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April 16, 2006
~Sleep with one eye open while the other two drift to gather specimens from the promised land.~
Why are there 24 hours in a day?, being a survey of various theories as to such. My favorite part is this comment at the end: via
The solution may be a mystery but an elegant mystery and there may be something deeper. If one were to look at the face of a clock and go around the clock twice numbering from 1 to 24 a number of things emerge...
-note the patern of prime numbers: 1 & 13; 5 & 17; 7 & 19; 11 & 23
-note the squares 1, 4, 9 & 16...4 and 16 overlay one another and is it possible that the relationship of 1, 4, & 9 represent the placement of the prymids?
-if you continue the sequence there are 5 prime numbers lined up with the 5 position: 5, 17, 29, 41, 53
Coincidence? Right!
comment from Bill at 4:27am on 16th November, 2004
"An illegal prime is a prime number which contains information forbidden by law to possess or distribute." via
Protest against the indictment of DeCSS author Jon Johansen and legislation prohibiting publication of DeCSS code took many forms. One of them was the representation of the illegal code in a form that had an intrinsically archivable quality. Since the bits making up a computer program also represent a number, the plan was for the number to have some special property that would make it archivable and publishable. The primality of a number is a fundamental property, one outside the scope of the law.
The parietal eyes of lizards see blue and green.
Specialized nerve cells in that eye, which looks more like a spot on the lizard’s forehead, use two types of molecular signals to sense light: those found only in simpler animals, like scallops, and those found only in more complex animals like humans.
According to the researchers, when the lizard’s third eye sees blue light, the blue pigment triggers a molecule called gustducin, which is very similar to a molecule found in human photoreceptors as well as the lateral eyes of the lizard – those on the sides of its head. But when the lizard’s third eye sees green light, the green pigment triggers a different molecule called Go, known as “G-other,” which also signals light responses in the light-sensing cells of the scallop and other creatures without a backbone. That Go is found in spineless creatures suggests it is the evolutionarily more ancient light-triggering signal.
Although gustducin and Go are different molecules, they are similar and considered “related” proteins. However, gustducin and Go each activate different molecular pathways that work against each other physiologically. Blue light and gustducin generate an “off” response in the nerve cell while green light and Go generate an “on” response.
“It may seem strange to have two opposing signals in the same cell,” says the study’s senior author, King-Wai Yau, Ph.D, a professor in the Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience at Hopkins, “but the unique mechanism renders these parietal photoreceptors most active at dawn and dusk.”
“So incorporating two different pigments and two separate signaling molecules in one cell may have been an economical way, in a primitive eye with relatively few cell types, to tell the transitions of the day based on changes in the spectrum of sunlight,” says Chih-Ying Su, Ph.D., the first author of the study and a former neuroscience graduate student at Hopkins.
Because of that parietal eye's connection to the transition between day and night, and the Science Blog headline calling it a "third eye," I began to wonder if there was an evolutionary connection between reptiles' parietal eyes and the pineal gland. Googling didn't reveal anything of the sort, but it did lead me to this fascinating theory about how the pineal gland evolved from retinal cells.
The evolutionary resolution of the serotonin/retinaldehyde conflict was to separate retinaldehyde from serotonin by creation of the pinealocyte, allowing the melatonin factory to continue to evolve in one cell and visual transduction in another: ”the retinal photoreceptor. Gradually, the pinealocyte lost the ability to detect light, and the retina lost the ability to make melatonin, as seen in primates.
Since Bush became President, America has squandered its lead in broadband access. via
The history of the equals sign: via
Howbeit, for easie alteration of equations. I will propounde a fewe exanples, bicause the extraction of their rootes, maie the more aptly bee wroughte. And to avoide the tediouse repetition of these woordes : is equalle to : I will sette as I doe often in woorke use, a pair of paralleles, or Gemowe lines of one lengthe, thus: =====, bicause noe .2. thynges, can be moare equalle.
If you are still having trouble reading this, try reading it aloud. The only tricky things are the spelling and the word "Gemowe". Reading aloud will solve the spelling problem. "Gemowe" means "twin", like in the astrological sign of Gemini.
I knew that the German "umlaut" symbol was originally a small letter "e". A word like schön ("beautiful") was originally spelled schoen, and then was written as schon with a tiny "e" over the "o", and eventually the tiny "e" dwindled away to nothing but two dots. I have a German book printed around 1800 in which the little "e"s are quite distinct.
And I had recently learned that the twiddle in the Spanish ñ character was similarly a letter "n". A word like "año" was originally "anno" (as it is in Latin) and the second "n" was later abbreviated to a diacritic over the first "n". (This makes a nice counterpoint to the fact that the mathematical logical negation symbol ∼ was selected because of its resemblance to the letter "N".) But I had no idea that anything of the sort was ever done in English.
Recorde's book shows clearly that it was, at least for a time. The short passage illustrated above contains two examples. One is the word "examples" itself, which is written "exãples", with a tilde over the "a". The other is "alteration", which is written "alteratiõ", with a tilde over the "o". More examples abound: "cõpendiousnesse", "nõbers", "denominatiõ", and, I think, "reme~ber". (The print is unclear.)
I had never seen this done before in English.
Posted by Jon Rubin at April 16, 2006 08:48 PM
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