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 are 1 mathematician, 1 physicist and 1 pediatrician.  That’s it for STEM. This is hardly representative of the faculty as a whole being top heavy on the liberal arts, which may explain ..read more

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 worth a post about a bit of history. Just shy of 56 years ago I entered the service under the Berry Plan as an Air Force doctor. After serving as an army doc for two years in ’68 – ’70, a time when we had 500,000 troops ..read more

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 is a brief summary of how this happens from a recent paper [ Cell vol. 187 pp. 1685 – 1700 ’24 ] “Cholesterol biosynthesis and uptake are tightly regu-lated through a negative feedback mechanism that senses the cellular cholesterol levels. When cells are de ..read more

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 molecular biology and cellular physiology. What PNMA2 does is amazing.  It forms icosahedral viral capsids which are released from cells (in culture) as nonEnveloped capsids.  It isn’t clear if th ..read more

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 world’s largest astronomical collections — will shutter its doors on Friday, in a move that was “driven primarily by financial considerations,” according to an email from Harvard Center for Astrophysics Director Lisa J. Kewley ..read more

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 you can figure out what it was.  No one I’ve told the story to over the years, has been able to. Answer will appear 25 Feb in this space. Win fame and fortune for yourself by posting your answer in a comment. Watching the eclipse in Billings 135 miles away where it was partial was imp ..read more

“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 Forms” by Tristan Needham — as “the single most clear-eyed, elegant and (ironically) modern treatment of the subject available — present company excpted !” So O’Neill starts by defining a point  as an ordered triple of real numbers.  Th ..read more

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 use of electronics and computers in military systems.    The math they put into  their guidance computers was simpler to minimize the strain on the onboard computer.” The more transistors you put on a chip of a given size, the more computing it can ..read more

Just about everything in this post is from Chip Wars by Chris Miller, some are direct quotes, others are paraphrases.   A few things are my own, but they’re pretty obvious. Even though I was vitally interested in computers as a neurologist starting in the early 70s and got one as soon as I could afford it (an Alpha Micro which I really couldn’t), Chip Wars covering the early history of silicon based computers taught me a lot.  It starts with Shockley’s invention of the transistor in 1948 and goes from there.   I won’t try to summarize that, but if you want an extremely well writ ..read more

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 was an amateur cellist. Chip Wars is an extremely important book.  I picked it up because it’s about computers, and neurologists are all interested in computers in the hope that understanding them will tell us something about how the brain works.  But Chip Wars is r ..read more