rubisco

Light a candle.

May apple blossoms fed by the energy of sunlight caught by the tree's leaves beckon to honey bees. Apple trees are sexual beings. Offering nectar, their sticky stigmas wait under the warm spring sun for the brush of pollen.

The bees collect nectar, and make honey. In the second week of a bee's life, she eats lots of honey, which she converts to wax through special glands under her belly; her belly exudes wax scales, which other bees then harvest for the hive.

The bees chew the wax and shape it to form the honeycomb; they use hexagonal tubes to store the honey, getting the most volume for the least amount of wax. Ask a local mathematician to come up with a more efficient shape.

In the olden days, kids chewed on honeycombs. 'Course, in the olden days, most kids were breastfed, too. Now it's Enfamil and Bazooka Joe.

Light a candle.

Forests of plankton caught sunlight millions and millions of years ago. The plankton sank and was buried. Under increasing pressure and temperature, the bonds of life transform into hydrocarbons we burn today.

A few miles from here, petroleum is cracked in refineries--gasoline, oils, and paraffin all come from the same rich crude. Travel through the northern corridor of the New Jersey Turnpike and you can see the cracking towers lighting the sky, flames licking over a puzzle of giant pipelines and huge tanks.

Most candles today are made from paraffin.

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Just about every school child knows that plants capture sunlight and carbon dioxide to form "stuff": our food, our heat, our homes, our air all depend on photosynthesis. Carbon dioxide and water fueled by the energy of the sun form carbohydrates and release oxygen.

Chlorophyll gets all the glory--it captures the energy of photons, lassoing excited electrons like roping calves as they bounce from chlorophyll molecule to chlorophyll molecule, finally calmed down enough to be converted into chemical energy.

Still, after all is said and done, the light reaction leaves us with just ATP and NADPH--enough to keep you going if you're a bacterium, but nothing you'd serve at Christmas dinner.

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Credit Melvin Calvin for figuring out the cycle of reactions that fix carbon dioxide to organic compounds during photosynthesis. It's how an acorn can turn into a massive tree without "using up" soil.

The critical step is grabbing hold of a carbon dioxide molecule (relatively rare in our air, despite its starring role in global warming) and plying it into existing organic compounds, creating high energy hydrocarbon bonds that make the existence of humans possible.

At the heart of the process is an ancient enzyme rubisco. Some enzymes can catalyze millions of reactions per second.

Not rubisco--it churns out new molecules at the parkinsonian rate of 3 reactions per second.

Most enzymes are amazingly picky; each enzyme reacts only with very specific molecules.

Not rubisco--it gets confused. Oh, it mostly gets things right, grabbing a carbon dioxide molecule to fix to a carbon chain, but now and again it grabs oxygen instead. Oh, well.

It's an old, old enzyme.
It's an inefficient enzyme.
It's an unevolved enzyme.

It's also the most abundant protein on this planet.

graven image

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

-- Exodus 20: 4 (KJV)

I once had a man die under my hands while I was on the street. He had been shot multiple times in the chest, shortly after lunch. Not much I could do. Soon after the man was gone except for a burgundy stain on the sidewalk, an eruv of yellow tape defining his universe.

I went to a work meeting that evening--it did not go well. When it was clear it was not going well, I mentioned what had happened. Folks mumbled, I had made them uncomfortable. I do not talk about it much anymore.

When you see a photograph, you have the option of looking away. We are surrounded by images. Don McCullin could not look away.

We like numbers, quantification. How many died?

3000?
110,000?
160,000?
6,000,000?

I do not have that kind of imagination. No one does.
I have watched a child die. And my mother. Then my father.
My sister died, but I did not hold her hand. I like to imagine it was not too painful as her chest filled with blood.


A friend sent me Don McCullin's autobiography. Don McCullin takes photographs.

The aborigines believe a camera steals your soul. McCullin proves it. Like the executioner who performs his job admirably because he is affected by it, McCullin captures the souls of the dying. Or at least he did. It got to be too much for him. Now he does landscapes.

During Biafra's brief (and futile) struggle to break from Nigeria, most folks starved.

McCullin had a natural eye for composition, but that is not why he took pictures, at least if he is to be believed (and I believe him). Otherwise he would just be another pornographer.

You may have seen the picture. McCullin had traveled to a hospital for war orphans. The children are grotesque, large heads and bellies balanced on insect legs.

This child is an albino--and he has been ostracized by the other children. He carries an empty tin of corned beef, as well as its lid, stamped with the word "FRANCE" He is leaning over, barely able to stand, supporting himself by holding his right knee. He has on a tattered long-sleeve shirt and underwear. His eyes reflect sadness deeper than I can imagine.

Yes, the composition works, the angles and the light, the artistic dominance of the child's head in the frame--to focus on this, to intellectualize this photograph, to make it "arty" helps you step back a tiny bit from what McCullin witnessed. To step back from a child suffering is obscene.

I'm not a person who wants to go stealing images of other peoples grief, and things like that.... I don't sleep well, I think sometimes.... I wake up and think about things like this. I can still remember the day I saw a man shot in cold blood in front of me. And sometimes, it's not always convenient but these memories come back at the most terrible times. Sometimes at night, sometimes even on a beautiful sunny day when I'm sitting in my garden, or walking through some woodland. And you know, photography has been very very generous to me, but at the same time it's damaged me, really.

Don McCullin

We are visual creatures. But we are not loving ones.

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Don McCullin, Unreasonable Behaviour, An Autobiography, Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1990
Matt Kime, in a review of Don McCullin, A Retrospective, in TVcameramen, http://www.tvcameramen.com/lounge/Don_McCullin.htm

inside out

A Topologist's View of the Body

Perchlorate is present in virtually all milk samples, the average concentration in breast milk is five times higher than in dairy milk. Although the number of available measurements are few at this point, for breast milk samples with a perchlorate content greater than 10 g/L, the iodide content is linearly correlated with the inverse of the perchlorate concentration with a r2 of >0.9 (n = 6). The presence of perchlorate in the milk lowers the iodide content and may impair thyroid development in infants. On the basis of limited available data, iodide levels in breast milk may be significantly lower than it was two decades ago. Recommended iodine intake by pregnant and lactating women may need to be revised upward.

Andrea B. Kirk et al., "Perchlorate and Iodide in Dairy and Breast Milk," Environ. Sci. Technol., web release date February 22, 2005, http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/jcen?esthag/asap/html/es048118t.html

Ah, another environmental fountain of words. More sated Westerners, conquerors of the planet, seek to fight the good fight, to "protect" the environment, this soup we live in.

Maybe you're interested because your mother has breast cancer, or maybe you feel a little threatened by terpenes in your water. You're minding your own business, yet now you have to face some messy nonsense in this "environment"-

Swallow a long string. Keep feeding the string as it passes through your gullet. Eventually it will pass out your anus. You can tie the two ends, forming a nice loop. You are topologically related to a doughnut.

(Actually, given the holes in your nose leading to the pharynx, the holes in your nasolacrimal ducts leading to your nose, and the assorted other sorts of holes in your body, you are a bit more complex than a doughnut-we're closer to pretzels.)

It's easy enough to see one as a doughnut still separate from one's environment. Keep your mouth closed, your ass tight, and you can maintain a sense of identity.

Indeed.

Think of a cell deep in your body. The only qualification is that it has to be alive. Let your mind meander to 3 centimeters inside your liver capsule, or maybe you prefer thinking about a kidney cell nestled deep in your back.

If it is alive,

If it is alive, it respires--sugar combines with oxygen, heat and motion result. Life.

We think of ourselves as separate from the environment, and that is partially true, at least at macroscopic level. Still, without joining in the global party of life, consuming bits and pieces of sunshine, you cease to be.

The surface area of your skin is about 2 square meters.

Your lungs? About 100 square meters.

Your gut? 300 square meters.

While your Western sensibilities balk at this sort of nonsense, the rest of your body wants to be exposed. 400 square meters of you wants to absorb air and sugars and proteins and water. You have giant sails of mucous membranes specialized in absorbing anything and everything around you.

Meanwhile, you spew off methane and carbon dioxide, urea and heat.

To say you live "in" the environment confuses the issue. Don't let your skin define you. Go with your gut.