Monday, January 10, 2011

Monday Jumble

Wow, I thought that Nurse Cutie cartoon was hilarious, but I guess no one else did!

Metal News
There has been some news on the gold and silver front. Interesting developments will be worth keeping an eye on. As usual I was looking for a much larger pull back in Au and Ag but they seem to be holding tight. Here are some items:
Judge Sides With GATA, Orders Fed To Present Her With Its Classified Gold Records For Private Review
I will wait to see if this really happens, but this is huge news (one way or the other).

One from Jesse:
Massive Silver Withdrawals From The Comex
Another item to keep tabs on.

Kid Dynamite has a good post on PSLV and the trading premium behind it (why?):
Silver Irony - PSLV, SLV

And of course how long was it going to be (5 minutes, a day?) until this type of thing gets ink:
Arizona Shooter’s Obsession with Returning to the Gold Standard
To be 100% fair to Mr. Mark Thoma (who I disagree with on things economic all the time, but he is a brilliant guy) he was asked to give some background on this angle by CBS Moneywatch. Still, will talk of a gold standard be outlawed next?

I am a long term bull and holder of physical gold and silver and I still believe in them long term. Short term I want to see some resolution in ugly price action (especially silver) before jumping in for more.

Are All New Life Forms about to be Discovered?
I have written about Lake Vostok a few times. From the Wiki entry:
Lake Vostok is the largest of more than 140 subglacial lakes found under the surface of Antarctica. It is located beneath Russia's Vostok Station, 4,000 metres (13,000 ft) under the surface of the central East Antarctic ice sheet. It is 250 kilometres (160 mi) long by 50 kilometres (31 mi) wide at its widest point, thus similar in size to Lake Ontario, and is divided into two deep basins by a ridge.
So this lake has been sealed off from the rest of the world for a LONG time, it is supersaturated with Oxygen, and under enormous pressure. Any microbes living there will be sure to have evolved insane anti-oxidant systems and enzymes that work in unknown ways. Why is this a big deal?

Again, natural products. Many of the best drugs (and almost all antibiotics) are natural products found to be made by plants, bacteria, fungi, etc. Here we have an untapped realm where all kinds of things are possible. This also fits in with my desire for a Pharmaceutical company to get into seawater bacteria screens for natural products. I had the chance to work at a small firm that used DNA isolated from sea soil samples (yes, there is tons of DNA in soil!) for expression studies to find new antibiotics. It was a great time. I love Pulse Field Electrophoresis.

Fellow blogger Kid Dynamite asked a bit ago why I do not spend more time going into Pharmaceuticlas/Biotech as it is my specialty after all. The reason is that I work for a top 3 Mega Pharmaceutical company and I never wanted my blogging to get entwined with my real life work. My company works with all kinds of firms and is aggressive in acquisitions so it often becomes hard to discuss various companies. I don't know about Wall Street, but the Biotech/Pharma world is very small. I had the luxury of working at a up and coming biotech in the golden years (1998-2002) of biotech and from that I know very well people in many areas in high positions spread across the industry. Legal, business, research, you name it and I probably know someone who holds that spot at many biotech/pharma firms. Of course I am always available via the email on the left to discuss generally anything a reader may want to know more about, or offer my own understanding of a company's leads or technology. Now you know.

Did You Know?
The best and most tested theorem on how the Moon came to be is that a Mars sized body collided with and early Earth. Here is some more to start:
Clouds Made of Rock Vapor Once Rained Magma on Ancient Earth
Nifty!

Have a good night.

7 comments:

EconomicDisconnect said...

Wow, I guess No one is around!

Kid Dynamite said...

you definitely shouldn't blog about biotech if it would effect your career. I was asking more for your personal investments.

side story: I had a "blog" friend who anonymously wrote a very crude, funny blog that any company would find inappropriate. He was a pharma rep, and got in big trouble when they finally linked it to him.

GawainsGhost said...

I thought the Nurse Cutie video was funny. Unfortunately, when I tried to view it there was a lot of distortion, so all I could do was listen. That seems to happen quite often on this new computer, probaby because Adobe doesn't have a Flash Player for a 62-bit board.

I don't know anything about pharmaceutical companies. I do know that pharmaceuticals have saved a lot of lives and prevented disease outbreaks. I'm not too wild about the side effects of these new drugs though. The way I look at it, if I have a germ that can't be killed by cigarettes and alcohol, I might as well die.

Anyway, I became disenchanted with science long ago, because it isn't science anymore.

This began when I was teaching science at a junior high back in the 80s, when crop circles were all the rage. Every time there was anything about crop circles in the news, the kids would come running in and start telling me about UFOs, flying saucers buzzing the planet, messages from outer space. This is what we call a "teachable moment," and I kept trying to convince them that there was some logical explanation for this phenomenon. But it was to no avail. I mean, when reputable publications like Omni and Scientific American were printing articles about space aliens with photos of crop circles, what kid was going to listen to his junior high science teacher?

Well, one morning I was eating breakfast and watching some news show, I believe it was Good Morning America, and they were interviewing these two old guys in England, who said they had started the whole craze in the 70s. They were best friends, and they would get off of work, stop by a pub, drink a couple of beers and eat cheese doodles, then draw some design on a napkin, and on their way home go out into a field and recreate it. They used a plank of wood and some rope, something like a swing. One of them would tie a long rope to his waist, and the other would wrap it around his body. So he would stand in place and turn around so that the rope would elongate, while the other would walk around with the swing flattening wheat. That's how they were able to make perfect circles.

When asked why they would do such a thing, one said, "Well, what else do you do after beer and cheese doodles?" And the other said, "These scientists, they're supposed to be educated men. It's just flattened wheat. You go out into a field and flatten it." I never laughed so hard in my life.

There wasn't another story about crop circles for at least ten years after that. And it really exposed to me how truly stupid people who pretend to be scientists are. Besides, the discipline has been totally corrupted. Like with the study on vaccines causing autism being exposed as a complete fraud, the global warming scam and all that.

I maintain my faith in the scientific method, which is pure. But I have very little faith in scientists, who are easily fooled and more easily bought and paid for.

Anonymous said...

Nurse Cutie was OK. It was awkward the way they would only move after they were finished speaking.

Is there not a way to get them to move and speak at the same time?

watchtower said...

Just checking in.

I thought the Nurse Cutie vid was pretty funny myself, especially liked the part where bringing home the bacon = hot nurse uniform.

I guess art really does imitate life sometimes, hee hee.

EconomicDisconnect said...

Snowed in here today big time! Maybe 12-15 inches out there right now. Going to have to go out at some point to clear walkway.

GawainsGhost said...

You know, GYC, I've only seen snow twice in my entire life. The first time was in San Antonio when I was 7. I got to build a snowman. The second time was on Christmas Eve in 2001. This was a few months after my father passed away, and I took my mother to midnight mass. When we left the church, it was snowing in the Rio Grande Valley. The last time it snowed down here was over 200 years ago, so it was quite remarkable. But it was a light snow, maybe a couple of inches, and it all melted away by noon the next day.

Occasionally, we get ice storms. I remember once when I was a teenager, I woke up and went outside and everything was frozen. Trees, grass, fences, cars, all covered with ice. Kind of freaky, really.

Other than that, we get I would say a week or two of weather below 60 degrees a year, usually in January and February. It's about 45 outside now, and that's pretty cold for these parts.