Into the Wormhole of Genetic Memory

Award-winning writer, journalist, and mullet whisperer Michael Rutschky redirected me to thoughts on genetic memory by way of his link to a post on The Schpat Dope, Is There Such a Thing as Genetic Memory? The following passage, in particular, got my mental gears grinding:

Their findings: rats that had been fed the livers and brains of rats that had been stressed learnt to avoid pain more quickly. This they found out was due to chemicals produced by the stressed rats, the higher the stress the higher the levels of these chemicals and the quicker the learning rate.

Does this qualify as proof that eating animals that died in fear passes that fear on to the eater? Does this mean that after countless generations of eating scared, stressed animals has led humanity to be more fearful and stressed? If so, why aren't meat eating wild animals like lions and tigers and bears (Oh my!) full of fear and stress? Are prey animals taken down in the wild less full of fear and stress than domestic livestock? Are lab rats rolled around in sealed jars more full of fear and stress than domestic livestock and free-roaming wildebeests? Are lab rats fed a diet of chopped up lab rats that were rolled around in sealed jars more likely to inherit the fear and stress of their tortured predecessors than humans fed a diet of chopped up chickens that were kept in wire cages? Are the stress and fear of tortured lab rats more "contagious" than, say, the stress and fear of a capybara killed by having its windpipe crushed by a jaguar?



And how could any of that be proved?

I believe that eating severely stressed animals is worse for you than eating animals that were happy right before we slit their throats or bashed their heads in or shot them with a Muzzy MX-3 100 Grain 3-Blade broadhead.

They think in images—prose is for them a code

My wanderings around the web which led me to this post, in reverse:

A contagious information pattern that replicates by parasitically infecting human minds and altering their behavior, causing them to propagate the pattern. An idea or information pattern is not a meme until it causes someone to replicate it, to repeat it to someone else. All transmitted knowledge is memetic.

Meme

The only ones who actually wish to share the mischievous destiny of those savage runaways or minor guerillas rather than dictate it, the only ones who can understand that cherishing & unleashing are the same act—these are mostly artists, anarchists, perverts, heretics, a band apart (as much from each other as from the world) or able to meet only as wild children might, locking gazes across a dinnertable while adults gibber from behind their masks.

WildChildren

"Rebellion to tyrants
is obedience to God."
—Thomas Jefferson

Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension

Which I got to by way of Directory > Society and Culture > Cultures and Groups > Cyberculture.

Does anyone still use Yahoo's directory search? Does anyone remember when that's basically what Yahoo looked like? Remember when it was just a college project?

Exploring Yahoo's directory provides more opportunities for random finds compared to the more common keyword searches. The directories offer you avenues of exploration you may not have thought of otherwise.

the sound of the celestial realm

Early this morning, the Colorado Rockies defeated the San Diego Padres 2 to 1 after 22 innings of play. 22 INNINGS!!! It took them over 6 hours to finish the game.

Wait a minute.

So is it a big deal because the game ran so late, 1:21 AM? Or is it a big deal because they played for over 6 hours? Both?

I'm on my feet and moving around for more than 6 hours on a regular basis. And I've been on my feet and moving around for longer than that and past 4 AM a whole bunch of times. Aren't these guys professional athletes? I guess most of them couldn't hang in the bar and restaurant industry.

Yeah, the story's good in the confines of Major League Baseball news but it's not much in the way of human performance. There is some excellent stuff here, though:

"This was a good game to get outside yourself," Hurdle said. "About the 16th inning, I said, 'Hey boys, no matter what's in front of us, there's a world of people out there who've got harder rows to hoe than we do. No matter what happens the rest of the night, have some fun with this thing.' "

Now that's something I can respect. Even if it's just a game it's still a real battle that you really want to win. Go through some tough times with a bunch of other people and you'll be bonded to them. That's something that interests me. The men on those baseball teams went through something intense and real that night, and probably some unreal stuff, too. Imagine slugging it out under all those lights in front of all those people. I bet all those guys slept well after that.

Maybe the game was a testament to man's ability to stave off boredom.

Anahata (Sanskrit: अनाहत, Anāhata) is the fourth primary chakra according to the Hindu Yogic and Tantric (Shakta) traditions.
In Sanskrit the word anahata - means unhurt, un-struck and unbeaten. Anahata Nad refers to the Vedic concept of unstruck sound, the sound of the celestial realm. [Anahata]

Apoptosis: Pulse of Life

Life's many layers blow my mind.

The interweaving of seemingly disparate wormholes and mindthreads from across the blanket of reality and even from beyond the fabric itself, seeing how it all connects...beginning to see how it all connects, sometimes visibly and sometimes you can just feel it.

Life and death. Good and evil. How beautiful is the above entity? Is it odd that we instinctively know we're looking at a manifestation of life? That's prostate cancer, my friends. Real bad shit. [snicker] Odd how something so deadly can be beautiful. Guess it isn't, though. A great many beautiful things will kill you. Death itself is a thing of beauty. Death is a polytentacled energy vector. Death is simply energy transfer and movement on the atomic level.

Mitochondriate eukaryotic cells live poised between life and death, because mitochondria still retain their repertoire of molecules which can trigger cell suicide.[16] This process has now been evolved to happen only when programmed. Given certain signals to cells (such as feedback from neighbors, stress or DNA-damage), mitochondria release caspase activators which trigger the cell-death inducing biochemical cascade. As such, the cell-suicide mechanism is now crucial to all of our lives.

Cell-suicide mechanism? That'd be a good band name. Biochemical Cascade. Bad-ass.

Programmed cell death. Some cells are designed to die in specified situations. Their deaths benefit us.

Beautiful. We live and we die every day in a million different ways, the pulse of life.

We All Love Snuppy

I see articles such as the following as signs that cyberpunk is upon us.

A South Korean company says it has taken its first order for the cloning of a pet dog.

Craziness...

Speaking of cyberpunk, peep this:

Sarah Lipman, co-founder and R&D director for Power2B, suggested an almost mystical solution, somehow tapping into users' "neural networks" to navigate a mobile phone interface "using touch and pre-touch input."

And how trippy is this:

The dilemma, left unsolved by the panelists, was how to squeeze the user through that window, past the cashier, to sample all the things in the store, without guilt, while still feeling grateful to the cashier who seemed, all along, to be standing in the way.

All this cyberpunk and psychonautical literature from an article about a panel of human behavior and technology experts at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which I think has a stupid and misleading headline.

Speaking of psychonauts, take a gander at this firsttime salvia user's experience: The World as a Pop-up book.

The rippling turned into an intense electric rolling, i began to sweat profusely and the world changed fast. Apparently I held my hands out in front of me for a while, like I was trying to tilt reality. I don’t know when it happened, but I realized this unbelievable truth. I finally learned that the world, existence, all of it doesn’t actually exist…its all a big joke, a conspiracy against me, and my friends were in on it.

Going back to the cloning thing. You know what makes that whole article hilarious? It's got this fairly scientific or serious tone and then near its final lines we find:

But the team did succeed in creating the world's first cloned dog two years ago - an Afghan hound named Snuppy.