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Thursday, January 24, 2008

Niche

I've found my own little part of NUS. Been studying for the past few days in the Yong Siew Toh library, where there are really few people, and lots of quiet, and lots of wonderful music books for me to read.

I'm taking a break, just to keep the mind fresh for more medicine, and I'd just like to write a little about my love for music.

Music to me, is more than just a form of expression. I've been reading a few method books about music, and one writer wrote that music, or sound fits into the primal urge of man to establish space. You want your sound to fill the space, and claim it. In a way, it is reminiscent of Evangelion, the concept of penetrating somebody else's space. Just as the game of Go, is about the penetration of space.

I think I could write a lot about the concept of penetrating space, since that concept really touches on the human psyche, but i'd like to focus on the music today, and that really, music is about establishing a niche. About creating a space that is uniquely yours, or a form of expression.

I see music also as a means of challenging my learning processes. Each instrument is arbitrary. The scale on a stopped string instrument is logarithmic, while the scale represented on a piano is linear, and the scale on a blown instrument is arbitrary. The way we notate music is also linear, while guitar tabs and drum tabs are arbitrary. The mind needs to be challenged with it's perception of the world. And learning an instrument is about challenging all these preconceptions that we have about the auditory world.

The auditory world also intersects the visual world. Sound is as much about variance of frequencies as colour. I am developing my sense of perfect pitch, just as I have developed my sense of colour. I know when blue turns to green. But when i listen, i can hear notes turn from C to C sharp to D (but they are not equally apart from each other, as the primary colours are). Why is one sense centered, and the other sense not? (in the sense that i know pure blue is pure blue because it excites only the blue receptors, and pure red is pure red because it excites only the red receptors) as for sound, we are taught that the ear listens to the entire spectrum equally. So where does the tonal centre in our mind exist? Why is C pure or C# pure, and all the other in between frequencies just sharp or flat of these tonal centres? If there is no physical reason for this, then is this concept a mind concept? How do mind concepts affect our perception of reality? As to what is pure, and what is muddy?

Similarly, now i tune my violin (quite accurately) by thinking of a reference A. I hear the beating in my head, between the heard note and the imagined note, and i reduce that beating until it is in unison. With this, I can tune to any frequency I desire, just by hearing the frequency of the beating, and working out the time interval between them. Can this concept apply to colour? Where is the beating between two similar (but slightly off) colours? How can it manifest?

There are things we know exist, there are things we know might exist, and there are things we don't know they exist. By thinking, we can postulate the existence of something we do not observe, and look for it. As Joanna posted on her blog, I quote:

" Of the many things that were said in that conversation with Mr Douglas Gresham, two things he mentioned struck me quite a lot. One was "Always teach a child to search for the truth, because if he grows up always searching for the truth, he will find Jesus sooner or later." "

I think we're at the postulating stage, and we've been looking for him for a while, but until we find him, maybe it's best that we do not presume his existence.

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Love

Sometimes out of two almost equally good things, you can choose one to love exclusively. And sometimes you don't really know which one you love more. Or maybe you have two paths, and you're deciding which one to take. But once you've made your choice, you know if you're right.

If you made the wrong choice, you'd always be thinking about the other choice you had and wishing you'd have taken it. If you made the right choice, no matter how difficult the path may be, you'd always stick with it and reaffirm your decision not to take it in the first place.

I think this time I made the right choice. I'm happy with the what is, rather than the what could be.

Monday, January 07, 2008

To Be Or Not To Be!

ADDICTION MODULES AND PROGRAMMED CELL DEATH AND ANTIDEATH IN BACTERIAL CULTURES

Hanna Engelberg-Kulka1 and ­ Gad Glaser2 ­
Extract:

“To be or not to be, that is the question!” The principal decision of each cell is to
choose life or to choose death. An addiction module is a genetically well-designed
simple “biological bomb” (121) that enables the cell to make such a decision at
definite times and physiological conditions. In the addiction module system, the
straightforward choice is death, which is facilitated by a stable intracellular toxin
that causes cell suicide, that is, death from within.

Choosing life requires a dynamic antagonistic process. The cell can survive only in the presence of an active process, requiring either the continued production of an unstable antitoxin or some process that would prevent its degradation.

Thus, the principle of toxicity-antitoxicity of the proteic addiction module is attractive on several levels. This notion of toxicity-antitoxicity suggests fundamental questions for future research of which we shall mention several.

1. The toxins of addiction modules are biotechnologically important because
they represent an enormous reservoir of potentially useful antibiotics. In
view of the widespread development of multidrug resistance among bacterial pathogens, the intracellular induction of such antibiotics could be used as the basis for alternative therapies and thus help to solve what has
become a major public health problem.

Blah blah blah.