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.

Gustav Theodor Fechner

Recently, in examining Bernard Riemann's influences from his philosophical fragments, I came upon the work of Fechner. Today, Fechner is almost exclusively remembered as the father of the field of "psychophysics." In particular, his logarithmic function for the threshold of conscious perceptions. However, Riemann was very much captivated by Fechner's writing on Zend Avesta. It is quite remarkable that Riemann's work on sonic shockwave propagation predated the actual demonstration of the said phenomena by some decades. The reason for this is, I believe that the principle involved actually transcends the narrow application that Riemann gave it in that instance, i.e. of pressure and the speed of sound . That is that given a wave being propagated beyond the speed at which the medium is capable of accepting a shockwave aggregates perforce. As this continues over time the shockwave can be thought of as a negatively curved horn surface. This idea immediately links to Riemann's habilitation thesis wherein he details the non Euclidian geometries as the basis of choice for metric for physical space. It is the moving over from positively curved propagation to a negatively curved time series that is there in germ form in that thesis of Riemann. And I believe that likewise Fechner in the Zend Avesta evinces the germ of autowave phenomenology when he states (in English translation from the German): "Our future spheres of existence, though all incorporated in the same great body, the earth, will not disturb, confuse or efface each other. Even here our spheres of existence necessarily cross and intersect each other, as the means of mutual intercourse, which in the here after will only increase in intimacy, variety and consciousness; and in our brain the material changes connected with our reminiscences cross and intersect each other, leaving them nevertheless undisturbed and uneffaced." (my emphasis added) I believe that this is a remarkable instance of how a method for viewing interconnectedness of physical and psychological phenomena leads to a correct hypothesis of neurological characteristics before any experimental apparatus is available.

Elephants hear through their feet!

This research appears on first glance to be quite straightforward reasoning from the premise that extends the concept of ground based vibrational communication from bugs to mammals. But, if you review Riemann's philosophical writings and interpolate his work on hearing, then you get an interesting congruence with this research. His view of time being relative to the species and the electromagnetic wave nature of sound as primary combine quite elegantly here. By the way, the notion that all of the biological substrate persists as a kind of soliton is I think a wonderfully apt characterization.

Upon learning of Obama's new Internet Mining Policy

Obama is cool.
Obama is the real deal.
Obama is the man.
Obama is for change.
Obama is our hero.
Obama is the best president ever.
Obama is the yes we can man.
Obama is a man for all seasons.
Obama is a never ending story of hope.
Obama is an American hero.
Obama is a jazzy dude.
Obama is the biggest thing ever!

Krugman: the Laputan?

Krugman opines thusly:

So new budget projections show a cumulative deficit of $9 trillion over the next decade. According to many commentators, that’s a terrifying number, requiring drastic action — in particular, of course, canceling efforts to boost the economy and calling off health care reform.
The truth is more complicated and less frightening. Right now deficits are actually helping the economy. In fact, deficits here and in other major economies saved the world from a much deeper slump. The longer-term outlook is worrying, but it’s not catastrophic.

I retort:


In the rarified precincts of ivory tower of Nobel Prizedom, (or rather Nobel Prizedumb) the erosion and collapse of the manufacturing base means less than nothing to such high falluting intellects, of course. The fact that the government has encumbered itself with the greatest speculative bubble known as derivative securities to the tune of untold hundreds of trillions, why that is irrelevant saith these Laputan folk. Besides Hamilton's report on manufactures where he establishes that there exists a physically productive economy and attacks Smith's Wealth of Nations by name is so 18th century. "Why we live on our floating island of Laputa on information alone now" they declaim commiserating with my ignorance. But why should I cast these topics before such celebrated professors in the first place? A fools errand I'm sure.

Monkeyshines

Flash -- this just in:

(PhysOrg.com) -- Entropy can decrease, according to a new proposal - but the process would destroy any evidence of its existence, and erase any memory an observer might have of it. It sounds like the plot to a weird sci-fi movie, but the idea has recently been suggested by theoretical physicist Lorenzo Maccone, currently a visiting scientist at MIT, in an attempt to solve a longstanding paradox in physics.

This thesis parallels the monkeys typing a Shakespeare play in infinite time. It proves that given even an infinite amount of time a physicist of the reductionist sort will never discover that he has a brain. I.e., the human mind is proof of a non entropic process (when its applied, that is.)

Prometheus Rebound

These days there are some pretty savvy global warming researchers. Sometimes I am awestruck. The latest just in is a dandy, indeed. It seems that Zeus is the original environmentalist. Who knew? What do you mean with such blunderbus you ask? I can't make this stuff up, I retort.

"Agricultural methods of early civilizations may have altered global climate, study suggests

Massive burning of forests for agriculture thousands of years ago may have increased atmospheric carbon dioxide enough to alter global climate and usher in a warming trend that continues today, according to a new study that appears online Aug. 17 in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews."

Why does this involve purely mythological figments like Prometheus and Zeus? Stay with me here. Prometheus was worshiped as one of the older Titanic gods that rivaled Zeus. His sin was giving mankind fire. You see his brother Epimetheus must have been a fraud or have doublecrossed Prometheus. (He was the one who had the gift of foresight.) He should have known that fire would eventually doom mankind through global warming.

Now this puts Christianity in a whole new light. It turns out that all this talk about the meek inheriting the earth is hokum. They are for the big multinational polluters in reality. Bring back Zeus, bring back Gaia. Io Pan, io pan! Yo' mama. Big mama.

Obamacide?

Let's see if I get the Obamacide health care bill rationale correct: Insurance companies are rationing healthcare. Rationing health care leads to people unnecessarily ill or dead. That's bad. The oversight board set up by the healthcare legislation will have the final say on appropriate coverage for patients. That means rationing care (or "triage", if you prefer). Now the government can take over from the greedy insurance companies that are causing patients to go without health care. In the current budgetary crisis we must have a major cutbacks on health care costs. Why? Because we are spending trillions to bail out too big to fail banks (e.g. Goldman Sachs) and insurance companies' (viz. AIG) gambling debts (also known as derivative securities). Therefore I believe now our liberal government under Obama wants to be brought into the business of doing evil liberally in its own right. Bravo!

Obfuscations abound

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, Obama's top advisor on the healthcare overhaul, says he opposes euthanasia. But when you read his actual writings it is clear that he thinks some lives have more value than others. For example, the elderly have less value because they have less years of productivity left. This logic is absolutely consistent with the idea of useless eaters propagated by Dr. Josef Mengele's Nazis. Now who is obfuscating whom?

Common Sense

Let me add a little something here to the healthcare debate, if I may. We just bailed out an insurance behemoth AIG to the tune of oh $100 billion or so. Mr. Obama wants to save $200 billion on Medicare. Can none of you left wing or right wing fools see the connection here? When money is put ahead of humanity the economics of scarce resources leads inevitably to tyranny. The war reparations placed upon Germany after WWI lead to the bestial final solution. The logic of bailing out criminal speculators too big to fail leads down that same path. If you are not able to understand this it is because you refuse to look this evil in the eye. It really is just that simple. Thank you.

A Fishy Story

One fine morning in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama awoke to find himself metamorphozed into a large fish. He immediately panicked and reasoned thusly: "I must now get help to put myself in water or I will surely drown". (He not being used yet to living life as a fish really should have thought suffocate instead of drown.) So he began flapping for all he was worth. Soon he tumbled to the ground of the Presidential bedroom. Immediately at the door appeared a wide eyed secret service agent named Bill. Bill guffawed. "This must be the biggest practical joke ever played in the White House ever'" he thought. "Well, I guess I'd better just play along." So with almost super human strength he bounded forth and scooped up the large fish and ran out of the room.

Barack meanwhile was gurgling bubbles through his gills and thinking to himself, "I think I can get out of this jam now, because Bill is going to find me some help." Sure enough, Bill ran to the Presidential fish tank and gently eased Barrack into its confines. Barack felt very peculiar as he slid into the tank as well he might, having only been just turned into a fish. He did his best to scream at Bill that he was the President, but no sound at all came out of his mouth no matter how hard he tried.

"At least I'm alive," he resignedly thought to himself after a long pause. "Maybe there's a way out of this. If I can only retrace my actions from yesterday. Maybe there will be some kind of explanation. There must be some kinda way out of here. Think Barack! Think! What could have lead to this? What was I doing that wound me up transformed into a fish. What kind of cruel magician could have cast this spell on me?" These thoughts were running over and over in his head while he swam back and forth in wide circles in the fish tank.

In the meantime, a large group of secret service men gawked at him from the outside. They were frantically talking to each other on their Blackberries. "We cannot locate the President," were the words that went crackling over the airwaves. "We are on full alert. Only Cosmic Clearance and family will be informed. Let's get Biden down here now."

To be continued.

Napoleon's Detractor

ETA Hoffmann is said to have lost his government post when he caricatured the French occupiers of his homeland. I wonder if someone is being dismissed at this instant for some saucy Obama as Hitler cartoons. Hmm...

An Unhealthy Dilemma

Now let me see. Obama when questioned on the charge that his health care reform will mean rationing shoots back that health care is already being rationed. I will now try to reason through this logically to see if this is true, because I believe we can come to some meeting of the minds so to speak. When my elderly mother had a benign brain tumor removed a few years back, she did not have to succumb to any outside board inquiring whether such an operation would be cost effective. Medicare was not under any such mandate. Therefore, her treatment had no taint of being rationed whatsoever. Now, correct me, I beg of you, if I am wrong here, but wouldn't the current legislation (or the one that Peter Orzag desires) set up just such an oversight board to determine whether her operation would be cost effective from the standpoint of metrics like life expectancy, quality of life, and other such rubrics? In fact, I know I will be accused of engaging in the logical fallacy of slippery slope here, but isn't this the essence of the meaning of the term "Useless Eaters" that the Nazis used during their reign of terror? And isn’t the same type of statistical manipulation that Dr. Emanuel engages in with his "lifeboat ethics" type discussions in the New York Times which also underlies the mathematics of the so called “quants” that led us to the collapse of the speculative bubble. And why is it that we simply had to bail out insurance behemoth AIG to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars (much of which is why Goldman Sachs is doing so well today) without flinching, but can't afford too expensive medical procedures on the other hand? Please would Mr. Obama or his any of his surrogates like to enlighten me in my state of confusion on these issues?

Why Science Benefits Humanity

No matter how much we as a species may uncover by explicating the mechanics of certain classes of phenomena, it is demonstrable that we will nevertheless remain an infinite distance from ascertaining a lasting mechanistic resolution of them.

These phenomena are of the type that Nicholas of Cusa referred to as the incommensurable cardinality spanning the divide between the other and non-other. However, following Cantor, we can further refine that notion of a quality of transfinite incommensurals. This being his distinction between the absolute infinite and transfinite. We may now locate certain classes of scientific investigations on the peripheries or boundaries of the transition from the Vernadskyan categorical domains as having a precisely analogous character. Firstly, the transition from the inorganic to the organic/biosphere. (This for today's current hypotheses is included among the "RNA World" hypothesis and Astrobiological pursuits.) Secondly, the transition from the biosphere to the noosphere. (One aspect of this, for example, would be the the research of neurogenesis and its correlation with a hippocampal locus for memory.)

Taking the latter case poses a stark case in point of a fundamental incommensurabilty. When the mind functions, whether through memory or other distinguishable modes, there is a correlated physical creation of new neuronal networks. Is it not apparent that while we may continuously define sundry connections at an ever greater infinitesimal scale of this biophysical domain, we can never come to a thorough resolution along this boundary because of the unique way that the universe is composed? However, we can expect that proceeding to investigate anomalies along these boundaries should spark breakthroughs that will of necessity benefit humanity's unceasing requirement for technological innovation.

Leibniz understood that it were a fool's errand (a la R.D. Laing) to attempt to unravel the labyrinthine paradox of the number continuum, because it is merely a mental artifact of the underlying issue to which I am referring here and not physical reality. Unfortunately, Cantor and Goedel, inter alia, did not.

Global Warming, Climate Change-- or Atmospheric Deterioration?

"The unwashed masses are like sheep which we educated ones have a duty--nay, a burden to enlighten. Let us cry out so all and sundry may understand: THE SKY IS FALLING. THE SKY IS FALLING! SAVE YOURSELF! (SAVE OURSELVES.) OH! HELP... HELP!"

Chicken Little
(proud to be a founding member of the World Wildlife Federation)

Waterboarding

What's in a word? "Harsh interrogation techniques"-- formerly known as torture. Hmm. I guess noticing Orwellian doublespeak has become passe these days.