Vote or die

I'm trying something experimental: blogging by democracy. You, fearless reader, get to have a hand in deciding what I'm going to write next. Just post a comment below with the number of your choice by Christmas Eve (December 24). I will tally the votes and then make a semi-arbitrary decision that may or may not correlate with your collective wishes. Think of me as the Electoral College.

Now, in keeping with the overarching character of this blog (i.e. the bland, lukewarm gruel of mediocrity), the candidates have been cast in particularly uninteresting terms. This is on purpose. Some of them may, in fact, turn out to be more savory than you imagine. Others may not. But just like electing officials based only on the strength in their hand-grip and their apparent ability to protect our realm from fen-stalking descendants of Cain (I can't possibly be the only one who does this, can I?), you may be surprised by the kind of politician they turn out to be.


Drum-roll, please:

This blog should next feature...

1. A political statement, full of quasi-ignorant bombast
2. A serial journal of literary exploration
3. A not-very-stunning confession regarding the arts
4. A work of unpolished creative writing
5. Nothing. Your shitty blog should die, and you with it.

The winning option will be announced Christmas Day, and posted before the beginning of 2010. Thank you for voting.


Nota bene: Anyone voting for Option #5 should be aware that this blog, unlike certain other democracies I could name, does not subscribe to such silly notions as habeas corpus. By voting, you hereby relinquish your right not to be tossed unceremoniously into the dank nethers of my island stronghold's deepest oubliette, where there are guaranteed to be no ancient, withered husks of men who know any forgotten secrets about any kind of fabulous treasure. There are spiders down there. Only spiders.

It appears to be Mahoney Time

This going to be a "cool things I learned in science class" post. You have been forewarned.


This morning in biochemistry class, our professor gave us the Willy Wonka factory tour of an enzyme known as ATP synthase*, which I will now recap even more briefly for your reading pleaure. Trust me, it will be quick and painless, and it's worth following the sci-talk to get to the coolness.

ATP synthase has two components, F1 and Fo.** F1 is a ring of three α-β subunit pairs, and the action happens right in between the two members of each couple. And what action is it? The conversion of ADP and free phosphate to ATP!

(If that doesn't mean anything to you, just think of it as the creation of high-energy fuel for the cell. Good news.)

Anyway, each α-β pair has three configurations - or moods, if you will: liking ADP, liking ATP, and liking nothing at all. They change mood based on the orientation of the γ stick. Don't worry about how it works. The γ stick spins around, pointing to each pair in turn, causing them to like ADP, then ATP, then nothing. This catalyzes the process of turning ADP to ATP and then letting it go.

But, in a Thomist vein (Lewis Thomas, that is, not Aquinas), we have to ask "What makes the γ stick spin?"

Well, that's where the Fo unit comes in. The Fo is a cylinder made up of α-helices, and the γ stick from the F1 sticks down into it like an axle into a gear. The actual dynamics of what happens were beyond the scope of our lecture, but suffice to say that there is a proton pump that that uses the proton gradient across the mitochondrial membrane to make the Fo unit spin. Think of it like a water wheel: because of pumps elsewhere in the membrane, there are a lot of protons outside, so when the Fo's channel opens, they all happily flow in. The Fo uses this current to power its spinning. As the Fo spins, it takes F1's γ crankshaft along with it, clacking the other end across the catalytic α-β pairs and driving the synthesis of ATP.

[/science]

If you don't see why this is cool at this point, I'm afraid you may not even see the coolness after I enthuse about it, but here goes:

ATP SYNTHASE IS LIKE A TINY MACHINE INSIDE YOUR CELLS!

Yes, an actual machine. With moving parts. How unbelievably cool is that? I'll tell you: it's very unbelievably cool.

As Julien Offray de La Mettrie wrote in his 1748 L'homme Machine, "The human body is a machine which winds its own springs." Though he was largely concerned with locating the soul in a mechanistic body, I think he would have been ecstatic to know about ATP synthase. Granted we would have had a lot of biology and chemistry to cover before he could even understand what was going on ("OK, so... humours? Right out. Now let's talk about cells...), but this little protein complex really is the perfect example of how mechanical our bodies really are. And because this is a machine involved in creating usable energy for the functioning of the rest of the cell, it's also a fantastic example of the body winding its own springs.



OK, that's enough swooning over science for now. The title of this post, in case you are wondering, is in tribute to the late Professor Mahoney of Princeton's history of science faculty. The man's enthusiasm for machines - and the reading thereof - left a fairly indelible mark on the minds of his pupils, and loomed large over all our explorations into the history of science.





Notes:
*"This is the machine that extracts the juice of the snozberries, and it's connected to the tubes full of luminiferous aether, but it's really rather complicated so don't worry about exactly how it all works. Just trust me, it works."
**That's "F one" and "F oh," not "F zero." The o stands for oligomycin, an antibiotic that poisons the Fo unit.

A still more glorious dawn awaits

The further beyond our senses we venture, the greater will be our incredulity. We cannot see the teeming cauldron of reactions boiling in each of our trillion cells, and we cannot resolve the titanic grandeur of the galaxies, full of stars. Not from where we stand. In the past, our human universe was limited by our complete inability to see beyond our own "macro" link in the Great Chain of Being, but men like Galileo and van Leeuwenhoek gave us mechanical appendages, allowing a select few initiates to peer beyond, into the micro and the mega.

But the large majority of people do not have access to such tools, and many who read Nature's parables do not know how to interpret them, for "...seeing they may see, and not perceive." We are not actors on the micro and mega stages in everyday life, and we cannot perceive them with our unaugmented senses, so our brains have not yet caught up with our science, and we have a hard time conceiving of both the vast and the infinitesimal.

Science asks us to contemplate the nearly infinite, and religion blinds the man who would look on the face of God. In religion's circumscribed crystalline sphere, we are held comfortable in amniotic embrace (this is my body...) and fed by umbilical vein (this is my blood...) - directly into the gut, bypassing the head entirely. We do not smell, do not taste, do not analyze spiritual nourishment, but imbibe it intravenously. Please don't chew on the body of Christ while He's transubstantiating.

Richard Dawkins' latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, was written to make the case for evolution. Every previous book, he says, started from the presumption that evolution is fact; the latest, though, aims to present the evidence. I agree with this approach. I think the greatest buttress of prejudice is ignorance, and an anti-scientific viewpoint is rarely anything other than prejudgment.

Still, I don't know that a book will go far enough. I've bought into the scientific outlook to the greatest extent possible, and it is still incredibly difficult for me to wrap my head around things like the fact that the largest black holes in the galaxy could be the size of fifty billion suns. I don't even know how big a billion is, really, nor how big the sun is. How can I conceive of such a fact? I can't. This whole line of thought occurred to me in Biochemistry lecture because I made the mistake of thinking about how the glycolysis pathway we were studying is churning incessantly in my cells, and the minute concentrations of reactants and products and regulated by other pathways, and hormones, and gradients... and all in all, the whole system (which is, by definition, life itself) is far too complex to actually understand.

This is actually part of the reason I'm excited about augmented humanity, too. I think that if we can augment our senses, we'll be able to experience a larger slice of the universe's micro-macro-mega spectrum. With our everyday consciousness expanded, we'll be better equipped to confront a vast and complex reality that is daily growing in size and complexity. I guess I'm just saying that as we chew on tougher and more gristly questions, it wouldn't hurt to have sharper teeth and a detachable jaw.



Note: The post title is from that autotuned Carl Sagan music video I posted a little while ago. Really, do yourself a favor and check it out now if you didn't before. Or even if you did - it's worth a few viewings, at least.

Present Engagements

1. I'm building a ballista on a $10 budget.
Our physics department is hosting a Punkin' Chunkin' competition, which is both a concept and a phrase that fills my heart with joy. The idea is to see who can attain the greatest range with a homemade, jury-rigged gourd-flinger. Naturally, I couldn't pass up this opportunity to combine my love of ancient technology with the destruction of produce (cf. Halloween 2009, "De Motu Citrus Nitrensis"). As such, I've spent a number of hours rummaging through local dumpsters and junk piles for building materials. The ten dollars went towards a coil of rope, but if I can find any for free I'll use it instead. I'd share my design plan here, but I'm keeping it secret lest any rivals stumble across this blog. If everything works out, I'll try to post pictures or videos.

2. I'm interviewing for medical school.
Tomorrow. It's my first one. Still haven't really processed it. I mean, what? Me? Interviewing for med school? How did that happen? I'm just a humble punkin' chunker from a punkin' chunkin' clan - not doctor material. Don't be silly. (Can you tell I'm a little nervous?)

Granted, part of me is sure I'm going to blow the roof off this thing like a tornado in a trailer park, but that's the same part of me that also says things like "If this medicine thing doesn't work out, you could always be Supreme God-Emperor of the Galaxy," so I'm taking its advice with a grain of salt.

If this last bit seems especially prideful to you, you're right. It's part of my campaign to hit all seven deadlies in one day, because today is 3. International Blasphemy Day. So crowning myself king of the cosmos seems like a decent way to get in pride and offend the Invisible Sky-Beard all at once. Now, I'm off to find a lingerie-clad model baking a chocolate cake she won't let me have, and that should cover another 3 or 4 no problem.

Incendiary

I just saw Buckethead at the Recher in Towson. His opening act was a mohawk-sporting hulk named Wolff (of Drums and Tuba) who, living up to his absent band's moniker, spent the better part of an hour doing unwholesome things with, and to, a tuba. We then stood for another interminable hour with an ever-more-restless crowd, waiting for the virtuoso to appear. Just as we began to ask ourselves "How long would you wait for Buckethead?" he descended upon us. The rest of the evening is a haze of shrill and blinding shredding, the music that Disney plays in its animatronic attractions, Buckethead dispensing gifts from a giant blue sack, an excellent John Williams interlude, and some genuinely solid and meaty metal riffs. The man, it must be said, is a prodigy. At times it was entirely unclear if he was playing the guitar or giving it multiple orgasms. My ears still feel cotton-plugged and my legs ache from standing, but the 90-minute set flew by. Not all of Buckethead's music is gentle on the ears, nor even entirely pleasant, but it is powerful if for nothing other than the immense skill it evinces. And his more melodic tracks can be perfectly sublime.

Did I mention that he wears a KFC bucket over his featureless white mask and does not speak during shows? Well, he's earned the right to be as strange as he wants. When you're that good with a guitar, no one cares what you're wearing on your head.

"Who's the more foolish: The fool, or the fool who follows him?"

I am sure I'm not alone in being sick of Sarah Palin. I was sick of Palin when she was running for national office, and I really wish she would just go away. I imagined that quitting her day job, she would spend all her time hunting and fishing and patrolling the Russian border, and the thought made me happy. I now realize, on the other side of a media circus, that she may strike herself down, but it will only make her more powerful than you can possibly imagine.*

This Reuters article only made me more frustrated, and I have developed a proposal for your consideration, Nation.** Let's say I want to make a comment about someone's policy; maybe I want to "slam Obama's energy and environment plans." OK, what are my options? Well, I can write a blog post about it, I can bitterly whine about it to my friends, I can make a card-stock sign and parade around Capitol Hill, or I can dump a bunch of Tetley in the trash. Among the things I cannot do are call a press conference or schedule a TV interview. Why not? Because I'm just a regular citizen, and nobody cares what I think. And you know what? That's fine. It's better than fine: it's right and just and fair.

Now, granted, Mrs. Palin is still a state governor, so I suppose she does get to have her turn at the podium. For now. But once she steps down, can we please start ignoring her? A concerted effort would be nice. If she willingly gives up her public office, she doesn't merit regard in the public forum anymore. I know it's a fool's hope, because, if nothing else, Fox News will never stop smearing her pablum around the airwaves, but I really think we should have a Palin moratorium. No more caring what she says or thinks, no more caring about her abstinence-only soap operas. I don't want to hear a peep about Palin again.

The consequence of giving up responsibility is giving up privilege. Public regard should be earned by public service or on the merit of erudition in public matters. Now that Palin has given up on service, she is bereft of all qualifications for regard, and she should be paid no more heed than any other bloviating celebrity with ill-informed views.










*It pains me to compare her to Obi-Wan. It pains me even more that, upon googling the quote to make certain I had it right the first goddamn result is some right-wing blogger mourning Palin's resignation! Gah! Leave my Star Wars bloody well alone! This makes me feel better, though.

**The rest of it doesn't rhyme. Also, can I address the Nation, or is only Stephen Colbert allowed to do that?

Too Soon

I know I was amazed to discover that Michael Jackson passed away this week at the age of 50. If you're anything like me, you can't believe that his strange and scrutinized life has come to an untimely end. You might assume that these are the kind of shocking events that happen only once in long while.

But wait! There's more.

Call in the next ten minutes and you can get two fifty-year-old celebrity deaths in the same week! With your Michael Jackson, we'll throw in a Billy Mays at no extra charge! That's right. Michael Jackson and Billy Mays: a combined hundred-year-old value for just $20.09 plus shipping and handling. Act now, before this once-in-a-lifetime offer expires.







Yes, I know I'm going to burn in Hell, why do you ask?

Today I get my MCAT Score

I was once a competitive athlete, so I know about nerves. I have been anxious before. But I had never felt like every ounce of my blood was replaced by adrenaline until this morning. I slept fitfully, dreaming all night of checking my score. I woke up buzzing. My limbs feel light and the world seems kind of slow and gauzy. Perhaps having coped with failure already in my countless repetitive dreams last night has put me at peace with the possibility of disappointment, or at least as much at peace as I can expect to be.

I click the button.


"You have no scores yet."


Not until 5:00pm.


I can wait.

Cortisol

OK, so this article about the President's address to the AMA grinds my gears a bit-- not just as the son of physicians and a future doctor myself, but as a logical person who appreciates balanced reporting.

I'm okay with Obama not limiting jury damages in malpractice cases, and I get where he's coming from. I'm not proud of the fact that he got booed. But what really bugs me is the lack of understanding displayed by the criticism of doctors for contributing to the inflated cost of health care by ordering "unnecessary tests." I can't claim expertise in the matter, but it seems to me that if doctors were not quite so afraid of being embroiled in malpractice suits over negligence, they could relax their hyperactive testing and procedures a bit. Don't get me wrong: I'm sure a lot of doctors are greedy SOBs who do it for the kickbacks, but you can't tell me that's the motivation in every case. So it troubles me that there seems to be a change in the prevailing winds, that now accusatory fingers are being pointed squarely at doctors, often without appropriate context.

Undoubtedly, some people actually know what they're talking about. And yes, Atul Gawande, I'm looking at you. As Dr. Gawande explained, the nation's doctors must cut down on the exorbitant expenses incurred by patients, but he recognizes the complexities of the issue:

"Fixing this problem can feel dishearteningly complex. Across the country, we have to change skewed incentives that reward quantity over quality, and that reward narrowly specialized individuals, instead of teams that make sure nothing falls between the cracks for patients and resources are not misused [emphasis added]."

The skewed incentives are not only the monetary rewards that doctors gain by loading up on dubious rigmarole, but the incentive to avoid accusations of negligence. Pace organic chemistry, the specter of malpractice is one of the scariest things faced by aspiring physicians. Reading ER doc blogger WhiteCoat's "Trial of a WhiteCoat" series (which is the ongoing account of his own malpractice suit), I can't help worrying that someday I'll also be held accountable for negligence if I don't order some test or consult some specialist quickly enough, and a grieving family assumes that my hesitation to call in the heavy artillery was what killed their loved one. So I completely understand the urge to open up with the whole battery of technological marvels, fill them full of contrast and blast them with radiation, poke, prod, jab, scan, biopsy, and consult with the experts in the interest of avoiding someone suing your scrubs off. So the criticisms being leveled at the doctors are perhaps valid, but they need to be contextualized in order to be fair.

Oh, and this quote?

Obama did not blame the doctors. Instead, he tried to woo them, much as he has done with recalcitrant foreign leaders.

Really, is it really necessary to lump us in with Ahmadinejad and Co.? I don't think so.

Yo ho ho, and a... wait, what?

This is the Somali Navy training to fight pirates:

[BBC News]

Guys, the footwork is impressive and the jaunty way you're holding your hands just so is quite debonair, but I think you're dealing with the other kind of pirates.

Yeah, not these guys:
These guys:
Oh, you realized that? Right, OK, well... cool. Yeah, just checking. No, I know. You were totally thinking of the pirates with RPGs and AK-47s, not the ones with cutlasses and cannons, and... yeah. Cool. Well, um... keep up the training there. Yeah.

Alo, Salut, sunt eu, un haiduc...

Somehow, this article from the BBC tells you pretty much all you need to know about Romania.

The gist of it is this: Gigi Becali was a shepherd "who made a fortune in land deals" and now owns the country's biggest soccer team. He is "a devout Christian" (as the golden icon in his photograph no doubt tipped you off), and he's one of Romania's most flamboyant politicians. Described as a "Robin Hood figure," he announced his candidacy for European Parliament from prison. Why was he in jail? When some thieves stole his car and demanded a ransom, he first paid the money, then sent a gang of thugs to trap, kidnap, and beat up the thieves.

Naturally, the thieves went to the police to complain about the violence, and Becali was arrested. Now he has been released and got himself elected as MEP, but a travel ban has been placed on him while the investigation is underway. As a matter of course, he's decided to ignore the ban and go to Brussels anyway, challenging the Romanian authorities to arrest him there.

Romania is a very odd country, and if my own experiences there are any indication, crime is viewed somewhat differently there than it is in other parts of the world. The long conversation I had with a cutpurse named Funny on a Bucharest city bus is a story for another time, but I mention it now because of the relative nonchalance with which he admitted to being a thief, and his emphasis on theft as a rectification of the injustices of class difference. Granted, I'm still unsure of Funny's mental soundness, but he seemed to see himself as a kind of Robin Hood, as well.

And I've just remembered something else: as I was about to wonder whether there was an analogous Robin Hood figure in Romania, I suddenly flashed back to a restaurant in Braşov where I ate cotlet haiducesc, or outlaw's porkchop. As referenced in the title of this post, the song "Dragostea Din Tei" (arguably Romania's biggest export since Dracula) also has the singer calling himself "haiduc."* From a completely unresearched perspective, I get the sense that there is a romanticized outlaw folklore in Romania. I think I'll look into it.

"Hæþenra manna hergunc adilegode Godes cyrican..."

This is the first time I have updated this blog while mentally compromised. I am currently feeling the effects of copious mead and ale (as promised to those who attended my party tonight), for I have just finished celebrating the 1,216th anniversary of the Vikings' sack of Lindisfarne Abbey in 793 CE. We played a fantastic game of Viking's Cup (my invention), but I believe I was the only one imbibing the honeyed nectar of Valhalla. As such, all I have to say right now is this:

Hail Odin, the All-father, ruler of Asgard and inspiration of the skalds.

I'm going to drink a lot of water before I go to bed, and pray to the Aesir that I am spared the all-too-imminent repercussions of the night's excesses. May the gods smile upon you.

A Short List of Things I Wish To Say

1. I took the MCAT exam this morning.
2. I am leaving at dawn for parts unknown. I am assuming I will not have access to the internet, so this will likely be my last post for at least one week.* I will post again when I return, perhaps with a tale of adventure and peril.

*Yes, I am aware that it's been more than a week since my last post. I was just getting you used to not having regular updates. Yes, I am aware that I never update regularly. I am also aware that shut the hell up.

Now cracks a noble mind

As I was stumbling into bed a minute ago, far too late for the alarm clock I just set, I began mumbling in exhausted delirium. "Goodnight, sweet prince," I slurred to... myself, I suppose, "and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. The rest," I continued, "is silence." I was immediately struck by three things, none of which (fortunately) were corporeal:

1) That I had just recited the lines out of order, and would probably be consigned to an extra decade in purgatory for my offense against the Bard.

2) That it's funny how both Hamlet and Horatio use the word "rest" two different ways in their abutting lines-- could it have been wordplay?

3) And lastly: what if it was a stage direction? I mean, it's one of the most famous lines in Shakespeare, if not the English canon, but what if "the rest is silence" is not what the actor playing Hamlet is actually supposed to say, but it just means that he's supposed to shut the hell up after prophesying the election lighting on Fortinbras? If certain scholars are to be believed, our written corpus of Shakespeare's work came from the frantic scribblings of audience-based scribes, probably looking to sell pirated copies of the latest blockbuster. So what if Jack Half-Flagon was scratching out the final iambs and forgot to put parentheses around the part where Hamlet starts mumbling incoherently before shuffling off his mortal coil? Over the next couple centuries, that smidge of non-dialogue gets enshrined as one of Will Shakespeare's most profound sentiments. It could all be a lie! I can see, even now, the topless towers of Academe crumbling to dust around my feet, and prophesy the destruction lights on English Departments. So tell them, with the occurrents, more and less, which have solicited. The rest is silence.

Riding the Wave

I used to be very troubled by the fact that my mind is basically just a very complicated chemical reaction. Thought, emotion, aspiration, and dream could all be reduced (or maybe oxidized) to basic organic molecules and cation gradients. Don't get me wrong, it still isn't my favorite thing to contemplate, but I put it in a new perspective this morning. As biology is increasingly melded with chemistry, and chemistry with physics, we begin to see the ways by which fundamental principles govern complex systems. For instance, traits may be determined by DNA, which is structured the way it is due to the interactions of nucleic acids, which interact as they do because of the properties of nitrogenous bases and phosphates, which react in specific ways because of the electrons in their molecular orbitals. Electrons, of course, and all subatomic particles really, are essentially wave functions describing the probabilities of their existence at a point in space and time. Despite the gross over-simplification and my minuscule knowledge of quantum physics , it makes me think about the fact that we are not just animals (as per Darwin's decentralization of humanity), we are not just unconscious minds (as per Freud's), we are not just chemical reactions sloshing around in a bony brain-case, we are not even collections of atoms. We are, as far as I can tell, probability functions with enough pieces to have a high degree of existence. The "Free Will" of particles notwithstanding, thinking about these kinds of things can lead to a very dark, scary, and confusing place, not unlike certain Baltimore neighborhoods late at night. In the interest of not getting mugged and beaten by my own psyche, I don't spend too much time there. But visiting every once in a while does remind me that living in a place where I can think of myself as a well-maintained chemical reaction really isn't so generative of existential angst. After all, it could be a lot worse: I could have to reconcile my rich inner life and sense of self with the notion that I am just a lucky interference pattern of quarks. Here, I have no choice but to take Hume's sacrament:

"I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther. Here then I find myself absolutely and necessarily determined to live, and talk, and act like other people in the common affairs of life..."

(A Treatise of Human Nature, I.vii)

Drinking the Scotsman's claret absolves me of my grindings and rumblings, and all is well enough for now.