Conorthoughts

Pricks cunts I have known

How bacteria may power computers

Below is Clive Cookson's article from Saturday's FT (30th October) - he is its science correspondent -and I've ripped off the photo accompanying the article as well which was titled 'Experiments with E. coli could lead to new biological computers' . I don't think the FT will come after me for theft.

A biological computer, in which the basic components are made from bacteria rather than silicon circuitry, has taken a step from science fantasy toward reality at Imperial College London.

Researchers there have built “logic gates”, the basis of digital information processing, from genetically engineered E. coli, the bacteria that populate the human gut. These are the first biological logic gates proven to function like electronic ones.

“Logic gates are the fundamental building blocks in silicon circuitry that our entire digital age is based on,” says Richard Kitney, professor of biomedical systems engineering at Imperial. “Without them, we could not process digital information.

“Now that we have demonstrated that we can replicate these parts using bacteria and DNA, we hope that our work could lead to a new generation of biological processors, whose applications in information processing could be as important as their electronic equivalents,” Kitney says.

The Imperial team suggests that bacterial logic gates could form the building blocks of microscopic biological computers – although these are still many years away.

Possible applications include sensors that swim inside arteries, detecting the build-up of harmful plaque and rapidly delivering medications to the affected zone, and sensors that detect and destroy cancer cells inside the body.

In a paper in the journal Nature Communications, the scientists describe how they transferred two linked regulatory genes from Pseudomonas syringae, a bacterium that infects plants, into E. coli.
Hot to trot

Racehorses adjust their body clocks to new time zones much more quickly than humans – and are less likely to suffer jet lag when flown across the world – according to research at Bristol University.

These genes are activated separately by organic chemicals, such as sugars – and both need to be switched on at the same time to produce a biological response in the bacteria. By appropriate chemical stimulation, the scientists made them respond just like an “AND gate” in a digital circuit. They went on to make a “NOT gate” and, by combining them, the more complex “NAND gate”.

Formidable practical problems remain in deciding how to connect many individual bacterial components together into a working system. As living cells, they cannot be wired together like electronic components. They will probably need to be immobilised by encapsulation in some sort of micro-fluidic device, says Martin Buck, the biology professor on the Imperial team.

“We believe that the next stage of our research could lead to a totally new type of circuitry for processing information,” Buck says. “In the future, we may see complex biological circuitry processing information using chemicals, much in the same way that our body uses them to process and store information.”

Wanted: a plan to save Europe

 

"From the recent conversations I have had with European ministers and officials," [on the future of the Euro and the Eurozone] "the passenger on the Berlin U-Bahn or Athens Metro is just as likely to be right as the multitude of pundits and experts."

Philip Stephens, Chief Political Correspondent, Financial Times, Thursday 22 September 2011 (The photo is my - CJ's - addition. I was unable to steal Ingram Pimm's wonderful cartoon illustrating Mr. Stephen's article. Apologies, Mr. Pimm!)

My new friend Dieter

 

I exaggerate, I lie but it is like finding a friend.

"Wer die eigene Arbeit als die Quintessenz des von Kant, gar des von Parmenides begonnenen Denkens sieht, mag leider die Lebenssituationen von sich abschneiden, aus denen er zu dem wurde, als der er sich nun versteht. Die unendliche Macht des Begriffs bringt seine Wahrheit aus beliebigen, somit gleichgültigen Bedingungen des besonderen Individuums hervor, das ihn zuerst in seiner vollen Bestimmtheit ausspricht, – so ist gut hegelisch ein philosophischer Grund für das Vergessen zu formulieren."

Form Dieter Henrich Hegel im Kontext, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2010 (first published Frankfurt am Main in 1971, 2nd edition 1988), p. 10.

Translation on request

 
 

A word for John Bull

Here is my quote of the day, of the week in fact (Why not throw in the month?):

"Many people in the world say that the English are racists. I don't agree."

Ali Farka Touré the late Malian musician in conversation with the BBC music journalist Andy Kershaw in 2003 north of Timbuktu.  

Post Job

What a job I am making of posting here. It's been so long since I've written here - it's not that I haven't been trying on and off - that I received this email recently from a friend:

"Conor - how are you? It seems a long time . . . And a long time too since you posted on your blog. People disappear for a while generally because they're distracted by happiness, or by wretchedness or something awful has happened, or sometimes just inadvertently. Reassure me - Jenny"

Jenny is not his real name though he has published a novel under it recently, receiving a very positive review (of the 'go-out-and-buy-it' type) just before Christmas in one of the broadsheets. What, by the way, are these newspapers called now that they have almost all shrunk towards tabloid scale?   

Colin Burrows ended a review in a recent Saturday Guardian of a book by John Mullan Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature, on the business of publishing under a pseudonym or under no name at all, with the following lament:   

"Anonymous authorship was more or less killed off by the literary marketplace, and Mullan's book makes one feel more than a little nostalgia for its teasing concealments."

I'm not so sure about the killing off. I only know a small number of writers in London - I could count them on the fingers of one hand if a couple of my fingers were amputated - and they have published, taken together, two books anonymously within the last two months. Now if I knew twenty writers ... 

Where am I? Having made a hard job of posting, I am now sewing together, or trying to, what I have just written with a piece that was to be called 'Job' of all of eight months ago. It is a rough bit of sewing.

The

thread

is

'job'.

                                                         Job

 

Not the Old Testament Job.

I don't know whether it was just in my family or whether it was a middle-class Dublin thing or an Irish thing generally – I'm pretty sure that the word is not used in this sense by English people – but, when I was little, 'job' was, em, what you did on the toilet by using the muscles in your bottom to press hard when you had a pain there. You did a job. The job was the result of the push. It bobbed around in the water or there might be two of them or even three, with nicely curved ends. Jobs. Each time you did one or more, it or they were an impressively different brown to the time before. They were a different size and texture, the most interesting ones having a rougher, granulated, surface, irregularly encrusted with tiny pebble-like structures, often a different brown or a different colour, such as a shade of cream.

Was I proud of them? I cannot remember but as I write, pride comes to me, so I suppose I must have been. They were fine jobs, jobs well done. Sometimes they were big jobs, darker and even more solid than usual.

I had a dream last night of three jobs. The toilet was a German rather than an Irish one, that is to say, it had a water-less plateau where you can inspect your faeces before flushing them down. To talk of an Irish toilet is not correct. Like Irish law and public administration and indeed our language, the Irish toilet is English. The Slovenian philosopher Žižek has a rich passage in one of his books - I cannot remember in which, it is on my shelves but they are far away as I am in the back of beyond in Umbria and I cannot do a quick search on the internet since I have not yet asked Santi, the owner of the retreat house where I am staying, whether I can use his computer, I know that there is an internet connection (Could it be broadband?) but now is not the time to ask him, he is cooking -  yes, there is a passage in Žižek where he gives a comparative analysis of English, French and German toilets¹. He delves into the toilets'  cultural meanings and what their different forms tell us about the differences between the cultures.

There were two huge, quite dark, adult jobs in the German toilet in my dream. I knew that they were not mine. The third job I produced. It was just as impressive and adult as the two that were there already.

When I was three, my father got a big job. He hadn't had a job until then. We moved from Dublin to the town where the job was. My father was a doctor and the job was in Mallow County Hospital. It was a very difficult job. My father would come home after work - he worked long hours - and talk at length to our mother in our presence of the difficulties he was having at work.

                                                        (To be continued)

Notes
1. I am now back in London, so can give the reference:  Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, Verso, London, 1997, pp. 4-5.

Desperate measure

Desperate measure. My therapist says ...  My ex-girlfriend says, writes ...

I need to post something here. I've haven't posted for ages. The Way of the Cross, the way of the word. What would Warburg think of that as a remark? Nothing, probably? Something, perhaps.

What can I post? Anything? Down to the wall. Another Oompah Loompah dog?  Hardly.

Here is my street, Lupus, in Google Maps. Count five (houses) from the left and I'm somewhere down there, beneath two layers of probably still sleeping bodies, looking, on a beautiful April morning, at the trees in the school-yard opposite, one of which you just make out. Damn, it doesn't work! Desperate measure, to be continued.
 

Backwards

Reading the title essay in Jacob Taubes' Vom Kult zur Kultur (From Cult to Culture)¹, a collection of essays and articles written by the Jewish-German theologian and philosopher between 1953 and 1983 and published after his death, brings me back to Carl Einstein's book Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen² of 1933. C. Einstein was the writer on whom I did my thesis. Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen was his last book. After finishing the thesis, I found myself in a place similar in some ways to the intellectual space marked out in this book. I have, in a way, lived there ever since. Maybe Taubes would help me move on, by stimulating me into looking at the Einstein book again.  

Taubes' essay was written in 1954. Thirty-one years separate it from Einstein's book. The Nazi period and the Holocaust separate them. It is difficult to read the Einstein book without thinking of it as a premonition of the disaster, and it is difficult to read Taubes' essay without thinking of what happened.

The essay 'Vom Kult zur Kultur' turns around the person who was the model for Dr. Chaim Breisacher, a character who appears in Chapter 28 of Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus (1947). His name was Oskar Goldberg. Like Breisacher, Goldberg was a philosopher of culture. Goldberg had published his main work Die Wirklichkeit der Hebräer (The Reality of the Hebrews) in Berlin in 1925, having already presented it in lecture form some years earlier, between 1903 and 1908. Taubes describes Goldberg as a historian of myths who took his subject so seriously that he became a philosopher of myth.

Breisacher represents for Mann an intellectual forerunner of the conservative nihilism that led to Fascism and Nazism. Like Breisacher's, Goldberg's is a theory of decline. Culture is itself decline.

                  (To be continued)

 

Notes

1. Jacob Taubes, Vom Kult zur Kultur: Bausteine zu eine Kritik der historischen Vernunft, eds. Aleida and Jan Assmann, Wolf-Daniel Hartwich und Winfried Menninghaus, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich, 1996.
2. Carl Einstein, Die Fabrikation des Fiktionen, ed. Sibylle Penkert, Rowohlt, Reinbeck bei Hamburg, 1973. 

 

Cracked

I thought that I was mad but she is, I believe, madder. Crackeder (to be pronounced 'cractor'). Addled. Perhaps I am less mad than I thought. This is some consolation, of which I am in need.

Bitter

From bitter searching of the heart
...
We rise to play a greater part

                                        Leonard Cohen