Tag: Grand Blueprint
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Not complicated
“Independents” are seeing Deepstate involvement in the Baltimore bridge collapse, which turned an ironic national anthem into a melting iron sculpture by Dali. Impressive piece of installation art. Jimi Hendrix, eat your guitar strings! Nah. Unnecessary complexity. The event isn’t being portrayed as an attack. If media was treating it as an attack, then we…
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Reprint on Glial Equipoise
I was reminded of this by something semi-relevant. It’s utterly amazing and worth remembering. = = = = = START REPRINT: While looking for more ancient stuff to animate, found an interesting 1915 book of questions and factoids. The Book of Wonders is something like Ripley or Hix, but more oriented toward serious descriptions of…
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Reprint on analog/digital
Linked in previous, definitely worth a reprint. = = = = = START 2013 REPRINT: Noticed an interesting article on an unfathomable and completely pointless dispute among mathies. The ‘foundational’ types seem to be puzzled about the distinction between countable infinities and the continuum. This leads to some kind of irreconcilable thingamajig which must be…
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Wot? No beats?
An experiment shows fungi don’t like silence. But the choice of sounds is peculiar. = = = = = START QUOTE: To investigate the impacts of sounds on fungi, Jake Robinson at Flinders University in Australia and his colleagues buried green and rooibos teabags in soil inside a soundproof box. Inside the box, they played…
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In the groove, Japan style
New research from Japan via Eurekalert. As usual, the Japanese academic setup with fungible annual funding PER LAB gives more flexible and creative results than the US system of funding PER PROJECT APPROVED BY DEEPSTATE. We used to have a more Japanese style in our industrial labs like Bell, but they’re gone now, LBOd by…
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Nature’s electrotyping
Pointed by Denyse as always, an interesting speculation about horizontal gene transfer. The researchers are NOT saying this process happens in Nature, only that an experiment shows it CAN happen. = = = = = START QUOTE: Electroporation uses an electric field to create temporary pores in the cell membrane. This lets molecules, like DNA…
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Is it prosody or epigenes?
This is interesting. Newborns respond preferentially to stories in the ‘mother tongue’ before they’ve had a chance to hear much talking through air conduction. Were they picking up intonations and prosody through the liquids in the womb? Or is the familiarity imparted through epigenes? The former possibility could be checked by using different languages with…
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Wise woman
In this clip Yasuko is showing a ‘hand reflexology’ trick for slowing down anger. Those indirect pressure points don’t work for me, but her basic advice about anger is deeply and eternally wise, and also good science. = = = = = START YASUKO QUOTE: It looks and feels like people are getting snappier as…
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Ionopus
Pointed by Denyse as usual, this is the first EKG of an octopus. The researchers are trying to figure out how the eight arm-brains and one center-brain of an octopus communicate. Each arm-brain can operate independently, talking to the other arms without involving the center-brain. This isn’t entirely alien; our kinesthetic sensors in arms and…
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Sitters vs Rovers
Linked in previous, worth a reprint. = = = = = START 2011 REPRINT: In the last few years the public and scientific understanding of human temperament has been recovering from the grotesquely false egalitarian / chemical mindset of the 20th century. From NYTimes last month: = = = = = But the Zoloft ad’s…
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Aliens
Via NewSuperstitionist: Adult starfish are not bilateral because they don’t have a body. A starfish is just a “head walking about the seafloor on its lips”. The larva is bilateral and looks like other simple invertebrates, a worm with head and tail. When it morphs into an adult, it stops expressing the genes for body…
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More on C-Tactile
First, reprinting from a month ago: = = = = = START REPRINT: Yasuko has produced a huge number of tutorials using acupressure and similar methods to improve mood and health. This one turned out to be surprisingly effective: Is C-Tactile proper science? Yes. Exactly. = = = = = START QUOTE: The human equivalent…
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SAG, UAW, DAC
The Ankler notes frustration by two old labor activists who are unexpectedly members of SAG. Nader complains that he wrote letters to Fran and she didn’t answer, which seems cranky and whiny. He’s warning that AI is a serious threat, which is redundant because SAG is already treating AI as deadly serious. I don’t see…
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Definite and speculative
Noted on this morning’s walk… A walnut tree dropped a dozen nuts in a dozen seconds from one branch, then stopped. Caught my attention because most of them were falling on a roof, making a loud noise. The same branch on the same tree dropped nuts on the same roof during my walk a few…
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Mammary grammary
The internal evidence of language has always implied that our brains have separate ways of processing One, Two, Three, Four, Many. Languages have basic words or grammatical forms for 1 2 3 and sometimes 4. Beyond 4, the later developed numbers take over, but without any grammatical connections. A new study firms up the brain…
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