EclecticLip

I recently began my 500th week with my employer, during which time the stock price has risen from $40.00 to… uh, never mind. 
Expanding that thought out a little bit:

- 500 months ago (1967) Bill Gates was just another twelve-year-old übernerd — he hadn’t yet been enrolled (bankrolled?) into the exclusive prep school where he got access to his first computer

- 500 years ago (1508) Michelangelo started working on the Sistine Chapel (cool!)

- 500 decades ago (specifically, on January 18, 3102 BCE) by the Hindu calendar, the Kali Yuga started.  It’s a sort of “dark ages” in that tradition.  Fortunately, they last “only” 432,000 years.  I say “only” because that’s not long, compared to Brahman’s age of roughly 157 trillion (that’s 157,000,000,000,000) years. 

         http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_Time_Cycles

More concretely, the earliest copies of the Epic of Gilgamesh — the oldest preserved story in human history — were only written in about 2000 BC, by which point the historical Gilgamesh had already been dead for five hundred years.

While I’m on a “not only” kick, I might as well mention a couple articles recently from New Scientist that I came across.

First, some Earth microbes may be capable of surviving on Mars. This doesn’t imply they could survive travel across space (e.g. in comets) — that’s another quantum leap in feistiness — but it does prove that life is pretty darned tenacious.

If MRSA is conventionally called a superbug, then the above should qualify as “super-duper” bugs.

MRSA is a staph bacteria that has become resistant to conventional antibiotics. It’s generally accepted that misuse of antibiotics (e.g. stopping doses prematurely) allowed MRSA to develop.

Now, American scientists recently discovered some bacteria in an old 1970’s soil sample that was resistant to Ciproflaxin, an antibiotic first marketed in 1989. The implication (and I heard this from a microbiologist acquaintance once before) is that, whatever antibiotics humans have created or will create… …many microbe species have probably already encountered and developed resistance to, in their billions-year-old struggle of escalating chemical warfare against each other.

Which kind of puts us in our place.

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Even with the miracles of science (to use the old DuPont slogan)…

a mere 100 years of directed biochemistry
by millions (1,000,000’s) of specialist vertebrate mammals,

…probably pales in comparison to the inventiveness of…

1,000,000,000+ years of semi-directed biochemistry (directed only in the “survival of the fittest” sense)
by nonillions (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000’s) of bacteria.

(Hat tip to Wikipedia.)

Apparently, Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) says that a wiki / blog needs five committed contributors to be self-sustaining.  I posted to the Global Guerrillas blog entry instead of the source… because the original post is looooooooooooooong.
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I remember reading that it takes at least six molecules to demonstrate the behaviour of all three (common) phases of matter, but can’t find the source.  I’ll document that, when I get a reply.

(The basic premise is that, two molecules is enough to get solid or gas behaviour — it just depends whether the molecules are bonded or not — but liquid behaviour involves a more complex interaction of molecules, and thus needs more than just a couple molecules to “define”.)