Category Archives: CounterCurrent

The Squamous Chronicles, part deux: Into the beam we go.

9 Replies

My adventure with Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma, HNSCC, soon enters a third phase.  A week from this writing I’ll don my custom prepared plastic mesh mask and they’ll strap me onto an x-ray machine. Oh yes, one other thing. There’ll be a weekly dose of cis-platin coincident with irradiation. Turns out that there is a synergistic effect with radiation and platinum poisoning cis-platin chemotherapy. No doubt it is related to the fact that platinum is a heavy atom with a lot of electron density ripe for scattering. Platinum ligated to DNA during irradiation is a bonus as well I suppose. Your own DNA as a ligand for platinum. A funny thought for someone in the catalyst business.

The first phase was the identification of a swollen lymph node and its subsequent removal from its cozy perch on my right carotid artery. Here I learned first hand why cancer is destructive. Mutant squamous cells from some molecular-genetic train wreck are washed away from their birthplace to lodge in distant locations. In my case, the aloof cells got hung up in a lymph node. There, they invaded the node and proliferated to the point where much of the lymphatic tissue became necrotic, likely from blood starvation. The node was not especially painful. Well, until the biopsy needle went in. Then it became very, very angry. But I digress.

The second phase, post surgery, was the adventure of finding suitable oncologists. This is a little bewildering. It is easy to get overwhelmed by information. I went for a second opinion and soon thereafter chose the Anschutz Cancer Center at the University of Colorado in Aurora. I’ve already had medical students and residents sitting in on consultations and exams.  The medical oncologist is a research professor specializing in head and neck cancer. He sees patients on Fridays too. The radiation oncologist sees a lot of HNSCC and seems knowledgeable and confident.

More to follow.

Comments on Edward Snowdon

Leave a reply

I have to say that I am tickled to death over what young Edward Snowdon has done in regard to his leaking of the NSA PRISM project. Funding and compelling otherwise well intentioned civil servants to sift through the transmissions of US citizens and allies under the false idol of “national security” represents a sort of cancer of civil society. The future is not for the faint hearted. Unfortunately, the faint hearted are in charge.

The assertion that X number of terrorist attacks were prevented by internal espionage activity is patronizing rhetoric uttered by functionaries who are powerless to actually prove it. Obviously we have enemies. We’ve earned it. The US is not a target simply because “we love freedom”, a slogan so infantile that it is a wonder that Bush II was able to utter it with a straight face. We are a target because of decades of foreign policy overreach.

The US federal government and allied corporations are so brain addled over Middle Eastern politics and security that congress is deadlocked over what amounts to a new form of the guns v. butter problem.  Congressional members, I’ll say Republicans in particular, live in another world distorted by wealthy patrons.  In their view, civilization is something that markets do rather than the other way around. This is a natural viewpoint if you control a lot of wealth- or hope to.

Simplistically, we input defense dollars into the military machine and privately owned petroleum comes out the other side. So, the stockholders of Exxon, Chevron, etc., are protected from risk on foreign territories by the US armed forces. US taxpayers pay for this but petroleum companies seem to carry little of the burden.

What we have gotten in return for our foreign petroleum adventures is pushback in the form of guerrilla warfare, commonly called terrorism. The term “terrorist” has been transmogrified into some form of supernatural evil. Really, a terrorist is a criminal. Killing people and destroying property is a crime and it is immoral. It is not evil incarnate. We are not in a supernatural battle between good and evil or God and Satan.

If Snowdon’s action was to shine a little light on how the government commits espionage on its citizens, then I say good for him. In doing so he broke the law. He violated contractual agreements on disclosure and should pay a price for that. But in regard to accusations of treason based on what facts are available, I cannot agree with that charge.

The thin blue line

3 Replies

I had the opportunity to take a ride in a CT scanner yesterday. It was my first such experience. It’s a great opportunity to pick up a few milliSieverts if you find yourself short in the ionizing radiation department. The particular device I refer to spins a helical beam of x-rays through you as the platform moves you through the big donut with its rotating source and detector.  Through the magic of the integrated circuit and millions of lines of software code the computer reconstructs images based on extinction of the x-ray beam as it careens through your tissues.

During this wierd little Roentgen ride I had a peculiar experience. After the iodinated tracer injection the radiologista trots around the shielded wall, clicks “go” and the sequence takes off. As the beam was scanning from head to chest I had the distinct sensation of a horizontal thin blue line in my visual field for just a beat. Because my eyelids were closed I was not seeing a focused image through the lenses of my eyes. Against the backdrop of latent images slowly fading from consciousness there appeared the line. I was not thinking about this at the time- I was focused on obeying the breathing instructions.

My theory is that the visual stimulus was the result of the x-ray beam inducing a bit of fluorescence acreoss the width of my retina.  There are plenty of pigment molecules in the retina as well as the tracer compound coursing through the retinal vasculature.

Question- Has anyone else had or heard of such a phenomenon?

Is lifting combat restrictions on women the achievement we need?

1 Reply

I am torn on the matter of Defense Secretary Panetta lifting restrictions on combat duties for women. I understand the rationale for greater upward mobility for women in the military. And I grasp that women are already operating in combat areas.

The point I want to offer is this:  rather than broadening the range of the population who may be exposed to combat, perhaps we should put as much energy into demilitarizing just a little bit. If bringing women fully into combat is a solution, then maybe we do not understand the problem.

As an advanced society the USA should be striving to avoid the production of disabled combat veterans. Could it be that we should engage in less combat? Isn’t that the solution we should be seeking?

Right now the USA is so heavily armed with kill-at-a-distance lethality that we have become at ease with radio-controlled diplomacy.  When you have the US arsenal in your pocket, everything looks like a helicopter landing zone.

There is so much money to be made in plundering petroleum resources abroad and in military armaments and materiel that a persistent and refractory global sub-economy of state-protected mineral extraction has frozen in place. With every kilowatt of new load connected to the power grid and with every clever new military toy that is invented we tighten the spiral toward a global energy war.

Where does this new load come from? All of the microprocessed consumer devices certainly contribute. All of the wall-wart chargers for cell phones, iPads, laptops, etc., put stress on the power distribution system and in due course create demand for fossil fuels. This demand is manifested in several ways- 1) electric current to power the devices, and 2) all of the upstream power needed from mine or wellhead to produce ultrapure gallium, arsenic, tellurium, silicon, aluminum, titanium, boron, polyethylene, polypropylene, organic semiconductor materials, etc.

If we take the view that exposing women in our volunteer military to the horrors of combat represents some kind of progress, then I beg to differ. I would like to suggest that the folks in the DoD, the administration, and the congress have salved over a civil service inequity in exchange for equal opportunity for a spectrum of life altering traumas. In regard to military matters, our government and military elites are swept up in a food web of moral corruption so systematically ossified that I do not see how we can steer civilization away from a Malthusian step change.

A few sentences relating to Power

1 Reply

Power is as power does, or the fact of power is the act of power.

Just a reminder. In the fable of the emperor’s new clothes, what is important to understand is not that an emperor can be highly delusional. The real lesson directs your attention to the ease with which those around him facilitate his delusion.  This is an insidious condition that creeps in silently like a fog that soon envelops everyone. It takes a child-like innocence of perspective to see through it. Regrettably, child-like innocence is rarely encouraged in organizations.

Power is in the ability to allocate resources. A successful business person must excel at accumulating and centralizing the power of resource allocation.

Business power stems from centralized control by a few. Representative democratic power is granted by voters.  What is behind the fascination with setting up a businessman in a legislative or executive power position? Business is inherently non-democratic.

What a Meth Lab is Not

3 Replies

It is time that someone questions the use of the phrase “meth lab”. Just as a cook would object to the phrase “meth kitchen”,  those of us who spend our careers in the laboratory should push back on the use of the word “lab” in this manner.  The use of this word confers the notion that a workspace is fitted for chemical handling activity and is operated by someone who knows what they are doing. Dubbing a meth operation as laboratory surrenders too much credit to the operator. These people are moonshiners skulking around on the periphery of society.

A meth lab is not a lab. It is the workshop of a criminal enterprise where unscrupulous people manufacture a dangerous substance. Its sole purpose is to profit from the uncontrollable neurological train wreck of methamphetamine addiction. This is not laboratory work. It’s just crime.

Fulminating Belief and the Drake Equation

2 Replies

It seems to me that the character(s) who produced the YouTube video that has caused so much religious fulmination in the sandy parts of the world ought to be parachuted into Cairo to answer for their actions. Surely they can give the best explanation of what their movie represents.

Another thing has occured to me. Perhaps we should make a minor adjustment to the Drake Equation which describes the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible. The equation can be found at this link.  The L factor defines the length of time a civilization releases detectable [radio] signals into space. Given the self destructive behaviours of beings capable of generating radio signals on at least one planet, maybe it is time to define L*.

L* = L(1 – P*/P) where P = average number of intelligent inhabitants of a planet and P* = average number of intelligent inhabitants willing to die/kill for their magical or political beliefs.

Perhaps the reader has a better modification.  Here is the Drake equation copied straight from Wikipedia:

N = R^{\ast} \cdot f_p \cdot n_e \cdot f_{\ell} \cdot f_i \cdot f_c \cdot L

where:

N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible;

and

R* = the average rate of star formation per year in our galaxy
fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fℓ = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point
fi = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life
fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space

General remarks

Leave a reply

I wish to make a few remarks on current news items of interest.

Country singer Randy Travis was found in a ditch in north Texas allegedly drunk, naked, and belligerent following an apparent one car accident.  Crimony! It’s that awful Nashville music that he sings. If I sang that twangy, mornful, depressing stuff all the time, I guess I’d be sloppy drunk in a ditch too. He should dry out and switch to show tunes or something a bit more cheerful.

It seems that while the televisions and internets of the world are busily dulling enchanting us into the delusion that our ever accelerating consumption of resources and expansion into wild spaces are having no effect on the “natural world”, the global ecosystems are actually in trouble. I emphasize natural world only because so many of us are preoccupied with the on-line world. In fact, many are worried about a “state change” in the global ecosystems.

In Approaching a state-shift in Earth’s biosphere, a paper just published in Nature, the authors, whose expertise spans a multitude of disciplines, suggest our planet’s ecosystems are careening towards an imminent, irreversible collapse.

Earth’s accelerating loss of biodiversity, its climate’s increasingly extreme fluctuations, its ecosystems’ growing connectedness and its radically changing total energy budget are precursors to reaching a planetary state threshold or tipping point. [ The Automatic Earth, August 6, 2012. ]

I know, I know. Sounds like Chicken Little. But we should pay more attention to our small planet. The atmosphere is thinner than most people think, the fisheries are stressed, desertification is happening in Africa, and human population pressures are mounting in many locations.  We can’t keep the extractive industries going forever. We need to find an economic model or culture that allows us to do with less mass. Reduced consumption per capita. Look, it’ll happen anyway as key resources dwindle.

We should be aggressively recycling lithium, gallium, tellurium, indium, and the rare earth elements in particular.  These are key elements in our much beloved electronic devices. There are other materials to watch, including hydrocarbons in general.  A society with infrastructure causing one to hop in the SUV and drive 5 miles from their isolated subdivision to buy cigarettes and beer is a society that is on a rendezvous with destiny.

Thoughts on crystals, symmetry, and perfection

1 Reply

Bismuth crystals on my desk

Nothing too unusual here. Just some bismuth crystals sitting on my desk. A metallurgist friend died recently and his family passed along some of his samples to me. Virg was a great guy. He knew how to conduct himself with decorum like a civilized human being. I don’t confer this praise on everyone.

Bismuth City

I think many people find some kind of solace in the orderliness of crystals. Nature has seemingly betrayed the prevalent trend of disorderliness to produce a latticework of pristine stuff in appealing shapes. Crystals appeal to our innate desire for symmetry and rectilinearity. We subconsciously associate symmetry with goodness and calm. Properly stacked goods in your basement suggest orderliness. Shoes lined up in the closet or socks neatly arranged in the drawer provide a reassurance that something in life is at least predictable.

Crystallinity infers a repetitive array of subunits asssembled under the austere constraints of efficient stacking. It represents subunits held in confinement and subject to limits on motion.

Crystallinity is in a sense sterile and lacking in diversity. Living things are not crystalline for the most part. Crystallinity is static and devoid of the many necessary degrees of freedom needed for life.  Living things often have superficial symmetries, though on closer inspection something inevitably cracks the symmetry. Humans have a bilateral symmetry across a line taken from the head to between the feet, as do butterflies and hippos. Internally, though, the symmetry is less than obvious.  Our genetic polymers of DNA have a gross secondary helical symmetry as do some peptides, but even that yields to partial symmetry when the monomeric units are accounted for.  Sure, there are instances of crystallinity in living things. But living things require a fluid internal environment to allow molecules to collide and react.

If you take crystallinity as an allegory of perfection in the sense of a way of being- that is, orderliness and freedom from defects- then you might conclude that a perfect being would be constrained by symmetry or the attributes of perfection.  It would seem that the attribution of perfection in a being might pose the possibility of limitation.

Instead of getting wrapped around the axel philosophically, perhaps we should gladly rejoice in the lack of perfection in ourselves and the ultimate absurdity of perfection in the fanciful dieties whom we imagine control the vibration of every molecule in the fleas that ride on the tailfeathers of every sparrow.