Two Hands Approach to the English Language Home Page   Blog of the
Two Hands Approach to the English Language
teacherbook
studentbook
sentencebank
forms
Archives
Blog
quotes
Click here if you need help navigating the site about
search

main
comments
survey
2010.02.04
giant squids and responsible reporting


posted by stedawa on 10 Feb 04 4:15 pm permalink AddThis Social Bookmark Button  
2009.10.21
veronika asks; david gray sings babylon

Chanced upon this video via veronikaasks, a great website that features interviews with mostly women writers.

Not sure why the song has the title Babylon, but its reference to heart and feeling over mind is worth noting.



posted by ramblin' rose on 09 Oct 21 8:41 pm permalink AddThis Social Bookmark Button  
2009.09.25
the mystery of being human

sketch of face by stedawa


I provide a link to an essay I wrote back in 2000 called The Mystery of Being Human. I was teaching at Kumoh National University of Technology, and was working on my M.Ed. through the University of Southern Queensland.

That year was the first year in the UN Decade of the Culture of Peace, which goes until 2010. Another overlapping decade of the UN is the Decade for the United Nations Literacy Decade, which runs from 2003 to 2014. The other decade is the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development which runs from 2005 to 2014.

The themes are loaded with related issues. I guess anyone who makes an effort in any way towards realizing these goals or the Millenium Goals will be helping make the world move towards that elusive goal of World Peace.

I wonder to what extent I have been a peace-builder in the past seven years.

I would like to put it in installments here, but time is of the essence, as I am relocating to an as yet undetermined location.

Please excuse the declining frequency of new bloggits (this may continue until early August), but the bloggist's road is strewn with road blocks and hurdles that I must hurtle past.


posted by stedawa on 09 Sep 25 11:33 pm permalink AddThis Social Bookmark Button  
2009.09.07
bacteria almost randomly seek position polar to current position

I am only partially understanding this, but it is worth noting: apparently bacteria almost always seek position(s) polar to current position when breaking off from an already large cluster assembly to make a new small cluster assembly — intuitively without any cellular machinery telling it what to do.

In other words, once an area (am not sure what shape the large areas is on this) has a large number of bacterial cells (not sure what the saturation point is before break-off), some unattached bacterial cells start congregating at a location "polar" to the locale of the large cluster assembly.

Considering the opposite seems to be fundamental at the cellular level.


Really Random Receptors

L. Bryan Ray

Science, Science Signaling, AAAS, Washington, DC 20005, USA

Bacteria can sense tiny changes in the concentration of food molecules and can adjust their swimming motion to move toward the source of a gradient. They can do this in part because they localize enormous clusters of thousands of transmembrane receptors at specific positions at opposite ends of the cell, the cell poles. Surprisingly, evidence has suggested that formation and maintenance of such clusters may occur through stochastic self-assembly of clusters, rather than by association of receptors with some sort of anchor. But to test this idea rigorously, one needs the ability to detect and count single receptor proteins even if they are densely packed in clusters. That’s a job for PALM (photoactivated localization microscopy), a technique in which fusion proteins containing a photoactivatable moiety are stimulated with a low intensity of UV light that activates a single molecule at a time in a small area monitored in a microscope. This allows optical resolution 10 to 100 times better than the diffraction limit for light microscopy. Greenfield et al. analyzed over 1 million receptor molecules and observed that many were present as single receptors or small clusters, consistent with a stochastic model of cluster assembly. They also extended a mathematical model in which the receptors are randomly inserted in the membrane but can be captured and incorporated into existing clusters and showed that the model could account for the observed distribution of receptors. Because of this capture by existing clusters, the density of new clusters is highest at a position farthest from a large cluster. This, the authors explain, means that through random formation of clusters, a cell with a large cluster at one pole will normally form a new large cluster at the opposite pole. Generation of new membrane occurs in lateral parts of the cell, further favoring clustering of receptors toward the poles. The authors propose that these processes can give rise to distinct large clusters of receptors of appropriate size and stability, all without any specific cellular machinery to position the receptors.

D. Greenfield, A. L. McEvoy, H. Shroff, G. E. Crooks, N. S. Wingreen, E. Betzig, J. Liphardt, Self-organization of the Escherichia coli chemotaxis network imaged with super-resolution light microscopy. PLoS Biol. 7, e1000137 (2009). [PubMed]


posted by stedawa on 09 Sep 07 2:54 am permalink AddThis Social Bookmark Button  
2009.07.14
in your hands - video



Charlie Winston's video In Your Hands shows the frustration of joblessness coupled with the need to leave things and let the Divine take care of them.

Check out the official music video at realworldrecords or myspace.

mini-snap of Show Of Hands promo poster
A bit reminiscent of the angst of the Show of Hands Witnessalbum.


posted by chairman dao on 09 Jul 14 6:58 pm permalink AddThis Social Bookmark Button  
2009.07.08
simple English wikipedia

For those EFL or ESL students out there:
Simple English Wikipedia


posted by ramblin' rose on 09 Jul 08 6:42 am permalink AddThis Social Bookmark Button  
video: jerry lewis goes rhapsodic on the typewriter



posted by chairman dao on 09 Jul 08 3:22 am permalink AddThis Social Bookmark Button  
EARLIER 7  

Journalism [and this blog] is literature [or at least a written time capsule] in a hurry. Matthew Arnold