lunazure said

It's a dash of Post traumatic Moody syndrome.

Rather, I suffer traumatic post Moody dash syndrome - when one kicks oneself to pieces for all the coulda-shouldas in a two-second meet and greet - behind the black curtain.

lunazure said
No regrets. I do think Justin was highly amused we showed up in the Aberdeen conga line tho. Just my interpretation of the photos.... that man just knocks me out whatever he does.

Laughing with you and at me. Drears.

lunazure said
OOOoooOooo I didn't know you liked stuff like mitochondria and respiration.... oooo one of my favorite topics.

Just because I remember it doesn't mean I like it, but I guess I always did have a thing for mitochondria now that you mention it. I loved the way they achieve high surface areas.

lunazure said
I had to learn all that STUFF in Biology my sophomore year... lessee I was 15? 14/15 years old that year? Anyway I BOUNCED off the "electron transport chain" because it didn't seem to make any sense.... so a bunch of ATP (adenosine triphosphate) molecules passed around a bunch of electrons to become ADP (adenosine diphosphate) then picked up the electron again and repeated the process. I could see no purpose to it. But I dutifully memorized it because I love those As and Bs on my report card, and then filed the lesson along with a lot of other useless memory storage I seem to have no use for but which bubbles up at the weirdest times.

I think they give off PO4's, given the name. Breaking bonds is exothermic, and forging them endo. The point is like why you put gas in your car if you're just going to burn it off and refuel. If you drive your car to a Moodies show, we call it an expenditure of good energy. If you just sit in traffic and don't make the show till the last few numbers and have to go as a sweaty rat with windblown hair in glasses, we call it bad energy.

I learned yesterday that to be accepted to veterinary school you must have all A's in your undergraduate coursework. Well, some places will accept developing fourteen vaccines and creating new species with a 3.9 GPA. Back when I was in college, a 4.0 GPA was unheard of. Anybody close was sure to get a 3.5 from one prof just to break the geek. (I know of somebody to whom this happened.)

lunazure said Mind you all of this is going on inside the mitochondria, down in the "valley" cillia spaces in the clever folds of the inside of that organelle. Did you know it's generally assumed that mitochondria were once independent bacteria that somehow took up residence inside eukaryotic single celled critters, and became symbiotic with them?

We were taught the hypothesis in my way back when.

lunazure said
Did you know that all your mitochondrial DNA comes from yer Mum?

If I knew it, I forgot it.

lunazure said
Anyway I went on through life and came out the other side of the Navy with a considerable amount of electrical knowledge, then wound up taking Microbiology in a college course. And how about that, NOW I got to learn about the Kreb's cycle, which is respiration (and the opposite of photosynthesis) which yes happens inside the mitochondria and is responsible for YES our energy levels.

Exactly! Potential energy is merely the suspension of mass or charge in ways that could, following a disturbance, precipitate motion.

lunazure said
It was like this sudden flash of lightning hit me. IT'S ALL ABOUT ELECTRON FLOW. Energy is coming from MOVING ELECTRONS. Just like an electrical current. Moving electrons generate magnetism via inductance. Better yet, with the flow of Potassium and Calcium channels in normal cells (across the cellular membranes), this ALSO generates electrical current. Cells are like organic batteries!!!!

Yes. Tesla said we were meat machines. Me mum taught me all our movements and thoughts had electrical components. She worked for the inventor of high-resolution electrocardiography. It was novel then, but oh, so primitive now. (I'm chuckling now as I recall the time a biology prof came into the physics lab to see if we could measure the voltage of a Venus flytrap snap. I suppose he figured the high specific impulse would, better than any biological phenom, with predictability, have a chance of getting a reading. I didn't think so, but we exhausted all our clunky equipment that was incapable of low-level indication.)

lunazure said
Microbiology turned me into an intelligent design freak. We are incredibly sophisticated *designed* walking machines, with incredibly intricate energy systems.

I could almost accept the use of energy in the above sentence. Well-done, Weedhoppa. So, as I was saying, I freaked out when I thought this was a clockwork universe. The meat machine comment entered my cosmos when I was watching my landlords' little girl grow up, simply regurgitating anything her mind picked up from her environment, or so it seemed. I drastically prayed that God would show me I was more than a meat machine. My parents happened to be visiting from out of town at the time, and I was staying with them in their motel room. I had a dream that I didn't remember until . . .

On the way to work, I was teaching at the local community college, I passed some roadkill that totally sickatated me. It still weighed heavily on my subconscience when I went into the lab. Several of my students had been stumped by a math problem, and so I attempted to help them. We would work it out on the board. Then, I got stumped. I think it was the combination of the road kill and my high-strung ego at getting stumped that caused me to pass out. As I laid on the floor, I heard the students talking over me, and it was playing out exactly as it had in the dream.

Wow! I thought! How could I have such prescience if there was not some Higher Power and no meaning to life. That answer lasted a couple decades, but now I see I could also have read it to mean everything is so clockwork it's predictable.

Either way, I used to tell my physics students that I was only teaching them about dead matter - what mass and charge do in the absence of spirit. Spirit, that which gives life and has free agency, formerly called vis-viva, is another realm. With spirit, an organism can choose how it will use its ATP. Organisms with the same amount of ATP can use it to vote for Republicans or Democrats, or to get out of bed or get fat. There is no contradiction.

However, I believe I have rambled here before about New Agers misappropriating physical concepts like the uncertainty principle and relativity to try to explain agency. More poignantly are the physicists growing the particle zoo in search of a particle to explain agency in a universe of dead matter. Both endeavors, from the above arguments, are misguided.

lunazure said
My biggest question after THAT was who the heck designed us? Why? and who the heck designed the designer????

He has many names as you know. I suppose after we're dead we'll learn how many generations the heavens have and what came before. I haven't had the revelation yet, but it is enough for me to strive to follow my Immediate Suprevisor.

Thanks for asking. Next round?

Wow! Good catch on the Justin photos. Although I would love to see everything in the world about Justin, I really like how he's not so narcissistic as to post all he does on the social media.

P.S. Meaning no disrespect to those in the wrong place at the wrong time, I is-pose, due to the absence of news to the contrary, that Justin is safe and sound.
Pshew.

You're full of good avice, I say sarcastically of me in white pants.

Everything looks good in shades of green. I had to pause awhile, as a thunderstorm is brewing (out to the west, of course). The sun is still here making a captivating play of light on the tree outide the window. The contrast of the bright green leaves and their shadows against the deep gray sky really turns me on. It's fleeting, so I need to soak in as much as I can before the clouds engulf the sun. For things like this, my sister would call me maudlin.