos, the fine structure constant remains just that - constant. These new very distant measurements have pushed our observations further than has ever been reached before."


June, 2020

K-State study reveals asymmetry in spin directions of galaxies

The patterns span over more than 4 billion light-years, but the asymmetry in that range is not uniform. The study found that the asymmetry gets higher when the galaxies are more distant from Earth, which shows that the early universe was more consistent and less chaotic than the current universe.

But the patterns do not just show that the universe is not symmetric, but also that the asymmetry changes in different parts of the universe, and the differences exhibit a unique pattern of multipoles.

"If the universe has an axis, it is not a simple single axis like a merry-go-round," Shamir said. "It is a complex alignment of multiple axes that also have a certain drift."

September, 2020

Why is there a normal galaxy sitting at the edge of the universe?

"Massive stars blow powerful winds, supernovae detonate like flashbulbs, and all that energy released should stir the gas up in the galaxy, making it irregularly shaped (plus, that early in the age of the Universe there just hadn't been a lot of time to get organized). Most distant galaxies we see are indeed blobby. The fact that this galaxy has a disk that appears to be pretty calm and stable is bizarre."

"Interestingly, it’s not alone. Earlier in 2020 astronomers announced they found a disk galaxy at about the same distance, called the Wolfe Galaxy. Like this one, it’s not understood how it can exist. Clearly, the theoretical models are wrong, or at least (and more likely) incomplete. Obviously, there’s more to learn about galaxies that exist at the edge of the observable Universe."

November, 2020

Scientists Detect Hints of Strange New Physics in The Universe's Background Radiation


"As far as we have been able to measure so far, there's only one fundamental interaction that breaks parity symmetry; that's the weak interaction between subatomic particles that is responsible for radioactive decay. But finding another place where parity symmetry breaks down could potentially lead us to new physics beyond the Standard Model."

"And two physicists - Yuto Minami of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation in Japan; and Eiichiro Komatsu of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany and Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe in Japan - believe they have found hints of it in the polarisation angle of the CMB."

December 2020

Are primordial magnetic field theories getting in a twist?

"In cosmic voids where the density of galaxies is far lower than standard, astronomers have observed weak magnetic fields that may provide a window into the early universe. The fields 10-17-10-10 G in magnitude with large coherence lengths of up to megaparsecs are thought to have their origins in the early universe, but so far it is unclear when or how they were generated."

December 2020

Portrait of young galaxy throws theory of galaxy formation on its head

"Scientists have challenged our current understanding of how galaxies form by unveiling pictures of a young galaxy in the early life of the Universe which appears surprisingly mature.

The galaxy, dubbed ALESS 073.1, appears to have all of the features expected of a much more mature galaxy and has led the team of scientists to question how it grew so fast."

February 2021

Discovery of a Giant Arc in distant space adds to challenges to basic assumptions about the Universe

"The Giant Arc, which is approximately 1/15th the radius of the observable universe, shows as an enormous, nearly symmetrical, crescent of galaxies in the remote Universe. It is twice the size of the striking Sloan Great Wall of galaxies and clusters that is seen in the nearby Universe. This new discovery of the Giant Arc adds to an accumulating set of (cautious) challenges to the Cosmological Principle."

June 2021

Discovery of ASKAP J173608.2−321635 as a Highly-Polarized Transient Point Source with theAustralian SKA Pathfinder 

"We report the discovery of a highly-polarized, highly-variable, steep-spectrum radio source, ASKAP J173608.2−321635, located ∼4 ◦ from the Galactic center in the Galactic plane. (...)  We discuss possible identifications for ASKAP J173608.2−321635 including a low-mass star/substellar object with Corresponding author: Ziteng Wang zwan4817@uni.sydney.edu.au, tara.murphy@sydney.edu.au arXiv:2109.00652v1 [astro-ph.HE] 2 Sep 2021 2 Wang et al. extremely low infrared luminosity, a pulsar with scatter-broadened pulses, a transient magnetar, or a Galactic Center Radio Transient: none of these fully explains the observations, which suggests that ASKAP J173608.2−321635 may represent part of a new class of objects being discovered through radio imaging surveys. "

September 2021

Early Massive Galaxies ran out of gas, Shutting Down Their Star Formation

"But what is removing the cold gas from the galaxies? Astronomers are stumped, and will have to continue their observations to find clues to this great galactic mystery. “We still have so much to learn about why the most massive galaxies formed so early in the Universe and why they shut down their star formation when so much cold gas was readily available to them,” said Whitaker. “The mere fact that these massive beasts of the cosmos formed 100 billion stars within about a billion years and then suddenly shut down their star formation is a mystery we would all love to solve, and REQUIEM has provided the first clue.”"

October 2021

Strange radio waves emerge from direction of the galactic centre

"Astronomers have discovered unusual signals coming from the direction of the Milky Way’s centre. The radio waves fit no currently understood pattern of variable radio source and could suggest a new class of stellar object.

“The strangest property of this new signal is that it is has a very high polarisation. This means its light oscillates in only one direction, but that direction rotates with time,” said Ziteng Wang, lead author of the new study and a PhD student in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney.

“The brightness of the object also varies dramatically, by a factor of 100, and the signal switches on and off apparently at random. We’ve never seen anything like it.”"

March 2022

Mysterious, Swirling Waves Discovered in the Sun – Incredible Speed Defies Explanation

"Researchers from NYU Abu Dhabi’s (NYUAD) Center for Space Science have discovered a new set of waves in the Sun that, unexpectedly, appear to travel much faster than predicted by theory.

"In the study, Discovery of high-frequency-retrograde vorticity waves in the Sun, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, the researchers — led by Research Associate Chris S. Hanson — detailed how they analyzed 25 years of space and ground-based data to detect these waves. The high-frequency retrograde (HFR) waves — which move in the opposite direction of the Sun’s rotation — appear as a pattern of vortices (swirling motions) on the surface of the Sun and move at three times the speed established by current theory.

"Complex interactions between other well known waves and magnetism, gravity, or convection could drive the HFR waves at this speed. “If the HFR waves could be attributed to any of these three processes, then the finding would have answered some open questions we still have about the Sun,” said Hanson. “However, these new waves don’t appear to be a result of these processes, and that’s exciting because it leads to a whole new set of questions.”"

December 2022

Tetrahedral Asymmetry Handedness in Galactic Distributions

https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.04227

February 2023

"This is our first glimpse back this far, so it's important that we keep an open mind about what we are seeing," Leja said. "While the data indicates they are likely galaxies, I think there is a real possibility that a few of these objects turn out to be obscured supermassive black holes. Regardless, the amount of mass we discovered means that the known mass in stars at this period of our universe is up to 100 times greater than we had previously thought. Even if we cut the sample in half, this is still an astounding change."

Discovery of massive early galaxies defies prior understanding of the universe

January 2024

The Big Ring galaxy cluster discovery challenges the principle that the universe is smooth at cosmological scales.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-67950749

Time and Light

Einstein's principle of the invariant speed of light no matter what the relative motion is from the physical starting point from which that light emanates, indicates that time itself must be relative to this universally inherent quality of boundedness. The function of light, more broadly conceived as propagation of electromagnetic wave phenomena, varies relative to the type of bounding sphere (geosphere, biosphere, noosphere) as defined by Vernadsky, upon which it operates.

First, what Vernadsky labelled the geosphere or the inorganic realm is the result of the creation of elements up to iron by nuclear fusion in the furnaces of stars and heavier elements by shockwave explosions in supernovae (or perhaps other hitherto undiscovered inorganic processes.) The scale of time for the evolution of elements is only bounded by the age of the universe itself. In Riemann's philosophical notes we find musings upon the hierarchical relativity of time. He takes as his model Fechner's works on the Zend-Avesta. Fechner views the systems of stars as a higher form of a universal life principle. Vernadsky dismisses this as pantheism, or a form of world soul, purporting  to bestow consciousness upon the inorganic. However, I am more charitable toward Fechner's scheme. It is the case that inherent in the formation of planets from stars, the elements essential to life, and cosmic energy is embedded a principle of life. The question of whether this universal order is higher because it encompasses all of time and thereby all possibilities, or lower because it is merely inorganic dissolves when viewed from the standpoint of how technology may use the principle of fusion, matter anti-matter reactions, and other as yet undiscovered sources of energy/matter transformations. Seen from this perspective,that which Vernadsky denominates as the Noosphere, humanity noetically continues or recapitulates the process of creation in the sense that Nicholas of  Cusa gives as the Microcosm recapitulating the entire development of the Macrocosm.

Second, the photosynthetic property of light on the biosphere is the obvious transformation that leads to large scale evolutionary dynamics. We also now find that life thrives at the cellular level as thermophiles and extremophiles feeding from thermal and radioactive  radiation. For the biosphere, the addition of a directional sort of causality that involves a primitive sort of choice is manifest. The opposite chirality of the amino acid and sugar molecules evince this. It is quite remarkable that the ATPase mitochondrial motor that produces usable biological energy rotates either clockwise or counter  clockwise depending on whether the form of life is aerobic or anaerobic. Further, an ongoing quality of directness inheres in the evolutionary development of life forms that are able to capture and efficiently use more energy dense sources of nourishment. Thus, for Vernadsky, the biosphere is bounded by this evolutionary principle.

Third, the human creative interaction with light and radiative processes more generally, via technology shows itself in a multi-functional evolutionary way. At the dawning of civilization, epic poetry underlines the discovery  of fire from wood burning. This is the first in a succession of advancements in fuel sources that lift humanity's inventors into the role of self conscious directed evolution benefiting  unborn future generations. Just as fundamental to these epic poems is the invention of navigation via decoding the positions and movements of the light from stars. As LaRouche has shown, within any one mode of technology, there is posed a crisis for society through the using up of the relatively limited energetic resource. This is the principle which by necessity bounds the proper functioning of the Vernadsky's Noosphere. Here for humanity, creativity and choice becomes a moral imperative for ensuring that we bestow on our posterity the capability to advance understanding and application of light understood literally and metaphorically. This power of continuous creation we can either willfully promote or deny. If we insanely and suicidaly insist upon the primacy of the obligation to pay debt which has been manufactured by the machinations of the global monetarist oligarchy then we will have willfully doused this light. And a dark age will have justly be brought down upon us. On the other hand, if we defeat this monetarist cabal and their control, we can look to the future prospect of our species happiness through virtually limitless colonization of space.

Time as a Vector of Biophysical Relativity

"In the far northern reaches of the Arctic, day versus night often doesn't mean a whole lot. During parts of the year, the sun does not set; at other times, it's just the opposite. A new study reported online on March 11th in Current Biology shows that Arctic reindeer have come up with a solution to living under those extreme conditions: They've abandoned use of the internal clock that drives the daily biological rhythms in other organisms."

In our human world, we adopt the principle of time as the counting of cycles and the counting of things as equivalent in an unconscious act. We don't stop to question whether the process is truthful with respect to the world around us because it is self evidently so. We have embedded within our biological brain a suprachiasmatic nucleus that operates as an internal 24 hour clock.  As the above research indicates, this clock may be biologically overridden in the circumstance that it is out of sync with the earth's own internal diurnal clock of alternation of day and night.

Why Any "Formula for Success" Must Inevitably Fail

Kepler castigated the purveyors of algebra as standing in the way of his revolutionary rewriting the laws of what is today called astrophysics. Applying Keplar's principled objection to algebra to the frame of reference of society's functioning at large is urgently necessary if we are to survive and progress. For what is an algebra when it comes to society except the tissue of accepted rules of behavior, whether those rules be conscious or not? And how does it happen that a society dooms itself to a dark age? Isn't it because it is incapable of the sort of change in its way of doing things necessary for its survival? Up to this point in my argument, a radical environmentalist advocating "change" might nod his or her head in agreement. Aren't they for radical change? Actually, the truth is just the opposite. They are the most bitter inalterable haters of true change. They romanticize the "noble savage." Like the transcendentalists of yore. Like Carlos Castaneda they profess love of soil (and often psychedelics, which should be more accurately labeled psychotomimetics.) It should be quite simple to see that this is in essence proto-fascist whether or not it is labeled as leftism. Except that most among us are chained to our way of doing and thinking about things.

Isn't it the case that the universe has a built in principle of evolutionary change? If there is a crisis in remaining fixed in our way of doing things, isn't there always a potential solution available? In fact isn't it a type solution that leads to more freedom for humanity? If even a class of diseases shows the potential for indefinite change in morphology such that their macrophage combatants exhibit this infinite evolvability, how much more so the mental capacity to evolve society? Tis is what Leibniz meant by the preordained harmony of the best of all possible worlds. Contrary to that false portrayal by that wretch Voltaire, not that there was no inevitable painful crises to be overcome by society through application of scientific progress. 


Today's economic crises are based upon a cabal of financiers setting the rules to save their insane game of speculative looting of the world's population. To save the bubble of debt that they have manufactured out of thin air, inevitably they must demand increasing the death rate. This is the ugly truth behind their political, media and academic hod carriers clarion calls for "entitlement reform." This is why they turn apoplectic and shout the label of "extremism" at any who thus accurately expose their game. The only way out of the crisis is to do the unthinkable: break the algebraic rules of the game. Write off the lunatic forms of derivative securities. Set up agreements among nations above the so called markets that will assure lasting referred investments in infrastructure, energy intensive agriculture and industry.

Johannes Kepler

Today's Dark Age Flagellants

"A seven-month old baby girl survived a shot to the chest after her parents shot themselves and their two-year-old in a global warming murder-suicide pact."

The masquerade of pseudo-science is increasingly wearing thin.  Hatred against technology deployed for preservation of the Ancien Regime is the puppeteer's sport. Drive them mad and reap the profit of death is their emblem. Thus the flagellants spread the plague with the hue and cry that humanity is only fit for evil. Who benefits from this?

Star Gazing

We map the universe by looking through the past as light travels to our neighborhood. But the interesting question is, given what we know of likely scenarios of its potential evolvability, what does the map of the known universe in its entirety look like in the here and now? Because perhaps approaching the issue in this way may lead to thinking of universal structural and functional interrelatedness in new and useful ways.

Political Skulduggery

In the bowels of Dante Alighieri's Inferno, Count Ugolino, the traitor, gnaws upon the skull of the corpse of his former political ally Ruggieri. Isn't this an apt metaphor for both today's Democratic and Republican parties currying the favor of high finance to impose brutal austerity to collect debt. But which party is the better at it? Of course, "debts must be paid by someone," intones the devil. Who will perform the best as his beloved minion? He or she will have the honor to reside there in the pit of hell next to Satan. Gnawing away for eternity...

Global Warming.Cui Bono?

Mathusianism. Whence comes it? An oligarchical hatred of humanity. Prince Phillip's stated desire, for example, that he would like to be reincarnated as a deadly virus to reduce the world's population. This hatred persists over millennia. It is old as mud. It is the hatred of the pagan would-be gods for discoveries that lift humanity out of the muck and mire. Thus the myth of Zeus' torture of Prometheus the bringer of fire.

More Goldman Sachs Bedtime Stories

Today's NY Times reports that Goldman did everything in its power to bring down the mortgage backed derivative securities market to put the squeeze on AIG to pay off its gamble that the mortgage valuations would collapse. Of course, anyone not drunk on the hype that mortgage values never collapse, foresaw that exactly what Goldman bet on was in fact inevitable.

Therefore the contents of this article completely gives the lie to the oft repeated line by a supine media "that no one could have known that the markets would crash." In actual fact, Goldman not only knew but did everything to make that happen, including inducing its partner in crime Paulson to grovel for more loot, on bended knee, crocodile tears and all, before a scarified congress. What a sordid, shameful con game these "honorable men" have foisted upon us rubes.

Jail All The Bankers First!

"Goldman Sachs Group Inc., trying to show it is responsive to public pressure over its pay, said Chairman and Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein would get a $9 million bonus for 2009, a fraction of the $68.5 million payout he got in 2007."

The discriminating reader will, of course, be amused by this foregoing sentence. In actual fact, it were meet that Messer Blankfein find himself in the hoosegow, alongside his brethren in crime Messers Paulson, Geithner, and Summers. Surely, John Dillinger and Baby Faced Nelson are rolling over in their graves with envy at Mr Blankfein's hubris.

(A thousand pardons dear reader. I foolishly left off Messer Bernanke from my list.)

Is the World's Oldest Profession Economics?

From today's headlines:

Economy Sheds 20,000 Jobs But Rate Drops to 9.7 Percent

While a sharp increase in the number of people giving up looking for work helped to depress the jobless rate, some details of the employment report were encouraging. The number of "discouraged job seekers" rose to 1.1 million in January from 734,000 a year ago.

Hmm. Very interesting. Shouldn't we encourage the Labor Department for the sake of full disclosure to label these "discouraged workers" as "desaparecidos" a la Argentina or perhaps they might prefer the Stalinist "Damnatio Memoriae" method of photographic erasure. I guess the statisticians will do anything to provide the illusion that there is a "recovery" even though the corpse of the economy rots apace.

The Current Essential Difference Between Democrats and Republicans

In order to adduce the distinction between the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States today, first one must recognize that the only appropriate arena within which to make an unbiased judgment, ab initio, is the province of animal psychology.
The careful reader may object that I have heretofore shown only disdain for any claim that behaviorism is to be accorded the label of the science of the human psychology. This is indeed quite true. No such strictures imposed by a supposed science that limits the scope of humanity's capacity to a fixed set of behavioral patterns could ever account for the creative problem solving evinced in our species' nature time and again. Therefore behaviorism deserves only opprobrium. However, in this instance, you must bear in mind that we are dealing with the degeneration of humanity into these bestial parties which adamantly refuse to partake of precisely that truly unique human quality of problem solving.
Moreover, it is the characteristic behavior of that particular animal from time immemorial referred to as man's best friend with which we must compare the subjects of our inquiry. Every dog has its day. One party is up now, only to be toppled by a disgruntled and betrayed populace. They both serve the interests of their lords in their own way though. They serve as shills like the proverbial dog and pony show keeping one's attention on the circus while one's pocket is picked. This is all the current debate about budget cutting signifies. Nothing more. The Democratic dogs and Republican dogs snarl and yelp, meanwhile ladies and gentleman our future is being stolen by the pickpockets of the financiers that control the show from beginning to end.

What Leibniz Did Not Imply

When Leibniz wrote that music is the pleasure the mind derives from counting without being aware of the act of counting, he foreshadowed the continuous development of music up to the summit of Beethoven's late string quartets. However, he would sorely disapprove of any aesthetics that would try to impose counting or any of its mathematical extensions as the essence of what he called the pleasure of the mind. This is what Beethoven himself so publicly parodied in that vulgar mechanician Maelzel. This is what Furtwaengler execrated in the conducting of Tuscanini. And it is where Goethe went off the rails in his theory of color.Likewise in Felix Klein's dubious study of curvature and statuary.

"Why the mirror lies: Individuals with body dysmorphic disorder see their own faces differently "

Conversely, according to Leonardo da Vinci from his notebook writings, the opposite can be true. That is, that one's notion of facial beauty may be unduly influenced by narcissism. However, Hieronymous Bosch appears to have had a variation of this problem. He has been reported to have uttered that he only let his children out at night because they were so ugly.

Headlines We'd Like to See

JFK 1962: "We shall go to the moon." Obama 2010: "We shall not go to the moon. (We shall go to hell, however.)"

"Fish Oil May Prevent Psychosis"

Then I say this--force feed cod liver oil to all our representatives and the media--NOW!

Idea for New Direction for Obama

Use the MASH theme song from now on: "Suicide is painless-- it brings on many changes" 

Paul Volcker's Latest Incarnation

Many years ago yours truly had the pleasure of challenging Mr Volcker to debate the merits of his handling of the economy. He did not stop but waltzed along at DFW airport. Today's Op-Ed in the NY Slimes evinces a true characterization of his ultima ratio.
He opines thusly: "Here in the United States as elsewhere, some of the largest and proudest financial institutions — including both investment and commercial banks — have been rescued or merged with the help of massive official funds."  
I retort pointedly: Mr Volcker, in heaven's name, exactly what justifies these institutions' pride in your opinion? Now as then, I doubt I'll get a response from this august personage.

New Ice Age Aphorisms

In this new ice age, whilst engaged in a snowball fight with the neighborhood AGW believer, it's a good idea to bring one's dog along for that special something extra.

Watch the Pollsters Attempt to Change the Agenda Now That Obama's Down for the Count

Boys and girls-- here's the new game in town. And it goes like this: The media, like the son of a mother dog that we so well know it to be, will forthwith put in for its usual Mutt and Jeff routine, now that Obama has incompetently run afoul of the Families' agenda. Polls are now going to show more and more Americans are excruciatingly worried about the deficit. Of course this is pure manipulation. The Republican party is ginning up this Simple Simon brand of Joe six pack falderol a la that s-l-o-w drawling Republican version of Al Gore's best schoolmarm imitation, Phil Gramm and his kitchen table economics for kindergarteners: Mr. and Mrs. America (he twangs): the government has to pay as you go just like you and me. Ergo, the Mutt and Jeff ragtime. So John Q., you aren't ready for deathcare euthanasia a la the Obama kill your granny meme? Well here's what you are telling us now you want in this latest poll: you demand budget cuts: soto voce--read Schachtian austerity. Come on, you know you want it. After all, money rules the world don't it? Pleased to meet you, I hope you guess my name. Woo hoo hoo. Hail her royal satanic majesty. Hail Satania!

Bin Laden Embraces Green Fascism

This just in from the BBC:

A new message said to be from al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden has blamed global warming on the US and other big industrial nations."All industrial nations, mainly the big ones, are responsible for the crisis of global warming," the latest tape says.

"This is a message to the whole world about those who are causing climate change, whether deliberately or not, and what we should do about that."

So now Britain's Greenpeace,  Gore's Democrats, and Osama's Al Qaida share the same bed. How cozy! It wouldn't surprise this writer in the least to see Osama nominated to the board of the IPCC.  Or better yet, the Nobel peace prize. Looks like he has come home to Mother, as in MI5, that is.

Universal Relative Motion and Potential Energy Propagation as Subsumed By Creative Imagination

If you imagine the layerings of mere rotational (and thereby chiral) motions starting from the infinitesimal and continuously amalgamating toward the transcendent velocities of galactic groups, what you come away with should not be a path of a point. That would be to miss the continuously embedded toroidal subsumption of potential energy of which that point partakes. That toroidal form as a singularly deformed sphere propagates material waves externally as allowed by the surrounding medium through which it moves. However, on its surface, there is an orbital which at its extremum represents an alternation from negative to positive surface curvature. This is the chiral (or spiral) pathway from the toroidal pole through its inner equator, which is a point connecting two horns at center then continuing along the opposite horn and through the outer equator and back to the pole. For the mathematical imagination, the velocity of this rotation goes from zero to infinity. Thus providing a model for a metastable alternation of propagation of potential energy which anneals the shock wave velocity which is ever present here as the path along the negatively curved horn with the continuation along the positively curved outer spheroidal shell. And doesn't this model suggest a more general means for the universal annealing of the psycho-physical continuum, as distinct from the merely number line mathematical one?
Because as you move onto the domain of truly human cognition as the ability to create analogous singularities via revolutionary technological innovations, it becomes apparent that there exists an unending process of a potential chiral pathway through the propagation of the adoption of these technologies by society as it is able in a spherically propagated wavelike analogous way and onto the next such breakthrough.
Therefore, without the understanding that the noetic, creative impulse of humanity subsumes all we can know about merely physical subordinated systems we go off in a puerile, masturbatory quest like some theoretical physicist Don Juan's multiverse raised to the power of one thousand and three .
This metastatic model is akin to Leibniz' concept of monad, Cusa's microcosm macrocosm principle, and Plato's unspoken resolution of the Parmenedes paradox. It is what Sancho Panza solves in the governor bridge riddle: the power of mercy. In any epoch of human history, inevitably there is crisis. Why? Because creativity cannot sit still. The technological means of society's reducing power are necessarily limited and evanescent. Every culture thereby confronts its own demons. Zeus as the oligarch who punishes Aeschylus' Prometheus the fire bearer. That is to say, the creative spark latent in each and every one of us. This is the secret of the tragedy in Shakespeare's works. The imposition of a self destructive impulse upon the governance of men that would like Cronus eat its own children is the antithesis of this model. The principle is above the here and now: as scientific and artistic creativity it is truly immortal. Either you choose to embrace it or shun it at humanity's peril. You are at once free and yet constrained, dear reader. How else would you have it?

Eat your spinach! (and drink your coffee)

Learning and memory are fundamental brain functions affected by dietary and environmental factors. Here, we show that increasing brain magnesium using a newly developed magnesium compound (magnesium-L-threonate, MgT) leads to the enhancement of learning abilities, working memory, and short- and long-term memory in rats. The pattern completion ability was also improved in aged rats. MgT-treated rats had higher density of synaptophysin-/synaptobrevin-positive puncta in DG and CA1 subregions of hippocampus that were correlated with memory improvement. Functionally, magnesium increased the number of functional presynaptic release sites, while it reduced their release probability. The resultant synaptic reconfiguration enabled selective enhancement of synaptic transmission for burst inputs. Coupled with concurrent upregulation of NR2B-containing NMDA receptors and its downstream signaling, synaptic plasticity induced by correlated inputs was enhanced. Our findings suggest that an increase in brain magnesium enhances both short-term synaptic facilitation and long-term potentiation and improves learning and memory functions.

Spices, nuts, cereals, coffee, cocoa, tea, and vegetables are rich sources of magnesium. Green leafy vegetables such as spinach are also rich in magnesium as they contain chlorophyll which is rich in magnesium. Observations of reduced dietary magnesium intake in modern Western countries as compared to earlier generations may be related to food refining and modern fertilizers which contain no magnesium.

"Conan Obama"

I must say: we are amused...

Womanizing

Shea-Porter: Send the men home and Congress could pass health care reform

 In some of her most incendiary comments to date, Democratic Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter (NH-01) claimed on Saturday that female Republican members of Congress have confided in her, in the ladies room, no less, that if they could just send the male members of Congress home they could pass health care reform by the weekend.

 Must be Shea-Porter's opinion of women is a little low. I put this question to her: If as you say quite rightly, I believe, that it's the women that provide care for their family members, why would they vote for legislation that will ration their care with an "independent expert advisory board" called IMAB? (Look that up in your Funk and Wagnalls if you dare.)

And now for something entirely different...

70-year gag on Kelly death evidence (Dr. David Kelly)

Hail Britannia! The exemplar for liberal democracies everywhere.

"Why are America's teens getting so fat?"

Mayhaps they have been convinced by the mis-educators in this once great country of ours that we truly are the "consumer society." Oh, and I almost forgot, considering that lolling upon one's derrière is a weighty cause as well, the "information society."

Is President Obama Acting Fishy? (A Metaproof.)

Dear reader, you may recall some months ago -- I believe it was in August -- that the President's communications director asked Obama partisans to report to her all things (chain emails and the like) fishy in opposition to her principal's health care cause. Now, Ms. Douglas' use of  the word "fishy" in this context, I believe, was not as accidental as it first might appear. Let us pause for a moment to consider this. As many a wag thereafter immediately concluded (including yours truly, of course) she was in essence insinuating for the word "fishy" the meaning "seditious." But she couldn't just come right out and say that. Why? Because then all the old shibboleths that liberals were really fascists in sheep's clothing would come home to roost. (((I know, (sigh) I just really upset the immiscible metaphor purists here.(Ugh!))) But let's dig a bit deeper here, shall we? What was Linda (I hope I'm not being overly familiar here, after all she did come into my living room via the boob tube) referring to in her ponderously, seemingly nonchalant and ill-chosen way? (Remember, after ll, she is the so called communcations director.) What and where are these home grown chain emails she bespoke?

Let us interpolate here some reflections upon the matter of what constitutes "proof" in cases such as the one before us. Now, Mr. Leibniz pretty much coined the the concept of "sufficient reason." (If one can be said to have "coined" a concept, that is.) The exemplar of the most elegant usage of this  methodology takes us far afield from the topic that I broached above. (However, not too far, given the identity and namesake of this blog.) Recall, if you will, the so-called "Longfellow Wars" that Mr. Poe engaged in. Ah, but this does give some little piquancy  to that oft quoted bit of doggerel: "He's a poet and didn't know it because his nose is a Longfellow." (With apologies to Messers Sterne and Gogol. They of Tristram Shandy and The Nose eclat, you see.) But, I digress. Back to the issue at hand. In that series of verbal rencounters, if you will,  betwixt Edgar and Longfellow's pseudonymous defender Outis, ((((("nobody" in school boy Greek (probably plagiarized from Homer.(!))) ((I hope that's quite enough parentheses. (My Kingdom for an editor.))))))  the issue was not so much a plagiarism in the sense of a "word for word type" plagiarism, but rather, the more hard to prove and thereby more devious one of plagiarizing content.

Now, what has this to do with the by now dimly remembered issue referenced above?, the restive reader will be seeming to urge. To wit: Ms. Douglas was unconsciously practicing the principle that the great Schiller illumined in The Cranes of Ibykus. Which is to say, she is covering for an hysterical reaction (a freakout, in common parlance) by Obama's inner circle (read especially Rahm Emanuel,) to the exposure of the content of the healthcare legislation. You see earlier that year as Mr. Emanuel's brother Ezekiel was testifying on behalf of the principle of "cost containment" in healthcare, he was unceremoniously taken to task in no uncertain terms, i.e. as a fascist, by Tony Chaitkin, a LaRouche partisan. Ms. Douglas would not want to bring any attention to this, because it is de rigueur, in such circles, never  refer to LaRouche by name,thereby giving him too much credit,  rather to either pronounce the words "extremist" or in this case the rather watered down term of "fishy." Not to alienate the "Reagan Democrats" more than necessary. Remember, Sarah Palin was calling the IMAB provisions, death panels by now. Republicans in general were openly criticizing the bill as leading to rationing on the floor of the Congress. So, frankly speaking, there was no need for Ms. Douglas to be so obtuse in her warning of fishy emails, in the tradition of erstwhile usage of the term "dark forces" by Politburo types. Did she somehow want to track Mr.or Mrs. Jones surrepticious visits to certain "dark forces" websites?

Well now you see the results of this type of behavior among the Obamaites and their media hangers-on. Even the pollsters, a notoriously obfuscating bunch, are showing overwhelming popular resistance, and I use that term advisedly, to the healthcare legislation. So how does Barack react to the disastrous election of  Scott Brown in Massachusetts? Fishily. One: change the subject. Talk about  jobs, jobs, jobs. Throw Geithner under the bus. Bring Volker in as a placebo to the "populists." Two: connive in mysterious ways behind the scenes to get the budget cutting IMAB provision in no matter what. Very fishy, indeed. QED.

(Kudos to eLLUMINATI BLOG for the spectacular image above.)

Tomes of Forgotten Lore

"Psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Memphis have released a new study on linguistic evolution that challenges the prominent hypothesis for why languages differ throughout the world."

 It seems as if the academic field of linguistics has long ago forgotten what philology was. Wilhelm von Humboldt described the social parameters of the development of language far more convincingly in "The Heterogeneity of Language and its Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind" some 174 years ago!

OBAMA SAYS I WANT YOU (IN THE GRAVE)

I WANT YOU (IN THE GRAVE)

Behaviorists Behaving Badly

Studying animals in behavioral experiments has been a cornerstone of psychological research, but whether the observations are relevant for human behavior has been unclear. Weill Cornell Medical College researchers have identified an alteration to the DNA of a gene that imparts similar anxiety-related behavior in both humans and mice, demonstrating that laboratory animals can be accurately used to study these human behaviors.

While it is clear that humans may behave as animals behave in the grip of such emotions, what is not clear is whether behaviorists know that which irretrievably distinguishes humans from animals. Reason, i.e., the uniquely demonstrated human capacity to alter the supposed fixed laws of predator prey relationships via noesis.

More Krugman Dross

Professor Krugman opines:

“we really don’t know what it will take to rein in health costs”

I retort:

Not true, it’s quite simple: pull the plug on granny with the IMAB provision in the bill (not just her hip replacement.) Don’t know what that is? I wonder why?

Lilliputians redux

Director Oliver Stone’s upcoming Showtime documentary miniseries “Secret History of America” promises to put mass murderers such as Stalin and Hitler “in context.”

Only fools in a cave, somewhere, watching shadows on the wall, believe in earnest that left vs. right is anything other than a contrived pile of manure a la Jonathan Swift's Lilliputian fable. So, one can only hope that some little truth comes out here. Such as how Versailles' Treaty imposed uncollectable reparations, thereby allowing Hitler to be sponsored by the likes of W's grandfather. Today's ecofascism is of a piece with this history of manipulation.

The Vision of God in a Snowfall

If one walks facing the sun among the new fallen snow, glancing at the right attitude, one sees a remarkable vision and theodicy: the flakes act as prisms and glitter thousands of primary colors consecutively. Hats off to Nicholas of Cusa and Leibniz. What more proof of God does anyone deserve than this?

Googlefascism

The company in mid-December pledged on its blog "Going green at Google" that it was going to make its operations carbon-neutral and reduce greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.

One big challenge for search engines is to implement a measure of quality that is not based solely on popularity. Search engines must determine both relevance (is the item pertinent to the user's query?) and quality (is the item inherently accurate, useful and understandable, independent of the query?). Current relevance measures do reasonably well. Measures of quality require better models of the concepts and relations expressed in documents and how they relate to the reality of the world, as well as models of the trustworthiness of authors. Thus, a site that claims that the Moon landings were a hoax and seems to have a coherent argument structure will be judged to be lower quality than a legitimate astronomy site, because the premises of the hoax argument are at odds with reality. Understanding and improving these models is a key challenge for the coming decade.

It is becoming obvious with this announcement and the piece from a Google bigwig in the latest Nature rag that states that they want to control the quality of information in searches in the future that this is quite the neo-fascist outfit.

(It is next to impossible, since Microsoft removed it from their code, to get a good Google logo with the o character transposed to a swastika as is meet to illustrate the principle, but as an optimist, I am sure this will be forthcoming soon.)

The Would Be Hunger Artist at the NY Times

It’s a small daily tragedy that we animals must kill to stay alive. Plants are the ethical autotrophs here, the ones that wrest their meals from the sun. Don’t expect them to boast: they’re too busy fighting to survive.

It seems that the only ethical thing to do according to this NY Times article quoted above is to starve oneself. (If only the anti-humanists like Al Gore, et al. were ethical!)

Outre science?

(PhysOrg.com) -- By implanting an electrode into the brain of a person with locked-in syndrome, scientists have demonstrated how to wirelessly transmit neural signals to a speech synthesizer. The "thought-to-speech" process takes about 50 milliseconds - the same amount of time for a non-paralyzed, neurologically intact person to speak their thoughts. The study marks the first successful demonstration of a permanently installed, wireless implant for real-time control of an external device.

The new brain-computer interface enables HB to select letters on a computer screen using her mind alone, spelling out words at a rate of one letter every 56 seconds, to share her thoughts. Credit: Brain Center Rudolf Magnus, University Medical Center Utrecht

 

 

One could imagine with the evolution of this technology, a nano computer system implanted in the brain (or perhaps less invasively, rather as an article of clothing in contact with the electro magnetic brainwave spectrum) such that communication would be possible between parties by thought alone and translated from their native languages automatically. Frankly, this scenario seems no further off than, say, harnessing matter/anti matter reactions to power inter stellar flight shielding humans from radiation and using inertial force as an equivalent for gravity via effect continuous acceleration deceleration.

Riemann surface and biological functions

The Riemann surface models a complex function that has multiple values on sheets connected through functional branch points. Compare that with this functional diagram of the simplest of protein life forms and once again it is clear that Riemann's geometric epistemology was prescient.

This image represents the integration of genomic, metabolic, proteomic, structural and cellular information about Mycoplasma pnemoniae in this project: one layer of an Electron Tomography scan of a bottle-shaped M. pneumoniae cell (grey) is overlaid with a schematic representation of this bacterium's metabolism, comprising 189 enzymatic reactions, where blue indicates interactions between proteins encoded in genes from the same functional unit. Apart from these expected interactions, the scientists found that, surprisingly, many proteins are multifunctional. For instance, there were various unexpected physical interactions (yellow lines) between proteins and the subunits that form the ribosome, which is depicted as an Electron microscopy image (yellow). Credit: Takuji Yamada /EMBL

A Biophysical Analog of a Higher Order Process Embedded in Apparently Random Mutations

As I pointed to in an earlier post, Riemann's mathematical method in approaching "chaotic" disordered functions through elimination by degree of arbitrariness should prove instructive in applications for applied sciences. Now a new microbiology discovery bears this idea out:

When cells are confronted with an invading virus or bacteria or exposed to an irritating chemical, they protect themselves by going off their DNA recipe and inserting the wrong amino acid into new proteins to defend them against damage, scientists have discovered.
These "regulated errors" comprise a novel non-genetic mechanism by which cells can rapidly make important proteins more resistant to attack when stressed, said Tao Pan, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago. A team of 18 scientists from the University of Chicago and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease led by Pan and Jonathan Yewdell published the findings Thursday in the journal Nature.
"This mechanism allows every protein to get some protection," Pan said. "The genetic code is considered untouchable, but this is a non-genetic strategy used in cells to create a bodyguard for proteins."
Proteins are constructed through a process called translation where cellular elements use the genetic code to guide the assembly of building blocks called amino acids into the correct sequence. First, a copy of the DNA, called messenger RNA, is made and transferred to a cellular structure called a ribosome. Transfer RNAs (tRNA), one for each of the 20 amino acids used in building proteins, read the messenger RNA code and bring the proper amino acids to the ribosome, where they are bonded together to form a complete protein.
Each tRNA can be attached to only one of 20 amino acids, a specificity that prevents errors during the construction of proteins. In artificial laboratory preparations, scientists have observed that only one out of every 10,000 amino acids is placed into a protein incorrectly, and thus protein errors were thought to be exceptionally rare.
But Jeffrey Goodenbour, University of Chicago graduate student and co-lead author along with Nir Netzer of the NIAID, decided to look at how often tRNA errors, called misacylations, occurred in live cells. After developing a novel technique for measuring these errors, published for the first time in this paper, the authors were surprised to find a much higher error rate in those cells for the amino acid methionine. As high as one out of every 100 methionines was incorrectly placed in proteins, they found.
When the cells were stressed by exposure to a virus, bacteria or a toxic chemical such as hydrogen peroxide, that error rate went even higher, as up to 10 percent of methionines placed into new proteins were different from what the gene specified.
"That was 1,000 times more than the textbook says should be there," Pan said.
Further experiments revealed that it was always the same amino acid, methionine, placed incorrectly into new proteins. Methionine is one of only two amino acids to carry sulfur atoms on its side chains, a feature that allows it to neutralize dangerous molecules called reactive oxygen species (ROS) that form inside an infected or stressed cell. ROS can damage proteins through a chemical process called oxidation, but methionine can be oxidized (and restored through a process called reduction) without being permanently damaged.
"The idea is that methionine can protect you from having oxidation of the active site of protein, which would ultimately completely block function of the protein," Goodenbour said. "You end up reducing the total reactive oxygen species load in the cell. It's a very interesting mechanism."
Cells normally put methionines near important parts of a protein to protect those segments from being damaged by reactive oxygen species. When the cell is under stress, and the amount of ROS increases, the number of methionine "errors" is ramped up tenfold, allowing new proteins to be even more resistant to attack.
"Think of a boxing match," Pan said. "If you put methionine close to active site, the reactive oxygen species has to get past it to get to the active site residues for oxidization. You've put something right in front of it so a protein can take a hit. If you have a lot of methionines, to knock this protein out will take many, many hits. So this is a strategy used in cells to create a bodyguard for a protein."
A remaining puzzle is to determine why extra protective methionines are not encoded as part of the DNA in the first place, instead of being left to the post-genetic random placement described in this paper. Pan suggests that random placement of the amino acids makes proteins even more resistant to attack, since no two are created alike.
"This sounds chaotic and doesn't make a lot of sense according to the textbook," Pan said. "But this way the cells can always ensure that a subset of these proteins is somewhat less sensitive to the extra hits. I think that's the most important part of this - to make every protein molecule different - and you cannot do this genetically."
Source: University of Chicago Medical Center

Apparent errors/mutations in RNA translation of protein production lead to extra methionine amino acid randomly being attached to proteins. But this is now shown to be purposeful because these "misreadings" of the protein genetic code lead to protection against reactive oxygen species when cells are under attack by disease or stress and these errors are then greatly accelerated. So, the question that this begs is what is the higher order functional mechanism that directs this apparent disorder? This is precisely where the zenith of scientific epistemology exemplified by nineteenth century Riemann's radically constructive non Euclidean approach needs to be brought to bear.

Fast and slow brain waves as analogue carriers versus digital information model of brain

My last entry on Fechner's concept of non interfering waves in reminiscences has gotten an interesting empirical support from new research:

ScienceDaily (Nov. 19, 2009) — The human brain is bombarded with all kinds of information, from the memory of last night's delicious dinner to the instructions from your boss at your morning meeting. But how do you "tune in" to just one thought or idea and ignore all the rest of what is going on around you, until it comes time to think of something else? Researchers at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience and Centre for the Biology of Memory at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) have discovered a mechanism that the brain uses to filter out distracting thoughts to focus on a single bit of information. Their results are reported in 19 November issue of Nature.
Think of your brain like a radio: You're turning the knob to find your favourite station, but the knob jams, and you're stuck listening to something that's in between stations. It's a frustrating combination that makes it quite hard to get an update on swine flu while a Michael Jackson song wavers in and out. Staying on the right frequency is the only way to really hear what you're after. In much the same way, the brain's nerve cells are able to "tune in" to the right station to get exactly the information they need, says researcher Laura Colgin, who was the paper's first author. "Just like radio stations play songs and news on different frequencies, the brain uses different frequencies of waves to send different kinds of information," she says.
Gamma waves as information carriers
Colgin and her colleagues measured brain waves in rats, in three different parts of the hippocampus, which is a key memory center in the brain. While listening in on the rat brain wave transmissions, the researchers started to realize that there might be something more to a specific sub-set of brain waves, called gamma waves. Researchers have thought these waves are linked to the formation of consciousness, but no one really knew why their frequency differed so much from one region to another and from one moment to the next.
Information is carried on top of gamma waves, just like songs are carried by radio waves. These "carrier waves" transmit information from one brain region to another. "We found that there are slow gamma waves and fast gamma waves coming from different brain areas, just like radio stations transmit on different frequencies," she says.
You really can "be on the same wavelength"
"You know how when you feel like you really connect with someone, you say you are on the same wavelength? When brain cells want to connect with each other, they synchronize their activity," Colgin explains. "The cells literally tune into each other's wavelength. We investigated how gamma waves in particular were involved in communication across cell groups in the hippocampus. What we found could be described as a radio-like system inside the brain. The lower frequencies are used to transmit memories of past experiences, and the higher frequencies are used to convey what is happening where you are right now."
If you think of the example of the jammed radio, the way to hear what you want out of the messy signals would be to listen really hard for the latest news while trying to filter out the unwanted music. The hippocampus does this more efficiently. It simply tunes in to the right frequency to get the station it wants. As the cells tune into the station they're after, they are actually able to filter out the other station at the same time, because its signal is being transmitted on a different frequency.
The switch
"The cells can rapidly switch their activity to tune in to the slow waves or the fast waves," Colgin says, "but it seems as though they cannot listen to both at the exact same time. This is like when you are listening to your radio and you tune in to a frequency that is midway between two stations- you can't understand anything- it's just noise." In this way, the brain cells can distinguish between an internal world of memories and a person's current experiences. If the messages were carried on the same frequency, our perceptions of the world might be completely confused. "Your current perceptions of a place would get mixed up with your memories of how the place used to be," Colgin says.
The cells that tune into different wavelengths work like a switch, or rather, like zapping between radio stations that are already programmed into your radio. The cells can switch back and forth between different channels several times per second. The switch allows the cells to attend to one piece at a time, sorting out what's on your mind from what's happening and where you are at any point in time. The researchers believe this is an underlying principle for how information is handled throughout the brain.
"This switch mechanism points to superfast routing as a general mode of information handling in the brain," says Edvard Moser, Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience director. "The classical view has been that signaling inside the brain is hardwired, subject to changes caused by modification of connections between neurons. Our results suggest that the brain is a lot more flexible. Among the thousands of inputs to a given brain cell, the cell can choose to listen to some and ignore the rest and the selection of inputs is changing all the time. We believe that the gamma switch is a general principle of the brain, employed throughout the brain to enhance interregional communication."
Can a switch malfunction explain schizophrenia?
People who are schizophrenic have problems keeping these brain signals straight. They cannot tell, for example, if they are listening to voices from people who are present or if the voices are from the memory of a movie they have seen. "We cannot tell for sure if it is this switch that is malfunctioning, but we do know that gamma waves are abnormal in schizophrenic patients," Colgin says. "Schizophrenics' perceptions of the world around them are mixed up, like a radio stuck between stations."

This further refutes the nonsensical delirium that the human mind could ever be modeled as a complex "digital" system. Anyone who has ever experienced the nonlinear leap of creative insight best exemplified in Beethoven's compositions, immediately recognizes the absurdity of such misguided behaviorist assumptions about truly human thought.