Candyassification

Posted on May 18, 2013 by gymnosperm

Admit it, the world is getting more candy assed. Gone are the tough handed men of the past who dragged canon over mountains; who sailed wooden ships into the unknown with both skin and bone in the game.

All we want now is protection. Protection from pain . Protection from suffering. Protection from risk, even protection from being a complete dumbass. Burglars who fall through skylights sue for your not having burglar proof skylights.

Can we afford all this safety? Maybe not.

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I was looking for a picture from the 1970’s, a color photo of an OSHA cowboy, but all I can find now are ridiculous line drawings. The photo above of ironworkers in Brooklyn in the 1930’s was to have been the counterpoint, but it will have to be the point.

I think we can do better for our workers than the above, but we shouldn’t entirely protect them from responsibility for managing the risk. Safety must be the responsibility of the workers as well. Will we decline as a society when everyone is entitled and protected from responsibility for their work safety, for their medical problems, for their unemployment, for their retirement?

I fear so, but anyway, the world is definitely becoming more candyassed.

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(Too Much) Fun in the Photons

Posted on May 9, 2013 by gymnosperm
A UV radiation induced thymine-thymine cyclobu...

A UV radiation induced thymine-thymine cyclobutane dimer (right) is the type of DNA damage which is undone by photolyase. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Having thus far avoided grossing everyone out with pictures of my penance for past overindulgence in photons, there can be no reason to begin now. Suffice it to say the swelling is going down, my face has been spared further Thymine poison, and there is every reason to believe the Fluorouracil has done its job.

Photons are little quanta of energy emitted and absorbed by mass according to its temperature. Some really smart people will argue they don’t exist, but some nasty things for your skin come from that yellow ball in the sky that warms  during the day and goes away at night. Let’s just call them photons.

The  high energy shortwave photons are the worst. They can damage the DNA deep in your skin. Just like they penetrate deep into water to warm our oceans.

UV and Skin

The graphic above from Intech does not mention Thymine dimers, probably because they seem to be part of the pyrimidine cycle, but fluorouracil appears to work by causing “thymineless death” in damaged and aberrant skin cells.

The really remarkable lesson for me from Efudex treatment is how similar the effect on my skin was to sunburn. It felt like a burn, it itched, it peeled, it felt tight, it blistered. It was as if I were reliving all the sunburns of my past  as penance.

Two weeks after ending applications to my face I’m still pink and peeling. No prior sunburn ever lasted that long!

I hide in the shadows now, avoiding photons like the plague, for they have visited a plague on me, indeed.

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Passwords and GDP

Posted on May 1, 2013 by gymnosperm
English: Fingerprint

English: Fingerprint (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Passwords suck.

Be fair, how much of your life have you wasted for a lost username or password? It would be one thing if it were airline security, but mostly it is some random website you don’t give a rat’s pajamas if the whole world sees through your eyes.

It is really their problem more than yours, but I have a laptop that scans my fingerprint. Pretty much gotta be me right? Nevertheless the dumber than a box of rocks mentality requires me to enter a password after every reboot before I can scan my fingerprint?

Hello?

Oh, maybe they are worried someone will be holding a gun to my head to force me to scan my fingerprint for my WordPress password. Or my bank account, but I’m dead either way unless I elbow them in the nuts and shoot them. Entirely possible.

What is the cost to the economy? Enormous. Probably on the scale of traffic in the modern era where those truly motivated will surreptitiously text and email to get things done on the road.

I used to be appalled by the economic cost of traffic, where millions of people waste hours of their time every day. Assign minimum wage to that time and you are talking several basis points of GDP.

Now I am appalled at the economic cost of passwords.

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Subjective and Objective

Posted on April 19, 2013 by gymnosperm

Those who have studied English might call this a “watershed”. As a carpenter and mountaineer I always objected to this term as imprecise because what is really meant is ridge or divide where water flows one way or the other. It is the difference between water dripping off the front or back of your house, between the tributaries of this or that river system, and also between I and me.

Science strives to be objective, to dissociate and float above in some dreamlike state and look down and say, “Wow, this is happening to me.” The subjective take would be, “I do (or not) like what is happening.”

With a bit of a musical ear I listen to random people talk. I love the inflection, syncopation and rhythm of speech. Yet Henry Higgins rises in me. I hear young folks saying it, I hear my kids saying it, I got this email today: “Please do not hesitate to contact Drea or I directly.”

Higgins

“If you spoke as she does sir instead of the way you do, why you might be selling flowers too!”

Doggone kids just don’t seem to realize that when you are the object of a verb you are supposed to dissociate and float above in some dreamlike state, look down and say, “Me.”

On the other hand I’ve read the “Wives Tales” , Chaucer, rugged stuff memorable at this point mostly for scatological humor. “Ayhd sooner ear a horse fardt ayn the preacher…” Shakespeare and legalese are pieces of cake by comparison.

Language evolves and there is no stopping it, but water must drip from either the front or the back of your house. I worry this portends a loss of objectivity.

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Something In Us Loves a Witch

Posted on April 14, 2013 by gymnosperm

Something in us loves a witch. We’ve already explored the irrational behavior demonstrated by Prohibition and the Salem Witch Trials. See “Global Warming and Prohibition”.

endor

The nature of the human condition is that we are constantly confronted with forces beyond our understanding and control. Floods, droughts, pestilence and famine, the fickle finger of fate.

Maybe more so after the agrarian revolution as frantic fingers furrowed and God-Kings postured. There were sacrifices, both animal and human. Kings posed as interpreters of kindred spirits, decreed rituals,  and so you see the kings were actually witches.

Skeletons of children beneath the threshold footings of Druid houses, our Easter Lamb, assuage the incomprehensible that we might have a bountiful harvest.

Yet, we must manifest the incomprehensible tangible by proxy. God-Kings, witches, sorcerers…prophets. Sacrifice a prophet?

Fingers to the bone, nasty brutish and short.

 

Posted in Anthropology, Climate, History, Metaphor | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

The Edge

Posted on April 7, 2013 by gymnosperm

It never ceases to amaze how quickly in any research endeavor one reaches the edge of human understanding. Research by search engine in any subject is like peeling back the skins of an onion. First comes the chaff, and then the facile answers as if we understand it completely, then the layers that make the complexity of the subject clear, and finally the edge.

1913a.1 Moms album 27

All this came to mind because research into fluorouracil, a treatment mentioned in the prior post, yielded first that it was in a class of drugs called anti-metabolites. Now that name got me thinking it worked on mitochondria, but it does not. The next layer of the onion revealed that we understand its function completely and it interferes with the transcription of RNA. This is the facile layer. While some of its effect probably is copied to RNA, it definitely does not generally interfere with RNA transcription, and in fact may rely on RNA to perpetuate its action deep into tissues.

The next layer is  “thymineless death“, and the edge. It was discovered in the 1950’s that E. coli grown in a thymineless substrate would just up an’ die. This was noteworthy because substrates without adenine, guanine, and cytosine were limiting but not fatal.

There are theories but my own suspicion is that sticking that Fluorine on like a spike allows the uracil to function normally  in the pyrimidine pathway, binding on one side but preventing expression on the other.

Fluorine is bad stuff.

uluwatu-temple-2

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El Patron, El Sol

Posted on April 2, 2013 by gymnosperm

This is what I will be looking like soon. The wages of a Nordic phenotype who spent his life in the sun. Not so much at the beach, although there too when I was younger. High altitude sun, Radon and X-rays from granite monoliths I was climbing, a ridiculous amount of time over 12000′ even as the ozone was waning.

Brad Armstrong

This picture is of Brad Armstrong from his YouTube you can’t miss if you Google Fluorouracil. He looks a bit like me and I love his attitude and shoot eatin’ grin.

I’ll post my picture when I get to week two. No sequestration, no mercy for the bewildered. I’ll tell everyone I’m trying out Halloween costumes, joined a punk band, that it’s the new rage and everyone will be doing it soon.

March bravely to meet your fate.

The first miracle cancer drug from the seventies turned into a skin cream ferrets out hyperactive cells, and may just save us boomers from one of our indulgences.

Posted in Anthropology, Biology, Wilderness | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Wine, Volcanoes, and the Dioxides

Posted on March 24, 2013 by gymnosperm

Making wine teaches important lessons about the wee beastie soup we live in, call it the dim sum. It also holds lessons about Carbon and Sulfur. Carbon and Sulfur were instrumental in the evolution of life on this planet, and likely by no coincidence oxides of Carbon and Sulfur are the second and third most prolific exhalations of volcanoes, after water.

volcanic-eruption-67668_640

Most folks understand the fundamental role of Carbon in the chemistry of life, and many that one of the more plausible scenarios for the terrestrial evolution of life involves reducing Sulfur in the anaerobic environment of oceanic hydrothermal vents . Those so inclined may draw a volcanic metaphor for life.

NOAA hydrothermal vent

For billions of years life existed only in the oceans as a microbial soup I like to call the dim sum. One can also think of it as wine. Lest we underestimate the industry of our wee predecessors, they are currently found in our deepest holes drilled into the crust and in the highest reaches of the atmosphere. Our human ancestors discovered that the fungi we now call yeasts quickly turned mashed grains into beer and bread, and collections of fruit into wine.

The dioxide of Carbon became the basis of a balanced economy of photosynthesis and respiration we consider ourselves the culmination of. The dioxide of Sulfur, however, is the evil twin, the anti-life.

While many beasties, including yeasts retain the anaerobic Sulfur reducing metabolic pathway for tough times, the usual resultant, Hydrogen sulfide is extremely toxic to aerobic creatures and is an unpleasant component in wine. Research on selecting yeast strains to eliminate Hydrogen sulfide has demonstrated a previously unknown reducing pathway that produces free Sulfur.

The antimicrobial use of Sulfur in winemaking is at least as old as the Romans and Sulfur was our primary antibiotic as recently as World War I.

When I hear the Carbon wags expostulating about  volcanic Carbon dioxide causing mass extinctions, I yearn to bring them down to earth with a whiff of my stock sulfite solution.

Skull Crossbones

Posted in Anthropology, Biology, History, History of Life, Metaphor, Ocean Acidification | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Duty of Truth

Posted on March 17, 2013 by gymnosperm

Those who work at public institutions owe the public, their patrons, a duty of truth. Private citizens are free to engage in any foolishness that suits them, but public servants must be held to a higher standard.

figure-1c

The graph above was recently published by Shaun Marcott et al in Science Magazine. It is a graph showing world temperature as recorded by some “proxies”, 18O in the shells of sea critters and such, for the past 2000 years. It involved some heavy statistical techniques and it seems to show a dramatic spike recently.

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But here is the same graph from Marcott’s PhD thesis a few months earlier that shows no recent spike.

There is no excuse for a paper in a premium journal to not at least offer an explanation for this change in results. It has become clear that the dates of data points were changed to create the spike.

This is scientific misconduct and a cynical abrogation of the duty of truth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Here’s the Beef, Or the World Economy Explained by a Billion Cows

Posted on March 9, 2013 by gymnosperm
Cattle on the alp

Cattle on the alp (Photo credit: Darkroom Daze)

Grasses coevolved with ungulates (we can call them cows). About 30 million years ago due to declining temperature, humidity, and atmospheric Carbon dioxide a bunch of plants including grasses evolved a more efficient form of photosynthesis called C4. This allowed them to keep their pores open longer and suck in CO2 faster without drying out. This was a tremendous advantage and these plants proliferated. The cows were loving it of course.

Fast forward to maybe 50,000 years ago and we humans follow the herds out of Africa. First during wet oscillations we follow them into the Sahara. Then during dry intervals some of us follow them north and east out of the desert and you know the rest of the story…

Posted in Anthropology, Climate, Climate Change, Economics, Geography, History, History of Life, Paleoclimate, Salvation from Cows | Tagged , , | 1 Comment