6/19/10

A challenge to this wretchid condition

Reader, followers, hearers of my oratory, I wish to proclaim a challenge to you all, in light of this wretchid conidition. The challenge is to, when looking at the world around us, find mathematical notation and numbers - to see numbers in every star, equations in every calm, patterns in every wind, and theorems in every storm.

The winner will be greeted with undue praise and all contestants must write about what they have discovered under the comment section for this post. My firt entry is below. See comments;

6/17/10

Home grown mathematician points torch towards cure for death.

Man was created by the Earth, and lives by virtue of the Air, for there is in the air a secret food of life
- 1604, a Polish Alchemist

Jeff Hajewski is a simple man. Called 'Haj' by his friends, he's a mathematician by training, a skier/runner by bent, and a romancer of the stone. Haj's expert analysis on the effects of that 'elixir of life' - oxygen -, and him directing the publics gaze to its life preserving properties (perhaps) is the lead story.
Inhale – breath out – ahh, yes air. But so shitty is the air with oxygen, only 20% of those molecules we call the air are actually o2 (boo). But going into an environment with less of it may actually lead to brain cells communicating with germ line cells to prevent cell death – another support for that mystery of mysteries in which the brain is a phantom which constantly watches out for us while we are ‘along for the ride – unaware’.
Fun:The man who coined the name Oxygen was a gentlemen by the name of Lavoisier - he was beheaded in 1796. He was a part of the ruling class prior to the french revolution, made enemies, and was accused of "watering the soldiers tobacco"
Mechanism:Poetic contemplations aside, a study was performed on the famous c elegans (“cheap date” as an old professor called it, only because it’s very sensitive to alcohol) –basically if you took a c elegans worm, then put radiation on it, nerve cell jelly would come to life and some how start transcription factor proteins to dance near cells in the c elegans tum tum (really its germ line cells) – and basically these guys would stop another transcription complex from starting the destruction of these cells.

an image of a general overview article with the diagram of how the process works

Relation to death? One of the big riddles for why everything is collapsing in front of us (6 billion people will die in the next 100 years) is that the atom oxygen is susceptible to these types of 'redox' reactions - somehow or other it can easily steal electrons from neighboring atoms, causing them to become themselves electron hungry. This is a theory for why the body degrades with time (along with the 'shortening telemores idea' and also the 'insulin pathway' idea)

See for more mysteries:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v465/n7298/full/465554a.html

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v465/n7298/edsumm/e100603-03.html


6/16/10

the inconceivable nature of nature!

" Our whole direct knowledge of the stellar universe depends entirely on our sense of sight. To no other of our senses do any other worlds than our own in the slightest degree appeal. We touch them or hear them never...
If there were a race with higher or other senses than our own.. a whole universe of existent fact might become for the first time apparent."
- the said Sir Oliver 1887
So it’s time that I share with the world something I hold dear: Its about these two 1/8th inch black holes we have glued to our faces.. and which we get all the information we need to navigate, explore, and roam about the world – it’s about vision.

Now the whole post below are ideas from 2 years of this dialogue burned into my memory. (when you watch the video try putting it on mute and watch his facial expressions)

“I’m sitting next to a swimming pool and somebody dives in.. And she’s not to pretty.. so I can think of something else.. I think of the waves and things that are formed in the water.. and when lots of people have dived in the pool there’s a very great choppiness of all these waves that are formed in the water… and to think that its possible maybe.. That In Those Waves is the Clues to what’s Happening in the Pool! That some sort of insect or something with sufficiency cleverness, could sit in the corner of the pool and just be disturbed by the waves, and by the nature of the ireegularitys and bumping of the waves, have figured, who ,what, where and when. And what’s happening and over the pool.. and that’s what we’re doing when we’re looking at something – the light in waves

This paragraph I wrote from memory. (It's from the video above.. which I pasted after- i am that nerdy i know it) This to me is why the speed of light and relativity are not at all surprising. When you consider that this monitor that sits before you is like an object continually dropped in a pool with waves sprouting everywhere and about, it is not surprising that moving away at the speed of the wave will cause that last ’scene’ to stand still.

Move over, get this - the sense of time - is based on comparing wavelengths and digesting them, also our notion of distances in the field of vision.. color.. it’s all comparing distances of those lil fast waves... and how accurate and wonderful it is that those waves travel so quickly.. close your eyes now ... do it….. now open- see how quick it happens! All that information is there so fast.. of course the brain must digest it.. and imagine how crazy it is.. that the energy of the waves.. just the distance from crest to trough.. is all the brain has to ‘sort’ ie color the information, giving depth, putting it in 3d etc.

Take out your two fingers.. and make a space about ( ) wide…. Now hold em out about a foot in front of you and look at it.. pretend it’s a camera ok.. and you want to record the room for a friend and what your seeing.. . look how all the information you can show your friend has to come through that little spot– basically nothing.

But those are the eyes my friend, the eyes you have.. you see it’s amazing huh! And to think, even more amazing, we’re missing the best parts!:

Go into your bedroom and turn on the radio… now turn it off… now turn it on.. the music is there all the time.. those waves of radio.. 99.5 or whatever you listen to.. are in the air ghosting through every room of your house 24/7.. from the instant you were born to the instant your taken to the grave.. and you don’t need to know about it, notice it, none of it. It’s there. So is the information about body heat from your neighbor across the street.. the clues to naked people are there too.. bombarding your face right now.. it’s infrared.. see look at all this information that God has wraught. There’s gamma rays, infrared (what the microwave invisibly shoots into that space at the food) radio.. whatever.. television stations perfume the air now..

“And I think it’s kind of incredible because when I’m looking at you... the information that he sees is coming form this side.. so that there’s this tremendous mess.. of waves… all over in space.. which we say is the light bouncing all over the room, going from one thing to the other, because most of the room doesn’t have 1/8th inch black holes.. it’s not interested in light.. but the light’s there anyway.. I mean it bounces off this, and it bounces off that.. and all this is going on… and we can sort it out with this instrument.

Again from memory. It’s Feynman. That’s why the brain is so interesting, imagine two tiny windows into the universe, upside down.. behind balls of jelly.. in black and white.. not in 3d and tiny as all hell.. that’s what we get.. that’s the ‘instrument’ of the eye.. the brain does the rest.. if you don’t think that’s incredible your going to purgatory for a week.

“But you gotta stop and think about it.. to really understand.. the incredible.. the inconceivable.. nature .. of nature”

I couldn’t recite the middle part.. my memory is sketchy. I probably haven’t watched the video in 6 months.. it’s a sin I can’t go the whole way anymore. But it’s fun.

PS – On a side note.. there’s no need to say ‘electromagnetism’ when describing the waves.. there’s a difference between knowing something and knowing the name of something.. knowing the name is actually a bad thing in many ways.. it ruins the mystery.. without the name your forced to explore what the hell the thing is.. if you didn’t know what ‘oxygen’ was.. and looked it up.. you’d see.. ok 6 protons.. similar neutrons.. ok whirling about.. just enough energy to be carried by hemoglobin.. ok just enough energy to push down electron gradients in our mitochondria.. ok it’s this elixir of life.. see how wonderful that is! but the name was based on the latin word for ‘acid forming’.. that’s what it means.. its called the wrong damn name.. it's not necessary to form all acids.. this was originally the idea.. see knowing it.. it’s pointless.. knowing the name with most things just leads you astray. I hate it. Try ‘synthetic biology’ - you already know my opinion on crap like that. I visisted a woman’s blog who used that term 14 times in 1 post. 14 times. She doesn’t even know what it is. Write 3 pages describing it in the most down to earth terms.. never using more than 4 letter words. You don’t understand it, you don’t know it, it’s there in front of you, it’s how the world behaves.. using words bigger and longer is false understanding, a crutch, you’re learning absolutely nothing whatever about synthetic biology.. your learning only about humans in different places and what they call ‘synthetic biology’.

The pseudoscience world of psychology is litered by this – try ‘anger defiance disorder’ – the hidden cause of that is located at the molecular level with brain synapses.. and the riddles will be described in terms of the second messenger cAMP messing some transcription factor.. or some immume deficiency in the some brain region or some transporter disruption.. or receptor coding malfuction.. etc, resulting in such and such. The name ‘anger defiance’ doesn’t even make any sense! - the nervous system for mammals is universal, squirrels rats have the same capacitys.. this gets into ethical issues... but the only reason they are a problem is because the herd is stupid and doesn’t understand how the nervous system works.. and how our notions of art/music/etc. is a result of these kinks. But art is another topic. And fun too.