Ok, so we've got this information packet called a virus. It inserts itself into the DNA of a cell and uses the cellular machinery to make lots and lots of copies of itself. But, suppose there already is another virus in the cell, doing the same. Things can get confused real easily, which is apparently how these new flu strains move from duck to pig to human. It isn't generally a simple mutation by the original virus, but rather a mix-up of genes from another virus already adapted to t...
From here in the very center of the OC - Santa Ana, the youngest big city in the U.S., also the most Hispanic, also one of the poorest and with the worst educational record in the OC, the worst business climate (due to the elite running city hall) and a long-standing rep for thugish cops. Some of the kids are starting to wake up. A few months back, they decided to join the nationwide "Protest Against Police Brutality" and march on the Santa Ana Police Station. They were not polite. In f...
Please note that this article has no official endorsement or fiduciary connection to Ballys Incorporated. This is a consumer reaction to events and apparent policies which appear to the writer to be offensive. Well, it almost isn't worth it any more anyway, as my lifetime gold membership is nearly up to the rate I can get a monthly membership for at any number of clubs, including Ballys. Wonder when the class action suits will commence as Ballys raises the lifetime yearly fee at the maxi...
Update: 04/12/05 Well. Done at last! Almost, anyway. The room that I thought I had nailed down to rent while I reorganized all my stuff disappeared when the owner had her sister run a credit check and discovered that I had no credit history prior to 1999. Of course not! I paid cash or check or money order and only finally broke down and got a credit card when it became too cumbersome to deal that way on line. So, all my years of avoiding the horrendous charges and worries about cr...
I just noticed earlier this week that my hair - previously merely thinning - is now starting to turn noticably grey. Not a happy moment. For years I have watched as much younger guys turned, and felt a certain satisfaction that all the mega-supplements on which I've spent so many thousands of dollars were doing their job and protecting me. Another illusion falls. One way or another, we boomers are going to be working a lot more into our promised retirement time than we anticipated, as t...
The various strains of flu that emerge mainly from Asia come via one major route - birds and pigs raised together. Note that this combination is not necessary, but speeds the process of getting to humans. The birds catch the original version of the new mutated virus, then the pigs pick it up by eating the birds' droppings, but not immediately, as the virus has to go through a lot of random mutations before it can make the leap successfully to a mammal. Once there, however, it is a much ...
Oh joy, yahoo access is back at the libraries! And we only lost a couple of weeks... Does this worry anyone except me? Of late, if anyone has tried to contact me at my Yahoo address, you may be wondering why I'm not answering - at least immediately. The answer is simple: Yahoo is blocking my email. Yahoo is blocking a lot of other people's email, as well - namely library users who log on to public library terminals, at least those at the main public library system of the OC. It seems ...
For three periods of time now, for at least several hours each, and, I suspect, several days, including the present time and most of the past two weeks, I have not been able to get to my Yahoo email account. I've heard rumors that this is happening to other people. And, try to complain. There is no route. The "help" system has no option to reach a human being, so far as I can determine. I have tried leaving messages with no response. Does anyone have a clue as to what is happening? Is...
VERY interesting public lecture tonight at UCI (University of California, Irvine) by Eric Lander, one of the heads of the Human Genome Project. Lander outlined the future goals of the project, the basic methodologies, how long it will take, and how much it may cost - A LOT, but probably well worth it. A case study he covered: turns out that there are two very distinct forms of leukemia that look exactly alike. The symptoms are the same. The microscopy is the same. One research doctor had a...
Update: 01/31/05 Having seen nothing yet of my refund from the L.A. Times, I called the number from the Sunday Times ad, and then the 2nd number that they referred me to, and finally spoke with a rep who assured me that my non-subscription as detailed below would finally be refunded to my credit card. We'll see... Every year for some time, I anticipate the holidays for one major reason: C H O C O L A T E Sometimes the local SavOn drugstores dump huge amounts of Reeces and Nestle...
In Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" (which came in right after the Bible as the book that most influenced American's lives, when the Book of the Month Club did a survey in 1991 - not bad for a 1958 novel, which still sells quite briskly in 2005), there is a classic scene in which two of the good guys are facing a crew of state sleezebags who are utterly certain that they have them under their thumb. The baddies have succeeded in having passed a whole set of draconian laws which nobody could foll...
Ok, my beef is with the idiots who torched the library. THE Library. You know, the world library at Alexandria, where the collected wisdom of virtually all mankind West of India and East of the Americas resided. All that lore and history and science and myth and poetry - gone. And who is to blame? Allegedly the Moslem hordes, proclaiming that the only book necessary is the Koran. But wait, it turns out that the library was burned, partially or totally, on several occasions over the c...
Some time in that past few years, I got to hear Dr. Douglas C. Wallace, the Donald Bren Professor of Biological Sciences and Molecular Medicine at UCI discuss his research on mitochondria, the energy organelles that power all our cells. Wallace is the generally acknowledged top-gun worldwide in mitochondrial research. I posed him a hypothesis, during Q & A, which I had come up with on my own to explain an interesting anomoly. Background: We all have various different variants of mitoch...
Nalini of KPFKChat.org submitted a pointer to this little site bashing Bush. Not bad. Want to see something REALLY bizarre? Take virtually any interview with Condi - say the ones from "Uncovered" - and s l o w i t d o w n . . . on your DVD player. You'll see what I mean. I never knew that a human face could exhibit so many extremes of expression in a period of one-second. Now try playing it backwards - S l o w l y. Watch how she twists her mouth around each sy...
Trying to figure out how to put the altavista Babel Fish translator button on my site... Let me know if you know a way to do this...