Luysii.wordpress.com

100 faculty at Columbia wrote a letter defending ‘robust inquiry’, e.g. students supporting Hamas shortly after their attack of 7 October 2023. Here’s a link to the letter and the signatories — https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/1cVLg6RTnqd2BTzuouWbfACnFEex7GQeImDZJnMlUReM/mobilebasic Some 100 faculty signed the letter and their departmental home can be found in the list in the link.  Among the 100 […]

It was nice to get back to the science (https://luysii.wordpress.com/2024/04/17/cholesin/) after several long detours through current events but reality continues to intrude.  The firing of 30 Google staffers who protested Google’s choice of clients and the mass arrests and academic suspension of the Columbia University students who set up a protest encampment on campus is […]

You wouldn’t think that there was anything more to be said about cholesterol metabolism after decades of work by med school classmate Mike Brown and a host other researchers.  But there is. The body can synthesize cholesterol starting from scratch and Mike found out how this is inhibited when cholesterol levels get too high.  Here […]

PNMA2 (ParaNeoplastic antigen MA2) is a protein initially found as the target of the immune response (autoantibodies) producing a nasty dementing neurologic disease (Paraneoplastic encephalitis).  The PNMA2 protein is exclusively expressed in neurons which implies that neurons are using it for something.   This is teleological thinking, usually looked down on, but always needed in […]

Unless someone has taken over the Harvard Crimson website the following isn’t fake news:  here’s a link — https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/3/19/wolbach-library-closure/. The Harvard Endowment was the largest in the world as of June ’22 approaching 50 billion.  Yet here is the lede from the article — “The John G. Wolbach Library — which carries one of the […]

The next total eclipse of the sun visible in the USA will occur 8 April 2024.   I well remember one in Montana 26 February 1979.  People flocked to Lewistown where the eclipse was to be total, the weather perfect, yet there was a disaster which ruined their trip.  It wasn’t the weather. See if […]

“Analyze This”, is a very funny 1999 sendup of the Mafia and psychiatry with Robert DeNiro and Billy Crystal.  For some reason the diagram on p. 7 of Barrett O’Neill’s book “Elementary Differential Geometry” revised 2nd edition 2006 made me think of it. O’Neill’s  book was highly recommended by the wonderful “Visual Differential Geometry and […]

China as shown by Huawei has the capacity to design state of the art chips, and they certainly have the brains.  Morris Chang did a lot of his work at Texas Instruments before running TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company).  Jensen Huang runs NVIDIA.  In retirement, I pass the time by reading 5 journals (Cell, Nature, […]

The following quote from part II says it all — “As Silicon valley crammed more transistors onto silicon chips, building them became steadily harder.    Russia stole the equipment to make them, but they had no way to get spare parts.  The Russian military didn’t trust the chips produced in country, so they minimized the […]

There are no loading docks in Washington D. C. said my brother who lives there.  He’s right.  D. C. doesn’t produce anything physical, as do most, if not all, people reading this blog.  I didn’t meet anyone involved in manufacturing until I was nearly fifty, and that only because the head of a local factory […]