Tuesday, December 03, 2024

The Long View


The Long View

There are few people, much less countries, that take the long view save for possibly the Chinese as their civilization is the longest running example of how a particular society conducts business on planet earth yet forever remaining a fleeting moment in a reality we will never fully understand. In writing, there is one writer who embodies The Long View and his name is Olaf Stapledon.




Existentialism, combined with a profound understanding of science and philosophy, permeate his writings contemplating the issue of mortality and its deep connect to an existence that doesn't care. Another interesting aspect of Stapeldon's work is his unique ability to convey how a given creature perceives reality, in this case, in the guise of an enhanced dog named, Sirius.


In the end, it all comes down to this.

Monday, December 02, 2024

Venom


As much as I like Venom and his buddy Eddie Brock, this blurb isn't about this dynamic duo but rather about biological venom and the benefits it has for mankind as nature never disappoints if one looks hard enough
to learn why.




For one researcher, the start point was the Gila Monster.



Gila monsters — sluggish, thick-tailed ground dwellers — are native to southern Arizona and northern Mexico. They have blunt noses and bumpy black skin with tan, pink or orange squiggles. They spend 95 percent of their lives underground. Like their cousins to the south, Mexican beaded lizards, they are one of the very few lizard species that produces venom, which they excrete from mouth glands into grooves in their serrated teeth.

Something's afoot.


Eng recognized the exendins as a potential diabetes therapy. He had patients with the condition who needed to calibrate their insulin injections carefully to avoid both hyper- and hypoglycemia. Exendin-4, on the other hand, resembled a human hormone called GLP-1, which works as a natural insulin manager in people without diabetes. When we eat, the small intestine releases GLP-1, prompting the pancreas to produce more insulin only when blood-sugar levels get too high. The molecule also slows digestion and makes us feel full. Scientists suspected that injections of GLP-1 would be a much easier and safer diabetes treatment than insulin, except for one crucial problem: The hormone lasts only a few minutes in the bloodstream before it breaks down. But the Gila monster analogue, Eng and Raufman were surprised to note, lasts for hours.

Fast forward a few years ...


Patients who took Byetta and other exendin- and GLP-1-inspired drugs also experienced substantial weight loss, trials revealed, but pharmaceutical companies were slow to realize how useful that side effect could be. Once they did, and had improved their formulations, the consequences transformed society: Ozempic and Wegovy, followed by Mounjaro and Zepbound, became blockbuster drugs for treating diabetes and spurring weight loss. What’s more, many of them appear to have additional beneficial impacts that researchers are only beginning to understand. Some seem to be protective against kidney and heart disease and may reduce inflammation in the brain that is linked to the development of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. You might say that the Gila monster — this shy, subterranean reptile — harbored a blueprint all along for medicines that may be among the most consequential health advances of our time.

Venom delivery systems have been around for a very long time. :)


Cone snails, may have the most sophisticated venom in the world.


In closing ...

But in the venoms of creatures that researchers have been able to examine more closely, two features stand out that hint at their significant medical potential. They are incredibly potent and fast-acting — necessary qualities if they are to aid the survival prospects of the creatures deploying them. They can be produced in advance and stored for long periods at ambient temperatures (in the animals’ glands). They are composed of hundreds — or sometimes thousands — of molecules that often serve multiple purposes, making venoms “essentially ecological Swiss Army Knives,” as a 2019 review in the journal Toxins put it. And a majority of those molecules are peptides and proteins honed over millions of years to target other animals in the host’s ecosystem, including plenty of creatures whose biology overlaps that of humans.

Read the long NYTimes piece in its entirety. You'll learn a lot. I know I have. :)

Ignorance ...



A subject most interesting is ignorance and it's unique ability to enable one to be blissfully oblivious to how reality works at any level never ceases to amaze as it comes in all shapes and sizes, something humorously depicted in Mike Judge's Idiocarcy, a film people should watch to see why ignorance's been around since the beginning of time and will never go away as long as humans continue to reside on planet earth. One perplexing aspect about this all too common phenomenon is the fact we know people who are willfully ignorant but not stupid so what gives? 

From this perspective, being ignorant's easy. Not taking the time to know while remaining true to one's core beliefs remains effortless as long as something untold doesn't come along to bite you on the ass. To learn more about this ever present human condition, the NyTimes piece titled The Surprising Allure of Ignorance awaits. :)


Same as it ever was. - Talking Heads

The world is a recalcitrant place, and there are things about it we would prefer not to recognize. Some are uncomfortable truths about ourselves; those are the hardest to accept. Others are truths about the reality around us that, once revealed, steal from us beliefs and feelings that have somehow made our lives better, easier to live — or at least to seem that way. The experience of disenchantment is as painful as it is common, and it is not surprising that a verse from an otherwise forgotten English poem became a common proverb: Ignorance is bliss.

The contrarian view ...

But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them.” _ George Carlin


“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

Sunday, December 01, 2024

You're kidding, right?



Lack of knowledge regarding how the environment functions, in this case, the weather, can kill you. If one doesn't know where and when a hurricane will strike (think Florida or Louisiana), the probability of one buying the farm raises exponentially so when Musk and company actually think about not renewing funding for NOAA, a case of intense puckering comes to mind, right?



Weather of a different kind

It's endless :)


Equipoise

e·qui·poise
/ˈekwəˌpoiz/

noun

balance of forces or interests. 

"this temporary equipoise of power"

Similar:

equilibrium balance evenness symmetry parity equality

When viewing this "awesome" image, to yours truly, it indirectly connects to great art and the people who create it. Seen below is but a tiny sample. Enjoy. :)

Aja - Steely Dan
Kind of Blue - Davis
Special & General Relativity - Einstein
The Three Musicians - Picasso
Heart of Darkness - Conrad
Macbeth - Shakespeare
Double slit experiment - Young
Uncertainty Principle - Heisenberg
Light as a Quantum - Planck
Light as a particle - Einstein
Quantum Mechanics - Bohr & significant others
Propaganda - Bernays
Feyman diagrams - Feyman
The Conversation, The Godfather,  Apocalypse Now Redux - Coppo
Sultan of Swing - Dire Straits
The Blues & the Abstract Truth - Nelson
Culture, cuisine & the human condition - Bourdain
Charlie Parker
Le Etranger - Camus
Dizzy Gillespie
Electric Ladyland - Hendrix
Stevie Ray Vaughn
Oscar Peterson
Jimmy Smith
Frank Zappa
Solo works - Keith Jarret
JFK
The consummate professional - Michelangelo
The consummate visionary - DaVinci
Sophie's Choice
Waltz for Debby - Bill Evans
Jonas Salk
Vermeer
Rockets - Musk
The Blackbird - Johnson
Hockey - Bobby Orr
Football - Brown, Sayers, Brady et al
Basketball - Bird, Magic, Jordan, Chamberlain, West et al
The Bridge - Rollins
A Love Supreme - Coltrane
AI - Hinton
Talking Heads
Blackbird - Macartney
Analog computing - Lord Kelvin
Digital computing - Von Neuman
AI, chaos - Turing
Graphics Software - Alvy Ray Smith
Ray Tracing - MAGI
AC- Tesla
ElectroMagnetism - Maxwell
Animal Farm, 1984 - Orwell
Brave New World - Huxley
Incompleteness Theorems - Godel
Waiting for Godot - Beckett
OODA Loop - Boyd
Swanns Way - Proust
Moby Dick - Melville
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses - Joyce
Ian Hammer
John McLaughlin
Chick Corea
Weather Report - Wayne Shorter, Joe Zawinul
Bach
Goldberg Variations - Gould
Lenny
Dave Brubeck Quartet
Carlin
History - Alfred McKoy
2001, Paths of Glory, Full Metal Jacket, Dr. Strangelove - Kubrick
Citizen Kane - Wells
The Outlaw Josey Wales, Unforgiven - Eastwood
Blow by Blow, Wired - Jeff Beck
Network - Paddy Chayefsky

More entities will be added without question. :)


Stillness ...

Friday, November 29, 2024

4 of a kind :)


A few days ago, I had a wonderful conversation with a good friend of mine whereupon we discussed often overlooked similarities among musicians of stature with the first talk revolving around the ability to play in ways unable to be copied. For both of us, Eric Dolphy and Jeff Beck were the two whose sound and unique approach to their craft shows why this take rings true. With Dolphy, atonality and extensive use of extended chords sonically relates to works by Schoenberg, Berg and Varese IMHO. As for Beck, outlier applies as no one plays like him. Going beyond the Yardbirds, he just did his own thing whether it be hard blues or acid tinged jazz fusion melded with rock as seen by Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, Charles Mingus's homage given to the great Lester Young back in 1959.






On the composing side, Steve Winwood and Wayne Shorter come to mind as their works are nuanced and idiosyncratic to the nth degree. In the case of Winwood, forays into jazz, blues, folk and rock were key along with legendary collaborations with Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker.  For Shorter, work with Miles and Steely Dan were just starters for a musician considered to be one of the finest composers in jazz as per Oliver Nelson and Duke Ellington.


Extended Chords the playground of Eric Dolphy and significant others. :)

Thursday, November 28, 2024

7 Steps ...


7 Steps to the end of empire appears to be universal whether it be Alexander
the Great's, the Mongols, the Roman or the British and now, it may be America's turn as the nation moves further into the 21st century. 

And what marked the penultimate age? Defensiveness, pessimism, materialism, frivolity, an influx of foreigners, the Welfare State, and a weakening of religion. To what did he attribute this decadence? Too long a period of wealth and power, selfishness, love of money, and the loss of a sense of duty.

The religion part is questionable but the rest of Glubb's take is pretty spot on but a few other entries should be included in order to complete the picture of a once great nation beginning to lose its place in the world as a viable super power for the ages.

To whit.

  • Incompetent governance
  • Corrupt politicians
  • Rampant inequality
  • Climate change
  • Resource depletion
  • Environmental degradation
  • Excess militarism
  • Education collapse
  • Infrastructure decay
  • Lack of vision


Follow the yellow brick road

Stupidity ...



Yours truly has written copiously about stupidity as it's never ending, something Einstein alluded to in his famous quote ... "There are two things that are infinite. The universe and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." When writing about stupidity, one finds it matters not where it comes from whether it be US foreign policy or how people cling to nonsensical beliefs contrary to their self interest (Trump) because accepting ridiculous ideas according to one's take on the world is far easier than questioning as questioning invokes the possibility of doubt when trying to cope with something as truly mysterious as existence .

One person who addresses this all too prevalent condition with eloquence and grace is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a courageous German theologian who challenged Hitler and lost his life because of it. 



Bookends ...



Yours truly reads a lot as you, my loyal readers know, but one book, it seems, everybody's read, but not me, is Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, a 1st person viewpoint from a preppy dealing with adolescence and angst to the nth degree. Well, in 2024, I finally have and Catcher brings back memories as a preppy who did the deed for four years in the early 60's in an environment identical to the one Holden Caufield dealt with in the 50's as my school, which will remain nameless and forever locked in time akin to the 50's, was a rather perverse monastery filled with the exact same characters described in the book. Like Holden, complaining as art form by me was the genre of the day, bemoaning how tough it was even though, in both our cases, being coddled and insulated from the real world, insured it was an absurd rant to the nth degree. 

Bringing back memories is not a bad thing as long as one's not obsessed by them. Robert E.


A few days ago, I again watched The Last Picture Show, a haunting and powerful film depicting the coming of age of adolescents not insulated from the world, presents, in exquisite detail, the vagaries and tragedies of life experienced by teens living in a dying town in rural Texas during the 50s, circumstances totally opposite the plush lives of characters residing in Catcher. The thing most captivating is how director Peter Bogdanovich weaves together the complex story lines from Larry McMurtry's book and give them heart rendering life through a cast for the ages, something most rare in this age of frivolous self aggrandizement issuing forth from sources like X and Facebook. 

To this rube, The Last Picture Show is one of the truly great films without question. 




Wednesday, November 27, 2024

If ain't broke ...



If it' ain't broke ... applies to Google as yours truly, on a daily basis, depends on Android running a smart phone and Chrome for browsing and searching the web because Google's environment works without question. Is it perfect? Not a chance as Google seems to not understand interface design like Apple but that's not the issue, legal types not knowing how tech operates at deep level is because Google's a company comprised of a vast array of integrated software code sets able to work seamlessly together due to the billions of man hours and dollars spent in developing a system able the meet the needs of a significant portion of the human race presiding on planet earth. With this said, recommendations made by Herbert Hovenkamp, a prof at the Wharton School, makes a lot of sense regarding on how to properly deal with a company as important at this one.

Remember, DOD created the F35 and we all know how that's working out so ... do we want to create another boondoggle like the F35? I thought so.



Backgrounder ...





If it ain't broke ...