Monthly Archives: November 2017

Antibody to the last resistant strain of free thought

Prose and Poems

Ignorant or uninformed:
You lack awareness of your shortcoming —
blissfully trapped in a box of self-restricted thought —
not to be antistream or unacceptable, sculpted protein for attention, calculated personality for procreation. Preprogrammed, color-coded, point —
seven-five waist to hip ratio —
what is it you don’t want to see? You’ve barely groped the cancerous tits of self-awareness and she’ll tease you to the end —
never return the favor. No. Ignorance implies there was at some point a flicker of knowledge discarded because it doesn’t make sense in the context of prefabricated thought —
squeeze your thumbs for another drip, another episode —
30 milligrams of enlightenment from the Nielsen IV —
a classroom full of future shrinks —
antibody to the last resistant strain of free thought.

AEM sometime in the 1990s

Tiny minds create a tiny god

Apologetics, Rants

“There is no avoiding the fact that we live at the mercy of our ideas This is never more true than with our ideas about God.”
This is a quote by Dallas Willard. I think it speaks to why we need an “omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent “entity” [0-0-0] to be the goal and center inspiration of our lives.
It is pretty clear to me that what we know, we do not worship, and so the mere act of thinking one understands what the 0-0-0 is then we move that entity out of our worship zone into the “trash” of our own understanding and out ideas about that 0-0-0 in reality become limited and tainted by our own ability to think. In this very sense man “creates” a god that becomes fraught with human emotions, and biases, and unconscious prejudices, and fear and judgement.
The ideation of god is critical to how mankind sees himself and others.
When our god(s) are selfish, indulgent, vengeful, we get what we have now on the planet, and it is not pretty. (there are wonderful thinkers too, and for them i am grateful, it allows me to have an 0-0-0 being so far above and beyond that it becomes comforting. at the same time, i run the risk of being too far removed that the 0-0-0 doesn’t function for me.)
I have come to think there is a “boundary of life/self/0-0-0” in all of our minds. I see it in a very commonplace way. Some people think that their sphere of existence only includes their automobile, they keep it clean and polished but through their trash out the window onto the streets.  There are others with a slightly larger sphere of “life/self/0-0-0” which includes their home and family. They keep their house tidy and their families cared for. The real thinkers in my humble opinion, are those who think of “life/self/0-0-0” as being infinite. These are the world changers for the better because they revere (worship is a tainted word) the entirety of existence and are NOT apt to violate or trash anyone, any group, or anything in the cosmos.  Kudos to those who can think beyond the tiny sphere that they occupy, they with their own microbiome.

Length, width, height, depth, thickness orientation?

Layered intracisternal protein granules in mammalian lung, Rants

This is hysterical. I wanted to describe the granule found in alveolar type II cells.  I would have liked to use the distance between two outer dense layers of this regularly layered structure, which is 100nm as width, but find i need to use the word height.  I had googled before which dimension is listed first, width or height for a standard rectangle…. and as i recall and as most people have given me measurements (yes for a different job, different hobby… making stained glass patterns) for width x height, and in that order…  Portrait orientation being given as 8 x 10  or 8.5 x 11 etc etc.

So there is also the convention to use the word “length” for the longest aspect of a object. In the case of the protein granules in alveolar type II cells of some species, the long aspect can be many microns, or alternatively the granule can be short and stacked with many repeating “periods” having great height.  If one uses only the “longest dimension” to connect with the concept of length then one gets into problems of orientation.

The question is then: what word do i use for the length in the direction parallel to the granule layering to describe it.  And, do I use height or width to describe the 100nm thickness of the layered “period” or “periodicity” that can be a single unit or repeats over and over.

One would think that after thousands and thousands of years of language development that some very basic words for important stuff would have been established, but as i googled it, it becomes very apparent that they have not.  For my purposes…. I will use the scheme above.

Other issues include convention by vocation, e.g., clothiers, tailors, lumbering, carpentry. In the graphics industry, it is width x height.  As one blogger put it nicely (and to which I can certainly attest) best ask to be sure, otherwise it comes back to bite you.

 

 

Hexagonal pattern in protein granules in alveolar type II cells of the ferret

Electron microgaphs of lung, Layered intracisternal protein granules in mammalian lung, The cell: images, Ultimate order, the cell

Hexagonal pattern in protein granules in alveolar type II cells of the ferret — yes still working on this. This image is from new sections, new microscope, but the results are the same. Image on top is unretouched, image in bottom i have burned what i see as a hexagonal pattern in this layered intracisternal granule.

Indy Monumental Marathon Nov 4 2017

Rants

I ran this race. I wasn’t the last, but i marveled this morning about how empty the sentiment was at the bottom of my timing ticket.  “no award”  I am not saying anything about the managers of this marathon event, but everything about how we interpret our circumstances, our accomplishments, our lives. Something is wrong when “no award” is the take-home message for a New Years resolution for 2017, and 8 months of hard work accomplished..shame on me…and how can i fix that attitude. At 74 it is a little late trying to fix it, but i remain hopeful. I look at my division placement… i came in last/i came in second…both are correct, but i see only the former.

Kroger, what a pain.

Rants

This is the fourth time in a month that I have purchased grapes at a Kroger store, twice in Hyde Park Cincinnati, once on Wooster Pike in Cincinnati, and once at the Kenard Street Kroger. Whats with them? do they think that all people are so scatter-brained that they don’t understand when there is fraud going on. Four times I have purchased grapes, each time the signs say $1.79/lb, but at checkout, there is always something wrong as the price rings up. Once the grapes were over 3 dollars a lb. Today, because this had happened three times before, and I calculated some astronomical amount of profit if every one of Krogers many stores scammed the public for 20c a lb for grapes and it equated to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I looked so closely at the prices today, and the tags… “red, green and black grapes, $1.79/lb. I get to checkout and what happens…. the same pricing error, U-scan checked me out with $1.99. So there, 5 lbs of grapes and they made a dollar off me. AND a dollar off YOU, and  I complained, and the manager went to the grape bin and just as i said…. there were three signs…. red, green and black grapes, all $1.79. He did credit me, he did say he would change the signage — will it happen, well likely not before Kroger rakes in a few more hundred thousands on unsuspecting customers. Shame on you Kroger.

Why is it?

Prose and Poems

Why is it i no longer see the destiny of man
But the source code of an impervious future
Or the vanity of a culture that has perfected itself
And taken the credit

Why have you forsaken me with this vision
Existence condemned to a single thought
Futility that inspires repressed animal aggression

What force drives the trivial motion of your incognizant machine?
AEM sometime in the late 1990s-early 2000s

Dunkin Donuts sausage egg wrap:

Health - opinions, Rants

yeow…. if you are glutamate, monosodium glyutamate or glutamic acid sensitive, don’t eat this. I got a reaction within about 10 minutes… thats just nuts… and it neither looks like the picture nor tastes good, and it sure is more than .89c  wonder where internet got this pix.  ha ha… reposting here with credits to anonymous.

Before you pitch your old electron microscope –

Electron microgaphs of lung, Rants

Before you pitch your old electron microscope -consider these observations.

Firstly, the human brain is a marvelous (and anticipatory) machine. You can scan at break neck speed past grid bars and open space (as one has to do when one is doing electron microscopy on the lung when it has been fixed by inflation) and the section goes by in focus.  That is an amazing computational skill.  If you want to waste time, scan your grid in a newer digital image scope (I used an Hitachi this morning) and i wasted half my scope time waiting for the monitor to update the image so i could tell what i just passed.  Scanning by space and grid bars to find what I wanted to look at closely, and the computer is so slow at updating the images, made me realize that waiting for smear after smear of grey blur took up an inordinate amount of time andleft me feeling like i would have been better off with my old binocular viewport and my old seimens 1A microscope.

Secondly, while the function of automatic bright-dark adjustment is a nice though… again, it is very very annoying. My eyes and brain don’t need to make those contrast changes, they are automatic, and instantaneous. The lighter tissue next to a black grid bar means manual adjustment there, and the second you move more central in the grid space, it changes again.  Not to reiterate the obvious, but the brain does a tremendous job of adjusting, and filtering, and adapting…..  this scope didn’t even come close.

Digital image procurement on transmission electron microscopes (at least this Hitachi at children’s hospital) is a big time gobbler, and is still very very promitive.  and certainly as viewed on the monitor hold no candle to film.

Thirdly, time, how much wasted time. This was supposed to be a time saver, but it recall it took about 14 small steps to capture an image on film with the Elmiskop 1A, but in fact it was less than a few seconds to perform all tasks, on this Hitachi I wait for the final image, i wait for the menu to save comes up, i hunt for the keys in the dark to label (or not label) the image, I wait for the screen to refresh.  It took me less time to write the grid and block numbers in a log book and snap the picture on my antique electron microscopy.

I remember during one “annual review” when an unnamed director was in charge and he mentioned to me that i wasn’t doing enough to get new equipment…. he gave me a bad annual review…. i think because i told him it wasn’t the scope that limited microscopists, it was they 2$ eyes.  I like technology…. but not for the sake of technology.  I like technology when it is an improvement.

I will take the old baby on the left any day of the week.

 

Monumental task: Indianapolis Monumental Marathon

Health - opinions, Rants

woa that was a hard run today (Nov 4 2017) a cool-ish 40-50 degrees and only a tiny mist now and then, otherwise OK weather.  I finished 26.2 miles in …. 5hr 22min, not speedy, but passable for someone 74. One fellow i saw around mile 5 had a World Vision tee shirt on, next time i run anything i will make if for World Vision charity like he did…i didn’t even know I could do that.  I saw another man in a yellow tee (around mile 20) with Isaiah 40:31 printed on the back, i tapped him on the shoulder and said…. I know this verse…. and i do not feel “lifted up on eagle’s wings” he laughed and said “and I am about to faint”  ha ha.