September 11, 2006
110010000
What do we have here? Why, it appears to be a blog post! The 400th, no less.
After this mega-entry, expect few-to-no entries until I can get Movable Type set up for a link log, where every item is a separate link. I might create a static archive of these first 400 posts and switch things up more, like moving to a different content management system. Plus, I think my free web hosting ends in November, so I'm also considering migrating to a new web host.
One thing's for sure, though. Despite the dearth of activity these past few weeks, I haven't forgotten about ubiquit.us, and, no, it is not dead.
The archives of the Jedi council were designed off of the Long Room Library at Dublin's Trinity College. via
The old Library of Trinity College is Burgh's masterpiece and was built between 1712-1732. A huge building, it originally towered over the university and city when it was completed. The building has undergone two major adaptations since it was constructed. Originally the Library was placed on an open ground floor arcade whose purpose was to insulate the books from damp. This was filled in during the 19th century for more shelf space. The timber barrel vaulted ceiling ie not original either, being added by celebrated architects Deane & Woodward in 1858-60. Originally the library had a high flat ceiling.
Is it too much of a coincidence that designers at Lucas Films would produce a library with not only a similar book arrangement to the Long Room, but a similar roof? A roof that was not original but added by later generations to solve a specific problem? The original flat ceiling was causing the external walls to buckle, and the insertion of the barrel vault was the preferred option to reintroduce structural integrity to the building. Additional supports were added which run from the floor to the ceiling along the edge of the bookstacks. Each library bay became structural and is vaulted at right angles to the main vault.
There's something magical about inverse power: the laws of gravity predict the spread of plant pathogens.
"It turns out insects are more likely to move shorter distances between better plants," write the authors. "Interestingly, then, the probability of disease being passed between two plants goes up if they are closer and/or better, which parallels the stronger gravity between closer and larger planets."
The researchers tracked a fungal disease spread by bees and moths in the course of pollinating and feeding on nectar from white campion flowers at the University of Virginia's Mountain Lake Biological Station. As predicted by the behaviour of insects, the disease was more likely to spread shorter distances between plants that had many flowers.
Bjornstad and colleagues have previously shown that similar patterns describe the spread of measles among cities, because people tend to travel more between large towns or only short distances.
There's a new collision attack on the SHA-1 hash. Until now, SHA-1 was the more secure sibling of a hash method called MD5. A hash contains a set of data, but scrambles it. The way it's supposed to work, there's only one feasible unique hash for one set of data. Last year, someone figured out how to find what were until now unfeasible alternate hashes, or collisions--a circumstance where two sets of different data hash to the same scrambled code. The problem with last year's attack, though, was that the alternate set of data couldn't be user-selected. It was just nonsense. Because of that, it was pretty much impossible to use hash collisions to inject malicious code. However, the new collision method does allow the attacker to inject selected data: via
The latest violation means that the attacks against the reduced step SHA-1 variant has reached the same level as, for example, the attack against the old MD5 algorithm. The most successful previous attack against SHA-1, by Wang, had until now been inconsequential in practice, because the hash twins produced were always completely unreadable. Using the new method, it is possible, for example, to produce two HTML documents with a long nonsense part after the closing </html> tag, which, despite slight differences in the HTML part, thanks to the adapted appendage have the same hash value.
Stephen Jay Gould's "A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse" explains how and why Disney re-designed their mascot, over and over again, to make him like more infantile. via
In one of his most famous articles, Konrad Lorenz argues that humans use the characteristic differences in form between babies and adults as important behavioral cues. He believes that features of juvenility trigger ""innate releasing mechanisms" for affection and nurturing in adult humans. When we see a living creature with babyish features, we feel an automatic surge of disarming tenderness. The adaptive value of this response can scarcely be questioned, for we must nurture our babies. Lorenz, by the way, lists among his releasers the very features of babyhood that Disney affixed progressively to Mickey: "a relatively large head, predominance of the brain capsule, large and low-lying eyes, bulging cheek region, short and thick extremities, a springy elastic consistency, and clumsy movements." (I propose to leave aside for this article the contentious issue of whether or not our affectionate response to babyish features is truly innate and inherited directly from ancestral primates--as Lorenz argues--or whether it is simply learned from our immediate experience with babies and grafted upon an evolutionary predisposition for attaching ties of affection to certain learned signals. My argument works equally well in either case for I only claim that babyish features tend to elicit strong feelings of affection in adult humans, whether the biological basis be direct programming or the capacity to learn and Fix upon signals. I also treat as collateral to my point the major thesis of Lorenz's article---that we respond not to the totality or Gestalt, but to a set of specific features acting as releasers. This argument is important to Lorenz because he wants to argue for evolutionary identity in modes of behavior between other vertebrates and humans, and we know that many birds, for example, often respond to abstract features rather than Gestalten. Lorenz's article, published in 1950, bears the title Ganzheit und Teil in der tien'schen und menschlichen Cemeinschaft--"Entirety and part in animal and human society." Disney's piecemeal change of Mickey's appearance does make sense in this context--he operated in sequential fashion upon Lorenz's primary releasers.)
Lorenz emphasizes the power that juvenile features hold over us, and the abstract quality of their influence, by pointing out that we judge other animals by the same criteria--although the judgment may be utterly inappropriate in an evolutionary context. We are, in short, fooled by an evolved response to our own babies, and we transfer our reaction to the same set of features in other animals.
Many animals, for reasons having nothing to do with the inspiration of affection in humans, possess some features also shared by human babies but not by human adults---large eyes and a bulging forehead with retreating chin, in particular. We are drawn to them, we cultivate them as pets, we stop and admire them in the wild- while we reject their small-eyed, long-snouted relatives who might make more affectionate companions or objects of admiration. Lorenz points out that the German names of many animals with features mimicking human babies end in the diminutive suffix chen, even though the animals are often larger than close relatives without such features--Kotkehlchen (robirr), Eichh6mchen (squirrel), and Kaninchen (rabbit), for example.
In a fascinating section, Lorenz then enlarges upon our capacity for biologically inappropriate response to other animals, or even to inanimate objects that mimic human features. 'The most amazing objects can acquire remarkable, highly emotional values by "experiential attachment' of human properties. . . . Steeply rising, somewhat overhanging cliff faces or dark storm-clouds piling up have the same, immediate display value as a human being who is standing at full height and leaning slightly forwards'-that is, threatening.
We cannot help regarding a camel as aloof and unfriendly because it mimics, quite unwittingly and for other reasons, the "gesture of haughty rejection"` common to so many human cultures. In this gesture, we raise our heads, placing our nose above our eyes. We then half-close our eyes and blow out through our nose--the "harumph" of the stereo-typed upper-class Englishman or his well-trained servant. "All this," Lorenz argues quite cogently, "symbolizes resistance against all sensory modalities emanating from the disdained counterpart." But the poor camel cannot help carrying its nose above its elongated eyes, with mouth drawn down. As Lorenz reminds us, if you wish to know whether a camel will eat out of your hand or spit, look at its ears, not the rest of its face.
As a second, serious biological comment on Mickey's odyssey in form, I note that his path to eternal youth repeats, in epitome, our own evolutionary story. For humans are neotenic. We have evolved by retaining to adulthood the originally juvenile features of our ancestors. Our australiopithecene forebears, like Mickey in Steamboat Willie, had projecting jaws and low vaulted craniums.
Our embryonic skulls scarcely differ from those of chimpanzees. And we follow the same path of changing form through growth: relative decrease of the cranial vault since brains grow so much more slowly than bodies after birth, and continuous relative increase of the jaw. But while chimps accelerate these changes, producing an adult strikingly different in form from a baby, we proceed much more slowly down the same path and never get nearly so far. Thus, as adults, we retain juvenile features. 'To be sure, we change enough to produce a notable difference between baby and adult, but our alteration is far smaller than that experienced by chimps and other primates.
A marked slowdown of developmental rates has triggered our neoteny. Primates are slow developers among mammals. We have very long periods of gestation, markedly extended childhoods, and the longest life span of any mammal. The morphological features of eternal youth have served us well. Our enlarged brain is, at least in part, a result of extending rapid prenatal growth rates to later ages. (In all mammals, the brain grows rapidly in utero but often very little after birth. We have extended this fetal phase into postnatal life.)
But the changes in timing themselves have been just as important. We are preeminently leaning animals, and our extended childhood permits the transference of culture by education. Many animals display flexibility and play in childhood but follow rigidly programmed patterns as adults. Lorenz writes, in the same article above: "The characteristic which is so vital for the human peculiarity of the true man--that of always remaining: in a state of development--is quite certainly a gift which we owe to the neotenous nature of mankind."
Phosphoinositides are at the center of the universe.
Well inositol metabolism seemed to be involved in everything, including oncogenesis and cell migration the only two important cellular activities.
So what the hell is inositol, phosphoinositides and all those inositol metabolites? I'll make this simple and then overload your neocortex. Inositol is a sugar polyalcoholcyclohexane molecule. It's hydroxyl groups can be phosphorylated to form phosphoinositides. Up to 6 phosphates can be linked to Inositol's six hydroxyl groups ... if all of the hydroxyl groups get phosphorylated you end up with inositol-hexaphosphate, or IP6 (see image). Inositol can also be linked to diacylglecerol to form phosphatidyl-inositol (PI).
So how do they act? Basically inositol derivatives are some of the most important second messengers in the cell.
I don't remember when I first heard the story of Abélard and Heloise. Maybe it was when I saw Being John Malkovich, but I think I'd already known about it then. Regardless, I was entirely unaware that it really happened! I thought it was just an earlier form of the Tristan and Isolde legend, not history. via
Peter Abélard was born around 1079 in Brittany. In 1100 he came to Paris where he was taught by one of the great scholars of the day, William of Champeaux. But he turned on his teacher and destroyed his reputation. The fight was over Plato's universals. Is everything on earth merely an imperfect copy of a perfection in heaven? Is there a perfect table at which the angels sit? Abélard said no - a stone can be a perfect table if it is fine to eat bread from. It is the function of things on earth that make them perfect, not their relationship to a heavenly abstraction.
This approach led Abélard into dangerous waters. He was beginning to define our modern individualism, how we speak of ourselves and question our place in the world. As the theologian Constant J Mews, our foremost authority on Abélard and Heloise, summarises it: "Did 'man' have any real existence as an abstraction, or did there exist simply individual men? Abélard's reading of the few texts of Aristotle then available in Latin translation led him to reject the reality of 'man' as a general notion. What mattered were the words that we might invent to describe any particular subject, whether it existed or not."
Abélard became the most famous philosophers of his day, founding his own school at the abbey of Monte-Sainte-Geneviere, on the left bank of the Seine at Paris. This was probably around AD1112. Heloise was the niece of Fulbert, a canon at the church of Notre Dame in Paris. Nothing is known of her mother or father. Her voice calls out to us clear as a bell across the centuries. She is as much a heroine of our time as she was of hers: fearless in her sexuality, intellectually Abélard's equal, a woman who appears in history as totally self-invented. There was no one like her before, and millions who have wished to be like her since. With Fulbert's blessing she became Abélard's pupil and at once his lover.
Rumours of sightings of them making love in the fields outside Paris spread like wildfire. She became pregnant with their son, Astralabe. For a while she left Paris and lived with Abélard's father and sister in Brittany. But foolishly they returned to Paris to attempt a reconciliation with Fulbert. Heloise at first refused point blank to marry. "The name of wife may seem more sacred or more binding," she wrote, "but sweeter for me will always be the word friend, or, if you will permit me, that of concubine or whore." Against every fibre in her being, she gave in. They were married secretly. But this seems to have inflamed Fulbert's anger all the more. He wanted revenge and had it. Members of his family burst into Abélard's lodgings and castrated him. Peter entered the monastery of St Denis as a monk. Heloise entered the convent of St Argenteuil as a nun. And then their lives really began. They reinvented themselves, and this real life Tristan and Isolde lived their "love in death" for another 30 years. He became an abbot, she an abbess of a convent, the Paraclete, which Abélard built for her. The famous lovers became famous religious teachers.
Quantum mechanics, tryptamine, and you. Or, the DMT elves are real. Or, we really are quantum machines. Sorry, I've been sitting on this gem of a link so long I can't decide on a way to sell it. The way they teach high school students how enzymes work is through geometry: the shape of the catalyst lets it bring two other molecules close by so they'll interact. I guess the reality is...a little more complicated. Check out the [via] link for more details from MetaFilter members. This article will blow your mind by combining quantum mechanics and an entheogenic neurotransmitter to explain the biological processes at the heart of all forms of life. via
Chemical reactions often face a problem: An energy barrier stands between the reactants and products. In the case of this simple reaction, a proton needs to gain enough energy to leave the reactant molecule in order for the reaction to occur. Quantum tunneling allows the reaction to proceed through the energy barrier, rather than having to climb it.
"While classical theory states that enzymes speed up the reaction by lowering the energy barrier, quantum tunneling allows the reaction to occur by tunneling through the barrier," Leys said. "As such, the reaction can occur at greater speeds than if the particle would have to reach energies high enough to surmount the barrier."
According to study co-author Adrian Mulholland, from the University of Bristol, researchers have previously shown that quantum tunneling accounts for proton transfer using deuterium—a form of hydrogen with both a proton and a neutron in its nucleus, instead of standard hydrogen, which has only a proton in its nucleus. When deuterium is involved, the reaction slows down drastically, because tunneling is much less likely with the larger, two-particle nucleus that more closely approximates a classical particle.
The experiment shows that enzymes move a few of their atoms that reside very near the substrate, and as these get closer to the substrate molecule, the possibility of proton tunneling increases.
"Relatively subtle, short-range motions at the active site affect the crucial distance between the groups between which the proton is exchanged, Mulholland said via e-mail, "And so, [they] can promote, or drive, tunneling."
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