ecodevoevo | Our culture, like any culture, creates symbols to use as tokens as we go
about our lives. Tokens are reassuring or explanatory symbols, and we
naturally use them in the manipulations for various resources that
culture is often about. Nowadays, a central token is the gene.
Genes are proffered as the irrefutable ubiquitous cause of things, the
salvation, the explanation, in ways rather similar to the way God and
miracles are proffered by religion. Genes conveniently lead to
manipulation by technology, and technology sells in our industrial
culture. Genes are specific rather than vague, are enumerable, can be
seen as real core 'data' to explain the world. Genes are widely used as
ultimate blameworthy causes, responsible for disease which comes to be
defined as what happens when genes go 'wrong'. Being literally unseen,
like angels, genes can take on an aura of pervasive power and mystery.
The incantation by scientists is that if we can only be enabled to find
them we can even cure them (with CRISPR or some other promised
panacea), exorcising their evil. All of this invocation of fundamental
causal tokens is particulate enough to be marketable for grants and
research proposals, great for publishing in journals and for news media
to gawk at in wonder. Genes provide impressively mysterious tokens for
scientists to promise almost to create miracles by manipulating. Genes
stand for life's Book of Truth, much as sacred texts have traditionally
done and, for many, still do.
Genes provide fundamental symbolic tokens in theories of life--its
essence, its evolution, of human behavior, of good and evil traits, of
atoms of causation from which everything follows. They lurk in the
background, responsible for all good and evil. So in our age in human
history, it is not surprising that reports of finding genes 'for' this
or that have unbelievable explanatory panache. It's not a trivial
aspect of this symbolic role that people (including scientists) have to
take others' word for what they claim as insights.
inference-review |The cell is a
complex dynamic system in which macromolecules such as DNA and the
various proteins interact within a free energy flux provided by
nutrients. Its phenotypes can be represented by quasi-stable attractors
embedded in a multi-dimensional state space whose dimensions are defined
by the activities of the cell’s constituent proteins.1
This is the basis for the dynamical model of the cell.
The current molecular genetic or machine model of the cell, on the
other hand, is predicated on the work of Gregor Mendel and Charles
Darwin. Mendel framed the laws of inheritance on the basis of his
experimental work on pea plants. The first law states that inheritance
is a discrete and not a blending process: crossing purple and white
flowered varieties produces some offspring with white and some with
purple flowers, but generally not intermediately colored offspring.2 Mendel concluded that whatever was inherited had a material or particulate nature; it could be segregated.3
According to the machine cell model, those particles are genes or
sequences of nucleobases in the genomic DNA. They constitute Mendel’s
units of inheritance. Gene sequences are transcribed, via messenger RNA,
to proteins, which are folded linear strings of amino acids called
peptides. The interactions between proteins are responsible for
phenotypic traits. This assumption relies on two general principles
affirmed by Francis Crick in 1958, namely the sequence hypothesis and
the central dogma.4
The sequence hypothesis asserts that the sequence of bases in the
genomic DNA determines the sequence of amino acids in the peptide and
the three-dimensional structure of the folded peptide. The central
dogma states that the sequence hypothesis represents a flow of
information from DNA to the proteins and rules out a flow in reverse.
In 1961, the American biologist Christian Anfinsen demonstrated that
when the enzyme ribonuclease was denatured, it lost its activity, but
regained it on re-naturing. Anfinsen concluded from the kinetics of
re-naturation that the amino acid sequence of the peptide determined how
the peptide folded.5
He did not cite Crick’s 1958 paper or the sequence hypothesis, although
he had apparently read the first and confirmed the second.
The central dogma and the sequence hypothesis proved to be wonderful
heuristic tools with which to conduct bench work in molecular biology.
The machine model recognizes cells to be highly regulated entities;
genes are responsible for that regulation through gene regulatory
networks (GRNs).6 Gene sequences provide all the information needed to build and regulate the cell.
Both a naturalist and an experimentalist, Darwin observed that
breeding populations exhibit natural variations. Limited resources mean a
struggle for existence. Individuals become better and better adapted to
their environments. This process is responsible for both small adaptive
improvements and dramatic changes. Darwin insisted evolution was, in
both cases, gradual, and predicted that intermediate forms between
species should be found both in the fossil record and in existing
populations. Today, these ideas are part of the modern evolutionary
synthesis, a term coined by Julian Huxley in 1942.7 Like the central dogma, it has been subject to controversy, despite its early designation as the set of principles under which all of biology is conducted.8
The modern synthesis, we now understand, does not explain
trans-generational epigenetic inheritance, consciousness, and niche
construction.9
It is possible that the concept of the gene and the claim that
evolution depends on genetic diversity may both need to be modified or
replaced.
This essay is a step towards describing biology as a science founded
on the laws of physics. It is a step in the right direction.
Stuart Kauffman's 1993 book, Origins of Order,
is a technical treatise on his life's work in Mathematical Biology.
Kauffman greatly extends Alan Turing
's early work in Mathematical
Biology. The intended audience is other mathematical and theoretical biologists. It's chock full of advanced mathematics. Of particular
note, Origins of Order seems to be Kauffman's only published
work in which he states his experimental results about the
interconnection
between complex systems and neural networks.
Kauffman explains that a
complex
system
tuned with particular
parameters is a neural network. I can not overstate the
importance of the last sentence in the paragraph
above. The implication is that one basis for intelligence, biological
neural networks, can spontaneously self-generate given the correct
starting
parameters. Kauffman provides the mathematics to do this, discusses his
experimental results, and points out that the parameters in question
are an
attractor state.
nationalgeographic |According to your book, physics describes the actions or tendencies of every living thing—and inanimate ones as well. Does that mean we can unite all behavior under physics?
Absolutely. Our narrow definition of the discipline is something that’s happened in the past hundred years, thanks to the immense impact of Albert Einstein and atomic physics and relativity at the turn of the [20th] century.
But we need to go back farther. In Latin, nature—physics—means “everything that happens.”
One thing that came directly from Charles Darwin is that humans are part of nature, along with all the other animate beings. Therefore all the things that we make—our tools, our homes, our technologies—are natural as well. It’s all part of the same thing.
In your magazine and on your TV channel, we see many animals doing this—extending their reach with tools, with intelligence, with social organization. Everything is naturally interconnected.
Your new book is premised on a law of physics that you formulated in 1996. The Constructal Law says there’s a universal evolutionary tendency toward design in nature, because everything is composed of systems that change and evolve to flow more easily.
That’s correct. But I would specify and say that the tendency is toward evolving freely—changing on the go in order to provide greater and greater ease of movement. That’s physics, stage four—more precise, more specific expressions of the same idea.
Flow systems are everywhere. They describe the ways that animals move and migrate, the ways that river deltas form, the ways that people build fires. In each case, they evolve freely to reduce friction and to flow better—to improve themselves and minimize their mistakes or imperfections. Blood flow and water flow essentially evolve the same way.
quantamagazine | Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a
colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct,
luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist
proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow
from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as unsurprising as
rocks rolling downhill.”
From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference
between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former
tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and
dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England,
a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains
this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates
that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy
(like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the
ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in
order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under
certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical
attribute associated with life.
“You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it
for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,”
England said.
England’s theory is meant to underlie, rather than replace, Darwin’s
theory of evolution by natural selection, which provides a powerful
description of life at the level of genes and populations. “I am
certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong,” he explained. “On
the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics,
you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general
phenomenon.”
His idea, detailed in a recent paper and further elaborated in a talk
he is delivering at universities around the world, has sparked
controversy among his colleagues, who see it as either tenuous or a
potential breakthrough, or both.
England has taken “a very brave and very important step,” said
Alexander Grosberg, a professor of physics at New York University who
has followed England’s work since its early stages. The “big hope” is
that he has identified the underlying physical principle driving the
origin and evolution of life, Grosberg said.
“Jeremy is just about the brightest young scientist I ever came
across,” said Attila Szabo, a biophysicist in the Laboratory of Chemical
Physics at the National Institutes of Health who corresponded with
England about his theory after meeting him at a conference. “I was
struck by the originality of the ideas.”
aeon | No matter how hard
they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a
copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words,
pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli.
The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’.
Our
shoddy thinking about the brain has deep historical roots, but the
invention of computers in the 1940s got us especially confused. For more
than half a century now, psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and
other experts on human behaviour have been asserting that the human
brain works like a computer.
To
see how vacuous this idea is, consider the brains of babies. Thanks to
evolution, human neonates, like the newborns of all other mammalian
species, enter the world prepared to interact with it effectively. A
baby’s vision is blurry, but it pays special attention to faces, and is
quickly able to identify its mother’s. It prefers the sound of voices to
non-speech sounds, and can distinguish one basic speech sound from
another. We are, without doubt, built to make social connections.
A
healthy newborn is also equipped with more than a dozen reflexes –
ready-made reactions to certain stimuli that are important for its
survival. It turns its head in the direction of something that brushes
its cheek and then sucks whatever enters its mouth. It holds its breath
when submerged in water. It grasps things placed in its hands so
strongly it can nearly support its own weight. Perhaps most important,
newborns come equipped with powerful learning mechanisms that allow them
to change rapidly so they can interact increasingly
effectively with their world, even if that world is unlike the one their
distant ancestors faced.
Senses,
reflexes and learning mechanisms – this is what we start with, and it
is quite a lot, when you think about it. If we lacked any of these
capabilities at birth, we would probably have trouble surviving.
But here is what we are not born with: information,
data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations,
algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines,
encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers – design elements that allow digital computers to behave somewhat intelligently. Not only are we not born with such things, we also don’t develop them – ever.
We don’t store words or the rules that tell us how to manipulate them. We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not.
Computers, quite literally, process information
– numbers, letters, words, formulas, images. The information first has
to be encoded into a format computers can use, which means patterns of
ones and zeroes (‘bits’) organised into small chunks (‘bytes’). On my
computer, each byte contains 8 bits, and a certain pattern of those bits
stands for the letter d, another for the letter o, and another for the letter g. Side by side, those three bytes form the word dog.
One single image – say, the photograph of my cat Henry on my desktop –
is represented by a very specific pattern of a million of these bytes
(‘one megabyte’), surrounded by some special characters that tell the
computer to expect an image, not a word.
Computers,
quite literally, move these patterns from place to place in different
physical storage areas etched into electronic components. Sometimes they
also copy the patterns, and sometimes they transform them in various
ways – say, when we are correcting errors in a manuscript or when we are
touching up a photograph. The rules computers follow for moving,
copying and operating on these arrays of data are also stored inside the
computer. Together, a set of rules is called a ‘program’ or an
‘algorithm’. A group of algorithms that work together to help us do
something (like buy stocks or find a date online) is called an
‘application’ – what most people now call an ‘app’.
Forgive me for this introduction to computing, but I need to be clear: computers really do operate on symbolic representations of the world. They really store and retrieve. They really process. They really have physical memories. They really are guided in everything they do, without exception, by algorithms.
Humans,
on the other hand, do not – never did, never will. Given this reality,
why do so many scientists talk about our mental life as if we were
computers?
NYTimes | Since
its release seven years ago, Minecraft has become a global sensation,
captivating a generation of children. There are over 100 million
registered players, and it’s now the third-best-selling video game in
history, after Tetris and Wii Sports. In 2014, Microsoft bought
Minecraft — and Mojang, the Swedish game studio behind it — for $2.5
billion.
There
have been blockbuster games before, of course. But as Jordan’s
experience suggests — and as parents peering over their children’s
shoulders sense — Minecraft is a different sort of phenomenon.
For one thing, it doesn’t really feel like a game.
It’s more like a destination, a technical tool, a cultural scene, or
all three put together: a place where kids engineer complex machines,
shoot videos of their escapades that they post on YouTube, make art and
set up servers, online versions of the game where they can hang out with
friends. It’s a world of trial and error and constant discovery,
stuffed with byzantine secrets, obscure text commands and hidden
recipes. And it runs completely counter to most modern computing trends.
Where companies like Apple and Microsoft and Google want our computers
to be easy to manipulate — designing point-and-click interfaces under
the assumption that it’s best to conceal from the average user how the
computer works — Minecraft encourages kids to get under the hood, break
things, fix them and turn mooshrooms into random-number generators. It
invites them to tinker.
In
this way, Minecraft culture is a throwback to the heady early days of
the digital age. In the late ’70s and ’80s, the arrival of personal
computers like the Commodore 64 gave rise to the first generation of
kids fluent in computation. They learned to program in Basic, to write
software that they swapped excitedly with their peers. It was a playful
renaissance that eerily parallels the embrace of Minecraft by today’s
youth. As Ian Bogost, a game designer and professor of media studies at
Georgia Tech, puts it, Minecraft may well be this generation’s personal
computer.
At
a time when even the president is urging kids to learn to code,
Minecraft has become a stealth gateway to the fundamentals, and the
pleasures, of computer science. Those kids of the ’70s and ’80s grew up
to become the architects of our modern digital world, with all its
allures and perils. What will the Minecraft generation become?
“Children,” the social
critic Walter Benjamin wrote in 1924, “are particularly fond of
haunting any site where things are being visibly worked on. They are
irresistibly drawn by the detritus generated by building, gardening,
housework, tailoring or carpentry.”
afr | Among the blockchain cognoscenti, everyone is talking about Ethereum.
A
rival blockchain and virtual currency to bitcoin, Ethereum allows for
the programming of "smart contracts", or computer code which
facilitates or enforces a set of rules. Ethereum was first described by
the programmer Vitalik Buterin in late 2013; the first full public
version of the platform was released in February.
Commercial
lawyers are watching the arrival of Ethereum closely given the potential
for smart contracts in the future to disintermediate their
highly lucrative role in drafting and exchanging paper contracts. Smart
contracts are currently being used to digitise business rules, but may
soon move to codify legal agreements.
The innovation has been
made possible because Ethereum provides developers with a more liberal
"scripting language" than bitcoin. This is allowing companies to create
their own private blockchains and build applications. Already, apps
for music distribution, sports betting and a new type of financial
auditing are being tested.
Some of the world's largest technology companies, from Microsoft to
IBM, are lining up to work with Ethereum, while the R3 CEV banking
consortium has also been trialling its technology as it tests
blockchain-style applications for the banking industry including trading
commercial paper. Banks are interested in blockchain because
distributed ledgers can remove intermediaries and speed up transactions,
thereby reducing costs. But if banks move business to blockchains in
the future, financial services lawyers will need to begin re-drafting
into digital form the banking contracts that underpin the capital
markets.
The global director of IBM Blockchain Labs, Nitin Gaur,
who was in Sydney last week, says he is a "huge fan" of Ethereum,
pointing to its "rich ecosystem of developers". He predicts law to be
among the industries disrupted by the technology.
theguardian | It’s 40 years since Richard Dawkins suggested, in the opening words of The Selfish Gene,
that, were an alien to visit Earth, the question it would pose to judge
our intellectual maturity was: “Have they discovered evolution yet?” We
had, of course, by the grace of Charles Darwin and a century of
evolutionary biologists who had been trying to figure out how natural
selection actually worked. In 1976, The Selfish Gene became the
first real blockbuster popular science book, a poetic mark in the sand
to the public and scientists alike: this idea had to enter our thinking,
our research and our culture.
The idea was this: genes strive for immortality, and individuals,
families, and species are merely vehicles in that quest. The behaviour
of all living things is in service of their genes hence, metaphorically,
they are selfish. Before this, it had been proposed that natural
selection was honing the behaviour of living things to promote the
continuance through time of the individual creature, or family, or group
or species. But in fact, Dawkins said, it was the gene itself that was
trying to survive, and it just so happened that the best way for it to
survive was in concert with other genes in the impermanent husk of an
individual.
This gene-centric view of evolution also began to explain one of the
oddities of life on Earth – the behaviour of social insects. What is the
point of a drone bee, doomed to remain childless and in the service of a
totalitarian queen? Suddenly it made sense that, with the gene itself
steering evolution, the fact that the drone shared its DNA with the
queen meant that its servitude guarantees not the individual’s survival,
but the endurance of the genes they share. Or as the Anglo-Indian
biologist JBS Haldane put it: “Would I lay down my life to save my
brother? No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins.”
These ideas were espoused by only a handful of scientists in the
middle decades of the 20th century – notably Bob Trivers, Bill Hamilton,
John Maynard Smith and George Williams. In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins
did not merely recapitulate them; he made an impassioned argument for
the reality of natural selection. Previous attempts to explain the
mechanics of evolution had been academic and rooted in maths. Dawkins
walked us through it in prose. Many great popular science books followed
– Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, Stephen Pinker’s The Blank Slate, and, currently, The Vital Question by Nick Lane.
For many of us, The Selfish Gene was our first proper taste
of evolution. I don’t remember it being a controversial subject in my
youth. In fact, I don’t remember it being taught at all. Evolution,
Darwin and natural selection were largely absent from my secondary
education in the late 1980s. The national curriculum, introduced in the
UK in 1988, included some evolution, but before 1988 its presence in
schools was far from universal. As an aside, in my opinion the subject
is taught bafflingly minimally and late in the curriculum even today;
evolution by natural selection is crucial to every aspect of the living
world. In the words of the Russian scientist Theodosius Dobzhansky:
“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”
themonkeytrap | I currently teach a class called Reality 101 at the University of
Minnesota. It is a 15 week exploration of ‘the human ecosystem’ – what
drives us, what powers us and what we are doing. Only when viewed from
such an ecological lens can ‘better’ choices be made by individuals, who
in turn impact societies. Our situation cannot be described in an hour
-but this was my latest and best attempt. The talk is 60% new from
prior talks – I start with brief summaries of energy, economy, behavior
and environment, followed by a listing of 25 of the current ‘flawed
assumptions’ underpinning modern human culture. I close with a list of
20 new ways of thinking about ones future-for consideration – and
possibly to work towards – for a young person alive this century. It is
my opinion we need more pro-social, pro-future players on the
gameboard, whatever their beliefs and priorities might be. 2 books
should be finished this year and I will post a note here about
progress/etc
telesur | The 2016 election campaign is remarkable not only for the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders but also for the resilience of an enduring silence about a murderous self-bestowed divinity. A third of the members of the United Nations have felt Washington's boot, overturning governments, subverting democracy, imposing blockades and boycotts. Most of the presidents responsible have been liberal – Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama.
The breathtaking record of perfidy is so mutated in the public mind, wrote the late Harold Pinter, that it “never happened …Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. It didn't matter … “. Pinter expressed a mock admiration for what he called “a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
Take Obama. As he prepares to leave office, the fawning has begun all over again. He is “cool." One of the more violent presidents, Obama gave full reign to the Pentagon war-making apparatus of his discredited predecessor. He prosecuted more whistleblowers – truth-tellers – than any president. He pronounced Chelsea Manning guilty before she was tried. Today, Obama runs an unprecedented worldwide campaign of terrorism and murder by drone.
History was declared over, class was abolished and gender promoted as feminism; lots of women became New Labour MPs. They voted on the first day of Parliament to cut the benefits of single parents, mostly women, as instructed. A majority voted for an invasion that produced 700,000 Iraqi widows.
The equivalent in the US are the politically correct warmongers on the New York Times, Washington Post, and network TV who dominate political debate. I watched a furious debate on CNN about Trump's infidelities. It was clear, they said, a man like that could not be trusted in the White House. No issues were raised. Nothing on the 80 per cent of Americans whose income has collapsed to 1970s levels. Nothing on the drift to war. The received wisdom seems to be “hold your nose” and vote for Clinton: anyone but Trump. That way, you stop the monster and preserve a system gagging for another war.
theintercept |When Hillary Clinton’s son-in-law sought funding for his new
hedge fund in 2011, he found financial backing from one of the biggest
names on Wall Street: Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein.
The fund, called Eaglevale Partners, was founded by Chelsea Clinton’s
husband, Marc Mezvinsky, and two of his partners. Blankfein not only
personally invested in the fund, but allowed his association with it to
be used in the fund’s marketing.
The investment did not turn out to be a savvy business decision.
Earlier this month, Mezvinsky was forced to shutter one of the
investment vehicles he launched under Eaglevale, called Eaglevale
Hellenic Opportunity, after losing 90 percent of its money betting on the Greek recovery. The flagship Eaglevale fund has also lost money, according to the New York Times.
There has been minimal reporting on the Blankfein investment in
Eaglevale Partners, which is a private fund that faces few disclosure
requirements. At a campaign rally in downtown San Francisco on Thursday,
I attempted to ask Hillary Clinton if she knew the amount that
Blankfein invested in her son-in-law’s fund.
rollingstone | This is why her shifting explanations and flippant attitude
about the email scandal are almost more unnerving than the ostensible
offense. She seems confident that just because her detractors are
politically motivated, as they always have been, that they must be
wrong, as they often were.
But that's faulty thinking. My worry is that Democrats like Hillary
have been saying, "The Republicans are worse!" for so long that they've
begun to believe it excuses everything. It makes me nervous to see
Hillary supporters like law professor Stephen Vladeck arguing in the New York Times that the real problem wasn't anything Hillary did, but that the Espionage Act isn't "practical."
If you're willing to extend the "purity" argument to the Espionage Act, it's only a matter of time before you get in real trouble. And even if it doesn't happen this summer,
Democrats may soon wish they'd picked the frumpy senator from Vermont
who probably checks his restaurant bills to make sure he hasn't been undercharged.
Young people don't see the Sanders-Clinton race as a choice between
idealism and incremental progress. The choice they see is between an
honest politician, and one who is so profoundly a part of the problem
that she can't even see it anymore.
They've seen in the last decades that politicians who promise they
can deliver change while also taking the money, mostly just end up
taking the money.
And they're voting for Sanders because his idea of an entirely
voter-funded electoral "revolution" that bars corporate money is, no
matter what its objective chances of success, the only practical road
left to break what they perceive to be an inexorable pattern of
corruption.
Young people aren't dreaming. They're thinking. And we should listen to them.
NYPost | "Follow the money.” That telling phrase, which has come to summarize
the Watergate scandal, has been a part of the lexicon since 1976. It’s
shorthand for political corruption: At what point do “contributions”
become bribes, “constituent services” turn into quid pro quos and
“charities” become slush funds?
Ronald Reagan was severely criticized in 1989 when, after he left
office, he was paid $2 million for a couple of speeches in Japan. “The
founding fathers would have been stunned that an occupant of the highest
office in this land turned it into bucks,” sniffed a Columbia
professor.
So what would Washington and Jefferson make of Hillary Rodham
Clinton? Mandatory financial disclosures released this month show that,
in just the two years from April 2013 to March 2015, the former first
lady, senator and secretary of state collected $21,667,000 in “speaking
fees,” not to mention the cool $5 mil she corralled as an advance for
her 2014 flop book, “Hard Choices.”
Throw in the additional $26,630,000 her ex-president husband hoovered
up in personal-appearance “honoraria,” and the nation can breathe a
collective sigh of relief that the former first couple — who, according
to Hillary, were “dead broke” when they left the White House in 2001
with some of the furniture in tow — can finally make ends meet.
No wonder Donald Trump calls her “crooked Hillary.”
A look at Mrs. Clinton’s speaking venues and the whopping sums she’s
received since she left State gives us an indication who’s desperate for
a place at the trough — and whom another Clinton administration might
favor.
First off, there’s Wall Street and the financial-services industry.
Democratic champions of the Little Guy are always in bed with the Street
— they don’t call Barack Obama “President Goldman Sachs” for nothing,
but Mrs. Clinton has room for Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice and their
10 best friends. Multiple trips to Goldman Sachs. Morgan Stanley.
Deutsche Bank. Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. UBS Wealth Management.
As the character of Che Guevara sings in “Evita”: “And the money kept
rolling in.” And all at the bargain price of $225,000 a pop . . . to
say what? We don’t know, because Hillary won’t release the transcripts.
WaPo | “It’s hard to imagine worse news for public health in the United States,” Lance Price, director of the Antibiotic Resistance Action Center and
a George Washington University professor said in a statement Thursday
about the Pennsylvania case. “We may soon be facing a world where CRE
infections are untreatable."
Scientists rang the alarm bells
about the gene in November, but not enough attention was paid. “Now we
find that this gene has made its way into pigs and people in the U.S.,"
Price said. "If our leaders were waiting to act until they could see the
cliff’s edge—I hope this opens their eyes to the abyss that lies before
us.”
Scientists and public health officials have long warned
that if the resistant bacteria continue to spread, treatment options
could be seriously limited. Routine operations could become deadly.
Minor infections could become life-threatening crises. Pneumonia could
be more and more difficult to treat.
Already, doctors had been
forced to rely on colistin as a last-line defense against
antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The drug is hardly ideal. It is more than
half a century old and can seriously damage a patient’s kidneys. And
yet, because doctors have run out of weapons to fight a growing number
of infections that evade more modern antibiotics, it has become a
critical tool in fighting off some of the most tenacious infections.
theeconomist | “PLEASURE is oft a visitant; but pain clings cruelly,” wrote John
Keats. Nowadays pain can often be shrugged off: opioids, a class of
drugs that includes morphine and other derivatives of the opium poppy,
can dramatically ease the agony of broken bones, third-degree burns or
terminal cancer. But the mismanagement of these drugs has caused a pain
crisis (see article). It has two faces: one in America and a few other rich countries; the other in the developing world.
In America for decades doctors prescribed too many opioids for
chronic pain in the mistaken belief that the risks were manageable.
Millions of patients became hooked. Nearly 20,000 Americans died from
opioid overdoses in 2014. A belated crackdown is now forcing
prescription-opioid addicts to endure withdrawal symptoms, buy their fix
on the black market or turn to heroin—which gives a similar high (and
is now popular among middle-aged Americans with back problems).
In the developing world, by contrast, even horrifying pain is often
untreated. More than 7m people die yearly of cancer, HIV, accidents or
war wounds with little or no pain relief. Four-fifths of humanity live
in countries where opioids are hard to obtain; they use less than a
tenth of the world’s morphine, the opioid most widely used for trauma
and terminal pain.
Opioids are tricky. Take too much, or mix them with alcohol or
sleeping pills, and you may stop breathing. Long-term patients often
need more and more. But for much acute pain, and certainly for the
terminally ill, they are often the best treatment. And they are cheap:
enough morphine to soothe a cancer patient for a month should cost just
$2-5.
In poor countries many people think of pain as inevitable, as it has
been for most of human existence. So they seldom ask for pain relief,
and seldom get it if they do. The drug war declared by America in the
1970s has made matters worse. It led to laws that put keeping drugs out
of the wrong hands ahead of getting them into the right ones. The UN
says both goals matter. But through the 1980s and 1990s, as the war on
drugs raged, it preached about the menace of illegal highs with barely a
whisper about the horror of unrelieved pain.
boingboing | The heroin epidemic in America has a death-toll comparable to the AIDS
epidemic at its peak, but this time, there's no movement coalescing to
argue for the lives of the economically sidelined, financially ruined
dying thousands -- while the AIDS epidemic affected a real community of
mutual support, the heroin epidemic specifically strikes down people
whose communities are already gone.
The Occupy movement rallied around the idea of the "precariat," the
downwardly mobile former members of the middle class who were one layoff
or shift-reduction away from economic ruination. Below the precariat is
the unnecessariat, people who are a liability to the modern economic
consensus, whom no corporation has any use for, except as a source of
revenue from predatory loans, government subsidized "training" programs,
and private prisons.
The precariat benefits from Obamacare, able to pay for coverage despite
pre-existing conditions; the unnecessariat suffers under Obamacare,
forced to pay into the system before going through the same medical
bankruptcies they'd have endured in order to get the coverage they need
to survive another day.
You're likely to be in the unnecessariat if you live in a county that
has high levels of addiction and suicide -- the same counties that poll
highest for Trump.
Corporations have realized humanity's long nightmare of a race of immortal, transhuman superbeings
who view us as their inconvenient gut-flora. The unnecessariat are an
expanding class, and if you're not in it yet, there's no reason to think
you won't land there tomorrow.
nautilus | Four years ago, I published a book calledLife’s Ratchet, which explains how molecular machines create order in our cells. My main concern was how life avoids a descent into chaos. To my great surprise, soon after the book was published, I was contacted by researchers who study biological aging. At first I couldn’t see the connection. I knew nothing about aging except for what I had learned from being forced to observe the process in my own body.
Then it dawned on me that by emphasizing the role of thermal chaos in animating molecular machines, I encouraged aging researchers to think more about it as a driver of aging. Thermal motion may seem beneficial in the short run, animating our molecular machines, but could it be detrimental in the long run? After all, in the absence of external energy input, random thermal motion tends to destroy order.
This tendency is codified in the second law of thermodynamics, which dictates that everything ages and decays: Buildings and roads crumble; ships and rails rust; mountains wash into the sea. Lifeless structures are helpless against the ravages of thermal motion. But life is different: Protein machines constantly heal and renew their cells.
In this sense, life pits biology against physics in mortal combat. So why do living things die? Is aging the ultimate triumph of physics over biology? Or is aging part of biology itself?
thesciencexplorer | Sunflowers have long been included with pineapples,
artichokes, and pine cones as one of nature’s stunning examples of the
Fibonacci sequence — a set in which each number is the sum of the
previous two (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610,
...).
The numbers appear on the giant flower’s head, where the
seeds arrange themselves in spirals. Count the spirals turning clockwise
and counterclockwise and you will usually find a pair of numbers that
sit side by side in the Fibonacci sequence.
Alan Turing first speculated sunflower seedheads adhered to
the Fibonacci sequence, but sadly died before accumulating enough data
to test his theory.
Four years ago, the Museum of Science and Industry in
Manchester, UK picked up where Turing left off. Data on sunflower
diversity were lacking, so the museum crowdsourced the problem. Members
of the public were invited to grow their own sunflowers and submit
photographs and spiral counts.
In a study just published in the journal Royal Society Open Science,
researchers who verified the counts on 657 sunflowers provided by
citizen scientists reported that one in five flowers did not conform to
the Fibonacci sequence.
Some of the non-conforming seedheads approximated Fibonacci
sequences, and others approximated even more complex mathematical
patterns.
These exceptions to the rule have peaked the interest of
the researchers, who wrote: “this paper provides a testbed against which
a new generation of mathematical models can and should be built.”
A Foundation of Joy
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Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...