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22.8.16

Camille Paglia on the Tim Hunt dispute

TIm Hunt has achieved great merrits for the discovery of cell cycle regulating proteins. This was an enormous contribution to understand embryonal development and malignant diseases, and was acknowledged with a nobel award to him and two other scientists some years ago. In 2015, however, all of Tims achievements were judged dispensible by the UCL London in view of a few political non-correct remarks he did about girls in science.

I have to ask Camille Paglia about her opinion on this case.

17.8.16

Asynchrony

When parts of a larger system seem to follow their individual time. This can confuse a human being totally, since we got used to experience time as an absolute parameter. We can easily imagine that for instance different temperatures occure (like in the kitchen it is hotter near the oven than near the sink). But we simply can not imagine that time runs faster near the oven than near the sink. Imagine that the water drops from the tap falling down the sink much slower (like in slow motion) than the drops of water that fall of the tea pot. Sometimes such effects are exploited in computer-generated movies, such as "Inception", but also in TV commercials. Than one sees the main actor moving around in an environment where time is frozen to a single moment. One is reminded of brother Grimms fairy-tale "Sleeping Beauty", when the prince enters the hidden castle and sees everything has fallen in a hundred years lasting sleep. Not only all people and animals are sleeping, but even the flames of the kitchen fire have stoped instantly and seem to be frozen. 

Whereas it is not so easy for us to fully understand the concept of physical relavity as discovered by Albert Einstein, it is easy to manipulate images or video sequences such a way that separate objects follow their own time schedule.

The image below, for instance, is composed of two photos.  The moon has been captured already 3 years ago, whereas the meteor (part of the Perseides shower) has been captures recently.



Read more books, live a longer life

Reading good books enriches our lifes. We can share experiences of others, sometimes romantic, sometimes painful, and by spending a few days to read a novel we can jump in other times, in another society and in another personality. Reading books is really a good investment of the short time that is given us in life.
But now a new study from Yale University shows that we not only gain knowledge and wisdom from reading fiction books, but that it can directly extend our physical life time. 
The study, which is published in the September issue of the journal Social Science & Medicine, looked at the reading patterns of 3,635 people who were 50 or older. On average, book readers were found to live for almost two years longer than non-readers. “When readers were compared to non-readers at 80% mortality (the time it takes 20% of a group to die), non-book readers lived 85 months (7.08 years), whereas book readers lived 108 months (9.00 years) after baseline,” write the researchers. “Thus, reading books provided a 23-month survival advantage.”
The paper also specifically links the reading of books, rather than periodicals, to a longer life. “We found that reading books provided a greater benefit than reading newspapers or magazines. We uncovered that this effect is likely because books engage the reader’s mind more – providing more cognitive benefit, and therefore increasing the lifespan,” the authors concluded.

Although I like the result of this study a lot, and I intuitively strongly believe in their conclusion, from a methodological point of view it suffers from the same shortcomings as many other retrospective social studies. The studies usually analyse questionaires they receive from randomly picked individuals. No doubt, analysing 3, 635 peoples health status and their reading behaviour is a vast amount of work and an association found between the reading habits and health status will be significantly and reproducible. 
But what remains to be shown is the causality. I.e. can I increase my life expectancy (or this of my children) if I or if we force ourself to read more books ?  And this is not clear, and the Yale study also has no answer to this. In epidemiology there is this well-known phenomenon of "reverse causation", which in the current studies could also underly the reported association. If one assume that any genetic or epigenetic factor (or a combination of those) improves a persons health status in general (including mental health, but also neuro-sensory fitness such as eye vision), this will independently lead to an incraesed longevity but at the same time also to a higher prefenrence to enrich ones life by reading good books. So these two outcomes of a questionaire, health status/life expectancy and frequency of reading books will automaticly be linked, cause they are influenced strongly by the same underlying inherent factors (genetic composition and epigenetic praegung). So they are clearly linked to each other, but not causing each other. 
The only solid prove of a causation of book reading and longevity would be a so-called randomized study (as they are state-of-the-art in clinical trials to test the therapeutic effect of new drug or method). Here, a large number of volunteers have to be recruited, and they assigned to a control and a test group randomly. And these two groups have to follow a defined protocol, whether they liek it or not. The control group should not read books (even if some group members are real book freaks), whereas the members of the test group all should read a defined minimal numbers of books (per month) whether they like books or not. And this study has to be followed over years or decades, of course. One could then do a simple non-parametric test (like Man-Whitney or Wilcoxon) for the attained age at death and could easily found if an intentional increase in book reading helps to extend life span. 
I am happy to notice that for me this problem does not exist, since I like to read books quite naturally. Assuming that I am not hampered by other life-shortening factors (such as working as a roof-layer or on a oil-platform or smoking or drinking extensively) I know that I fell in the group of 23 month longer than average live span, whether it is caused by my love to read books or by another congenital factor.
Twenty-three month is really a lot, sondiering that I have already gained 19 extra month by living with our dog Ivo, another 37 month by having a higher education, and another 16 month by living in a stable partnership. Whow, so much extra time, I have to think of how to spend it useful. 
I first will read more books, I think.  I have recently discovered Gaito Gasdanov, a contemporary writer of Vladimir Nabokov with a great classical writing style. I bought for the coming holiday season:
"The Return of the Buddha "

11.8.16

The 2016 Perseides Meteor Shower

Don"t know were you spend the evening tonight, but I"d like to remind you of the Perseides Meteor Shower that is most prominent these days. I think to watch them is also a good remedy for the sadness that one usually gets before beloved people leave.
Every 12 years, the constellation of earth and jupiter is such that the orbital trace of the perseides is slightly diffracted towards the earth, and therefore further increasing the frequency of meteors that appear as bright tracks on the night sky.
perseiden
Since the next two days might be quite cloudy, I think tonight is the only chance to view the fallen stars (nice term, isn"t it. Maybe we can see fallen stars like Whitney Houston, Britney Spears or Mikey Rourke tonight, or Michael Schumacher, Maradonna and the like).
To be honest, a real Meteor is much nicer than these celebrities that greet us every day from the yellow-press.
To help you find the Perseides and have a good chance to spot some of the meteors, I made a scheme for you to get an orientation on the night sky.



First try to find the north-eastern direction . Then turn your head further to the right, untill you see somewhere a very prominent constellation of stars called Cassiopeia (like a hughe W on the sky). Below or slightly left of Cassiopeia (depending at what time at night you are there) there is the constellation called Perseus, and the Stjaernfallen should originate from this site.
As I told you, according to mythology, you can express a wish whenever you see a Stjaernfallen, but you should not tell anybody about it.