a little epigenetics for a change

ll

now.

e.

Rich obviously hasn't met any rabid socialists. I used to run into them at trade union meetings in the U.K. - not that I went to all that many, and the rabid socialists were one of the aspects of the business that discouraged me, when my interests stopped being directly engaged. In the Netherlands the Socialist Party is too rabid for me - I vote for the Dutch Labour Party (Partij van de Arbeid) which is still socialist, but not so far to the left that it couldn't form a coalition government with the Christian Democrats and the Christian Union.

He doesn't know much about science either, which does explain why he can't get much from my posts.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Wrong. I do it fairly often, with people who build jet engines, big lasers, pretty big lasers, atom probes, biochemical analysis gadgets, electro-optics, radar test sets, ICCD cameras, all sorts of stuff. And I got purchase orders in all the cases named above. It just doesn't work with some people and organizations, and I've learned how to, pretty soon, spot which have a chance and which don't. One sign is that if they laugh, they can probably brainstorm.

Given that there's a good deal of poorly-instrumented, expensive scientific equipment around, it's a real opportunity for good circuit designers.

It wasn't a newspaper.

I don't pretend to be a biochemist, although I do work with some. Or a biologist, although I did father one. But I *know* that nobody understands much about how DNA really works, and astounding things remain to be discovered.

And I find it amusing when scientific orthodoxy gets rattled. It's unlikely to happen in mature sciences like physics, which is already predictive to 12 decimal points; it's guarenteed in the life sciences.

I suspect that complex Lamarckian things will be discovered because I believe in evolution. Anything the benefits an organism and isn't flat impossible seems to happen.

John

I do, too.

Especially with the advent of far, far better tools than even 20 or 30 years ago. The whole field is being revolutionized. In psychology, arguably a remote branch, I remember hearing interviews of attendees to an annual meeting (on PBS, I believe) commenting that the "big thing" that was expected to revolutionize their own approaches was "mirror neurons." Something discovered entirely by accident while studying primates with functional MRI for entirely different research purposes. That was only a couple of years ago.

I've no doubt there is much to come. However, it will be informed.

That's an argument for everything and nothing.

But modern evolutionary theory may actually deny your suggestion. The fact is, you don't even know if that's the case. I can give plenty of examples why I wonder, and I'm no biologist. I'll provide one.

The eye of insects is based on a very simple principle that started out long, long before they existed. It's basically just a light sensitive spot at the end of a shotgun barrel, so to speak. And lots of shotgun barrels stacked side by side to make up a picture, pixel by pixel, so to speak. It's very simple, uses the long tube itself to keep out (baffle) optical confusion, and is cheap at first, too. By comparison, eyes like humans (or somewhat differently, but like octopi where the light sensitive retina is not underneath but above the serving blood vessels) require a lens, methods for adjusting its focus, and a host of complexities that arrive -- such as tapeta found in mammels requiring more night sensitivity. Yet, eyes like humans will never evolve at all for insects. Even though they have large advantages and would definitely benefit them. The reason is that in order to survive well, they have already "dug themselves into a dead end pit" in a sense. They would have to unevolve for quite a while before they could re-evolve along those lines. Their eye perceptions are permanently stunted.

It's like moving up towards higher ground and finding a nice walking path and taking it. You eventually find yourself in a box canyon, though, and no way out but back the way you came. But you've already spent your capital getting there. So you are stuck -- unable to pay the price of going back and unable to climb any further.

You may sweep all this under the rug of your clause, "isn't flat impossible to happen." But the point is, you don't know at all. Just to suggest that Lamarckian ideas _might_ work doesn't state that they are possible or impossible. They may be impossible and there may be mechanisms in place already you'd know would severely limit/make impossible the idea, were you adequately informed. You don't even know. Neither do I.

But I think I'd expect a little knocking about the side of the head if I was ignorant about the present state of physics (which you graciously grant as being predictive to 12 places) and started proposing that heavier objects actually do fall faster than lighter objects in a vacuum. It would be one thing to be informed and to make a strong case for the idea on the basis of some hitherto unexplained phenomenon. Better still, if I had crafted a research program based upon existing theory to investigate it further and test it. But if I were ignorant about what IS known and what HAS been examined and had no ideas about what unexplained phenomena existed requiring this explanation? Expect a hard whack over the head and being shown the door out.

You seem to consistently retreat, from going back now a few years on the google search engine to see, to a feigned sense of personal unjust treatment rather than getting informed, instead, so that you can present a crafted case. I find that remarkable for someone so insistent.

Lamarck's ideas not only didn't find purchase, they were actually proposed, tested, and shown terribly wanting. They don't predict well, nor explain past experiment well.

Einstein put it pretty well, "It is the aim of science to establish general rules which determine the reciprocal connection of objects and events in time and space. For these rules, or laws of nature, absolutely general validity is required -- not proven. It is mainly a program, and faith in the possibility of its accomplishment in principle is only founded on partial successes." No one I know cares if a 'theory of Loki' is proposed, so long as it has general validity and provides that reciprocal connection Einstein talks about.

You would do yourself a service by not feigning some personal injury when your ignorance is reflected back in a mirror for you to see, but instead work to remedy that and do what you said you wanted to do -- "I I expect to help make it happen." You won't, by talking about it and remaining uninformed. Unless you are hoping someone else who is far better informed will decide to take your idea and run with it -- which is unlikely.

Jon

Don't tell my wife, but I have fallen in love. She's young, beautiful, and Japanese. I'm still tingling.

Makita hammer drill. Gorgeous machine.

John

The tests were mostly ludicrous, like cutting off rat's tails to see if future generations would be tail-less. And having proven that, and accepted the result, how much research will get funded to test the contrary?

Townes' research was almost cut off; he got maser action in the nick of time. That's because everybody knew that stimulated emission was doomed to uselesness by fundamantal thermodynamics.

Personal injury? Because I call Sloman a fathead? He *is* a fathead.

But I am making it happen. I've improved a number of scientific instruments by one to four orders of magnitude. Mostly by questioning the orthodoxy and following up with decent circuit design. It's surprisingly easy.

Unless you are hoping someone else who is

I enjoy speculating, and watching to see if the speculations come true. Sort of like betting on sports.

It is interesting how worked up some people get over speculation. And strangely, they seem to get more upset when it involves inexact studies (genetics, climate, nutrition) than hard sciences. And more upset when the speculator has some familiarity with the sciences, as opposed to total goofballs.

It turns out that eggs are good for you. After half a century of telling people the opposite.

John

"Buy this paper"... Bwahahahahahahaha. I wouldn't give you 2¢ for a publication by an UNKNOWN author ;-)

I'm always pleased to note that I'm the highest standard for Slowman's disdain, but please don't feed the jerk. Let him die that most unpleasant of deaths... alone ;-)

...Jim Thompson

I presume that would be LOW FAT ?:-)

And butter, and pork fat...

...Jim Thompson

I have one... thru concrete like butter ;-)

...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at

In Memoriam... Duane Lee Thompson October 31, 1972 - April 20,2006 4th Child, 2nd Son, of Jim & Naomi Thompson Victim of Colon Cancer

My German (Bosch) will kick your Jap crap's ass. ;-)

I got a special deal at Discount Builders. The set included the hammer drill and a bunch of masonry drills and a nice chisel. When I opened the box, there was also a bonus angle grinder with a diamond wheel. Good thing. I needed to make a 6" hole in a concrete-filled cinder block wall, and ran into four pieces of re-rod on the way through.

The whole job took about a half an hour. Well, that part of the job.

Dang, I love power tools.

John

rote:

rs and

its

ding

er of

lets

DNA

base

fty

of

to

in

ed

you

All of which involves knowing something about physics and electronics, where you are well informed. When you "brain storm" about biological subjects, you aren't anything like as well-equipped, and it shows.

Mostly there isn't enough of a market to pay for the circuit desing involved. When I was working at Nijmegen University I put about a year into designing a better prograamable pulse generator for an electron spin resonator, to some extent reworking what we'd done at a Cambridge Instruments for a stroboscopic electron microscope, but replacing the Gigabit Logic GaAs parts with Motorola/ON-Semiconductor ECLinPS and using CMOS SRAM (which I could buy) rather than the faster ECL SRAMs which we'd used at Cambridge Instruments(which the manufacturers still claimed to stock, but weren't prepared to even quote prices for).

The University employed me to do that kind of work, so the customer didn't have to pay for it, but when push came to shove, he didn't have the budget to pay to have the boards made or to buy the components to populate them - he'd got close enough to retirement that the University wasn't going to give him another graduate student and consequently he couldn't get money to re-equip his lab for that graduate student.

I though vaguely about paying for the gear myself - there is a small market for gear to drive electron spin resoance spectrometers - but it turned out to be much too small and fragmented to be worth going after.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I've got a few reprints left. Jim's obviously not part of the target audience, and I'd not waste one on him. People who want to use thermoelectric modules (Peltier junctions) are more interested and some of them claim to have found it helpful.

There are people around who should have read it.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I rarely agree with krw, but I too am am pretty happy with my Bosch PBH160R hammer drill.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I wouldn't count on it. My Makita hammer drill is a joy to use.

...Jim Thompson

and

Stanford Research Systems

has an interesting business model: find some established, volume-selling, old-and-klunky-design scientific instrument and kill it. Their product line is all over the place, as you can see, business targets as opposed to a central technical theme. They got started by specifically deciding to kill the Berkeley Nucleonics digital delay generators; the founder of SRS told the founder of BNC, over lunch, that he would do it, and then he did.

But they don't do one-offs. I don't think they even do custom versions of the catalog products. Engineering is too valuable to sell once.

John

My drill's bigger than yours! ;-)

My Makita is 5/8" chuck.

...Jim Thompson

Mine had a 24 foot masonry bit.