Living on the Edge of the Fringe

I'm a musician, a cellist. I've been playing cello for more decades than I care to admit. About two years ago, I treated myself to a new cello, replacing the instrument I got in fourth grade. Heidi, my new cello's name, has been a renaissance for me. Suddenly, I can play music I wouldn't even attempt with my old cello. My personal motto could now be: A day without Heidi is like a day without sunshine. I practice at least an hour a day, and sometimes, if I go to an orchestra rehearsal, I might spend three or more hours with her on a given day. That's as much as some people spend in front of their televisions!

My current project is to learn the Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1 to be the rehearsal cellist for an actual performance of the music. I won't be doing the actual performance, however, I will be soloing during orchestra rehearsals so the musicians can understand how the orchestra and cello solo combine.

The last movement of the concerto is blazingly fast, with the half note having a metronome marking of 88. Of course, being a modern piece, not much of it "falls under the fingers," and I have to rehearse very carefully to play the right notes at the right speed. Yesterday, I decided it was time for the metronome, to give me my speed goal. When I set it to 88 (176, actually, so I can hear the quarter notes), it was ticking away very fast. Fortunately, the last movement starts with quarter notes, then moves to eighth notes, and then sixteenths.

As I went through the movement, I found I was able to keep up with the metronome. It didn't seem to be that fast to me. Doing this requires extreme concentration. It's an interesting feeling. I lose all sense of myself and surroundings. I think I even lose sense of the notes and it all comes down to music. If I get distracted even in the slightest, it all falls apart.

So, there I am, just me, metronome, and music. I was keeping the beat until the end of the section, and when I stopped I heard a very strange thing: the metronome seemed to speed up. I did this several times, playing with great concentration, but when I stopped, the beating of the metronome sped up very noticeably. It's an electronic metronome, it's digital. There is no cause for the metronome to speed up or slow down without adjusting it. So, this variable speed must not be the metronome, it has to be my perception of the metronome.

This is not surprising. To us mortals, time is very subjective. When we are engaged, time speeds by. If we are laboring on a boring task, the individual seconds can seem interminable. I believe everybody has the ability to concentrate to the extent that nothing seems to exist except the task at hand. Just look at a kid with an X-Box (yes, they are all kids, if you see an X-Box, there's a kid at the other end, regardless of age). The kid is totally zoned out.

Of course, it makes me wonder. When I'm concentrating on the music and time subjectively slows, I wonder what part of time is slowing. Is it my perception of time? Are the processes in my brain speeding up resulting in my perception of the slower passage of time? Or, most intriguingly, is our concentration putting us in a different time, with different rules? Is it possible for us to control the actual passage of time?

This last suggestion is difficult, if not impossible to prove. Even if we somehow inserted a clock in our braincases, I'm not certain it would record a different time flow. Clocks are not really about time anyway. They measure phenomena (like a flywheel going clock-wise then counter clock-wise [pun intended], or the vibration of a quartz crystal, or the atomic decay of a radioactive element) and through mechanical or electronic means, translate it to some sort of time reading.

Our perception of time sucks, at least compared to a clock. If somebody locked us in a room with no clocks in view, no windows, or anything to mark the passage of time, I really think any guess involving how long we were locked in that room would be way wrong. We rely too much on our time pieces, on the height of the sun in the sky, or any number of time cues to develop anything close to an objective sense of time.

So, do we have the power to alter the passage of time? I think we may, and I think it has to do with living on the edge of the fringe. Here's my reasoning:

One of my favorite lines as a college chemistry teacher was: When you get really small, really fast, or really cold, things get really weird.

Albert Einstein predicted that time slows down when you travel faster. If you get to light speed (186,000 miles/sec), time, as measured by clocks, stops. Currently, the speed of light is an absolute, nothing can go faster, at least at present (another bizarre concept when you are discussing changing the passage of time, what is present?). The speed of light is fringe, it's the edge of the fringe.

About the smallest you can get is to the subatomic level, you know, electrons, protons, neutrons, and others. The size of these particles is at the edge of the fringe again. Nothing gets smaller. Well, an electron, for example, has completely weird behavior. Compare an electron to a baseball. You can hold a baseball, and while you are holding it, you know exactly where it is: in your hand. Electrons aren't that cooperative. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal states that you can't know the exact position and direction of an electron at the same time. It may have something to do with the fact that it is phasing in and out of existence so fast. The Josephson Junction, widely used in electronics exploits this very weird characteristic of electrons. Believe it or not, electrons can penetrate barriers that they shouldn't. It's like they phase out of existence on one side of the wall, and phase in on the other side. So, we say that electrons are discontinuous, they are not all here. Some of the time, they just disappear.

And, believe it or not, you and I are phasing in and out of existence, too. Strictly speaking, we are discontinuous. The good news is that our harmonic frequency (related to our mass) is so high that for all intents and purposes, we are continuous. So, if you think you can disappear long enough to re-appear on the other side of the bank vault wall, you might have difficulties putting this into practice.

The coldest you can get is absolute zero. We define heat as molecular vibration. Yeah, molecules vibrate, we can measure their vibration frequencies. The bonds holding the atoms together act like springs and they can spring in and out, and side to side. At absolute zero, -459 degrees F, all molecular vibration stops. You can't get colder than that. But, at the edge of this fringe, some materials become superconducting, able to conduct electricity with no resistance at all. This is a real effect, indeed, those MRI machines that allow doctors to see inside of us, use a superconducting magnet.

OK, so we aren't really fast, really small, or really cold enough to be really weird. We don't live on those fringes. But, consider yourself. As living, breathing creatures, we are miracles. Every part of us, our kidneys, intestines, blood, organs, brain, skin represent the highest order of molecular organization. Our brains, for example, have an organization, a structure that we cannot begin to understand. This organization, this structure has incredible power. When pushed to the edge of the fringe, our brains, our wills, can cure us of cancer, lift huge weights, create incredible inventions, stories, lives.

I really think the miracle of our bodies can alter the passage of time. I really think this is the beginning of the ways we can influence our environment, indeed, create new environments. We all have ways to achieve levels of concentration where our worlds change, where the rules we live by bend. All we need is to live on the edge of the fringe of our abilities.

Flavors and Fragrances--How They Can Manipulate Us

I well remember the day I was going through a buffet line with my former supervisor, Percy. As we passed each entree, I told him the chemical name of the predominant flavoring or coloring in each food. When we got to those fake "crab" legs, with that red coloring on top, I told Percy that it wasn't crab at all, but a gelatinized cod that was colored with some red dye number 5. The woman ahead of us in line apparently had enough and asked me to stop talking. She wanted to enjoy her lunch. I assured her that, if the crab legs were real crab, the red color is not a dye, but a potent, highly-colored toxin. However, it was in low concentration, so it wouldn't put her into anaphylactic shock. I had the best of intentions.

My first career job as a chemist was in flavors and fragrances. I worked for a company that made natural and unnatural chemicals for foods and fragrances. This is a fascinating area of study, especially when I began to realize that chemicals are what stimulate our senses of taste and smell.

Our sense of smell depends upon air-borne molecules that are emitted by some source. How do molecules become air-borne? There are a couple ways. The principal way molecules become airborne is when they evaporate. Smaller molecules can just float right into the air. This should be nothing surprising. Water on the sidewalk after a rain will “disappear” due to evaporation. When you smell fresh fruit, like an orange, the fragrance components in the orange evaporate from the peel, and you can smell the molecules floating in the air.

Another way molecules become air-borne is when they are associated with small particles, such as dust or smoke. Cigarette smoke, for example, consists of microscopic particles. When you take in smoke from a cigarette or if you breathe second-hand smoke, you breathe in the particulates containing odor molecules. Generally speaking, breathing particulates, such as smoke or the air on a hazy day, is unhealthy. Particulates find their way into our lungs and are not easily expelled.

I believe that most smells we encounter are evaporated molecules. Although we associate smells with emotions such as enjoyment, feeling secure, or uncomfortable, smells are really much, much more than a way of affecting us.

For example, consider a fragrant rose. The principal chemical in that fragrance is a fairly simple one: phenethyl alcohol (pronounced: fen’-eth-il al’-co-hol). This is a molecule with eight carbons, one oxygen, and a bunch of hydrogen atoms. It almost completely captures the rose fragrance, right down to that slightly cloying note that you smell a few seconds into the experience. Roses have the machinery to make that chemical. Why would a rose want to make phenethyl alcohol? Darwin's Theory of Evolution has an answer. The phenethyl alcohol attracts beneficial insects, such as bees. Bees love the sweetness of roses and spend a good deal of time around them. In their rapture, the bees gather some pollen on their bodies and then fly off to another rose bush to get raptured all over again. The bees also collect some nectar for their honey manufacturing at the nest. So, it’s a natural win-win situation.

Nature has a very different way of “thinking” about a rose fragrance. Nature doesn’t really “care” if you enjoy the fragrance of her flower. “Enjoyment” may not even be in her vocabulary. I will tell you a word that is in her vocabulary: Information. The phenethyl alcohol in the rose is, to Nature, anyway, an information molecule. When the rose emits that fragrance, it’s say to the whole world: “Hey, all you bees and other beneficial insects out there, here I am. Just home in on my phenthyl alcohol and you will find me. Take my pollen and propagate me and my species.”

That phenethyl alcohol is also an information molecule to us humans. When we walk by a rose garden and take in that fragrance, a little voice in our heads says: “Wow! That smells so good! But, I know what I’m smelling just doesn’t smell good, I’m smelling an information molecule. It tells me that there is a rose garden nearby. That’s because the phenethyl alcohol I’m smelling right now can only come from one thing, a rose plant. It makes me relax and think calm, peaceful thoughts. I wonder if I can take one of those roses with me so I can smell it all day in my house.” Well, that’s what my little voice says.

But, let’s take it further. Look at any garden center and you will see a huge variety of roses that you can purchase and plant in your yard. Somebody decided that lots of people would want to smell that fragrance, so, they took roots and saplings from a really nice-smelling rose plant and multiplied that plant all over the world. Now, more than any rose plant in the world, the continued existence of our rose plant is assured, thanks to us humans who fell for phenthyl alcohol and the information it conveys. And, it’s all because roses emit the information molecule phenthyl alcohol. Our rose will survive longer than you or me. I wish I emitted some phenthyl alcohol, then maybe somebody would find a way to keep me around longer. Then again, I would be very attractive to bees and, for humans, that’s a down side. I suppose I will have to find another way to survive.

Speaking of surviving, roses may enjoy a visit from a bee, but, its thorns certainly discourage visits from other creatures attracted by its smell, such as deer. What creature wants thorns lodged in their gums?

Flavors and fragrances are very powerful chemicals that affect us emotionally. They can stir our memories, make us feel good, or make us feel uncomfortable. In future blogs, I will describe more of the myriad ways they influence us.

Nicotine--Where It Comes From, Where It Goes

Did you ever wonder why cigarettes have nicotine? Did you ever wonder what nicotine is?

Nicotine is a chemical compound. A chemical compound is simply a bonded collection of atoms. The atoms are bonded, or held together, mainly by electrostatic forces: positive and negative charges associated with the atoms attracting each other. A single unit of a chemical compound is a molecule. If you have a bottle of the same molecules, like nicotine molecules, you have a chemical substance. Bottles of nicotine are fairly common in chemistry laboratories. Retail price for about a pint of the stuff is around $800. The discounted price is probably around half or less.

Nicotine is in the class of alkaloids. Simply stated, alkaloids are molecules that contain the element nitrogen. In the good, old days, when our analytical methods were crude, chemists would identify alkaloids by tasting them. If they were bitter tasting, we had an alkaloid. Quinine, the stuff in the tonic water you flavor your drinks with, is an alkaloid, one of the most bitter-tasting alkaloids known. For some reason, alkaloids tend to have powerful biological effects, besides bitter taste. Some of the better-known alkaloids, such as cocaine, morphine, and ephedrine are examples. Most alkaloid names have the suffix “-ine.” When I see a chemical name ending with “-ine,” I know it’s an alkaloid.

So, why is there so much nicotine in tobacco? Is it there to get us addicted? Probably not! Nicotine is one in a class of defense chemicals. It's a poison. It's poisonous to humans, and, to a lot of insects. Consider, if the tobacco plant leaves a bad taste in an insect's mouth, or makes it sick, the insect will look for something more palatable. Thus, the tobacco plant survives because insects avoid it. If only humans were as intelligent as insects sometimes. Why are humans so attracted to poisons like nicotine or alcohol (yes, alcohol is a poison, my friends, stay tuned for a blog on that)? So, even though insects are smart enough to avoid the toxic effects of nicotine, smokers aren’t. But, before it poisons us, it addicts us.

The nicotine in tobacco is a natural component of the plant, just like the fragrance of a rose is a natural component for the rose plant. Nobody has to add nicotine to tobacco leaves, it's already there. Your average tobacco leaves have about 3% nicotine. That means, if you have 100 pounds of tobacco leaves, you have 3 pounds of nicotine spread out in the leaves.

Our good friends at the Brown & Williamson, a major tobacco company, decided that 3% nicotine was not enough in their tobacco leaves. So, in the 1970s, they cultivated a special variety of tobacco called Y1, which contains up to 6% nicotine. No wonder the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) started an investigation to see if Brown & Williamson was manipulating nicotine levels to addict even more smokers. The tobacco companies also tried the other direction by making the “Lights” line, with reduced nicotine. The nicotine can be extracted away from tobacco using a process called supercritical carbon dioxide extraction.” Yes, that’s the same carbon dioxide at the center of the greenhouse gas/global warming discussion. Anyway, after the tobacco is extracted and has reduced nicotine content, the cigarette companies make their “Lights” line. And, of course, they have a whole bunch of nicotine from all that tobacco they extracted.

Did you ever wonder what the tobacco companies do with all that nicotine they extract from tobacco when they make those low-nicotine cigarettes? They sell it as an insecticide. The boll weevil that attacks cotton cannot survive exposure to nicotine. So, the cotton is saved. It is harvested and converted into all sorts of fabrics, like the fabric used for shirts. The fabric goes to a garment manufacturer to make shirts for you to buy.

So, you have your cotton shirts and smokers have their low-tar, low-nicotine smokes. Next time you see somebody ask for a carton of Marlboro Lights at the open-all-night convenience store, thank them for your shirt.

Chemistry, chemicals, molecules, nicotine, extractions are not easy concepts. I know I dumped a lot of technical stuff on you. If you want to know more about this fascinating area, please Google the terms on your browser. There is a lot of information out there, the more you read, the better your comprehension.

What's with NASA and those Rockets?

I've been around long enough to remember staring at the family's black and white TV displaying a smoking rocket for hour after hour, listening to some announcer trying to fill up that time explaining NASA nonsense at us. There were countdowns, aborted countdowns, countdowns that were holding at "T minus 6 seconds," and adding time to the clock, like the countdown was some sort of football game and the officials had to put some time on the clock.

All we wanted was to see a huge plume of exhaust shoot out of the bottom of the rocket, hear that loud thundering noise as the rocket, with three totally helpless guys, gets flung into space, or at least real high. After a couple decades, rocket launches weren't that inspirational anymore, and today we rarely see a launch on TV. But, rocket launches are still problematical, dependent on so many factors, and incredibly resource intensive. I'd like to address the whole resource thing.

It's not easy to propel a rocket into space. To get into orbit, you have to accelerate to about 18,000 mph. To escape the pull of the earth's gravity to go someplace else, like the moon or Mars, you have to achieve 25,000 mph. This is a huge job for any contraption NASA designs. And then, there's the energy required. You have to burn tons and tons of fuel to achieve these speeds. You need armies of engineers and support people, and vehicle construction facilities, and on and on and on. NASA's budget for 2009 was $17.2 billion. I guess when you compare that number with the sub-prime bailout, it's a bargain. But, look what it pays for. We have satellites, an international space station, a skateboard-like thing that rolled around on Mars, and some probes, and a few more humans in space, risking their lives to float around in free-fall.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of it. But, any forward-looking, visionary type, like myself, would take a look at the NASA program and ask: What's wrong with this picture? How are we going to truly explore space, like our solar system, our galaxy, and beyond, if we can't get a human past the moon? I don't know about you, but the thought is pretty demoralizing.

As much as we deny it, if we simply abide by Sir Isaac Newton's vision, we truly are alone, separated by vast distances of space and time from any other planet, star, or galaxy. But, we want to get out there something awful. Look at all the movies and TV shows about warp speed, alien cultures, and teletransportation. Well, my friends, right now that's nothing but a bunch of plot devices. Today, if we want to visit Mars, forget it! In Star Trek, if somebody wants to visit Andromeda, hell, just point the Enterprise in its general direction, and in a few hours at warp speed, we are there, having bar brawls with the Andromedans. If you miss by a few parsecs, no problemmo, just make a course correction, and you are there.

I don't know about you, but I don't know anybody who has a warp engine, dilithium crystals, or can fold space. Trouble is, if we don't find another way of getting from point A to point B besides using rockets and space modules, we are going to flash in and out of existence on Spaceship Earth, and nobody will be the wiser, at least nobody on Andromeda.

A while back, I really got concerned about this and wrote a letter to Jerry Pournelle, a science fiction writer who consults for NASA. I asked him if anybody was working on anything besides the big rocket approach to space travel, he actually wrote back to say that he wasn't aware of such an effort. Later on, NASA did admit to having a small section devoted to "Alternative Propulsion Technologies." Imagine my relief.

Bottom line, from where I sit, forget the rockets. Anybody can see that they can only take you so far. Sure you can throw a bunch of sattelites in orbit, but, getting free of the earth's gravity just ain't gonna cut it.

I do believe that there are alternatives to rockets. I believe there are ways of getting from Point A to Point B, even if they are separated by light years, and I believe I have some very rational, practical thoughts on how to go about accomplishing this. I'm not going into specifics here, because I'd like to bring some of my ideas to fruition, but I'd like to leave you with a question.

What is gravity?

Consider this: Although we know how gravity behaves, and we can predict how one object of a given mass can influence another object from a distance, we don't know what it truly is. For example, the sun exerts such a powerful gravitational field, that it actually holds the earth in orbit. It does this from a distance of about 93 million miles, give or take. Just how does the sun hold the earth; which is hurtling around the sun at over 33,000 mph from flying out into space? Nobody knows.

See, not even the most intelligent physicist truly knows what gravity is. Not even Einstein. Old Al had some ideas about "gravity waves," but, that doesn't explain gravity, does it? My point is that there are some fundamental things going on, things that directly affect us, and we don't know what they are, we don't know what causes them, and we sure as hell don't know how to influence them. Other things we don't really have a good bead on: light and matter come to mind, we don't know what those are, either. We do have a very good idea about what they do.

So, when it comes to understanding our world, when we consider the most fundamental forces around us, we haven't a clue. Any scientist will tell you that we can understand anything using the Scientific Method. However, with all the resources at our disposal, we don't get gravity and other forces. The scientist in me says this: We aren't seeing the whole picture. If we saw the "Big Picture" we might begin to understand some of these fundamental concepts.

There's a story I'm fond of: It's nighttime and Bert is standing under a street lamp, apparently looking for something. Ernie sees Bert, walks up to him and says: "Hey Bert, what are you looking for?"

Ernie replies: "My wallet, I lost my wallet."

Bert inquires: "Where you do you think you lost it?

Ernie points off into the darkness: "Over there someplace, I think."

"So, if you lost your wallet over there, why are you looking here?"

Ernie looks at him like he's from Mars: "I'm looking for my wallet here because the light is much better here than over there."

Is it possible that we are only looking for our answers where the light is best?

Sleep Apnea and Amusing CPAP Tricks

That's right. I have sleep apnea. You can Google it to find out the gory details. For my anecdotal take on the condition, read on.

I don't know when it started, but I'm pretty certain I haven't had sleep apnea my entire life. I'm guessing, based on the observations of those geographically near me when I am asleep, that I've had sleep apnea for at least a decade. I wasn't aware I had it. Sleep apnea occurs when you are sleeping, right? If you experience while you are awake, it isn't sleep apnea, is it? In the last couple years, though, I think I've been experiencing sleep apnea symptoms when I'm awake. Maybe we should call that "wake apnea."

I became aware of my sleep apnea long before I ever heard that expression. I recall my sons giggling in the mornings following their sleepovers at my apartment. Even though I kept my bedroom door shut, they could hear all sorts of snoring, loud gasps as if I was being suffocated, moaning, groaning, and other sundry sounds that, to teenage ear, at least, were pretty funny. Of course, I was totally unaware of this wee-hour hullaballoo I was generating. I was asleep.

Then the restless leg syndrome kicked in, so to speak. So, in addition to my gasping, proto-corpse episodes, my legs were spinning wildly out of control. I was positively dangerous in my unconscious state. About this time, I was becoming aware that my conditions were impinging on my social life. The lady I was dating, who was to become my bride, was very disturbed by my night time behaviors, and didn't know what to think. My brother, who is a doctor, heard me tear up the bed when I was staying at his house for a few weeks, and he prescribed a sleep testing session at a nearby hospital. I decided to do it, just to see if I really had something. I was still in denial at this point.

The sleep clinic was pretty interesting. We were told to bring pajamas, toothbrush, toothpaste, and something boring to read. The nurse who connected me to the sleep apnea machine took about 45 minutes to connect electrodes to my ankles, thighs, chest, arms, and hands. She also attached electrodes to various locations around my head. She clipped an oxygen detector on my finger and fitted my head with some sort of gadget that can detect air flow. By the time I was fully hooked up, I looked like I was going into cryosleep for the long journey to Galaxy Omega. I felt like some sort of telephone cable junction box, with about 93 cables coming off my body. Next, they test to make sure that everything is working properly. Of course, some electrode on my chest was not registering Of course, it was attached to the hairiest part of my chest. Every time she ripped off the electrode to put on more electro-conductive glop, it pulled enough hair with it to knit a long scarf. So, after they laid me down, on my back, told me not to move, and attached a facemask with a pneumatic tube extending out of it, she wished me good night.

It wasn't easy to sleep this way. I'm guessing I did sleep. Next thing I know, it's 1 am and the nurse comes into the room. "You've got it bad," she tells me. "Bad" apparently means that I've had 90 sleep apnea episodes in an hour. That's bad. It's so bad that they don't have to wait for a doctor to diagnose it. My sleep apnea was as plain as the mask on my face. So, the next thing they did was get a CPAP machine and start trying to figure out what pressure to set it at. I'll discuss CPAP machines in a second.

I did learn some important stuff that night. I learned I had sleep apnea, and I had a pretty severe case of it. Throughout the night, the nurse showed up to adjust the CPAP machine. CPAP is an acronym for: Continuous Positive Airway Pressure. The machine itself is a retangular box about 8 in wide, 4 inches high, and about 11 inches deep. I've never seen the inside of it, but it must have some way to control the pressure in the exit tube. The 1 inch-diameter tube extends from the CPAP box and terminates in a face mask. This mask fits over my nose with an airtight fit. There are straps that go behind my head to hold the mask against my face. The machine pumps a positive pressure into the facemask, hardly more than a tenth of a pound per square inch, depending on what the doctor orders, but, it's enough to somehow push the parts of my sinuses or whatever so they don't block my breathing, which is the cause of sleep apnea.

I'm not a vain person. I don't look in the mirror and admire my reflection for hours. But, I've never looked at myself in the mirror when wearing that dopey face mask with the tube dangling out of it. I guess I look like some hose beast from dimension 92 or something. It's such an embarrassment for me that I wait until the lights are off in the bedroom before donning that mask.

And, the CPAP machine makes noise. It makes the loudest noise when I don't have the face mask on and there's no back pressure. Then it roars away. When I have the mask on, it is very quiet when I'm not breathing. However, most of the time I breathe, which the idea of the gadget in the first place. When I put the mask on, I feel the pressure build up around my nose. The machine gets quiet, however, when I breathe, the CPAP machine begins to roar. It stops when I exhale. This is no fun for me.

However, I've started learning how to make all sorts of different noises. I find, when I relax my sinuses, the pressurized air flows into my nose and out my mouth. By doing this, you can make any number of very unnatural-sounding noises, like when you talk after inhaling helium from a balloon. Other noises you can make: If you press your lips together at the right pressure, they will flap like a race horse's, except you can flap for hours, if that's what turns you on. You can direct the air flow over your vocal chords and make those low, droning sounds like those Tibetan monks. On my to-do list is to take the mask underwater, like in the bath tub. I think I need to do a run with no bubble bath and a run with bubble bath. The addition of suds will probably have a major effect on the resulting sounds and visuals.

I use that CPAP machine every night. I definitely have more dreams. My brother, the doctor, said that I should be feeling more awake during the day. For somebody like me, however, having more energy might be detrimental to the health of those around me. I still have restless leg syndrome, but, as long as I take a hot bath before retiring, it's OK.

So, now my nighttime is under control. If only they'd make a machine for my daytime antics.....

Adam, Eve, and Genetically Modified Organisms

A while back, I was walking through the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. I was attracted to a Renaissance painting by some grand master. I don't remember the title of the painting, nor do I recall the artist's name, I'm so bad with those details. As I walked closer to the painting and the group of onlookers standing nearby, I saw a scene of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Except for some gravity-defying loose-leaf system, they were stark naked, and, in Eve's hand was The Apple. Adam's hand was outreached to receive it, presumably to a big bite and get thrust out of Eden and do nothing for the rest of Eternity except view Baywatch reruns.

The Apple was dead center of the painting and, of course, my eye was drawn right to it. "Ugh!" I said, "who would eat such an apple?" It was the most mis-shapen, gnarly, mealy-looking apple I've ever seen. It was unappetizing, unappealing, and hardly worth a Garden of Eden Eviction Notice from the Landlord.

A woman standing in the group near the painting responded to my outcry of revulsion to the Apple. It's true, I did say my comment out loud for all to hear, that's how I felt. The woman told me that, since this is the forbidden fruit, the artist painted it to look pretty forbidding, as it indeed was. OK, that seemed logical, forbidden fruit should look forbidding. Makes sense....sort of.

However, something about her comment didn't make sense to me. I began thinking about life in the 14th century, or at least how I thought life might be. I thought about apples, for example. How would an apple in Renaissance times appear? Well, I'm guessing that sciences like horticulture were not advanced compared to today's standards. The concept of determining traits in plants and mating them to achieve plants with superior traits was first suggested by Gregor Mendel in the mid-19th century. So, I think it's a fair guess that much of the food people ate was what we would call "wild." Fruits, for example, came from trees whose genetic material was determined randomly by pollen-carrying bees and such. So, it's possible that apples in the time this painting was created didn't look so great.

Fast forward to the present. A walk in the grocery store produce aisle is like walking through a still-life painting of perfect fruits and vegetables. But, consider, in Renaissance times, there was no such perfection. What happened? What did we to to our fruits and vegetables that made them so perfect and beautiful? We would never accept the apple in that painting. Any self-respecting fruit grower would leave it on the ground to be next year's fertilizer.

Our understanding of Nature now helps us to eat better than royalty did in the 14th century. As our understanding of genetics, horticulture, plant nutrition, and plant pests increased, so did the quality of our food. Horticulturists have been mating plants with desirable characteristics to create perfect peas, spectacular citrus, delicious corn, potatoes to die for, and squash about which to write home.

You see, by purposefully mating plants with positive traits to get an optimum organism, we are manipulating their genetic material. Using the mating process, we are controlling their genetic codes, their DNA, to give us what we want. And, once we've created this perfect produce, we grow it all over the place. And, while we are growing our perfect produce, other, less-desirable varieties, are not being grown, and are becoming extinct. This is not only the case for plants, but for domestic animals. Cattle, for example, are bred to produce high levels of tender meat. Breeding programs can produce cattle that are so heavy, they cannot stand, their legs won't support their weight.

So, when we hear about Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), it's not a stretch to see that we have been genetically modifying plants and animals for centuries. We have accepted organisms that are products of breeding programs and believed them to beneficial because of their higher yields, resistance to pests, and better taste.

It's interesting to me when we apply today's standards and morals to times of the past. I often hear people wishing for simpler times, when life was slower and therefore better. If you could put them in a time machine back to the 14th century, for instance, I doubt they would find much very desirable. The available food would be pretty bad, diseases rampant, dirty water, sewerage all over (no plumbing, you know), and no escape. And, you die early.

Meanwhile, back in the 21st century, things are going faster than you ever imagined. These days, we don't have to bother with horticulture, we can go directly into a plant's or animal's DNA and have a good old time. Any biologist will tell you that you can't mate two species, Nature's safety valve kicks in and there is no progeny in such acts. So, if you have a plant that is resistant to, say, the boll weevil, and you have cotton, which isn't, you can't mate those two plants. But, today, we can take the genetic material from the boll weevil resistant plant, and incorporate it into the cotton. Voila, you have boll weevil resistant cotton.

It isn't that easy, but, it's not impossible. A half century ago, it was impossible. Today, there are companies that will take your organism and DNA from another organism and incorporate the DNA into that organism to create a completely new variety of that species. The USDA's Plant Variety Protection Office (PVPO) administers the "Plant Variety Protection Act (PVPA), by issuing Certificates of Protection. The Act provides legal intellectual property rights protection to breeders of new varieties of plants which are sexually reproduced (by seed) or tuber-propagated" (from http://www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/ams.fetchTemplateData.do?template=TemplateC&navID=PlantVarietyProtectionOffice&rightNav1=PlantVarietyProtectionOffice&topNav=&leftNav=ScienceandLaboratories&page=PlantVarietyProtectionOffice&resultType).

Maybe we are living in a modern Eden. We have perfect fruits and vegetables, our food supply is the most varied ever, and it's just down the street at your local FoodWay store.

I'd stay away from the Apples if I were you....

Food and Geometry

A scene in the most recent remake of the movie: The Day the Earth Stood Still stands out in my mind. Keanu Reeves plays Klathu, who is charged with destroying life on the planet, because us humans are destroying it. So, to keep us from destroying earth, Klathu will deploy that famous robot to destroy earth so we don't. This is not making sense.

After Klathu emerges from his ship and some panicky soldier shoots him, resulting in a trip to the hospital, where he recovers despite whatever a doctor does to him, Klathu easily escapes the hospital and finds himself in the Newark, NJ train station. The last time I was in the Newark train station, I also felt a fleeting urge to destroy the earth, just so that station would disappear. However, I didn't have the resources Klathu had, so, the earth survived the day I was in Newark Penn Station. Klathu is hungry, so he zaps a vending machine and coaxes a tuna salad on Wonder Bread sandwich out of it. Kathu opens the cellophane wrapper and pulls out a perfect right triangle of tuna salad sandwich. Wonder Bread is almost a perfect square, and, when you cut it on the diagonal, you get two triangles of sandwich.

Let me describe that triangle of tuna salad sandwich: to you geometry geeks, it's a right triangle, meaning that one of the angles is a right- or 90-degree angle. The other two angles are very sharp and pointy. Keanu (Klathu) put the sharp angle in his mouth, bit it off, and started chewing.

"Man!" I said to myself, "That looks good! I feel like I should find a vending machine in Newark Penn Station that has diagonally-cut, tuna salad on Wonder Bread and take a bite out of it, just like Keanu." Then the sensible voice in my head began to rain on my parade, you know the one, it's annoying and you don't listen to it anyway, said: "Hey, you don't like tuna salad and you wouldn't go near Wonder Bread. So, what's the deal?"

Then it occurred to me: so much of the food we buy, especially the manufactured food, comes in perfect geometric shapes. Cookies are perfectly round or oval, candy bars are some variation of a perfect geometric shape. Even potato chips can come in perfect shapes. I don't know what it is, but, there is something very inviting about eating perfect geometric shapes. I know everytime I see a perfectly-formed Chips Ahoy, a Snickers bar as a perfect rectagular solid, or those Milano Cookies as perfect ovally things, I want one. I want to bite into it. I want to look at that first bite into my perfect snack and, as I'm chewing, I will stare feeling pretty happy with myself that I made my mark, I've staked my claim. Nobody will touch any morsel with my bite mark in it.

What is it about food in perfect geometric shapes that attracts us? Why do we have an almost uncontrollable urge to destroy that symmetry with our teeth? Pringles Potato Chips don't taste very good. They taste like chemicals to me, which is the only way you can drug a potato enough to conform those three-dimensional parabolic shapes. It's possible the only reason anybody eats those chips is because you get to trash something perfect with your teeth.

I think there is something primordial about these urges. They come from our distant past. Consider a dog, which, some believe, occupy a lower rung on the evolutionary ladder than humans. Give them anything with a perfect shape and all they can do is rip it to shreds. Come to think of it, dogs seems to want to trash any shape they can get their teeth around, until they all look the same, all chewed up, soggy, no-shape blob sitting in the backyard someplace.

Do an experiment. Go to the convenience store and buy a few items having perfect geometric shapes. Sit at the dining-room table and open each one of them. Wait 10 minutes. If there is any food left on the table, congrats! You are an evolved person. If there is no food left on the table, immediately evacuate your home and tell Bowser to make room for you in the dog house.