Ability to Learn

I've noticed a characteristic people have that hinders their
ability to get an education more than any other thing.
Some People who have never graduated form high school
have it in common with, many people with advanced degrees.
The characteristic is the ability to realize or intuit what
they don't know. What is knowable is vast compared to
what can be known by one person, and the variety of the
universe is incomprehensible.

If you have the time, look in the archives for my world view,
reality, time, infinite direction, Big-bang, ......etc.

Big Book

I like the feel of a big book in my lap, it reminds me of the Andy
Divine T.V. show 50 years ago. Andy would start the show siting
in a chair with a big book open in his lap, His magic frog would,
"plunk his magic twanger", and the story would start.
This summer I read a big book, a bio-chemistry text book that
was copyrighted in 1995, the book I used when I took bio-chem
in the 70's was probably copyrighted in 1975. (I may be the only
person in the world who, two months from retirement, read an
entire bio-chem test, cover to cover). Much of it read like science
fiction, it has been 25 years since I took bio-chem in collage and
much has changed.I did not read it just to catch up on current
science, I also read it to see how it would change my world view,
as stated in the archives of this blog.
One of the changes was in the ultimate complexity of proteins,
20 raised to the power of the number of amino acids is only part
of the total variation in proteins. Variation is increased by: post
translation modifications, as in glycoproteins, and side chain
additions; also the incorporation of organic molecules and
metallic ions increases the complexity of final conformations.
There was also a reduction in complexity because, two proteins
can have similar conformations and functions with only 20% of
there amino acid sequences being similar. The change that I
enjoyed the most in this newer addition were the many
references to evolution, especially the references to an RNA
world which preceded our present DNA world. One striking
example of self-splicing RNA, was a ribosomal RNA precursor
that could prune and splice itself to its final form.

Well, I’ve started another big book, I’m reading,
Stephen Wolfram’s book "A New Kind of Science", again,
1197 pages in all.

Oak Tree

I like to sit out front and watch my new oak tree grow.
It’s amazing, it’s grown from a one-year-old twig to an eight
foot tree in only eight months. It was planted in a special planter
by squirrels that live in the yard, the planter was
special because it contained mothers-day flowers that were
given to my wife by a friend of her sons, after the son was
arrested for murder. I cared for the flowers over the next two
years while her son waited trial, because the flowers were
special to her and she can not do anything on a regular basis,
they surly would have died if I had not.
In the fall of the third year, after her son was convicted and
sentenced to 40 years, I convinced my wife to let me plant
the flowers and the one-year-old tree in the front yard.
Over the winter it stood as only a twig with one dormant
terminal bud, but when spring arrived the bud exploded
both vertically and horizontally . I have applied miracle-grow
ever two weeks and watered with rain water or air conditioner
condensate most days sense.
The tree now has gone through at least five growth cycles
with only two major problems. First, the terminal bud did not
form at about the third growth cycle and two lateral limbs formed,
when one of these limbs bifurcated in the some way I cut
it off and pulled the other limb into a vertical position
with a five foot tall stake in the ground. The second problem
happened when a caterpillar ate the terminal bud as the
new leaves started to unfold, I quickly trimmed what was
left and pulled the nearest lateral growth vertical with another
stick attached to the first.
The tree is doing fine now, eight feet tall ready to shed its
leaves for winter. Once it becomes dormant I will trim six
lower limbs so that it will eventually have a trunk at least seven
feet high before the first side limb.
What is the moral to this story?
If you raise children with the same care and training as
a tree they will not end up in prison.

Spider

I have a crab-back spider at the front of my house that came naturally.
If I don't have one I will move one to the front, but this one just showed
up as a tiny spider and will probably stay for a couple months.
It's big and fat now and has been there about three weeks. They spin
beautiful orb webs early in the morning.
But, this is not the spider that started me thinking about posting today.
I was packing some books, because I may move in the next six months,
when I looked in the front of a book called "Fuzzy Logic" by:
Daniel Mcneill and Paul Freiberger and found a thought followed by my
name written in Japanese characters. It alluded to the fact that I kill
cockroaches in the house but not spiders. As a side comment, I did
work in pest control while attending a tech school fifteen years ago.
For what it's worth, here it is:

Spiders I like- but that does them no good, though I let them in the
house, there food I don't.