6/24/10

The compound composing the living


CONSIDER Element 6 - essential for life.
Called Kohlenstoff (coal-stuff) by the Germans, Carbo by the latin Ancients, Carbono by the Spaniards, and Carbon by the Americans - The element is what allows your body to walk, move, stand upright, and take your 1/8th inch eye goggles from "place to place". It is in all the DNA in your cells (how she's built is the reason why your DNA looks like a staircase anyway)- and she composes the structure of the very nerve-cell-rod which just got excited in your eye this instant when you saw this period - .

She's hidden in you everywhere. Well what is she?
She is mathematical I argue. Look at this.


Ah, wonderful pattern. (Click the pic) See each 'lobe' one by one, and how
they form the overall structure. So what does that mean?
It means the carbons in your body are like patterned electron flowers -
and how each of these orbital tentacles makes love to the tentacles
of other orbits is the subject of Organic Chemistry.
Moreover, she, when with her pals, dances and grooves to her own beat.
She is a writheing, moving, 'alive', dancing thingy that we've never
noticed until video of her in a chain surfaced in the Journal Nature in 2008.




Basically how she interacts (or gets messed with) other molecules, which can wack out her orbitals (steal her electrons), is a theory of why me and you age.
Though I don't know if this is right - it's an idea.
One teacher said this to me about carbon and aging.
I think overall what destroys us is the inability to keep up with genetic abnormalities in making new enzymes, proteins, etc., as we age. We are good at it when young, but the body get worse at as we age. If we don’t tax the body (eat less calories) we live longer because there is less for our body to process (excrete)"
and I sent the response to another teacher, whom replied (he's my favorite)
It's plausible. Somehow there is a balance between longevity and reduced caloric intake. I've wondered if it somehow involves cell proliferation and telomerase. Possibly an issue between simply cell turnover time and telomerase losing function over decades -- but that also is a wild guess.
The question for your teacher is, what are the things that are being excreted that are so dangerous to cells in the first place? Carbon dioxide is a major one, urea is another, etc. Oxygen and oxidation fits in there somewhere.
The general idea is it's up for grabs - but keep in mind authority means nothing in regards to truth - "Nature doesn't care what we think, she just keeps working the way she does whether we believe it or not". The idea is the child in the playground making a wild guess has as good a chance as mine (search google for the 11 year old that pointed out some discrepancy in a Nasa report on mars). Either way, we are aging now by some mechanism, and here I am typing about what humans alive today think it's doing, all the while it operates and ignores our petty opinions.

PS - the guy in the pic was Lavoisier, who also studied Oxygen and coined it's name, while also studying carbon. I mentioned him prior - but how did his current generation reward him with his researches? He was beheaded.


For fun quotes
No element is more essential to life than carbon..
only carbon forms strong single bonds to itself that are
stable enough to resist chemical attack under ambient
conditions.. forming long chains and rings of atoms,
and these are the structurual basis for the compounds that
comprise the living cell, of which the most important is DNA.

- John Emsley, Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z guide

No one would have believed in the last years of the 19th
century this world was being watched keenly and closely
by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own;
that as men busied themselves about their various concerns
they were scrutinized and studied...

- Orson Wells, (First paragraph to the War of the Worlds)

When we look at the outside world, the primary event
is that light is focued on an array of
125 million receptors in the retina of each eye.

- David Hubel, Eye, Brain and Vision

6/22/10

Bruce Lee Tuesday and a Story from the Student Paper!

"There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. " - Bruce Lee

The Student Paper had a mathematically minded article written today, and I figured I'd post it. Enjoy!

xcosx – a lover, not a fighter – and a hiker when she’s off work from modeling for calc 2 classes. She stood in front of the board in her second modeling session (prior she was easy to paint with u substititon). The students gawked at her different appearance from the other easy trigonometric integrals.

‘How the hell am I supposed to integrate her?,’ shouted one of the artists in the class. ‘The same you did xe^xdx you ignorant prick – you use the integrals-in-parts paint brush’. Ahh shouts the class. Poor xcosx – while the students sit in their pretentiousness – jockeying with one another to see who can appear the most mathematically wise – one kid dons his N.D. class of 2013 shirt with glasses – as if he had to tell his classmates during his summer break he’s at this intutition for a credit at aother University. Another artist – a bearded old man – makes it obvious he’s only painting xcosx for medical school credit. Xcosx just sits there… while the humans with their different motives draw her curves – only 1 appreciates drawing her for own beauty – the teacher.

“You see, that is trivial – in 1990 – 75,000 kids took the AP exam – and then 110,000 took calc2 . 15 years later, in 2005, now 220,000 kids took the AP exam – a 3 fold increase. How many took calc2? It was 106,000 – a decrease! (his voice cracked when he said decrease, as if it personally hurt him)

‘ You superficial asses – whatever happened to austere beauty? Or the desire to climb the highest mountain – like George Mallory – “because it’s there”. Where are the lovers of wisdom? the true students of the ancients? Where are the Pythagorean followers – who believe and know to be true the creed that all things before you are draped in the language of number? Where are the Archimedes believers? Who when forced to bathe take fingers to their stomachs and draw mathematical figures in oil? Or who ignore the death and destruction of the world around us to finish off a diagram in the sand? – Whose completeness is more magnificent than any victory over the oppression of some warring peoples?

Dare to be great you unambitious – common – dim witted fellows. – burn with a fire for “want to” – a flame which thirsts for distinction – an urge that seeks to religiously worship the good, the just, and the beautiful!”

We all sat quiet in our seats. 'What the hell did he just say' we unanimously thought. But this story has taken place a million times – once w/the teacher as Isaac Borrow – one of the students in the audience – one who said not ‘what the hell’ was Isaac Newton. Once the teacher was Plato – one of the students who said not ‘what the hell’ was Aristotle! – When Aristotle said it – his student was Alexander. When Daavy said it – his student was Faraday. Now my teacher says it – who is listening?!

6/21/10

So beautiful!

My readers - men of leisure - hear Adam Smith talk too, about the profundiity's of our earthly habitation!

Of all the phaenomena of nature, the celestial appearances are, the most universal objects of the curiosity of mankind...The Earth had always presented itself to the senses, not only as at rest, but as inert, ponderous, and even averse to motion. ... [For opponents of Coperniocus] to enforce their objection, the adversaries of this hypothesis were at pains to calculate: the circumference of the Earth had been computed to be above twenty–three thousand miles: if the Earth, therefore, was supposed to revolve every day round its axis, every point of it near the equator would pass over above twenty–three thousand miles in a day; and consequently, near a thousand miles in an hour, and about sixteen miles in a minute; a motion more rapid than that of a cannon ball, or even than the swifter progress of sound. The rapidity of its periodical revolution was yet more violent than that of its diurnal rotation. How, therefore, could the imagination ever conceive so ponderous a body to be naturally endowed with so dreadful a movement?

link

Here's a video I made about a year or two ago. Imagine if Smith or Copernicus could actually see what they were talking about - to not have to imagine it. Humans now can actually 'float along with' the earth, and partake in that speed - and watch all of civilzation be glued to a ball surrounded in water. The glided part is towards the end. ('How ponderous a body with so dreadful a movement!')