Apoptosis and other hot links

I want to write about the wrongness of our course in Iraq but every time I start the topics and subtopics just seem to branch out endlessly in front of me. Fortunately, a friend wrote a very focused short piece a few days ago, "Wide of the Mark" at Daily Blague which has encouraged me not to abandon the idea entirely. As with most things I'm having trouble finishing I set the Iraq idea aside and started on something else. A search on "hubbert peak theory oil and gas" led to some very nice articles, but the best thing that turned up was Google Scholar. Google is good for news, views and products but most of the time it really falls down on science issues, very little useful material is returned. I'd been wanting to explore the idea of nicotine as cancer trigger for months but had not had much success and had set the idea aside until I got to a better medical library in Nashville later this year. Using Google Scholar on "nicotine cancer trigger" brought up a cellular biology term I just barely remembered, apoptosis, and also reminded me that I might better search on "nicotine carcenogensis genotoxcity" which was very productive and led to the very nice, recent and complete article, "Nicotine: Potentially a Multifunctional Carcinogen?" which gives a very satisfying answer to the general question of whether nicotine can trigger and promote cancer. Going back to apoptosis on regular Google we found "Apoptosis: Dance of Death" at Cells Alive. What a wonderful site Cells Alive is. I think going to school and/or doing research is a lot more fun now that it was thirty five or forty years ago, it's certainly more attractive. Seems like there was a war on then too. The war in Iraq is not like the war in Viet Nam, except for people dying, it will not respond to the same methods of protest as during my time in graduate school years ago. But it still needs to come to an end and needs to change its course soon. We definitely need to change the politicians soon also. Nothing like a little research in tetratogenicity of nicotine to focus ones mind, eh? Now, I wonder is teratogen an outdated term, is genotoxic a variant or a synonym?

Resonance

At the tender age of fourteen I asked my High School French teacher, Alex Cason, who was Belgian, if the way particular languages were structured influenced the way people thought, if by the very nature of the language a French speaker, a Russian speaker - Alex was also my Russian teacher - and an English speaker might simply form different concepts in thinking about the same topic purely as a result of their individual languages, at the time we were reading All About Language by Mario Pei. Alex dismissed my question as irrelevant and we moved on. Now, nearly better than four decades later the dismissal still stings, but I have the beginnings of an answer that seems to indicate that my question might have had some merit.

Without sharing certain attitudes towards the things around us, sharing a sense of relevance and responding in similar ways, communication would be impossible. It is important, for instance, that nearly all of us agree nearly all the time on what colors things are. Such agreement is part of our concept of color, Wittgenstein suggests. Regularity of the use of such concepts and agreement in their application is part of language, not a logically necessary precondition of it. We cannot separate the life in which there is such agreement from our concept of color. Imagine a different form or way of life and you imagine a different language with different concepts, different rules and a different logic.

This raises the question of the relation between language and forms or ways of life.

Gently lifted from The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 6. Rules and Private Language

A dear friend once commented decades ago about my distinct lack of learning in Liberal Arts, "that a good liberal arts education would have added so much resonance to your life". Now nearly in my sixth decade a little resonance is coming around. Perhaps, it is never too late to learn, but this late in life, resonance comes with a distinct feeling of embarrassment at having known Wittgenstein's name for years but little else.

Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah's wife

A friend writes today,

American Christianity: An Oxymoron?

It is very difficult for me to write about something that hasn't taught me something. To learn something new is to reconfigure the brain, if only slightly, and for me there is something about the process that creates a compulsion to write. No such compulsion was born of reading Bill McKibben's piece, in Harper's, "The Christian Paradox." Sure, there were a few little things that I learned from it, such as the dandy finding that

Only 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors of the the Gospels. Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. [!!!!!]

That's how the essay begins. -read more-

There is hope, as long as we have Andy and RJ.

NORTH KOREA MOVES ONE MILLION CLONED CATS TO BORDER WITH SOUTH,Angry Kim Jong-Il Retaliates for Seoul’s Dog Cloning

One day after South Korean scientists announced that they had successfully cloned a dog, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il denounced the cloning procedure as “an act of provocation” and immediately moved one million cloned cats to the border with the South.
-read more from Andy-

Golfing For Cats
Patricia Storms has raised a very interesting question at Booklust. Can readers be divided into "men" and "women" simply by what they read? Behind the obvious thrust of the question - are there subjects that interest men but not women, and vice versa, and how important are these subjects to readers overall - lies the issue of authority. Do people read what they're supposed to read? I have only to frame the question to generate the answer, but it should be borne in mind that, until some strange moment in the past seventy to a hundred years, nobody read anything unless it was authorized or - small difference - forbidden. And authority is still with us. Only now it flows from cool people who have excited our envy, not from greybeards in ivory towers.
-read more from RJ-

Cleaning up ...

A friend has written recently at Daily Blague about cleaning up.

"Team Vacation"
"Team Vacation Advances"
"Team Vacation Crests"
"Team Vacation Collapses"

I have my own physical, read that real world, disaster to attack myself and it's in the house not a storage room. And, I doubt that I will be brave enough to photograph my disastrous circumstances and publish them here with comments. But, my friend's effort did push me towards some long neglected virtual cleaning up. Perhaps fifty seven thousand files are a few too many for a 4Gb drive although there is still about 1Gb free. Finding things has become a bit of a problem even with nice tools like Google's desktop search. Three levels of folder directories in Favorites and My Documents and files that date back to 1998 is some real virtual clutter.

We reorganize and purge on, but it's slow going sometimes, moments of nostalgia, checking to see if old links are still active, and just plain 'what the devil is this?' moments impede progress. When the physical house has become inordinately cluttered in the past I have on occasion moved all the clutter to the garage or a storage room and then moved it back into the house a box at a time culling, discarding and rearranging as I go. Seemed like a good approach in the virtual world but it has proven otherwise. Beware! Power users will have no trouble locating the Favorites folder in the Windows subdirectory and simply moving the lot from under drivename:\windows\favorites to a new folder like drivename:\windows\favorites\oldlist. The procedure works, perhaps a bit slowly, but it works. However, and this is a big however, this massive file move creates thousands of dangling file references, "invalid paths" they're called, in the registry which slows the machine down, way down. My registry cleaner burps on the first thousand dangling file references and requires that they be cleaned out before proceeding again. Deletions, massive deletions, will likely cause the same problem.

With a fast new machine, a Pentium IV, and a big drive, one ten times my size, a 40Gb, or an 80Gb, or one of the mammoth 120Gb drives, the problem may not raise its ugly head right away, but it's there lurking in the background for you one day. Solutions? I'm not sure I have any good ones. Don't save so much stuff, that's always good. Do periodic housekeeping and move the old stuff to off-line storage like CD's or DVD's, that's good too and should actually be taken care of with proper periodic backups. If you're saying backups to yourself now and your facial expression is much like that of a calf at a new gate, we need to talk. If you don't know what a calf at a new gate looks like, we really need to talk. All of this brings to mind the idea that nothing is permanent or at least not much is permanently relevant in a Favorites folder. The best solution at the moment seems to be exporting the Favorites as a whole or portions of the Favorites to an HTML file which can be accessed fairly easily through the browser. The HTML Favorites list, however, is in chronological entry order and there is no clean way to sort it. Aren't you just overjoyed to know all this now? Probably all this belongs on Byte Butcher, maybe we'll move it, maybe not. And, so we come to the end of another session of very enjoyable typing. Ciao. EOF