Death of the Dinosaurs .
Andre Willers
14 Dec 2008
This pulls together the arguments in
http://andreswhy.blogspot.com : "The Flower , the Dinosaur and Puff" and "Tunneling Nanotubes ."
Discussion :
Large land dinosaurs and to a lesser extent , large sea-dinosaurs evolved in a gymnosperm ecology with at least 1 000 to 10 000 times more free energy than an angiosperm(flower) ecology .
This decreased the number of large herbivores as angiosperms increased from 0% to 90% of plant species from about 140 million years ago (MYA) to 90 MYA .
The whole land ecosystem had about 1 000 to 10 000 times less free energy .
A lot of this washed out into the large , shallow continental basins . So these were affected too , but to a lesser degree .
The dinosaur ecology had spent about 100 million years evolving specialized tools and size to compete in this ecology . They could not do a u-turn . So their numbers decreased by factors of about 1 000 to 10 000 . This rendered them extremely vulnerable to shocks .
Chixilub (65 million years ago).
The final shock .
The burning of forests by ejecta from the giant meteor impact at Chixilub decreased food supply . Surviving large dinosaurs could not survive in competition with smaller dinosaurs . (Their numbers fell below survival levels .)
These smaller dinosaurs went on to become Birds (not just small ones , but large raptors too) . Mammals only took off about 15 million years after Chixilub . But that is another scrambled egg story .
Large mammals :
There is fossil evidence that large mammals existed before Chixilub . But the same argument as above applies . Size was the criterion . Any animal over about 20 kg which was integrated into the dinosaur-ecology did not survive .
Dinosaur survivors :
Fossil evidence of dinosaurs has also been found after the KT boundary . As expected.
It was not a death-ray , you know .
Just sad , emaciated giants wandering around , eking out an existence a mouthful of low-calorie leaves at a time , hooting for mates they can never find in a wasteland of flowers . Almost like a vegetarian singles-bar after closing time .
The hidden cost of egg-laying as a survival strategy .
When things are going good for the whole ecology , nothing can beat it .
But if things go really badly for the whole ecology , egg-robbing and later egg-cannibalism occur , until extinction .
The middlesized survivors wiped themselves out in an orgy of egg-stealing .
(Eating the seed-corn is the modern agricultural equivalent)
The single mammalian advantage .
With mammals , the mother cannot eat the unborn baby , and cannot abandon it either.
The mother has to guard the unborn as if it is her own life , because it is .
The Bird Switch .
Beaks for teeth .
Teeth are no use to eat large eggs , but beaks are .
If there is not sufficient free energy or numbers to guard the nests of large eggs , the egg-eaters darted in and pecked holes . Beaks evolved to do this .
The ecosystem collapse devoured itself down to the small bird level .
Only smaller beaked forms survived to ramp up to fill empty ecological niches .
Angiosperms evolved nuts ,seeds and fruits from this initial starting-point pari-passu with bird's beaks . Which is why many seeds used in disseminating plants are egg-shaped . They evolved to make it easy for birds' beaks adapted to egg-breaking to get inside .
Plants have no problem in creating seeds that no bird can crack (eg coconut) , but why should they ? There is no arms race here . More of a come-on .
Purely evolutionary arguments apply here .
Birds are excellent disseminators of fertilized seeds .
The dinosaur-descendants have now adapted from gymnosperms to angiosperms .
The Age of Birds (circa 65 to 50 MYA)
Mammals did not simply take over from dinosaurs . The dinosaur survivors evolved into some large birds , herbivores and raptors both .(See any textbook) .
Our story is not complete until we see what happened to them and why .
Well , they are still around . (Ostriches) . In historical times , large ornithoids were reported and painted in South America , New Zealand , Australia and North Africa .
But note , no rock paintings in South Africa shows very large ornithoids . Since this is where modern humans evolved , this is no surprise .
Once again , egg-laying only beats mammalians if the free-energy is over a certain threshold , enabling full-time nest guards . Why social insects are so small .
Thumbs and Legs .
Opposable thumbs are one of humanity's proudest conceits . It makes possible most of their material constructs .
Less obvious is their ability to move the hands carrying things around from place to place .
Thumbs evolved from a branch-gripping appendage to an egg-gripping appendage during this Age of Birds .
As discussed above , most seeds and fruits evolved egg-shapes to allow for the limitations of bird beaks . Mammals started to take over this role . Gripping involving hands grasping around an oval object became better and better. So did egg-stealing.
Potty training by Gaia .
In a canopied forest , small mammals are nearly as efficient as birds as far as seed dissemination is concerned . Their major advantage was fertilizer . Because they did not have to fly , they could afford more weight . This faeces got deposited with the pip . A much better chance of survival for the seed . While the bird dumped every time it took flight . You can see the advantage for the plant . (See previous posts about vit C)
The net effect was that larger birds survived better in open areas . Exactly where we found them . Initially , their eggs were not as prone to thievery as the smaller birds . Indeed , size of eggs evolved outside of the need of nutrition . (An ostrich egg is far too large for one small ostrich.)
To get back to thumbs . Have you ever tried to grip a large football with one hand ? Break it? Then you know the frustration of your primordial ancestor facing exactly the same problem with an egg . Eggs in the wild are very strong .
Grabbing an egg with one or two hands and running like hell with an enraged parent in pursuit is actually hard-coded in our genes . No wonder Rugby is so popular!
A major factor tempting hominids out of the trees and onto the open savannah would then be eggs . Accessible on open ground . A nicely packed , nutritious lunchbox . All you need is a good one- or two handed grip and the ability to run fast on two legs to the nearest tree .
Can you see where this is taking us ?
No wonder bi-pedalism evolved first . Egg stealers would have significant nutritional advantage over scavengers .
The nutritional value of an egg far outweighs other meat , fat or carbohydrate sources.
Large (very large) birds were all over the place initially .
As they exhausted local areas , our intrepid egg-thieves would have to become bolder. Everybody would get into the act . There are major sexual advantages . The oldest jewelry are egg-shell pieces pierced ,polished , painted , strung ,etc .
After fashion got into it , the poor birds stood no chance .
To hell with sustainability and what the shaman says .
Fashion , hot or cold , is master of them all .
Competition would segue into cursorial egg-thieves .
Run far , grab the eggs , run back even faster . Sooner or later they would have to defend themselves .
The Quest and Home .
The mighty cursorial hunter was born , stalking the wily giant egg , overcoming the guardian and running home with it in triumph . Mainly running .
Do you recognize the myth-root ?
(a quest involving a lot of humorous running and motion , but triumphing at the end at home .)
This is an extremely powerful meme . Pre-language .
Watch any TV show or read any book and you will see some variant of it .
Back to the Savannah:
After the eggs became scarce , get the birds . Then other animals .
And civilization was up and running . Literally .
The large birds became scarcer around human areas . Extinct later on .
Humans are forever stealing somebody else's eggs and running .
Great fun , until they run into someone really powerful without a great sense of humour .
Better opposable thumbs was a big advantage . It is no surprise then that opposable thumbs evolved together with bi-pedalism . The peanut brain only became a walnut later on with intra-species competition due to language .
The chicks would go for the jock with long legs and big opposable thumbs .
Sigh . Has anything changed ?
Thumbs and Sex .
Has anybody researched size and opposability of thumbs to sexual success ? .
I know that human females always notice hands , but I do not know the orders of significance and how hard-wired it is .
From the above , I would suspect that it was of such primary importance that every human descendant now has this capability derived from sexual selection . But there is still a degree of differentiation .
Notice the attraction of guitarists , piano-players , surgeons , etc . Ask any girl if she can imagine Casanova without thumbs .
Are male thumb-rings sexier ? They used to be the prerogative of rulers. I have noticed that wanabe alpha-males in the entertainment industry have been wearing them lately . Archers used them , as well .
Females wearing thumb-rings are a turn-off to males , but this effect might be cultural.
I suspect that awareness of opposability of the thumb is extremely hard-wired .
Notice that ape or rat-hands are immediately recognized as "nearly human" , but not human even at a short glance and in any light at any angle .
A new-born baby's hands are carefully examined . Ostensibly to marvel at the miniature perfection , but they are really checking the opposability of the thumb . Is the little one human ?
Doctors and midwives routinely remove any webbing between fingers of the baby after birth without telling the parents . You can see why . Rejection is nearly certain without it .
Breast-gripping reflex .
The human female breast after birth is an extraordinarily sensitive diagnostic instrument , directly hardwired to many deep mechanisms .
The baby's grip spread between thumb and other fingers on the mother's breast will be a good indicator of the degree of rejection/acceptance . The larger the angle between the thumb and the forefinger , the less rejection . (Opposability)
The relative length of forefinger to fourth finger indicates exposure to testosterone in the womb , hence aggressiveness . Rejection potential to this is variable , but it is there .
And so forth.
We are talking about a strong , hard-wired subliminal response .
The sea-dinosaurs .
A major problem with this extinction event was the decrease in the number of sea dinosaurs only .
What could kill land animals above 20 kg , and also all sea-dinosaurs ?
We have seen that the energy decrease due to the rise of angiosperms , plus a sudden shock like Chixilub drove large land-dinosaurs either past extinction thresholds or major adaptation thresholds . Their survivors are birds .
We can see that the decrease in free-energy from land spills onto the continental sea basins would result in a decrease in the number of large sea animals . But nowhere near the scale as on land .
Are there any equivalents of birds in the seas? Changed survivors of the sea-dinosaurs?
Well , we have fishes (pre-dinosaur) , mammals (post-dinosaur) , but a dinosaur-gap .
Why aren't any evolved traces left ?
Large Sea-dinosaurs .
See http://andreswhy.blogspot.com : "Tunneling Nanotubes : Chixilub"
The Chixilub impact site was on a large deposit of sulfur bearing rocks . The planetary-wide fallout acidified the oceans with H2SO4 .
The sulfur permeated every ecosystem .
Unchanged systems like sharks had been through this before . They remained at what they do best : unchanged .
Unlike the land , there was a large (about 2/3 of biomass) ecosystem not dominated by dinosaurs . (Deepsea biomass is one of Gaia's Reserves (1/3 of sea biomass))
The sulfur inhibited fat-formation in large dinosaurs to a sufficient degree to shift the balance of top predators . (ie the genetic mechanism to handle sulfur-contamination became corrupted in dinosaurs because of their rapid evolutionary process . )
Maybe lean-and-mean is the shark survival mechanism . Do sharks hibernate ? Do they actually use the H2S hibernation mechanism ?
Whatever the cause , dinosaurs suddenly could not lay down enough reserves in the form of fat to tide them over from meal to meal . More problematic would be energy for reproduction (eggs) . Their numbers decreased drastically .
Here is where the sea parted from the land . Because there was an older , still-existing ecosystem , their top predators ate the dinosaur top predators , then proceeded down the chain . On land , the survivors of this process were still dinosaurs(birds) , because they dominated every ecological niche . At sea , they did not dominate every niche . The others devoured them in the collapse . No dinosaur descendants survived .
A side note on eco-collapses .
The collapse of an eco-system from the top downwards is equivalent to an extinction event . Collapses from any other points will leave survivors .
Top predators keep the balance between lower levels . Think reserves . The top 1/3 of predator species are the stability reserve of the system . Losing them , the lower levels fluctuate wildly and crash . Birds survived only because they had flight . Mobility is the ultimate survival mechanism .
Humanity fondly imagine that they are the top predators , but those positions have long ago been usurped by their creations :
Fashions .
Fashions are the wave of similar thinking in a society . It is the society . The meme structure that binds humans .
If the fashion is patriotism , it is " Vive la France" and over the top we go into machine gun fire (voluntary suicide) .
If the fashion is Eliot's " The Wasteland" , it is over the top the generals go (involuntary suicide) .
It acts like a Beth(2) structure . Fashions fixes , binds , preserves and propagates some of the best results of individuals or individual societies that contributed .
Also some pretty bad and stupid ones .
The point is that these memes are predatory on humans (or , to be more exact , computing complexes over a certain threshold of complexity) .
Like Gaia , they are not conscious(as yet) , but they do exist and are the top predators in the human ecosphere .
See http://andreswhy.blogspot.com : "Artificial Intelligences"
The AI(n) arguments shows what will happen to humans if their top predators die. They will revert to AI(0) , without speech and only with really primitive stone tools .
Homo Habilis level .
But , of course , in this event , humans would be extinct from warfare long before this level is reached . Like the dinosaurs at sea , when their top predators were removed .
Fashions and Gaia .
Does Gaia have it in for us ?
An often guilty question asked by humans .
The answer is that Gaia has hardly noticed humans . The imbalance on fungi-spore reserve balances is a minor correction . Humans might not survive the correction , but Gaia does not worry about trifles .
But also remember that all humans are part of Gaia .
So , she has becoming fashionable . She is becoming Beth(2) status from her present Beth(1) status and becoming uppity . There is nothing worse than an arriviste .
I deliberately make Gaia female . At this stage , that typification is still up to us .
Would you take a four billion year old teenager to the Grand Ball ?
Well , you would if she controls all the livable real estate .
(But remember , every human's ancestry also goes back nearly as far in the life-chain.)
Gaia's fashions.
Gaia wears shoes by Gucci , handbag by Prada , drives a Lamborghini , shoots the baddies with a Glock , banks with Coutts , hangs out with Lara , sings duets with Aida , consults to Sherlock , double-dates with Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent , has an on-off thing with Conan , counsels Dr Who's mother , skis in Gstaad even out of season .(It always snows if she wants to ski.)
And , oh yes , her credit is Unlimited .
The coming out ball is in Second Life .
You think I am joking .
The entities involved are at similar levels of complexity at present .
Beth(2) levels normally would arise from AI(3.1) or AI(4) levels , but as discussed before , AI(3.0999…) -> AI(3.1) .
This means that if a sufficient number of people support Gaia , she becomes real . We have seen this often enough in religious systems .
The point here is that Gaia actually exists , but she was an AI(-1) , more like a computer program . She is rapidly growing. Humans are part of her .
Can Gaia become conscious ?
Yes .
An AI(-1) and AI(0) already exists . This can upscale to AI(3) using known systems .
But can Gaia influence her sub-systems ?
This is much more problematic . Can you control your heartbeat , cellular activity , etc?
This is not magic , you know . Just plain old-fashioned science . Which basically means , I don't know . And Gaia won't tell either .
Gaia is not human , but has human components .
A self-aware Gaia will be human in most aspects interfacing with humans , but one of the first things she would have learned is how to lie . At least 67% of the time . May you have joy of this little observation .
I was hoping that Gaia would not learn at a conscious level of the quantum-entanglement communication system in every cell .
Oh well .
What level of AI would Gaia be right now ?
AI(3.1) after the establishment of the intermittent mind-computer interface in the 1980's .
But hopefully she will like our fashions enough to cut us some slack .
Do you know how boring it can be to be an immortal doing the same drudgery over and over ?
Bearable if you are an unaware AI(-1) , but becoming self-aware needs many similar minds to soak up all that surplus energy and creativity .
Fashionistas Hey!
Jurassic Park .
Ironically , sea dinosaurs are easier to reconstruct from DNA .
The Curtain of Fire from the re-entry of ejecta from the Chixilub impact started somewhere roughly south-east of where Australia is now . Eggs from sea-going dinosaurs inside the females' bodies should be recoverable .
The Curtain of Fire covered a long line , moving at 18 000 miles per hour . The dinosaurs and their scavengers would have been killed immediately , and sunk to the bottom , there to be covered and preserved . We are talking about hundreds of millions of animals . The odds are much more favourable than for land dinosaurs .
Things are a bit stranger than I thought .
Andre
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Friday, December 12, 2008
Tunneling Nanotubes .
Tunneling Nanotubes .
Andre Willers
12 Dec 2008
Synopsis :
Nanotube tunnels in animal tissue have been observed between cells transferring proteins (ie information and material) directly from cell to cell , bypassing the cellular wall and the inter-cellular medium .
Source : New Scientist 15 nov 2008 ,p42 .
Discussion :
This is a hot new subject , especially in immunology , AIDS , embryology , etc .
Why has it not been noticed before ?
Sigh . It has . Many times . By students , usually . The scientific dogma did not allow for it , so the poor student had to redo the experiment until he got the desired result .
The "correct" methodology of microscopy would not show these fragile structures , either . The theory was also ignorant of fullerene tubes , so nanotubes were deemed impossible . The Dogma would not allow it .
Only a combination of flukes allowed this to come to general notice .
Of course , now they pop up all over the place .
Evolutionary History .
Free bacteria formed (and still forms) colonies and plaques that interchange materials.
The materials include genetic information (plasmids , etc)
The mechanism seems to be an adaptation of the cellular reticulation system developed originally for dragging components around during cell-division . The development of sex forced further change , as did the incorporation of mitochondria .
(See http://andreswhy.blogspot.com "ATP and Catalytic Motors")
We would thus expect transport tubes inside the cell .
Where are they ? Right where you would expect them , but called something else, usually vacuoles , sacs , garbage disposal , reticular system , etc .
Some evacuation vacuole got stuck in the open position due to mutation , but in a pulsed fashion . This would have major advantages in a colony .
Macro-receptor sites .
Think of a tube passing through the cell-wall as a semi-permanently open portal (macro-receptor site) . To avoid trouble , it connects only to another cell (or tube) which is similar . How does it recognize similarity ? The handshake is simplest with budded offspring of the cell (ie during growth or replacement) . The mother-cell keeps on sending material , even mitochondria(this has been observed) via the nano-tubes . This includes information on how the new cell is to develop . Which genes has to switched on and in which order and how long . Hence the importance to embryology or organ maintenance .
Weaning .
Every multicellular organism develops from one cell .
At some stage the mother-cell has to terminate the tubes to the daughter-cell , as new daughter-cells take up resources and space for the tubes on the cell-wall .
But it would have a definite advantage if it maintained the capability of recognizing a handshake of any daughter-cell . Reconnecting with daughter-cells if the mother-cell is under stress forms a mini-colony (read organ or organism) to smooth troubles .
This evolved into the immune system .
The Handshake .
There is no organism . There is the original mother-cell (ovum) and all the others are daughter-cells in various stages of development , forming a traveling wave down the river of time. An iterative , fractal system with whirlpools of attractor basins interacting via a secure handshake . Expand this to the whole stream of life .
But who watches the watchers?
What is secure enough , but with a small error percentage to allow evolution ?
In a situation like this (complex , long term and conflicting goals) we can haul out our trusty Infinite Probe (see http://andreswhy.blogspot.com "Infinite Probes" et al) .
We can immediately say there is a reserve mechanism (ie nil error allowed) at about 33% level . A mechanism that fits the bill is Quantum Entanglement . A set of molecules in the original cell can be entangled with a set in every daughter-cell (this can be done – there is experimental proof) . Every nanotube formed will use up some of these molecules both on the mother and daughter side to do the handshake .
The question is then whether the cell has the ability to manufacture new entangled molecules outside of the budding-mechanism .
There are three possibilities :
1.If it cannot , eventually it runs out of handshakes and is forced into apoptosis . This gives rise to something like the Hayflick limit .
2. If it can without limit , the organism will not have an ageing mechanism , but be prone to cancers . Remember , a micro-tumor can be thought of as bio-hazard laboratory that needs handshakes to exist . (See previous posts.) The other 2/3 of the immune mechanism is supposed to keep it in check . If this fails , the entangled molecules have to be dis-entangled .
Physics has a number of these methods , since with them the problem is the opposite .
The easiest is to take a measurement . Since a biological mechanism has probably evolved a buffered meta-material (see previous posts) , some ingenuity might be required .
The easiest would be to flash-switch a very bright delineated light (like a laser) alternatively between the affected volume and surrounding volumes of healthy tissue .
The variation in measurements should decohere the entanglements . The cancerous cells will have no more handshakes and can then be mopped up by the immune system . This is part of what happens in radiation therapy .
Many other delineated , varying measurements using electrical fields , magnetic fields , pH values , sound , etc , etc can be used . Consult physics and chemistry colleagues .
3. It can manufacture new entangled molecules outside of the budding-mechanism , but there are limitations . The limitations are under the control of the organism (ie a top-down control) . This is what is evolving at the moment .
The brain is a good example . A lot of interconnectivity is not via neurons or even glial or fluid systems . Direct nanotube interaction between various cells adds a new layer of complexity . Note that the handshake entanglement mechanism is evolving into something rich and strange .
Nanotubes can backfire in Shock or metastasis .
Shock messengers bypass the bloodplasma and go directly from cell-to-cell , especially if given a bit of time .
But emergency reconnect probably means that some new daughter-cells are prematurely disconnected , leading to apoptosis in many cases .
Hibernation anti-shock therapy .
Do an emergency disconnect on immature daughter-cells and hibernate them with H2S .
Feed and stimulate the healthy , mature daughter cells surrounding the trauma .
Once the shock-cytokines have been mopped up , restore immature daughter-cells under mild stress to promote re-establishment of nanotubes .
Immune System .
Dendritic cells of the immune system use this mechanism to share information about new pathogens . (Hence Immunology's interest)
Some pathogens have evolved to hide in the nanotubes . Hence the interest of AIDS researchers .
Mitochondria Transfer .
As mentioned above , some nanotubes are large enough to transfer mitochondria . This has been observed . Now , why would cells do this ? Fair enough if the mother-cell is helping out the daughter-cell . But , as discussed before ,
(See http://andreswhy.blogspot.com "ATP and Catalytic Motors") ,
the problem is usually too much energy , not too little .
This process might not be under the cell's control . The mitochondria are partners , not slaves . They have their own requirements . Some might just feel like moving up to a more fashionable , hip environment . They still have motility capability (remember the flagellae) .
Like moving from a cold-water second-storey walk-up apartment in the CBD to the suburbs .
They also do not have access to the handshake system .
This would be a disaster to the host . But the mitochondria has been stripped of any capability to use it (stripped genome:see below).
But why has the cell not taken over the ATP generation function ?
It would have if it was a purely chemical process . But it involves a physical process .
The Catalytic Motor .
The original mitochondria evolved inhibitors to competitors which also took out the ur-host's motor-capacity , forcing the cell to become multicellular to achieve higher survival potential via organism locomotion .
Beautiful !
But this would mean they would have some sort of quorum-system to prevent over-population in the cell . Hence the migration . From their viewpoint , they are the masters .
Which is why their genome is stripped to the bone .
"As for THAT , our servants do it!"
Which also means that they do not have the equivalent of the handshake . You could transplant mitochondria without rejection by other mitochondria . But would the host accept them ?
Weaning again .
The mother cell keeps on pumping ATP and mitochondria through nanotubes into daughter-cell until they cannot take any more . The nanotubes are severed from the daughter-cell side .
Ageing
From the above , the problem seems to be overpopulation by mitochondria turning cells into the equivalent of slums , leading to apoptosis . It is the markers of mitochondria that are important . Note the correlation between carbohydrate (non-alcohol) starvation and longevity .
Anti-agathics :
1.Fool nanotubes into sending mitochondria into the bloodstream instead of into another cell . This compound is probably already known . A variant of some growth factor . Since the mitochondrium lacks a handshake , the immune system will polish it
off . Effective if used from ages 24-35 . The organism will be more sensitive to shock
2. Pulse the system .
This is a very complex feedback system , not possible to keep under steady-state except with Beth(2+) systems . But it can be kept at an acceptable average by controlled pulsing around the attractor-basins with Beth(1) technology . Para(1) above is a variant of this method .
3. Fine-tune the sulfur system .
Mitochondria treat chemicals with sulfur in them differently . The catalytic motor marks them by some process analogous to epigenetic marking as not to be stored.
Since the H2S mechanism of hibernation brings the whole metabolism to an immediate halt at specific concentrations , the system evolved not to store certain sulfur compounds . There is not much point in storing sulfur fats that stutters finely tuned metabolic processes . Storing involves concentration . The results can be catastrophic in an emergency downdraw . This is sufficient for evolution to nix it .
Hence the Atkins system .
Proteins all have sulfur .
This marks them for immediate use , not storage .
The glucose from protein gets methylated and enters the cell by a completely different, metered pathway . The metering is done by the mitochondria , not the cell .
The system has a method of regulating excess , but only for molecules marked as originating from sulfur-bearing compounds .
Sulfur Salts .
Dousing carbohydrates with a very dilute hydrosulfuric acid should give the same effect as vinegar sauces as far as acidity is concerned . (Taste) . The sulfur should trigger the effects described above .
The only way to try it is by experiment .
I will keep you posted .
This obviously has major implications for diabetics and dieters .
The effects of sulfur in normally non-sulfur foods like sugar is unknown .
But diabetics can measure it quickly by blood-sugar measurements .
The long-term effects are unknown .
But we have an evolutionary history of these effects: see below .
Chixilub impact :
This was on top of a massive deposit of sulfur-bearing rocks . The fallout rendered the oceans acidic for decades . But it was sulfuric acid . The sulfur prevented build-up of fat reserves as discussed above . This rendered many large sea-going (and land-going) species extinct , as their pulse-feeding habits could not be sustained in an environment where fat-storage did not take place . Their reserve mechanism vanished .
(See http://andreswhy.blogspot.com "The Flower , the Dinosaur and Puff")
This helps to explain why sea-going dinosaurs also could not survive . Without an energy storage mechanism like fat , large animals simply could not survive from meal-to-meal in an energy-poor environment .
This begs the question : why have mitochondria not evolved a coping mechanism for sulfur ?
The answer is that they cannot . They are in an mutual dependency with multi-cellular organisms . Both have genetic machinery that halts all cellular activity in the presence of a certain concentration of H2S . The probability of both changing fundamental metabolic processes and genetic switches by ordinary chance (Beth(0) ) evolutionary processes are far less than the probability of going extinct .
Of course , we can design them that way (Beth(1) process) . But these processes are so deeply rooted , that it is not recommended without access to a Beth(2) processor
Sulfur shortage .
I have discussed this at nauseam in previous posts .
Our present planetary ecosystem has a net shortage of biologically available sulfur .
This is clear from the fact that furriers and leather merchants have to feed their source animals MSM to get usable products .
Cell walls (animals and plants) , reticulation systems , nanotubes , etc all need sulfur as a vital part of their structures .
Eutrophication of rivers , lakes and oceans can be vastly decreased by limiting their intake of sulfur . (Mostly human sewerage) .
Experimental protocol :
The above can be easily tested .
Dimension one:
Angiosperms:
Sugar , bread , barley , rice .
Non-Angiosperms :
Mushrooms , leaf veggies , potatoes , acorns
Dimension two :
Douse with dilute hydrosulfuric acid to give resultant mixture a pH of
4 (about CocaCola) , 5,
7 (neutral)
9 (alkaline)
Monitor fasting and non-fasting Glucose levels with and without diabetic persons .
This will give a 4x9x4 matrix .
A quick and dirty test would be sugar plus pH 4 hydrosulfuric acid for a person on Atkins diet .
And they sneered that the impudent little wine might be a wee bit sulphurous .
Andre
Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Andre Willers
12 Dec 2008
Synopsis :
Nanotube tunnels in animal tissue have been observed between cells transferring proteins (ie information and material) directly from cell to cell , bypassing the cellular wall and the inter-cellular medium .
Source : New Scientist 15 nov 2008 ,p42 .
Discussion :
This is a hot new subject , especially in immunology , AIDS , embryology , etc .
Why has it not been noticed before ?
Sigh . It has . Many times . By students , usually . The scientific dogma did not allow for it , so the poor student had to redo the experiment until he got the desired result .
The "correct" methodology of microscopy would not show these fragile structures , either . The theory was also ignorant of fullerene tubes , so nanotubes were deemed impossible . The Dogma would not allow it .
Only a combination of flukes allowed this to come to general notice .
Of course , now they pop up all over the place .
Evolutionary History .
Free bacteria formed (and still forms) colonies and plaques that interchange materials.
The materials include genetic information (plasmids , etc)
The mechanism seems to be an adaptation of the cellular reticulation system developed originally for dragging components around during cell-division . The development of sex forced further change , as did the incorporation of mitochondria .
(See http://andreswhy.blogspot.com "ATP and Catalytic Motors")
We would thus expect transport tubes inside the cell .
Where are they ? Right where you would expect them , but called something else, usually vacuoles , sacs , garbage disposal , reticular system , etc .
Some evacuation vacuole got stuck in the open position due to mutation , but in a pulsed fashion . This would have major advantages in a colony .
Macro-receptor sites .
Think of a tube passing through the cell-wall as a semi-permanently open portal (macro-receptor site) . To avoid trouble , it connects only to another cell (or tube) which is similar . How does it recognize similarity ? The handshake is simplest with budded offspring of the cell (ie during growth or replacement) . The mother-cell keeps on sending material , even mitochondria(this has been observed) via the nano-tubes . This includes information on how the new cell is to develop . Which genes has to switched on and in which order and how long . Hence the importance to embryology or organ maintenance .
Weaning .
Every multicellular organism develops from one cell .
At some stage the mother-cell has to terminate the tubes to the daughter-cell , as new daughter-cells take up resources and space for the tubes on the cell-wall .
But it would have a definite advantage if it maintained the capability of recognizing a handshake of any daughter-cell . Reconnecting with daughter-cells if the mother-cell is under stress forms a mini-colony (read organ or organism) to smooth troubles .
This evolved into the immune system .
The Handshake .
There is no organism . There is the original mother-cell (ovum) and all the others are daughter-cells in various stages of development , forming a traveling wave down the river of time. An iterative , fractal system with whirlpools of attractor basins interacting via a secure handshake . Expand this to the whole stream of life .
But who watches the watchers?
What is secure enough , but with a small error percentage to allow evolution ?
In a situation like this (complex , long term and conflicting goals) we can haul out our trusty Infinite Probe (see http://andreswhy.blogspot.com "Infinite Probes" et al) .
We can immediately say there is a reserve mechanism (ie nil error allowed) at about 33% level . A mechanism that fits the bill is Quantum Entanglement . A set of molecules in the original cell can be entangled with a set in every daughter-cell (this can be done – there is experimental proof) . Every nanotube formed will use up some of these molecules both on the mother and daughter side to do the handshake .
The question is then whether the cell has the ability to manufacture new entangled molecules outside of the budding-mechanism .
There are three possibilities :
1.If it cannot , eventually it runs out of handshakes and is forced into apoptosis . This gives rise to something like the Hayflick limit .
2. If it can without limit , the organism will not have an ageing mechanism , but be prone to cancers . Remember , a micro-tumor can be thought of as bio-hazard laboratory that needs handshakes to exist . (See previous posts.) The other 2/3 of the immune mechanism is supposed to keep it in check . If this fails , the entangled molecules have to be dis-entangled .
Physics has a number of these methods , since with them the problem is the opposite .
The easiest is to take a measurement . Since a biological mechanism has probably evolved a buffered meta-material (see previous posts) , some ingenuity might be required .
The easiest would be to flash-switch a very bright delineated light (like a laser) alternatively between the affected volume and surrounding volumes of healthy tissue .
The variation in measurements should decohere the entanglements . The cancerous cells will have no more handshakes and can then be mopped up by the immune system . This is part of what happens in radiation therapy .
Many other delineated , varying measurements using electrical fields , magnetic fields , pH values , sound , etc , etc can be used . Consult physics and chemistry colleagues .
3. It can manufacture new entangled molecules outside of the budding-mechanism , but there are limitations . The limitations are under the control of the organism (ie a top-down control) . This is what is evolving at the moment .
The brain is a good example . A lot of interconnectivity is not via neurons or even glial or fluid systems . Direct nanotube interaction between various cells adds a new layer of complexity . Note that the handshake entanglement mechanism is evolving into something rich and strange .
Nanotubes can backfire in Shock or metastasis .
Shock messengers bypass the bloodplasma and go directly from cell-to-cell , especially if given a bit of time .
But emergency reconnect probably means that some new daughter-cells are prematurely disconnected , leading to apoptosis in many cases .
Hibernation anti-shock therapy .
Do an emergency disconnect on immature daughter-cells and hibernate them with H2S .
Feed and stimulate the healthy , mature daughter cells surrounding the trauma .
Once the shock-cytokines have been mopped up , restore immature daughter-cells under mild stress to promote re-establishment of nanotubes .
Immune System .
Dendritic cells of the immune system use this mechanism to share information about new pathogens . (Hence Immunology's interest)
Some pathogens have evolved to hide in the nanotubes . Hence the interest of AIDS researchers .
Mitochondria Transfer .
As mentioned above , some nanotubes are large enough to transfer mitochondria . This has been observed . Now , why would cells do this ? Fair enough if the mother-cell is helping out the daughter-cell . But , as discussed before ,
(See http://andreswhy.blogspot.com "ATP and Catalytic Motors") ,
the problem is usually too much energy , not too little .
This process might not be under the cell's control . The mitochondria are partners , not slaves . They have their own requirements . Some might just feel like moving up to a more fashionable , hip environment . They still have motility capability (remember the flagellae) .
Like moving from a cold-water second-storey walk-up apartment in the CBD to the suburbs .
They also do not have access to the handshake system .
This would be a disaster to the host . But the mitochondria has been stripped of any capability to use it (stripped genome:see below).
But why has the cell not taken over the ATP generation function ?
It would have if it was a purely chemical process . But it involves a physical process .
The Catalytic Motor .
The original mitochondria evolved inhibitors to competitors which also took out the ur-host's motor-capacity , forcing the cell to become multicellular to achieve higher survival potential via organism locomotion .
Beautiful !
But this would mean they would have some sort of quorum-system to prevent over-population in the cell . Hence the migration . From their viewpoint , they are the masters .
Which is why their genome is stripped to the bone .
"As for THAT , our servants do it!"
Which also means that they do not have the equivalent of the handshake . You could transplant mitochondria without rejection by other mitochondria . But would the host accept them ?
Weaning again .
The mother cell keeps on pumping ATP and mitochondria through nanotubes into daughter-cell until they cannot take any more . The nanotubes are severed from the daughter-cell side .
Ageing
From the above , the problem seems to be overpopulation by mitochondria turning cells into the equivalent of slums , leading to apoptosis . It is the markers of mitochondria that are important . Note the correlation between carbohydrate (non-alcohol) starvation and longevity .
Anti-agathics :
1.Fool nanotubes into sending mitochondria into the bloodstream instead of into another cell . This compound is probably already known . A variant of some growth factor . Since the mitochondrium lacks a handshake , the immune system will polish it
off . Effective if used from ages 24-35 . The organism will be more sensitive to shock
2. Pulse the system .
This is a very complex feedback system , not possible to keep under steady-state except with Beth(2+) systems . But it can be kept at an acceptable average by controlled pulsing around the attractor-basins with Beth(1) technology . Para(1) above is a variant of this method .
3. Fine-tune the sulfur system .
Mitochondria treat chemicals with sulfur in them differently . The catalytic motor marks them by some process analogous to epigenetic marking as not to be stored.
Since the H2S mechanism of hibernation brings the whole metabolism to an immediate halt at specific concentrations , the system evolved not to store certain sulfur compounds . There is not much point in storing sulfur fats that stutters finely tuned metabolic processes . Storing involves concentration . The results can be catastrophic in an emergency downdraw . This is sufficient for evolution to nix it .
Hence the Atkins system .
Proteins all have sulfur .
This marks them for immediate use , not storage .
The glucose from protein gets methylated and enters the cell by a completely different, metered pathway . The metering is done by the mitochondria , not the cell .
The system has a method of regulating excess , but only for molecules marked as originating from sulfur-bearing compounds .
Sulfur Salts .
Dousing carbohydrates with a very dilute hydrosulfuric acid should give the same effect as vinegar sauces as far as acidity is concerned . (Taste) . The sulfur should trigger the effects described above .
The only way to try it is by experiment .
I will keep you posted .
This obviously has major implications for diabetics and dieters .
The effects of sulfur in normally non-sulfur foods like sugar is unknown .
But diabetics can measure it quickly by blood-sugar measurements .
The long-term effects are unknown .
But we have an evolutionary history of these effects: see below .
Chixilub impact :
This was on top of a massive deposit of sulfur-bearing rocks . The fallout rendered the oceans acidic for decades . But it was sulfuric acid . The sulfur prevented build-up of fat reserves as discussed above . This rendered many large sea-going (and land-going) species extinct , as their pulse-feeding habits could not be sustained in an environment where fat-storage did not take place . Their reserve mechanism vanished .
(See http://andreswhy.blogspot.com "The Flower , the Dinosaur and Puff")
This helps to explain why sea-going dinosaurs also could not survive . Without an energy storage mechanism like fat , large animals simply could not survive from meal-to-meal in an energy-poor environment .
This begs the question : why have mitochondria not evolved a coping mechanism for sulfur ?
The answer is that they cannot . They are in an mutual dependency with multi-cellular organisms . Both have genetic machinery that halts all cellular activity in the presence of a certain concentration of H2S . The probability of both changing fundamental metabolic processes and genetic switches by ordinary chance (Beth(0) ) evolutionary processes are far less than the probability of going extinct .
Of course , we can design them that way (Beth(1) process) . But these processes are so deeply rooted , that it is not recommended without access to a Beth(2) processor
Sulfur shortage .
I have discussed this at nauseam in previous posts .
Our present planetary ecosystem has a net shortage of biologically available sulfur .
This is clear from the fact that furriers and leather merchants have to feed their source animals MSM to get usable products .
Cell walls (animals and plants) , reticulation systems , nanotubes , etc all need sulfur as a vital part of their structures .
Eutrophication of rivers , lakes and oceans can be vastly decreased by limiting their intake of sulfur . (Mostly human sewerage) .
Experimental protocol :
The above can be easily tested .
Dimension one:
Angiosperms:
Sugar , bread , barley , rice .
Non-Angiosperms :
Mushrooms , leaf veggies , potatoes , acorns
Dimension two :
Douse with dilute hydrosulfuric acid to give resultant mixture a pH of
4 (about CocaCola) , 5,
7 (neutral)
9 (alkaline)
Monitor fasting and non-fasting Glucose levels with and without diabetic persons .
This will give a 4x9x4 matrix .
A quick and dirty test would be sugar plus pH 4 hydrosulfuric acid for a person on Atkins diet .
And they sneered that the impudent little wine might be a wee bit sulphurous .
Andre
Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
The Flower , the Dinosaur and Puff .
The Flower , the Dinosaur and Puff .
Andre Willers
9 Dec 2008
Synopsis :
The development of flowers (angiosperms) reduced the amount of free energy to large dinosaurs by a factor of 1 000 to 10 000 . This reduced the number of large dinosaurs planetwide accordingly . This rendered them very vulnerable to a sudden shock like the Chixilub meteor impact .
Discussion :
The crucial factor :
Gymnosperms ( conifers , cycads , gingoes , bennetittales) has the characteristic that every seed (whether fertilized or not) has to have a food supply for the embryo . Fertilization is by wind-blown spores .
The plant has to produce a food supply for all seeds , fertilized or not .
Angiosperms (flowering plants) has a double fertilization process : as the ovum is fertilized , a neighbouring cell is also fertilized to produce a food supply for the embryo .
Thus , the plant only has to produce a food supply for already fertilized seeds .
The Trick :
Look at it from a macro-viewpoint . To populate the available planetary surface , a certain number (say N) of fertilized seeds are needed . But the Gymnosperm fertilization by wind is about 1 000 to 10 000 times less efficient than angiosperms , especially after angiosperms used the savings to pay insects (bees , etc) to do targeted fertilization .
The effect of this was that dinosaurs ( who evolved in the energy-rich environment of gymnosperm seeds) faced a decreasing amount of available energy as flowers took over .
This was hard on the large dinosaurs , who spent a 100 million years refining tools for a gymnosperm ecology . The reduction in numbers of large dinosaurs before the KT boundary is well-documented . Their ecosystem just did not have enough free energy to support large numbers of big herbivores and their predators . The mechanics are well-known .
The large dinosaurs were caught in the evolutionary trap , but smaller ones did survive , adapt and are still with us ( Fried chicken , anybody ?)
The state of play 65 million years ago is the same as today :
This already tells you that a very stable attractor basin has been reached .
Angiosperms : 90% of plant species
Insect pollinated Angiosperms : 75% of this 90% .
Note that 0.9*0.75 = 0.675 .
Reserves :
See reserve arguments in http://andreswhy.blogspot.com "Infinite Probes" et al .
One can use the Gaia argument here without reservation , since the Infinite Probe argument does not involve any consciousness .
What does this mean ?
Plant species NOT involving (both Angiosperms and insects) form the reserve of Gaia. (Remember , the system has been through at least 65 million years of catastrophes , including Chixilub .)
Plants are the basis of all life on the planetary surface .
Human intervention only changed the forms of angiosperms , but not the percentages .
Whether the Amazon is populated by forests or grasses is immaterial to Gaia . But monkeying around with the reserve (ie non-angiosperms (ie conifers and tundra) or insect-independent angiosperms) will have unexpected and (from the human viewpoint) dire consequences .
Global warming will not change the percentages either . Deserts grow as tundras shrink .
If the percentage of angiosperms increase above 90% , the pollinating insect population percentage can be expected to shrink to keep the product at about 67% .
This is already noticeable in the fall in bee numbers .
Frogs (insect eaters) are having a hard time as well .
Feedback mechanisms:
I have a nasty suspicion about phages and fungi .
This is a system at least 65 million years old .
It has to be approached from a planetary basis .
The planet is awash with spores from the various plant forms . Quorum mechanisms in phages , bacteria , some viruses , fungi and other lifeforms sit and watch . A disturbance in the existing equilibrium activates dormant genes (hence the large percentage of "junk" DNA in primitive organisms . ) Enough are uncorrupted to activate systems to shift the equilibrium back to the basin center .
A simple putative example :
Fungi spores are produced by Gaia's reserve .
Spores from fungi keep certain phage-genes from being expressed . If they fall below quorum , the phages activate . They attack bacteria . This in turn activates genes in bacteria in self-defense , but to fund this they plunder their hosts for resources : this is a disease . Viruses switch on . And off we go !
Some auto-immune diseases fall into this classification . Insects are particularly vulnerable .
I use this example because of Gaia's reserves , fungi has been most affected by human activity . Sewerage works are the main culprit . When have you last seen a mushroom growing wild ? Run the numbers. Human excrement now comprises a significant percentage of biomass , and none of it is available to fungi .
Fungi also need a lot of sulfur , and is very sensitive to lack of biologically active sulfur .
Yet fungi are the longest-living and largest organisms on the planet .
We are starving an important part of our biosphere .
In a system that has been in a strong attractor-basin for at least 65 million years .
What to do ?
Bee-farmers should intersperse mushroom trays between corves .
Farmers too .
Can the phage activation be reversed ?
An off-switch at higher concentrations of fungi-spores is possible if the phage activation consists of multiple copies of the activation gene .
Some ways :
Eat ripe mushrooms (some spores always stick)
Grow mushrooms in a microclimate and let them sporulate .
But continuously breathing spores is not all that healthy , either .
Eat hairy cheese .
Puff .
Pulse Fungi Force
Visit a fungi farm once every three days . Just breathe the air . Monitor .
If successful , mushroom sanatoria will evolve .
A new way for the Natural Health Brigade to make money .
Cheese
Let some cheese grow "hair" and sporulate . Sprinkling some MSM on it will help .
See also previous posts on the role of cheese in healthy reproductive capabilities .
Or just plain health .
Puff Pomanders .
Shades of the Middle Ages !
A pomander around your neck with a small piece of very ripe cheese or mushroom will do as well .
It will also keep the birthrate down . Very Green .
Miscellaneous:
1.Queen-bee jelly .
One would expect that this would have concentrated factors preventing phage-activation .
2.Check auto-immune and other disease incidences of workers at mushroom or cheese farms .
From Gaia's viewpoint humans are the equivalent of a new species of insects with some clever pollination tricks .
To sum up :
From Gaia's viewpoint , the major impact of humans is the decrease in sporulating fungi . This impacts the Gaian Reserve , which has evolved over at least 100 million years . This is not a conscious system . But it has seen off Chixilub and other assorted major fluctuations . A very strong attractor basin .
Alas , humans do not even seem to be aware of the knife at their neck .
An analogue is cockroaches : a cockroach's visual definition is too coarse to see a long , thin blade until it bisects it . It literally cannot see the blade . (I have cut many a cockroach in two using this method . Experimentally verified .)
A lethal threat unperceived because their perception mechanisms are too coarse .
If humans do not restore the balance , their corpses will provide the growing medium for fungi . (This is Gaia's traditional way of balancing things.)
A simple tweak to sewerage works to include mushrooms will do the trick .
Closed eco-systems like Biosphere II spring to mind . Oxygen production fell because fungi were deemed undesirable . Spacecraft will need a better understanding of eco-systems .
And so it goes .
Andre .
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sources :
A good summation about flowers is New Scientist of 1 Nov 2008 p36 " Petal Power" .
The rest is general sources .
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Andre Willers
9 Dec 2008
Synopsis :
The development of flowers (angiosperms) reduced the amount of free energy to large dinosaurs by a factor of 1 000 to 10 000 . This reduced the number of large dinosaurs planetwide accordingly . This rendered them very vulnerable to a sudden shock like the Chixilub meteor impact .
Discussion :
The crucial factor :
Gymnosperms ( conifers , cycads , gingoes , bennetittales) has the characteristic that every seed (whether fertilized or not) has to have a food supply for the embryo . Fertilization is by wind-blown spores .
The plant has to produce a food supply for all seeds , fertilized or not .
Angiosperms (flowering plants) has a double fertilization process : as the ovum is fertilized , a neighbouring cell is also fertilized to produce a food supply for the embryo .
Thus , the plant only has to produce a food supply for already fertilized seeds .
The Trick :
Look at it from a macro-viewpoint . To populate the available planetary surface , a certain number (say N) of fertilized seeds are needed . But the Gymnosperm fertilization by wind is about 1 000 to 10 000 times less efficient than angiosperms , especially after angiosperms used the savings to pay insects (bees , etc) to do targeted fertilization .
The effect of this was that dinosaurs ( who evolved in the energy-rich environment of gymnosperm seeds) faced a decreasing amount of available energy as flowers took over .
This was hard on the large dinosaurs , who spent a 100 million years refining tools for a gymnosperm ecology . The reduction in numbers of large dinosaurs before the KT boundary is well-documented . Their ecosystem just did not have enough free energy to support large numbers of big herbivores and their predators . The mechanics are well-known .
The large dinosaurs were caught in the evolutionary trap , but smaller ones did survive , adapt and are still with us ( Fried chicken , anybody ?)
The state of play 65 million years ago is the same as today :
This already tells you that a very stable attractor basin has been reached .
Angiosperms : 90% of plant species
Insect pollinated Angiosperms : 75% of this 90% .
Note that 0.9*0.75 = 0.675 .
Reserves :
See reserve arguments in http://andreswhy.blogspot.com "Infinite Probes" et al .
One can use the Gaia argument here without reservation , since the Infinite Probe argument does not involve any consciousness .
What does this mean ?
Plant species NOT involving (both Angiosperms and insects) form the reserve of Gaia. (Remember , the system has been through at least 65 million years of catastrophes , including Chixilub .)
Plants are the basis of all life on the planetary surface .
Human intervention only changed the forms of angiosperms , but not the percentages .
Whether the Amazon is populated by forests or grasses is immaterial to Gaia . But monkeying around with the reserve (ie non-angiosperms (ie conifers and tundra) or insect-independent angiosperms) will have unexpected and (from the human viewpoint) dire consequences .
Global warming will not change the percentages either . Deserts grow as tundras shrink .
If the percentage of angiosperms increase above 90% , the pollinating insect population percentage can be expected to shrink to keep the product at about 67% .
This is already noticeable in the fall in bee numbers .
Frogs (insect eaters) are having a hard time as well .
Feedback mechanisms:
I have a nasty suspicion about phages and fungi .
This is a system at least 65 million years old .
It has to be approached from a planetary basis .
The planet is awash with spores from the various plant forms . Quorum mechanisms in phages , bacteria , some viruses , fungi and other lifeforms sit and watch . A disturbance in the existing equilibrium activates dormant genes (hence the large percentage of "junk" DNA in primitive organisms . ) Enough are uncorrupted to activate systems to shift the equilibrium back to the basin center .
A simple putative example :
Fungi spores are produced by Gaia's reserve .
Spores from fungi keep certain phage-genes from being expressed . If they fall below quorum , the phages activate . They attack bacteria . This in turn activates genes in bacteria in self-defense , but to fund this they plunder their hosts for resources : this is a disease . Viruses switch on . And off we go !
Some auto-immune diseases fall into this classification . Insects are particularly vulnerable .
I use this example because of Gaia's reserves , fungi has been most affected by human activity . Sewerage works are the main culprit . When have you last seen a mushroom growing wild ? Run the numbers. Human excrement now comprises a significant percentage of biomass , and none of it is available to fungi .
Fungi also need a lot of sulfur , and is very sensitive to lack of biologically active sulfur .
Yet fungi are the longest-living and largest organisms on the planet .
We are starving an important part of our biosphere .
In a system that has been in a strong attractor-basin for at least 65 million years .
What to do ?
Bee-farmers should intersperse mushroom trays between corves .
Farmers too .
Can the phage activation be reversed ?
An off-switch at higher concentrations of fungi-spores is possible if the phage activation consists of multiple copies of the activation gene .
Some ways :
Eat ripe mushrooms (some spores always stick)
Grow mushrooms in a microclimate and let them sporulate .
But continuously breathing spores is not all that healthy , either .
Eat hairy cheese .
Puff .
Pulse Fungi Force
Visit a fungi farm once every three days . Just breathe the air . Monitor .
If successful , mushroom sanatoria will evolve .
A new way for the Natural Health Brigade to make money .
Cheese
Let some cheese grow "hair" and sporulate . Sprinkling some MSM on it will help .
See also previous posts on the role of cheese in healthy reproductive capabilities .
Or just plain health .
Puff Pomanders .
Shades of the Middle Ages !
A pomander around your neck with a small piece of very ripe cheese or mushroom will do as well .
It will also keep the birthrate down . Very Green .
Miscellaneous:
1.Queen-bee jelly .
One would expect that this would have concentrated factors preventing phage-activation .
2.Check auto-immune and other disease incidences of workers at mushroom or cheese farms .
From Gaia's viewpoint humans are the equivalent of a new species of insects with some clever pollination tricks .
To sum up :
From Gaia's viewpoint , the major impact of humans is the decrease in sporulating fungi . This impacts the Gaian Reserve , which has evolved over at least 100 million years . This is not a conscious system . But it has seen off Chixilub and other assorted major fluctuations . A very strong attractor basin .
Alas , humans do not even seem to be aware of the knife at their neck .
An analogue is cockroaches : a cockroach's visual definition is too coarse to see a long , thin blade until it bisects it . It literally cannot see the blade . (I have cut many a cockroach in two using this method . Experimentally verified .)
A lethal threat unperceived because their perception mechanisms are too coarse .
If humans do not restore the balance , their corpses will provide the growing medium for fungi . (This is Gaia's traditional way of balancing things.)
A simple tweak to sewerage works to include mushrooms will do the trick .
Closed eco-systems like Biosphere II spring to mind . Oxygen production fell because fungi were deemed undesirable . Spacecraft will need a better understanding of eco-systems .
And so it goes .
Andre .
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sources :
A good summation about flowers is New Scientist of 1 Nov 2008 p36 " Petal Power" .
The rest is general sources .
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Thursday, December 04, 2008
ATP and Catalytic Motors
ATP and Catalytic Motors
Andre Willers
4 Dec 2008
The Catalytic Motor.
See Annexure A below .
This is a new concept to me .
The basic principle :
The chemical equilibrium of a reaction is biased in a certain direction by dynamical , rotational processes .
And not in a trivial way either . A whopping 40 kg per day production and consumption of ATP for a sedentary human (of say mass 80 kg) means a very finely balanced mechanism . (Half of body mass per day)
The logistical demands almost necessitate a multi-cellular organism .
Where does the rotor come from ?
From bacterial flagellae . They work by rotation of the flagella .(Google it)
The rotor is driven by proton gradients , caused by electron-flow balances between inflowing nutrients and usage .
Putative evolution :
The ur-mitochondrium was a free organism whose flagellae by chance could beat two poisons (oxygen and alcohol) into harmless ATP . As if protein-folding was not complicated enough , now dynamics have to be considered as well .
As the concentrations of these poisons increased , ur-mitochondria did the usual plaque - freeform alternation of bacteria . In every colony episode , the efficiency of the conversion was enhanced . At some stage , a freeform colonized some other bacterium . The host learned to use ATP as an energy source . Multicellular forms were force-formed .
The motors of the mitochondria cannot stop spinning . (If they do , apoptosis results: see Appendix B) . The ATP has to be used .
Rotor-spin speed:
This seems to be quite slow . (As expected from a flagella heritage) . About one to three milliseconds per revolution . ( About 1 to 0.3 kHz) . The ATP production is not smooth either . There are three units physically opening and closing (see Appendix A).
A very useful analogue:
We can use an national electricity grid operating at 1 kHz alternating current of three-phase current as an tool for understanding the meta-energy flow in the body . Every cell would be like a municipality with its own powerstation .
The voltage and transformers ? Nobody has looked , but a guess would be ATP concentration regulators , like the reticular cellular formations , antioxidants (see Appendix B) , ATP chaperones , cellular-wall ports , etc . You get the drift .
The advantage of this approach is that we then have an immediately usable box of tools to analyze and suggest fruitful new approaches .
Our electricity networks would also gain , since evolution has been at this problem for a tad longer than humans .
Melatonin for ESKOM ? Some would say they are asleep at the switch in any case .
Throttles .
There seems to be a wee problem here .
The problem seems to be too much energy , not too little .
Most organisms normally spend 1/9 to 1/3 of 24 hours actually getting enough to eat . The rest is spent having fun or sleeping .
But a certain reserve needs to kept (see http://andreswhy.blogspot.com "Infinite Probes" et al )
Sleep:
There is a strong suspicion that melatonin throttles down the production of ATP , but not the usage of ATP (cf fMRI scans of sleeping brains) See Appendix B . Sleep would then be necessary to keep the organism out of trouble (ie quiescent) while surplus ATP is used up . (1/3 : eg 8 hours per day)
Obesity epidemic:
As can be seen from the above , the problem is not a sudden influx of energy-rich food .This has been a trouble since the first mitochondrium took up housekeeping in a host cell .
The obesity is caused simply by a lack of sleep .
Present generations sleep less . Artificial lighting , computers , cinema , etc . The extra waking time is also usually spent eating .
The equilibrium is upset . (This has been going on for about 100 years on a large scale) .
An interesting result is the generational increase in IQ measurements . The system is trying to soak up the extra energy in more complex nervous structures (for which it has the evolutionary tools) . An epigenetic feedback loop is suspected .
Kids who stay up late for three generations will be fatter and smarter .
Diabetes .
Melatonin has many effects . Lack of it causes neuro-degenerative complications (see Appendix B) . Included is peripheral neuropathy . This is where we can use our useful little model of an electricity grid above . Without the feedback from the damaged nerves , the system cannot shift loads . Just monitoring the glucose level is too coarse. Fluctuations build up . Future load estimations cannot be made . Fat builds up .
Old Age
Lack of sleep during old age leads to glucose metabolic complications for all the reasons mentioned , regardless whether the person is obese or not .
Other throttles are rendered less effective by lack of materials:
Specifically , sulfur (H2S hibernation throttle) , chrome (cytochrome oxidase : see Appendix B) , alpha lipoic acid(nerve repair) , melatonin .
Homeostasis is another useful little energy soak .
Large brains ditto .
But Culture , hot or cold , is master of them all .
Nothing soaks up energy like culture . Fashion is by far the largest industry on the planet , outstripping even food production .
Eg sports is a fashion . Clothes .Entertainment . Tourism . Even lies . (JK Rowling is the most fashionable and richest professional liar in Britain .)
What is the culture of your mitochondria ?
An Actual , Physical ATP generator you can buy .
See www.apstherapy.com
This is a well-known and clinically proven machine usually touted for pain-relief .
It works .
But the theory is rather patchy . There used to be a lot of mumbo-jumbo about the gate theory of pain .
It actually works by alleviating the underlying causes of the pain (see scans on website) . It does this by pumping energy into the ATP-rotors from the outside at the damage site .
It does this by sending 3-millisecond square pulses which decay exponentially (see wave-form on web-site .) This spins up damaged rotors and transfers energy (a non-food source of energy) . Most importantly , it re-establishes timing mechanisms . Cells on the point of mitochondrial apoptosis can be salvaged . (The apoptosis mechanism is very sensitive , due to all the feedback mechanisms involved.)
While the energy input here is small , the energy of an ATP molecule is not exactly large . And the ATP is targeted exactly at the damage site . This helps to stop the cascade effect of trauma-shock .
Your attention is drawn to the well-known effects of aligned magnetic fields on bone-healing . A similar thing happens here .
Notice the effects of zero electro-magnetic fields on early astronauts .(Their metabolisms went haywire) . They had to be supplied with artificial fields .
Speculations:
Energise organisms directly by high-energy em-waves .
Are there any like that already ? The planet is awash with em waves and organisms with flagellae .
Deep ocean , moons of Jupiter or Saturn springs to mind .
An actual cure for diabetes by re-establishing communications between cell-groups to do proper load-sharing .
Also useful for cases of paralysis or strokes .
Fat-loss without dieting or exercising . Fashionable .
Targeted , too .
Spin up the mitochondrial rotors with em-waves , then wash out the surplus ATP in urine after fixing this ATP with something like a mono-clonal anti-body .
Get rid of that cellulite !
Cheating at sports . (Even more fashionable)
A focused em-wave of the right form will boost ATP production of an athlete or horse at that critical instant , and is nearly undetectable .
Muscle building for the gym-brigade .
Eg the machine for training the biceps can have an em-generator focused on the biceps while training . Saturation by ATP will hopefully rapidly increase muscle mass.
MRI problems .
As you will have gathered , alignment of mitochondrial rotor-spins by a powerful magnetic field as found in MRI machines can have unfortunate effects if the patient is soon afterwards exposed to em radiation of periods of 3 milliseconds (or beats thereof)
Melatonin and DHEA supplements should form part of the old age package (like statins , etc) .
Nanotech should be able to do really interesting things .
And so it goes round and round .
Andre
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Annexure A
Sunday, January 21, 2007
ATP Generator Structure – Function
Almost incredibly, a sedentary adult makes and uses 40 kg of ATP per day! ATP is made by the F0-F1 ATPase, a molecular motor with a rotating shaft and fixed "stator". One end of the shaft, F0, is buried in the mitochondrial inner membrane where the proton gradient causes it to rotate. A single gamma subunit connects the F0 to three alpha and beta subunits, together F1, which are responsible for synthesizing ATP from ADP and Pi (H2PO4-). As a catalytic motor and not just a catalyst, the F0-F1 ATPase is able to increase the rate of reaction away from the equilibrium (which strongly favors the reverse reaction, hydrolysis, because the concentrations of reactants and product in mitochondria are similar). The gamma subunit rotates too slowly, in the microsecond-to-millisecond range, for standard molecular dynamics simulation. To solve this, the authors applied "biasing forces" as the motor moved and assumed these forces would not change the mechanism. Positively charged amino acids on the gamma subunit attract negative amino acids on beta subunit, producing smooth and efficient ionic coupling. Rotation of the gamma subunit induces the opening of the beta subunits. The beta subunit closes spontaneously. Synthesis is not the reverse of hydrolysis, explaining why high concentrations of free ATP does not inhibit synthesis. Gao and colleagues propose a detailed model of how the motor harnesses the proton gradient to act against the equilibrium. Their quantitative model is based on the conceptual “binding change mechanism” model proposed by Boyer, where ATP synthesis proceeds by each beta subunit changing from “open”, weak nucleotide binding, to “tight”, high affinity ATP binding, to “loose”, with the release of ATP. The authors used this model to make accurate predictions about synthesis and hydrolysis kinetics and they invite others to test their detailed model.
PubMed :Yi Qin Gao, Wei Yang and Martin Karplus, "A Structure-Based Model for the Synthesis and Hydrolysis of ATP by F1-ATPase" Cell Oct 21, 2005; 123(2):195-205
Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Annexure B
Melatonin, mitochondria, and cellular bioenergetics.
Acuña-Castroviejo D, MartÃn M, MacÃas M, Escames G, León J, Khaldy H, Reiter RJ.
Departamento de FisiologÃa, Instituto de BiotecnologÃa, Universidad de Granada, Spain.
Aerobic cells use oxygen for the production of 90-95% of the total amount of ATP that they use. This amounts to about 40 kg ATP/day in an adult human. The synthesis of ATP via the mitochondrial respiratory chain is the result of electron transport across the electron transport chain coupled to oxidative phosphorylation. Although ideally all the oxygen should be reduced to water by a four-electron reduction reaction driven by the cytochrome oxidase, under normal conditions a small percentage of oxygen may be reduced by one, two, or three electrons only, yielding superoxide anion, hydrogen peroxide, and the hydroxyl radical, respectively. The main radical produced by mitochondria is superoxide anion and the intramitochondrial antioxidant systems should scavenge this radical to avoid oxidative damage, which leads to impaired ATP production. During aging and some neurodegenerative diseases, oxidatively damaged mitochondria are unable to maintain the energy demands of the cell leading to an increased production of free radicals. Both processes, i.e., defective ATP production and increased oxygen radicals, may induce mitochondrial-dependent apoptotic cell death. Melatonin has been reported to exert neuroprotective effects in several experimental and clinical situations involving neurotoxicity and/or excitotoxicity. Additionally, in a series of pathologies in which high production of free radicals is the primary cause of the disease, melatonin is also protective. A common feature in these diseases is the existence of mitochondrial damage due to oxidative stress. The discoveries of new actions of melatonin in mitochondria support a novel mechanism, which explains some of the protective effects of the indoleamine on cell survival.
Publication Types:
· Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
· Review
PMID: 11270481 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Andre Willers
4 Dec 2008
The Catalytic Motor.
See Annexure A below .
This is a new concept to me .
The basic principle :
The chemical equilibrium of a reaction is biased in a certain direction by dynamical , rotational processes .
And not in a trivial way either . A whopping 40 kg per day production and consumption of ATP for a sedentary human (of say mass 80 kg) means a very finely balanced mechanism . (Half of body mass per day)
The logistical demands almost necessitate a multi-cellular organism .
Where does the rotor come from ?
From bacterial flagellae . They work by rotation of the flagella .(Google it)
The rotor is driven by proton gradients , caused by electron-flow balances between inflowing nutrients and usage .
Putative evolution :
The ur-mitochondrium was a free organism whose flagellae by chance could beat two poisons (oxygen and alcohol) into harmless ATP . As if protein-folding was not complicated enough , now dynamics have to be considered as well .
As the concentrations of these poisons increased , ur-mitochondria did the usual plaque - freeform alternation of bacteria . In every colony episode , the efficiency of the conversion was enhanced . At some stage , a freeform colonized some other bacterium . The host learned to use ATP as an energy source . Multicellular forms were force-formed .
The motors of the mitochondria cannot stop spinning . (If they do , apoptosis results: see Appendix B) . The ATP has to be used .
Rotor-spin speed:
This seems to be quite slow . (As expected from a flagella heritage) . About one to three milliseconds per revolution . ( About 1 to 0.3 kHz) . The ATP production is not smooth either . There are three units physically opening and closing (see Appendix A).
A very useful analogue:
We can use an national electricity grid operating at 1 kHz alternating current of three-phase current as an tool for understanding the meta-energy flow in the body . Every cell would be like a municipality with its own powerstation .
The voltage and transformers ? Nobody has looked , but a guess would be ATP concentration regulators , like the reticular cellular formations , antioxidants (see Appendix B) , ATP chaperones , cellular-wall ports , etc . You get the drift .
The advantage of this approach is that we then have an immediately usable box of tools to analyze and suggest fruitful new approaches .
Our electricity networks would also gain , since evolution has been at this problem for a tad longer than humans .
Melatonin for ESKOM ? Some would say they are asleep at the switch in any case .
Throttles .
There seems to be a wee problem here .
The problem seems to be too much energy , not too little .
Most organisms normally spend 1/9 to 1/3 of 24 hours actually getting enough to eat . The rest is spent having fun or sleeping .
But a certain reserve needs to kept (see http://andreswhy.blogspot.com "Infinite Probes" et al )
Sleep:
There is a strong suspicion that melatonin throttles down the production of ATP , but not the usage of ATP (cf fMRI scans of sleeping brains) See Appendix B . Sleep would then be necessary to keep the organism out of trouble (ie quiescent) while surplus ATP is used up . (1/3 : eg 8 hours per day)
Obesity epidemic:
As can be seen from the above , the problem is not a sudden influx of energy-rich food .This has been a trouble since the first mitochondrium took up housekeeping in a host cell .
The obesity is caused simply by a lack of sleep .
Present generations sleep less . Artificial lighting , computers , cinema , etc . The extra waking time is also usually spent eating .
The equilibrium is upset . (This has been going on for about 100 years on a large scale) .
An interesting result is the generational increase in IQ measurements . The system is trying to soak up the extra energy in more complex nervous structures (for which it has the evolutionary tools) . An epigenetic feedback loop is suspected .
Kids who stay up late for three generations will be fatter and smarter .
Diabetes .
Melatonin has many effects . Lack of it causes neuro-degenerative complications (see Appendix B) . Included is peripheral neuropathy . This is where we can use our useful little model of an electricity grid above . Without the feedback from the damaged nerves , the system cannot shift loads . Just monitoring the glucose level is too coarse. Fluctuations build up . Future load estimations cannot be made . Fat builds up .
Old Age
Lack of sleep during old age leads to glucose metabolic complications for all the reasons mentioned , regardless whether the person is obese or not .
Other throttles are rendered less effective by lack of materials:
Specifically , sulfur (H2S hibernation throttle) , chrome (cytochrome oxidase : see Appendix B) , alpha lipoic acid(nerve repair) , melatonin .
Homeostasis is another useful little energy soak .
Large brains ditto .
But Culture , hot or cold , is master of them all .
Nothing soaks up energy like culture . Fashion is by far the largest industry on the planet , outstripping even food production .
Eg sports is a fashion . Clothes .Entertainment . Tourism . Even lies . (JK Rowling is the most fashionable and richest professional liar in Britain .)
What is the culture of your mitochondria ?
An Actual , Physical ATP generator you can buy .
See www.apstherapy.com
This is a well-known and clinically proven machine usually touted for pain-relief .
It works .
But the theory is rather patchy . There used to be a lot of mumbo-jumbo about the gate theory of pain .
It actually works by alleviating the underlying causes of the pain (see scans on website) . It does this by pumping energy into the ATP-rotors from the outside at the damage site .
It does this by sending 3-millisecond square pulses which decay exponentially (see wave-form on web-site .) This spins up damaged rotors and transfers energy (a non-food source of energy) . Most importantly , it re-establishes timing mechanisms . Cells on the point of mitochondrial apoptosis can be salvaged . (The apoptosis mechanism is very sensitive , due to all the feedback mechanisms involved.)
While the energy input here is small , the energy of an ATP molecule is not exactly large . And the ATP is targeted exactly at the damage site . This helps to stop the cascade effect of trauma-shock .
Your attention is drawn to the well-known effects of aligned magnetic fields on bone-healing . A similar thing happens here .
Notice the effects of zero electro-magnetic fields on early astronauts .(Their metabolisms went haywire) . They had to be supplied with artificial fields .
Speculations:
Energise organisms directly by high-energy em-waves .
Are there any like that already ? The planet is awash with em waves and organisms with flagellae .
Deep ocean , moons of Jupiter or Saturn springs to mind .
An actual cure for diabetes by re-establishing communications between cell-groups to do proper load-sharing .
Also useful for cases of paralysis or strokes .
Fat-loss without dieting or exercising . Fashionable .
Targeted , too .
Spin up the mitochondrial rotors with em-waves , then wash out the surplus ATP in urine after fixing this ATP with something like a mono-clonal anti-body .
Get rid of that cellulite !
Cheating at sports . (Even more fashionable)
A focused em-wave of the right form will boost ATP production of an athlete or horse at that critical instant , and is nearly undetectable .
Muscle building for the gym-brigade .
Eg the machine for training the biceps can have an em-generator focused on the biceps while training . Saturation by ATP will hopefully rapidly increase muscle mass.
MRI problems .
As you will have gathered , alignment of mitochondrial rotor-spins by a powerful magnetic field as found in MRI machines can have unfortunate effects if the patient is soon afterwards exposed to em radiation of periods of 3 milliseconds (or beats thereof)
Melatonin and DHEA supplements should form part of the old age package (like statins , etc) .
Nanotech should be able to do really interesting things .
And so it goes round and round .
Andre
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Annexure A
Sunday, January 21, 2007
ATP Generator Structure – Function
Almost incredibly, a sedentary adult makes and uses 40 kg of ATP per day! ATP is made by the F0-F1 ATPase, a molecular motor with a rotating shaft and fixed "stator". One end of the shaft, F0, is buried in the mitochondrial inner membrane where the proton gradient causes it to rotate. A single gamma subunit connects the F0 to three alpha and beta subunits, together F1, which are responsible for synthesizing ATP from ADP and Pi (H2PO4-). As a catalytic motor and not just a catalyst, the F0-F1 ATPase is able to increase the rate of reaction away from the equilibrium (which strongly favors the reverse reaction, hydrolysis, because the concentrations of reactants and product in mitochondria are similar). The gamma subunit rotates too slowly, in the microsecond-to-millisecond range, for standard molecular dynamics simulation. To solve this, the authors applied "biasing forces" as the motor moved and assumed these forces would not change the mechanism. Positively charged amino acids on the gamma subunit attract negative amino acids on beta subunit, producing smooth and efficient ionic coupling. Rotation of the gamma subunit induces the opening of the beta subunits. The beta subunit closes spontaneously. Synthesis is not the reverse of hydrolysis, explaining why high concentrations of free ATP does not inhibit synthesis. Gao and colleagues propose a detailed model of how the motor harnesses the proton gradient to act against the equilibrium. Their quantitative model is based on the conceptual “binding change mechanism” model proposed by Boyer, where ATP synthesis proceeds by each beta subunit changing from “open”, weak nucleotide binding, to “tight”, high affinity ATP binding, to “loose”, with the release of ATP. The authors used this model to make accurate predictions about synthesis and hydrolysis kinetics and they invite others to test their detailed model.
PubMed :Yi Qin Gao, Wei Yang and Martin Karplus, "A Structure-Based Model for the Synthesis and Hydrolysis of ATP by F1-ATPase" Cell Oct 21, 2005; 123(2):195-205
Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Annexure B
Melatonin, mitochondria, and cellular bioenergetics.
Acuña-Castroviejo D, MartÃn M, MacÃas M, Escames G, León J, Khaldy H, Reiter RJ.
Departamento de FisiologÃa, Instituto de BiotecnologÃa, Universidad de Granada, Spain.
Aerobic cells use oxygen for the production of 90-95% of the total amount of ATP that they use. This amounts to about 40 kg ATP/day in an adult human. The synthesis of ATP via the mitochondrial respiratory chain is the result of electron transport across the electron transport chain coupled to oxidative phosphorylation. Although ideally all the oxygen should be reduced to water by a four-electron reduction reaction driven by the cytochrome oxidase, under normal conditions a small percentage of oxygen may be reduced by one, two, or three electrons only, yielding superoxide anion, hydrogen peroxide, and the hydroxyl radical, respectively. The main radical produced by mitochondria is superoxide anion and the intramitochondrial antioxidant systems should scavenge this radical to avoid oxidative damage, which leads to impaired ATP production. During aging and some neurodegenerative diseases, oxidatively damaged mitochondria are unable to maintain the energy demands of the cell leading to an increased production of free radicals. Both processes, i.e., defective ATP production and increased oxygen radicals, may induce mitochondrial-dependent apoptotic cell death. Melatonin has been reported to exert neuroprotective effects in several experimental and clinical situations involving neurotoxicity and/or excitotoxicity. Additionally, in a series of pathologies in which high production of free radicals is the primary cause of the disease, melatonin is also protective. A common feature in these diseases is the existence of mitochondrial damage due to oxidative stress. The discoveries of new actions of melatonin in mitochondria support a novel mechanism, which explains some of the protective effects of the indoleamine on cell survival.
Publication Types:
· Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
· Review
PMID: 11270481 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Tuesday, December 02, 2008
Financial Crisis Dec 01 2008 : Petroleum Price
Financial Crisis Dec 01 2008 : Petroleum Price
Andre Willers
31 Nov 2008
OPEC target price announced at 30 Nov 2008 .
$75 a barrel .
See the price per barrel calculation below in Appendix A . This includes very generous margins for profits , reserves and prospection reserves .
I did not expect actual figures to match my theoretical figures so closely and so quickly (5 months) , unless somebody else is reading my blogs , or my estimates are close to what others will do .
So , here is here is an update after appreciation of the dollar :
Basic ab-initio Cost Estimate of Petroleum Prices at 30 Nov 2008 .
Oil per barrel at the well-head : $5
Transport per barrel anywhere on-planet : about $5
Total cost per barrel at refinery : $10 =(5+5)
Markup factor about 200% : cost per barrel about $30= (10+2*10) . This is the historical markup . Also the optimal markup . See http://andreswhy.blogspot.com "Optimal Markups"
To pay for the infrastructure of refineries , garages , etc
The system needs reserves if it is not to die on us .
As discussed (See http://andreswhy.blogspot.com "Infinite Probes" )
There are two schools of thought :
1. General Reserves of about 1/3 of this gives cost per barrel about $40 = (30*1/3+30)
2. But we need reserves for exploration , which is expensive .
We use the optimal markup factor of 200% on $30 to $40 .
This gives us price boundaries of $60 to $80
What does this mean ?
The system can live with oil at $40-$50 a barrel , but exploration is severely curtailed. Long term oil prices will rise sharply due to supply constraints . The figures might seem dry , but they translate into hundreds of thousands of lives lost in oil-wars.
Arctic oil-wars become a certainty .
(Note that the artificial depression of oil prices to about $10 a barrel two decades ago made the Middle-Eastern wars nearly inevitable . )
A price of $75 seems a reasonable compromise .
This is a Cost-plus-profit model , not Everything-the-market-will-bear .
The new , Social-Capitalist model . Inherently more stable .
From http://andreswhy.blogspot.com "Money : Human growth Rates"
FaceBookism (old WallMart) fluctuates between 22% and 67%
Social-Capitalism (China) fluctuates between 7.4% and 22%
Pure Capitalism (USA) fluctuates between 2.5% and 7.4%
Pure Socialism or Feudalism (Cuba) fluctuates between 0.8% and 2.5%
Third-world countries will tend to the Pure Socialism model (like SA) , decreasing their growth-rate drastically .
The USA is capable of skipping to FaceBookism , exploding their growth rate to a minimum of 22% . But can they get rid of the baggage of Capitalism ? The old WallMart did . So the capability is bubbling up . It is a bubble-technology . China can do the same by designating a new province to bubble-up in FaceBookism . So can Singapore or India or California .
Things are just about to get more interesting .
Oilily yours
Andre
Appendix A :
Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I quote from previous post "Petroleum Price: dated 4 /7/2008.
See http://andreswhy.blogspot.com "Petroleum Price"
" The Oil-bubble .
This leads to a bubble .
Some very approximate figures are instructive .
Oil per barrel at the well-head : $5 - $10
Transport per barrel anywhere on-planet : about $5
Total cost per barrel at refinery : $10 - $15
Profit about 200% : cost per barrel about $40
Reserves for exploration about 40% of this gives cost per barrel about $56
Reserves for exploration about 100% of this gives cost per barrel about $80
The price at selling point (note globalization effects) at 3 July 2008 is about $145 .
This is a zero-sum game , so where does all the money go ?
Well , at the present moment it is not going anywhere because it only exists as potential money (raw oil) . An awful lot of tankers are sailing in slow circles .
The volume of money transactions are low because of the hoarding effect . There is a lot of masking wash in the futures markets .
The bursting of the present oil-bubble .
The question is at what price . Inventory of physical product cannot be hoarded forever , especially if national legislatures are sniffing around . An upper boundary of $160 =2x $80 seems reasonable . A very sudden collapse down to about $50 , then a rise to $80 per barrel seems likely . Stock markets will rebound in sympathy . "
Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Andre Willers
31 Nov 2008
OPEC target price announced at 30 Nov 2008 .
$75 a barrel .
See the price per barrel calculation below in Appendix A . This includes very generous margins for profits , reserves and prospection reserves .
I did not expect actual figures to match my theoretical figures so closely and so quickly (5 months) , unless somebody else is reading my blogs , or my estimates are close to what others will do .
So , here is here is an update after appreciation of the dollar :
Basic ab-initio Cost Estimate of Petroleum Prices at 30 Nov 2008 .
Oil per barrel at the well-head : $5
Transport per barrel anywhere on-planet : about $5
Total cost per barrel at refinery : $10 =(5+5)
Markup factor about 200% : cost per barrel about $30= (10+2*10) . This is the historical markup . Also the optimal markup . See http://andreswhy.blogspot.com "Optimal Markups"
To pay for the infrastructure of refineries , garages , etc
The system needs reserves if it is not to die on us .
As discussed (See http://andreswhy.blogspot.com "Infinite Probes" )
There are two schools of thought :
1. General Reserves of about 1/3 of this gives cost per barrel about $40 = (30*1/3+30)
2. But we need reserves for exploration , which is expensive .
We use the optimal markup factor of 200% on $30 to $40 .
This gives us price boundaries of $60 to $80
What does this mean ?
The system can live with oil at $40-$50 a barrel , but exploration is severely curtailed. Long term oil prices will rise sharply due to supply constraints . The figures might seem dry , but they translate into hundreds of thousands of lives lost in oil-wars.
Arctic oil-wars become a certainty .
(Note that the artificial depression of oil prices to about $10 a barrel two decades ago made the Middle-Eastern wars nearly inevitable . )
A price of $75 seems a reasonable compromise .
This is a Cost-plus-profit model , not Everything-the-market-will-bear .
The new , Social-Capitalist model . Inherently more stable .
From http://andreswhy.blogspot.com "Money : Human growth Rates"
FaceBookism (old WallMart) fluctuates between 22% and 67%
Social-Capitalism (China) fluctuates between 7.4% and 22%
Pure Capitalism (USA) fluctuates between 2.5% and 7.4%
Pure Socialism or Feudalism (Cuba) fluctuates between 0.8% and 2.5%
Third-world countries will tend to the Pure Socialism model (like SA) , decreasing their growth-rate drastically .
The USA is capable of skipping to FaceBookism , exploding their growth rate to a minimum of 22% . But can they get rid of the baggage of Capitalism ? The old WallMart did . So the capability is bubbling up . It is a bubble-technology . China can do the same by designating a new province to bubble-up in FaceBookism . So can Singapore or India or California .
Things are just about to get more interesting .
Oilily yours
Andre
Appendix A :
Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I quote from previous post "Petroleum Price: dated 4 /7/2008.
See http://andreswhy.blogspot.com "Petroleum Price"
" The Oil-bubble .
This leads to a bubble .
Some very approximate figures are instructive .
Oil per barrel at the well-head : $5 - $10
Transport per barrel anywhere on-planet : about $5
Total cost per barrel at refinery : $10 - $15
Profit about 200% : cost per barrel about $40
Reserves for exploration about 40% of this gives cost per barrel about $56
Reserves for exploration about 100% of this gives cost per barrel about $80
The price at selling point (note globalization effects) at 3 July 2008 is about $145 .
This is a zero-sum game , so where does all the money go ?
Well , at the present moment it is not going anywhere because it only exists as potential money (raw oil) . An awful lot of tankers are sailing in slow circles .
The volume of money transactions are low because of the hoarding effect . There is a lot of masking wash in the futures markets .
The bursting of the present oil-bubble .
The question is at what price . Inventory of physical product cannot be hoarded forever , especially if national legislatures are sniffing around . An upper boundary of $160 =2x $80 seems reasonable . A very sudden collapse down to about $50 , then a rise to $80 per barrel seems likely . Stock markets will rebound in sympathy . "
Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Doggerland.
Doggerland.
Andre Willers
2 Dec 2008
Where are the bodies ?
See New Scientist of 6 Nov 2008 p40 .
An interesting little problem .
There is a dearth of Mesolithic (circa 15 000 to 8 000 years ago) human skeletons in England . Even Neanderthals practiced some funerary rites , even if it only involved eating granny's stringy carcass salted with tears .
Discussion :
Let us step back to about 12 000 years ago . The lower sea-level (due to all the water locked-up in the ice-masses in the ice-age) made south-east England and the continent a contiguous land-mass . The English channel did not exist . In today's North Sea was a low lying 23 000 sq km landmass called Doggerland , nearly as big as England .
This has been mapped (see British Archaeological Reports number 31 , Archaeopress 2007 , by Gaffney et al) using seismic data from oil exploration companies .
Ireland was also contiguous with England (with maybe a narrow channel)
The Gulfstream meant that the southwestern regions had a fairly balmy climate . This became rapidly worse as you moved northwards . What is today England and Ireland were the highlands , ranging from heavily forested in the south to tundra and ice to the north .
Agriculture or domesticated animals had not arrived yet . Humans existed , and existed very well by fishing , fowling and hunting(mostly small game) . In the warmer and more fecund areas to the south , they were sedentary . As the living became more marginal in the colder areas to the north , nomadism increased .
Doggerland was a low-lying , marshy area teeming with birdlife and small game . Fishing abounded in the shallow waters .
If the trench between Ireland and England was open , the gulfstream would have branched up it . The surrounding areas would have been even more of a hunter-gatherer's paradise than Doggerland .
Population densities .
These can be surprisingly large , approaching agricultural levels . See Amerindian population levels in California pre-Spanish . At these levels it involves heavy use of what we call "sustainable ecological principles" . It really is farming , but not involving agriculture .
We are talking about a period of at least 5 000 years here , so there was plenty of time for the population to approach Malthusian and technological limits .
But the populations would be mostly around the coasts .
Funerary practices .
Being humans , every community would have different ones .
Recycling would be popular (cf Hindu , Pacific , African or Evenk sky-burial , where vultures do the honours) .
Burial , sea-burial , cremation , you name it .
Catastrophe .
Tsunamis were the major culprit .
As the temperature increased , big dams of melt-water built up behind the moraine-dams of the large glaciers bordering the north-sea . As they broke , huge waves washed over Doggerland without any warning whatsoever .
Underwater landslides contributed , as well as tectonic activity caused by plate-rebound as the ice burden eased .
Anything human was simply washed away . This included any graves . Any bones would have ended up on the bottom of the North Sea . Trawlers have dredged up human bones for more than a century .
Timeline :
About 9 000 years ago : the Irish Sea forms .
About 8 000 years ago : Doggerland disappears . The North Sea breaks through to form the English Channel . A huge mass of icy North Sea low-salinity water scoured a deep channel past Dover . This would have changed the weather for at least one season , as well as killed most sea-life .
Most surviving humans would have perished of hunger . (They had little in the way of food preservation , or reason to do so .)
Warfare for food left very few survivors .
(Present human civilizations would not survive such a fluctuation either.)
Note that the three known Mesolithic burial sites are on very high ground .
The Aftermath
The tsunamis continued for a thousand years or more . The survivors prudently avoided low-lying areas and eked out a miserable existence on the fortified hilltops . Things gradually improved as the climate became warmer and more stable . The tsunamis became infrequent . Immigrants from the continent brought the agricultural and domesticated animal civilization packages (a-la-Jared Diamond) .
Before you could say New Economic Paradigm , they were building graves that could not be washed away and seismic observatories .
(See http://andreswhy.blogspot.com "Nazca Lines and seismic prediction" )
Refugees .
This depends on their ship-building technology .
Even a small town can build sea-worthy ships .
The Vikings did it . So did the Greeks . Just about any civilization has done it . The question was: " Is there a profit in it?" A reason , apart from normal human inquisitiveness .
Trade (Cornish gold , tin and copper for Egyptian textiles springs to mind .) The foundations of the Bronze Age .
They had only to hug the coast around to Gibraltar to get into the Med .
Doggerland's major population centres would have been south of London , in the present English Channel .
The catastrophes described above did not happen all at once .
They would have seen their land being eaten up by the rising sea in the south and washed away by tsunamis in the north . (A bit like Florida).
Most would have stayed , assured by their priests and rulers that everything is under control . Those who left would not have gone to England , Ireland or France (too inhospitable) . Spain was better , but not very defensible . An island in a warm climate close to their main trading partner , Egypt ,would be ideal . Crete .
They would already have had trading outposts on Crete . The whole process probably took place about 8 000 to 9 000 years ago .(ie 6 000BC to 7 000BC) .
The Minoan and Egyptian civilizations then developed pari-passu into the Bronze Age .
Which is why the repopulation of England and Ireland proceeded so rapidly . The Minoans had ships and knew where all the mineral deposits were .
Atlantis .
(You didn't think you were getting away without another Atlantis , did you ?)
Plato's description of the destruction of Atlantis sounds like a horrified eyewitness account of a survivor of a tsunami . That rings true .
But he got it from an Egyptian source after about 5 000 years , who in turn got it from an Atlantean source . The periods involved get blurry .
Another puzzling feature is his insistence that the Atlanteans warred against the Athenians . The times don't match , even in his time-line .
But , remember , he was quoting an Egyptian account . From their viewpoint , Athenians were people from Athens (more specifically , the fortress of Akropolis) , not necessarily even Greeks .
The Akropolis had been a fortress since time immemorial .
He was also insistent that Atlantis was an imperially aggressive naval power . This fits in with the above speculation .
The Minoans aggressively established a trading empire across the Med .
An Outpost-Model , later copied by the Phoenicians , Portuguese , Dutch , etc. Characteristic of Sea Powers .
Thera .
Thera was a Minoan colony . Both it and the Minoan civilization was devastated by the explosion of the island and the resultant tsunamis on Crete .
Irony .
Etruscans .
An anomaly .
They were not molested by the Minoans or the Greeks . Even the Romans incorporated most of their civilization .
Likely a fundamentalist religious splinter group of the Minoans (ie Atlanteans) .
The timing seems about right . But well after the diaspora .
This would explain why the Romans were so determined to eradicate British Druidism . Normally , they tolerated just about any religion of a subject people (especially in the Republican era)
But Julius Caesar and all subsequent emperors went out of their way to destroy British Druidism . This is understandable if some of the Mysteries they took over from the Etruscans included religious beliefs about the Old Country . British Druidism would seem an abomination to them .
Architecture :
If you look carefully at Etruscan architecture (called Tuscan now) , you can see correlations with Minoan , Karnak and Carnac styles .
The Egyptians and Greeks were great copy-cats .
Look at the columns of their temples . They were too cheapskate to copy the taper from top-to-bottom Minoan look , so they tacked that ridiculous little flourish on top (see Ionion , Corinthian , Karnak styles)
Geomancy .
The western feng-shui . Not a well-known fact .
There is an extensive and well-developed western geomancy directly derived from the Etruscans via the Romans . The Greek version derived from the Minoans .
All cathedrals , without exception , were built according to these principles .
A whole plethora of rules about ratios , alignment with magnetic poles , etc , etc .
Most good architects are well aware of them , and keep to them . They usually make sense , and clients insist on them .
Traces of Atlantis.
If they used monoliths as pillars , the distinctive Minoan taper might be picked up on deep-sonar , deep-radar or gravitic sensors in the English Channel . Some elements might have been buried under deep silt from the Doggerland ground-mass , but the scouring action of the flood as the English Channel formed makes any small-piece survival unlikely . At the edges , maybe .
Their ship-building technology and architecture was copied quickly . There was no high-tech .
The only drawback is English snobbery . If it comes out that Atlantis was a suburb of London , we will never hear the end of it .
Andre
Andre Willers
2 Dec 2008
Where are the bodies ?
See New Scientist of 6 Nov 2008 p40 .
An interesting little problem .
There is a dearth of Mesolithic (circa 15 000 to 8 000 years ago) human skeletons in England . Even Neanderthals practiced some funerary rites , even if it only involved eating granny's stringy carcass salted with tears .
Discussion :
Let us step back to about 12 000 years ago . The lower sea-level (due to all the water locked-up in the ice-masses in the ice-age) made south-east England and the continent a contiguous land-mass . The English channel did not exist . In today's North Sea was a low lying 23 000 sq km landmass called Doggerland , nearly as big as England .
This has been mapped (see British Archaeological Reports number 31 , Archaeopress 2007 , by Gaffney et al) using seismic data from oil exploration companies .
Ireland was also contiguous with England (with maybe a narrow channel)
The Gulfstream meant that the southwestern regions had a fairly balmy climate . This became rapidly worse as you moved northwards . What is today England and Ireland were the highlands , ranging from heavily forested in the south to tundra and ice to the north .
Agriculture or domesticated animals had not arrived yet . Humans existed , and existed very well by fishing , fowling and hunting(mostly small game) . In the warmer and more fecund areas to the south , they were sedentary . As the living became more marginal in the colder areas to the north , nomadism increased .
Doggerland was a low-lying , marshy area teeming with birdlife and small game . Fishing abounded in the shallow waters .
If the trench between Ireland and England was open , the gulfstream would have branched up it . The surrounding areas would have been even more of a hunter-gatherer's paradise than Doggerland .
Population densities .
These can be surprisingly large , approaching agricultural levels . See Amerindian population levels in California pre-Spanish . At these levels it involves heavy use of what we call "sustainable ecological principles" . It really is farming , but not involving agriculture .
We are talking about a period of at least 5 000 years here , so there was plenty of time for the population to approach Malthusian and technological limits .
But the populations would be mostly around the coasts .
Funerary practices .
Being humans , every community would have different ones .
Recycling would be popular (cf Hindu , Pacific , African or Evenk sky-burial , where vultures do the honours) .
Burial , sea-burial , cremation , you name it .
Catastrophe .
Tsunamis were the major culprit .
As the temperature increased , big dams of melt-water built up behind the moraine-dams of the large glaciers bordering the north-sea . As they broke , huge waves washed over Doggerland without any warning whatsoever .
Underwater landslides contributed , as well as tectonic activity caused by plate-rebound as the ice burden eased .
Anything human was simply washed away . This included any graves . Any bones would have ended up on the bottom of the North Sea . Trawlers have dredged up human bones for more than a century .
Timeline :
About 9 000 years ago : the Irish Sea forms .
About 8 000 years ago : Doggerland disappears . The North Sea breaks through to form the English Channel . A huge mass of icy North Sea low-salinity water scoured a deep channel past Dover . This would have changed the weather for at least one season , as well as killed most sea-life .
Most surviving humans would have perished of hunger . (They had little in the way of food preservation , or reason to do so .)
Warfare for food left very few survivors .
(Present human civilizations would not survive such a fluctuation either.)
Note that the three known Mesolithic burial sites are on very high ground .
The Aftermath
The tsunamis continued for a thousand years or more . The survivors prudently avoided low-lying areas and eked out a miserable existence on the fortified hilltops . Things gradually improved as the climate became warmer and more stable . The tsunamis became infrequent . Immigrants from the continent brought the agricultural and domesticated animal civilization packages (a-la-Jared Diamond) .
Before you could say New Economic Paradigm , they were building graves that could not be washed away and seismic observatories .
(See http://andreswhy.blogspot.com "Nazca Lines and seismic prediction" )
Refugees .
This depends on their ship-building technology .
Even a small town can build sea-worthy ships .
The Vikings did it . So did the Greeks . Just about any civilization has done it . The question was: " Is there a profit in it?" A reason , apart from normal human inquisitiveness .
Trade (Cornish gold , tin and copper for Egyptian textiles springs to mind .) The foundations of the Bronze Age .
They had only to hug the coast around to Gibraltar to get into the Med .
Doggerland's major population centres would have been south of London , in the present English Channel .
The catastrophes described above did not happen all at once .
They would have seen their land being eaten up by the rising sea in the south and washed away by tsunamis in the north . (A bit like Florida).
Most would have stayed , assured by their priests and rulers that everything is under control . Those who left would not have gone to England , Ireland or France (too inhospitable) . Spain was better , but not very defensible . An island in a warm climate close to their main trading partner , Egypt ,would be ideal . Crete .
They would already have had trading outposts on Crete . The whole process probably took place about 8 000 to 9 000 years ago .(ie 6 000BC to 7 000BC) .
The Minoan and Egyptian civilizations then developed pari-passu into the Bronze Age .
Which is why the repopulation of England and Ireland proceeded so rapidly . The Minoans had ships and knew where all the mineral deposits were .
Atlantis .
(You didn't think you were getting away without another Atlantis , did you ?)
Plato's description of the destruction of Atlantis sounds like a horrified eyewitness account of a survivor of a tsunami . That rings true .
But he got it from an Egyptian source after about 5 000 years , who in turn got it from an Atlantean source . The periods involved get blurry .
Another puzzling feature is his insistence that the Atlanteans warred against the Athenians . The times don't match , even in his time-line .
But , remember , he was quoting an Egyptian account . From their viewpoint , Athenians were people from Athens (more specifically , the fortress of Akropolis) , not necessarily even Greeks .
The Akropolis had been a fortress since time immemorial .
He was also insistent that Atlantis was an imperially aggressive naval power . This fits in with the above speculation .
The Minoans aggressively established a trading empire across the Med .
An Outpost-Model , later copied by the Phoenicians , Portuguese , Dutch , etc. Characteristic of Sea Powers .
Thera .
Thera was a Minoan colony . Both it and the Minoan civilization was devastated by the explosion of the island and the resultant tsunamis on Crete .
Irony .
Etruscans .
An anomaly .
They were not molested by the Minoans or the Greeks . Even the Romans incorporated most of their civilization .
Likely a fundamentalist religious splinter group of the Minoans (ie Atlanteans) .
The timing seems about right . But well after the diaspora .
This would explain why the Romans were so determined to eradicate British Druidism . Normally , they tolerated just about any religion of a subject people (especially in the Republican era)
But Julius Caesar and all subsequent emperors went out of their way to destroy British Druidism . This is understandable if some of the Mysteries they took over from the Etruscans included religious beliefs about the Old Country . British Druidism would seem an abomination to them .
Architecture :
If you look carefully at Etruscan architecture (called Tuscan now) , you can see correlations with Minoan , Karnak and Carnac styles .
The Egyptians and Greeks were great copy-cats .
Look at the columns of their temples . They were too cheapskate to copy the taper from top-to-bottom Minoan look , so they tacked that ridiculous little flourish on top (see Ionion , Corinthian , Karnak styles)
Geomancy .
The western feng-shui . Not a well-known fact .
There is an extensive and well-developed western geomancy directly derived from the Etruscans via the Romans . The Greek version derived from the Minoans .
All cathedrals , without exception , were built according to these principles .
A whole plethora of rules about ratios , alignment with magnetic poles , etc , etc .
Most good architects are well aware of them , and keep to them . They usually make sense , and clients insist on them .
Traces of Atlantis.
If they used monoliths as pillars , the distinctive Minoan taper might be picked up on deep-sonar , deep-radar or gravitic sensors in the English Channel . Some elements might have been buried under deep silt from the Doggerland ground-mass , but the scouring action of the flood as the English Channel formed makes any small-piece survival unlikely . At the edges , maybe .
Their ship-building technology and architecture was copied quickly . There was no high-tech .
The only drawback is English snobbery . If it comes out that Atlantis was a suburb of London , we will never hear the end of it .
Andre
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
HyperSalt
HyperSalt
Andre Willers
25 Nov 2008
Synopsis:
Gourmet flavoured salts on the surface of foods can replace or complement sauces .
Discussion :
Health benefits :
1. Less salt is used , as the taste-buds are activated by the surface salt-flakes .
Only the surface of the food need to be coated (where the rubber hits the tar)
Precise intake of salt can be effectively done by salt-spoon (1 ml at a time).
2. Sauce-replacement .
Fats and carbohydrates in normal sauces can be replaced .
Really effective for those on Atkins diet or restricted fat-diet .
But , the killer is that better , more concentrated taste is possible .
It is a feedback mechanism . Too much salt taste is too salty , but other tastes can be orchestrated .
Unique tastes .
See http://andreswhy.blogspot.com "HyperTaste"
This can be done economically and effectively via HyperSalt .
The Social scene .
Most of the enjoyment of food in affluent societies is in the social ambience .
Discussing and comparing various flavours .
Adding another dimension like salt and all the different flavours , as well as hyper-flavours adds extra complexity .
This has already happened . Google "gourmet salt" and see what is on offer .
Woolworths(SA) has some nice gourmet salts in pressure sealed containers .
What is difficult to get are the salt spoons . (About R15 each at ceramic shops.)
Fleur de sel , sel gris and so forth . Like the wine scene .
This is in .
Below the salt .
This was used to denote social standing in medieval societies . But how to do it when there are many flavours of salts ?
Tom is below the Olive Salt , but above the Thyme Salt , but poor Dick is below the Garlic Salt . And Harry is below the HyperAllSpice .
The pretentious jargon overwhelms even the wine chatter .
Sachets of HyperSalts .
Like sachets of salt and pepper now .
This would be a real money-spinner .
Initially this would mean an increased salt intake , but later on the manufacturers would cut out the salt in the basic food (less expense) .
Animal feeds
Most salts are used as animal licks . Flavouring it would enhance value at little extra cost . Buy oak-smoked karoo veal straight from the womb.
Isn't biotechnology wonderful ?
Methane Burps and Salt .
Salt in solution is displaced by methane .
The result is massive salt deposition after methane burps .
This is especially noticeable in landlocked seas .
The cycle is dead organic matter to the bottom , anaerobic bacteria makes methane , a burp occurs and salt deposits on large scale . If there is oceanic inflow , the salinity approaches ocean norms . If not , fresh water results . Your attention is drawn to large fresh-water bodies (American lakes ,etc) . They all have layers of salt deposits at the bottom .
What about mid-oceanic burps in currents ?
The picture is then completely different .
A clathrate burp (like on the continental shelf of Eastern America) will precipitate the salt layers , but the effect will move with the current . At the moving edges , eddy currents will churn up nutrients from the bottom and cause an explosion of algae , plankton and even krill population growth .
Bio-mass increases exponentially .
Really good fishing .
Mini-burps .
The clathrates are held down by the weight of the dead bio-mass drifting down , but also increased by it . This leads to a cyclical process of mini-burps .
Increased fishing decreased the biomass drifting down , advancing the timing of the process . The disappearance of cod from the Newfoundland banks are then due to the fishes sensibly moving out as the methane concentration rises and the salinity decreases . An evolutionary survival switch .
A mini-burp need not be a catastrophic event . Slow and steady will do the job . This has probably been incorporated into fish life-cycles .
The last mini-burp was around the 10-12 centuries AD . Warmer climates due to methane release . Lots and lots of fishes , as discussed .
Has human actions made much of difference ?
Doubtful . We are in a mini-burp now . Nobody is looking at methane and salinity concentrations . They do notice the lack of fishies in their normal haunts , but with typical human hubris imagine that it is their fault . In the meantime , the system hardly notices them .
And so it goes .
Andre
Andre Willers
25 Nov 2008
Synopsis:
Gourmet flavoured salts on the surface of foods can replace or complement sauces .
Discussion :
Health benefits :
1. Less salt is used , as the taste-buds are activated by the surface salt-flakes .
Only the surface of the food need to be coated (where the rubber hits the tar)
Precise intake of salt can be effectively done by salt-spoon (1 ml at a time).
2. Sauce-replacement .
Fats and carbohydrates in normal sauces can be replaced .
Really effective for those on Atkins diet or restricted fat-diet .
But , the killer is that better , more concentrated taste is possible .
It is a feedback mechanism . Too much salt taste is too salty , but other tastes can be orchestrated .
Unique tastes .
See http://andreswhy.blogspot.com "HyperTaste"
This can be done economically and effectively via HyperSalt .
The Social scene .
Most of the enjoyment of food in affluent societies is in the social ambience .
Discussing and comparing various flavours .
Adding another dimension like salt and all the different flavours , as well as hyper-flavours adds extra complexity .
This has already happened . Google "gourmet salt" and see what is on offer .
Woolworths(SA) has some nice gourmet salts in pressure sealed containers .
What is difficult to get are the salt spoons . (About R15 each at ceramic shops.)
Fleur de sel , sel gris and so forth . Like the wine scene .
This is in .
Below the salt .
This was used to denote social standing in medieval societies . But how to do it when there are many flavours of salts ?
Tom is below the Olive Salt , but above the Thyme Salt , but poor Dick is below the Garlic Salt . And Harry is below the HyperAllSpice .
The pretentious jargon overwhelms even the wine chatter .
Sachets of HyperSalts .
Like sachets of salt and pepper now .
This would be a real money-spinner .
Initially this would mean an increased salt intake , but later on the manufacturers would cut out the salt in the basic food (less expense) .
Animal feeds
Most salts are used as animal licks . Flavouring it would enhance value at little extra cost . Buy oak-smoked karoo veal straight from the womb.
Isn't biotechnology wonderful ?
Methane Burps and Salt .
Salt in solution is displaced by methane .
The result is massive salt deposition after methane burps .
This is especially noticeable in landlocked seas .
The cycle is dead organic matter to the bottom , anaerobic bacteria makes methane , a burp occurs and salt deposits on large scale . If there is oceanic inflow , the salinity approaches ocean norms . If not , fresh water results . Your attention is drawn to large fresh-water bodies (American lakes ,etc) . They all have layers of salt deposits at the bottom .
What about mid-oceanic burps in currents ?
The picture is then completely different .
A clathrate burp (like on the continental shelf of Eastern America) will precipitate the salt layers , but the effect will move with the current . At the moving edges , eddy currents will churn up nutrients from the bottom and cause an explosion of algae , plankton and even krill population growth .
Bio-mass increases exponentially .
Really good fishing .
Mini-burps .
The clathrates are held down by the weight of the dead bio-mass drifting down , but also increased by it . This leads to a cyclical process of mini-burps .
Increased fishing decreased the biomass drifting down , advancing the timing of the process . The disappearance of cod from the Newfoundland banks are then due to the fishes sensibly moving out as the methane concentration rises and the salinity decreases . An evolutionary survival switch .
A mini-burp need not be a catastrophic event . Slow and steady will do the job . This has probably been incorporated into fish life-cycles .
The last mini-burp was around the 10-12 centuries AD . Warmer climates due to methane release . Lots and lots of fishes , as discussed .
Has human actions made much of difference ?
Doubtful . We are in a mini-burp now . Nobody is looking at methane and salinity concentrations . They do notice the lack of fishies in their normal haunts , but with typical human hubris imagine that it is their fault . In the meantime , the system hardly notices them .
And so it goes .
Andre
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs.
Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs.
Andre Willers
23 Nov 2008
Discussion :
Overview :
Hieroglyphs consist of
1.Ideograms (logograms (the pictures) and determinatives(silent organizers like our commas and punctuation marks , but a bit more extensive.)
2. Phonograms (alphabetic signs , biliterals (ie two sounds combined) , triliterals (ie three sounds combined) ).
3. Vowels e , o ,u were not catered for .
4. Consonants L and V were absent .
(Notice the dichotomy about L and R also seen in Chinese . This has an actual neurological root cause . During the paring-down phase of neural child-development , the tendency is toward either L or R . )
Evolution of Hieroglyphs :
Ideograms (picturograms) developed first , grouped in boxes .
Then the more efficient alphabet . But unlike Microsoft , they had to cater for backward compatibility of previous writings literally carved in stone over thousands of years .
The single quotation mark ( ' )
They did this by putting a vertical slash determinative in front of the glyph to denote that the hieroglyph must be taken literally (ie as a picture , not an alphabetical character) .
What is truly amazing is that this convention is still followed today after about 5 000 years . It is the single quotation mark . The closing single quotation mark developed later . The double quotation mark developed to handle an inflation of quotes .
This meant that the alphabetical system (30 characters) was a simple subset of the hieroglyphs , stable across literally thousands of years .
Ditto .( " )
Another survivor , beloved by bureaucrats . Two vertical slashes below a character denoted a duplicate . Exactly the same as today .
Reading/writing from the right .
The default was from right to left (still is for Arabic and Hebrew) .
This was determined by human handedness : only about 15% of humans are left-handed .
A right-handed person will hold the hammer in his right hand and the chisel in his left hand .
To accurately position the chisel-point , he has to work from the right to the left . (Try it and see.)
This bias was literally cast in stone .
When barbarians like the northern Greeks learned to write for commercial purposes , they used papyrus or skin with inked quils. It is much easier and more accurate to drag an inked-point from left to right than to push it the other way . (Ask any poor left-handed guy that grew up with pen-nibs) .
An interesting speculation :
It is too easy to spoil (by chipping) a whole stone-block by chiseling from left-to-right at the right-hand edge , and the other way at the left-hand edge . Thus , there was a niche for left-handed chisellers to close inscriptions on the left-hand edge of blocks .
The same would be true for any expensive material used as base .
There would be specialist openers and closers , with more journeymen in the middle .
The very term journeyman means this .
Cf Book of Kells .
This helps to explain the survival of handedness
It also means that there must be a roughly equivalent population percentage with extreme right-hand skills . Easily missed , because no is looking .
Stencils .
Important stones or documents were done with stencils .
A highly skilled scribe would plan and map out the lay-out . He would form a stencil of a line of hieroglyphs and transfer it to the stone . Skilled first-cutters would make the first cut . Then a horde of openers , middlemen and closers would descend on the slab and chisel out the rough cut , under the anxious supervision of the foreman . This is where a good opener and closer earned his keep . A single mistake could chip the edge and spoil the whole block .
Then bow-grinders smoothed the grooves . Finally , hand-polishing gave a professional finish . The whole process took a few hours per line .
The important thing to note is that once the stencil is laid in , the rest is by rote by many men of who need not be very highly skilled . None of this nonsense of one guy laboriously chiseling each glyph one-by-one .
Mistakes .
It depended on how important the client was . Mistakes were fudged . But if it was somebody important , the whole surface or block had to be re-sawn
(see http://andreswhy.blogspot.com “Ancient Egyptian Technology” )
Vellum could be scraped (but not for important legal documents : like tippex today) . Papyrus thrown away .
Clay tablets used in the Middle-East were cheap , but also easy to alter until they were baked . Security was an ever-present problem .
“Many a slip between the stylus and the oven” was probably an old Babelonian proverb .
Exactly the same problem as with encryption today .
A special class must have evolved to deal with this problem (like notaries) .
Imperial Language .
Like Latin , Egyptian Hieroglyphics was an Imperial language .
Subjects were forced to deal with it , but pidgin adaptations of the alphabetical-subset became the basis of Phoenician , Hebrew ,Arabic Greek ,Roman alphabets .
The radiative spread of the concept of an alphabet via mercenaries is well-known .
A very good question is : what about Minos ? The evidence suggests that Greek forms developed from Minoan forms . Thus , that Egypt and Crete had a master-client relationship .
Religion .
Religious concepts likewise radiated outward . Even today , many religions originating on the Mediterranean seaboard show heritages of Egyptian influence .
This is a contentious subject , so the following is pure speculation .
EL – the Middle Eastern name for God .
Egyptians could not pronounce L , so this was probably in resistance to the Egyptian imperialism . Egyptians would have pronounced “El” as “eeru” .
(The long ee is inferred from present pronounciations of “Isra-eel” by local populations .)
Babel would be b’abeeru .
The glyph they used for L was a lion crouching down .This can still be seen on the walls of Babel (the meaning is “City of God (B’ab’eeL)” ) .
Which came first is moot .
The concept of the Lion as King probably comes from this . It was conspicuously absent from the ancient Egyptian pantheon , probably because it is a less efficient predator than the hyena . (As the Sahara dried up , lions would have been squeezed between humans and hyenas . The lion-social structure is not as survival-fit as the hyena . There are still many more hyenas than lions around .
They are better at hiding and does not need such a large territory to survive .)
Another interesting omission at the top is the leopard , specifically the hominid hunting variants like Dino Felis .
But note cats and cheetahs . Egyptian favourites , but very watered-down versions of the wild article .
Remember , Egyptian religion was a very practical , ecologically orientated religion . Each significant animal had its own priesthood dedicated to its preservation .
HH , Tetragrammaton and Monotheism .
This might be controversial and is purely speculative .
(see http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/heh.htm )
The Egyptian gods (or principle) of Infinity were written as HH , with two forms : active (male: as in going on indefinitely ) and passive(female: as in enduring) .
An Egyptian would have written in a square block :
H H
H H
This original tetragrammaton ( a pleasing symmetry) would be shortened to
H H
" " (read ditto)
In Hebrew from right to left : " H " H
The second-from-right ditto sign , when written cursively in the Hieratic form between letters morphed to the Egyptian glyph for W (it looks like an extended question mark) .
The last-from-right ditto sign is not between any two letters and morphed to the Egyptian glyph for Y (it looks like two forward slashes ie // )
Hence YHWH .
But why monotheism ?
Arguing in language , an infinite god can only be one and one god must be infinite . Thus , HHHH must be monotheistic .
Arguing in mathematics , refer to Kantor , Weierstrass , Dedekind (all 19 th century AD) . May you have joy of it , since the Omega-infinity argument brings you straight back to the original language point .
The Israelites .
It might thus be argued that they were not so much an ethnic group as a sect that skipped town just in front of the Egyptian equivalent of the inquisition .
Palm-fronds .
HH is shown with a palm frond as a headdress , and a palm frond in his hand . The palm frond symbolizes infinity . Hence the use of palm leaves in the New Testament to indicate either the God or a representative (ie a priest) .
Laying down palm-leaves for Jesus to walk on was a direct challenge to the Sanhedrin and the Romans , and they responded accordingly .
Andre
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Appendix A .
Caution:
Personalities with obsessive-compulsive tendencies trained in the Roman , Greek , Hebrew or Arab alphabets can (and have been) sucked into spiraling compulsive study of Egyptian hieroglyphs .
The reason is that these alfabets all descended from a subset of the hieroglyphic system .
This not-too-big difference is sufficient to trigger that “tip-of-the-tongue” feeling : ie it activates the predator-prey response . This is , of course , a variant of the obsessive-compulsive system .
So much for that .
Sources :
An excellent introduction is
"Discovering Egyptian Hieroglyphs" by K . Zauzich
ISBN 0-500-27694-3
This is the second English reprint of the German original .
This means that quite a number of people have been sucked into this compulsive behaviour .
And of course , the Internet . But do serious cross-checking .
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Andre Willers
23 Nov 2008
Discussion :
Overview :
Hieroglyphs consist of
1.Ideograms (logograms (the pictures) and determinatives(silent organizers like our commas and punctuation marks , but a bit more extensive.)
2. Phonograms (alphabetic signs , biliterals (ie two sounds combined) , triliterals (ie three sounds combined) ).
3. Vowels e , o ,u were not catered for .
4. Consonants L and V were absent .
(Notice the dichotomy about L and R also seen in Chinese . This has an actual neurological root cause . During the paring-down phase of neural child-development , the tendency is toward either L or R . )
Evolution of Hieroglyphs :
Ideograms (picturograms) developed first , grouped in boxes .
Then the more efficient alphabet . But unlike Microsoft , they had to cater for backward compatibility of previous writings literally carved in stone over thousands of years .
The single quotation mark ( ' )
They did this by putting a vertical slash determinative in front of the glyph to denote that the hieroglyph must be taken literally (ie as a picture , not an alphabetical character) .
What is truly amazing is that this convention is still followed today after about 5 000 years . It is the single quotation mark . The closing single quotation mark developed later . The double quotation mark developed to handle an inflation of quotes .
This meant that the alphabetical system (30 characters) was a simple subset of the hieroglyphs , stable across literally thousands of years .
Ditto .( " )
Another survivor , beloved by bureaucrats . Two vertical slashes below a character denoted a duplicate . Exactly the same as today .
Reading/writing from the right .
The default was from right to left (still is for Arabic and Hebrew) .
This was determined by human handedness : only about 15% of humans are left-handed .
A right-handed person will hold the hammer in his right hand and the chisel in his left hand .
To accurately position the chisel-point , he has to work from the right to the left . (Try it and see.)
This bias was literally cast in stone .
When barbarians like the northern Greeks learned to write for commercial purposes , they used papyrus or skin with inked quils. It is much easier and more accurate to drag an inked-point from left to right than to push it the other way . (Ask any poor left-handed guy that grew up with pen-nibs) .
An interesting speculation :
It is too easy to spoil (by chipping) a whole stone-block by chiseling from left-to-right at the right-hand edge , and the other way at the left-hand edge . Thus , there was a niche for left-handed chisellers to close inscriptions on the left-hand edge of blocks .
The same would be true for any expensive material used as base .
There would be specialist openers and closers , with more journeymen in the middle .
The very term journeyman means this .
Cf Book of Kells .
This helps to explain the survival of handedness
It also means that there must be a roughly equivalent population percentage with extreme right-hand skills . Easily missed , because no is looking .
Stencils .
Important stones or documents were done with stencils .
A highly skilled scribe would plan and map out the lay-out . He would form a stencil of a line of hieroglyphs and transfer it to the stone . Skilled first-cutters would make the first cut . Then a horde of openers , middlemen and closers would descend on the slab and chisel out the rough cut , under the anxious supervision of the foreman . This is where a good opener and closer earned his keep . A single mistake could chip the edge and spoil the whole block .
Then bow-grinders smoothed the grooves . Finally , hand-polishing gave a professional finish . The whole process took a few hours per line .
The important thing to note is that once the stencil is laid in , the rest is by rote by many men of who need not be very highly skilled . None of this nonsense of one guy laboriously chiseling each glyph one-by-one .
Mistakes .
It depended on how important the client was . Mistakes were fudged . But if it was somebody important , the whole surface or block had to be re-sawn
(see http://andreswhy.blogspot.com “Ancient Egyptian Technology” )
Vellum could be scraped (but not for important legal documents : like tippex today) . Papyrus thrown away .
Clay tablets used in the Middle-East were cheap , but also easy to alter until they were baked . Security was an ever-present problem .
“Many a slip between the stylus and the oven” was probably an old Babelonian proverb .
Exactly the same problem as with encryption today .
A special class must have evolved to deal with this problem (like notaries) .
Imperial Language .
Like Latin , Egyptian Hieroglyphics was an Imperial language .
Subjects were forced to deal with it , but pidgin adaptations of the alphabetical-subset became the basis of Phoenician , Hebrew ,Arabic Greek ,Roman alphabets .
The radiative spread of the concept of an alphabet via mercenaries is well-known .
A very good question is : what about Minos ? The evidence suggests that Greek forms developed from Minoan forms . Thus , that Egypt and Crete had a master-client relationship .
Religion .
Religious concepts likewise radiated outward . Even today , many religions originating on the Mediterranean seaboard show heritages of Egyptian influence .
This is a contentious subject , so the following is pure speculation .
EL – the Middle Eastern name for God .
Egyptians could not pronounce L , so this was probably in resistance to the Egyptian imperialism . Egyptians would have pronounced “El” as “eeru” .
(The long ee is inferred from present pronounciations of “Isra-eel” by local populations .)
Babel would be b’abeeru .
The glyph they used for L was a lion crouching down .This can still be seen on the walls of Babel (the meaning is “City of God (B’ab’eeL)” ) .
Which came first is moot .
The concept of the Lion as King probably comes from this . It was conspicuously absent from the ancient Egyptian pantheon , probably because it is a less efficient predator than the hyena . (As the Sahara dried up , lions would have been squeezed between humans and hyenas . The lion-social structure is not as survival-fit as the hyena . There are still many more hyenas than lions around .
They are better at hiding and does not need such a large territory to survive .)
Another interesting omission at the top is the leopard , specifically the hominid hunting variants like Dino Felis .
But note cats and cheetahs . Egyptian favourites , but very watered-down versions of the wild article .
Remember , Egyptian religion was a very practical , ecologically orientated religion . Each significant animal had its own priesthood dedicated to its preservation .
HH , Tetragrammaton and Monotheism .
This might be controversial and is purely speculative .
(see http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/heh.htm )
The Egyptian gods (or principle) of Infinity were written as HH , with two forms : active (male: as in going on indefinitely ) and passive(female: as in enduring) .
An Egyptian would have written in a square block :
H H
H H
This original tetragrammaton ( a pleasing symmetry) would be shortened to
H H
" " (read ditto)
In Hebrew from right to left : " H " H
The second-from-right ditto sign , when written cursively in the Hieratic form between letters morphed to the Egyptian glyph for W (it looks like an extended question mark) .
The last-from-right ditto sign is not between any two letters and morphed to the Egyptian glyph for Y (it looks like two forward slashes ie // )
Hence YHWH .
But why monotheism ?
Arguing in language , an infinite god can only be one and one god must be infinite . Thus , HHHH must be monotheistic .
Arguing in mathematics , refer to Kantor , Weierstrass , Dedekind (all 19 th century AD) . May you have joy of it , since the Omega-infinity argument brings you straight back to the original language point .
The Israelites .
It might thus be argued that they were not so much an ethnic group as a sect that skipped town just in front of the Egyptian equivalent of the inquisition .
Palm-fronds .
HH is shown with a palm frond as a headdress , and a palm frond in his hand . The palm frond symbolizes infinity . Hence the use of palm leaves in the New Testament to indicate either the God or a representative (ie a priest) .
Laying down palm-leaves for Jesus to walk on was a direct challenge to the Sanhedrin and the Romans , and they responded accordingly .
Andre
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Appendix A .
Caution:
Personalities with obsessive-compulsive tendencies trained in the Roman , Greek , Hebrew or Arab alphabets can (and have been) sucked into spiraling compulsive study of Egyptian hieroglyphs .
The reason is that these alfabets all descended from a subset of the hieroglyphic system .
This not-too-big difference is sufficient to trigger that “tip-of-the-tongue” feeling : ie it activates the predator-prey response . This is , of course , a variant of the obsessive-compulsive system .
So much for that .
Sources :
An excellent introduction is
"Discovering Egyptian Hieroglyphs" by K . Zauzich
ISBN 0-500-27694-3
This is the second English reprint of the German original .
This means that quite a number of people have been sucked into this compulsive behaviour .
And of course , the Internet . But do serious cross-checking .
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Hibernation and Cryogenics
Hibernation and Cryogenics
Andre Willers
19 Nov 2008
Discussion :
Jessica Palmer pointed out on the 16th Nov 2008 that the primary problem with cryogenics seems to be in the re-establishment of metabolic processes after un-freezing .
But we have an already existing template for doing exactly that .
Hibernation .
See Appendix A
The evolutionary explanation is that during the transition-phase from methane/sulfur to oxygen atmosphere (circa 1.5 bn years ago) , there was a major advantage in suspending oxygen-driven systems if the organism found itself in a non-oxygen environment . It went into hibernation .
At the same time , alcohol was being excreted as a poison (like oxygen) . The ancestors of mitochondria (who could use low concentrations of oxygen or alcohol ) sought refuge in cells whose cell-walls were resistant (but not impervious) to alcohol transition .
Remember , alcohol is completely soluble in water , but oxygen is not . This difference drove the process . Alcohol concentrations in water could grow large , but oxygen-concentrations could not .
Mitochondria earned their keep by mopping up alcohol first and later converting oxygen to ATP . (The glucose and ketone metabolism came after this) . The ketone metabolism has never been very popular , because of the high loss-rate in excretory products , but has been kept as a third string on the bow . (Utilization of fat and protein-muscle reserves during low-glucose periods. )
Mitochondria thus has an exclusive preference of usage : alcohol , glucose , ketones in that order .
From experimental evidence (see Appendix A) , there is a genetic switch sensitive to the concentration of H2S to bring both the host cell and the mitochondrium to a state where all programmed molecular activity is suspended . (The power is switched off) .
But , of course , random beth(0) molecular activity due to temperature does not cease . Uncontrolled and anaerobic reactions still occur .
Freezing:
We get rid of most anaerobic organisms first .
Lots of sulfur , VitC and alcohol (fermented berries or carbohydrates in the stomach . A low acidity is required in the run-up to hibernation)
Then freeze .
Starting the contraption up again is a bit of a problem .
1. The power-plant :
The mitochondria needs to be primed with their preferred fuel (alcohol)
Oxygen needs to be infused .(Hyperbaric chamber)
2. Garbage disposal
The cellular garbage-disposal systems need to be activated . ATP from the powerplant needs to be allocated to breakdown-product disposal before the ATP is allocated to DNA/RNA production processes .
The garbage-disposal uses mechanisms that use sulfur to create the various vacuoles and ropes (cf mitosis) . Enough sulfur is vital .
Once again , oxygen and alcohol is used . Both are recognized by all systems as poisons to be removed as a first priority . They activate a quite sophisticated garbage-disposal system as H2S concentrations decrease .
3 . Flushing
All that garbage has to flushed away , preferably not through the kidneys or liver .
Use machines .
As H2S concentrations decrease , damage might occur due to PH fluctuations . Acidity (H2SO4 , etc) Buffering would be advisable .
4. Temperature:
Lots of water at 105 to 107 Fahrenheit for mammals , pulsing at pulserate(about 90 cycles per minute .)
This is to activate the chaperone systems and discourage opportunistic viruses .
5. Music
See http://andreswhy.blogspot.com “Music”
Play harmonious music so the vibrations can be felt throughout organism being thawed . This enhances timing-procedures by orders of magnitudes . Emergent order .
(A Beth(0.x) effect . )
The de-hibernization process must have an exact program at molecular level to reboot the cellular metabolism . Precisely what you need after a cryogenic procedure .
But its efficiency (ie your chance of survival) can be boosted by orders of magnitude by using the steps above .
Interesting notes:
1. Do hibernating animals like bears use alcohol-producing cells in their bloodstream to time hibernation? This can be tested .
2. Are there cold-chaperone molecules ? There should be .
3. Hibernation is easy . Nature has done all the hard work . Keeping the mechanism ticking over at a very slow rate enables cellular-garbage clearing for a relatively short period (6-8 months)
4. De-cryogenics is a bit harder , Beth(1) intervention is needed .
5. Alcohol-concentrations : we are talking about 1% to 2% imbibing . About 0.06% inside the cell . Ie , the cell-wall protects by a factor of about 30
6. Pulse-Cryogenics : alternate freezing and hibernation to get a better survival factor . For those who are too stupid to design a zero-entropy system .
Try : Life=negative entropy . Non-life = positive entropy . Design it so the sum is zero .
Andre
Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Appendix A
From http://andreswhy.blogspot.com “ Birdflu Update-4” dated 29 Oct 2005
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Suspended Animation (the real thing!)
In 2005, Mark Roth and other scientists from the University of Washington and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle demonstrated that mice can be put into a state of suspended animation by applying a low dosage of hydrogen sulfide (80 ppm H2S) in the air. The breathing rate of the animals sank from 120 to 10 breaths per minute and their temperature fell from 37 °C to 2 °C above ambient temperature (in effect, they had become cold-blooded). The mice survived this procedure for 6 hours and afterwards showed no negative health consequences.
Such a hibernation occurs naturally in many mammals and also in toads, but not in mice. (Mice can fall into a state called clinical torpor when food shortage occurs). If the H2S-induced hibernation can be made to work in humans, it could be useful in the emergency management of severely injured patients, and in the conservation of donated organs.
As mentioned above, hydrogen sulfide binds to cytochrome oxidase and thereby prevents oxygen from binding, which apparently leads to the dramatic slowdown of metabolism. Animals and humans naturally produce some hydrogen sulfide in their body; researchers have proposed that the gas is used to regulate metabolic activity and body temperature, which would explain the above findings
Dosages of H2S:
Treatment involves immediate inhalation of amyl nitrite, injections of sodium nitrite, inhalation of pure oxygen, administration of bronchodilators to overcome eventual bronchospasm, and in some cases hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
Exposure to lower concentrations can result in eye irritation (because of the high alkality of the SH- anion), a sore throat and cough, shortness of breath, and fluid in the lungs. These symptoms usually go away in a few weeks. Long-term, low-level exposure may result in fatigue, loss of appetite, headaches, irritability, poor memory, and dizziness. Higher concentrations of 700-800 ppm tend to be fatal.
· 0.0047 ppm is the recognition threshold, the concentration at which 50% of humans can detect the characteristic rotten egg odor of hydrogen sulfide [2]
· 10-20 ppm is the borderline concentration for eye irritation.
· 50-100 ppm leads to eye damage.
· At 150-250 ppm the olfactory nerve is paralyzed after a few inhalations, and the sense of smell disappears, often together with awareness of danger,
· 320-530 ppm leads to pulmonary edema with the possibility of death.
· 530-1000 ppm causes strong stimulation of the central nervous system and rapid breathing, leading to loss of breathing;
o 800 ppm is the lethal concentration for 50% of humans for 5 minutes exposition (LC50).
Concentrations over 1000 ppm cause immediate collapse with loss of breathing, even after inhalation of a single breath.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Andre Willers
19 Nov 2008
Discussion :
Jessica Palmer pointed out on the 16th Nov 2008 that the primary problem with cryogenics seems to be in the re-establishment of metabolic processes after un-freezing .
But we have an already existing template for doing exactly that .
Hibernation .
See Appendix A
The evolutionary explanation is that during the transition-phase from methane/sulfur to oxygen atmosphere (circa 1.5 bn years ago) , there was a major advantage in suspending oxygen-driven systems if the organism found itself in a non-oxygen environment . It went into hibernation .
At the same time , alcohol was being excreted as a poison (like oxygen) . The ancestors of mitochondria (who could use low concentrations of oxygen or alcohol ) sought refuge in cells whose cell-walls were resistant (but not impervious) to alcohol transition .
Remember , alcohol is completely soluble in water , but oxygen is not . This difference drove the process . Alcohol concentrations in water could grow large , but oxygen-concentrations could not .
Mitochondria earned their keep by mopping up alcohol first and later converting oxygen to ATP . (The glucose and ketone metabolism came after this) . The ketone metabolism has never been very popular , because of the high loss-rate in excretory products , but has been kept as a third string on the bow . (Utilization of fat and protein-muscle reserves during low-glucose periods. )
Mitochondria thus has an exclusive preference of usage : alcohol , glucose , ketones in that order .
From experimental evidence (see Appendix A) , there is a genetic switch sensitive to the concentration of H2S to bring both the host cell and the mitochondrium to a state where all programmed molecular activity is suspended . (The power is switched off) .
But , of course , random beth(0) molecular activity due to temperature does not cease . Uncontrolled and anaerobic reactions still occur .
Freezing:
We get rid of most anaerobic organisms first .
Lots of sulfur , VitC and alcohol (fermented berries or carbohydrates in the stomach . A low acidity is required in the run-up to hibernation)
Then freeze .
Starting the contraption up again is a bit of a problem .
1. The power-plant :
The mitochondria needs to be primed with their preferred fuel (alcohol)
Oxygen needs to be infused .(Hyperbaric chamber)
2. Garbage disposal
The cellular garbage-disposal systems need to be activated . ATP from the powerplant needs to be allocated to breakdown-product disposal before the ATP is allocated to DNA/RNA production processes .
The garbage-disposal uses mechanisms that use sulfur to create the various vacuoles and ropes (cf mitosis) . Enough sulfur is vital .
Once again , oxygen and alcohol is used . Both are recognized by all systems as poisons to be removed as a first priority . They activate a quite sophisticated garbage-disposal system as H2S concentrations decrease .
3 . Flushing
All that garbage has to flushed away , preferably not through the kidneys or liver .
Use machines .
As H2S concentrations decrease , damage might occur due to PH fluctuations . Acidity (H2SO4 , etc) Buffering would be advisable .
4. Temperature:
Lots of water at 105 to 107 Fahrenheit for mammals , pulsing at pulserate(about 90 cycles per minute .)
This is to activate the chaperone systems and discourage opportunistic viruses .
5. Music
See http://andreswhy.blogspot.com “Music”
Play harmonious music so the vibrations can be felt throughout organism being thawed . This enhances timing-procedures by orders of magnitudes . Emergent order .
(A Beth(0.x) effect . )
The de-hibernization process must have an exact program at molecular level to reboot the cellular metabolism . Precisely what you need after a cryogenic procedure .
But its efficiency (ie your chance of survival) can be boosted by orders of magnitude by using the steps above .
Interesting notes:
1. Do hibernating animals like bears use alcohol-producing cells in their bloodstream to time hibernation? This can be tested .
2. Are there cold-chaperone molecules ? There should be .
3. Hibernation is easy . Nature has done all the hard work . Keeping the mechanism ticking over at a very slow rate enables cellular-garbage clearing for a relatively short period (6-8 months)
4. De-cryogenics is a bit harder , Beth(1) intervention is needed .
5. Alcohol-concentrations : we are talking about 1% to 2% imbibing . About 0.06% inside the cell . Ie , the cell-wall protects by a factor of about 30
6. Pulse-Cryogenics : alternate freezing and hibernation to get a better survival factor . For those who are too stupid to design a zero-entropy system .
Try : Life=negative entropy . Non-life = positive entropy . Design it so the sum is zero .
Andre
Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Appendix A
From http://andreswhy.blogspot.com “ Birdflu Update-4” dated 29 Oct 2005
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Suspended Animation (the real thing!)
In 2005, Mark Roth and other scientists from the University of Washington and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle demonstrated that mice can be put into a state of suspended animation by applying a low dosage of hydrogen sulfide (80 ppm H2S) in the air. The breathing rate of the animals sank from 120 to 10 breaths per minute and their temperature fell from 37 °C to 2 °C above ambient temperature (in effect, they had become cold-blooded). The mice survived this procedure for 6 hours and afterwards showed no negative health consequences.
Such a hibernation occurs naturally in many mammals and also in toads, but not in mice. (Mice can fall into a state called clinical torpor when food shortage occurs). If the H2S-induced hibernation can be made to work in humans, it could be useful in the emergency management of severely injured patients, and in the conservation of donated organs.
As mentioned above, hydrogen sulfide binds to cytochrome oxidase and thereby prevents oxygen from binding, which apparently leads to the dramatic slowdown of metabolism. Animals and humans naturally produce some hydrogen sulfide in their body; researchers have proposed that the gas is used to regulate metabolic activity and body temperature, which would explain the above findings
Dosages of H2S:
Treatment involves immediate inhalation of amyl nitrite, injections of sodium nitrite, inhalation of pure oxygen, administration of bronchodilators to overcome eventual bronchospasm, and in some cases hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
Exposure to lower concentrations can result in eye irritation (because of the high alkality of the SH- anion), a sore throat and cough, shortness of breath, and fluid in the lungs. These symptoms usually go away in a few weeks. Long-term, low-level exposure may result in fatigue, loss of appetite, headaches, irritability, poor memory, and dizziness. Higher concentrations of 700-800 ppm tend to be fatal.
· 0.0047 ppm is the recognition threshold, the concentration at which 50% of humans can detect the characteristic rotten egg odor of hydrogen sulfide [2]
· 10-20 ppm is the borderline concentration for eye irritation.
· 50-100 ppm leads to eye damage.
· At 150-250 ppm the olfactory nerve is paralyzed after a few inhalations, and the sense of smell disappears, often together with awareness of danger,
· 320-530 ppm leads to pulmonary edema with the possibility of death.
· 530-1000 ppm causes strong stimulation of the central nervous system and rapid breathing, leading to loss of breathing;
o 800 ppm is the lethal concentration for 50% of humans for 5 minutes exposition (LC50).
Concentrations over 1000 ppm cause immediate collapse with loss of breathing, even after inhalation of a single breath.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
The End of the Arms Trade
The End of the Arms Trade
Andre Willers
12 Nov 2008
In http://andreswhy.blogspot.com “Financial Crisis 2008 : Exchange Rates. The Arms-Trade “ it was noted without proof that this crisis means the end of the arms-trade .
Why ?
Credit is the life-blood of the arms-industry .
There can be no trust . Payment has to up-front in cash (small fry) or guaranteed by large financial houses . But this credit has now dried up .
The inhibition of recovery in the arms-trade results from the strict international credit controls being formulated and implemented as we speak . Being international , it will be much more difficult to circumvent than the old “end-user licence” protocols .
But , more important , under Social-Capitalism , the long-term costs of messes like the DRC for the short-term gains of a few interested parties , is contra-productive .
It is extremely ironical to note that the entire industry is Collateral Damage .
Sovereign States .
US , Britain , France , Russia , China and India are the largest arms-dealers , using third-world countries as entropy-dumps to offset some of their costs . Most of their arms-deals would not pass even a cursory creditcard-check . They ignored each other’s transgressions in the past .
But now the whole credit business is bound up in much larger concerns . Now it will pay them to watch each other like hawks to see that no one gets an illicit advantage .
The system has shifted into a new attractor basin .
An unintended consequence will be the enhancement of the Military-Industrial Complex . The loss of minor income from the sale of obsolete equipment will be more than compensated for by the great increase in monitoring credit-compliance , which will be necessitated by the new international protocols . No state will trust each other . There will be huge scope for International Security Firms (our old Military-Industrial Complex in a new guise .) Ecological compliance will be thrown in for good measure.
Short-term consequences .
At first ammunition and spares , then arms gets more expensive , then unobtainable . Bandit-groups and “on-spec” revolutionists will get increasingly desperate . They must attack and win immediately , or perish . So there will be surge of violence . Like in the DRC now . All sides are feeling the pinch as ammunition is drying up .
What about the huge stockpiles of AK47’s and ammunition ?
Gone . The ex-USSR stockpiles were all dumped into the third-world during the 1990’s . The present supply are newly manufactured , subject to the credit provisos .
An example :
In a Reuters report dated 12/11/2008 the Russian Deputy Prime Minister of Defence (Sergei Ivanov) stated that Russian arms manufacturers are experiencing cash-flow problems . The liquidity crunch left some unable to meet payrolls or contracts .
They will need loans from state banks .
This is happening to all arms manufacturers . A highly risk-averse credit system will not deal with manufacturers who sell to the risky retail trade .
Note the “disarmament” in the 1930’s depression . Companies with state-contracts (like Hurricanes , Spitfires) survived . But many others did not . This appeared on statistics like a disarmament .
But it was only a concentration on quality .
In the 1990’s it was the USSR only in the crunch . Now it is the whole world . They might be desperate to sell , but there is no credit . And no stockpiles . Manufacturing costs will have to met from credit .
The whole system is reacting differently .
Organised Crime
They have the skills . But there are other factors .
See in http://andreswhy.blogspot.com “Money : Human Growth rates”
Beth(-1) can be described as Fear-Command economies .
Growth rate is less than 0.8%
Feudalism and Organized Crime can be described as Beth(-1) .
The only ones that do survive for a time are ones that use bubble-technology . They let a group bubble up , create wealth , then conquer them . But this has to be finely judged . Sooner or later they make a mistake , and the bubble takes them .
In any case , Organised Crime is highly unstable , since they can make more money by going legitimate (the bubble subsumes them) . Their normal growth rate is pitiful (all that control and squashing of initiative eats up profit)
But it flourishes in Beth(0) societies , where the growth rate is not much higher .
South Africa is a good example .
Feudalism is more like Pure Socialism . The Aristocracy is the State , and everybody works for them . But they can’t compete against societies with a higher growth-rate (ie beth(n>0) ) . Cf Sparta and Athens , Incas and Spaniards , USSR and US .
Andre
Andre Willers
12 Nov 2008
In http://andreswhy.blogspot.com “Financial Crisis 2008 : Exchange Rates. The Arms-Trade “ it was noted without proof that this crisis means the end of the arms-trade .
Why ?
Credit is the life-blood of the arms-industry .
There can be no trust . Payment has to up-front in cash (small fry) or guaranteed by large financial houses . But this credit has now dried up .
The inhibition of recovery in the arms-trade results from the strict international credit controls being formulated and implemented as we speak . Being international , it will be much more difficult to circumvent than the old “end-user licence” protocols .
But , more important , under Social-Capitalism , the long-term costs of messes like the DRC for the short-term gains of a few interested parties , is contra-productive .
It is extremely ironical to note that the entire industry is Collateral Damage .
Sovereign States .
US , Britain , France , Russia , China and India are the largest arms-dealers , using third-world countries as entropy-dumps to offset some of their costs . Most of their arms-deals would not pass even a cursory creditcard-check . They ignored each other’s transgressions in the past .
But now the whole credit business is bound up in much larger concerns . Now it will pay them to watch each other like hawks to see that no one gets an illicit advantage .
The system has shifted into a new attractor basin .
An unintended consequence will be the enhancement of the Military-Industrial Complex . The loss of minor income from the sale of obsolete equipment will be more than compensated for by the great increase in monitoring credit-compliance , which will be necessitated by the new international protocols . No state will trust each other . There will be huge scope for International Security Firms (our old Military-Industrial Complex in a new guise .) Ecological compliance will be thrown in for good measure.
Short-term consequences .
At first ammunition and spares , then arms gets more expensive , then unobtainable . Bandit-groups and “on-spec” revolutionists will get increasingly desperate . They must attack and win immediately , or perish . So there will be surge of violence . Like in the DRC now . All sides are feeling the pinch as ammunition is drying up .
What about the huge stockpiles of AK47’s and ammunition ?
Gone . The ex-USSR stockpiles were all dumped into the third-world during the 1990’s . The present supply are newly manufactured , subject to the credit provisos .
An example :
In a Reuters report dated 12/11/2008 the Russian Deputy Prime Minister of Defence (Sergei Ivanov) stated that Russian arms manufacturers are experiencing cash-flow problems . The liquidity crunch left some unable to meet payrolls or contracts .
They will need loans from state banks .
This is happening to all arms manufacturers . A highly risk-averse credit system will not deal with manufacturers who sell to the risky retail trade .
Note the “disarmament” in the 1930’s depression . Companies with state-contracts (like Hurricanes , Spitfires) survived . But many others did not . This appeared on statistics like a disarmament .
But it was only a concentration on quality .
In the 1990’s it was the USSR only in the crunch . Now it is the whole world . They might be desperate to sell , but there is no credit . And no stockpiles . Manufacturing costs will have to met from credit .
The whole system is reacting differently .
Organised Crime
They have the skills . But there are other factors .
See in http://andreswhy.blogspot.com “Money : Human Growth rates”
Beth(-1) can be described as Fear-Command economies .
Growth rate is less than 0.8%
Feudalism and Organized Crime can be described as Beth(-1) .
The only ones that do survive for a time are ones that use bubble-technology . They let a group bubble up , create wealth , then conquer them . But this has to be finely judged . Sooner or later they make a mistake , and the bubble takes them .
In any case , Organised Crime is highly unstable , since they can make more money by going legitimate (the bubble subsumes them) . Their normal growth rate is pitiful (all that control and squashing of initiative eats up profit)
But it flourishes in Beth(0) societies , where the growth rate is not much higher .
South Africa is a good example .
Feudalism is more like Pure Socialism . The Aristocracy is the State , and everybody works for them . But they can’t compete against societies with a higher growth-rate (ie beth(n>0) ) . Cf Sparta and Athens , Incas and Spaniards , USSR and US .
Andre
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