guidoLamoto

These guys are a little late to the party. The Universe runs according to probablities and The Minimum Principle. Darwin's theory is really just a specific case as it relates to biology. Self-organization is a natural consequence of those two rules. S Kauffman's The Origins of Order is an excellent summary of this, and JD Murray has done a ton of work in many different areas of biology applying it. The zebra pictures above are from his work and summarized in his book Mathematical Biology. If Dr. Falsi had read that, he wouldnt have told us to isolate to deal with CoViD....BTW- the stripe pattern of Zebras is a special application of the Laplacian equation that also applies to epidemics-- the zebra's stripes and the wave pattern of an epidemic are mathematically related.

Because the major source of warming for the planet is the sun, there is net warming locally for only about 6 hr a day, with net cooling for 18hrs. At this point, the total energy budget is stable. It just takes a little longer, theoretically, to cool back down each day at any given location. but we still do cool...We are dealing also with the problem of the physical meaning of averages.... The satellite record shows that virtually all of the warming seen over the 45 yrs of the record has taken place in the polar regions-- completely predictable because heat flows from high concentration to low. There has been only a ittle warming, mostly at night, in the temperature zones and almost none in the tropics. https://www.nsstc.uah.edu/climate/ The geologic climate record shows that the planet must have a negative feedback system dominating temps. Despite [co2] of 8000ppm ages ago, temps never have seemed to exceeded 25*C....The co2 influence should be a positive feedback loop, but it likely is "over-powered" by the several other cyclical factors influencing climate. Reviewing the concept of coupled oscillators may give insight into the problem at hand. Say swinging to the left causes warming and to the right, cooling. Now expand it to at least a dozen masses of widely varying size with a wide range of pendulum lengths-- the state of "the climate" being the total state of the system at any particular moment in time...The "perfect storm" is the codition when all are at their max or min at the same time. Thanks for the negative credits...Anybody care to show some intellectual integrity and say why you think I'm wrong or are you simply insulted that your religion has been questioned?

Good point about disengenuous reporting-- The Warmists are guilty of that. They commonly show the co2 gragh and the temp graph superimposed- both, miraculously, with a 50% slope implying a 1:1 relationship....But in truth, the co2 graph should be sloped about 60% (260ppm ==> 420ppm or 160/260) over the last century, while the temp graph should be sloped only 0.7% (286 ==>288*K) ...Then we could argue about what a 2deg rise in temps means...Can you step outside and accurately estimate the temp to any greater accuracy than +/- 5 degC? The common wisdom has been that co2 is a well mixed gas with little variation from one geographic location to the next, but now that we have a co2 sensing satellite, that may not be as true as we'd like to think. https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/12/01/carbon-dioxide-movie-night-the-global-picture/ Note how much co2 is being dumped into the atm by Asia, and, with Mauna Loa, the "official measurement site" directly downwind, maybe we need to re-examine how much the [co2] has really gone up. This whole "GW" controversey is marred by so much bad science, unethical practices and outright lies for political and financial advantage that we have to treat it like we treat "data" about Big Foot-- while we can;t scientifically say he doesn;t exist, there's so much outright fraud involved in the reporting that we have to hold all info suspect.

It looks like that's a back-handed way of saying that the co2/temp relationship is exponential, exhibiting a doubling period phenomenon. https://hifast.wordpress.com/2019/02/15/how-does-temperature-depend-on-co2/ To be considered on the logical level, increasing [co2] won't result in more warming over all, just a trapping of heat in a thinner layer, closer to the surface. ...That means higher atm will be cooling. We see that now in the UAH satellite data-- troposphere warming, stratosphere cooling. ...and consider the phenomenon of extinction of absorbtion-- Increasing humidity may make the lighthouse look dimmer and dimmer until it's fogged out completely. At that point, adding thicker fog won't change anything in regards seeing the lighthouse. Skeptics don't "deny" that there's climate change or that the GH Effect exists. They point out that the actual effect of increasing [co2] at the current level of 420ppm has minimal effect on climate, and even less as it goes higher....It's like ignoring the relativistic component of the gravity equation when calculating the trajectory of the bowling ball dropped form the Leaning Tower. Perfectly justified from the practical stand point. Now, we could discuss the source of the increasing [co2] if you like-- also more likely to be due to warming oceans and minimally caused by humans mobilizing geologically sequestered carbon. Keep in mind that the increasing co2 seen in the ice core data lags 800 yrs behind the warming. In a cause & effect situation, the cause has to pre-cede the effect. Addendum in respnse to iNow-- Those minor absorbtion bands for co2 coincide with the major bands of h20, so they add little to the GH trappjing effect of co2...co2 is a much "stronger" GHG on a molar basis than h20, but h2o is so much more prevalent that it far outweighs co2 in its warming effect... ...and then it gets really complicated because h20 means clouds and clouds shade the surface, and also mean precipitation which further adds cooling effects. Cf- diurnal temp changes in desert vs rain forest-- they both have the same amount of co2. It's a mistake to look for a simple explanation in a complex matters.

The association of the female cycle and the lunar cycle was pointed out as food for discussion....There are several rather obvious diurnal cycles in human biology, why not lunar assocations?.. .While the human female cycle is variable from individual to individual, the mean/median coincides with the moon's cycle length.....Even our diurnal cycles vary about a mean. That indiviual variation accounts for a good deal of the insomnia problems man in iindustrialized society has. If the sun is on a 24 hr cycle and you are on, say, a 28 hr cycle, you will want to be awake when the sun is up for a good deal of the month, but want to sleep when it's up for the complementary portion of the month...and da capo. While the length of the lunar cycle has changed considerably over the eons, H.spaiens is less than 10^6 y/o, and a good deal of that time may have been used "evolving" to the current state. The Moon's cycle period has not changed all that much in that time span. None of the objections raised above exclude or reject the concept of a lunar/hormonal association. The phenomenon is certainly operant in other species https://www.astronomy.com/science/how-lunar-cycles-guide-the-spawning-of-corals-worms-and-more/ Why not H. sapiens? The real question is can we make a drug to take advantage of this and make some real money?

We could define "living" as the on-going biochemical processes of metabolism (Stop metaboilizng and you're dead.)...Those processses involve enyzymes and their receptors, both are protein in nature...."Disease" is basically some abonormility of that metabolism.... Finding drugs to treat disease has been traditonally acccomplished by making fortuitous observations of the effects chemicals have (usually from eating plants) on various conditions-- Many indigenous people, for instance observed that nibbling willow bark (contains aspirin) stopped headaches, etc. (You gotta wonder why they were nibbling on willow bark in the first place?) Those associations are rare and difficult to make....It makes more sense, now that we have the technology, to accurately describe the structure of the enzymes or receptors in the cell and then manufacture chemicals with complementary structures (hand and glove situation) to block the action of the enzyme or receptor... With technology, we could also find the protein responsible for the disease state, then find the gene responsible for that protein, and then block the specific gene, but that adds a layer of comlexity and difficulty to the process....They just announced this week that they did it for the first time in regards treating sickel cell anemia, but we already knew the specific gene involved.

Is it just a coincidence that the human female hormonal cycle is 28 days, the same as the lunar cycle, and that the moon is referenced so often in the literature of love?

Before calling me pretentious, read my first line again-- "My fantasies about..." I realize my data was not sytematically collected nor critically analyzed....You should be aware that no "treatment" for the various addictive behaviors has a very good success rate beyond a few weeks or months. AA is the best among them and is a continuing process, not a short session. My intention was to point out that for smoking, the chemical part is probably not as important as the behavioral component- a point easily deduced along the lines I described ("nicotine is a stimulant....) "Superstitious behavior" is when a strong coincidental occurrence is mis-interpreted as a cause & effect relationship. As I pointed out, most hospitalized smokers do well without their nicotine for a short duration, even if malaria is not involved. Your questioning the relationship in your experience doesn't make you superstitious. It represents the legitimate formation of a hypothesis to be tested. I apologize if the term got your shorts in a bunch. It's your lungs and arteries. Do what you like. Smoking is a difficult habit to break and has a powerful impact on health. While "only" 15% of smokers go on to develop lung cancer, that disease that doesn't show itself until the 6th or 7th decade of life. Many more smokers succumb to CAD in their 5th or 6th decade, before they have a chance to get cancer....and besides, it stinks. Literally.

You don't know Mantle or Mays?... I take it you're either not American or some kind of Communist or Vegetarian.. (They were excellent baseball players, both palying in New York in the '50s. Add in Snider playing for Brooklyn in that decade and you have the meat for endless hours of arguments among sports fans in the bars over who was the best center fielder.) Leonardo had as much to do with math as Sir Isaac had to do with sculpturing and painting...although Leonardo's plan for a bridge over the strait at Constantinople has been shown in models to be feasable and mechanically sound engineering, far advanced for its time. https://www.livescience.com/da-vinci-bridge-never-made.html He was also said to be the strongest man in Italy. .. and I think he invented the Whoopie Cushion too. A well rounded man. Newton can't compete on that level.

There's a couple mistakes in logic in this discussion common to those who are not familiar with research data collection and analysis. For example, what do we mean by "causes?" Eg- Everyone "knows" that smoking causes cancer, right? Then how do you explain the fact that less than 15% of long time smokers ever get cancer?...It's because there are other factors (genetic and just plain luck) involved. Then there's the problem of the logistics of doing sutdies-- Studies are usually only funded for relatively short periods of time- a few years, while diseases often require decades to show themselves and evolve. The researchers try to compensate for this by including large numbers of subjects and calculating "patient years."..But it's easy to see that following 10 pts for 20 yrs (200 pt-yrs) is not the same as following 100 pts for 2 yrs (also 200 pt-yrs). Not much may happen in 2 yrs, but a lot of things coould develop over 20 yrs. Medical studies cannot be viewed in a mechanistic, cause-and-effect way. It's more a matter of probabiities. Interpreting these probablities is even more difficult because often the rates involved are low. Let's say we're looking at lymphoma in farmers exposed to glyphosate. Several studies show that about 3 cases of lymphoma appear over a course of 10,000 pt-yrs. A few show 3 -6 cases, a couple 1 or 2 cases. They average out to 3/100,000...That variation from study to study, 1- 6 cases/100k is called statisrical wandering (error)- a well known phenomenon...Then they followed the non-farmers (no exposure) and found the same wandering and the same averages. The only scientific conclusion we can draw is that the chemical is not responsible for an increase in lymphoma rates....BUT- we can't really conclude that no person is safe from exposure. ...Statistics only apply to the group- NEVER the individual. Willy Mays, a lifetiine .300 hitter, can't get 3/10ths of a hit in his next At Bat. Then there's the problem of risk to benefit ratio. The FDA wouldn't license a drug for treating the common cold if it had the dangerous side effect profile of some of the nastier chemo- agents for cancer. The short answer to the original question is that the benefits of metronidazole far outweigh the risks of taking it.

Bump again (I'm bored today.) My fantasies about smoking and cessation based on 40 yrs of observations practicing medicine among a large urban, working class population (ie- a lot of smokers): Short answer to the OP's situation-- he has made the superstitious association between two episodes of acute illnees and a loss of desire to smoke. It wasn't the malaria. It was the hospitalization itself with it's other worries, points of attention and probably hard fast rules preventing smoking....I've never seen a pt who insisted on smoking while hospitalized. Nicotine is not really an addictive chemical, when we define addicitng as the combination of two phenomena-- tachyphylaxis (a need to continually increase doses to obtained the desired effect) and withdrawal (a rebound effect with eaggerated physiological response upon sudden discontinuation of the drug. Cf- the DTs- wild neurological firing after discontinuing the tranquilizing ethanol)... Nicotine is a stimulant in the first place, so stopping it should cause a calming of the nerves upon withdrawal, not increased nervousness if it was a "rebound," and you don't need to keep on smoking more cigs each day. Most smokers have a habitual smoking pattern (note the word habitual)-- one pack a day seems to be the norm-- for years on end. The ritual of smoking, tapping one out of the pack, knocking the loose tobacco out (you alewya see that in the Film Noir movies), lightining it, all the hand manipulations as you go to your mouth, to the ash tray, etc It becomes mindless habit....It's a RITUAL and when forced to abandon the ritual, the smoker feels like he's forgetting something and has the urge to keep the ritual going. I think nicotine gum or patches are areally just placebos, if effective at all. My pts had some more success if they used aversion therapy-- either sucking down a half dozen cigs in rapid succession causing some nausea, tachcardia etc, or by saving the butts in a small container for a day or two, adding some water to make a sloppy slurry, then inhaling that deeply every time they wanted to light up over the course of a day or three...can work pretty well, at least for awhile. The problem for the rest of us is that those who quit often become as insufferable as Born Again Christains or Vegetarians. Sheesh. Give us a break.

Amusing thread. Just a warning (from a retired physician)- pica- the craving to eat non-food items= often signal a vitsmin or mineral deficiency. Clay pica was very common in The South prior to WWII when malnutrition was fairly widespread...Craving to eat corn starch, for some reason, usually signals iron deficieency, Olfactory hallucinations or cravings can also mean intracranial lesions- tumors, abscesses, strokes and such. While Fe-deficiency is common and easy enough to treat (Fe pills) it's cause should ALWAYS be tracked down. Healthy people don't get Fe deficiency. There's ALWAYS a "cause." The may be as benign as heavy menstrual flow or hiatus hernia, but serious things like peptic disease, and especially GI tumors need to be excluded and treated. NEVER take Fe supplements unless instructed to do so by your doc who has done a complete work up to make a diagnosis...If you have, say, a colon cancer that weeps blood a drop a day, and you;re taking supplements on your own, you won't develop the anemia easily caught on your yearly screening blood work. Suspicion won't arise, and focused testing won't be done and a diagnosis will be missed until you have a football growing out from under your ribs. Too late. Too bad. Oh, BTW- olfactory "cravings" more often than not are traced to psych problems, not physical pathology.

We agree about Newton's place in history, but it's difficult to fault Leonardo- scientist, artist and futurist. If we were chosng up sides for a stick ball game in the streets and Mickey Mantle and Willy Mays were there, would it make any difference who you chose?

Anybody who has ever worked in the ER will try to convince you that all the coo-coos come out during the full moon. There may be a plausable explanation for that-- the stronger gravitational influence my draw more electolytes up in to the brain, altering nerve conduction. That effect could also explain the behavioral changes that occur in women according to their monthly cycles- more estrogen causing Na retention, etc. Horses and at least some migrating birds can sense the planet's magnetic field. Hemoglobin and myoglobin, among other biochemical constuents are full of Fe- obviously magnetic- so possibly influenced by magnetic fields. Science works when an observation is made, a plausable explanation formulated and then tested. As pointed out by others above, whether on not this phenomenon is "real" it certainly is not of very much clinical importance in the great scheme of things. Anybody who would be affected adversely by a cosmic storm probably is about to suffer the damage soon anyway, with or without the cosmic storm..... Has anybody seen my tin foil hat lately?

OK, here's where we start confusing the kid in the OP-- You're right- dx and dy are differentials. A differential (called an infinitesimal by Newton originally) is the value of x when x = a - b and a and b are brought closer and closer together, x approaching zero "in the limit." dx/dy is a differential expression and could be called a derivative in the specific case where y = x + c, but that doesn't help much in defining the term. In my example above, 2x dx is the derivative of y. When you differetiate a function, you get a derivative...When you integrate the derivative, you get the function back. Newton was an amazing guy. He invented calculus as a 19 y/o while on hiatus from Cambridge during The Plague. How many of us did anything even remotely as ambitious while shut down during CoViD? I straightened out my underwear drawer.

Not only do I have insomnia tonight, but I can't sleep either, so I thought I'd share my experience with chicken genetics: Years ago, as an undergrad, I had the bright idea to isolate the genes for drum sticks and for taste in chickens. If I could replicate them and re-insert them I could develop chickens that would taste twice as good and have twice as any drumsticks (everybody likes drumsticks the best). I figured i could sell the idea to The Colonel or Popeye and make a fortune. .. Well I successfully isolated the genes, replicated them and re-inserted them. I did grow chickens with four legs...but I don't know if they tasted any better. With those four legs, the little %$#@ers could run so fast I could never catch them to wring their necks and cook them. Oh, well.

an old thread, but-- the OP may want to familiarize himself with this site http://co2science.org/ Plants grown under higher [co2] show more vegetative growth (ie- more llignin & cellulose) that "dilutes," so to speak, the amount of N fixed. They still fix more N . Yields of seeds/fruits also are higher, although there is some data that show there is some dilution of nutrients therein, over-all production of nutrients per ac is still increased....Mistermack's response above is excellent. While [co2] may be the highest in human history, keep in mind that H.sapiens evolved initially during the last Ice Age when [co2] levels were dangerously close to the 180ppm level that would stop all photosynthesis and essentially wipe out almost all life on Earth (chemotrophes excepted)....We are returning to pre-glaciation levels of temps & co2 (maybe- we may be headed for the next glaciation even now)...What is "normal" temp & co2 for planet Earth?

Publish or perish, I guess, even if you publish things that don't need to be published or thought them out very well. While H. sapiens and no doubt earlier H species have altered their environments to some extent, does it come anywhere near the impact that photosynthesizing bacteria had on turning Earth's reducing atmosphere into an oxidizing one, or the effect of carbon fixing diatoms have had on producing the vast limestone deposits of the American Midwest, the marble backbone of Italy or the White Cliffs of Dover?...and all the humus in the world was produced by biological activity....Beavers have had a significant and far-reaching impact on their ecosystem, and then there's coral. There would be no Florida if there hadn't been coral. Human impacts have been and will continue to be miniscule in The Great Scheme of Things.

Short answer-- Differentiation is a process. Eg-- You may be asked to differentiate the equation y = x^2 + 8. You would find dy = 2xdx. Re-arrange it to get 1 = 2x dx/dy. That's a differential equation, because it contains a differential....dx/dy is a differential.... A differential is a number. Diffeetiation is a process.

Tetracycline oxidizes and becomes toxic with age, although it's rarely prescribed anymore. I'm not sure if the newer minocycline, doxycycline etc forms show the same thing. (Most drugs don't generally deteriorate significantly with age-- although ASA & NTG are notable exceptions, oxidizing and losing potency rapidly (weeks) once the bottle is opened. The problem of antibiotic resistance and short courses of treatment is more theoretical than practical. Every time an antibiotic is used, the pressure is for an increase in the gene frequency of resistant alleles in the population of surviving bugs.....Resistance is, after all, a phenomenon of neo-Darwinian evolution, not Lamarckian. The population curve of a bug being treated shows an exponential decay over time, so, for a short course, a larger surviving population remains at the end of the course...but the survivors, no matter how few after even a longer course, have as much time as they need to re-populate... The med can't give 100% mortality-- It's purpose is to cut down the population of invaders enough that the natural immune response will finally polish them all off.--Resistance actually occurs out in the environment, not so much in the patient, when the free-living bugs are exposed to the "spillage" of the antiobiotic and the final "mop up operation" of the immune system is not available.

ALA, being an omaga-3 fatty acid, would be found in the fat portion. It's actually found in quite high concentration in the organ meats of beef in particular. The stats show that the ratio of omega3- to omega-6 FAs are more significantgly associated with cardiac status than the actual amounts, but, as with all these so called "risk factors" and various measures of lipid levels, statistical significance does not translate very strongly to clinical significance. Cf- Baseline risk of a cardiac event is 4/1000 per annum. Those with DM have a risk increased to 16/100/yr, strong family hx of early MI ~15/1000/yr, and HTN also ~12/1000/yr (and treating it doesn't lower the risk). Chol >200mg% increases risk to 8/1000/yr-- twice the risk of "normal" chol (!!!)--but that means 992 /1000 DON'T have an Mi each year, compared to 996/1000-- big deal....Takng statins as primary prevention has not been convincingly proven to lower MI rates, while 45 pts with an acute MI need to take statins for five yrs to prevent just one repeat MI--big deal- an improvment of only 2% in absolute risk (35% in relative risk). (And no-- statistically speaking YOU are NEVER "the one" who is helped."-- a risk probabliity is a 2-D element-- an area under the curve; an individual is a 0-dimensional element.) Given the side effect profile of statins is in the 10% range, the risk/benefit ratio doesn't seem to be there, unless we include the legal risk/benefit ratio for the prescribing doctors. In regards O-3- & O-6-FAs and beef: in the lab, grass finished beef (all beef is grass-fed unitl it gets to the feedlot) has a statistically significant increased amount of O-3-FAs compared to feedlot-finsihed beef-- but again, don't conduse statistical significance with clinical significance....As tudy ~10y/a showed that cattle on a feedlot given only hay and not feed for the final two weeks before slaughter (or "harvest" for the more delicate reader) is found to have the same biochem analysis as purely grass-finshed beef. ...I give up-- I don't know what that means either in regards best practices recommendations.

ALA is found in meat, particularly beef. Beef also contains high amounts of cardiolipin-- another cardioprotective agent and the subject of several studies showing its beneficial effects in treating acute MI. In regards fish oil and the cholesterol problem in general-- a grossly over-stated problem exploited for the financial benefits of thpse emphasizing it. If you review the data & stats on the benfits of fish oil and the risks of trans-fats, it's a pretty flimsy argument....The risk cholesterol poses on CAD is about as strong as the risks imposed by serum Fe levels. How come nobody is recommending periodic phlebotomy to combat CAD? If you want to signifcantly improve your cardiovascular status, don't smoke, exercise regularly and chose your parents wisely. Nothing else helps much.

You must be riding out this blizzard like me, with a lot of time on your hands. Apparently many members here are academics who insist on rigorously accurate posts and like to argue details & rhetoric rather than principles. I apologize. I should have asked if anyone could name a non-renewable resource that is in danger of depletion in the next 300 yrs. You're absolutely right about our fisheries. We already did a number on our bison, but that was intentional. It wouldn't do to have 60 million migrating, large beasts trampling our crops, not to mention feeding our rivals, every year. In regards sustainable ag, I guess I should have explicitly stated that we can't use organic, renewable N sources and continue our high yields. Lower yields would translate to lower carrying capacity, and that in turn, would lead to a die-off until population numbers matched resource availability. You gotta spell it out for some people. Between the biased editorial policy and this sort of picayunish, petty crap, I don't think I'll be back here. Thanks for the ride. It's been a slice.

Do the math: Pre-WW II farming was essentially "organic"-- the best yields were 50bu/ac for corn. Today, corn belt farmers get 200bu/ac-- ain't enough cow dung and Rhizobium to produce that. US population before WW II ~130M; today it's 330M....We've been swimming hard against the current all these yrs and can't stop now or we'll get swept away. To go organic on a large scale would result in a large change in the carrying capacity necessitating a commensurate die-off. ...Any volunteers?