Essential Oil of Everything II - questions

Various oils, notably methyl salicylate, are used to "clear" samples of tissue (like moth brains). The tissue goes in opaque, and come out transparent. How? Does it denature the "colored" proteins? I'm stuck on thinking of the fixed tissue as being like glass, but then i realized i don't know why glass is transparent or opaque. I know it is jumbled up at the molecular level....but I think air bubbles make it opaque. If you melt your own glass (CF. fulgurites) it is usually not clear. At first I was thinking of the absorption spectra of each protein contributing to the "white" of opaqueness, but now I am thinking of these second-order effects of how the proteins are organized (parallel or cross-linked or jumbled)...

Go emergent complexity

Sir D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson: "Growth creates form, but form limits growth."

Are plasmids a new form of life different than viruses and bacteria?

Plasmids are like swap-out plug-in superpowers for bacteria. Bacteria can 'upload' them much like Neo in the Matrix uploads Kung Fu, only in bacteria it seems to be the plasmids that are in control: obligate parasites. They say this is the planet of the bacteria, but maybe they're just the metaphorical shells of the hermit crabs, the real kings of the planet, the plasmids. Listed below are a few of the common superpowers they confer on their mild-mannered hosts.

Fertility, ability to conjugate (tra)
Toxin production (Shiga, tabtoxin, Diptheria)
Symbiosis (pSYMin Rhizobiumspp.)
Restriction / Modification (enzymes)
Hydrocarbon metabolism (2,4-D, toluene)
Antibiotic-resistance (StrR, AmpR, TetR,ChlR)
Antibiotic production (Colicins, Agrocin)
Heavy metal resistance (Hg2+, Zn2+, Cu2+)
Virulence (vir, pili)
Tumorigenicity(in plants) (tmr, tms, iaa)

Levels of Abstraction

Hong Lei's talk on 1/24/07 brought up the old issue of whether we're smart enough to understand our own minds, the self-servingly appellated "most complex object in the universe". All of his statistics are motivated to try to capture the a priori differences observed in the spike waveforms. But just because we can see a difference doesn't mean our mathematics can [accurately] capture it. For example, his algorithm for labelling bursts uses an arbitrary cutoff and binning, so that some information is lost going from the original analog to the digital output. Again, when he measures constancy of spike number in bursts, there is an arbitrary distinction between "same number" and "different number" [with no regard for spacing of spikes]. But information is lost in each analog-to-digital conversion: information is lost at each analytical step. Today in Genetics class Dr. Pierson cautioned that we can make theories about biological mechanisms, but inevitably the biochemistry is more complex and nuanced. Eventually you are just taking averages of averages of averages. This is the danger in statistics of, say, finding the standard deviation of standard deviations.

Manduca DARPA Project

Flying is a difficult problem in an integrated system. The question is at what level of neurobiology could our course/coarse control (100 bits, 10 times a second) steer a moth? Will it be lower on a descending neuromuscular nerve bundle, causing the moth to jerk to the side and fall five feet, but regain a course that is say 30 degrees to the left, with a standard deviation of 30 degrees, so that it barely staggers and zigzags to the target, or can we hit the brain at the right spot to make it fly at exactly the azimuth we tune our dial to, or somewhere in between, say the cervical connective, so that we can bias the flight in some kind of nonlinear function --which might require a skilled operator not to over-correct in this situation, like sailing a boat?

I am a Libertarian

"Competition is merely the absence of oppression."
-- Frederic Bastiat

Freakanomics and the PBS series "Comanding Heights" (a reference to Lenin's conception that socialism, in order to control the economy, must control the commanding heights of the economy -- mostly energy production and concomitant natural resource utilization) about globalization 1900-2005, mentioned Hayek and the other libertarian post-keynesian thinkers. Hayek's book "the road to serfdom" , if you pick up the edition with the cartoons, is a great read. Also now am a big fan of Milton Friedman's work, and just finished reading David Henderson's "The Joy of Freedom" which is actually really good despite the hokey title. It mentions, among other things, that economics shouldn't be taught "theory first" with all that ceteris paribus junk but instead should just keep it real, with real world examples. Henderson has a great list of the top ten principles of economics, the first is that incentives matter. For a spoof see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVp8UGjECt4

Although there are problems with the explanatory power of a purely rational approach to the world, there are many things that are rationally/economically obvious (raising the minimum wage necessarily raises unemployment, tariffs hurt both countries), and I no longer think Stieglitz is the be-all and end-all (his textbook with the lighthouse on the cover -- referring to the idea that some services are best left to gov't -- is actually a non sequitur since it was shown that lighthouses were privately owned in England in the 1700 and 1800s). I definitely wouldn't vote for a candidate who thought the gov't could do a better job on anything (except maybe defense?) than private enterprise.

How do I reconcile all this dismal science with social justice and environmentalism? Paul Hawkin and Amory Lovins have the answer in Natural Capitalism, which due to space limitations I cannot quote in its entirety.

Raw Food and Raw Education -- Common Cause

Quote:

Formal education resembles agriculture. Agriculture greatly reduced the diversity of the human diet. Before agriculture, a person might have eaten 80 different foods each week; after agriculture began, far fewer. Agriculture caused a big decline in health because its fundamental assumption – it is okay to eat a small number of foods – is false or at least very hard to reconcile with nutritional requirements. Likewise, formal education (classrooms, lectures, textbooks, etc.) surely reduced the diversity of what was learned, how it was taught, and how learning was measured.

From Diversity in Learning
Seth Roberts in Ideas That Matter Quarterly, a publication honoring the civic and theoretical work of Jane Jacobs.

Wildflowers and Drought in the Southwest

http://www.desertusa.com/wildflo/az.html

drought watch:

The ag station's weather monitoring:
http://ag.arizona.edu/azmet/

Unique Gift Ideas

Chart your genetic lineage

Create your own essential oil

Save an endangered plant

Listen to bat squeaks

Ecosphere

Thinkers

Steven Levitt , author of Freakonomics
Seth Roberts, nutritionist and psychologist best known for experimenting on himself.
Stewart Brand, founder of whole earth catalog/magazine
H.L Mencken
Milton Friedman
Rustum Roy

Thinkers I don't agree with
Stewart Brand
Patrick Moore