'Sdeath

So the "Supreme Court" has ruled that we "citizens" can be taxed to have the privilege of having ourselves pronounced worthy of life saving medical treatment or not by a faceless board of budget cutters. This is truly a most Unnatural Law from a truly most Unsupreme Court. Not surprising that the debt collectors are having their pounds as they so often have.

China Takes Up The Mantle of Civilization

It is with a profound mixture of hope and disgust that any American worthy of the name must view the news of China's successful docking of three astronauts with their space station.-- Hope that we may be on the threshold of a new era of sovereign nations cooperating to undertake the necessary step of space colonization. -- Disgust that the people of the United States have been bamboozled by a latter day sordid burlesque of  a Hollywood version of Emperor Nero's Rome.

Why James Fenimore Cooper's Politics Made Him a Marked Man

Cooper's novel Homeward Bound describes how the Federalism of Alexander Hamilton was subverted by the pro British factions' interests in Boston Yankee Clipper ships and New York speculators:

America was then much too young in her independence, and too insignificant in all eyes but her own, to reason and act for herself, except on points that pressed too obviously on her immediate concerns to be overlooked; but the great social principles,--or it might be better to say, the great social interests,--that then distracted Europe, produced quite as much sensation in that distant country, as at all comported with a state of things that had so little practical connexion with the result, The Effingham family had started Federalists, in the true meaning of the term; for their education, native sense and principles, had a leaning to order, good government, and the dignity of the country; but as factions became fiercer, and names got to be confounded and contradictory, the landed branch settled down into what they thought were American, and the commercial branch into what might properly be termed English Federalists. We do not mean that the father of John intended to be untrue to his native land; but by following up the dogmas of party he had reasoned himself into a set of maxims which, if they meant anything, meant everything but that which had been solemnly adopted as the governing principles of his own country, and many of which were diametrically opposed to both its interests and its honour.

Today, of course, the media and most of our venial politicians and "elites" wax grandiloquent in their fulsome praise of our "oldest and closest ally." What rot!

The only pathway out of the onrushing plunge of the world into a new dark age is the re-invigoration of the mostly forgotten mission of the founding of this republic. The creation of a world of perfectly sovereign nations in which the existence of "empire" is once for all extinguished root and branch. Most of what is taught as history is the equivalent of a Malaysian monkey trap for conditioning minds by providing false alternatives that leave the very same empire intact.

Least Action Principle Awaits Innumerable Discoveries

The anti-empiricism "continental" Leibnizian universal principle of least action continues to spur on breakthroughs in all branches of science. The latest is a fascinating study of how heart muscle fibers are organized in a minimal surface called a generalized helicoid. The beauty of this organization is that it allows for the ultimate strength as the tissue expands and contacts with the blood flow. Thus, contrary to the misanthrope Voltaire's attack on Leibniz: the pre-established harmonic ordering across all biological domains really does make this the "best of all possible worlds."

Uprooting Our Mostly Misleading Assumptions

Habits can make us captive of oppressive opinions, in much the way that conscience makes us cowards. Such a habit is the lack of scrutiny about why we say what we do. Every so often, almost out of the corner of our eye we have an inkling of this. For instance, I just read this passage in Cooper's Homeward Bound:

Reflections something like these passed through the mind of Eve Effingham, as she examined the mixed crowd, in which some were busy in receiving stores from boats; others in holding party conferences with friends, in which a few were weeping; here and there a group was drowning reflection in the parting cup; while wondering children looked up with anxiety into the well-known faces, as if fearful they might lose the countenances they loved, and the charities on which they habitually relied, in such a mêlée.

Cooper's use of the word stores struck me; and I realized at once that I have never before stopped to ask why I go to what I call the grocery store. Now I suppose that the naming of the very thing which I use as a necessity in the end could matter very little if I had forever remained in blissful ignorance of the wherefore of its name. It seems so very trivial a thing. And of course if one were to try to tease out all such linguistic connections, then you would end up spinning your wheels like the Red Queen.

Thus Leibniz declared that memorizing names of things was futile. You need them the same way you need street signs: to get somewhere. For that matter, DeGaulle said that political parties are like taxis.

Descartes set out to carry the illusion that names are equivalent to substance to its ultima ratio. If I create an algebra where a grid can locate a point no matter where it might try to hide itself, I can always create a formula that will name that very same point. But why do we believe that doing so we have somehow captured reality? Is it because we have been oh so clever in interpreting the shadows on the wall of the metaphorical cave that our senses are so certain of?

And why when we have the enormous binary filing system that is the Internet do we erroneously believe that that is somehow the equivalent of human creativity? How often, dear reader, have you paused in silent awe to ask "why do I believe what I just thought to myself?"

DARPA Seeks to Automate Garment Industry: The Moral of the Story

This is on its face a worthy endeavor. Only Luddites would argue otherwise. It does beg the question, however, of the quality if job creation that is required for our exit out of the nightmarish post industrial/derivative securities based financial system that is so evidently collapsing around the planet.

We need plenty of cheap energy for robotics and a lot of other things. We need plenty of fresh water for agriculture, industry and human consumption. Massive water projects like NAWAPA for North America have been on the books for decades. We need massive upgrades in nuclear fusion research and the manned space program.

Instead of this, our so called leaders in both parties are scrambling to bail out speculative gambling casino too big to fail financiers as they stuff their pockets with their filthy lucre. This cannot stand for long.

Nature is Noble...Or Maybe Not So Much

The long standing mythology of the apologists for the cynical neo-feudalism that pristine nature is pure and glorious and must be preserved at the cost of keeping the so called third world in a perpetual state of immiseration, is coming unglued at the seams. Not so very long ago, you may recall dear reader, Jane Goodall confessed that her ape friends were (gasp!) practicing cannibalism.

Now we hear reports that there has been are long standing obfuscation from the bowels of her very own Majesty's Royal (screw up) Society that penguins are in fact sexual deviants. Oh, lack-a-day! For the love of Jean Jacques Rousseau and Teddy Roosevelt! Oh, Canada! Mon dieu! Scheiß ins Bett daß' kracht; gute Nacht!

Oh, Albion! Cover your wretched face in shame! What a world we weave ...

Massacre in Houla: Something is Very, Very Rotten

As the scandal deepens that the bloody shirt being held aloft in Syria to enable military intervention is the doing of the "good guys," the media ought to be held accountable for what they really are--.two bit prostitutes (at best.)

It would seem from our quaint ever-loving geo-politicians are somewhat overeager to redraw the map of the region. If their surrogate Sunni human rights activists are are caught carrying out massacres, then it is back to the drawing board, I'm afraid. When you get Israeli hawks in bed with Salafist fanatics the UN and NATO all for the purpose of a new cold (or perhaps hot) war not much good can come from such an unwholesome witches brew...

Tabletop X-Ray Laser and Piero's Risen Christ

The announcement of a successful x-ray laser is almost unnoticed by the dis-infotainment claptrap news media. It puts me in mind of this wonderful metaphor in the painting of Piero Della Francesca:

Behaviorists Still Behaving Badly (Of Course)

On my blog the highest number of "hits" by far is from the brief item entitled Behaviorists Behaving Badly. I simply state the case that their worldview prohibits them from acknowledging that which fundamentally distinguishes human creative powers of mind from all other biological forms of life. We alone for better or worse can discover a higher ordering in physical reality that allows us to utilize energy in ever more efficient and dense ways to increase our well being.

All animals are utterly fixed in this regard, although they may exhibit certain qualities on the surface which are congruent or imitative with aspects of human behavior.

Of course, these truths will forever elude those who would hysterically deny them...

More Obama Graffitti on the Wall Creates an Eyesore for the World

As that braggart and would-be macho-man Barack Obama lets the cat out of the bag that he ordered the Stuxnet computer virus attack on Iran, certain questions are necessarily brought to the fore...For instance: so now if the sovereignty of the US is likewise violated by any nation or group of nations the rationale will be that Obama gave them the green light to do so.  Once again, the writing is on- the wall.

Eurodammerung, Greek Erinyes, and Spanish Tragedy

While your treatment of the symptoms of the pending Eurodammerung can't be quibbled with, the causes are what need to be identified if there be any hope of emergence from a literal hell on earth. The crisis is the sequelae  of the end of Bretton Woods. This happened as the US shifted away from a production technologically progressive commitment to the post industrial junkheap of today. Taking the world's largest economy and anchor off the gold reserve ratio opened up currency arbitrage. This led in turn to more and more worthless speculation. Further damage was done with the repeal of Glass-Steagal creating the "bucket  shop" lunacy of derivative securities. Either we bankrupt out the financiers who created these insane markets and return to the sanity that FDR represented or the erinyes of Greek tragedy await us all.

Obama's Brain on Marijuana

Much brouhaha has been ginned up as of late regarding the President's youthful embrace of marijuana and cocaine. Many who clamor for pot legislation are raising the hue and cry of calling him hypocrite. But taking into consideration that Obama's number goal is his extremely narcissistic financial aggrandizement, this is no surprise. I am all but certain if he perceived that there would be a big payback for him, he would be all over legalization. (As was the case in his recent epiphany on gay marriage.)

Besides which, his Justice Department is doing their utmost to put a lid on the HSBC  (Hong Kong Shanghai Bank Corporation) multi-billion dollar dope money laundering situation. And then there is the stonewalling on the ATF gun giveaway program.

To further prove my point now Obama is having our government be the guarantor of the insane practice of derivatives trading.

Christine Lagarde: The Face of Evil

A practically unspeakable horror of opprobrium has just been emitted Sibyllike from the orifice of the new head, Christine Lagarde, of the International Monetary Fund (which a deceased quondam associate of mine Hulan Jack with good reason called the International Murder Fund.) At the same instant that Greek pensioners are committing suicide in protest over the grinding austerity imposed upon them, and worse yet, the pharmacies there are running out of life saving medicines, Ms. Lagarde pronounces that it is time to pay the piper and that she cares more about dying Africans than dying Greeks. This, after IMF conditionalities for decades have imposed untold immiseration and a hecatomb of death upon those very same Africans Ms. Lagarde sheds copious crocodile tears for now. If anyone hearing this is not repulsed by this overt admission of pure evil, then they have no heart nor mind.

Lately, I have learned that an ancestor of mine was jailed in a town near Salem during the witch trial hysteria as a "mischief maker." It was indeed a black mark upon that most noble of experiments in the Massachussets Bay Charter that Franklin later picked up from Cotton Mather as the basis for the so called establishment clause in our Constitution, the principle of doing good for future generations. However, if ever there were a real life witch in our midst conjuring up poisonous potions to be served to hapless victims it is this soulless woman.

Fredrich Schiller once wrote that Shakespeare's Iago (like Beethoven's Pizarro in his opera Fidelio) was too much a one sided character purely evil and capable of no development to be fit for a dramatic portrayal. But, like her predecessors Hitler or Napoleon, Ms. Lagarde proves that such irredeemable characters are all too real.

Every Time a Light Goes Off New Brain Cells Are Being Born

The culminating proof of an hypothesis that was proffered by what Bernhard Riemann denominated "geistesmassen" or loosely "thought-masses" some 150 years ago is to be applauded. Researchers at the Pasteur Institute have demonstrated that neurogenesis in mice correlates with learning and memory. This has been for readers of these pages been a recurring theme from the first.

But here I want to pause for a moment to reflect on why with what would see to be no empirical evidence Riemann could have foretold this astounding development. The effort to locate some intimate connection between the "soul" and the material goes back to the earliest of thinkers. Leibniz who successfully refuted Descartes' formula for force, posited an harmonic principle of continuous development among differential degrees of substance in his great work the Monadology.

It was a major setback for humanity that Leibniz' bid to become prime minister of England was put down by the Cabal of practitioners of the black arts promoting the crazed Isaac Newton's useless mathematical scribblings. It is to be rued that this anti German prejudice continued to be fueled in the nascent American republic. For example, it was considered slander to label Poe's writings "Germanic." The fact that Schiller's ideas of aesthetics were instrumental in ousting that meglomaniac Napoleon notwithstanding...

But the genius of Franklin's Constitution that hearkens back to Cusa's Universal Concordance principles knows no boundaries religious or dogmatic. And it is the establishment of a government of, by, and for the wise that promotes the improvements in physical wealth that correlates with scientific breakthroughs, that provides the proof of the same principle discovery of the function of neurogenesis writ large. So, it is only lawful that there is a concrete parallelism in the realm of the small, even within the brain of a mouse! For as Leibniz would have it, we are not a blank slate thrown into this world as empty potter's vessels, but rather the willful microcosm of unfolding universal harmonic and continuing development best exemplified most immediately in the Grosse Fugue of Beethoven.

More Forgotten Lore--Masonic Magic, Mormons and The Raven

Last summer my father mentioned that two of my forbears (great great grandfathers, I think) were somehow involved, one as a judge and the other a state legislator, in the trial of the masons for the murder of William Morgan. This was the fellow who wrote a book exposing that the initiation into masonry included an oath that if you divulged their secrets or became disloyal you would have your tongue ripped out and be buried alive at sea. John Quincy Adams played a pivotal role in the anti masonic upsurge shortly thereafter. It is interesting that Adams was associated in publishing with one of my ancestor's literary circle Joseph Dennie.

Now it just so happens that the widow of William Morgan became one of the wives of Joseph Smith the founder of the Mormons. Now this same Smith was very deeply into what he called true and perfect masonry. He even possessed a magic amulet called the Jupiter Table. Isaac Newton was fanatically consumed in the alchemical "study" of the traditional Hermes Trismegistus' Emerald Table. (I think therefore Newton's mind might be proof of a true Tabula Rasa, in my humble opinion.)

Here is a poem exalting Hermes Trismegistus from Edgar Poe's adversary H.W. Longfellow:

"Was he one or many, merging
Name and fame in one,
Like a stream, to which, converging,
Many streamlets run ?

Who shall call his dream fallacious ?
Who has searched or sought
All the unexplored and spacious
Universe of thought ?

Who in his own skill confiding,
Shall with rule and line
Mark the border-land dividing
Human and divine ?

Trismegistus ! Three times greatest !
How thy name sublime
Has descended to this latest
Progeny to time !"

Now Joseph Glanvill's writings, which Poe so thoroughly absorbed, scored the Cabbalist Rosicrucianism in England of Kenelm Digby, et al. An ernormous amount of the mischief that has come about on these shores can be traced back to the creation of this very type of irrationalist superstition. 

And The Raven is a poem that in actuality is just such a polemic (as so much of Shakespeare is likewise) against the occult and most melancholy superstition. And  today many of Poe's most ardent admirers have no clue that he was and still is, in reality laughing at them.

The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
"'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door -
Only this, and nothing more."

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; - vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore -
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore -
Nameless here for evermore.

And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me - filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating,
"'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door -
Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door; -
This it is, and nothing more."

Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
"Sir," said I, "or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you"- here I opened wide the door; -
Darkness there, and nothing more.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "Lenore?"
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, "Lenore!" -
Merely this, and nothing more.

Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,
Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.
"Surely," said I, "surely that is something at my window lattice:
Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore -
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore; -
'Tis the wind and nothing more."

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore;
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door -
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door -
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore.
"Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore -
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning- little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blest with seeing bird above his chamber door -
Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
With such name as "Nevermore."

But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing further then he uttered- not a feather then he fluttered -
Till I scarcely more than muttered, "other friends have flown before -
On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before."
Then the bird said, "Nevermore."

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
"Doubtless," said I, "what it utters is its only stock and store,
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore -
Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore
Of 'Never - nevermore'."

But the Raven still beguiling all my fancy into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door;
Then upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore -
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking "Nevermore."

This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core;
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining
On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamplight gloated o'er,
But whose velvet violet lining with the lamplight gloating o'er,
She shall press, ah, nevermore!

Then methought the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor.
"Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee - by these angels he hath sent thee
Respite - respite and nepenthe, from thy memories of Lenore:
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil! -
Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted -
On this home by horror haunted- tell me truly, I implore -
Is there - is there balm in Gilead? - tell me - tell me, I implore!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil - prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us - by that God we both adore -
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore -
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore."
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

"Be that word our sign in parting, bird or fiend," I shrieked, upstarting -
"Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken!- quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamplight o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted - nevermore!

Is the Good Doctor Leonard Suskind Off His Rocker?

I have had much merriment in this blogosphere for some time now lampooning the absurdities of theoretical physicists. The egregious character of Sheldon Cooper on TV's The Big Bang Theory must seem a stretch to some, however I fear the comedy doesn't quite do justice to real life. We all smile, of course, when we hear about the recondite Aristotelian scholastics who got their knickers in a twist over how many angels can fit on a pinhead. But now I am starting to fear for these fine feathered fellows' sanity when I come across such wild-eyed stuff as this: (But perhaps there be financial method and rewards to their madness...)


Is Eternal Inflation Past-Eternal? And What if It Is?
Leonard Susskind
(Submitted on 3 May 2012)
As a result of discussions with Bousso and Vilenkin I want to return to the question of whether the multiverse is past-eternal or if there was a beginning. Not surprisingly, given three people, there were three answers. However, the discussions have led to some common ground.
The multiverse being past-eternal, or at least extremely old has content and potential phenomenological implications. I will discuss how the oldness of the multiverse is connected with recent speculations of Douglas.

Information "Theory" is Nothing Except Fraud and Mysticism

Here comes a rather self important and "weighty" arXiv paper claiming to clarify the confusion regarding self organizing complex systems. While "cellular automata" are the solitonic type of phenomena which I have emphasized are well worth study, the ridiculous conceit that these types of phenomena can reduced to some network input /output computer model is laughable. Read the synopsis for a chuckle or two, if you please:


Complexity and Information: Measuring Emergence, Self-organization, and Homeostasis at Multiple Scales
Carlos Gershenson, Nelson Fernandez
(Submitted on 9 May 2012)
Concepts used in the scientific study of complex systems have become so widespread that their use and abuse has led to ambiguity and confusion in their meaning. In this paper we use information theory to provide abstract and concise measures of complexity, emergence, self-organization, and homeostasis. The purpose is to clarify the meaning of these concepts with the aid of the proposed formal measures. In a simplified version of the measures (focussing on the information produced by a system), emergence becomes the opposite of self-organization, while complexity represents their balance. We use computational experiments on random Boolean networks and elementary cellular automata to illustrate our measures at multiple scales.

How a Magical Belief in Entropy Makes Us Blind

Life scientists unlock mystery of how 'handedness' arises

May 8, 2012

Enlarge

Colored patches represent parallelogram outlines around pairs of triangles that have formed chiral super-structures. Parallelograms having different "handedness" and orientations are color-coded and superimposed over each other. Credit: Thomas G. Mason and Kun Zhao

The overwhelming majority of proteins and other functional molecules in our bodies display a striking molecular characteristic: They can exist in two distinct forms that are mirror images of each other, like your right hand and left hand. Surprisingly, each of our bodies prefers only one of these molecular forms.

This mirror-image phenomenon -- known as chirality or "handedness" -- has captured the imagination of a UCLA research group led by Thomas G. Mason, a professor of chemistry and physics and a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA.

Mason has been exploring how and why chirality arises, and his newest findings on the physical origins of the phenomenon were published May 1 in the journal Nature Communications.

"Objects like our hands are chiral, while objects like regular triangles are achiral, meaning they don't have a handedness to them," said Mason, the senior author of the study. "Achiral objects can be easily superimposed on top of one another."

Why many of the important functional molecules in our bodies almost always occur in just one chiral form when they could potentially exist in either is a mystery that has confounded researchers for years.

"Our bodies contain important molecules like proteins that overwhelmingly have one type of chirality," Mason said. "The other chiral form is essentially not found. I find that fascinating. We asked, 'Could this biological preference of a particular chirality possibly have a physical origin?'"

In addressing this question, Mason and his team sought to discover how chirality occurs in the first place. Their findings offer new insights into how the phenomenon can arise spontaneously, even with achiral building-blocks.

Mason and his colleagues used a manufacturing technique called lithography, which is the basis for making computer chips, to make millions of microscale particles in the shape of achiral triangles. In the past, Mason has used this technique to "print" particles in a wide variety of shapes, and even in the form of letters of the alphabet.

Using optical microscopy, the researchers then studied very dense systems of these lithographic triangular particles. To their surprise, they discovered that the achiral triangles spontaneously arranged themselves to form two-triangle "super-structures," with each super-structure exhibiting a particular chirality.

In the image that accompanies this article, the colored outlines in the field of triangles indicate chiral super-structures having particular orientations.

So what is causing this phenomenon to occur? Entropy, says Mason. His group has shown for the first time that chiral structures can originate from physical entropic forces acting on uniform achiral particles.

"It's quite bizarre," Mason said. "You're starting with achiral components — triangles — which undergo Brownian motion and you end up with the spontaneous formation of super-structures that have a handedness or chirality. I would never have anticipated that in a million years."

Entropy is usually thought of as a disordering force, but that doesn't capture its subtler aspects. In this case, when the triangular particles are diffusing and interacting at very high densities on a flat surface, each particle can actually maximize its "wiggle room" by becoming partially ordered into a liquid crystal (a phase of matter between a liquid and a solid) made out of chiral super-structures of triangles.

"We discovered that just two physical ingredients — entropy and particle shape — are enough to cause chirality to appear spontaneously in dense systems," Mason said. "In my 25 years of doing research, I never thought that I would see chirality occur in a system of achiral objects driven by entropic forces."

As for the future of this research, "We are very interested to see what happens with other shapes and if we can eventually control the chiral formations that we see occurring here spontaneously," he said.

"To me, it's intriguing, because I think about the chiral preference in biology," Mason added. "How did this chiral preference happen? What are the minimum ingredients for that to occur? We're learning some new physical rules, but the story in biology is far from complete. We have added another chapter to the story, and I'm amazed by these findings."

To learn more, a message board accompanies the publication in Nature Communications, an online journal, as a forum for interactive discussion.

This research was funded by the University of California. Kun Zhao, a postdoctoral researcher in Mason's laboratory, made many key contributions, including fabricating the triangle particles, creating the two-dimensional system of particles, performing the optical microscopy experiments, carrying out extensive particle-tracking analysis and interpreting the results.

Along with Mason, co-author Robijn Bruinsma, a UCLA professor of theoretical physics and a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, contributed to the understanding of the chiral symmetry breaking and the liquid crystal phases.

If it were simply entropy, how and by what circumstance did the close packing occur? Entropy again?

So what we have here is a recursive reductio ad absurdum species of mathematical supposition which takes entropy as a given that somehow miraculously always leads to less and less disorder. Cannot we see the fallacy of composition in the premises of reasoning here?

In fact, the quality of step function increases in the living processes in the biosphere to both capture and organize energy in increasing density of throughput to ever higher states of evolution is evidence not of entropy but the very opposite.

This evolution culminates in the human species ability to consciously change its mode of capture and organization of energy via creative problem solving expressed in technology. Once again, further devastating evidence that negative entropy is the subsuming potential latent in the universal process of development, not stochasticity or for that matter irrationality...

Winter of Financiers' Discontent

What dark and nasty thoughts must be roiling around in the skulls of the oligarchy today? It must be something to the effect that "democracy must be upended"

" Fiscal austerity cannot ever win elections and must simply be imposed. Oh, if only the people would come to see this simple fact of life, dictatorships would be unnecessary. But no, they never learn. Now we will need to scour the field for strong men to bring the rabble to heel. So be it."