Category: Science

I just finished reading Merlin Sheldrake’s book on mycelia.  I didn’t read it for months because my daughter (a PhD in biology) kept recommending it and I kept saying, “I knew him, I don’t need to read it.”  I was wrong.  I knew his father in hippy days as everyone did, Rupert Sheldrake.

The book is excellent and easy to read. Merlin, like his father, is a little grandiose and has a slight tendency to exaggerate.  I’m not complaining, I do it myself. Mycelium are terribly under appreciated.  

I am a mycelia fanatic.  I love an organism that was not recognized as its own phyla until I was 25 years old and still doesn’t fit into the Linnaean categories.  Like I love pointing out that medicine was mostly wives’ tales until I was born before WWII when penicillin was first used.  Penicillin comes from mycelia so the two issues are related.

Merlin Sheldrake likes to focus on many of the problems in our understanding and thinking about mycelia.  I enjoy that about his book.

The whole biological sphere has a problem.  Fungi can’t get energy directly from the sun, and green plants that do so through photosynthesis, can’t get many vital chemicals such as nitrogen and phosphorus from the air or the soil.  The relationship between mycelia and plants that allows the plants to get the vital chemicals to exist and the mycelia to get the energy (sugars) to exist has the wrong  name.  

The name for this exchange is generally called parasitism. But that is definitely wrong because there is a symbiosis, both giant categories need the other.  There is a mutually beneficial exchange that takes place. Sheldrake makes that clear; he also points out that biology is deficient in words to explain the mutual dependence that takes place.

This is where the word ‘commerce’ is needed.  What takes place between the mycelia and plants is a mutually beneficial exchange. The very definition of ‘commerce.’  It is biological commerce.

Commerce is the right word but most people don’t understand the common use of the word.  Commerce is always mutually beneficial.  One of the few human endeavors that is mutually beneficial. 

Commerce is 99.4% cooperation.  Go to any commercial establishment and see that it only works because everyone cooperates.  Not just everyone who is visible, but also the suppliers, the whole supply chain, the advisors, the consultants, the outside workers and the landlords.  The 0.6% consists of the government agencies that represent all the present and past hostile forces to the healthy thriving of the commerce and to some extent people who believe they are more suited to supply the clients, often called competitors.

When we truly understand the unique attributes of commerce, what it really is, we will appreciate this greatest of all god’s gifts and we will be able to apply it to biology.

My great uncle Abraham Lincoln Phillips was born in Petaluma California in the late 1870s.  Sometime in his 20’s uncle Abe, whom we called A.L, became a Christian Scientist.  As he explained, “Science is very successful.”  

He remained a Christian Scientist faithful until he was 92 when he had prostate surgery. 

I bring this up because I never cease wondering how more than a billion people worldwide can believe in Human Caused Global Warming and the consequent Armeggedon.  After all, the temperature of the surface of the earth is 57.4 F today as it was in 1950.

I think the reason may be the same. ‘Science is very successful,’ and the billions who believe in the Global Warming thesis are terribly impressed with the incredible products of science they see in the world around them.

That is how I explain this mass hypnosis.  

—————-

People who have been reading this blog for years know that I took a class at the U. of Chicago from Niels Bohr, who taught that the history of science was the history of people explaining the physics behind the series of constants being discovered by engineers and technologists.  It is really the engineers and technologists to whom we are indebted for the miracles of the modern world.

I’ve been saying this since I first looked at the evidence in 1983.  The false nature of this thesis is recently well evidenced in a Congressional hearing. S71022-20132171-302668.pdfs 

Just for my records.

I write this blog with inadequate data.  I can find no data on the level of depression in the U.S. over time.  The birth rate has been steadily declining since 1994.

A proxy for depression in the U.S. might be suicide, which has increased by 30% since 2000.

I know that the highest reproduction rate in all developed nations is found in Israel, the Jews in Israel.  Every other developed nation is showing a decline in reproduction.  Israel is significant to me because the Israeli army has women members meaning marriageable mates are introduced to each other. Israel also has a uniquely optimistic society.  A homeland dream becomes real after two thousand years.

My personal family data is what leads to this blog. My most recent cohort of 20-year-old children and grandchildren has more depressed members than any previous cohort. A small sample.

I believe the reason for both depression and not having children is the current prevailing young person’s worldview.  Human-caused global warming and the imminent Armageddon that follows is a good reason not to have children. Add to that the belief that America is a racist nation with a terrible income inequity problem and I can’t see any reason to have children; to create more Americans. ‘Wokiness’ is the source of depression and the anti-birth consequences.

Does all that make sense?  A generation with a gloomy world view and a history to be ashamed of means fewer and fewer children.

Please note that I consider the global warming worldview to be nonsense. The planet today has an average temperature of 57.4F, the same as the first reliable data in 1950. A country where 7 of the top public corporation CEOs are dark-skinned immigrants from India can’t be considered racist by a rational person.

My life has been very different than most people’s.  Starting as a student at the University of Chicago, I was introduced to the concept of reading original documents. It has shaped me, positively and for a more interesting way to live.

Then while starting two corporate marketing research departments, I learned how to easily handle data. Which I have done for the last 60 years.  I did it often as a court- certified expert witness in many fields. I use data to shape my views of the world.

In 1992, looking at  global population data on a spreadsheet, I was among the first human beings to discover that the population explosion was over.  I threw a big party to celebrate it. 

A few years later I put all the data for global surface temperature on another spreadsheet and found that there was no global surface temperature rise in the past 100 years.  No rise, no way to blame it on human generated CO2.  I’ve followed temperature data ever since.  Satellite data confirmed what I had learned and reported in many blogs.  Then while showing a young friend how to collect the data, he found the most reliable numbers in radiosonde measurements accurate daily back to 1950.  Fifty seven point 4 F (57.4 then and now) no change in the global surface temperature.  Look at this chart, lower right. Surface temperature has gone down in the past 18 years. (Source.)

There is an even better source with daily data. No change from 1950 when global surface temperature was 57.4F.  Here.

Data on Covid

Now we have a reliable source (National Bureau of Economic Research) that has looked at the covid data to see what government policies worked and what led to excess deaths in most states in the U.S. (data.)

• First, closing schools was counterproductive in many ways.  Measurable loss of education and no excess deaths in that age group with or without classes.
• Mandating masks on people who were not potential spreaders, people not dealing with the public, were not productive. The closing of businesses cost millions of jobs and destroyed over a million businesses. Unproductive from a contagion perspective.
• Putting hospital patients in retirement homes created additional excess deaths among the elderly.

That data will hopefully inform governments in the future.  Governments need to act more like Utah and Florida and less like New York and California.

I end up with a unique and different view of the world because I like data and know how to make use of it.  Hopefully more people, over time, will join me.  It is comforting to be in a world of reliable first hand data.

I was just brought up to date on Stephen Wolfram’s project to find the key to the universe which he released online last year.  He used many of the simplest math statements to generate entire universes with hundreds of thousands of outcomes.

The problem has become one of knowing which one is the closest to the universe we live in.

I dealt with a similar problem in biology.  I’m not in Wolfram’s league; a man who understood Reimann tensors by age 13 is unique, and one who didn’t find enough stimulus at the Institute for Advanced Study in his early 20s is ahistoric.

My insight comes from visiting Dr. Donald A Glaser’s lab in the late 1970s at U.C. Berkeley. Dr. Glaser had laid out 1 million separate agar cells on a flat table with a moveable arm overhead that could visit and interact with every cell, quite fast.  In each cell he placed a single bacterium.  He then, in the case I saw, placed a drop of liquid on each bacterium and let it grow. He then photographed the resulting growth and ran the 1 million images to find clusters of common variance. 

Dr. Glaser was applying the urine from thirty Stanford basketball team members where the mild illnesses of a dozen were known.  The photos found the precise clusters of the cells where liquid from the specific dozen had been applied and Glaser knew from the shape of the bacteria which shape was connected to each illness.  He could therefore predict the same future illnesses if they were reintroduced into the cell machine.

I thought it was brilliant.  The NIH had given him a $5 million grant to build and test the machine but ended the grant after he wrote his final report.

In discussing this success/failure with my close friend Dr. Peter Sherrill, Peter explained a long verbal apocrypha in science that: making accurate predictions was not of interest to science if the mechanism was not understood. That was the case with Dr. Glaser’s machine.

It seems to me that that is the problem with Wolfram’s hundreds of thousands of automata created universes.  He can’t predict which one must be the correct universe.  

If he could take four objects from our universe, say neon, pi, a gamma ray and the 2.7K radiation and use those to predict the existence of radioactive decay I believe he would prove that one of his automata was the basis of the universe.  

And most thinkers would agree.

One good mask study has been done.

I am a court-certified expert on survey research and design.  Somehow a good study of using masks to prevent Covid-19 was done last year but I didn’t hear about it.  ‘Somehow.’ Not really. We have a totally dishonest media and government infrastructure that openly and consciously lies.

I read the Claremont Review of Books. In the latest issue, Summer 2021, there is an article by Jeffrey H. Anderson that tells about a Danish study by 22 medical people of two randomized samples done for two months last year; one group wore masks while the other didn’t.  The sample size was 8,000 people, enough to detect any fraction of a percent difference in the number of cases that got Covid-19.  There was no significant difference in the two groups.

Meaning, the 120 nanometer virus circulates freely in the air with little or no regard to a face mask.

My relevant background on this subject is that I helped start the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco in 1974.  I was co-organizer of the 1st International Erotic Film Festival and Museum with material from the Kronhausen Collection. I was on the California State certification committee that approved the masters and Phd degrees for the Institute.

I also funded and helped start the Sex Information Hot Line in San Francisco and New York.

Early data based on survey research in the 1950s, U.S., came from Alfred Kinsey and Playboy Magazine.  There was not much detail on the frequency of orgasms. Most data indicated males were near 100% orgasmic while women were about 50%.

After 50 years I have finally seen some reliable data; it comes  from the Kinsey Institute.

In summary, males have orgasms nearly 100% of the time except for medical or old age issues.

For adult women the reported data is as follows:

15% never have an orgasm.

20% never have orgasm from sex.

35% have orgasms in sex with assisted stimulation.

25% have regular orgasms with sex.

5% unknown

———————–

100%

It looks like more women have orgasms after 50 years. Two women deserve special acknowledgement.  Both were good friends of mine.  Betty Dodson who did trainings, everywhere in America, focused on females, for more than 45 years.  She stars in an excellent video by Gwyneth Paltrow. The third video in the first Netflix season. 

Joani Blank started the first Adult Toy store, Good Vibrations, in 1977 that was clean, well lit and aimed at women. It expanded in the Bay Area and was copied nationally. I was Joani’s business consultant.

I know we are in a period of extreme Puritanism but everyone can be grateful to these two pioneering women.