From the PBS Newshour on Oct. 15:

Dr. Celine Gounder:

Well, think of it like maybe a mug shot of a criminal. If you have two different photographs, one from the front, one from the side, you have a better chance of recognizing that person out in public than if you only had one snapshot.

And, similarly, these vaccines give your immune system different ways of looking at the virus. And so your immune system has a better shot at recognizing it down the line.

I always thought it was simple: your genes set your limits, your environment determined if you reached them. If you had 6-foot genes and shit nutrition, you turned out to be 5-5. If you had 5-5 genes, it didn’t matter what you ate, you weren’t ever going to be taller than 5-5.

Turns out that, like everything in life, it is more complicated than that. Here’s a New Yorker profile (behind the pay wall) that ran on Sept. 13, 2021:

Can Progressives Be Convinced That Genetics Matters?

The behavior geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden is waging a two-front campaign: on her left are those who assume that genes are irrelevant, on her right those who insist that they’re everything.

For me, the nut graf was half-way into the story. A GWAS is a study that tries to correlate MANY genes with single traits:

“The largest gwas for educational attainment to date found almost thirteen hundred si+tes on the genome that are correlated with success in school. Though each might have an infinitesimally small statistical relationship with the outcome, together they can be summed to produce a score that has predictive validity: those in the group with the highest scores were approximately five times more likely to graduate from college than those with the lowest scores—about as accurate a predictor as traditional social-science variables like parental income.”

We need to find a way to use a predictor that accurate to equalize results. IMHO: people with the (many) genes don’t need help. People without them need extra help. Or, as one expert noted, we need to de-emphasize the need for education in some cases.

Andy Singer’s Web Site

Here’s a public service announcement. I know a few of you use CPAP machines, and some of the men may be forced by their facial hair to use nasal pillows, as I do. I was having a terrific dry-mouth problem in the morning, as my mouth dropped open at night. The two side effects: bad for your teeth, bad for your marriage (snoring). I think every CPAP kit should include an Anti-Snoring Chin Strap for Men and Women CPAP Users. Its been great for me; maybe it will be great for you. I believe it would even reduce snoring among non-CPAP users. It is quite comfortable.

I noted here recently that the heart has neurons which send more information to the brain than they get back. My wife recently noted that the gut has neurons as well. Here’s the breakdown:

Brain: 100 billion neurons

Gut: 500 million neurons (0.5% of the brain)

Heart: 40,000 in the heart, but they send more data to the brain than the brain sends back. (.00004% of the brain)

AI: Researchers now have AI with 1 billion neuron equivalents: about 1% of your brain. There has been talk on the Internet that when they hit 10 billion, AI may be able to write rough drafts of fiction. It’s already written passable imitation Kafka. One company is hoping to offer writers an AI assistant for $300 a month in a few years.

If you haven’t heard about this project, read the article: Global Consciousness Project – Wikipedia. If you subscribe to an early warning earthquake site, why not find a place on your desktop for https://gcpdot.com/

To summarize: the GCP is a worldwide network of random number generators is being observed for incidents of non-random number generation. It is a proven fact that human beings can influence these hardware generators with their minds, at a distance. Basically, this project is trying to measure disturbances in the force (to use the Star Wars terminology), or the quantum field (physics) or the worldwide human consciousness. GCP found disturbances on 9/11 and the day Princess Diana died, among others.

I learned about it from a movie I can, literally, only half recommend. SKIP SKIP SKIP the first 40 minutes of Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind on Amazon: it is pure tin-foil hat. But the last hour and 20 minutes is about meditation and global consciousness, and includes the clearest explanation of quantum entanglement I’ve ever seen, with a graphic reminiscent of the best of the Bell Telephone Science Hour. While the discussion of consciousness is in the context of contacting extra-terrestrial life forms, the science is sound―including the observation that the heart contains 40,000 neurons.

Kevin Sullivan suggested Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment by journalist Robert Wright. It is an amazing and impressive work, using evolutionary biology to demonstrate the wisdom of the Buddha’s teachings about not-self and meditation. My favorite quotes:

“It is possible to argue that the primary evolutionary function of the self is to be the organ of impression management (rather than, as our folk psychology would have it, a decision-maker).”

“You may find it useful to think of meditation as a process that takes a conscious mind that gets to do a little nudging and turns it into something that can do a lot of nudging—maybe even turns it into something more like a president than a speaker of the House.”

From Daniel Dern with regard to my Darwin This and That item last week:

In one of his final/posthumous books, Oliver Sacks wrote some interesting stuff about Darwin.  https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2008/11/20/darwin-and-the-meaning-of-flowers/

also a video  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVyL7YgSLag

here's more review links

https://www.wsj.com/articles/review-oliver-sacks-travels-down-the-river-of-consciousness-1508522780

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/24/opinion/oliver-sacks-a-composer-and-his-last-work.html

You have no doubt heard of, or quite possibly taken, one or both of the traditional U.S. personality tests which are often required by employers. I have taken both the Myers-Briggs and Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Tests. I was intrigued by a NPR report on the Big Five personality traits test also known as the OCEAN model. It is not black and white; rather it places your traits on a spectrum.

After years of wondering about nature or nurture (when I was young, I thought it was all about genetics), I can’t say I am surprised that, in reality, who you are is an even split between both. Quoting from Wikipedia: “research [has] shown that about half of the variation between individuals results from their genetic inheritance and half from their environment.”

Those of you who know me, which is almost all of you, will not be surprised to hear that I am on the extreme high end of the scales for Openness, Extraversion, and Agreeableness, and right smack dab in the middle on Neuroticism and Conscientiousness. Maybe I am not really a whiny drama queen. You can take the The Big Five assessment test yourself and see how you compare. I find the results highly accurate.