70 years on a Stairway to Heaven: Jimmy Page

Jimmy Page, a living legend of rock guitar style and founder of Led Zeppelin celebrates his 70th birthday today. Wondering how it all began, with a young, shy school boy in a south London suburb, and his dream to play skiffle against his mothers advice, and to start a career in biomedical research to help fighting cancer ? Well, below there are some of his early musical performances at a BBC show that looks like the predecessor of Britain has got talent.

Jimmy Page (left side, on the guitar) playing in a skiffle band and talking to a BBC show master.

I am wondering if the polite interviewer from the BBC, who at this occasion was perhaps convinced that his didactic questions would bring young Jimmys on a right path of middle class academic career, ever remembered this day when in 1973 Jimmy did this:

Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin playing Stairway to Haven 25 years later.

Google in Style

Good literature is not just about great ideas, good stories, dramatic situations interlaced with well developed thoughts and reflections. Literature is also about a writer-specific form, the specific style of how to say things. And this is what makes writers so unique and recognizable. You quickly can tell if a text which deals with a train ride through south-eastern Europe is by Thomas Pynchon, or Agatha Christie or Joseph Roth. Similarily, despite many novels and short stories are located in San Francisco, you will quickly recognise which one is a Raymond Chandler, because of his special style of writing: sober, precise, and very illustrative, with a certain distance to his characters, and by leaving any judgement to the reader.
Bad literature can be easily identified by the absence of style, or by the adoption of a very uniform style. A bad example are the Scandinavian crime stories which saw an inflation on the book discounts and the best seller lists. I guess they all follow the blood trace of the ordinary readers appetite for explicit described cruelity, for their suspicion that behind a seemingly harmonic society must be the worst degree of murder and slaughter-house sensation, and that after 5 p.m. every office clerk turns into a zombie or a werwolf, hunting for young flesh. Most of these crime novels also fuel the stereotype that moral values in the society are maintained only by a small, usually female minority.

If I open a book of this genre, I don’t recognise a style difference, whether its is by Adler Olsen, Stig Larsson, Henning Mankell or others of this school. Their style is simply indistinguishable, and therefore no style at all. The form is like Ikea, for a quick and cheap consumption to fill some empty time with some easy to get sensation.

There is, thanks god, much better literature coming from Ikea land, and one of the finest examples is Lars Gustafsson. He is not only a brilliant narrator, a great magician of merging reality, utopia, and philosophic reflections, but in addition he is a great stylist. After reading one of his novels, whether the plot is situated in Swedens Västmanland county, or in an Italian castle, or in a Berlin villa or a students dorm in Austin/Texas, you have the good chance to recognise any other of Gustafssons euvre. And this not because any names of the acting characters re-appear in the next book, a cheap trick used by the notorius Swedish crime writers in a helpless attempt to make their mass-production sequel books recognisable, by telling us again and again about the adventures of Wallander or Lisbeth Salander.

Lars Gustafsson does not need such a cheap trick to make his literature unique and recognisable. And how resilient Gustafssons style is I recognised only recently, when in complete ignorance of his Swedish mother tongue dared to translate two unpublished texts, assuming they were of his authorship, by using Googles translate function. The first text I received by e-mail, signed by Mr. Gustafsson personaly and carrying his e-mail address, one that my mail program properperly recognised because we had exchanged some correspondence before. What surprised me was that suddenly Gustafsson wrote to me in Swedish, maybe he wanted to challenge my promise from some years ago to learn the language in order to read his next books before they are translated by the publisher. But of course, I did not made much progress, and instead I quickly copy/pasted the whole message into Google Translate, and within a second or two, I could read a cry for help, explaining that Lars Gustafsson got pickpocket in London and without any cash or credit card left, has to sleep rough for the next night unless he can buy a ticket home, for which he asks me for some financial support. At this moment, I did not paid too much attention to the writing style of the message, first assuming that even a great literature stylist as Lars Gustafsson might not use his full talent at each and every short communication, and secondly, at least at this stage, I did not trusted a computer generated text translation to preserve a writing style. But this notion I had to revise short after. But what confused me a bit was that I received this emergency e-mail, supposedly from Lars Gustafsson, right at a weekend when Munich was hosting a three-days series of Skandinavian literature and poetry, with Mr. Gustafsson beeing scheduled to read from his books and poems on the first and the last day. When I called the organizers to investigate how Mr. Gustafsson could quickly be brought to Munich, to my surpise they could ensure me that he has already arrived in town some days ago, on a regular flight from Stockholm. So apparently, he never had been pick-pocketed in London, and the emergency mail was a fake one produced by some internet criminals to raise money from people they identified after hacking Mr. Gustafssons address list.

The week after hearing him reading some of his poems and essays in Munich, I had a look at his internet blog, curious to see if he already wrote something about his visit to Munich and this fictious London crime with him as the robbed victim. Everything new I found there was a text by Mr. Gustafsson recalling a former visit to Portugal. The few words I could decipher from the Swedish text were “globalisation”, “tourism”, “Fernando Pessoa” and “Baixa Alta”. To get at least some ideas what Lars Gustafssons relation to Portugal are, I again used Google to translate his blog post from Swedish to German. And within some milliseconds, I was reading a typical Gustafsson essay, in this incoparable style of linking some marginal observations of a daily life with deep philosophical reflections, sentences void of any didactic selfsufficiency, but entertaining and inspiring for the reader.  And this very unique, recognisable style made it almost undamaged through a computerized transformation, so that the text finally was not much worse than one translated by a professional translator of the publisher.

It is hard to tell, of course, if Google is realy so sophisticated that it can adequately translate any personal text to other languages and maintain the personal flavor, or if it is mainly the powerful style of Mr. Gustafssons language that makes his text so resilient to a computerized conversion. In this case, for sure, I could clearly tell which text was a real Gustafsson, and which one was a fake using his stolen e-mail address.

In maybe not too far a future there will be a new Google program, not to translate texts from one language to another, but from one style to another. So one could than take a text from an instruction manual and convert it into a Lars Gustafsson style instruction manual. Would this be an adequate essay, fiction or non-fiction ? For sure not, because style without ideas is still no literature, not a penny better than all the cheap best seller with their action-plots so hastily cobbled together.  Good literature needs both, clear, crisp ideas to develop, wrapped into a great style. And Lars Gustafsson is one of the few modern authors who is a master of this skill, and there is no Google program in sight to replace this talent.

Each light bulb wants its own MAC address

Recently, Phillips announced that it will produce light bulbs with its individual MAC address. The purpose of this idea is to permit switching on and off every lamp at home (or anywhere else) by using your local WiFi net and a smartphone. I got a little bit worried, in the time of sustainable usage of natural ressources, because MAC addresses are definitely not sustainable. They are unique and bound to a single device, and ones this device is discarded (like a light bulb), its MAC address ends on the scrap yard just like the device itself.
One can do some estimations of how long will the limitted set of available MAC addresses last, until the very last one is awarded to the last Philips light bulb, of course in a big ceremony. MAC addresses are unique identifiers for devices that enable global network access. They are crucial for the increases attempts of big data collectors to unambigiously identify which computer, smartphone, tablet, or digital camera exchange information via the internet.
Each MAC address consists of 6 pairs of two hexadecimal numbers (0-9;A-F). In other words it consists of 6 byte, or 6 x 256 different strings, equally 281,474,976,710,656 possible words. This looks really like a huge number, and one might wonder if it could ever be a limitation for further growth of web. But lets just summarize how many different MAC addresses I already "consumed" since the beginning of the internet age.
At work:    5 PCs (with Ethernet cards)
                4 Laptops (with Ethernet + WiFi cards)
                3 ethernet/WiFi router
At home:   2 PCs (with WiFi cards)
                2 Laptops with on-board WiFi + bluetooth device
                1 mobile phone with bluetooth (Sony-Ericsson)
                2 smarth phones with WiFi + bluetooth (HP iPaq and Samsung Galaxy)
                2 handheld organizer with bluetooth (Sony Clie)
                2 tablet with bluetooth and WiFi (HP Slate and Galaxy Tablet)
                2 ethernet/WiFi router
                3 old plug-in USB or PCMCIA WiFi sticks.
 = 40 MAC addresses in total
Some of these 40 MAC addresses are already terminally out of use, together with the devices they found their way into the IT nirvana of a scrap-yard. But 24 are still in use. As compared to the > 280 trillion possible MAC addresses, this sounds msrginally. And if any other of the 11 billion people on earth would consume on average the same number of MAC addresses, 440 billions of the 281 trillions would be gone. This suggests that there is still an 500 fold excess of free MAC address available for all the future web enabled devices available, including for light bulbs, web connected fridges, kitchen ovens or electric tooth-brushes.

No Dark Side of the Moon

Dear Michael,

The last full moon of 2013 was visible in the night between December 16th and 17th. This is a view over Parkers Piece in Cambridge, with the sky slightly claudy.

Although the moon is clearly masked here by some clouds, from a different view point (maybe only a few miles away) this might look completely different. Another blogger (in Sicily) made a very clear photo of the moon, I guess at the same night. But the confusion about the moons illumination (i.e. full moon or new moon) and its visibility (above horizon, below horizon, or masked by clouds) goes much further when people refer to the moons hemispheres relative to the earth. Because moons rotation around its axis is perfectly synchronous to its circulation around the earth, moon always faces the same side towards earth. With the exception of a slight deviation, we can therefore only see not much more than 50% of its surface. This is the hemisphere that always faces earth. The hemishere that faces away from earth was only photographed once the Russians succesfully launched the first man-made lunar orbiter in 1957. 

Man-kind of course was always fascinated by this "invisible" side of the moon, they perhaps assumed that someone dangerous is hiding there or something precious can be found there. The most weired idea was shown in the recent movie "Iron Sky", where Nazi refugees did not went to South America to hide after World War II, but occupied this averse side of the moon and there, as every evil breed,  proliferated and became strong enough to attack our democratic and liberal civilization in an awful attempt of revenge 70 years later .

And here (if you carefully listen to the voice at 33'') you have the indication of one of the biggest misunderstandings in our pop-culture when it comes to the two hemispheres of the moon.  When the Nazi kids are asked in a school lesson where they come from, they univocally shout "From the Dark Side of the Moon". This term "Dark Side of the Moon" became such a fixed term in pop-culture, that nobody questions its meaning any more. All the reviews for "Iron Sky" talked about the dark side of the moon, and it so nicely suits with the black Nazi outfit.

Before Iron Sky, there was another movie in the year 1990 by D. J. Webster, called "The Dark Side of the Moon", but was much less satirical.

Much earlier, the UK progressive rock band Pink Floyd called their most succesful album The Dark Side of the Moon. I guess they used the metaphorical dark (or invisible) side as a reference to the band founder and writer Syd Barret, who after leaving the band caused a creative crisis and left many unanswered questions. The video below is from a concert movie they produced a year earlier in Pompej.

The first time somebody wrote down the concept of a moons dark side was Mark Twain, in a collection of aphorisms he said „Every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.“

But despite this widespread usage of the phrase "Dark Side of the Moon", there is no area on our lunar neighbour that is permanently dark or bright. Each place on moon, whether its facing earth or not, experiences a regular day-night-intervall. The difference to earth, however, is that there are about 14 days uninterrupted sunlight followed by the same period of darkness.

This is to you and the New Year

Take Care

/ghazal

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

Letter of Endorsement for an Angel in Heaven

No doubt Christmas time is on the verge again, and with it come this very weird species of christmas angels. They are populating the highstreets, department stores and all the media, and depending on where in the world one goes, they are called either kid Jesus Christ (Christkindl), Snowflake (Snegotchka) or End-of-Years-Winged-Puppet (Jahresabschluss-Fluegelpuppe). But recently I received a personal message from somebody who most likely is up in heaven now. It was a request through one of the professional social media networks called ResearchGate, and it came from a person I knew very well.  In this message I was asked by Beatrix N., a former colleague from a colaborating institute, to write an endorsement for her skills in Genetics of complex diseases, transgenic mice and gene mapping.  The problem was, that Beatrix died half a year ago in a dreadful accident, when a truck hit her on her bike.  She died in her mid 30s, and the institute for experiemental genetics lost one of their very social and scientifically commited researchers. I am happy that she was a co-author and a driving force of my first paper on Parkinson-Disease in a mutant mouse model.

But when I received the ReserachGate request today, I thought how weired it is that people after death remain a member of the scientific community.  It would be nice to imagine that they carry on to contribute to science from heaven. Of course I am convinced that Beatrix made it up their, I think she would enjoy to argue with St Peter, since she was always very good in arguing. And if my "letter of endorsement" for her scientific skills helps her to open the gates of the paradise, I would be so happy. In particular I like the idea that with her eminent critical view onto our rotten society she might also drive the wardens of heaven a bit crazy.

Best greetings up there, Beatrix, and the next paper on mouse neurodegeneration we will dedicate to you personally.

Michael

Supersize Obamacare

There is currently this cartoon circulating around in the global internet, showing Obama and a little boy in a restaurant, talking about the identity of the boys dad. Just by chance, I recognized that the US president and this little boy had ordered quite different types of food, with the little boy obviously just finishing a large supersize fastfood dish. I thought that there might have been a quite different conversation between the two.

The Run for instant Fame in Science hampers our Search for Truth ?

Dear Michael,

Since I did my master in Munich 3 years ago and now work on my PhD thesis I observe a trend in scientific research that worries me more and more. It seems to me that in the current research communities a devastating rush takes over to carry out large numbers of experiments as fast as possible and publishing their results before the initial findings could be carefully verified. On the other hand, there is the absurd tendency to start new projects, work on them in a very superficial way and finish them before anybody was able to go into depth and understand more global implications. A typical example are large whole-genome association studies, which generate endless data columns of genes with more-or-less clear links to human diseases. At the end, the usual conclusion derived from these studies is that "everything in biology is link with everything in life-science", virtually telling us nothing new. Before anybody could afford to take a complex physiological or pathological network apart and study a single biological mechanism in a defined model, the funding has usually expired and the scientific caravan went further, leaving behind only some empty water bottles and cold fire-places, but no documents to testify that the place where they erected their camp for some time was a good place and how much we have learned here. Gary Marcus wrote recently a text in The Newyorker where he explains that this not only is a very inefficient way of spending research funds, but that it even undermines the reputation of the entire research community. In Science and Its Sceptics he calls for 

"... greater enthusiasm for those people who are willing to invest the time to try to sort the truth from hype and bring that to the public. Academic science does far too little to encourage such voices. " 

But Marcus also defends the right of scientists to walk on unfortified roads, since the daily business of research is to go forward on a provisional area. This, however should not lead to a dismission of science altogether. But it is in my understanding like climbing a rock using a rope: you can go forward to the next fix-point maybe 5 meters, and when you fall you might fall 10 meters before the rope holds you. This is still acceptable, the perspective to get 5 meters higher justifies the risk fall 10 meters down and get some superficial scratches and bruises. If you risk to climb up 10 meters before fixing the rope on the next hook, however you risk to fall down 20 meters before the rope catches you, and this might cause fractures or other lesions that could become life threatening. In research, of course, it is not a matter of damaging your own physical health or your life, but to risk that a whole scientific project be put on the verge of destruction.

I am longing for the possibility to follow a single project into its depth, to discover and verify something really new and important.

take care,

/ghazal

Superstition

For my colleague from Israel it was a matter of faith, when he warned me that going to the lab on a Saturday wont be favored by God. Yes I know, I said to him, but first of all I am an bloody atheist, and second this super-ambitious student in my group occupies the RealTime PCR machine every day of the week. So to check the results of my transfected cell cultures, I have to do it on the weekend. Moishe from Israel was just smiling, saying that in Israel nobody would trust any experiments which were done on a Saturday. 

I ignored his remarks, and of course came here yesterday, when Moishe was sitting at home doing the Shabbat, avoiding to manually switching on any light or cooker, let alone a computer or anything else related with work.

I was happy to do a large batch of gene-expression measurements that nicely filled an entire 96well reaction plate. I also was happy to find a new batch of the qRT-PCR master-mix, from a company which just promoted their more reliable, more sophisticated, simply cooler enzyme and fluorescence formula. Everything went pretty smooth, and after pipetting the cDNAs and the primers and the master-mix I happily quitted the "Are you sure you want to start the run" button, locked the lab door and jumped on my bike to ride home.

Today when I came to collect and analyzed the results I immediately recognised something fishy had happened. The usually very smooth and nice ordered kinetic curves all looked like the footpathes of  a crowd of drunken teens. They were jumping up and down on the diagram and simply did not made any sense at all.

So I thougth to consult the FAQ page of Agilent, the supplier of the new qRT-PCR kit I used first time on Shabbat. One question was "How much of the internal fluorescence dye standard should I add to the reaction" ? What they mean by "adding an internal fluorescence dye standard", usually all other kits we used before had this already pre-mixed. Only Agilent, for their own enigmatic reason, decided to ship it separately, and have it added by the customer himself.

The consequence of my insistence to work on the holy Saturday: I worked 2 hours for nothing, and I wasted the reagents for 96 reactions (at a price of 0,80 € per reaction plus consumables, i.e. about 100 € in total). 

I promise I wont turn to any religious faith now, but maybe I try a little bit of Superstition.