Death of "K and r selection" : for PhDs and Punksters alike, popularity is anathema

Memes are like indie bands

Nothing kills a good scientific metaphor  more stone dead than having it taken up by the detested "civilians".

Supposedly grown-up male scientists tend to act just like not-yet-grown-up male scientists : nothing kills the young male science student's interest in some obscure punk indie band faster than if  the rest of humanity also decides to like it.

Panarchy reigns....or should reign

I still think that "K and r selection" is a highly useful metaphor (and am glad that people much smarter than me, like Buzz Hollings and Brian Walker agree in its continuing value as a scientific metaphor in discussing Panarchy concepts.)

Yes, in stable statutory and economic environments, big K-selected organisms like Canada's Bell Aliant can totally dominate the Canadian media niche.

But, equally, in time of turmoil (say a drastic change in the artificial CRTC rules that restrain true competition) , nimble little r-selected media businesses might pick up the pieces when Bell fall apart.

Except that, unlike in Nature, Bell is usually judged "too big to fail" by the libertarians (sic) that dominate our government, universities and media and so remains bloated but alive, held aloft by nothing more - or less - than trillions of taxpayers' and consumers' dollars .....

Nova Scotian-born Dr Henry Dawson and the "Invention" of systemic - natural - penicillin

The "Invention" of systemic - natural - penicillin

Discovery vs Invention

Many substances were "discovered" many years (sometimes centuries) before they were (re) "invented" as having a highly useful medical effect.

It is only since Aug 1945 (and the ascendancy of Physics over Chemistry as the Queen of Science) that we have devoted all our adulation to "discovery" , rather than "invention" in medicine.

Carbolic acid and sulfa's both had early dates of discovery (versus their much later first medical use) .

Alexander Fleming is - wrongly - credited with discovering the penicillin we have used since 1940 - but what did he actually do ?

 Fleming in fact thought his penicillin would be useful as a sort of "Plan B" antiseptic -- and only if pure and synthetic.

Howard Florey - ten years later - thought his penicillin would be a useful "Plan B" back-up systemic to Sulfa -- but again, only if pure and synthetic.

By contrast, right from the start and until his death, Martin Henry Dawson thought that natural (even if impure) systemic penicillin would be the "Plan A" choice to cure the incurable, to save the unsavable --- starting with those dying of invariable fatal SBE.

Only two people in New York worked with penicillin in 1940, despite a war (with millions soon to be dying of infections) raging the world over.

 One doctor published a conventional article in JBC, reminding bacteriologists how useful crude penicillin could be as an agent to clear common throat bacteria from suspected specimens of influenza bacteria.

That was about all that penicillin was in (semi-) common use for, in 1940. Just as carbolic acid had its various non-clinical uses in the days before Lister "re-invented" it as a life-saver.

The other doctor, Dawson,  saw crude penicillin as the most likely cure for SBE.

NOT because it was a super-killer of bacteria, but for some less sexy but rather more "useful" characteristics: it combined nearly-limitless non-toxicity with an extraordinary diffusion ability.

He could thickly saturate the blood stream with penicillin without killing the patient, and hope some would still diffuse in past the thick vegetations (bio-films) of SBE, as that saturated blood rushed past the diseased heart valves at breakneck speed.

Some modern SBE patients have needed as much as a kilo of pure penicillin over many months - that's 1.67 BILLION units of penicillin - but have beaten the disease.

Still while penicillin - and only penicillin - could save an SBE in the 1940s, SBE was a prodigious user of then very scarce penicillin, so Dawson also had to morally kick start ("invent") an entire "natural penicillin" industry into existence, to deliver the amount of penicillin needed for his SBE patients.

(As a by-product, the rest of the world soon got as much penicillin as anyone could need - so much so it was soon feed to cattle as a growth stimulator, partly to absorb some of the production.)

I say his "invention" was by moral argument, because the scientific and commercial consensus then was that only synthetic (patentable) penicillin could do the trick.

But only when Dawson morally convinced the head of Pfizer, John l Smith, to take a very great financial risk and go against the consensus of his industry, did the miracle of penicillin really begin to happen....

Medium-density walkable, bikeable communities best hope to put less C02 in atmosphere

 SWITCH volunteer

Halifax Nova Scotia held its very first SWITCH DAY on september 9th 2012 - put one long series of connected Streets from Agricola to South Park in the slow lane: no car tires, only feet and bikes.

Thousands turned about (half of them electoral candidates and their volunteers) (joke!)

About half came with their bikes - from 2 years olds in tandem bikes to people I estimate into their late seventies.

Agricola St is so COOL !

Church services, music, food, gossip, hand goods and sunshine filled the street with activity.

People caught up with people they hadn't seen in years - wonderful !

Lazy HRM employees try to kill citizens, but fail to do so

Gust & sign that hit Mrs May

HRM's special event signs, made of thin sharp aluminum metal, have holes at top and bottom for a purpose - to secure them safely against gusts of wind turning them into weapons.

But those lazy, idle, useless employees who were supposed to securely tied these signs to trees on Ahern Ave, for "SWITCH DAY", were too damn brain-dead to tie the signs properly top and bottom, despite highly public warnings of possible hurricane winds drifting up to HRM on the weekend,  from a disturbance off Bermuda.

Lazy HRM workers almost cost woman an eye

Result ? Lindsay May, former school board member and wife of former Dartmouth councillor Colin May was hit in the ear by the sharp edge of one sign suddenly swinging up violently in a gust of wind.

I have video-taped the gusts catching these signs to show the speed they achieve.

I unilaterally swung one sign up and out of the way, when I could find no policeman about to set them right.

Lindsay told me,  "I feel okay now - but an inch closer and it would have been my eye that got the force instead of the very tip of my top ear lobe....."

South Mountain BATHOLITH debated by skygods and earthlings

hunka,hunka burnin' lava

One reason why Nova Scotia has such an unique lobster like shape is that its backbone is one immense chunk of highly-erosion-resistant granite, by far the largest chunk on the entire east coast of North America : the famous South Mountain batholith.

A batholith is an giant upwelling of granite-like magma, from deep down below melting its way through the surface rocks.

The South Mountain batholith, which is hundreds of kilometres long is indeed big, but not the biggest in the world - ones on the west coast of North America can be thousands of kilometres long.

Batholiths and thermodynamic laws

Basically batholiths are one enormous rock that erodes about as slow as anything does on earth ; this one in Nova Scotia is about 350 million years old and hardly changed since its birth.

Skygods are People of the First Law (of thermodynamics) and in their understanding of the South Mountain, its surface impression of solidity is in fact just that, an impression.

In fact, they are argue, its solidity is all an illusion. Matter and energy can't be created or destroyed only changed from one form to another ----- and change is easy, even for granite.

Granite can be easily reduced to its constitute atoms and then reduced no further : atoms are the simple, small, easily controllable, harmless "solid" fundamentals of reality : mix and match them and turn granite's atoms into the atoms of silicon oven gloves or concrete or whatever.

Earthlings , as People of the Second Law (of thermodynamics)see the South Mountain totally differently.

They think that its granite is surpassingly solid - one of the most solid objects in the Universe in fact.

But once they divide it into its atoms, they find they are not solid but rather dividable and in fact,  "a waste of space" : tiny busy electrons swirling around the vast distance between them and a tiny heavy nucleus.

But that nucleus isn't solid either : it breaks down into ever smaller sets of Russian dolls and ends up feeling like nothing more than whirling bits of energy.

So mass, it turns out, isn't just convertible into energy : it IS energy , bits of energy whirling about so fast that it gives us mega-sized humans the illusion of weight and solidity.

Energy popping in and out of existence constantly, but always moving slowly,ever slowly, to a totally dispersed state where they will slow down into the Universe's death at near absolute zero temperatures.

(Aka : Entropy).

Skygods: big is dynamic and complex and small is solid, stable and knowable-controllable. Optimism as high as the blue skies themselves.

Earthlings: big is solid and while dynamic is at least a bit knowable-controllable. The small ? mercurial, unknowable, non-solid. Cautious (grounded in what we do know, not what we might know) and skeptical we will ever begin to 'control' reality.

Which side are you on ? Is granite more solid-seeming than atoms or vice versa ........

If RON JOYCE still ran it, rural NS Tim Hortons would have WIFI

Not for RURAL Cdns

It seems, as of this date, that the closest TIM HORTONS to my family home in Seaforth Nova Scotia (the outlet in nearby Porters Lake) isn't going to get WIFI.This is a rural location and I suppose the attitude was "it doesn't really face much fast food 'n' coffee competition, so why offer WIFI to gain and hold customers, if you don't have to ?"

Pity, because while I do think that desktop computers' contribution to national work-related productivity gains has been vastly over-stated, there is no doubt that mobile computing has been a great help  in a country this vast size, in raising the nation's overall productivity.

(Dad texting Mom to say he's gotten the ham and the milk and has he forgotten anything --- and she says "Crikey, I sent you out to a store ten miles away for  baby nappies - don't dare come home without them !")

A  case of a rising tide lifting all boats - in and out of the workplace.

Forget Jesus : what would RON JOYCE do ?

I can't help feeling if rural Nova Scotia-born ( and indeed rural Nova Scotia-retired) Ron Joyce was still running Tim's,  he wouldn't dare let rural Atlantic Canadians gather the impression that Tim's regards them as second-class citizens.

Mobile computing is an extra big help to rural people who must travel much further to get services and who can't afford to waste gas (and warm the planet), by making lots of unnecessary trips.

I might have to start up a petition to Tim's, asking them to treat rural Canadians right, when it comes to delivering WIFI....

'Nasty' Abbott and Howard Florey : told they'd be important from day they were born

the new Howard Florey ?

Reading David Marr's fascinating walkabout through the early years of the next Aussie PM, A. 'Nasty' Abbott, an astute student of that other hard-driving Aussie, Howard Florey, can't help but see similarities in how both men's families deliberately distorted their only son's personality to suit their parental dreams.

Both men were the only spoiled child - the only male child - in a family of girls. From birth they were told constantly they, not the girls, would be somebody--- that they had to be somebody.

Spoil a child and raise up a sociopath....

"At all costs , get there !"

Energy, sharp elbows and "take no prisoners" attitudes got them to the top but left very few, except fellow sociopaths, really liking them.

The lazy but studiously modest Alexander Fleming charmed his way into getting a Nobel Prize and most of the glory for merely discovering penicillin ("to be basically useless as a life-saver") .

Fleming left it to others to work hard (onto death in the case of Martin Henry Dawson) to prove the reverse : that penicillin is in fact the most useful life-saving medicine yet invented (my italics).

One who worked hard to prove up penicillin was Florey - but widespread dislike of Florey led the media (and Fleming and his hospital) to make Alec Fleming the star of this saga.

History isn't done with wannabe DLP leader Nasty Abbott : but I doubt it will be kind.

Both Florey and Abbott had much in their characters to admire but because they were warped from birth by their parents, the bad always seemed to outweigh the good in them, as they obeyed their parents' dictates to succeed at all costs, unceasingly issued to them since before they could even speak.

Spoil a child and ruin a nation.....