The first time is eerie, the N'th time banal

Haggard can be a fun read. He's the father of the mysterious lost land genre of adventure story, and although he's very far from PC he always tried to make sure that the natives were human--some vile and some more noble than the hero.

King Solomon's Mines introduced Alan Quatermain, who proved popular enough that Haggard wrote over a dozen more books about him. Haggard killed him off in one book, but wound up writing more anyway. And She had several sequels as well. Magic and reincarnation and Isis pop up all the time. (And I'm afraid a sampling of sequels suggests that they suffer from the usual deterioration.)

In The Ivory Child he sets the character for one lady by having her make mysterious pronouncements about her and the hero's lives having been connected before they were born, with a "mystic look come into her face."

That may have worked well enough a hundred years ago to outline a fey woman of mystery, but today it conjures images of a bored woman whose life hasn't been exotic enough and who has read a book of pop mysticism. Jarring. I'm not sure I'll finish it.

Didn't think of pictures in time

The past few years Google has found for me the records of many helpful people who found a problem and documented them for the aid of others.

The driver's window switch in my V6 Saturn (the gas mileage of a V6 combined with the get-up-and-go of a 4-cylinder) failed, so that the window would roll down but not up. This is unacceptable in winter. The shop said it would be O($200) to repair it. I found a few step-by-step fix-its on-line; none concerning the model I had.

I popped the switch console out and fiddled with it, bought a dental-probe affair and disassembled the last bits of the switch, cleaned out the melted plastic and swapped switches and it works.

And, after snapping it all back in place, I realized that I had missed the chance for a public service. I forgot to take pictures.

Without pictures... I'll try anyway.

Fixing the power window switches in a Saturn V6 console.

A switch console pries out easily from its location between the front seats, and if you can't figure out how to get the cable unconnected yourself just push it back in and don't bother reading any further.

The switch console has two rocker switches (and a lock switch as well if it's the driver's side console). It is made of an electronics board sandwiched inside three snap-together plastic housings, each held to the next with 6 tabs. A thin flat screwdriver and a little twisting will detach the housings from each other. Pop off the "lock" switch tab and the rocker switch heads.

Standing up high on the electronics board are the business parts of the two rocker switches, each held on with 4 tabs that you cannot pry away without using something like a dental probe. I bought some probes (not sharp) and found the plastic quite soft. I was able to pry the upper part of the switch loose from the tabs on one side easily, after which it came off quickly. I've never seen switches quite like it--the bottom (soldered to the board) part held two channels each with a metal strip (3 contacts underneath it) and the upper part of the switch had two short stubs that pressed against these metal strips--except that one stub was melted and the corresponding strip was covered above and below with melted crud. I scraped the strip and the contacts under it clean using a tiny flathead screwdriver, replaced the bad upper switch with the identical one on the same console, and reassembled all the bits.

Figuring it out took the longest time, and cleaning it came second. Reassembly was about 3 minutes. Strictly speaking this isn't a fix but a hack that swaps a heavily used switch for a lightly used one. But the window works now.

Heroin "statistics"

I went to a school session on heroin use in the area. The bulk of the time was taken up with a movie in honor of a DeForest youth who OD'd last year. The movie wasn't very illuminating--I already know heroin was bad--but his mother (who made the movie) was there and I decided against complaining.

Heroin overdoses are rising, and so are associated deaths--the majority aged between 16-30 and most of those out of high school. They advertise a medication that, delivered promptly, cures an overdose, but there aren't many doctors qualified to "prescribe" it to a heroin buddy. Overdoses are pretty easy to measure: you count the hospital/morgue visits and add a factor from repeat requests for the Narcan. The ratio of overdoses to deaths was about 10:1 in Madison and Sun Prairie.

Not all their statistics were quite as trustworthy. They had numbers on Oxycontin abuse and other drug abuse in middle and high school that are apparently self-reported. Umm, I think I want a little more info.

Apparently Oxycontin is easy enough to get hold of that it makes a good gateway drug.

One other little number was dramatic by its absence: the ratio of users to overdosers. I trotted back and forth a bit online to try to get a ballpark estimate and it looks like of order 50-25:1. (Don't use that number anywhere, OK?) Which would make heroin use remarkably dangerous, so maybe I made a mistake. But if I didn't then that means 250-500 addicts in a town of 16,000. Apparently there are two aspects to habituation: the brain's changes to lead it to expect opiates, and the rest of the body's changes, in particular the respiratory system. The brain takes a year or more to clear itself, but the body recovers in a few days. Which means that after being on the wagon for a week, the same dose you took before could kill you. At least so they say.

The story arc was that middle and upper middle class youth were starting to abuse Oxycontin et al in school, but finding the supply limited, were migrating to heroin. The supply of heroin is greater, but it winds up costing a great deal. Upper middle class kids typically were preying on family and friends, and turning to dealing.

The numbers weren't quite consistent from slide to talk. At one point they were talking about doses for $25, and another for $150. A factor of 6 seems pretty large to be a habituation effect.

The state is into "harm reduction" and provides paper lunch bags with heroin kits, and encourages addicts to never shoot up alone. I wonder what the overall effect is. The harm for any given addict is presumably less, if he isn't sharing infected materials, but if the addiction rate rises it isn't instantly clear that we've reduce the harm. (I'd not expect the rate of addiction to rise immediately. Instead I'd expect a period in which the bags slowly grow more normal in the background, and then a rise.)

Simple googling didn't find me the sorts of n-tuples I like to work with, so I'll let this be a back-burner mystery for a while longer.

General Philosophy by David Elton Trueblood

One nice thing about vacations is you can catch up on reading. I don’t like to think how long ago I first started this book.

This was part of my father’s library, and has some of his underlining in a couple of chapters.

As the title suggests, it is an overview of philosophy. Trueblood emphasized the back and forth questioning of issues, and filled it with illustrative quotations with appeals to read the original author. "The best way toward greatness is to mix with the great." Dialog is one of the best ways to sharpen your own thoughts, and he tries to approximate that in the book.

Samples:

A.N. Whitehead, The Function of Reason "Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study."

Or his own words in the penultimate chapter, on Society

The ultimate enemy is not any of these things or events to which we usually refer. The most terrible enemy is triviality. No society will be a good one, no matter how adequately people are fed and clothed, if it is not a society in which men and women can be made to feel, without deception, that their lives are important.
…

The ideal social order, then, must include many things, but three are preeminent. It must include freedom; it must include order; it must include a sense of meaning.

The book was an interesting journey through the to and fro of debate about the limits of proof and determinism and chance, and what can be built on the foundation of the certainty of error. (If you know that at least somebody in a debate has to be wrong, what can you infer about the existence of an objective order?)

He spends more time than warranted on the Oxford group that followed Wittgenstein, but their approach (philosophy is merely the study of the grammar and never tried to figure out if propositions are true or false) isn’t so much of a live issue these days. Which was inevitable.

It was fun to see where I fit in the spectrum, but I have a lousy memory for names and I'd have to re-read it to make sure I had the labels right.

Read it. Though perhaps Trueblood would say "Read Plato and Temple and..."

State and Church and Family

So 43 Catholic groups are suing the feds over the health insurance mandate rules.

Good for them. The mandate was unwarranted, and unConstitutional on the face of it. Together with the earlier (unanimously defeated by the Supreme Court) effort to make the government the arbiter of who is and who is not a religious employee, these are strong indicators that the movers and shakers in DC want full sovereignty, with no other pesky institutions competing for loyalty.

I understand why statists (setting aside the power-hungry; bureaucrats and politicians tend to become addicted to power) want a society with a clear power center and no pesky independent institutions: there's no confusion, and the beneficent rule of law can be applied everywhere. But that presupposes that that "rule of law" is always benign, and that the state has the right to override other institutions at will, and not just in emergency.

For example, consider a religion that believes the sun won't rise unless there are human sacrifices. That's an emergency. Consider another that believes that white people are rebellious androids made by a black genius, and that won't let white people join. That's not an emergency by any stretch. Consider another that teaches that you have been invaded by alien parasites and need to spend tens of thousands of dollars on therapies. OK, that's pretty dubious (France and Germany agree, btw).

I don't think the statists are all that concerned with the smaller religions, or even the big ones (like Southern Baptists) that aren't that organized. But the Catholic church really gets up their nose.

Family loyalties aren't spelled out in statutes or canon laws, but what do you do without them? They can go too far, as when jurors refuse to convict someone of their tribe. But if you allow that the state has the right to spell out those limits, the state likewise has the right to modify them at will. And if the culture discourages them substantial fractions of our children are ill-raised. (Easily observed, btw)

The relationships between the various institutions in our society are not clearly defined. Though historically the state and religion and tribe were often united, they were not always, and certainly are not united in the United States now. I wonder how many of us remember what a terrifying horror an utterly sovereign state can be. Or the chaos of multiple tribes in conflict. We hear plenty about the dangers of religion(*)--disproportionate to the real situation here, though it is serious enough in places like Saudi controlled Arabia.

I wonder how united we can remain without some sort of philosophical consensus on what the limits to power are. The old agreement is still available if we want to try it again.

---

(*) I've argued before that statism is a variety of religion, but I leave that out here for brevity.

Need to know

Kodak had an enriched uranium reactor in a basement for decades. It was a neutron source for research; safe with no danger of melt-downs, and no leaks. "Small plates of highly enriched uranium multiplied the neutron flow from a tiny californium core." Even (perhaps especially) when it was decommissioned there was no whisper of what was going on. After 2001 the rules changed, but even before then the US was very careful about information about the location of enriched uranium. The most dangerous time was after decommissioning and during transportation, when the 3 1/2 pounds of enriched uranium was loose for the first time.

Of course the neighbors never knew, nor did most of the employees, nor, I gather, did the city emergency officials. Nor, of course, did the Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

Hat tip to the Cranky Professor

Forbidden fruit?

I know I should have reported on this before, but I went for an apple.

High fructose diet hampers memory! Well, sort of. It was a combination study looking at the effects of deficiencies in n-3 fatty acids (omega-3?) and added fructose. This changed insulin levels and other chemicals I’m not familiar with, which isn’t a big surprise and not the point of the headlines. The authors posit that excess insulin monkeys with brain membrane fluidity (at minimum—have a look for yourself).

I skipped the chemical level details to go to the good stuff. They divided the rats into 4 samples, with 6 rats in each sample. (Alarm bells) Some got normal diets and some got low omega-3 diets. Each of these groups was further divided into sets that got extra fructose and not. The difference in weight gain was minor. Before the diet, the groups were tested on a maze. Before you ask:

All surfaces were routinely cleaned before and after each trial to eliminate possible olfactory cues from preceding animals.

That’s good, but I wonder how sensitive rat noses are. (Maybe high sugar levels decreases sensitivity?)

They measured "latency" time, which I suppose this is how long it took the rats to run the maze. They trained the rats on the maze for 5 days, gave them 6 weeks of the special diet, and then tested them again one day. Their result was that the high omega-3 diet without extra fructose rats ran at pretty much the same rate as the last time, those with low omega-3 or high fructose didn’t run the maze quite as fast, and those with both low omega-3 and high fructose even less rapidly. The lights over the maze were bright, to encourage the rats to find a way out quickly. (Maybe high-fructose diets leave rats feeling more laid-back and not so irritated by light?)

Figure 1 is very odd. A shows that all rats tended to run the maze in about the same time by day 5: about 40 seconds if I read the graph correctly. B shows that the good diet rats ran it in 20 seconds on the average 6 weeks later. Something doesn’t add up.

Also notice how huge the errors are in A until they converge by day 4. One sample averaged twice as fast on day 4 as on day 5. Those large errors are consistent with the authors’ interpretation of forgetfulness, since one sees large errors on the 6-week later test samples also.

Figure 2 shows the correlation between serum triglyceride levels (and insulin resistance) and the "latency". Except for one flier (is it the same animal both times?) the high and low omega-3 diet (both low fructose) rats seem to have the same speed running the maze. It is interesting that the insulin resistance level seems to have a cleaner correlation with "latency" than the serum levels do. I suppose that’s consistent with the authors’ interpretation that excess insulin changes the brain, so the overall resistance, a proxy for the history of insulin exposure, would be more important than the triglyceride levels of the moment.

This is flawed, and does not justify the headlines. It needs more work, and to address some of the alternative interpretations I mentioned.

I hope it doesn’t pan out. The folks who know what’s good for you (FWKWGFY) already say we shouldn’t eat meat (canine teeth must have no reason for existence), and now fruit is supposed to be bad too. Next year it will be vegetables.

Inexact computers

Let's see if I can do this one without looking at the report. Researchers found that with pruning computers could be made much more energy efficient at the price of some accuracy.

The concept is deceptively simple: Slash power use by allowing processing components — like hardware for adding and multiplying numbers — to make a few mistakes. By cleverly managing the probability of errors and limiting which calculations produce errors, the designers have found they can simultaneously cut energy demands and dramatically boost performance.

Let me guess.

Digital devices like computers use electrical pulses to represent bits. These are typically square wave pulses. When the clock tick comes, if the voltage is beyond some threshold (WAG 1.6V), that's a "1", otherwise it's a "0". There will always be a little distortion, and even a perfect square wave at one end of a bit of wire will be a bit blurry by the time it reaches the end. Over a long enough wire the blurriness might drop the voltage at the clock tick below the threshold, and a "1" could turn into a "0". So you want the voltage enough higher than the threshold value and the distances short enough to keep things clean and accurate. And that clock tick needs to be clean and sharp too.

But, the more jumping up and down the voltage does the more energy turns into heat.

You can cut down on the heat by lowering the voltage. If you lower it too much you start to get occasional errors. Tradeoff.

I think you can also cut down on the heat by giving up on square waves. A perfect square wave is a sum of the sine wave with the same frequency and an infinite sum of higher frequency waves--and those higher frequency components have to contribute to the heat. So if you use a blurrier wave you could be more efficient too--but again at the cost of some accuracy.

Sometimes accuracy isn't that critical--you can get "good enough" results, as the article shows. For those kinds of applications, this can be very useful--but don't try it for your orbit calculations.

So. Let me go to Rice and have a look...

One example of the inexact design approach is "pruning," or trimming away some of the rarely used portions of digital circuits on a microchip. Another innovation, "confined voltage scaling," trades some performance gains by taking advantage of improvements in processing speed to further cut power demands.

Ok, I'm not a computing guru. I completely forgot about error correction circuits. And I'm not sure if they mean the same thing by "confined voltage scaling" as I suggested above. I can't find their paper at the conference web site :-(

Majorana

Neutrinos are so hard to detect and so low mass that one question that you'd think was easy hasn't been answered in the 80 years since Majorana proposed it: does a neutrino have a distinct anti-particle? Electrons do, no question, likewise protons, muons, and so on. Photons don't. The "anti-particle" for a photon would be another photon exactly out of phase with it. (Which is to say that the photon would never exist at all, since it would be cancelled at every point by the other photon.) You could say similarly that a π+ and π- are each others' antiparticles; they are composite particles and their quark content is the mirror image of the other (up and anti-down quark vs anti-up and down).

But the neutrino is so hard to pin down that we can't tell. What would you get if two did annihilate? They're neutral, so photons don't couple to them very easily. (Photons can couple to "W" particles which in turn couple to neutrinos, but adding more links in the chain makes it less likely to happen.)

You can try a trick.

But first...

When a nucleus has a radioactive decay that releases an electron (or a positron which is just an anti-electron), it also releases a neutrino. Since momentum and energy are conserved, the recoil of the nucleus and the energy of the electron tell you about the energy of the neutrino (which... ooops... you didn't see, so we call it "missing energy" Creative names, right?). Put the atom in a crystal lattice so it can't recoil easily (so its kinetic energy will be trivially small). That makes the problem much easier; it is more like a 2-body problem. Now measure the energy of the electron. Do it again and again and again and look at the distribution. If the neutrino's mass were a little larger you could see the edge of the distribution of electron energies drop to zero a little faster than if it were massless. That's a tough experiment, and hasn't been successful yet. We know the neutrino has mass, but it is so small that this method hasn't spotted it yet.

Now pick something even rarer: nuclear decays that toss out 2 electrons at once (not one after another!) Only a handful of nuclei do that. Most of the time you expect 2 neutrinos as well, but if the neutrino is its own antiparticle sometimes the neutrinos will annihilate each other and you only get 2 electrons, with no "missing energy". These experiments have been tried for years without success, but there's a new one that's a little more ambitious. It is still a prototype, but the final system (if it works well enough to build) will have a ton of germanium-76 crystals inside multiple layers of shielding and detectors. Natural radioactivity in the rock will add a background of random energy in the system unless you shield against it carefully, and cosmic rays dump in energy and sometimes catalyze nuclear reactions to boot--so you want to detect them on the way in and veto against them: "A cosmic ray just went through the system so don't look at anything for a few microseconds."

If Majorana was right the Standard Model of particles will need some revision. We know the model isn't complete, but it works very well anyhow. Any revision has a hard row to hoe to do as well.

Counterexamples?

A mathematical model says 9% of mammals in the Western hemisphere won't outrun climate change. I can't find the original article--I don't think it has been released yet. They especially worry about monkeys. There've been a few substantial cold snaps in the not-too-distant past, and some of the transitions are supposed to have only been a thousand years or less. The missing bit here is "how long are these researchers assuming the changes will take?" 100 years? 1000? If 1000 years, I wouldn't believe them--the fact that the animals are there at all says they can weather changes like that.

Outdoor services

A knot of about 80 people were on the west corner of the capitol square singing songs about recalling governor Scott Walker. The second one I heard was based on "Down by the riverside" and the first was also based on an old spiritual.

At first I thought it was a bit odd, but on reflection realized that they were still religious songs, rewritten for a different religion. No doubt there was a sermon too.

How sharper than a spider's tooth

How does a spider bite work?

Although their armour consists of the same material as their predator’s fangs, flies, grasshoppers and other insects that are the usual prey of spiders have little to offer by way of defence against the spider’s bite.

The answer, according to some Max Plank researchers, is that the fang's layered and reinforced structure beats ordinary layers of chiton. I've never seen a spider fang close up before: go look.

There are still lots of obvious questions lying around loose for people to study. A few years ago someone asked: why do fingernails tear across rather than randomly (in general), and found that they're made of layers of oriented proteins. Long before the advent of nail clippers or scissors, we needed to have fairly reliable nails... And I, like probably vast numbers before me, remember staring semi-crosseyed at bathroom tiles to get a 3-d effect--but never went the extra step to try to make 3-d images (Magic Eye).

So I ought to have suggestions--they'd be obvious, after all...

In the dirt at last

The tomato and pepper seedlings have been popping in and out of the house for the last month. "What's the forecast? Bring them in." But the time has finally come to give them a home, and the garden has some new denizens: "One for the cutworm, and one for the crow, one for the taxman, and one to grow." Or something like that.

The calendulas returned so prolifically that there were enough to edge a whole other section of the garden. I'm not sure what calendulas are, but I think I got the right patch.

The maple roots are strangling one garden so we're moving tulips out before turning it and adding some decent dirt again. I hope tulips don't need a lot of depth--I landed some above a buried stump. (The other buried stump is easily spotted by the luxuriant crop of mushrooms.)

My better half says that children should learn to garden: "There's no better way to make the connection between hard work and eating."

Survivalist Spectrum

Just for laughs I googled "survivalist spectrum" and wouldn’t you know it, the spectrum that topped the list was declared to be sort-of political (the sustainable vs the well-armed).

What sparked the query was a nagging question that finally surfaced: "Why do people buy gold shares?" I’ve seen them advertised for several years and didn’t pay much attention. The ads are getting more pervasive, and I finally spent a minute thinking about them. Gold is one thing, gold shares another. You can hide gold in the backyard if you like and it’ll have some value in almost all scenarios, but gold shares have no value unless there’s still a functioning banking system and the government hasn’t gone all Order 6102 on us.

Governments suffer the besetting temptation to seize things that don’t belong to them, and bullion stock in gold shares firms beckons. Thus gold shares are only really valuable until the government starts hurting for income or starts soak-the-rich theater (only against the non-cronies, of course).

Even plain old gold isn’t always as useful as advertised. Imagine—TSHTF and you’ve got yourself a pantry of canned goods and trading booze, and a couple of Krugerrands. You need a new axe handle and some nails, so you go to what’s left of the lumberyard to buy some. What are you going to get in change? Do they even carry that much change? You need a bank to get full use of your gold, and some sort of currency system.

The spectrum I had in mind was more along the lines of the degree of preparedness and how major an upheaval you expect.

For the moment ignore the folks who don’t prepare.

At the near end you have those of us who keep a week’s worth of canned goods on hand and have an emergency kit available. This is "dual use" preparedness: good for when a blizzard shuts down the roads and also good for camping trips. We have a lot more of the latter than the former, fortunately. And no gold, so don’t bother burglarizing the place, OK?

At the far end you have the fortress farm with a jack of all trades who has ammo for a hundred years. You hope he never gets appendicitis.

Scenarios abound, of course. What sort of assumptions do you make? Will there still be a flow of fertilizer and pesticides at prices farmers can afford, and fuel for food transport? I can’t easily find a listing of fertilizer plants, but it isn’t hard to come up with scenarios in which the number is regulated back and the price turns unaffordable; and in a major downturn there might not be any way to build new ones in time. That would be very bad.

If there are jobs but not good ones, with just enough food to keep body and soul together, then knowing how to make do and having neighbors you can trust is the largest part of preparation. And being adaptable. We’ve been there before—most of the world lives like that.

If you just think this will be a 10-year downturn and we’ll be back on our feet again afterwards, then it makes sense to invest in business property and congressmen, and try to hang on. If you think cities are headed for Detroit-ization, business property is the last thing you need.

I’ve already written what I suspect about the zombie apocalypse.

Lensing gamma rays

Gamma ray lenses? A team at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich created a silicon prism that slightly deflected gamma rays with an effective refractive index of 1.000000001. Using gold instead of silicon should increase it quite a bit: If this is Delbruck scattering as they think, then since the scattering goes as Z to the fourth power (Z is the atomic number of the nucleus), the refractive index would go to 1.000001. Not big, but it could be useful.

X-rays can be focused, apparently using multiple very small lenses, or using "zone plates" (or see this). I think you could get better luminosity by using x-ray channeling in slices of crystal tilted at angles that increase with distance from the center of the lens--but I never figured out how to fabricate one easily/cheaply, and the best focus you'd get would be of the order of the size of the crystal slices. (I was thinking of uses in dental x-ray systems, where you could increase the intensity in the interesting direction without increasing the power and total radiation dose.)

Update: FWIW, I didn't remember anything about Delbruck scattering when I read this; all I know I learned from looking it up for the occasion. And the "SciTechDaily" site made hash of the story, so I didn't link them. Gamma ray wavelengths are smaller than the size of atoms, so it isn't surprising that any sort of bending would be small.

When a mammoth isn't

The story seemed surprising: I'd heard years ago that Cretan mammoths were tiny. But it is alleged that the original story was based on flawed DNA analysis. The detailed study of teeth and fore"arms" confirms that they were mammoths after all. 3.7 feet high and 680 pounds isn't quite terrarium size, but that's about 1/30 the size of its northern brothers.

I remember the old article claiming that on one of the islands the remains were only about 5000 years old, and another (much older) article suggesting that the cyclops legends rose from elephant skulls (which look sort of like there's a big hole in front which might be for an eye).

Tidal heating

An astrobiologist at UW-Seattle claims that the "habitable zone" (where water can be liquid) around red dwarfs isn't quite as large as you'd guess from naive luminosity estimates, because the planets have to orbit so close to the cool star that tidal forces will heat the planet's core. As the planet rotates different parts get squeezed (the popular article fails to mention that, btw), and friction heats the rock; at least until the planet's rotation decreases to the point where it keeps one face at the star all the time (tidal locking). Then the only squeezing comes from the different forces at different times in a non-elliptical orbit (which the article does describe).

It seems plausible. But the devil is in the details. Some back-of-the-envelope with how long tidal locking would take with an earth-sized planet at half Mercury's orbit and a star 1/10 the Sun's mass gives about 6E10 years. If that's the timescale for heating I don't think the temperature would rise much. But I may be leaving something out, and there's a fair bit of tweaking room. For example, at 1/10 of Mercury's orbit, the time scale is only 4 million years. And my model of an iron planet isn't very realistic (I only get 100 degrees C rise). It would take a few days work to research a decent model, and it is getting late at night...

Growing electronics

Magnetic bacteria may help build future bio-computers! If that were so, "your computer has a virus" might be an even more disastrous diagnosis than it is now. Instead the BBC story suggests that one can use bacteria to grow electronic components. After all, if the bacteria can grow little crystals of magnetite, can't they be induced to grow larger structures? Think slime molds and go nuts.

Of course further down in the story you read about bacteria making tiny parts of disks-- presumably tiny read/write heads--without details about how you persuade them to add coils and electrodes.

Details, details.

For the English teachers out there

The stages of grading:

Stage II presents with mild but steady localized pain, mostly along the GI tract, and an inability to concentrate. Despair is still contained, but it’s eyeing the lymphatic system’s freedom train. Women are "co-modified." Men are "discluded." Role models are "immolated." Passages are "taken out of context due to objective reality." "Often times" is everywhere.

Pull your forelock

I was going to marvel at the thoughts of our betters in the Massachusetts school board, but Texan99 beat me to it and said it better.

Bake sales are so middle-class...

Football explained

This is the only collection I could find, of Peter Sinclair's earlier work. He got better with time.

I guess the poor guy's world-view didn't have room for threats from outside: he descended into Trutherism after 911 and I haven't heard of him since. A pity--he did some nice work.

Don't eat me, CD47

The "New drug could potentially shrink and cure all tumors" headline is a bit excessive, though the report is very interesting. Possible side effects will immediately occur to you.

The treatment uses an antibody that blocks the 'do not eat' signal that's usually displayed on tumor cells and coaxes the immune system to destroy cancer cells.

Leukemia cells produce higher levels of the CD47 protein than healthy cells. It's a marker that will block the immune system from destroying healthy blood cells. Cancers take advantage of this by using it to trick the immune system into ignoring them.

CD47 is found on every human primary tumor that the team has tested. The researchers transplanted human tumors into mice. Once the rodents were treated with anti-CD47, the tumors shrank and did not spread.

I don't understand their Figure 2A/B on survival rates with high and low CD47 tumors, which don't seem consistent, and not all the approaches gave statistically significant results.

And (drum roll please) the tumors were human tumors in mice (at least if I understand what "xenotransplantation" means). So once the "don't eat me" proteins were gone the mouse phages should be pretty good at getting rid of alien cells. The next test should be with mouse cancers, though that will be a longer study. And then long term studies to see what gets accidentally eaten during the treatment....

Zombie ants

The pictures of zombie ants are gruesome enough for the M rating ("not before Meals"), but the report is encouraging. Ant colonies are defended against the parasitic brain-controlling fungus by a regime of thorough grooming and by another parasitic fungus in ants that attacks the brain-controlling one. "Because the hyperparasitic fungi prevents the infected zombie-ant fungus from spreading spores, fewer of the ants will become zombies."

When did you last wash your hands?