Winter Life

When we moved to England in 1992, we quickly realized that the British Islands are very distinct in terms of their nature. Nowhere else we have seen before trees full of blossoms in early January. At least till today I was convinced that this must have to do with the rather mild winter in the southern counties of the UK, like Kent, Sussex or Surrey, where we lived. Today I found the exact same tree on a cemetry in Munich, and became interested in its history and how it became so resistant to cold weather.

Bodnant viburnum, on Daglfing cementry, December 28th 2013

The name of this tree is Bodnant viburnum (Duft-Schneeball in German), and it is actually a product of man made plant breeding. The cross of Viburnum farreri (formerly V. fragrans) and V. grandiflorum was originally made by Charles Lamont, the Assistant Curator at the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh in 1933, and I guess this is the reason why it became first popular in gardens and parks in Brittan, and only later was imported to other European countries.

So this tree is unique for showing its real beauty only in winter time, when (at least in Germany) most other plants lost their leaves and look pretty sad. I don't really know why all around the world people warship so much the Christmas tree. I think they are pretty boring, and except for their wood have no use at all. Their needles are a pest once you have them on your carpet, and if you have them in your garden, they poison all other plants (by producing humic acid). Their roots destroy the foundations of buildings, inhibit the growth of grass and promote growth of moss. If you have some spruce or fir in your garden, you can be sure that after a while the garden looks like a dark forest. we have three of them in our garden, and I plan to cut them all this year to heat our oven with their wood. But even for heating, they are no good choice, since their resin causes a lot of soot which contaminates the chimney.

I would therefore opt to replace the fir (christmas tree) as symbol of life in hard winter times with Bodnant viburnum. It is an elegant and beautiful three, and it permits the few rays of winter sun to reach us, whereas pines and firs are like black spots which block the sun.

By the way, there are other plant species which resist the winter cold. I also like a lot the winter-hard cereals like rhy or barley, which look freshly green even at the strongest frost.

Winter rhy, near Munich-Daglfing, December 2013

When I saw these tiny young shouts now in December, I was happy to know that next year we will have again fields full of golden rhy with its tentalizing odor in summer.

Sollbruchstelle and Fremdkoerper

Hi Ghazal,

despite the overwhelming usage of English terms in modern language, there are still a couple of words imported from German which became common in English texts. "Eigenvalues" and "Eigenvectors" are important solutions of multidimensional algebraic equations, "Anlage" is used in developmental biology to describe a primordial structure that has the potential to form an organ or an anatomic structure later on. A term I personally would like very much to promote for use in English texts is "Fremdkoerper", literary translated "Foreign Body". Whereas the english "Foreign Body" sounds very ambigous, only receiving meaning within a particular context, the German "Fremdkoerper" always refers not only to the item itself (i.e. the piece that is located where it does not belong to), but it immediately implies the counter-reaction that it induces. A "Fremdkoerper" somewhere in your body causes pain, inflammation or an immune reaction. A "Fremdkoerper" in the society causes widespread aversion, mobbing by the collective crowd, police investigations and legal trials, finally branding the "Fremdkoerper" as a heretic thread to the society and a person which has to be isolated and kept under permanent surveilance.

Recently our son came home from school lessons in social and economic politics, telling me that the evil capitalists introduce "predetermined breaking points" in their consumer products, thereby making sure that the stuff they sell has a limitted life span and needs replacement after not too long time. He quoted a light-bulb that since 112 years works without any defect in a California firehouse. He told me that everything we buy nowadays (and in particular the Christmas gifts he will receive the day after tomorrow) come with such inbuild "predetermined breaking points", making sure they wont last till Christmas next year. I told him that George Michael and the Wham had the same idea already 30 years ago, and made one of the greatest Christmas pop-songs of the idea that a heart you give to somebody as a gift has a "predetermined breaking points", making the love to last only for a short time. Whether or not one believes in such "predetermined breaking points" in all modern products, I think that one more time German languages provides a more crispy and pointed solution: SOLLBRUCHSTELLE. In contrast to the English word, it not only defines the "Breaking Point" (-bruchstelle) as something that was included with a special purpose, but it also explaines that its  purpose is the prevention of a desaster by breaking in advance. You can find Sollbruchstellen at the handle of a beer stein, to break if people beat each others heads with them and prevent a too fiercely head trauma. And everbody is perhaps familiar with the rectangular groove pattern on chocolate bars, predetermined breaking lines to make sure you can break the chocolate in small pieces before your fingernails break. Sollbruchstellen, "predetermined breaking points" are therefore no recent invention by the industry, but something as old and maybe even older than mankind. Obviously, as soon as God (or however you call it) came up with the idea of living organisms, he invented the build-in SOLLBRUCHSTELLE. Each living organisms has a timer that unevitably runs down, and as long as we have not found the construction detail to inactivate the SOLLBRUCHSTELLE, will terminate. Ashes to ashes, Funk to Funky. Our research in stem-cell aging and replacement clearly tries to find out how to fix the SOLLBRUCHSTELLE of life. From a biochemical or biophysical point of view, there is no need for a termination of life.

Happy Yalda

Michael

The Dark Side of Humor: Seizure induced by Laughing

Dear Michael, well, didn't we found agreement at least on this very subject:  that however difficult life might be and how long it can take before our efforts in research pay out, threre is always one measure to keep us from giving up. I am talking about human laughter. And it was not only Aristoteles who described human laughter as devine, but it was also identified in several medical studies as promoting health, protecting from various diseases and extending longevity.  I remember when we were riding on the bike through Munich, and you pushed me forward, I felt I should protest against this but in fact I could not, but instead I fell into laughter instinctively. And you said "12 laughters a day keeps the doctor away" ?  And I thought that at least for short term you were right, and it made me feel happy.

But now I red this article in the peer-reviewed Journal of Medical Case Reports (Impact factor 0.4), entitled "Laugh-induced seizure: a case report" by MR Mainali et al from the Health System Department of Medicine in Reading, Pennsylvania. The patient, a 43 caucasian men suffered from "...multiple episodes of seizures, all induced by laughter while watching comedy shows..." (hic!) The patient described the conditions himself as following: "... I started laughing, then my arms started shaking and I felt like my consciousness was being vacuumed away... ". Now I became suspicious, whether I am suffering from the same symptoms. I don't mean that I felt my "...consciousness being vacuumed away..." those days on the bike in Munich, but my arms indeed started to shake a bit when you pushed me forward, and I lost control over the bikes handlebar. So it might have ended dangerous indeed, at least in this situation on the bike.

The authors of the study tested several treatments to help the poor man. The anti-convulosant drug Carbamazepine appeared to prevent the seizures for several month, but according to the FDA this drug has several potential side effects, in particular onto the unborn child of pregnant mothers. The authors concluded in their study that the safest measure against the seizures is by preventing all laugh-inducing situations.  I have to admit, since I started my PhD here in Stockholm, the frequency of laugh-inducing moments went down a little bit. I think to benefit from the healthy effects of laughter, I should instead expose myself intentionally to some extra laugh-inducing situations. As the authors very firmly state at the end of their paper, "... Smiles and laughter are universal human social gestures that involve a complex sequence of facial, pharyngeal and diaphragmatic muscle contractions and help to establish a friendly interaction with other people."  Unfortunatly, they don't make any suggestion about the Comedy that was so efficient in their patient to make him Rolling-on-the-Floor-Laughing.

Take Care, and keep smiling

/ghazal

Intelligent Food Design

Hello Michael, So you think that posting photographs of food, half-eaten dishes from restaurants and so on blogs or FB (like I used to do) shows a lack of creativity, intellectual retardation and a developmental arrest at the oral stage ?  I have to admit, yes , I often post pictures of food to my PB pages, but usually they are either not yet touched (still in a perfect designed stage) or they are just decoration of a nice social company. You also had a recent picture with your colleagues in a restaurant, but this was either before you were served the food or you were there just drinking tea. 

I'd like to show you an example that pictures made during lunch not always have to do with a "..retardation at the oral developmental phase", but that they can also be the demonstration of a intellectual dispute. Today, for instance we had "baked Salmon with boiled potatoes and salad" for lunch in our institutes canteen. When I was about to dissect the fish on my plate I suddenly discovered that it did not contain any fish-bones !!!!  (see attached photo).

 In the concept of darwinian evolution, the appearance of the skeletton was a major leap. And as we all know, Fish were considered the first species belonging to the group of vertebrates.   

So how can it be that suddenly I catch an "invertebral salmon" on my plate ???  Could it be that this is a fake salmon, made by casting pangasius meat paste into a form that only looks
like a salmon ?

No, it is obvious, all vertrebrate fish are laboratory artifacts produced by pro-evolution scientist, whereas the one on my plate is a representative of natural fish.  Invertebrate Fish shows that darwinian evolution was never even a concept, but a product of a conspiracy.





Don't you think I'm right ?  
Take Care
/ghazal

Happy Persian New Year - سال نو مبارک

Haft Sheen:  The 7 S..., a set of objects all starting with the persian letter Sheen

 

 

 

People in and from Iran, Kurdistan and Afghanistan celebrate the beginning of their new year today. By precise astronomical calculation it started already yesterday at 11:02 GMT, since astronomers calculated that at this very minute the duration of day and night is equal (vernal equinox).

For today, I'd only like to wish all Iranian people a happy Nowruz, hoping that 2572 will be the last year of a 34 years long period of political and intellectual oppression in their home country.

I will later today add an alternative calculation here proposing a more rational estimation of the precise timepoint of Nowruz.

The HEIDELBERG Ion Therapy Center and the continuation of the Epic of Gilgamesh

Arriving at Heidelberg train station on a February afternoon not necessarily makes you believe that this place could somehow be linked to the eternal problem of mankind of how to conquer death, a question that is at least 5000 years old has echoes that since these ancient times have never died out. Still, the search for an answer and attempts to overcome the finiteness of life influences what we do and how we exploit our talents today and in the future.
I am on my way from Munich to the Heidelberg Ion Therapy center, through the snow covered abandoned fields of southern Germany, to attend a small informal meeting with pediatric oncologists. We are about to discuss the potential of novel accelerated particle beams in cancer therapy to find a better cure for some rare forms of childhood tumors. Whereas we are confident that scientific progress, medical research and innovation is the most promising way to finally overcome disease and death, 4 and half thousand years ago the most eloquent and free thinkers had less hope that the natural sequence of birth, life and death could be conquered by human innovation. But even then, long before Christian religion invented a fairy- tale of life after death for those who follow the holy bible and are positively selected at the gates of heaven, a narrative existed in Mesopotamia which appears very modern, complex and human from today’s perspective. 
In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the main hero initially falls into despair when he realizes that physical life will inevitably end one day. He first tries to get around this shocking frustration by adopting a wild life-style, fighting everyone whom he could define as an enemy, drinking and eating and celebrating bacchantic feasts every night. And of course he soon discovers the ultifmate remedy against the fear of death:  Sex as much as you can. So at least this seems to provide some solace, the hope that if not our own body and soul will gain immortality, at least the fruits of our loins could live on. And even people who understand little about reproduction, evolution of a species and human demographic instinctively know that when we love, death can loose its horror. And in the moment of highest sexual pleasure, death even becomes a joke. Why else does a loving couple cries “Kill me”, if not to show that love is so mighty, that even death is no thread any more. So death and love, in essence excluding each other, form a dipole in our unconsciousness, with the one being impossible without the other.

 I remember that for myself the starting point of puberty was not when I felt the first physical attraction to girls, but when at the age of fourteen after a traditional kids initiation feast I recognized at a silent moment and without any obvious reason that my own life is not infinite, that perhaps one day quite far away in the future, everything that I feel, think, watch, worry about, love, everything will end.  This was one of the most frightening discoveries that I ever made, and I remember that I locked myself in my room and cried bitterly. In particular, it seem absolutely absurd to me that all the guest at this party, my parents, relatives and invited friends celebrated my entry into adulthood, whereas at the very same moment I had discovered for myself the inevitable death. Now I know, that without this horrible recognition that life is not endless, I would have perhaps never discovered the thrill and fascination of love. But the inevitability of death is not only the ultima ratio for love, but vice versa the fight to conquer death is also the only unambigious proof of love. Same as medieval knights showed their love to a young lady by fighting her free from the claws of the evil dragon, we remember cases from more recent episodes of war and oppression when a father or a mother saved their kids life by shielding it with their own body from the bullets and shrapnels.

But the epic of Gilgamesh would have never become the book with by far the longest publication history in mankind (from the first edition of the verses written down on sumeric cuneiform clay plates between 1700 and 2000 B.C. till today with currently more than a hundred different editions listed in the english Amazon alone), if it would have described only the pleasures of love between man and woman. When Gilgamesh meets Enkidu, the uncivilized creature that arises from the wild, he has first to realize that his physical power is not unlimited, but that Enkidu is an respectable fighter as well. Later on he learns from him that sex is nothing that can distinguish a human being from all other animated creatures on earth, and that physical reproduction alone might only give us the illusion of eternal life. Gilgamesh and Enkidu finally decide that death can only be overruled by the active productivity of men, by their creativity and their desire to change to world it was there at a persons birth. Gilgamesh becomes the founder of many cities which give shelter and home and pleasure to many of his nation. In a famous journey, he travels to Libanon to bring from there the famous cedar wood, the strongest and most durable building material in ancient times to roof large palaces and temples. And here, at the gates of the cedar forest, fighting a hostile dragon is not a funny game any more to demonstrate his muscle power, but it has a clear practical purpose: to attain the material he needs for his architectural ambitions.

When Gilgamesh looses his friend Enkidu in the fight against the dragon he comes to the conclusion that the most durable legacy of Enkidus life are the results of his creativity. Reading how high Gilgamesh acknowledged the creative power of man to beat the horror of death, we are wondering today how J.W.Goethe or Karl Marx could have come to a very similar conclusion without knowing  about Gilgamesh’s epos. Its first English translation by the assyrologist and archeologist George Smith was published 1872, 64 years after Goethe’s Johan Faust discovered that “… only those deserves freedom and life, who has to fight for it day by day…” and 5 years after Karl Marx declared the productive labour as the source of all human assets and the driving force of historical progress.

The earliest parts of the epic of Gilagmesh have their origin in the 3^rd millennium B.C., perhaps predating the Jewish thora. It is more than 2000 years older than the Christian bible and about 3000 years older than the Quran. But in it admiration of the individual, of the values that a man sets for himself, in the complete absence of any dogmatic, divine rules or moral codices, the Epic could have been written by a modern philosopher. Unlike the thora, the bible or the holy Quran which today have little more than a historical or linguistic value and seem absurd by setting anachronistic standards of a righteous life, the epic of Gilgamesh still today reads like a contemporary essay about the sense and the purpose of human existence.

Epic of Gilgamesh: Cuneiform text on clay plate (British Museum, London)

One of the perhaps most impressive examples of human creativity can be visited next to the Heidelberg University pediatric hospital, where the most advanced technology for accelerated particle tumor therapy is in operation since 2009. Here, nuclei from carbon ions are first accelerated in a circular synchrophasotron with 65 m circumsphere, than guided through a couple of deflecting and focusing magnets and finally channeled through a 650 t, 16m broad and 35 m long so called gantry, which revolves around the patient like a giant wheel within only a few seconds. The accelerated particles finally reaches 3/4 the speed of light, befor they hit the patients tumor placed in the very center of the revolving steel mass, hopefully sterilizing each single of its malignant cells. The doctors place the patient on a tray mounted to a robotic arm such a way that the deadly tumor will always be in the focus point of the particle beam. Invisible to patient, hidden behind a thin designer plastic blinds the revolving giant machinery around him could remind one of the movie "Contact", where Ellie Arroway (played by Jodie Foster) sits in the center of three huge revolving steel rings that, as the story goes, can eliminate gravity and send her into another time . But in the very real world of the Heidelberg Ion Therapy facility, the hope is that the patient can soon be send home cancer free, whereas the life threatening tumor in his brain or somewhere else in his body is send into oblivion by the high-precision particle beam that has only the size of a straw but transfers hugh energy. Indeed, the idea to fight deadly tumor cells, each measuring just a few micrometer, by bombarding them with atomic nuclei, each being another 10000 fold smaller, but only after the latter have been accelerated in a machine that  measures several tens of meter in each dimension, weights several hundreds of tons and requires 30% of the electricity of the entire city of Heidelberg, such an idea would have sounded like a science fiction plot only 50 years ago. But opposing the paradigm that a deadly thread is an unavoidable destiny or, even worse a proof of Gods enigmatic logic, is what brings the scientists and medics at the Heidelberg Ion Therapy (HIT) center very close to the ideas of the author of Gilgamesh.
The writer Sin-leqe-unnini, believed to have collected and written down the Epos in the ancient sumeric city of Ninive, shows us Gilgamesh fighting against the ordinary sequelae of life, death, and eventually the quick disappearance of all traces that we left behind us. For the people who designed, constructed and operate HIT, their motivation was not so much to become famous. When the first plans of such a machine emerged, it was a long way to go and more than 30 years to test, redesign, optimize technologies, before the first tumor patient could be successfully treated. And it also was quite obvious, that such a complex, sophisticated and unique technical innovation will hardly ever become profitable, at least not in terms of a quick or predictable financial profit. The main driving force that kept all the people at HIT so passionate about their achievements is the feeling that by curing previously incurable cancer types, each single patient that can be send home disease-free is a clear victory over an otherwise inevitable death. 

The Ion Therapy Center (HIT) at the Heidelberg University Clinic. The irregular ring on the upper left is the synchrophasotron (65 m circumfere) to accelerate carbon and other heavy atom nuclei to 3/4 of the speed of light. These high energy nuclei are then deflected by a set of magnets before they enter an array of focussing magnets mounted to a so-called gantry. This giant wheel weights more than 600 tones (right side in blue) and revolves around the patient, targetting the particle beam to the tumor with highest precision (photo courtesy of HIT press-office).  

But Gilgamesh’s search for the purpose of life not only experiences this very transcendent form of continuation in Heidelberg, but has a pure physical dimension just a few kilometers south from HIT. Here, at the archeological institute of the university Stefan Maul, an assyrologist recently began to decipher newly excavated cuneiform clay plates which were recently found in Assur. So whether we will soon hold in hand a continuation of the epic of Gilgamesh, telling us in new chapters what happened after Enkidu died, or if we will soon learn something about Gilgamesh’s childhood and the origins of his restless odysses is not clear yet. But I would not be surprised to learn from these additional chapters of the Epic that it was not only the mythology of the deluge which both the Talmud and the Christian bible copy-pasted from the Sumerian epic. 

Iranian Nose Jobs can sabotage Eugenics

Dear Michael,

It is no secret that many Iranian woman do not value their impressive, arian noses very high. In contrast, they tend to follow a very questionable beauty picture that more and more seems to be coined by the Japanese manga figures. For them, a nose is merely anything more than a small ridge to hide the nostrils.
The historical form of Iranian noses, however, is impressive, and if an ancient myth is true that the nose is the main location of human character, than Iranians must have a lot of it (which I believe many of them will agree).

The more I regret that low self-esteem of Iranians when it comes to the shape of their facial “center of gravity”. Iranian woman try to raise their competetiveness when hunting for a good match on the vanity fair, and the men, beeing either the driving force behind this or the obidient donkey, really fall for this.

Here I will explaine to you (based on what I feel as a young woman and what I learned as a young geneticist) the short and the long term consequences of this:

1) In the short term, there will be a constant drop of beauty among Iranian woman, because more and more collect or borrow money to afford a “Nose Job”. So very soon, you will see less and less Iranian ladies whom their strong and proud character is logically located in an equally strong, sharp and expressive nose. We might be confused soon, that Iranians with strong self-esteem decline to western beauty standard, have their face irreversibly damaged only to fill the pockets of those medics, who as all their colleagues from other disciplines agree, are the least qualified ones to distinguish between health and disease, let alone to cure any real sick patient.

The Iranian woman who lost this attribute of an ancient, devine beauty, however, will in fact have better chances to catch a husband and have more children. That is what we know from natural selection of the fittest, which if we like or dislike, becomes the natural selection for the most attractive in the human population.

But, thanks to genetic laws, there is not only hope in sight, as I will explaine in the following, but in the long term these “Iranian Nose Jobs” even have the potential to rescue the Iranian Nose from becomming extinct by natural selection.

2)  Because on the long term,  of course, no plastic surgery can change the genetic code, that over hundreds of generations insured that Iranians, sometimes synonymously with the original Arian nation, where characterized by nice, sharp, impressive noses. No ordinary medic, let alone the half-educted plastic surgeons, have any clue where in the Iranian genome the key for nose shape is hidden, or how this could be manipulated.  So with the current genetic knowledge and the status-quo of molecular technologies, the real treasure of the Iranian nose is still hidden and safely deposited deep in our genome.  So even if all Iranians have their “noses done”, the next and all following generations still carry the fertile seeds to grow proper Iranian noses again.

But this is only half of the truths, the real excitement comes here:  Without plastic surgery, large Iranian noses could in fact become extinct due to genetic admixture from (Iranian x Non-Iranian) partnerships (introgressing the Small-Nose-Gene-Variant from East-Asian or US or Latin-Americans) followed by preferential marriages between the descendents inheriting the Small-Nose-Genes (and consequently growing these dwarf nose variants reminiscent of a Hobbit face). Over just a few generations, there would indeed undergo a natiural selection for the Small-Nose-Gene-Variants, resulting in irreversible loss of the Iranian noses.  But this, in fact, does not happen, thanks to the plastic surgeons and their messing up with the natural link between beauty, genes, and attractiveness.  By virtually “hiding” the real heritable Iranian Nose variant behind a fake, non-heritable small nose, natural selection can not take place any more.

So in the long term, nose jobs to Iranian woman might ensure that the real traditional Iranian nose shape with its distinct and impressive sharpness will always reappear in every new generation. In other words, the plastic surgeons who make money from nose-reducing operations to Iranians on the assembly line, carry out in fact a very efficient sabotage operation against eugenics.

Skilled Angels Hand

Ghazal Dear,

I guess that must be your handwriting, that I found on a plastic envelope containing EtBr stained agarose-gels. I asked a friend at the Avicenna Bookstore here in Munich, to translate it into Persian, and she proposed that "24 wells" is " 24 خوب ".

If the date is right, than they were lying in the cool-room since two and half years. I thought to give them a trial electrophoresis with some fresh DNA samples we had for sequencing. And what a miracle: they are still giving excellent DNA patters. It must be your angel fingers while casting the gels that made them last forever.

Take Care my Dear Michael

----------------------------------------------------------------- Hello Michael, Yes this is my handwriting! So the gels are still there? Your friends translation was a bit misleading. She obviously just used a dictonary. "well" is "khob - خوب" yes its correct. but in english well is good and also what we use it in gels (like a slot or a hole. so "khob" means "good", but not "hole". And "24" in persian would be ۲۴ Don't forget, Persia was once leading in Mathematics, with men such as Al-Khwarizmi or Omar Khayyam. If you want to practise more, you can go here. So far, Take Care. Ghazal

Where has my blood gone ?

Ghazal my Dear, Two month ago, in September 2012 Israel seemed to be the most relaxed and calm country one could imagine. Except for very rare security checks at the entrances of large shopping malls, concert halls or the Jad Vashem museum, there were hardly any signs of the immanent threat of violent attacks. As travelers we were more concerned about the possible failure of the air-conditioning in our flat, or about the trouble to release our car from the car-park that was suddenly locked on Sabbath. In an attempt to dissociate myself as far as possible from the tourists (many of whom visit Israel for its christian heir or because they come on a cruise with a one-day break in Haifa) I was lurking around Lev Hamifratz Shopping Mall. There, a memorial plate told that during construction of the mall in 1991 it had been hit by a scud missile launched by the lunatic Saddam Hussein. Some years later an attempted car bombing attack by the Libanese Hisbollah was prevented by police that sapped the vehicle on the car-park outside the building. This suddenly reminded me of an ever-present, albeit latent danger for life or injury in Israel, and this might to a certain degree prompted me to decline to the invitation by the Magen David Adom (the Israeli equivalent to the Red Cross) to donate blood right there at the shopping mall. 

 

I never donated blood before, except when it was recommended before a surgery in hospital. When I laid down on this rubber-covered bed I had some time to talk to the doctor and the nurse about the most likely occasion when my blood (of course processed and perhaps mixed with a lot of Israeli blood to dilute out the Goi-factors) was used for transfusion. Anything could happen in Israel like anywhere else: car accidents, surgical operations with sudden complications, caesarian sections. The prospect of a military conflict was rather unlikely, two month ago.

Now, after Israel started its counter-attack to protect its people from the Gaza-launched rockets, it appears that victims of air-strikes, bombs or rockets blowing living-houses will be more likely to be in need of blood-transfusions. If my blood finds a way out of the deep-freeze storage into the circulation system of a patient, it could be a civilian who's house in Ashkelon or Ofakim or even in the suburbs of Tel Aviv were hit by Hamas rockets. It could be an IDF soldier who is about to enter Gaza in an attempt to neutralize the terrorists of Hamas. But most likely, it will be an innocent person living in Gaza, who has been misused by the terrorists as a living shield, who finally is be the most vulnerable and least cared-for victim. Israels IDF recently circulated a Twitter news promising that it will open the Gaza check points to permit delivery of emergency medical goods, maybe including my blood.

When I donated blood in September in Haifa, I had to fill in the form below, and of course without understand much hebrew I simply followed the suggestions of the Magen David Adom nurse and clicked any field she recommended to me. I did not asked her, if any of these fields to fill in were refering to the intended usage of my blood. Did it possibly exluded its use during military operations ? Or for certain minorities ? Or could it even be that non-kosher blood from a Goi like me would only be used to rescue non-Jewish victims ? Everything is possible, but I hope in the case of life emergency, people forget about race, nation, faith, and give the blood to those who need it most.

Accelerating Evolution on Mars

Hello Michael, 

You have probably heard that last week a new mars rover landed succesfully on Mars surface, and how this event was enthusiastically wellcomed by NASA and the entire scientific community. It follows a long series of less brilliant failures to get a working mars robot up there, one that could produce more than just pretty pictures. This new mission of an explorer vehicle called "Couriosity" is officially intended to test the existence of lower forms of life on our neighbor planet. For this purpose, "Couriosity" carries on board a couple of sophisticated devices, some that can take samples from mars' surface or from deeper layers of the ground in order to apply sensitive detection methods for organic molecules, considered to be exclusively produced by living organisms. I am wondering if they are looking there for a sort of blood stains, or some traces of blond hair or spit-out chewing gum.

What makes this new Mars exploration so special (for me as a radiation biologist) is the fact, that the rovers energy supply comes from about 5 kg of plutonium 235, providing 120 W electric energy for at least five years. Thats fine, I would say from an engineers point of view, and I would also like to drive my old Benz with this sort of low-emission, low-cost and low-maintenace type of fuel.

But the radiation-biologist in me (and I hope you agree somehow) has to wonder about the long term consequences of 5 kg plutonium, a potent alpha emitter, if it comes to its mutatgenic effects on living organisms. Assuming the plutonium is accidentally released from the mars rover and evenly spread over the hypothetical mars ecosphere,  it would cause a tremendous rise of the mutation rate in all cells, whether low prokaryotes or in higher and multi-cellular creatures like plants or animals or anything else in between. This means the 5 years mission of the man-made Mars rover will not only explore the presence of live on Mars, but if there is any, it will also drive evolution by increasing the number of new mutants. So scientists will not only be the silent observers, but active players of an extra-terrestrial evolution of life.

I am afraid, that with this man-made mutation burden, the mars creatures will indeed soon look like those in Tim Burtons "Mars Attacks". But for this, we have to blame nobody else than ourself.

I am more than worried now looking up the sky at night. There are not only beautiful meteor showers and the romantic moon, but from now on there might also be a laboratory of accelerated evolution on mars.

Take Care, yours sincerely
/ghazal

The Moon -- one year later, but more than one year elder

Ghazal my dear, 

What is age, and what is aging, if everyone uses a different measure for this. This came to my mind when I did another picture of the moon tonight. Tonight it was once again the night of the Persides meteor shower. But since nothing could top the spectacular meteor that we saw together with you at the same night in 2010, I put more attention to the moon again (1). A year ago at the same night, we have been at the Bulgarian blacksea coast, and then the Persides night fell together with the full moon. This year, however, the same day in the year (11th to 12th of August), the moon looked completely different. 

Its shape was already ascending to less than 25%, whereas full moon was already 10 days ago (exactly at August 2nd). So it is of some interest to understand why according to the solar calender exactly one year passed by (and even the Persides meteor showers declined to this (2), but the moon implies something different. As a proof, the picture on the left shows the shape of the moon as of tonight, and you can compare with the picture from a year ago.

The reason for this asynchrony is that the circular rotation of the moon around the earth and relative to the sun happens once every 29 days, 12h and ~4min. This means, that 12 month for the moon (or one year for it) take only 345 days, i.e. 11 days less than a normal year of 356 days. Therefore the full moon of August 2012 was visible 11 days earlier than the full moon of August 2011.

This means that for people who rely on the sun as their calender reference, a year has some 11 extra days, as compared to people who rely on the moon as a calender standard (like muslims). In the long term, after 33 solar years (which the western civilisation and the Persians use) an extra year has already accumulated for people in the islamic world. I have no clue if muslims indeed celebrate their birthdays according to the moons calender, and count one extra life year every 33 normal years. And it is not completely unlikely, that the processes of real biologically aging (or lets call it maturing) is influenced to some degree by the imagination of aging. Maybe somebody who really feels elder, if he or she suddenly discovers that instead of 33, he or she is already 34 years old. So therefore you might conclude (together with the early Beatles) that it is better to "....follow the sun":

Sun is definitely good for a couple of physiological functions (vitamin D synthesis, production of serotonin which makes us happy and satisfied), but in higher doses it is doing the opposite: You know better than anybody else how UV-A and UV-B can accelerate the entire aging process, since you work on this issue and even got a scientific price for this. The Isar island, where some black ashes might still mark the site of our camp-fire, and which looked pretty uncosy and barely populated three weeks ago, today saw masses of locals who followed the sun and took advice from the 1960 Beatles song, rather than from your 2011 publication in Mutation Research.

I guess that now you'd like to know why I waited for an entire year, before sending you another photograph of the moon again. The reason was that after the Persides night in Bulgaria last year, my camera broke. I somehow smashed the display, and from then on it was totally black. But I did not want to throw it in the waste bin right away, since this camera was always a brave and reliable companion to us. So I left it untouched on my desk, before in a quiet moment three weeks ago I started to take it apart (like I did it with your wrist-watch two years ago). I soon realized that the broken display can be removed carefully and replaced with a new one. And soon I found through Ebay a possibility to get even seperate display units for virtually every single digital camera. I quickly located a provider with the funny name of GLOBAL-SHINING (3). Mr. or Mrs. Global Shining appeared to be a Mr. Ho, living with his GLOBAL STAR SHINING in Flat S30 1/F, Shopping Arcade, Tsuen Wan Centre, Tsuen Wan, Hongkong (4).

When I received Mr. Ho's delivery, the small parcell contained not only the brand-new Samsung camery display, it also had as a little extra a special screw driver (not only fitting the microscopic steel screws that held together the camera back, but also of perfect size for chinese fingers) and a handwritten piece of paper saying "Thank you for considering GLOBAL SHINING as business partner". 

By help of the microscopic screw driver and some forceps from the lab I quickly managed to replace the camera display, and the pictures on todays post are the proof how well the whole camera is working again. Since I was so happy about revitalising the nice camera with the Mr. Ho's help, I decided not only to give him excellent reference points on Ebay, but also send him some words of gratitude on a postcard showing Castle Neuschwanstein. It is nice to imagine how Mr. Ho mounts the colourful postcard to the wall of his Flat S30 1/F in the shopping arcade of Tsue Wan, Hongkong.

Is there a final take-home message from this post for you, Ghazal ?
I hope you will find one.
Take Care my Dear

Michael




Footnotes: 
(1) Surely you know that the Moon symbolizes the pure, innocent beauty in Persian classicla poetry. This is independent of the exclusive role of the Sun in ancient, pre-islamic Persian culture, philosophy and science. But because poetry is very much influenced by arabic traditions, their spiritual preference for the moon as symbol in religion and arts got access into the poetry of Hafez, Rumi, Atta and Omar Khayyun.
(2) The Persides Meteor shower lives up to its name: same as the Persian people do, it follows precisely the sun's calender. I guess that it follows in a precise and constant time after Persian Nouruz.
(3) Initially I could not figure out, if the name of the company GLOBAL-SHINING was referring to the moon or the sun. But now that I know that it is a Hongkong based company, I guess they even mean the Shining Stars.
(4) I guess Mr. Ho wont mind having his business address published here on my blog. But it might further promoted his excellent business. Just that Tsuen Wan does not have a postcode might discourage Hongkong tourists to drop into his store and buy camera displays.

A redshift of our E-mail traffic

Ghazal, Dear,

For the delay of your e-mails relative of the ones I send to you, there is this easy explanation. If I send you about one message per day, and receive from you only one in response per 2 weeks, it must have to do with your own location getting further and further away. The great astrophysicist Edwin Hubble was the first to relate the observation of a redshift (i.e. the elongation of wavelengths of the star light) with the proposed expansion of the entire universe The long intervalls of your response e-mails are an equivalent to this redshift, but maybe as a passionate car driver you are more familiar with the Doppler-Effect that is used by the traffic police to measure the speed of vehicles. In essence, its the same physical phenomenon.

In our case, the observation that daily send E-mails from me to you experience a dilation of their responses to only one every two weeks results in a calculated escape velocity of your location relative to Munich by 1440 km/h. (Whow, thats more than the speed of sound !!).

The calculation please find below.

This once again convinces me that you are an angel, which accidentally had to do an emergency stop in Munich 2 years ago, but now you are again in your other world where Angels rule and drive cars with chocolate engines.

Take Care Michael

Red-shifted E-mails

Ghazal, Dear,

For the delay of your e-mails relative of the ones I send to you, there is this easy explanation. If I send you about one message per day, and receive from you only one in response per 2 weeks, it must have to do with your own location getting further and further away. The great astrophysicist Edwin Hubble was the first to relate the observation of a redshift (i.e. the elongation of wavelengths of the star light) with the proposed expansion of the entire universe The long intervalls of your response e-mails are an equivalent to this redshift, but maybe as a passionate car driver you are more familiar with the Doppler-Effect that is used by the traffic police to measure the speed of vehicles. In essence, its the same physical phenomenon.

In our case, the observation that daily send E-mails from me to you experience a dilation of their responses to only one every two weeks results in a calculated escape velocity of your location relative to Munich by 1440 km/h. (Woh, thats more than the speed of sound !!).

The calculation please find below.

This once again convinces me that you are an angel, which accidentally had to do an emergency stop in Munich 2 years ago, but now you are again in your other world where Angels rule and drive cars with chocolate engines.

Take Care
Michael

To 'think outside the box,' think outside the box

Dear Michael,

I finally gave the talk about my MSc project at an institutes seminar, about genetic factors associated with radio-iodine uptake in mice. People immediately became interested in the link between radioiodine uptake and retention in the fetal thyroid gland, and thje later risk to develop thyroid cancer.

I had to tell them that at least in the mouse model that we studied together in your lab, there was not such a simple link. Radioiodine uptake and pharmacokinetic are determined by genetic factors, but the long term cancer risk is obvsiouly governed by other genes. And the subtle differences between different mouse strains in their isotope retention in thyroid seems to be only a minor determinant in cancer risk. Other genes or their variants are obviously more important, but we have not found them yet.

Most colleagues assumed that there must be a direct linear connection between isotope uptake or thyroid dose and cancer risk. Only a professor from human genetics department told people they should start to "think outside their box". I did not knew this phrase before, therefore I checked it in Google. And I came across an interesting research paper in a psychological journal. The authors of the new paper were inspired by metaphors about creativity found in boardrooms to movie studios to scientific laboratories around the world and previous linkages established between mind and body.

Want to think outside the box? Try actually thinking outside of a box. In a study to be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers had students think up solutions to problems while acting out various metaphors about creative thinking and found that the instructions actually worked.

Enjoy your day, and remember there are not only cages that restrict our physical freedom, but also boxes which keep our inspiration and phantasy down.

Take Care

/ghazal

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Ghazal my Dear,

Thanks for the nice thoughts. I printed out this last sentence from you and sticked it on my memory board. It is there together now with a sentence by Oscar Wilde: "We are all living in cages, but there are only a few of us who see the stars". Of course you are one of these few.

Take Care, my Dear

Michael

First system developed to assess living conditions on other planets

Hi Michael,

You recommended last year to escape onto this newly discovered exo-planet Giese..., which is 20 light-years away from earth. I told you I can not leave Stockholm , cause my family needs me here and I am busy with my PhD project.

But today I red something in the newspaper, what might make your invitation more realistic: Some researchers have developed a computer program that after putting in some data it can predict the suitability of any planet for human life. So in case you will know about a planet that is not light-years away from home, but maybe only some light-hours, we might have its living-conditions checked with this program, before going there for a short visit.

Take Care /ghazal

The gels you left behind are still useable

Dear Ghazal,

It is a rainy Friday today (the americans would say its a "vanilla sky").
I hope you are o.k., hope my last e-mail was not too frustrating. As I told you, there are still plenty of things in the world that are amazing. For instance this one: I tried to detect a new Rb1 promotor variation today, and because I was too lazy to make a new gel, I went through the fridge were we all store our agarose gels.
And guess what I found there: several plastic bags with gels, and written on them with your nice handwriting "Ghazal, 2.5% agarose +EtBr, 12-06-2010".


Since I remember you were always working with highest quality, I thought I give it a trial and run my PCR samples on it. And if you believe it or not, but the gels still work perfectly. The only trouble is, that I could detect the Rb1 promoter only from human cell lines (MCF7). Most frightening, that DNA from myself does not contain Rb1 signal. Now I have to worry whether I am mutant (like X-men).

So you see there is always a bid to worry, even if something amazing is happening. But what made me really sad was to see that you left behind these gels, but did not stayed here yourself.


Thank you anyhow, Ghazal. In case I can do something for you in compensation for the gel: let me know.
enjoy the weekend, and write something.


Take Care, Michael


PS: I forgot what was this special chocolate waffles you liked so much ? Was it "Knoppers" or was it "Hanuta" ? Since I am not going to the Warsaw meeting I"d like to send you some - not only to say thank-you for the gel, but also to honour your achivements with the conference price that you were awarded.

A Night Walk at Full Moon

Hi Michael,

I just arrived at home, after driving my friends home. Very tired. I sweared to myself I wont do this any more. You know what happened ? In the middle of the night, more than a kilometer from home, my car stoped without any obvious reasons (Except for a loud noise that came from somewhere under it). Hey, what is that with your german cars? It is a Benz (o.k., not very young any more), how can it just let me stand alone on the road in the middle of the night ? The disgusting thing was that my mobile also was low on battery, so can you imagine I had to walk home at 2 o"clock a.m.?
My only rescue was the bright, full moon. It was so strong, that I could always see my moon-shadow.

Hope you are fine, sleep well.
TAKE CARE,
/ghazal

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ghazal my Dear,

Poor you, must be a frightening experience to walk home in the middle of the night. I guess it was not the kind of walk that you liked so much here in Munich, to let you thoughts flow and to recharge your vitamine D pool in the sun. I have to estimate, if and how much moon-light is any good to synthesize it. But I guess it has no UV-A, what do you think ? By the way, wouldn"t it be a interesting project to study in photobiology in cells using moon-light ?
So you worked as a driver again. I suspect people exploit your reluctance to drink any alcohol at the party and invite you as the driver.
The moon was visible here as well. If you can, make a photo of your moon shaddow.
The one below I did in our garden.

Take Care, my Cat on the Moon,
Michael

Salman Rushdie about Chernobyl

Dear michael,
Finally, I gave the talk about my MSc thesis today here in the institute, and as you expected, people were much more interested to discuss the implications of the Fukushima accident (which of course also has to do with radio-iodine) than the genetic studies I did last year in Munich. I doubt if people could really estimate what we found out with you doing the genetic studies in mice.
Before giving the talk to my colleagues, I practised a bid at home and did the same presentation at home to my family. My parents were much more interested in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, which I used as introduction to explaine the importance of the radio-iodine incorporation studies. I now understand why: When the Chernobyl disaster happened, I was exactly 10 month old, so according to all the studies that I read for my thesis, I was at the most sensitive age when the radioactive cloud reached Sweden. You see how differently people anticipate events: Nowadays everybody is worried about the Fukushima disaster from 3 weeks ago, whereas my parents are obviously still worried if their daughter might have been affected by the Chernobyl fall-out.
My dad, who is always very interested in names and their meaning wanted to know what this "Chernobyl" means. But my mom immediately shouted "Who cares about names, if the only daughter we have might have been irradiated". Thanks god I could relieve her anxiety by showing the graphs from my thesis about the latency time of thyroid-cancer, and she understoud that the danger is already very low for me cause I"m old enough ("Eh Vay, old enough for what? Who can tell me"). Now, Mom could lean back again and Dad came back to his question about the meaning of "Chernobyl". I still remembered that you once told me it is the russian and ukrainian word for Artemesia, a shrub used as herb for cooking and in traditional chinese medicine. Since dad is not so specialized in botanics, he looked it up in his precious Encyclopedia Iranica and found something interesting: Artemisia (or Wormwood) is called in turkish Shaybani, and this was also the name of an invader that came in the 16th century from middle asia (Usbekistan, where you got your Polou-recipie from) to Iran. His persian name was شیبک خان ازبک
and he defeated Barbur, the first ruler of the Moguln-empire. Since the persian Shah Ismail began to fear that Shaybani might look for other neighboured countries to conquer, he attacked him in the battle of Marv. Shaybani was killed in this battle and parts of his body send by Shah Ismail to other leaders of neighboured empires as a warning.
My Dad told us all these stories of wars, victories and defeates with great passion. But Mom and myself as usual questioned the meaning of this for the progress of civilization and for the goal of human happiness. We suspected that in all these heroic stories of the battles between nations and empires, the million tears and lost lives were forgotten. Neither my Dad nor the encyclopedia iranica knew anything about the families of Shaybani, Emir of Buchara, of Barbur, the first Moguln ruler or of Shah Ismail of Persia. During these persistent fights to expand their empires or to defend it against the attacks from enemies, they were virtually rarely at home. Who were looking after their wives and children ? If today a husband and father would be absent from home so frequently, I guess the department for child care or some family judges would fine hime.

Hope you don"t have these problems, and even though you spend much time in the lab and at scientific meetings, your family does not feel neglected.
Hope you are doing fine, Take Care
/ghazal

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ghazal my Dear,

I think I am not as bad as the military leaders of these historical times you describe in your mail. At least I always stay in contact with home, using mobile phone or skype ;-)

The history of the rise and fall of the persian empire in the 16th century, its defeat by the ottoman empire in the west and its link with the rise of the Moguln empire in the east is the background of Salman Rushdie"s novel "The Enchanting Florentine". If you read it, you will be able to tell your dad the more private side of Shaybani, Barbur and Shah Ismail, because in this novel Rushie introduces a "lost" sister of Barbur. Her name is Qara Köz (or "black eyes") , and she first becomes wife of Shaybani, than of Shah Ismail and finally of the ottoman general Argul, who is originally italianian and defeats Shah Ismail. The novel uses this magic realismen to show how a young, beautiful woman always changes from one winning horse to the next. But it also shows the price she has to pay for it, that she never really builds a home for herself and never raises children. This at least is the state on page 367, and there are another 108 to come. Maybe I read them tonight, maybe there will be an happy end for her.

In case there wont be a happy end for Qara Köz, do you want me to tell you the rest of the novel ?
Hope you have a nice evening, enjoy the spring, relax and don"t use your brother automatic e-mail-response program to send me an answer.

Take Care, my Dear
Michael

ELIZA - The Phantastic Answering Machine

Dear Michael,

sometimes I wonder about how much we trust in the electronic communication, that one person writes some words to another person thousands of km away, and these words are converted into a sequence of bits and rush through computer chips and are converted into electric pulses or light waves, send back and forth to satellites until they finally reach the recipient. And the recipient for some reason does not question that the words he reads in the message are nothing else but the written thoughts that his friend has hammered into the keyboard thousands of km away.
Shouldn"t we be more cautious about the messages we receive day by day ? I don"t mean the mail I receive from you, I"m always sure that they come from you, cause they have their very unique style and always contain some code-words that mark them as authentic. But my younger brother, who is studying IT technology in the 2nd course now has shown me something they are doing currently. They got the project to develop a computer program that is able to write "fake answers" to an e-mail. I don"t know how they are doing it, but the program searches for some keywords in an incomming message, and than replies with some sort of standard sentences (that are usually not very complex or intelligent) which again contain the same keywords.
So my dear brother asked me to test his program. Therefore I send him an e-mail and within some micro-seconds already got an answer:

My Dear Brother,
I send you my best wishes to persian New-Year. Did you received my present that I send you by post ? When I packed the parcel I cut my fingers with the scissors and had to put bandage on and now I can only use my left hand. I went with Shava to the mountains on Saturday, because with an injured finger the only proper thing to do is to go out for a walk in nature. We would have liked to stay there till Sunday, but I have no time because I have to prepare for the lecture at college. The students of the new curse will arrive tomorrow, and they want to be entertained properly. I hope you doing well and work hard to become the next Bill Gates or J.v.Neumann.
In love, your sister

No have a look at the answer I received instantly from his program:

"Dear Sister,
O, I did not knew there was persian New-Year. What present you send, I did not received anything. O, you cut your fingers ? Interesting, why you need the scissors for this ! Did Shava liked the mountains ? What else did you do on Saturday ? So the students will come. I hope they will have fun.

Take Care
/your brother"


And now, what you think ? Do you find that the program is doing a good job ? I know my brother was never very keen sending long letters to anybody, but at least he put his own (crazy) ideas into it. But the program that he wrote virtually only repeats what I wrote in my original message. I think it is better to carry on writing down our thoughts, even though the answers may take a bid longer.

Hope everything is fine with you, Good Night.
Ghazal

--------------------------------------------------

Ghazal my Dear,
So funny to read your experiences with your brother. Thanks god, it is just a technical project that sends you such standard and formal letters in response to a mail. The quality of a machine-based artificial intelligence was actully tested by one of the earliest and most influential computer scientist (Alan Turing) by setting up a similar device that you and your borther were using. Turing suggested, that an experimentalist should do two verbal dialogues in parallel behind two black curtains. Behind one of the curtains a human person should sit to conduct a dialogue with him, wherease behind the other curtain the artificial-intelligence machine had to be placed. If the experimentalist could not tell after a certain time where the talking machine was and where the person was, than according to A.Turing the machine has passed the criteria of having indeed artificial intelligence.
But I could imagine, that this also depends a lot on the experimentalist. Simple-minded people might get fooled very easily, they might even think that a mail-response from your brothers program comes from a real person. Other people who read and wright a lot are probably much more critical. I could imagine that you are extremely critical. I think it will not be possible for any machine to fool you. You have somethink like a seventh sense to tell what is real and what is fake.

There were several attempts among IT freaks to beat Alan Turings test. They were called Chatter-Bots and among them ELIZA was probably the most famous. ELIZA was such an artifical language dialoge program developed at MIT. The exciting thing was that it should play the role of a psychoanalyst, talking to a patient. When Weizenbaum developed ELIZA, it was the time of Flower-Power, Hippie-Music and mind-extending drugs for the young, but the elder generation discovered the healing power of psycho-therapy. I guess this was the motivation for Weizenbaum designing ELIZA as a psychatrists chatter-bot. But even though ELIZA impressed some people really a lot (they were told that the doctor has a bad flue and therefore talks to them from behind a courtain), dedicated linguists that used the Turing Test could tell that it was only a machine.

I hope you can sleep well and don"t carry on endless dialogues with a machine in your dreams.

Take Care, Ghazal,
Michael

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Hi Michael,
a last remark before midnight: Do you know why the computer program by Weizenbaum, that could participate in seemingly meaningful dialogues, was called ELIZA ? There was the character of Eliza Dolittle, a simple, uneducated person with a very basic language in G.B.Shaws play "Pigmalion" (later in the funny musical "May Fair Lady"). Two university professors, one of them was Mr. Higgins, made a bet: Higgins promised that he will "re-educate" Eliza Dolitte with brute force, give her not just elegant clothes but also a new language. And he will guide Eliza Dolittle to a reception of the high society and nobody should recognised that before she was selling flowers on the market every day. Guess what happend ?

Take care
/ghazal

--------------------------------------------------

Hi Ghazal my Dear,

What is wrong with a girl that sells flowers all day long ?
(See, now you caught me responding to you in the answering-machine-style ;-).
I promise I wont do it again. But don"t expect me to read G.B.Shaws "Pygmalion" now to answer your question. It is already after midnight, and I have to go for a walk with our dog.


I"ll tell you tomorrow about what I think about Eliza Dolittles qualities as a chatter-bot.

Take Care, Good Night
Michael

Why the Fukushima nuclear disaster is good for nature

It is always worth to follow Monthy Pythons advise and ALWAYS LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE OF LIFE, even in case of an accident that is univocally considered a major disaster for the civilized world and in Japan the biggest catastrophy since their defeat in WW2. At least here in Germany, the most prominent critics of nuclear energy are the greens, in close alliance with WWF and Greenpeace. And as we all know how well and absolutely predictable this german Angst works it was no wonder that the Green Party managed to kick-out the conservative christian-democrats from their stronghold in Baden-Wuertemberg. They just had to point to Fukushima and reminding every voter in their state that it were always the cristian-democrats who support nuclear energy.

This, on the first glance, looked very straight for the green party, a clear "full-house" so to say. But in fact, they might have even won twice: Fukushima not only presented them the prime-minister post of Baden-Wuertemberg on a silver plate, but the long-term and global benefits of this "accident" might be even more important. I"m talking here about the whales and dolphins, who over the last years were slaughtered by the thousands to satisfy the desire of the japanese cuisine. Not the UN, nor Greenpeace or WWF could achieve, what the Fukushima accident did: a natural protection for these big naval mammals for at least one generation of animals. Remember, caesium 137, the strong gamma-isotope that was released into the japanese sea and into the pacific, has a physical half-life time of 30 years, and its biological half life time is not much shorter. It preferentially accumulates in the muscle-tissue of mammals, including whales and dolphins. For them, it does not bear a real health risk, so nobody of us should worry, and if Greenpeace and WWF do so, we all know it is just their business to beat the drum. In fact, muscle tissue is one of the most radio-resistent, so whales and dolphins will live as good or as bad as without caesium-137 in the ocean. But for us humans, since we always worry and we made the german Angst one of our best export-goods, any knowledge that some single atoms caesium-137 are in our steak or Sushi or Miso-Soup makes us sick right away. So the japanese whale-hunters and the violent Dolphin-Killers in Taiji will face some tough years to come. I guess the sale for whale and dolphin meat will drop by 99% soon. And unless some hard-liners such as Mr. "I-take-some-days-off"-Shimizu of Tepco, or Mr."My-blue-jackets-is-a-fake-Levis"-Edano of the gouvernment or his imperial highness Mr."I-love-you-all"-Akihito eat in front of the TV-cameras and on their web-sites some whale-sushi and dolphin-soup, the popularity of japanese sea-food would loose even more ground.
We all know instinctively, that there always must be light, when there is shadow. Or as a good friend of mine who was cought by the idea of physical laws-of-conservation ones formulated it: "For every person on earth who stops crying, another one has to break-out in tears. The sum of all the tears in the world is therefore a fixed number." Hence, we should not feel too much mercy seeing the japanese nuclear manager spreading their tears around and mourning in public and begging for pardon. We must know: for the whales and dolphins now starts a great time, they will live for the next decades a life without fear. Like the Jews still celebrate Purim as the rescue from a masacre planned by the persian minister Haman in the 5th century BC, such will the whales and the dolphins always commemorate the year 2011, when a devine hand blow up the Fukushima reactors and spilled the caesium-137 broth into the ocean to mark all naval mammals as unedible and unhuntable.
Or would it be possible that it was not God in his wise decision, who first triggered the earth-quake and than the tsunami, that hit Fukushima so badly ? Could it be that all the whales and the dolphins of the world came together on March 11th, to make a big, big wave, much bigger than the mini-tsunamis that our kids like to do at home in the bathing-tube ? A wave that hit the coolant-pumps and auxilary generators and electricity supply in Fukushima ? Don"t forget, how intelligent whales and dolphins can be: If you have ever seenw the movie "Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe", you remember how they could smell the coming disaster and with a smile on their face (which in fact they always have) they said "So long, and thanks for all the fish".
Does not matter who really did it, intelligent creatures (like the whales or dolphins) or a super-super-intelligent creature (like God or the WWF), finally we should understand that it was worth it. This little nervous break down around a japanse nuclear facility rescued the future life of our most loved naval creatures.