To read (recommended by Stan)

In Search of Memory, Eric R.Kandel The Emergence of a New Science of Mind
Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun

Our NY vacation

Saturday 23th
arrival to Newark airport, Bob's parents met us and took to Teenek home.

Sunday 24th
to Upstate NY
dinner at Simon's

Monday 25th
Ski
dinner at Simon's
Tuesday 26th
Beacon Falls, CN
Marine Aquarium Norwalk, CN
Papya Thai

Wednesday 27th
American Museum of Natural history
Rubin museum of Art
Chineese restaurant
THURSDAY, 12/28
Guggenheim Museum
Frick collection
Ground Zero
FRIDAY 29th
The Cloisters link

NPR link

Programs Archive

San Francisco Weather

want to see?

Андерсен. Жизнь без любви

We should see it sometimes link

Singing in SF

A list of Bay Area groups

This sounds very interesting:
The Loose Canons (SF/Oakland): a 10 voice womens a cappella ensemble, sings intriguing songs from all over. Rehearse Sunday evenings from 6:30-9pm. Contact Jillian Tallmer, 415-668-2284, or YIDL@peoplepc.com.
Events: A Cappella Festival
2006 Bay Area Regional
Saturday, February 25th 8PM
PALACE OF FINE ARTS
3301 Lyon St, San Francisco
Tickets from City Box Office - 415-392-4400

SFRV are Artists-in-Residenc e with Seventh Avenue Performances and made its debut in 2004 with a sold-out performance of Victoria 's Requiem. Our concerts feature rarely performed choral works from the Renaissance and in 2005 the group began "The Polyphony Project", a five year program exploring Renaissance music by dedicating a year to each of the major Renaissance "schools"; during 2007 we perform music from the " English School " with these concerts:

TRINITY
(featuring the Short Services of Gibbons & Tallis & Parson’s First Service)
May 5 & 12, 2007 – 7:30 PM

THE REGINA MONOLOGUES
(featuring Elizabethan madrigals with readings from Shakespeare’s Sonnets)
July 28 & 29, 2007 – 7:30 PM

EVENSONG for ALL HALLOW’s EVE
(Our traditional Halloween concert features the Dirge Anthems of Morley & Byrd, other works)
October 27 & 28, 2007 – 7:30 PM

What to do in Upstate NY ?

Canaan weather link
Ski Areas
1.Bousquet Ski Area - more info very small resort
101 Dan Fox Dr, Pittsfield, MA
(413) 442-8316
It a nice little ski area with beginner and intermediate trails.

2.Alpine Slide-Jiminy Peak more info
snow report
price: Adult 8h-$50, teen 8h-$40 trail map
37 Corey Rd, Hancock, MA
(413) 738-5500

3.I think it is same place as 2.Brodie Mountain Ski Area - more info
36 Williamstown Rd, New Ashford, MA
(413) 443-4752

4.Ski Butternut Ski Area & Ski & Board Shop- more
conditions
23 State Rd, Great Barrington, MA
(413) 528-2000

5. Otis Ridge Ski Area -
more
conditions
159 Monterey Rd, Otis, MA
(413) 269-4444
Double chairlift, T-bar, J-bar, three rope tows; patrol, school, rentals; snowmaking; cafeteria. Night skiing (Tues-Sun). Longest run 1 mile; vertical drop 400 feet. The remaining 10 trails are also "skiers' trails"--woodsy, lovely, with the feel of old New England.
All area adult $30 only.

6.Catamount Ski Area - more info
State Route 23 E, Hillsdale, NY
(518) 325-3200
Catamount again?
Route 23, South Egremont, MA
(413) 528-1262 - call

7. Berkshire East Ski Area - more info
S River Rd, Charlemont, MA
(413) 339-6617

8.Blandford Ski Area: Ofc - more info
41 Nye Brook Rd, Blandford, MA
(413) 848-2860

9.High Adventure Ski & Snowboard - more info
1054 Troy Schenectady Rd, Latham, NY
(518) 785-0501

Other attractions:
Dark Ride Project - Center for Robotic-Arts & Eric Rudd Studio
robots
While riding the Sensory Integrator in the Dark Ride Project, normal reality is taken away in order to allow a free fall into the reality of the artist. First the walls, floor and ceiling disappear; then the sense of place goes, as will the sense of time and distance...
General Phone: (413) 663-6662
Project/Reservation Office: (413) 664-9550

The Fields Sculpture Park

Ventfort Hall

Historic Deerfield

Survival of the fittest text

If "survival of the fittest" has any validity as a slogan, then the Bible seems a fair candidate for the accolade of the fittest of texts.
-Hugh Pyper, "The Selfish Text: The Bible and Memetics".

More from his lecture:
..Western culture is the Bible's way of making more Bibles.
The intriguing questions then become how the bible alters its environment to increase the likelihood of its being replicated and why it has been so conspicuously successful in this... The bible must be read and must make itself read if there is to be reproduced. Its success in achieving this is what makes it an example of a highly adaptive active replicator.
In this view the biblical reader, then, acts as the site of transfer of the information contained in the text to the meme-pool in which he or she operates. The book itself encodes memes which once active in the mind lead the human agents of that meme-pool to produce more examples of the text. But like all memes, in Dennett's view, they encounter competition. People have a lot of other things to do with their time and energy besides copying bibles, indeed a lot of other texts to read. What has lead to the particular success of the bible in this competition for mental space?...
If the primary evolutionary drive is for survival, then a virus or a meme that 'persuades' its host that it is necessary to the host's own survival and therefore conveys a reproductive advantage will have an instant welcome into the replicatory machine....This has resonances with the account that Zygmunt Bauman offers of the whole enterprise of human culture. Culture, he claims, is a human construct designed to fend off the threat of death. It is a survival mechanism, which finds a way of promising a form of survival in the face of the inevitability of individual death. For Bauman, the Jewish tradition is the clearest case of the subsuming of individual death in communal survival. The individual may die, but his or her genes and memes will carry on. The duty of the individual then, in the sense of his or her best survival strategy becomes one of ensuring the survival of the group, not simply his or her own prolonged life. Christianity has adopted the alternative strategy of a promise of immortality, in that the believer's death is caught up in the context of the resurrection of Jesus. Both genetically and memetically, the afterlife of the believer is strictly irrelevant except in so far as belief in personal immortality act to sustain the continuity of the meme pool....

.....The propagation of the text, and the founding of new communities are also linked to the survival of the reader and his or her community, or meme-pool. The Hebrew bible is full of admonitions about the duty to hand down its teaching, and by implication the text, to the next generation. Secondly the text contains a strong message of evangelisation. The survival of the reader's community depends on the production of new texts and new communities. This complex of memes and of strategies forms a powerful ensemble to ensure the accurate transmission of the text....
The bible contains powerful instructions as to its own unique worth and the limits to be placed on the infiltration of foreign information or texts into the communities which propagate it. The whole process of canonisation, for instance, reveals a complex interaction between text and community which serves, for example, to oust the fledgling apocrypha and turn the community's attention to the ever-growing task of copying and commentating on the biblical text with an increased sense of its importance and of the need for its conservation....Even more amazing is the development of communities of those supposedly excluded by the text, the Gentiles, who find ways of identifying themselves as Israel and arrogating to themselves both the promises and the duties imposed by the text, chief among which is the duty to ensure the connivance and dispersal of the text. Here the 'gene-pool' of Judaism, with its claim of descent from Abraham, is replaced by a meme-pool, a claim of descent from Abraham's faith, a line of argument already presaged in the Old Testament itself....This is an astonishing success and one of crucial importance to the propagation of the text. The consequence of its incorporation into the canon of the Christian bible is an exponential leap in the number of copies produced. However, it may also be true that the text turns against the communities that have sustained it if that is to its advantage. The horrid record of Christian antisemitism shows the consequences of the reappropriation of the filter mechanisms for memetic purity being turned against the original host community as the bible takes on a new existence as Christian Scripture. A prime exemplar of the selfishness of the text might be seen in the reformation where the text operates to cause a major breach and disruption in the community which sustained it in order to take advantage of the new technology of printing through the propagation of a meme that removed the authority of interpretation from the institution to the individual and to the possibilities of reproduction within vernacular language communities. The peril of too close an association with the host community may be that the text will fall with the community that guards it. The success of the bible has been predicated on its ability to 'jump ship' when necessary.....
My own view.... is that the bible has so firmly entrenched a place in our culture that it is ineradicable. It is not a parasite but a constituent part of the great complex of meme complexes that can be designated 'western culture', part of the exosomatic genome of that culture's members. More than that, I see it ... as an indispensable source of what might be called 'memetic diversity.' In agricultural genetics, one of the most worrying trends has been the loss of diversity from the appellations of food plants and animals. .. Ease of marketing may well win out against nutrition. However, there is a potential disaster looming if the super variety is suddenly attacked by a pathogen or if there is a major climatic shift. A variety may be fit for the purpose and the conditions of the moment, but what if conditions change?

Here it becomes vitally important to maintain a 'gene pool' of wild relatives of the crop plants which may themselves have all sorts of drawbacks from the point of view of the technology of farming, but which have shown themselves able to fend for themselves in this competitive world over time. Such wild populations contain a huge diversity of genetic material maintained over time and a vast potential for diversity and for change. Can we view the Bible as a sort of cultural 'memetic reserve'? Parts of it may seem irrelevant, redundant, even detrimental to our survival, but it has kept going. As Medawar and Plotkin indicate, it may serve to maintain a memetic richness and complexity, a inexhaustible source of variety which may contain the unexpected counter to forces that threaten to impoverish our cultural lives.

Sand Dollars

The sand dollars that we find on the San Francisco Ocean Beach used to look very different when they were alive. Most live sand dollars are found at depths of 30 to 40 feet (9-12 m).Their larvae travel many miles swept along by ocean currents.

Typhlonectes natans

I have found this animal while looking for available sequences for gonadotropin-releasing hormone II in the Gene Bank. Try to guess where it belongs in the animal kingdom :)
We later saw it in the NY Central Park Zoo terrarium.
Neither worms nor eels, caecilians (not Sicilians) are members of an ancient family of amphibians. These animals went underground long before the dinosaurs appeared. Typhlonectes natans is one of the only ones that spends a great deal of time in an aquatic environment. This species is native to Columbia (South America), and grows to 18 to 22" in length. It is a dark grey- black in color.
There is no trace of limbs or pelvic or pectoral girdles left in caecilians.
You can find them in pet stores under the label "Sicilian Worm" or "Rubber Eel."link

Тщательные наблюдения показали, что детеныши обитающей в Кении яйцекладущей червяги Boulengerula taitanus (Caeciliidae) поедают ее кожу, которая в этот период меняет свой цвет и клеточное строение, набухает и становится мягче. В клетках верхних слоев кожи появляется много жировых включений.

Детеныш ползает по телу матери, прижимаясь головой к ее коже, и отрывает верхний слой эпителия при помощи нижней челюсти, вооруженной мелкими острыми зубами. Такое «вскармливание» дорого дается матери: за неделю она теряет примерно 14% веса, а детеныши за то же время вырастают в длину на 11%.

Shadow of reflection

Very interesting artist, I liked the most this art work with a shadow of reflection.
How do you capture such a fleeting image?


Натюрморт с раковиной
Гилазутдинова В Н

South American Ornate Horned Frog

pets

No 1

So many people have blogs today that I should also give it a try. Let us see whether this will be the first and only record or there will be a continuation. It is not so easy to write in another language, but I will start in English – I still did not get the stickers for the keyboard!

Is every blog read by someone? Do people publish their random thoughts for themselves or for the world to read? Do they expect it to be some kind of legacy? Will this legacy stay there when the power is down and the server is not functioning? I do not think that posting my own ramblings collection would provide me with any answers to those questions. Rather I think having them in one place (as opposed to in emails to friends) would help me to organize my own thoughts, priorities and plan what to read and see in the future.