#it's encoded that far back into our DNA or something

[kedreeva]

My little 100yo house doesn't have a fireplace somehow, so I make do by turning on the fireplace in my TV (there's two versions on Netflix now- classic and Birchwood) for the same reason. I know it doesn't produce warmth the same way but in the winter it still feels like it does.

Hate how lighting a candle does wonders to my mood. Like wowwww. Grug like fire? Grug not sad anymore because Fire in Cave? Wow. Real predictable of Grug.

[tanadrin]

Khoda Station

For a long time after she joined the Project, Sirrek had found Tjumak to be a puzzle, the most difficult to understand of her colleagues. She took as read that you had to have pretty good reasons to want to risk defying the Archive’s most sacrosanct law, and also to spend half of every year out in the middle of nowhere, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest transport routes and thousands from the nearest settlements. For most of the people at the station, their motives were actually pretty simple. Koridek believed passionately in the work; so passionately that he was willing to break his most deeply held convictions about what it meant to be an Archivist. For him it was all about values. His desire to serve humanity ran deep, and that was what made him a good fit for the Archive. His desire to serve Paradise, well, that ran even deeper; it was the source of his desire to serve humanity, to protect their nascent colony, but also to violate an order that had been created decades before Sirrek was born, to prevent terrible bloodshed. Depending on how you looked at it, that made him a very bad archivist indeed.

Ardhat was also simple. She was a problem-solver. That wasn’t all of it, but it was most of it. Of course, she believed mightily, too, but Sirrek doubted anyone could believe in anything as strongly as Koridek did. But above all else, Ardhat wanted to solve the biggest problems she could find. That was what got her up in the mornings, and drove her forward. She was a puzzle-cracker, a code-breaker, a solution-seeker, a builder-of-systems. She would have been a fine architect, or a talented engineer, or a clever physicist. But what greater puzzle was there than the Great Record? What greater problem to solve could there be than resurrecting a lost world out of the most ancient memory of the past? Of building a whole new ecosystem, alongside and on top on alien to it that already existed? Sirrek was quite certain that Ardhat would die to protect the Project if it ever came to it, but in the meantime, she would live for its mysteries.

Sirrek? Well, introspection wasn’t her strong suit. But where Ardhat had a cordial indifference to authority and Koridek a deep but respectful complaint against it, Sirrek just hated being told what to do. And they had told her, you shall not be a biologist. Not in the way you want to be. You shall not undertake any part of the great work--for it will not begin in your lifetime. They had said to her, you shall leave Paradise fallow, at least for a human definition of the term. And so Sirrek hated them for that, hated them for deciding before she was born that all her talents and her ambition must be sacrificed in the name of politics, hated the religious zealots and the blind ideologues whose fledgeling war meant that it would be many lifetimes before the Paradise she dreamed of would come to be. She was compelled to disobey. That was what got her out of bed in the morning.

But Tjumak. There was a mystery. He affected it a little, Sirrek thought. He spent his days ensconced in the middle of his dark laboratory, like the heart of an animal, or the engine of a machine. He did not come and go, like Koridek. The dim light of the displays shone on the glossy exterior of his support apparatus. He had once had a survival suit, Koridek said, and had gone back and forth from the surface like most of the other Archivists, returning to Ammas Echor when the strain of surface living became too great. Archivists were not born for planetbound life; they were humanity as it lived between the stars, made for the long dreamlike time in the cold and dark, and for keeping the long memory of their people alive. How long did our ancestors travel from star to star? Sirrek had once asked her mother, when she was young. For countless ages, she had replied. Since the Garden was lost to us in the beginning of time.

A survival suit was meant to be a temporary thing, a way to endure the stresses of gravity and the immoderate temperatures of the surface. What, do you go naked in space? Sirrek had asked Koridek. Koridek laughed. No, he said. We still have to wear suits on the vessel, though they are much lighter. You see me only as a hulking, heavy thing in this armor. In microgravity, I am considered graceful; above the sky, I can dance. Why someone would exchange that for a planetbound prison, much less one where they could not leave the room they worked in, Sirrek struggled to guess. But that was what Tjumak had done. From the outside, he looked almost like a silly toy: a round, smooth metal body, topped with a round, smooth head on a short, flexible neck. His arms were more graceful, and the apparatus in which he set could turn this way and that to reach th various monitors and keyboards around him; but apparently much of the interface was actually inside the suit, which in Tjumak’s case was more of a chamber, one in which he floated in a carefully-formulated synthetic fluid. And if the power goes out? Sirrek had asked. He will be very annoyed until someone finds the switch for the backup generator, Koridek said.

Direct neural prosthetics like the Archivists used, and which Tjumak relied on for his work, were rare among the younger generations, so it was probably a less claustrophobic way of living than Sirrek imagined. And if he really had to, he probably could switch back to a survival suit. Like if they ever got caught, and had to evacuate the station. That was a possibility she did her best not to dwell on.

She got a little window into Tjumak’s world, or at least his thought process, when they spent several long weeks working on a section of the Great Record. It was a frustrating and exceedingly difficult task, and the missing portions that Sirrek needed amounted to only a handful of characters, but the Record was nearly impossible to work with directly. When she was little, her teachers had explained that the Great Record was a library of the genetic information of every animal and plant and little microscopic beastie that had ever lived in the Garden, the world humankind had come from. And when their most ancient ancestors, the ancestors of their unimaginably remote ancestors, had had to leave the Garden as exiles, they preserved the Record, and kept it safe, for hundreds of thousands of years.

That was almost, but not quite, entirely a lie. When she had started studying biology, with an eye to genetics and to endobotany specifically (back when she imagined that she might be permitted to do something with her training), she started learning about how the Great Record worked. It wasn’t just a record of DNA; that on its own would have been quite useless, she was assured. DNA was an important part of it, of course, nuclear and mitochondrial both, but only a small part. Rather, the Record had been compiled as an image of the shape of a living cell: it described actual genetic code, but also how DNA was formed, how proteins were folded, how DNA and RNA were transcribed, processes of methylation and copying, how mitosis and meiosis functioned, and so on and so forth, attempting to describe the metabolism of an ideal cell, one which contained within it the potential to embody almost any form of life to which humankind had once been related; and it was by reference to this elaborate, ideal lifeform that literally millions of other species, from single-celled bacteria that lived in the human gut to storybook leviathans, were described. And the reason, Sirrek was told, that the Record had been composed in this way was that, long long ago, their ancestors had once had the technology to use those reference descriptions directly. The heart of the Record was a terrible lacuna, a tool that had been so widespread, and so useful, that it had once been presumed it would never be lost.

Oh, fathers of my fathers and mothers of my mothers! Sirrek had thought. How far your children have fallen. The senior geneticists referred to this technology as the key to the universal cell; or just the key. What, exactly, it was and how it had functioned was hard to guess. It was related to other technologies they had that barely worked, and that they did not understand at all, like the ones the Archivists used to modify their genes and to improve their neural prosthetics. There were baseline humans who had been brought all the way from Rauk on the last journey, in sarcophagi that had preserved them between life and death. It was a form of the key that had brought them back to wholeness, and let them live out the rest of a natural lifespan. But it was a specialized version, a crippled and ghostly version. They did not have the true key; and they were working to rebuild it. Perhaps one day, many centuries from now, they would live up to the promise of those long-ago masters of the living world, and they would read forth out of the Record a whole teeming world, as had been intended.

But they didn’t need the key to start understanding the Record, and ordinary genetic engineering and cell manipulation techniques would serve to clone the most basic organisms recorded there. Of course, all of this was hampered by the fact that the Record was at both extremely terse, intending to encode an enormous amount of information in as small a space as possible, and maddeningly repetitive. It was not really one Record, but many; the collocation of multiple copies, in some places defective, and in others damaged. Later, totally uncomprehending generations had apparently lost all but the memory of the importance of the thing, and carefully copied what they did not understand into new forms. It was only in the glare of Rauk, millennia ago, that the Janese had finally understood what they had had in their grasp, and built it into the skeleton of Ammas Echor itself.

Understanding the Record had been the original purpose of the Archive, and in the long, slow journey to Paradise they had labored ceaselessly at their task. Still, it was slow work. And since their station did not have the benefit of access to either the Archive on Ammas Echor, or to all the latest work from investigators working on the surface, sometimes they had to work at it themselves. At Ardhat’s encouragement, Sirrek had been trying to get a handle on some of the plant species that, by their position in the Record, seemed to be relatively basal. Much of the work in unraveling that portion of the Archive had been done by others, and was well-known, but little attention had been paid to the bryophytes. Under the logic of the agreement between the Renewalists and the Instrumentalists, this didn’t matter. Actual resurrection of species was not slated to begin for nearly eighty years, and even then it would be confined to laboratories. But Sirrek wanted practical results. What she ideally wanted was trees, flowers, grasses, important primary producers that also occupied slightly different ecological niches from the xenophytes, and could be integrated alongside them. But mosses were step zero. Possibly even step negative one. All she needed was a single viable spore. In theory, everything she needed was in the Record, somewhere.

In their long, slow labor, the Archivists had painstakingly indexed the Record, but it was an immense of information, and one that was only partly understood. The language of the record, if it could be called that, was a sophisticated polyvalent writing system that could encode chemical formulae, the structure of molecules and proteins and organelles, and dipped in its most specific registers into the subatomic scale, to describe the precise interaction by which choloroplasts captured the light of the sun, to convert into energy; and at its most general, sketched a mathematical relationship between the populations of a predator and its prey. Yet for all that it said, it also left maddening amounts unsaid, details that were perhaps assumed by its creators to be common knowledge, or which simply could not be fit in.

“It’s almost gibberish,” Tjumak had observed dryly. “Almost.”

“Why do you think they made it in the first place?” Sirrek asked Tjumak. “Do you suppose they really thought the umpteenth children of their children would be able to make use of it?”

“I can only assume so. Hubris, perhaps, or merely an unfathomably acute case of optimism.”

“It had to have been made in the Garden, right?”

A small movement suggested a shrug from Tjumak. “To speculate on the historicity of our people before the last journey is to engage in theology as far as I can tell. Whatever the Garden once was, it is now more myth than fact.”

“Maybe,” said Sirrek, tapping her chin as she moved the same section of the Record back and forth on the display. The curling, two-dimensional network of shapes blurred together if you tried to take in too much of it at once, not to mention it was dispiriting. It was far easier to concentrate on the smallest legible piece, and work through it one symbol at a time. Tjumak peeked over her shoulder, and glanced at her notes.

“No, that’s not right,” he said. “That’s not a DNA sequence, it’s a protein sequence. Look, that’s a symbol for a folding geometry, in the corner.”

Sirrek muttered an impolite word and started backtracking.

“They can’t have made it during the Exile, anyway,” she said. “You can’t put millions of species on a generation ship. Even if most of them are beetles.”

“Perhaps not,” said Tjumak. “But what is an object such as this? It is a monument against ruin. If they made it in the Garden, they made it knowing its desolation was close at hand.”

“So you’re definitely in camp made-to-be-used.”

“I think… I think it doesn’t matter why they made it,” Tjumak said. He was scanning his own section of the text, which in real terms was inscribed about a meter and a half away from Sirrek’s on the same section of Ammas Echor’s structural frame; but which felt like it might as well have been on the other side of the planet. “The question is, why do we want to use it?”

“Hubris, and/or an unfathomably acute case of optimism?”

“It’s a reasonable question. We could have come to Paradise, gone down from the Ammas Echor, and made our living on this world as it is, with no attempt to change it besides the introduction of ourselves. For that matter, we could have stayed in orbit, bringing up such resources as we needed, air and water and soil, to make life there far more comfortable than it ever could have been on one of the airless or gasping worlds our ancestors lived their lives on, and left Paradise almost entirely unchanged. Yet when we arrived, we nearly fought a war against one another, not over whether to make use of the Record to resurrect the creatures of the Garden, but only how.”

“Do you think we should have considered the possibility?”

Tjumak leaned back from the display he was hunched over. The head of his support apparatus tilted up toward the ceiling, which was as close as he ever got to looking pensieve.

“I cannot honestly say yes. I’ve known space, Sirrek, real space. Not orbital microgravity, but the deepness beyond the summit of the sky. Some of my earliest memories are of the firing of Ammas Echor’s great engines, to turn our path inward toward the light below. Of the long, slow spiral down to the inner worlds of Kdjemmu. And even that emptiness was brighter and warmer by far than the great darkness between the stars that my mother and father were born into. When they were young, ever joule of energy was precious beyond reckoning, every drop of water or puff of air worth more than a human life. 

“The other worlds around this star, they’re airless, or formless giants, or scorching hot, or worse. And every world our ancestors ever visited, if the tales are true, from the Garden-which-was-lost to Usukuul-we-mourn, was as barren as them. I cannot imagine what suffering generation after generation endured to bring us here--and it would spit in the face of every soul that died on the journey not to bring Paradise to flower.”

“We will, Tjumak,” Sirrek said softly. She had never seen Tjumak speak so earnestly before. “And we will not ravage, and we will not burn. And one day we will call our brothers and sisters out of the darkness to live with us again.” The rhythm of the ancient litanies came back to her smoothly. Her parents had not been religious, but her grandmother had been. She had recited the litanies to Sirrek when she was small, a soothing voice to sleep to.

“Will they thank us?”

“The other Exiles?”

Tjumak shook his head, then pointed at his display. “No. The ghosts we’re going to call up.”

“What do you mean?” Sirrek asked, perplexed.

Tjumak swiveled in place to another display, and tapped a few keys on the panel next to it. The image of another part of the Record appeared, this one displayed alongside long sections of plain text. There were ghostly outlines of various creatures superimposed on it and displayed alongside it, gracile things with four legs and taut muscles, and things with sharp teeth and long claws.

“This part of the Record was indexed four generations ago, and pretty well translated,” Tjumak said. “It’s an unusual one--it’s organized by relationship between constituent elements, not by phylogeny. It’s probably from a lesser Record that was only integrated into the whole later.”

“What are they?”

“Animals. Warm-blooded, furry, placental. Very much like us, in some ways, but quadrupedal. And, to judge by the annotations, quick. Well-muscled. Herbivorous and carnivorous.”

“One is predator, and one is prey?”

“Likely.”

Sirrek had that dark feeling again, the one that was tinged with despair. Sometimes it came up when she looked at too much of the Record at once, or when she spent too long thinking about the aching gulfs of time that they hoped to bridge with the Project. The feeling that it was too much--too much for her, too much for anyone, too much for innumerable lifetimes.

“We’re a long way from placental mammals, Tjumak.”

“Yes. But we’ll get there one day. I don’t doubt that. What I wonder is, what would they say? If we could ask them. And, you know, they could talk.”

“I don’t think there’s anything alive that doesn’t want to live.”

“Ah, but they are not alive. Not right now. It will be us who make them live, if we choose to. And consider, my friend, what that will mean. For some, they will be the prey. The hunted. The fearful. The one whose existence ends with blood and pain and screaming. And others, they will be the predator. Hungry, ever-hunting, fearing that one day their source of food will move beyond the hills, or that a harsh winter will kill them all, and leave the hunter to starve.”

“You think it’s not a life worth living?”

“Would you want to live such a life?”

Sirrek shook her head. “It’s not a coherent question. Does the ferngrass or the swarmbug want to live? The ferngrass can’t react to external stimuli at all, and the swarmbug has six neurons wired in sequence--basically glorified clockwork that tells it when to fly and when to land, and when to lay eggs. There are more complicated xenozoa in Paradise, but they aren’t anything like us, either. And these mammals? Maybe they’ll be able to feel pain, and hunger, and a kind of fear in the moment--but ‘life worth living’ is a human concept. I’m not sure it applies.”

“Surely it must. Even to creatures without language, without tool use, without abstract thought. If they can suffer and feel joy, there is a place where suffering outweighs joy, however you favor one side of the equation over the other. Someone that brought a child into the world, knowing their whole life would be without joy and full of suffering, would be cruel indeed.”

“Are you really proposing we put the entire Project on hold to decide if the creatures we bring back might suffer too much for the Project to be worth it?”

“Just humor me for a bit.”

“All right, fine. A parent has moral responsibility for their child’s welfare.”

“Unless and until we discover something wiser than us already living here, we have moral responsibility for this world.”

“And it would be cruel of us to go out of our way to inflict suffering on the things living in it. You don’t see me pulling the wings off swarmbugs. But that moral responsibility only goes so far, because we can’t impose human values without limit onto things which live very different existences from us.”

“Not so different, these beasts here,” Tjumak said, tapping the display.

“Different enough. Different enough that in order to even begin to pose the question of whether their life was worth living, you would have to alter them mind and body until they were far more human than anything else. If you cannot pose the question without destroying the thing you propose to investigate, it is a bad question.”

Tjumak tilted his head in what Sirrek had come to recognize as the sign of a smile somewhere on the face she could not see. But he didn’t seem ready to drop the argument yet.

“Aren’t all values human values in the end? Unless you believe in a creating power with the authority to order the ethical universe by its own whim, which seems rather like a self-contradicting idea to me. The only values we have to judge the world by are human values. They’re limited tools, but they’re the best ones available. So if a human could have a life not worth living, so could an animal, by the only standard we have available to judge.”

“I don’t know if I buy that,” Sirrek said. “But even so: everything that lives desires to live. If you could bring one of those beasts back, and then you tried to hurt or kill it, it would run away. There’s something like volition there, and as far as I can tell, a vote in the ‘let me live!’ direction.”

“Hardly a spirited defense of the idea, though!” Tjumak said. “A mere stimulus response, maybe.”

“You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say a beast’s volition matters if it doesn’t want to suffer, but doesn’t matter if it wants to live. It’s not human, so you can’t ask the question as you would to a human, or to another creature capable of abstract thought, and in the only way it knows how to tell you, it tells you it wants to live. And, presumably, do other things. Eat. Run. Have babies. You might not let it do all those things. You certainly don’t have to let it eat you. But if the creature’s experience of the world matters at all, its desires must matter in some sense, too.”

“There’s always the option of just leaving out the carnivores, you know,” Tjumak said. “After all, your moss here doesn’t feel pain. Probably.”

Sirrek smiled. “I really hope not. And maybe that is an option. Or maybe we don’t know enough. Maybe the carnivores are as essential to the herbivores as the herbivores are to them, in some way we haven’t seen. I think a certain expansive humility is necessary when poking at these questions.”

“Humility. Humility!” Tjumak roared with mock outrage. “Expansive humility, says the woman who opposes the Archive and the consensus of the whole world, and seeks to resurrect an ancient biosphere from the dead! While remaking an alien one to boot!”

“You can be ambitious and humble at the same time,” Sirrek said. “It just means you set your sights high, but aren’t surprised when you fuck everything up.”

Tjumak laughed sharply. “You’re a good sparring partner,” he said. “Koridek always gets annoyed with me when I try to start an argument, and Ardhat has learned to ignore me. It’s good to have a new face around.”

And for the rest of the evening, that’s all Sirrek thought their conversation was--a verbal wrestling match for Tjumak, a way for him to sharpen his wits, and get to know Sirrek at the same time. But later that night, as she was brewing a cup of bitterstalk tea to take to bed with her, she saw a dull glow from Tjumak’s lab, when his monitors were usually all dark, and he was asleep. She went to the door, thinking to say goodnight, but paused when she got there. His back was turned to her, and he was looking at the image on his monitor, the one that showed the ghostly outline of runners and hunters, of the ones that long ago had died, and the ones that long ago had killed. He seemed to be staring at it, intently, one finger tapping slowly on the side of the display.

As she lay in bed waiting for sleep to overtake her, it occurred to her that Tjumak’s cynicism was just as much a kind of protection as his support equipment. It was his armor against the world, and the fears of his own heart. She didn’t doubt his commitment to the project. She did not doubt the commitment of a man who had exiled himself indefinitely to the loneliest place in the world. But he understood, perhaps, that he was responsible for the world he hoped to create. Maybe it was right that it should keep them all up at night from time to time.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Wow that's a lot of sources, nice! Also I'm sorry but I didn't assume you were lookinh at my blog haha, anyway like I said I'm not a scientist but I did follow you hoping to learn more so maybe you're doing me a favor, and yes I think I can understand the argument that chickens have evolved from dinosaurs or something in between but I was more so asking what evolved first that started it all? Like say .. I've heard some people mention that we started as bacteria

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/interlocking-puzzle-allowed-life-emerge/595945/

The cells that make up all living things, despite their endless variations, contain three fundamental elements. There are molecules that encode information and can be copied—DNA and its simpler relative, RNA. There are proteins—workhorse molecules that perform important tasks. And encapsulating them all, there’s a membrane made from fatty acids. Go back far enough in time, before animals and plants and even bacteria existed, and you’d find that the precursor of all life—what scientists call a “protocell”—likely had this same trinity of parts: RNA and proteins, in a membrane. As the physicist Freeman Dyson once said, “Life began with little bags of garbage.”

The bags—the membranes—were crucial. Without something to corral the other molecules, they would all just float away, diffusing into the world and achieving nothing. By concentrating them, membranes transformed an inanimate world of disordered chemicals into one teeming with redwoods and redstarts, elephants and E. coli, humans and hagfish. Life, at its core, is about creating compartments. And that’s much easier and much harder than it might seem.

More:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocell

if lungs need a brain and heart to work and a brain need lungs and heart to work and hearts need brains and lungs which evolved first and how did it survive until the rest evolved?

What you’re talking about is called “irreducible complexity.” Necessary organs can develop over time and are only necessary now, to us in our current forms. Organs in their current form may have replaced previous organs, such as gills. If tf the oceans rise - and assuming the species persists - in 100,000 years, we may have developed gills again and no longer possess lungs. An organ that served one function may change to perform another function if its original function is no longer required - e.g. the appendix.

QualiaSoup explains irreducible complexity:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W96AJ0ChboU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=As1HlmYeh7Q

By the way, brains, hearts and lungs are not necessary to bacteria. Or the coronavirus, for example. And they’re forms of life.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/lab-rat/the-origin-of-breathing-how-bacteria-learnt-to-use-oxygen/

Your body has the leftovers of many body parts that are no longer necessary, some of these remnants are even disappearing over time. They’re called vestigal structures.

https://religion-is-a-mental-illness.tumblr.com/tagged/vestigal-structures

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestigiality

If a god can create any form of life it chooses, why would it be limited to creating its crowning achievement, humanity, that has interdependent organs with little to no redundancy? Humans created organ transplants, not to mention artificial organs, to fix this god’s mistake. Why could it give salamanders and spiders the ability to regrow missing limbs, but not us? Why would it create the biological ability to change sex to facilitate reproductive continuity and survival, and give it to frogs instead of us?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequential_hermaphroditism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeneration_(biology)

For that matter, why would it be limited to creating life on the most temperate planet on the solar system, the one most suited to supporting it in the first place? Shouldn’t a creator god be immune to such limitations, and able to create life on Pluto or Mercury just as easily?

These interdependencies, vulnerabilities, limitations and flaws are a slam-dunk for evolution, and against the idea of a benevolent, powerful, intelligent creator. (Although perhaps not by a malevolent, limited, incompetent creator.)

All of them, and the many other flaws of the human body, are explained by evolution, but not by design or creation. 

https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-most-unfortunate-design-flaws-in-the-human-body-1518242787

http://nautil.us/issue/24/error/top-10-design-flaws-in-the-human-body

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/human-flaws-demonstrate-evolution-not-intelligent-design/

Evolution explains why men have nipples. Creation does not.

Also you bring up incest which makes me think of another question, when the first human evolved where did it get it’s mate? Was it a different unrelated fish that happen t evolve at the same time? Thanks again! (:

There was no first human. No creature has ever given birth to another creature of a different species. Speciation does not occur because you’re different from your parents. It’ occurs because you’re different from your great, great, great, great [x thousands of generations later] grand-parents.

i understand why you’re asking it, but with an understanding of evolution, it’s a nonsense question.

More:

Misconceptions series: http://pinkheretic.com/creation-misconceptions/

QualiaSoup’s primer on evolution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdddbYILel0

[andysmetahell]

One for All and All for One: The study in complimentary and infinite (wasted) potentials

One for All and All for One: two Quirks whose history we can, in the universe of Boku no Hero Academia, treat almost as the history of society. Their users had left enormous impact on everyone in the series, and through hints we can see their influence stretching long, long back to the first appearance of the Quirks.

Neither Quirk can be considered ‘normal’, though: the ability to take away Quirks at whim and an ability to share Quirks with others (which would inevitably leave you Quirkless) are both complete anathemas to the society that by and large is half-in love with the idea of simply having a Quirk (which deserves a whole breakdown in on itself, but that’s not what I’ll be writing about here!). And yet, One For All users are all heroes, and All for One users are all villains as far as we know (written after the release of manga chapter 280).

How is that even possible? With how objectively similar they are, why aren’t they both heroes, or both villains?

Well, before we take a crack at how Horikoshi coded the Hero society that made this happen, let’s first take a look at just why I’m so surprised the two Quirks aren’t on the same ‘side’. Also, obligatory ‘spoilers ahead’ warning for everyone who’re anime-only watchers, or haven’t gotten past Meta Liberation Army arc in manga.

Purely from the activation/mechanics point of view, All for One and One for All are warped mirror images of each other. All for One functions on the assumption that a) the user knows the other person has a Quirk and b) the Quirk doesn’t have an inherent clause that disallows itself to be taken by force when it comes to taking it. One for All is the only Quirk so far that has shown the resistance to the b), as it is encoded in the very nature of the ‘share-along’ Quirk that forms the true base of One for All that it can only be given away willingly.

Why is this so important? Because All for One doesn’t only take Quirks, it’s also capable of releasing them and giving them to others, whether the recipient is willing or unwilling. In this regard, One for All is startlingly identical: it can be forced upon someone else, as long as the DNA is exchanged and the previous user is willing to give it away. This little fact is often overlooked (likely deliberately) by the existing canon in favor of emphasizing the ‘cannot be taken forcefully away’ which makes sense plot-wise, but not ethics and logic-wise.

But who knows, maybe Horikoshi is holding back on us, and One for All ends up being the ultimate villain of the story.

… yeah, not likely. But the idea is interesting, isn’t it?

Moving onto the way they interact with their users and other Quirks, One for All and All for One are again very, very different, but with a shared approximate visualization of usage behind it. The closest approximation of how they interact with other Quirks would be, in my opinion, be gravity – but two very different applications of gravity.

There are two relevant things you need to know about gravity: it is defined by the masses of an object interacting with another object, and every single object in the universe has its own gravity field. (thank you, Physics nationals I went to once, for forcing me to learn more about gravity!)

All for One is more akin to a star within a stable planetary system: it holds planets, satellites and comets (other Quirks) locked in its orbit, but any change can make all those objects lose their orbits and go wander in the deep space. Its hold is strong, but the fact still remains it can be nullified in order to give away Quirks. It’s also stable – its attraction/hold power doesn’t change with the number of Quirks taken, it simply gives it a bigger array of powers to work with.

One for All on the other hand would be closer to black hole: its gravity is so enormous even light, the fastest object in the universe, cannot escape it, and its mass (and therefore its gravity) grows stronger with every object it swallows. Once it grabs a hold of anything (its user’s other Quirk) it merges it with itself and keeps it for forever, with very little chance of it ever surfacing again as individual Quirk (unless your name is Midoriya Izuku). However, it heavily relies on the energy (other Quirks it merges with) to provide power-ups; hence the ridiculous difference between Izuku’s and Toshinori’s One for All. (also protagonst shenanigans, but we’re not going that far into metatextuality here – that needs its own essay)

So, concept-wise, One for All and All for One are again identical in the idea behind it, but drastically different in application – both still fucking scary, but what can we do here, our main protagonist and antagonist need to have OP armor around themselves.

This leads us to the probably the biggest spoiler I’ll discuss in this essay:

this panel.

In chapter 270 of manga, Shigaraki Tomura is revealed to have been passed All for One, which is a whole mindfuck in on itself that Horikoshi needs to explain stat because I’m going crazy over here with theories (!!!), but moving on. The short and extremely brief summary of what happens afterwards is: Heroes discover where Tomura is while he’s still being transferred All for One, they wreck the Nomus and facility, Shigaraki gets partial All for One and his original Quirk Decay goes absolutely nuts again, Izuku runs off to face him, and at one point point, while using Ragdoll’s Search, Shigakari utters a very strange sentence while seemingly under the influence of All for One (the Quirk):

“You will be mine… little brother.”

Moments later, Shigaraki snaps out of it and comments about Sensei (All for One) no longer being his puppeteer, that he’s making his own choices and not Sensei’s.

Here we get a stunning punch in the plexus about what we already have been hinted at during Izuku’s fight with Shinsou Hitoshi, during Kamino Ward and Joint Training Arcs:

One for All and All for One both retain the echoes of their past owners.

Now, here comes a million dollar question: is this something both the baseline ‘share’ part of One for All and All for One possess (which would further link the two Quirks, and also explain a lot of characterizations in the series so far), or is it an imprint of All for One on ‘stockpile’ part of One for All that ‘share’ part absorbed and made its own? Both possibilities are extremely intriguing and make any future possibility of unification (which was apparently Sensei’s original goal before, judging by that one panel) extremely volatile, and very intriguing if Horikoshi pursues that idea to its end.

Speaking of the man himself, now we arrive at the question that really started the whole essay here: how come it was All for One chosen to be the ultimate evil, and One for All to be ultimate good? As we’ve seen so far, both Quirks are startlingly similar; theoretically, could All for One be a ‘heroic’ Quirk and One for One for All ‘villainous’?

The answer is yes and no.

Yes, because theoretically, switching the two would still make the story work; it’d change the motivations of characters drastically, sure, and turn the story of generations of good trying defeat one evil into one good fending off generations of evil, but it’d work – and no, because that’d fundamentally change the society in which Boku no Hero Academia’s current time frame is, and society is the key underlying factor in this entire story.

Let me explain through the examples of three characters and a faction.

Midoriya Izuku is Quirkless person in a society who is, like I said at the beginning, half-in love with the idea of having Quirks – the fact that you have them makes you seem useful, someone with potential, no matter how objectively useless some Quirks inevitably can be in certain lines of work. By their standards, he’s without potential, and therefore is largely useless out of gate. Had All for One been in public eye and celebrated as Hero, he’d be the pinnacle of useful: there’d be no danger of bad reactions to donated Quirks in his DNA, and he, someone who wishes desperately for a Quirk, could easily be given a Quirk of someone who finds their life unbearable due to it.

Bakugou Katsuki, someone with extremely property-damaging Quirk, would constantly be told that if he doesn’t behave himself, he’d be sent off to All for One to have his Quirk taken away – in essence, he’d be no one special, just another kid with a Quirk. Since All for One is so visible, it’d be all too easy for parents and teachers to threaten their kids into compliance whenever they throw an over-powered tantrum with the removal of a Quirk; it’d also be a good deterrent for any Pro Heroes that existed there to not get too comfy with their jobs, because they could easily be taken out of it if they manage to anger All for One enough, which would deter some people from being Pro Heroes.

Shigaraki Tomura (Shimura Tenko), someone whose Quirk came in during an extremely traumatic event and left him so scarred mentally he was never quite the same again, could easily simply give away his Quirk and have something far less volatile and triggering if he wished so, and also have a chance of potentially one day seeing his Quirk in the hands of someone like Izuku or Melissa, who could use it to its full potential without being constantly triggered by it or being re-traumatized again and again by the society who would rail on him for having such a potentially devastating Quirk.

Meta Liberation Army (which is a poorly disguised Brotherhood of Mutants on Genosha in X-men cartoons, let’s be realistic – the whole thing about the superiority of fight-compatible Quirks was not subtle at all) would be a much smaller and a lot less influential group. The publicity of a Quirk being able to take away other Quirks would make the existence of Deika City clones very, very difficult; it’d take but one hint, one whisper of a fringe group amassing in remote location that wants to eliminate so-called ‘useless Quirks’ for All for One to act – as much of an asshole as he is, he was shown [cite] to like all kinds of Quirks, despite only keeping the ones he felt were the most useful to him.

OK, but what about them being on the same side? You might ask yourself. If they’re so similar, why not make them both on the same side?

One, drama is always more delicious if there are high personal stakes involved, and nothing gets more personal than family drama – that’s just a fact. (Kardashians, anyone?)

Two, this is shonen – openly bad guys being the protagonists isn’t often done (in mainstream at least).

Three: we need some material to make all those ‘Izuku’s related to All for One or One for All first user’ for our satisfaction before Horikoshi josses the whole thing, okay??

(no, this is certainly not a call for you to make more ‘Izuku is related to original two brothers’… but it’s heavily suggested lol)

Thank you for sticking around until the end of this essay! Have a cookie, and enjoy the hell my mind led me to during the binge-read of the last 5 released chapters of manga:

[logicalbookthief]

ʌ: for clown movie

^: comfort after a nightmare

Wow this took a lot longer than I thought, I apologize! Work has been blegh lately and my writer’s block was strong. Nevertheless, I thank you for the prompt and hope you enjoy!

It’s a sort of sequel to my fic “Placebo” that isn’t necessary to read before this but would definitely help. All you really need to know is that it takes place in a universe where Eddie is Carrie White’s cousin and has the same telekinetic powers. 

*

*

"I'm not afraid." 

For once, it’s the truth. Eddie has never felt more powerful than he does here, among the ruins of It’s hiding place, where It lurked for centuries, millennia, gnawing on the bones of children, biding its time for the day It would feed again. The memory of this place terrified him for years-- even when he couldn’t remember, the fear was embedded in his mind. 

Now it’s shattering under the strength of Eddie’s will, destroyed by the sheer force of his mind, and the feeling is-- he can’t describe--

The weak, shriveled form of the clown tries to rally. Eddie squares his jaw, focuses on pinning It down, harder, merciless, refusing to give an inch. "I’m not afraid,” he repeats, the taste of blood in his mouth, hot as it slips down his face. “Not of you." 

The clown laughs-- it’s a raspy, death rattle. Still, Eddie tenses, a sense of doubt creeping past the smolder of anger, the self-righteous flaring through his whole body. 

"Even now I can feel it, that delicious reek of fear,” It smirks, a lopsided grimace turned smug. “Not of me, no. I already know what you are.” 

Gulping, Eddie falters. Only for a moment, the flare dousing to a mere spark. 

"I’ve always known,” It croaks, hoarse and almost unheard above the sound of the cavern as it crumbles. “But do they know, Eddie?” 

Carrie, her hair a tangled mass of flames, her dress a flowing wave of red. Her eyes are nearly electric, a frenzied flash of light that-- and, suddenly, Eddie’s staring at a reflection of himself, manic and panting, bathed in the blood of his tormentor.

“Do they know what you are?”

Eddie springs up, dislodging the sheets curled around his body, gasping for the air caught in his throat. His heart jackhammers against his ribcage, trying to claw out from under the heavy weight atop his chest.

Beside of him in bed, Richie stirs with a low, drowsy groan. Ridiculously long legs disentangle under the blanket. He’s amazed they manage to fit together most nights, what with how much of Richie there is to fit, and how Eddie tends to sprawl if not contained by his boyfriend's octopus-like embrace.

His boyfriend. Now there’s a word he never thought he’d be able to use sincerely. However, there’s no mistaking the realness of Richie as he shifts closer in search of Eddie, even in his half-asleep state.  

"Eds?" he calls in that scratchy voice reserved for the early hours of the morning. Frankly, a freshly-woken Richie is a sight to behold. Even as kids waking up in the Denbroughs’ den, Eddie’s guilty pleasure was waking before his best friend so as to catch a glimpse of Richie as he roused. 

With his glasses askew, his tousled hair a mess, his mouth slightly parted in the memory of a snore. As an adult, the sight’s no less appealing -- if anything, that half-lidded gaze staggers him more, now that he’s aware of the soft, unguarded affection that lingers behind it.

"You okay?" Richie persists, squinting without his glasses.

"Mhm," Eddie replies, muffled by his fingers as they scrub at his face, clearing the remnants of the nightmare.

Unconvinced, Richie struggles into a sitting position. Propped against the headboard, he sizes up Eddie far too easily for someone who can barely see. "Bad dream?" 

Too exhausted to form an answer, Eddie slumps backwards, colliding with Richie’s chest. Flush against each other, he can hear Richie’s breath stutter over the shell of his ear. Six months since Eddie moved in to Richie’s sunny LA apartment, the Derry hospital discharge band still around his wrist and Bev’s divorce lawyer saved to his phone, and sometimes they forget that this is allowed -- this closeness. This idea they can finally have what they want and not be hurt by it, by anyone.

Loving Richie is muscle memory, so natural it may as well be encoded in his DNA. Knowing that he has Richie, and can love Richie freely without hiding who he is, well-- that’s still a wonder, no matter how often Richie whispers the words against his skin. 

Eddie knows this, not only in his mind but in his heart, and yet... He’s perplexed. Besides the Losers, he’s never known a love without conditions. A love that wasn’t dependent on his willingness, his obedience. It’s easy with Richie and harder for the same reason. 

Once it registers that he’s got an lapful of a boyfriend, Richie winds an arm around Eddie and crushes him to the broad expanse of his chest. Hooks his chin over his shoulder and nuzzles his cheek like an over-excited dog. 

“Baby, you’re kind of warm,” he murmurs, two-days worth of stubble scraping fondly over Eddie’s cheek.

The attention sends a shiver down his spine, but it ends in a shudder as Eddie remembers the heat of the flames as they licked his face, smoke curling into his lungs. Was it his face -- or hers? -- the fire a distant heat compared to the warm blood soaking her dress, her clothes, eyes listless as they carnage rages around her, the destruction she -- or he, was it him? -- the cavern collapsing around him as It huffed out its last, dismal breath--

His lungs expand, vainly searching for space to breathe. Eddie wriggles out of Richie’s hold, trying to hide the desperate beat of his pulse. “Fucking California heat,” he mumbles, evasively. “Has me all.. Sweaty.”

New York contains many, many years worth of bad memories, but if there’s one thing he misses, it’s the cold nights. Though if he had to choose between the lonely dark of the guestroom where he slept instead of aside his wife or the comfort of Richie’s bed -- well, that’s hardly even a question.

“Did you wanna, ah..."  Flummoxed, Richie wavers over his next words. "Talk?"

It's a song and dance they've done before. A sliver of guilt pierces Eddie through the shields he’s barricaded around this particular issue. How many times has he startled awake and dragged Richie out of sleep -- and then, to add insult to injury, decline the invitation to talk?  

After Richie barred his soul and revealed the initials he carved into the Kissing Bridge, despite the threat of bullies and rejection, it seems hypocritical to keeps his darkest secrets under lock and key. 

Not for the first time, Eddie aches for his pills. He’s kicked the habit, endured the worst of the withdrawal, bears the occasional migraine with no complaint. But in moments like these the urge is almost too much to ignore. 

You’ll feel better, Dr. Silas cajoles, a venomous promise in his ear. Don’t you want to be normal?

It triggers a memory-- the pills in his palm, his mouth parted to swallow, but the desperation of Richie’s screams, the horror in the eyes of his friends. No, Eddie snaps. Of course he wants to be normal. Wants to have a normal life with his boyfriend. 

But he wants it to be real. No more placebos.

"Oh-kay. If you’re sure," Richie sounds uncertain, but he’s unwilling to cross the boundaries Eddie has firmly set. Eddie falls a little bit more in love with him for that. "Then it’s back to bed with you, guvnah!”

Usually the British voice anywhere near the vicinity of their bed drew a protest from Eddie -- it catches in his throat when Richie him swings him flat on his back, the bulk of his body sprawled between Eddie’s legs. He blushes to the roots of his hair, clutching at the wide expanse of Richie’s shoulders, fingers digging into soft skin and the tendons of muscle underneath. 

If he scowls, it’s a dismal attempt to hide how hopelessly turned on he is by every aspect of this ridiculous man.

"Otherwise, you'll be bitchy as fuck for the flight tomorrow.” His sigh blows against Eddie's hair. "And you know how much that turns me on."

Eddie sputters.

"God, you ever travel for upwards of six hours with a boner? Would not recommend, 0/10."

"Rich!" he scolds, which is hard to do when you're spasming with laughter.

"Unless," Richie continues, slyly, "Eds, you minx. You want to join the Mile-High club with me?"

"Richie," Eddie coughs, truly on his way to a ruptured lung. Hopelessly fond as he orders, "Shut up and go to sleep."

He waits until the chuckles peter out, eventually replaced by soft, even breaths. Carefully, Eddie twists out of Richie’s embrace. The soles of his slippers drag along the carpet as he shuffles to the kitchen.

The piles of dishes Richie convinced him to leave for later in favor of more amorous activities -- and to be perfectly honest, Eddie was easy to convince -- sits in the sink. Picking up the dish soap, Eddie figures he may as well be proactive in his insomnia.

Aunt Margaret used to say, Idle hands are the devil’s playthings. It was maybe the single coherent, non-hateful advice she ever gave. 

He’s halfway through the mess and elbow deep in sudsy water when Richie wanders in, stretching. “I thought we had an agreement,” he yawns. “Whoever isn’t accosted by trauma-fueled nightmares gets to make breakfast.”

Ducking his head around a smile, Eddie shrugs. “Too restless to sleep. The thought of you forgetting to pack underwear on this trip haunted my dreams.”

"Ooh, say that again," Richie moans, slotting their hips together from behind. Despite his playful tone, Eddie feels the half-stir of morning wood. "Slower this time."

Eddie shoves playfully at his chin. "Seriously," he huffs. "Our flight's only in a couple of hours and I know you haven't finished packing!"

"Our flight's in eight hours," Richie points out, which is met by a dubious eyebrow raise. "That is plenty of--"

"How many pairs of underwear do you currently have in your suitcase?"

There’s a long, unconscionable pause. 

"Fuck!" Richie snaps his fingers. "Knew there was something I forgot."

One of those rare instances where he isn't joking.

"You're pushing me toward an asthma attack," Eddie deadpans. "Please go pack."

Richie leaves a wet, slobbering kiss on his cheek that Eddie only half-pretends to hate. “Anything you say, darling."

Once he’s gone, Eddie can focus at the task at hand. He glances sidelong at a coffee mug that’s slightly out of reach. Retrieving it isn’t a hassle so much as an inconvenience, since his hands are damp with dishwater and the closest rag is across the room. 

You could do it another way, reminds the quiet voice in back of his head that Eddie’s spent the last twenty-years trying to suppress. Long before that, really. Since the day his mother told him what his cousin-- what Eddie was. 

Do you know what you are?

Eddie bristles. Fuck that clown. Fuck the idea that It has any lingering sway over his life. His mother, too. And those doctors, all those doctors and their tests, their experiments, their pills. Nobody can choose for him anymore. He’s in control of his life. 

Despite this conviction, Eddie dawdles. Strains his ears. He can hear Richie clunking around in their bedroom, a safe distance away. I’m alone, he thinks bracingly. I’m alone, so there’s no harm in...

He shuts his eyes, concentrating. The mug rattles, as though gently prodded by an unseen force. Slowly, carefully, Eddie relinquishes the vice-like grip of the leash wrapped tight around his mind, bit by bit. 

The mug slides along the counter, until it hovers over the edge. It does not fall. Eddie feels a prick of satisfaction tingle at the base of his neck.

I’m not afraid, Eddie thinks with a rush of spite. Remembering his dream, the clown’s laughter a fresh in his memory, he pushes the mug faster. I am not--

"Hey, Eds, did you-?"

The mug smashes against the ground, shattering. Pieces fly out, scattering across the floor. All sharp edges.

"Shit!" Eddie panics. "Don't step over here, the shards–"

Hastily, he reaches for a handful of glass, as if cleaning up the evidence will hide what he’s done.

What were you thinking, you freak? You could've hurt him or--

"Eddie.” That’s Richie's voice calling to him, soft and urgent. 

"Sorry, I'm sorry, I'll--” He’s babbling, the words choked, constricted, while sweat pools at the base of his neck and his hands shake with the effort to shove it all down, deep, deep down where nobody can see-- 

"Eddie!" Richie shouts. His face comes into focus near inches from his, eyes, wild with worry. "Calm down, it's okay. It's okay, see? Just a stupid mess.”

A mess you made, Eddie thinks viciously. Now he's seen, he's seen and he'll run, he'll leave, because you're a–

"C'mon, Eds,” Richie murmurs, both a plea and a demand. Trembling fingers tangle with his own, the bite of Richie’s knuckles as he presses their palms against his ribcage steadying Eddie in the present. “You've got to breathe for me.”

Only then does Eddie realize how rapidly it’s rising, and how difficult it is to inhale. Buoyed by the constant stream of Richie’s assurances, Eddie begins to count his breaths, focuses on the movement of his and Richie’s hands as he breathes once twice, in and out. He judges his success by the tightness of Richie’s frown. 

"Sorry," Eddie croaks once he can speak again. It feels as if the shards are lodged in his throat.

"Don't apologize," says Richie, a furrow nestling between his brows. He keeps his tone level, likely more worried than he lets on, but the lack of panic is what’s grounding Eddie and he’s appreciates it more than words will convey. "Do you need me to-- What do you need?”

Eddie shakes his head. Tears prick at his eyes and he bites down on the tide of pleas that threaten to overwhelm him. You, I need you. I need you not to leave me once you figure out what I am.

"You know I don't care if you use your Matilda whammy." Richie makes a show of squinting his eyes. Eddie chokes on a stilted laugh. Richie seems to sag in relief 

"It doesn’t change a thing for me,” he reminds, nudging Eddie softly. “You understand, right?" 

Eddie swallows, thickly. He doesn't trust his voice, so he nods, the reply burrowed into Richie's chest. He kisses his clavicle once, twice in gratitude.

"What were you going to ask before?"

"Uh," Richie hedges. "Do you know where all my clean underwear is?"

Again, Eddie laughs. Helplessly. "Fucking Christ, Rich, I told you: a man needs more than seven pairs of underwear."

"I resent that. I have more," Richie sniffs. "They're just not as sexy as my gluteus maximoose pair. Which, as you know, I reserve for all special occasions."

"You're fucking ridiculous, is what you are," Eddie chuckles. "I'll fold the laundry after I clean this up."

"Let me do that,” Richie insists, shooing him toward the bedroom. “You can shower first.”

Chewing his lip, Eddie hesitates.

"Are you wearing shoes?" Richie gestures impatiently at his moccasins. "Alright... Just be careful with the glass."

“Like you were?” Catching Eddie by the wrist, Richie frowns down at his palm. A thin slice below his thumb, the blood a steady ooze. 

"Oh," says Eddie, woozily. The prick of pain didn't even register. "I'll go, um. Wash this in the bathroom."

He ignores the feeling of Richie’s eyes on his back as he hustles the bedroom, quietly closing the door behind him. He’s ignored a lot of things, lately. 

The familiar yet nameless numbers on the cellphone he ultimately chucked. The decreasing amount of frantic calls from his ex-wife. The urge to tell Richie and the Losers every awful truth Eddie’s spent his entire adult life burying so deep that not even he has to confront it, ever.

At the sink, Eddie avoids his own reflection. Under the spray of water, the blood washes off effortlessly. As if it never happened. Wash your hands, Eddie. Like a good boy. His mother always repeated the order, ad nauseam. Like if he scrubbed hard enough, it would be as if the all the dirty, unclean parts of him she feared had never existed. 

For all her lies, Eddie wishes it was that easy. 

[revelio-obscurus]

Chapter 17/199 The Man With Two Faces

Today, we will be discussing Harry Potter through the theme of “Love.” How do we see “love” expressed or having an effect in Chapter 17 of the Harry Potter series? Of course, we have Harry’s mother’s love which is coursing through his veins and allows him to defeat Professor Quirrell (according to Albus Dumbledore)—this is perhaps the most obvious example of “love” we see in this section. But what about self-love? What about passion and desire? In this chapter, Harry again comes face-to-face with the Mirror of Erised, a magical object that shows us the deepest desires of our hearts (in other words: what we would most love to have or have happen to us). Finally, we will discuss the concept of making choices as it relates to love, self-love, as well as what we would love to have and have happen to us. 

What really stood out to me about today’s chapter was Harry thinking “I must lie” when Quirrell demands he look in the mirror and tell him what he sees. This is because I have been reading Book Five with my sister for months now, and in this book, he has the exact opposite statement carved into his hand by Dolores Umbridge: I must not tell lies.

What’s really messed up about Umbridge’s punishment, of course, is that Harry is not lying at all—and yet he is forced through this inhumane and torturous punishment. But through it all, what’s ironic is Harry sticks to his guns and continues to tell the truth, even as Umbridge is being rushed away by centaurs in Chapter 33 of that book.

I love that at the start of Book Five one of Harry’s father figures, Arthur Weasley, speaks to him before his trial, assuring him “the truth will out”! We don’t know if this will be the case, but Arthur works throughout the series to instill the values of truth and honesty in all of his children, including Harry. For example, in Book Three when he confesses his desire to tell Harry the truth about Sirius Black.

One might think, however, reading Chapter 17 of the Harry Potter series: “Okay, I get we shouldn’t tell lies. But in this case, shouldn’t Harry lie to Quirrell about what he sees in the mirror? Otherwise, Voldemort would know he has the Stone and he and his worthy follower would steal it.”

This is a good point. And we do see the benefits of lying throughout the series. One notable example is when Draco Malfoy lies to the other Death Eaters in Book Seven, saying he does not recognize Harry and this indisputably saves Harry from meeting his demise in Malfoy Manor (okay, it’s not certain whether he is “lying”, but I consider this canon). A second example would be when Severus Snape lies to Umbridge when Harry relays a secret message to him about Sirius during the Fifth Book—he tells Umbridge he has “no idea” what Harry is talking about, but later uses the secret information to round up the Order of the Phoenix.

That being said, if we turn back to this chapter, we discover that when Harry does lie to Quirrell, his efforts are for naught— Voldemort immediately calls him a liar and it leads to them meeting face-to-face anyway! Therefore, we can see that his lie did not help him avoid the inevitable. 

I think it’s interesting to see how we can go from “I must lie” to “I must not tell lies” from Book 1 to Book 5 and how, more often than not, Harry feels called upon to stand up and tell the truth—even if his voice shakes. Or even if he’s standing alone.

What’s immensely powerful about this scene in Chapter 17 is that Harry doesn’t even resort to using any magic or knowledge he is aware of to fight back against Quirrell and Voldemort. He actually is in such grave danger, that his body reacts instinctively: “Quirrell raised his hand to perform a deadly curse, but Harry, by instinct, reached up and grabbed Quirrell’s face.” Our instinct is something we find at our very core, as animals. We all naturally react to the environment around us just as our fellow animals do, and in times of danger, we are sent into “fight or flight” mode which is deeply encoded in our DNA. In my opinion, our instinct, as it is revealed to us during life-and-death scenarios, is one of the most honest and truthful things in this universe.

And what is the result of Harry’s instinctive grabbing of Quirrell’s face? “Quirrell rolled off him, his face blistering too, and then Harry knew: Quirrell couldn’t touch his bare skin, not without suffering terrible pain.”

We know from Dumbeldore’s explanation later in the chapter that it was Harry’s mother’s love running through his veins that made it impossible for Voldemort, and therefore Quirrell, to touch Harry. It was the magic of this love that made it possible for Harry to escape the villain’s clutches.

Or was it?

Or maybe I should say, “Was it just his mother’s love?”

Was it really only his mother’s love that saved him?

This was Harry’s first time in his living memory coming close to death. He realizes the urgency of the situation right away, which is astounding for an 11-year-old child. He knows that if he doesn’t find the Stone, he is going to be killed. He knows that if Voldemort finds the Stone because of him finding it, he’s going to be killed. He knows that Voldemort is lying when he says that his parents died begging for mercy. (Note: his mother did die begging him to not kill Harry, this is true, but the way he is presenting the story to Harry is a lie in and of itself because of all the gaps and holes amongst his presentation of events). 

When Quirrell destroys his own hands after trying to strangle Harry (they became “burnt, red, and shiny”) Harry knows that the only thing he can do is trust in what he knows to be TRUE (and not a lie). “His only chance was to keep hold of Quirrell, keep him in enough pain to stop him from doing a curse.” This submission to what is true is what allows his body to react on instinct, thus saving his life. One could also say that submitting to what is true is an act of self-love. Harry refuses to fight against what he knows to be true and trusts in himself, letting go to instinct. And that acceptance and trust in oneself is a powerful act of self-love that, in addition to his mother’s love, saves him in this scene.

**

Chapter 17 re-introduces us to Quirrell as a man with two faces. And in life, we also have two (or more) faces. But how often do we see our “true” faces reflecting back at us when we look in a mirror? What would we see if we looked into the Mirror of Erised? And when we see that, will we lie to ourselves or others about what we see? Many great people have lied while looking into the Mirror of Erised, for example Albus Dumbledore in Chapter 12 and Harry himself in this very chapter. And what do they gain from these lies?

Going back to our theme about “Love” today, I feel as if I’m being called to look into the Mirror of Erised myself—to find out who I really am, what I truly love and desire in my life. And when I look in the Mirror, I’ll then be faced with several choices. Do I lie to myself or to others about what I see? Do I keep it a secret for now because I don’t think others are ready to know? One might argue that’s why Dumbledore lies about seeing a pair of wool socks in the Mirror. Harry didn’t need to know what Dumbeldore’s deepest desire was at that moment. And Dumbeldore doesn’t have to share what he sees—but the fact that he chooses to lie instead of telling the truth highlights another very important point. Even wixen as wise as Dumbledore sometimes listen to that inner voice that whispers: “I must lie.” For whatever reason—and that reason might be justifiable or not. But either way, it is YOUR choice whether to lie, keep something to yourself, or tell the truth.  

It is our choices that makes us who we are, far more than our abilities. Today, I see many opportunities to make choices. I can look into the Mirror of Erised, or not. I can lie to myself about what I see, or not. I can lie to others, tell the truth, or say nothing to them about what I see. I can keep staring longingly at the Mirror, or I can take small steps towards my deepest desire in the real world.

When I imagine myself standing in front of the Mirror of Erised, I see myself reading, scribbling with a quill, making connections between books, films, songs, plays, art, and real-life experiences. As I start to understand the world and myself more and more, I am collecting my ideas and thoughts into stories, essays, and articles—sharing them with the world. In the Mirror, I see myself tying parchment to the legs of owls and sending them off into the world. I don’t always know who’s going to receive my writing. I only hope that whoever does can glean something meaningful from the words and start to understand the world and themselves just a little bit more.

[simple-ponderings]

We were made to Create

You know, there exists such a vast spectrum of Energy that dwells within each and every one of us. We are Energy just trying to understand itself. We are Now and everything in between. Everything intertwines and comes apart in this wonderful grand symphony of the Creator. Each soul, each spirit contributes to this majestic piece. It is the same and yet not the same. It is that ever turning wheel that goes on to create more things. It is that very essence that resides in each and everyone of us that strives to generate a Thing. From No thing to Some Thing. We are like mirrors looking into one another. Reflections are revealed and yet we are able to see something else. A different perspective- a different reality. What are We? What is the Purpose? Why IS this? Questions we have asked ourselves for millennia in order to understand what we are. We extend our hand and something reaches back embracing us, helping us- if we let it. Hear the whispers of Awakening and allow the echo to guide you back to what you always were. From not Knowing to Knowing. Everything around me helps me see that we are capable of doing absolutely amazing things, and absolutely horrific things. That sea of potentiality. That freedom to do as one wishes. Its truly Beautiful. It truly is a Gift. We are so capable of creating beautiful things. It is what we were made for. It is encoded in our DNA. How far can we go? We have seen this through out history. Even now! We correct ourselves when we have gone too far in one direction. Ever reaching, ever striving. We are filled with passion. Even if we can’t feel it, its always there. That burning light, that blinding flame, that eternal spark. It passes the realm of what we know to be Time. It is there dancing Within and Without and all around. I am filled with euphoria and childlike wonder when I stop and think about it; when I take a moment to feel it. I appreciate all of the experiences I have had on this planet. I am amazed at the things we have created. I have lamented on the atrocious things we have done. But I have hope for us. We are beautiful beings of Creation. We simply Are. Dance with me as we relish in the sweet wonderful sounds of Life All Around!

[allthislove]

I wanna come back to the affirmative action thing, because I’ve been thinking about it for a while and the shit bothers me, okay?

Racial intelligence is a myth. Positive or negative, this is not a real thing. I’m going to talk about the Model Minority Myth and bit here, and also how Black people, especially Black Americans, are seen as inherently stupider than other people.

On one end of the spectrum, you have Asian people, who do well academically. People talk about them like they’re inherently better at school, or smarter than other people.

On the other end, you have Black people, who are thought of as bad students, stupid, incapable of succeeding in school without the assistance of affirmative action.

Neither point makes much sense, because they ask the person listening to imagine that neither Black nor Asian students have individuality. They can’t succeed or fail because of their own merits, but that their success or failure is because of some thing encoded into their DNA. 

In reality, this is socialization. Before I get into this, I wanted to remind the world that Black women are the most educated demographic in America, today, and so what I’m about to talk about is (thankfully) changing, but let’s take a look at what factors help create both of these myths. 

Asian families, especially immigrant families, tend to push education. It’s almost a virtue. Getting good grades became important for some Asian immigrants because they wanted their children to have their best chance. Immigration is hard. Many immigrants (not just Asian immigrants) come here and have to completely start over. Degrees they earned in their home countries sometimes become useless, here, especially if they’re not fluent in English. They often came to this country and had to initially work very menial, hard labor or dirty task jobs that Americans didn’t want. So, they pushed for their children to do well academically, so that they could become something better when they grew up. 

So, right from the start, Asian parents are pushing for their kids to do extremely well in school.

What happened to Black kids, then? People never seem to tell the full story, here, but when I thought about it, it was obvious. I’m working on a play, right now, about Black people in the American South around the time of the first World War. The main character is a young Black woman who “finished” school at the 8th grade level because there wasn’t a school that taught Black people after that in her area. This wasn’t just some random thing I made up for my play. This is the situation that Black people lived in for a very long time, after Emancipation. While some HBCUs were being founded (thought many of them were initially just seminaries or agricultural schools) many parts of the country just didn’t have places where Black people could learn after a certain point. Couple that with a country that really doesn’t give a crap if Black people get good educations and education just never really became the most important thing, for us. 

Black people valued a lot. We valued our stories. We valued our culture, which we built ourselves because most of our original cultures were stolen from us. We valued music. But, we never got a chance to be socialized to value education, because education was not available to us. And then when it was, it was often subpar.

So, right away, you have two completely different situations. One group, largely immigrants who have everything to lose and access to education; education being one of the main reasons to even come here. One group, brought here on slave ships, enslaved, freed, and then kept from good education for decades, if not an actual century. 

The other factor in Asian academic excellence is that, especially at the college level, you have the top students coming to the US specifically to study at American universities. So, already, you’re skewing the numbers.

Anyway. So, Black people weren’t socialized to treat education with the reverence that many immigrant families do. So, once we started to get better access to education by the mid 1960s, most Black people just didn’t find it to be a virtuous thing to have good grades. Good or bad grades are just a thing. Don’t get me wrong. Black parents still get happy when their kids get an A, and upset when their kids get an F. But it was never treated as this all-encompassing thing. It just is what it is. 

Couple that with, you know... a lot of socioeconomic factors that a lot of Black people still live in, and grades and scores just aren’t that important. 

The thing is, that is shifting. A lot. Like, almost the sharpest course correction Black Americans could have. As I mentioned before, Black women are the most educated demographic in America, now. Why did this happen? I’m not exactly sure. A lot of people credit the emergence of images of Black success on TV in the 80s with shows like The Cosby Show and A Different World with sparking this shift. More Black kids saw that it was possible and therefore more Black kids went to college. The thing, though, is that that’s still mostly Millennials and Gen-Z. Meaning barely 1 generation of Black people have started to become more educated. Which also means, like... we haven’t had the time to see what the impact of this is going to be.

The Model Minority Myth for Asians is decades old. Black people even being able to go to PWIs is shorter than the Model Minority Myth. 

I guess what I’m trying to say is... Black people aren’t more educated because education went easier on us than other people. We’re more educated because we’re capable, and we never were not capable. 

Again, affirmative action makes sure you’re not overlooked because of your race. It doesn’t magically create a spot for you just because you’re Black, and especially not because you’re Black in spite of you being undeserving. And the other thing Affirmative Action doesn’t do is change your grades. If a Black student earned a 4.0, they earned the same 4.0 as and Asian student with a 4.0. Black students succeed or fail on their own merit, not because they’re Black. 

And as for poverty... poverty is incredibly difficult to escape, no matter your race. I’m not the best person to speak on Black poverty, because I’m not poor and I grew up comfortably middle class with two college educated and professional parents, so yeah, but I can say that because I grew up like that, it was far easier for me to go to any 4 year college and earn any degree I wanted than it will be for some poor kid living in the projects with a single parent with a GED. I’m not sure why people act like Black poor people are an example of why Black people are inherently bad or stupid. First of all, you can be incredibly good and incredibly smart and still live in the projects and be poor. Second of all, the existence of bad people in the Black race doesn’t mean that all or even most Black people are bad. Third of all, nobody is stupid, and if they seem “stupid” to you, something else is going on. A lack of education. A cognitive disability. Something. “Stupid”, like “crazy”, is a dismissive, and often ableist, word, and basically means nothing. 

And since I brought up the Model Minority Myth, I think I should mention that it’s also very harmful to Asian people, especially students. One, it’s dehumanizing, and makes people hold Asian people to impossible standards that obviously every Asian person can’t meet. And two, it misses the experiences of Asian people who didn’t come here for academic reasons, many of whom don’t have the same “education as a virtue” thing that many specifically East Asian or Indian immigrants have. Like, people who came here as refugees instead of exchange students. Many of those people find that they get left behind by the myth, teachers offer them less help because they’re Asian and are supposed to be “smarter than everyone else”, and they end up falling into a sort of gap. Many of them drop out, and the cycle of poverty continues. And I guess a third, big problem is that it makes colleges and universities judge Asian applicants more harshly and hold them to a higher standard than everyone else, which means that unless you’re a high flying Asian overachiever, you might have a harder time getting into college than your white or Black friends. 

So, anyway, what I’m saying is that assigning a certain intelligence level to someone based on their race is bad and like... America really has a big problem with race and we need to fix it.

Also, we need to do better, as a whole, about understanding why we have the misconceptions that we have. It’s really frustrating, for me, to constantly feel like I have to prove I’m not stupid to strangers because they all assume I am because I’m Black. Or at least less intelligent than they are. And to have to defend my two degrees constantly because old Duck Dynasty looking white guys think I didn’t earn them because of affirmative action. To have to constantly explain that a Black person’s A is the same A as anyone else in the class, because, while teachers do sometimes grade on a curve, it’s not given racially. And that if you answer a question correctly, it’s correct. And if you solve an equation correctly, you solved it correctly. And that the answer doesn’t change for Black people, and that the work isn’t easier. 

And I think people know that it doesn’t make sense, because when you think about it logically, it doesn’t make sense that one group of people is inherently stupid or that another is inherently smart. We understand individuals. We know lots of people, each of us. We know someone who isn’t bright at all, we know someone who is incredibly smart, we know some people like this who are the same race as each other, and even the same race as us. We know they’re different because they’re individual people, and that they don’t represent our entire race. So, why, FOR THE LOVE OF PETE, can we not... as a society... yet understand that race effects our conditions, but does not dictate the type of person we are in the slightest?? Good, bad, smart, pretty, not smart, ugly, short, tall, funny, boring, brave, scared, energetic, whatever the hell... THESE ARE TRAITS THAT MAKE UP INDIVIDUALS, NOT RACES. Race is a lie we tell ourselves to explain why certain people share certain physically features and/or geography. Nothing more. We have built entire societies around this lie, and like... I’m not naive enough to think that race will no longer be a factor any time soon. Some people are far too hung up on their racism for us to truly move on as a society. But I also know that, for us to begin the process of moving on from it, we have to be honest about how it has shaped our society and stop this thing of blaming people for the conditions the society forced on them and how it affected them through the generations. 

This was a lot, and I’m not sure if it’s clear, but yeah. All of this shit is more complicated than you want it to be, and people don’t fit neatly into little stereotype boxes. You have to get that shit out of your head and learn to both see individuals AND understand how history shapes our present reality. 

[heliosphoenix]

State of the Planet: 2019 Edition

Alright everyone, it's time once again for Helios' annual wrap up of the orbit we've just taken around the ol' Sun. This is the State of the Planet as we close out 2019.

Now before I begin I want to state that, unlike seemingly everyone else, I'll only be looking back at things that happened this year as opposed to this decade. For those wondering why, it's because I want to save my decade wrap up for when the decade actually ends. And as anyone who was around for Y2K can tell you, because there was no Year 0, the next decade doesn't actually begin until 2021.

Which means my decade wrap-up will be a year from today (and thus quite lame) but at least I'll be consistent.

So, with that in mind, let's take a look back at what happened this year:

Same-sex marriage became legal in Austria, Taiwan, Ecuador and Northern Ireland.

Pope Francis became the first Pope to visit the Arabian peninsula.

Avengers: Endgame became the highest grossing movie of all time.

A 17 year old in Britain was the first person to receive a genetically modified phage therapy to treat a drug-resistant infection.

Jane Goodall won the Luxembourg Prize for Outstanding Environmental Peace.

Humpback whales recovered from near-extinction in the South Atlantic.

71 new species were discovered this year.

The Antarctic ozone hole was the smallest on record since its discovery.

One third of the world's electricity is now powered by renewable energy sources.

A record number of African American women (34) graduated from West Point.

The Indian Navy welcomed its first-ever woman pilot.

The European Commission elected its first female President.

Chicago elected its first African-American woman mayor.

Ali Stroker became the first wheelchair-bound actor to win a Tony award for her role in "Oklahoma!"

Game of Thrones, The Big Bang Theory and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic came to an end with strong finales (2/3 anyway).

The New England Patriots won the Super Bowl, making it 6 rings for Tom Brady.

The Washington Nationals won their first World Series.

The US Women's National Team won the 2019 World Cup, their fourth title.

A new form of messenger RNA Aerosol was developed, which could be helpful for treating diseases like Cystic Fibrosis.

Malaria was eliminated from Algeria and Argentina.

Two men may have been cured of HIV.

Child mortality rates are at an all time low.

Researchers at the University of Michigan and UC Berkeley developed new 3D Printing methods.

Waymo has chosen Michigan to be the site of the world's first autonomous vehicle production factory.

All 16 gigabytes of Wikipedia were encoded into synthetic DNA.

The US Government authorized funds for Geoengineering.

Video was taken by NOAA researches of a Giant Squid in the Gulf of Mexico.

SpaceX's Dragon 2 and Boeing's Starliner capsules made their first flights.

The first all-women Spacewalk was conducted on the International Space Station.

India, Israel and China launched probes to the Moon, with China making the first soft landing on the far side.

Water was detected on Mars and K2-18b, a Super-Earth 110 light years away.

The New Horizons space probe made a fly by of the KBO Arrokoth (then known as Ultima Thule)

For the first time ever, a Black Hole was imaged.

The above is a snapshot of where I'm at right now, the final hours of 2019. You, dear reader, are in the future. Let this list above serve as a reminder of what we've experienced in this past year.

Now the time has come for me to give a little speech to tie up everything that we've been through in 2019. Usually this is the part where I have trouble, but the truth is that I've known for a while what word I want to use to describe this past year.

The word of the year is "sacrifice."

This is a word that isn't supposed to be thrown around lightly, but I feel it's lost its meaning. When sons of certain politicians equate their lost business opportunities to what the soldiers buried in Arlington gave up...I get the feeling that the meaning has been cheapened.

As Captain America said to Tony Stark, it's about fighting for someone besides yourself. It's about laying down on the wire to let the others crawl over you.

It's about giving up your youth to bring attention to a coming environmental disaster, as we saw with Greta Thunburg.

It's about going into a disaster zone to save one life, as we saw with the first responders who ventured into areas ravaged by Hurricanes or Earthquakes, or battled raging wildfires in the United States and Australia.

It's about risking your own life in the name of standing up for your rights and liberties, as we saw with the protesters in Hong Kong.

It's about nearly destroying yourself to save an entire continent, if not a planet, as we saw re-enacted in HBO's Chernobyl.

As we here in America prepare to once again ask ourselves what course our nation should take, I feel that we've lost sight of the sacrifices the Founders made to get us to this point. We seem less concerned with the prosperity of our nation and more concerned with the prosperity of those that we happen to like, with the misfortune of those who disagree with us not only accepted, but desired. We've gone from E pluribus, unum to "my side needs to win no matter what, fuck the others."

This is not to say we are averse to the notion of sacrifice. We're perfectly willing to give up something for our friends and family as well as anyone who happens to share the same views. But I feel that we're not willing to go further than that. If we are to continue to proclaim ourselves, as we indeed are, the defenders of liberty and freedom wherever they may exist in the world, then we need to uphold ourselves to those values. We need to be willing to make sacrifices not just for ourselves and our "side", whatever that may be, but for all Americans.

And more importantly, all citizens of this Earth must be willing to make a sacrifice not just for their city or country or race or ideology, but for all of humanity. This is the only way for us to fulfill our destiny. The future of our species awaits us among the stars, and I know that the only way to get there is together.

So as we head into the true final year of this decade, consider what you are willing to give up and who you're willing to give it up for. And remember that the time will come when we all will have to decide whether or not to make a sacrifice in the name of something that's greater than all of us. What that sacrifice is and whether or not you choose to make it is for you to decide.

Just know that somewhere out there in a sea of 400 billion Suns is a world just like this one.

We owe it to ourselves and our children yet unborn to give our species the best possible chance to visit. Just in case it turns out to have Jedi or Ponies.

Have a great day, a great week, a great month and a great 2020.

See you next year.

[cyanpeacock]

“On yer bike!”: An introduction to the wacky world of cyclins, and cell division control. 

Just like you cycle through your thoughts and emotions in a day, your cells cycle through a process of their own, to divide and grow so that you can do amazing things - like reading this post.

Setting the scene:

Your DNA comes in long curly strings called chromosomes, literally “coloured bodies.” From the day you’re conceived, these chromosomes replicate, segregate, and are separated into new cells. They build you! 

We’re diploid organisms, so in most of our cells, we have two sets of chromosomes. We call the amount of DNA in a cell 2n - two times n, where n is the haploid amount of DNA (the amount in a single set of chromosomes, which you would normally find in an egg or sperm cell). 

Some very clever sod came up with imaginative names to identify these stages of cellular replication and division. Here they are:

M-phase: Mitosis. Here, replicated chromosomes separate, and one cell, containing two diploid sets of chromosomes, divides into two. 4n becomes 2n. 

G1: Growth phase 1. Your cell grows to its optimum functional size, making sure it contains the right amount of everything for it to work, so far as it knows. Here, it might leave to a state called G0, or quiescence - the cell is no longer part of the cycle of division. It may be re-induced to divide by the presence of certain conditions, or go on to some kind of cell death. In this stage of the cycle, the cell contains 2n DNA.

S-phase: In S-phase, your cell begins replicating its chromosomes. 2n becomes 4n.

G2: In G2, the cell goes about replicating all the little machines inside it that make the cell able to function. It contains 4n DNA, and grows in size to accommodate all the molecules that get synthesized within it. 

So, we see this progression, with the exception of cells in G0:

M → G1 → S → G2 

[2 * 2n] → [2n] → [2n → 4n] → [4n]

And back to M. 

Now, how is this weird little progression controlled?

Cell division control genes, and their products:

It gets complicated, but basically, the progression is controlled by two families of proteins, encoded by the cdc genes. cdc stands for cell division control - makes sense, right? These genes make proteins, which act as little machines to control the division and growth of your cells. 

One family of proteins produced from cdc genes is called the cyclin dependent kinase group, or Cdk proteins for short. A kinase is a protein that phosphorylates a substrate (another molecule in the cell). All it does is add a little phosphate group onto the molecule, and that’s enough to change its behaviour entirely! 

Cdks are always present in your cells, and there are several types, but they don’t really work on their own. They can’t take the proper shape to phosphorylate anything without their pals, the cyclins. 

Cyclins are a bit strange. Again, there are several kinds, but unlike Cdks, they’re not present in the cell all the time - and for good reason. The different types need to be created and destroyed at certain times, so that they can cooperate with the Cdks to make the right things happen for your cells to divide normally. 

So, how do cyclins and Cdks pair up to do this?

Well, that requires looking at their structures.

Parts of a puzzle:

Cdks are pretty small, about 34 kilodaltons in weight, if you wanted to know the measurements. They have a little pocket on the side called the kinase domain, but without a cyclin pal, it doesn’t work!

Cyclins are also pretty small, and often very structurally different, outside of a small region called the cyclin-box. The cyclin-box is the bit that binds to a Cdk, which changes its shape, and activates the kinase domain. They also have an N-terminal destruction box - we’ll cover what that means in a little while.

So, a particular cyclin gets made, and through mystical processes vaguely described by physics, it floats along to find its best bud, the Cdk. Their shapes just - want to fit together, because of the basic laws of attraction that apply in this part of spacetime. We call this kinetics of association and dissociation. There’s handy maths for it, but that’s for another time.

The cyclin binds to the Cdk, and that little kinase domain pocket on the Cdk becomes active! It can hold onto the -OH group of serine and threonine amino acid side-chains, and add on a phosphate group nicked off ATP to its substrates. 

This action changes the shape of various molecules to produce an overall interaction with your DNA, so that it can be duplicated, and so that different sections can be transcribed into RNA, then translated into proteins. All this lets your cells grow and divide. Boom! Brand new cellular material. Isn’t that awesome?

Then, when enough time has passed, a protein called E3 ubiquitin ligase comes along to degrade the cyclin, by recognizing its N-terminal destruction box and tagging it with ubiquitin. Ubiquitin targets the cyclin to the proteasome - a little shredder for molecules, so their constituent parts can be recycled. It literally looks like a little bin with a lid! This terminates the action of the complex, and the cell is free to progress into the next stage of the cycle, or into quiescence. 

Who does what?:

As you might have guessed, the specific transitions between cell cycle stages are controlled by specific Cdks and cyclins. Thanks to the very clever work of many individuals, my lecturer Professor Andrew Fry (University of Leicester) included, we know quite a bit about precisely which cdc genes and products do what, and when. 

M-phase: Entry into M-phase from G2 is controlled by Cdk1 + cyclins A and B.

G1: In G1, it’s Cdks 4 and 6 + cyclin D. This combination permits passage through the G0 restriction point.

S-phase: Cdk2 + cyclin E permit passage into S-phase. Cdk2 + cyclin A allow for progression through S-phase.

What does that look like, paired up with the little sequence we made earlier?

M → G1 → S → G2

[2 * 2n] → [2n] → [2n → 4n] → [4n]

(Cdk 1 + A/B) → (Cdk4/6 + D) → (Cdk2 + E) → (Cdk2 + A)

You’ve probably noticed these transitions don’t line up precisely. That’s because this is a very fluid process - we’ve just made these discrete distinctions to make it easier to learn the major transition points, before you can visualize the whole process in motion. 

Study in vivo:

Did you know that these cyclins and Cdks are virtually identical between laboratory yeast cells and humans? They’re more than 95% similar!

This means we can use carefully-measured application of radioactivity to generate mutant yeast cells, with single point mutations in their genomes, to study them - no humans get harmed in the process, unless we’re careless with the X-ray machine. (O_o) 

Some of these mutants fail to grow and divide at all, and some, perhaps more usefully, fail to grow and divide at certain temperatures. 

These temperature-sensitive yeast cells with mutations in the cdc genes can be induced to grow and divide again. We can add plasmids to them - little circles of DNA containing certain genes, one of which might restore the function lost by the mutant yeast cell. 

This is called complementation, and it lets us retroactively figure out which gene has gone wonky in the mutant, by looking at the gene on the specific plasmid we introduced from our plasmid library (yes, we have a whole archive of them now!). It’s the process that allowed us to confirm that human cdc genes can cover for mutant yeast cdc genes, and perhaps vice versa in the future. 

We can also use the oocytes of marine animals (egg cells) to study the transitions between cell cycle stages. Frog oocytes are good for this - they’re big, and translucent enough for the cycle stages to be observed under a light microscope, so it’s not too expensive either. 

It’s possible to take the cytoplasm from a frog egg cell we’ve noticed is in mitosis, and inject it into another cell that’s not doing much at all, yet. The introduction of the foreign cytoplasm drives the cell into mitosis - so there must be the presence of a mitosis promoting factor, or MPF. We can see the mitotic spindle form under a light microscope. Isn’t that neat?

Through experiments like this, we’ve figured out that there’s an order of dominance to the cyclins and Cdks present in a cell, i.e. some cyclins and Cdks take effect over others. 

MPF, or Cdk1 + B, is dominant over all other cell cycle stages.

SPF (S-phase promoting factor), or Cdk2 + E, is dominant over G1 phase cells, but not G2 phase cells. 

So, why do we care?:

Well, it’s just plain interesting!

However, beyond human obsession with novelty, the study of cdc genes and their products has implications for a wide range of human diseases. 

Perhaps most notably, cdc genes can be implicated in cancer, where cells divide outside of the healthy range of control. By studying them and elucidating their structures, we can get a clearer idea of what might be going wrong in some kinds of cancer, and how to fix it.

We have the technology, here, today, now, to make replacement cdc genes from a functional template like the plasmids I mentioned earlier, and introduce them into new cells using something like a virus - SV40 is one that works in humans. It’s limited right now, because we don’t want anything to go horribly wrong with it, but it’s possible.

It’s a pretty funky little cycle, and although it’s scary when it goes wrong, it’s a joy to watch in motion when it goes right. 

I hope you enjoyed reading about it!

[silyabeeodess]

FusionFall Writing Prompts: Oct. 2019, Prompt #2: Part 4

Part 3: https://silyabeeodess.tumblr.com/post/188285373604/fusionfall-writing-prompts-oct-2019-prompt-2

The cold pricked Silya’s bare arms as she stepped out of the research participants’ quarters, followed by the fellow victim.  Much to her ever-growing horror, they weren’t alone: A group of Fusion Fighters were gathered together outside—among them, her missing roommate.  She couldn’t tell whether there was more than one Ectonurite involved or if just one or a handful had split their DNA across the whole of group, but she could still tell each human present was possessed because of the cold, cruel smile shared between them.  

As they waited for more of their numbers to gather, some exiting the barracks and a few others coming from the outskirts of Tech Square—most likely the ones involved with the cut power—they remained clustered in the shadows.  She could see flashlights in the distance, hopefully from the still-free soldiers looking to restore order.  No one could call out to them though.  People twitched and spasmed, fighting for control over the ghosts only to soon lose it again.  

Held prisoner in her own subconscious, Silya raced through anything she knew about the alien species. Unfortunately, outside of a small collective of stories and basic facts, her knowledge was limited.  She wasn’t a Plumber, so that information had been glossed over during training.  In order to keep up an act of normalcy, however, it didn’t seem like the Ectonurites were exuding full control over anyone.  She could still think clearly and read her surroundings, so that in itself was a good sign.  From what she could tell, he would have to shut her mind down completely anyway for total control, so that could rule out the possibility of him reading her thoughts.

It meant she could try to come up with some kind of plan.  What were an Ectonurites weaknesses again?  Direct light? Well, they’d already taken care of the electricity and they were pretty much invincible anyway so long as they remained in their hosts.  If there was any chance at beating the ghosts, they would need to be cast out of their bodies first.  Just how though?

The whole of their forces soon gathered.  There was only around two or three dozen people around her, but almost every research participant who’d stayed for the experiments had tested the Ghostfreak transformation.  That meant any remainders were either out on-duty, guarding Tech-Square’s borders, or were off on some other errand for their puppetmasters.  A new worry bubbled up inside her: She imagined the controlled soldiers taking out their companions and letting a hoard of fusion monsters through the blockades.  

They split off into two smaller groups: One headed to Mandark Industries and the other—hers—to Dexlabs.  All at once, the humans around her started talking; light-hearted chatter Silya knew was fake because a lot of it was the same kind of dialogue she had heard and said herself over the course of the week.  Only, just as before, it wasn’t them: The Ectonurites were just feeding them used lines.

It fooled the four watchmen at the front doors though.  They only stopped the large group with a curious brow, asking to see one of their ID cards. Looking it over with a tactical flashlight, the guard grunted, “Looks like the power’s out all over.  Dex and the other nerds are already on the case though, if that’s what you’re here for.”

A girl’s eye twitched, the Ectonurite controlling her forcing out a sigh of relief, “It is.  We were worried if it was some kind of emergency. The lights just shot on their own while we were all hanging out in our rooms.  Anything we can do to help?”

“Not unless any of you are technicians.”

“Ah… Well, in any case, can you send someone over there?  The emergency lock went off in one of the buildings.  No one can get in or out.”

Here, the watchmen shared a glance, and for a second Silya thought they might pick up that something was wrong.  Although the front doors of each of the barracks were electric, everyone who stationed at Tech Square regularly knew how to access the manual controls—not to mention most of them weren’t averse to just making their own exits if they had to. She thought she could signal them, fighting to regain control of her arm only for her other hand to swiftly grab it and pull it behind her back in a false, nervous stretch.

They didn’t notice anything. After a minute’s debate, two of the guards jogged away to the barracks, leaving the group standing with the final pair. The girl turned to them once again, “We were also thinking we could take advantage of the darkness.  We’ve all got our Spinal-ARCHs and there’s not much else to do, so we thought some extra training might be good.”

The same guard as before shook his head.  “Sorry, can’t even let you in to grab your gear.  Orders from up-top: Dex doesn’t want anyone wandering through the building without his authorization until the power’s back.”

“I think you’ll find that we answer to a higher authority.”

The young woman saw it coming, but her mouth was bound shut.  From around the edge of the facility, two large figures—sure enough, another two possessed research participants—darted from the shadows and struck the guards from behind.  Before either could cry out in shock, they were gagged and beaten: One struck in the neck and the other thrown against the wall until he was rendered senseless. Both collapsed, unconscious, and were dragged away in the same minute after one of their attackers tossed another Ectonurite a pair of keys.  Said alien quickly began to fiddle with a manual control hatch alongside the doors, the others keeping watch.

Eventually, someone managed to fight for control enough to collapse to the ground with a pained grunt, hands knotting through their hair as they stammered out a question bitterly, “W-what’sss… even about?!  Sabotage? You c-can’t!  Labs’ locked down.”

They had a point. Getting into the building itself was one thing, but any of the actual labs would be shut down by double or triple encoded locks that only Dexter or his team of scientists would know how to access. The research participants were only allowed so far in, and if they were caught anywhere else—whether or not anyone inside knew the full situation—they would be taken into custody.  The same standard applied over at Mandark’s—if they weren’t even more severe.  The Ectonurites’ puppeteering was pretty much useless from this point forward.

One of ghosts gave a jeering laugh from a young man’s body, “We’re not as contained as you would wish.  We only need you to get inside and use as cover.” As if to illustrate, he partially summoned one of the Ghostfreak tendrils, waved it, then quickly dispersed it. “Your employers may experiment on you all they like, but I doubt they would purposefully harm their prized lab rats.”

“That’s right,” nodded the one at the door, which made a faint click as it unlocked.  The Ectonurite pulled it open, motioning the others in with a mocking gesture.  “And if you’re lucky, maybe a few of them will trade themselves over for your sakes.  It wouldn’t be as fun, but I’m sure Lord Fuse would reward us well if we brought him a few of Earth’s finest minds as souvenirs.”  

The very idea of being used as a hostage made Silya want to curse.  For a second, she was able to push her will enough to curl her hands into fists at her side, even as she marched past the door with the others.  Beyond the faint light shining behind them, they were soon swallowed by darkness; however, the ghosts possessing them didn’t seem to mind—even when they still had to use their human eyes to get by.  Unlike during the day, the halls were bleak and empty, the metal walls somehow less pristine and more cold than usual.

It also seemed that the Ectonurites had memorized the way through the building, at least in the areas that the research participants regulated, hinting that they may have been secretly monitoring everything from the humans’ subconscious ever since their DNA had been accessed through the Spinal-ARCHs.  They passed the main lobby, the waiting areas, and the gyms, heading deeper through the winding halls to the silent areas few of them had ever explored without escort.

Soon enough, the group began to split off on their own investigations.  Two of them stopped in front of one door that Silya had never gone through.  She was forced to watch, disgusted, as one of the Ectonurites ripped out a girl’s body, her struggled cry muffed by a clawed hand before one of the other research participants—still possessed—gripped her from behind.  Not that she could wrestle away easily, given the way she leaned forward in exhaustion when the ghost finally broke free.  Fading it, slipped through the door, its host still bound and waiting for its return.

A light, a light… Silya panicked.  If she could just find something, anything to use against the spirit possessing her, she could try to attack him as soon as he snapped out of her body.  For a second, her mind angrily went to Dexter and his denial of all magical elements in favor of ‘real’ science.  Maybe if he wasn’t so quick to dismiss them, he’d have something useful on hand that didn’t have to be plugged into an outlet!  Maybe—!

She froze.  Magic… She had a magical being strapped right at her hip, Aoi!  He was a Demongo nano: His demon fire could burn anything right down to the soul!  

The idea came upon her so suddenly and terror reared its ugly head so much that the Ectonurite controlling her wasn’t prepared when she shot her hand out a second time with a loud, vicious scream.  He muffled her fast, her side thrown against the wall hard enough for her to see stars, but she had already ripped Aoi’s nanochip off of her built.  It went flying from her grasp, scuttling across the floor, and with a burst of blue light her familiar companion appeared in front of her eyes—confusion in his own gaze when he looked around to see just where they were and why she had jarred him awake.  Seeing her dazed on the floor, he tried to approach, but soon halted when Ghostfreak tendrils shot out from her back.

Bracing herself against the ground, shaking as she fought to rear the ghost inside her in, she fumbled for words.  They came out as a broken, sibilant whisper before she could manage to get out a soft, “Fire…”  Again, she cried out, louder even as it felt like the Ectonurite was seeking his claws into her throat and the tendrils twisted menacingly around her, “M-me…. Use you’re f-fire on me!”

It wasn’t an expression she was used to seeing, but a child’s fear lit in his stare at her order, “Silya—?!”

“Now, Aoi!” she gagged.  She was losing it!  Her vision was already beginning to cloud over and she could feel the Ectonurite regaining power over her limbs, limply pulling her off the floor.  He was taking full control!

But not long after darkness shrouded her completely, everything seemed to erupt in a cerulean light. Flames danced before her mind’s eye, tracing every inch of her body.  It hurt a lot—like nothing she’d ever experienced, even compared to the intense burns she’d get from overexposure to fusion matter.  However, when she heard a scream, it wasn’t her own.  For everything she felt, the Ectonurite was bound to feel it tenfold.  

She collapsed again. She couldn’t see.  She couldn’t move.  All she felt was the cold floor under her and all she heard was a loud ringing in her ears.  For a moment, she wondered if she died for real, Aoi’s powers somehow distorting whatever hold Grim’s magic had over her to connect her lifeforce to his Resurrect ‘Ems.  

Slowly though, the world began to piece itself back into existence.  She was in the same hall.  It was still dark.  And there was Aoi, hovering over her with a terrified expression on his face and his hands still held out in front of him from his attack.  She wanted to smile at him—the blasted demon-child that spent most of his time trying to get on her nerves.  She couldn’t though: She was too weak and beyond him she could see blurred figures racing onto the scene.  She had to warn him.

“Ghostfreaks, they’ve—” Silya huffled, struggling even with that small effort.  Not only was she still in pain, she couldn’t believe how tired she felt. “No time... Free the others, Aoi.  Burn those freaks to a crisp!”

It was hard to breath and things started to get dark and hazy again.  The little Demongo clone opened his mouth to demand answers, but was interrupted by the sound of feet hurrying toward them.  He jerked his head around as two more lights—red and yellow—spiraled off of her belt in near unison to join him at his side.

And then Silya’s mind slipped away.    

END OF PART FOUR

Part 5 (END): https://silyabeeodess.tumblr.com/post/188674258524/fusionfall-writing-prompts-oct-2019-prompt-2

[kalleskultur]

On the nature of life

Infinity is a term that's thrown around a lot, imprecisely, even by mathematicians. For example, the infinity you learn about in calculus is simply not correct.

The correct mathematics of infinity was worked out by a man name Georg Cantor, about a century ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Cantor

It turns out that infinite numbers have meaningful mathematical properties, but they're fundamentally different than ordinary numbers. Some of your intuitions about infinite numbers are correct. For example, if you add one to infinity, you get back infinity. But, you can change the scale of an infinite number, and so it turns out, that there are an infinite number of infinite numbers. That is, you can think about infinite numbers as being just as diverse (in fact more diverse) than ordinary counting numbers like 1,2,3, etc, but less responsive to arithmetic.

So, e.g, if you add 1 to 1, you get 2, and in general, doing basic arithmetic on a finite number changes the number. But if you add 1 to a number called Aleph_0, which is the base-level infinity in Cantor's arithmetic, you get back Aleph_0. However, you can prove that the number 2^Aleph_0 is necessarily larger than Aleph_0 itself.

This is a surprising realization, in short, implying that if you assume the existence of a base-level infinity, there is necessarily another level of infinity beyond that.

Part of the work I've been doing involves considering the complexity of objects. This has a rigorous mathematical definition, but you can think about it intuitively as, “how much information do I need to describe an object?”

For example, you can encode any finite integer number with a finite number of bits: the number 2 can be encoded as 10 in binary, the number 3 as 101, etc. 

There's some important nuance to this, but the general intuition is, that as a number gets larger, you probably need more bits to represent it.

Now imagine that you wanted to describe a perfectly symmetrical picture to someone, but you wanted to use as few words as possible. Because the picture is symmetrical, you only need to describe half the picture, and say that the other half is the mirror image of that first half. As a result, symmetrical objects have less complexity than asymmetrical objects, since you don't need as much information to describe them.

One of the areas I've been exploring is the connection between complexity and life:

As far as we know, there's nothing as complex as the life on this planet anywhere in the Universe. Beginning with the macroscopic details of the human body, like our hair, and our fingernails, all the way down to our DNA, we find confounding complexity, that is simply non-existent outside of living beings.

This observations suggests a question:

Is there a connection between life and complexity, in the sense of information theory and computer theory? 

That is, does living matter require significantly more information to describe than non-living matter?

I believe the answer is yes, and in particular, I believe, now, the difference between living matter and the rest, is that life requires an infinite amount of information to describe. Further, I believe that there are physical consequences to this, that may explain the nature of consciousness, true intelligence, and free will, in the sense that living matter is animated, and can spontaneously change its momentum.

This is not a thing that happens in Newton's Universe - baseballs don't decide to change direction, so something unusual must be happening to explain what it is that living creatures do.

In short, I think the answer is that there's a threshold of complexity, which is infinite, above which, new physics exists.

If you’re interested, you can read more about my research on the connections between complexity and physics here:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Charles_Davi

[billion-heartbeats]

mic Is this the beginning of the end of the pandemic in India?                     This was an organism unknown to science five months ago. Today it is the subject of study on an unprecedented scale. Antiviral drug trials have been launched. Some 150 vaccine trials are on the anvil! ICUs have been strengthened. Schools closed. To put it simply the World was in a lockdown. This may not be the end! But certainly, the beginning of the End! This is a public-health emergency, and only public health is going to get us out of this. It doesn’t matter how much virus is out there, if people aren’t susceptible to getting it, then the virus will go away. 2021 looks like it will be much better than 2020. India inches closer to the beginning of the end of COVID-19 pandemic. A timely response mitigates the effects of a disaster and India has been spot-on in this regard. The leadership role that India has assumed in dealing with this crisis is now being appreciated across the globe. India has shown the world that it can handle this crisis upfront.   The most tenuous moment is over: The scientific uncertainty at the heart of COVID-19 vaccines is resolved. Vaccines work. And for that, we can breathe a collective sigh of relief. “It makes it now clear that vaccines will be our way out of this pandemic,” The invention of vaccines against a virus identified only 10 months ago is an extraordinary scientific achievement. These are the fastest vaccines ever developed. The coronavirus continued to rip through the country and daily counts of new infections rose to record heights, the seemingly impossible occurred: good news- the beginning of the end of corona virus disease. Following India’s assiduous fight against the rapidly evolving COVID-19 pandemic since the past six months, the country finally sees signs of green shoots with the faster recoveries and sharp decline of new cases. R0 for India is slowly going down to 1.55 from 1.63 in last 20 days. Current R value is at 0.92. Containment zones in the city of Bangalore is down from a whopping 40,000 to Two in the last three months! The recovery rate has gone up to 93%. A year from now, India is likely to be in the midst of a massive vaccination initiative. If I’m getting your hopes up, then there’s good reason. We may be finally turning a corner on a pandemic after a year in which over 1.3 million have already died globally. On 9 November, Pfizer and BioNTech announced that their ribonucleic acid - RNA-based vaccine was 90% successful in preventing symptomatic covid-19. Overview of the corona pandemic The disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus is known as coronavirus disease 2019 – or COVID-19. Coronaviruses are a large family of enveloped, non-segmented, single-stranded, positive-sense RNA viruses that derive their name from their electron microscopic image, which resembles a crown – or corona. There have been 58.7 Million cases of COVID19 world wide with1.39 million deaths. India was home to 9.14 million cases with 134000 deaths. The decline has come in spite of release of lockdowns and other restrictions. 70% of the people with COVID have stopped transmitting the disease. The current India corona numbers are 45209 a day and there is a progressive decline! As the COVID-19 pandemic evolves around the world, it passes through several phases, raising distinct questions and challenges in each Phase 1 An unknown virus emerges 2 A pandemic unfolds 3 The pandemic accelerates 4 State of decline India has carried out 13 crore corona tests so far. This was the sixth consecutive week of falling coronavirus-related deaths in India. The highest deaths from the virus were recorded during the September 14-20 week, when 8,175 people had succumbed to the infection. The current week's toll, at 3,600, is a 56% fall from the peak. Fresh Covid-19 cases continued to fall for the seventh straight week in the country Transcending geographical boundaries — and every socio-economic and political demarcation — the COVID-19 outbreak has caused huge disruptions globally. It has substantially punctured mankind’s vanity. The scourge of nature is far more serious a threat than man-made wars. It is in this context that I see India’s role as exemplary. Among the world leaders, Prime Minister Modi seems to be particularly perspicacious — not only did he ascertain the real nature of the crisis, but he helped to prepare a graded response to it. It is important to step back and think about the monumental achievement of creating effective vaccines that work for a never-before-seen virus causing a disease in under a year. This rapid pace has been due to the technological advances in the last few years and also due to the rational approach used to design the front runner vaccines. Pfizer and Moderna have separately released preliminary data that suggest their vaccines are both more than 90 percent effective, far more than many scientists expected. Neither company has publicly shared the full scope of their data, but independent clinical-trial monitoring boards have reviewed the results, and the FDA will soon scrutinize the vaccines for emergency use authorization. Initial doses of vaccine should be available in December Pfizer and Moderna - they both bet on a new and hitherto unproven idea of using mRNA, which has the long-promised advantage of speed. This idea has now survived a trial by pandemic and emerged likely triumphant. If mRNA vaccines help end the pandemic and restore normal life, they may also usher in a new era for vaccine development. Several COVID-19 vaccines may soon cross the finish line. To vaccinate billions of people across the globe and bring the pandemic to a timely end, we will need all the vaccines we can get. When the Pandemic emerged with murky origins in late 2019 and found naive, unwitting hosts in the human body. science began to unravel many of the virus’s mysteries — how it spreads, how it tricks its way into cells, how it kills? How the body would react? How dangerous was it to life? How would it infect others etc. A fundamental unknown about vaccines hung over the pandemic and our collective human fate: Vaccines can stop many, but not all, viruses. Could they stop this one? The answer, we now know, is yes. A resounding yes. The day Chinese scientists shared the genetic sequence of a new coronavirus in January, researchers began designing vaccines that might train the immune system to recognize the still-unnamed virus. They needed to identify a suitable piece of the virus to turn into a vaccine, and one promising target was the spike-shaped proteins that decorates the new virus’s outer shell. Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines both rely on the spike protein. Human immune system and the Vaccines! The human immune system is awesome in its power, but an untrained one does not know how to aim its fire. That’s where vaccines come in. Vaccines present a harmless snapshot of a pathogen, that primes the immune system to recognize the real virus when it comes along. Traditionally, this snapshot could be in the form of a weakened virus or an inactivated virus or a particularly distinctive viral molecule. But those approaches take time and expertise. Both are lacking during a pandemic caused by a novel virus. mRNA vaccines offer a clever shortcut. We humans don’t need to intellectually work out how to make viruses; our bodies are already very, very good at incubating them. When the coronavirus infects us, it hijacks our cellular machinery, turning our cells into miniature factories that churn out infectious viruses. The mRNA vaccine makes this vulnerability into a strength. What if we can trick our own cells into making just one individually harmless, though very recognizable, viral protein? The coronavirus’s spike protein fits this description, and the instructions for making it can be encoded into genetic material called mRNA. Several more vaccines using the spike protein are in clinical trials too. They rely on a suite of different vaccine technologies, including weakened viruses, inactivated viruses, viral proteins, and another fairly new concept called DNA vaccines. Never before have companies tested so many different types of vaccines against the same virus, which might end up revealing something new about vaccines in general. The next few months will be a test of one potential downside of mRNA vaccines: their extreme fragility. mRNA is an inherently unstable molecule, which is why it needs that protective bubble of fat, called a lipid nanoparticle. But the lipid nanoparticle itself is exquisitely sensitive to temperature. For longer-term storage, Pfizer/BioNTech’s vaccine has to be stored at –70 degrees Celsius and Moderna’s at –20 Celsius, though they can be kept at higher temperatures for a shorter amount of time. Pfizer/Bio-NTech and Moderna have said they can collectively supply enough doses for 22.5 million people in the United States by the end of the year. The good news is that while we wait, new treatment options for covid-19 are also becoming available. Just last week the first monoclonal antibody (created by Eli Lilly) received emergency use authorization in the US for the treatment of early stage covid-19. There are other monoclonal antibodies which may be approved in the coming days. All of us are united in the hope for a Great Vaccine. But as they say, hope is not a strategy. Prudence demands that decision-makers of all hues have actionable and cost-effective plans to achieve resilience even in the face of a Protracted Covid. People should receive the vaccine on a war footing. It’s a public good and to be treated as such. But the end of the pandemic does not necessarily mean the eradication of COVID-19. The closing act of this public health calamity is likely to be a gradual return to a new normal, with infections, restrictions, and public health fears falling away one by one rather than all at once. Getting there will not be as simple as getting a shot, but with effective vaccines, robust distribution plans, widespread testing, and continued social distancing through the winter — all possible but hardly assured — our exit from the pandemic could come much sooner than many dared hopes. Testing, isolation and contact tracing, however, are all essentially a backup plan for fighting an infectious virus like SARS-CoV-2. The only way to ensure that the virus won’t burn through a global population again is to build a better defence. And the most impenetrable fortress against a virus is immunity by getting vaccinated. The virus is not likely to go away, maybe ever, but certainly not for a long time. “But that said, we’re not going to be living like this forever, and in fact, I expect by springtime that things will start really getting much, much better. And then it’ll continue to get better. And at some point, we will no longer feel like we’re living now. Dr N Prabhudev Former Director Sri Jayadeva institute of Cardiology Former VC of Bangalore university Former Chairman Karnataka state Health Commission nprabhudev@gmail.com

[therenaissancemystic]

Womb Priestessing

To my sister priestesses who work with the wombs, how did you remember?

I was a priestess initiate at the time and while we did give our wombs some love, it was by no means like the ways in which I work with wombs. It was more of a point of focus for meditation and just a general loving up on our magical lady organs.

I was in meditation and I was laying on my yoga mat which had the flower of life pattern all over it. It was a guided meditation with AA Kristiel/Christiel. My intuition then led me down my own path during this guided meditation. All of a sudden I was at an altar space in what appeared to be a private prayer room. There was a BIG crucifix hanging above the altar and I felt all this ooey gooey sexual energy rising. Mind you, I've never been religious and I never really felt connected to religious figures. I had only recently come to understand Jesus and Mary Magdalen as ascended beings, not just religious props.

I hear my guidance tell me that my womb had been sanctified, that I was holy space. I of course was trying not to judge my guidance, because feminine shame and sexual trauma would not allow me to believe such things at the time. So I continued on my way through this meditation. Where I felt like I was releasing sexual energy that didn't serve me, which was amazing. I don't tend to get aroused during meditation so this was odd for me.

I came to understand that sometimes sexual energy stimulates us physically even when the mind isn't in agreement. Very similar to when sexual abuse victims still orgasm during an unsolicited sexual act, the body does it's thing, the mind quite honestly can be in complete and total disagreement.

So I had this major release of what felt like decades of sexualization, abuse and so on. Each time I revisit this event I see something with a bit more perspective. There was this merging of energy, it felt like my past merging with the present in regards to this line of healing. I spent the rest of the time exploring my womb and what my womb meant to me. Mulling over what it meant that my womb was sanctified, that I was holy space.

I recall a few days before I asked my grandfather to get me some holy water from church, I wanted to use it to clean my altars and such. When I was done, I went downstairs and he found some Holy water that belonged to my grandmother, it came from the Saint Anne shrine in Quebec. Saint Anne is the Mother to The Virgin Mary.

I didn't really know of Saint Anne, I never heard of her. It dawned on me, although I did not grow up with religious indoctrination, I still as an adult admired saints and often felt like one of them. Not for the attention but for the marriage to my craft, my healing work. A saint in my eyes doesn't have to be religious but someone dedicated to helping others in an unconditional way.

I wondered why I had been presented with her energy and why during my mediation I was taken to a religious altar. Then it dawned on me, Jesus was my grandson. I had birthed his mother. So many times in my life I had felt pregnant without trying to become pregnant, medical knowledge was of no help to me. I'd believe I was having a chemical pregnancy if I was actually trying to conceive but if you know me, you know that's not the case. I have never TRIED to conceive.

I was taken back to a dream I had a few years prior, I was visiting this house which is not one I recognize and there were a whole bunch of people there. I'm assuming it was a small town just outside of a big city because buildings began to fall, there was fire raining down from all the destruction and everyone began panicking. I was not panicking, me and my little fur baby Niall were walking around quite calmly. I was looking for the "holy grail" This small dark haired boy appeared. He didn't belong to anyone and wasn't at the least bit effected by the outside commotion. I told him I was looking for the holy grail. I entered a room full of books, I opened one book and there was sort of gruesome religious imagery. Plague, leprosy and all around horror. I closed the book and put it down.

I left the room and looked around again, found nothing. Then I went back to the room with the books and he followed me. I picked up a book that had a deceptive sleeve on it. It appeared to be a book about fairies but it wasn't and I never got to read what was on the inside because when I tried to walk out with it, he stopped me dead in my tracks, and told me "you can't have this without the fetus, you have to have the fetus". There was a pregnant woman running around in horror outside due to all the destruction and he waved his little finger around and placed her fetus into my womb. That was the end.

Admittedly I woke up in shock. I didn't know how to take that information. Over time I realized that while I may not have ever given birth in this reality, there are other pockets of time and space where I am a mother and I have given birth to children. Which explains the overwhelming sensation of being pregnant even when I'm not. It was there that I felt in tune with myself in a vastly different way. There have been several times I've felt this way since. I believe being a mother is an activation of your womb space but what you are activating at the time of conception is whatever lives in the parents DNA currently.

I've continued to tune into what the womb space carries for me, I connect to and with divine feminine beings who tended to the sacred work of the womb, Hathor, isis, Mother Mary, Mary Magdalen, Quan Yin and more. I've come to understand the womb as an oracle. It is a portal to other worlds, to other realms, it creates or destroys life. It's not just something that brings us money when activated, that is reducing yourself down to a financial construct. Your womb space is a portal that only we can access and when we let distorted, traumatic or low vibrational energies remain in this space, we taint our portal. We experience disconnect from this space, we continue to experience a disconnect from our truth.

I've been held in a temple with divine feminine figures, encoded with beautiful energies and have been reborn in their imagine. Energetically, I've died and risen so so so so many times. We have to take time to understand ourselves, where we stand in relation to our womb space.

Much like making a baby, things take time to gestate, to build, to develop, to manifest. We are all so busy trying to use our womb as a cash cow that we overlook the potential for spiritual insight and healing that comes with it. There are women who make 7 figures who are still in abusive relationships so don't let anyone tell you that 7 figures equals a clear sacral center, it's just not true.

Over time I've been able to develop and build upon a craft that is intuitively channeled through me, it doesn't feel like a learning, it feels like a remembering. I've come to understand what sexual energies are innocent, which have a gross distorted undertone to them, where predatory energies seek to be housed in our wombs, where we ourselves make excuses for the things we give our energy over to and how we have an over reliance on them. How we sexualize people subconsciously, how to connect to their sexual energy without their permission and crate more karmic energy for ourselves.

I've also learned how to use my womb almost as a radar for sexual energy that needs healing. When dealing with women or men who carry a lot of lower vibrational sexual energy, I get cramps. I can tell they're carrying pain, burdens, guilt and shame there. I can pick up on energetic remnants of children who were just not meant to be at that time. Sometimes eggs are fertilized but never properly implanted into the uterus and their energy gets trapped there.

I've learned so much over the years by exploring myself and my clients. I love what I do and every day I'm so honored to be of service in this way. There is going to be a stronger pull this year towards working in the womb since I have Pluto, Venus, Vesta, Vertex, Mercury and Partof fortune all in my 8th house in my solar return chart. I will have a deeper and profound connection to the womb this year. I have a Gemini stellium in my 8th house. I keep being called to call Gemini energy like a bridge between worlds. This will all be within the realm of womb healing and how I utilize it as a portal.

If you stuck with me this far, YOU A REAL ONE! I hope this gave you some insight into where I've come from and what I'm about.

[stellxuk]

Broad lesson(s) from my solo trip

Some time has lapsed since I’d written the last post but as always words keep escaping me and at present time so o o o much has changed to how we’re essentially going about our daily lives. Being an introvert through and through, I don’t feel the effects of staying home as much as others but it has also created a new flux emotionally. I’ve been getting really vivid dreams (a side note), and have become more reminiscent of my trip to the UK, seeing it in different lights than the atomic now-I-know-I’m-not-a-solo-traveller vein. 

It has brought me immense gratefulness (more than I can express without sounding like a brat who decided to spend money on a leisure trip in the midst of then an impending pandemic) that I got to experience what I experienced in the UK before everything started going downhill. A lot, and I mean a lot, of unfounded worries surrounded me during the trip, which made me think that it was just a wrong time to have travelled and experienced the cities I went to. But now it has, in my own windings and projections, taught me a lot of empathy for the kind of fears people are going through now, and how important it is more than ever to surround yourself with the assurance that this is a time that will pass. It has also opened up a lot about who I am as a person inherently as well.

Picking up The Idiot Brain by Dean Burnett (a read I’d recommend) after reading 2 chapters and abandoning it for an awful long time (the pages have started to yellow kind of long), I understood how the irrational fears I felt during my trip were my cortisol levels trying to get me to hit optimum self-preservation mode and survive alone - something I have never done. Never! Of course my brain had trouble computing the experience then. I’ve never been physically alone more than an afternoon/ evening completing work at a cafe, or watching a movie solo, or a drive, or at most taking a solo flight (note that these aren’t survival activities but also just leisure activities). I’ve been wrapping my head around why I was so fearful and it seemed I couldn’t be at ease with myself more so than others who seemingly adapted pretty well to studying/living abroad alone. 

But it wasn’t a measure of courage and sensibility, it was apples and oranges in how I was raised and the circumstances which surrounded me as I embarked on the trip.

In the last post I wrote about enhanced responsibility traveling against my parents’ full consent (to clarify, they supported me in my decision but if they had a say they would’ve completely shut the trip down until the entire virus situation tided over). It had been weighing over my head the entire trip and through my mom’s frequent check-ins that as much as I wanted this trip for myself, I’m not my own person. We all aren’t. I read an essay “No Patient is an Island” by Anita Ho on Aeon and it presented studies on moral philosophy such as Rene Descartes’s “rugged individualism” where the self is individualistic, independent and in autonomous control of their lives. This goes against the inherent significance of family relationships - that which is characterised by collectivity, non-consensuality, sensibility and favouritism.

While it may seem that the end goal is independence, coming into your own person, much of our identities and idea of self is constituted by our relations with others. Besides navigating the new cities I was visiting, I was also grappling with a sense of guilt almost for having my mother worry over me, but also a sense of subtle want for defiance - to maybe miss a text or two, get back to the airbnb real late one night - and prove that I can be on my own. It is weird to say this even now but when I hadn’t done that, eventually caved to the messages my amygdala was sending and made sure I kept to my itinerary, don’t do anything stupid, and to assure my mother that the train ride home takes only 15 minutes and the station’s still crowded so I wasn’t alone, I felt like I still wasn’t really being fully independent. Even though I literally was - alone.

To me the premise for the trip was mild, non-social activities. Visit a park, a museum, catch a theatre play, take train rides to explore architecture, nature, boutiques, local cafes. That sort of thing. I remember catching up with a friend a week or two ago and he frowned when I said I started my days early around 8am but I was back in the airbnb most nights by 8pm. He proceeded to ask me why hadn’t I gone to a bar. Lol. Why would I be in a bar? Nothing wrong with bars - I’m not insinuating that if I had gone to a bar any of the nights that would’ve been the last you heard of me. I was just perturbed as to why there seemed to be a “generic itinerary” everyone had to follow and me missing out on these overtly “I’m solo tripping I am my own person now” type activities meant I had an odd trip.

I guess where I’m getting at is it all boils down to who I am, maybe neurologically my anterior hippocampus might be average sized or even smaller, or biologically I have inherited the DNA that encoded the same over-protectiveness and social paranoias my mother has (chemically, her oxytocin levels has surged through 3 childbirths and hence socially, my sense of danger and worry has also been compromised). There are so many reasons as to why I choose the straight path most times and I don’t take much risks. Don’t get me started on my psychological flaws on fears of failure and subconscious need for social (including parental) acceptance 🙃. But it doesn’t mean it was a horrible trip!!!! (I finally got to the point).

When friends asked me how was my trip, I felt socially obligated to preface that it wasn’t that great - because globally we hadn’t known we were about to fight a pandemic together, and because when I got back my parents were more relieved than excited to hear my stories, and I was slightly ashamed of how cautious I was and at some points, downright fearful. But now I understand, that I hold my life to great regards in accordance to others, and I attain a sense of selfhood through my connection with others. I have my fair share of social anxieties, but by my own measures I can deem the trip a great one regardless. An old friend who reconnected on my birthday (and we got to talking about her experience on her own solo trip) said this:

yea it’s not easy but it’s memorable hahaha there’ll be something about this trip that will stay with u for life and it’s sth that will be difficult to put into words or explain to anyone... try and relax and enjoy yourself! afterall this opportunity definitely didn’t come easy. you’re brave enough to even take ur first step :)

At that moment when I read her message a wave of calm just came upon me and that birthday I gallery-hopped - V&A Museum, The National Gallery, Hayward Gallery and Tate Modern - and I spent what others might think was the most mundane birthday but to me, one of the best yet. 

Will I go back to the UK alone again? Absolutely! Knowing all of the above doesn’t mean I’m okay with it and am set to just live like a hermit for the rest of my life. It means I have so much to work on and look forward to in growing myself more and more. This will (continue to be) on my own terms, that will also be considerate of the people I value and how I’ve been raised. It means communicating my fears and assurances for others better, and it means going against my amygdala sometimes and trying new things (that I would enjoy) to overcome irrational fears. I hope if you’ve read this far that you’ll also be patient with yourself to give yourself time to figure out why you feel/think in certain ways about certain things, and to understand that everyone is on their own path. I hope you’ll give yourself time for yourself, and not by social standards of what it should look like at this stage of your life, going through whatever it is you’re trying to figure out. 

Regular blogging content that actually talks about what I’d done on the trip in the next few posts :>

[equine-science]

It’s not just fish hips and cat thumbs that are the result of small changes in genetic control switches. David Kingsley has also discovered a few human traits that work in the same way, with the most immediately obvious being skin and hair colour. A few years back, he and his team discovered that the DNA around a gene called Kitlg, found in many animals including both sticklebacks and humans, seemed to be chock-full of control switches. The protein encoded by Kitlg (known as Kit ligand) is a biological multi-tasker, helping to make blood, sperm and cells packed full of the dark pigment melanin. It’s this molecule that determines your coloration. More melanin and you’ll be darker, less and you’ll be lighter. Kingsley and his team discovered that playing with these switches in sticklebacks changed their coloration, making them darker or lighter depending on which ones were missing. So they took the same DNA region from humans and broke it down into pieces, testing each one to find out when and where it was active. Sure enough, they tracked down one specific control switch that could turn on the gene only in skin and hair. Then when they looked at the DNA sequence of this switch in West Africans and white Europeans, they noticed a consistent difference in a region more than 300,000 letters (300 kilobases) away from Kitlg. Not as far as the distance between Sonic Hedgehog and its limb control switch, but still a long way off. One single letter was switched: an A in the Africans, a G in Europeans. Just one. Next, they tested whether this change affected how well the switch could turn on Kitlg, by looking at the two different versions in skin cells grown in the lab. They discovered that it wasn’t as simple as an on/off (or rather, black/white) switch. Instead, the version in Europeans wasn’t quite as effective at activating the gene as the African version was. A quick calculation in their paper suggests that having two copies of Kitlg with the European switch makes a person’s skin around six or seven shades lighter than someone with two West African versions. Because you have two copies of every gene – one from Mum and one from Dad – the effects of the switches will be more apparent if they are both the same, while having one of each will give a colour somewhere in the middle. However, there are around 30 shades between a typical Nigerian’s dark skin and a pale European complexion, so the difference in the Kitlg switch only explains part of our skin colour, rather than the whole thing. David suspects that there are probably other similar genes and switches out there that add up to give each person their particular hue. But even so, just a single letter can make a big difference to what you look like. This is true of hair colour as well as skin. In 2014 Kingsley and his team published another paper showing that European blondes have a single letter difference in a control switch around 350,000 DNA letters (350 kilobases) away from the Kitlg gene, compared to dark-haired people. Again, it’s a tiny change miles away from the gene, but it has a big impact. This subtle alteration in blondes means that a transcription factor protein called Lef can’t stick quite as well to the DNA of the control switch, so it’s not as effective at turning on Kitlg activity. It’s not on/off, but it’s enough to significantly cut down the melanin production in hair cells, and make them fair. Growing up in the 1980s, I would often hear jokes about blondes being stupid – and as a brunette (to my shame) I would often repeat them. I now know better, but many people apparently don’t. In a news article about his hair colour research, Kingsley attacked this long-held stereotype, saying, ‘It’s clear that this hair colour change is occurring through a regulatory mechanism that operates only in the hair. This isn’t something that also affects other traits, like intelligence or personality. The change that causes blonde hair is, literally, only skin deep.’ Blonde jokes aside, his work on coloration has more profound implications. As I’m writing this chapter, the United States is fracturing under the stress of racial tension following several high-profile incidents of white police officers killing unarmed black people, and a horrific racist shooting in a church. Countless numbers have been unfairly judged, oppressed or killed throughout history because of the colour of their skin, yet it boils down to little more than a handful of DNA letters in a few genetic switches. For a species named after our intelligence – Homo sapiens translates as ‘man who knows’ – we really are very stupid at times."

Herding Hemingway's Cats: Understanding How Our Genes Work by Kat Arney