The Market, Energy, And Political Page, T+46 -- September 28, 2018

The Ryder Cup: wow, after a great start in the first round, the US team is getting trounced in the afternoon go, about the midpoint of the afternoon round. All four US teams being trounced:

• team 1: EUR up 4
• team 2: EUR up 2
• team 3: EUR up 6 -- the US team: Mickelson and DeChambeau; Michelson seems to be the weakest link in the US team
• team 4: EUR up 3

Pre-market:

• movers and shakers unhappy with something; all major indices down
• TSLA: down $35; down about 12%; surprising it held
• AAPL: flat; down slightly
• RDS-B: down 2%; pays 5.24%
• other major oil companies not trading yet

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Notes to the Granddaughters

On the way home from TutorTime yesterday afternoon, Sophia told me that "ten" is a "one and a zero."

We then discussed "eleven." Wow, she caught on quickly. Last evening she told her mom "ten" was a "one and a zero" and "eleven" was "two ones." And then with her right hand, drew a huge "1" and a huge "zero" in the air. She held up two fingers and called it "eleven."

I didn't really think about it until then, but that's really quite remarkable that the numerals used for ten, eleven, twelve, etc., are not only "representative"/hieroglyphics/emojis but also mathematically correct, if that makes sense. I'm sure somewhere someone explains it better. In base 2, for example, 11 is "three."

"We" wouldn't have had to use "10" to represent ten, but had we not, it would have been problematic, to say the least. The Romans didn't use "I⃞" for "ten." The Romans did not have "zero" as a placeholder and hammer and chisel could not make the oval/round zero we have all come to know and love.

Usually when I start talking about higher math with Sophia, she says, "Can we talk about this later?"

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The Lobster Book

Continuing.

Lessons From The Lobster: Eve Marder's Work in Neuroscience, Charlotte Nassim, c. 2018.

From page 17:

A flood of women swept into life science graduate schools in September, 1969. The draft exemption for male PhD students was ending, and far fewer men could take shelter from the Vietnam War in graduate studies. 

The universities were taken by surprise and had to scramble to fill places. Suddenly almost half the intake in the life sciences was female. In 1968, the Biology Department at San Diego had taken two women in a class of thirty. The next year there were thirteen. "There was a giant uproar!" Marder chuckles. ""We, the women, arrived, and they were completely hysterical; they thought civilization as they knew it was over. By the end of that year, everyone had forgotten. There were good students who were women, good students who were men. The next year they accepted fifty-fifty. In two years, entry into virtually every biology program around the country was gender neutral.

My own experience, entering graduate school about that time -- three years later than Marder -- was that that the women were super-smart for the most part. I never understood how some of the white males were accepted; the family must have been alumni/huge donors. But, across the board, the affirmative action programs were a disaster. That was my perception; I'm probably wrong. Anecdotal.

Allen Selverston's lab: crayfish model; switched to Homanus americanus, the American lobster.

The archetype of large amenable neurons, with an easily visible axon called "the giant axon," was the one that triggers the squid's escape response. That was the model for the trailblazing, Nobel prize-winning work by Hodgkin and Huxley in the 1940s. So candidate animals included sea hares, sea slugs, and various crustaceans such as lobsters.

I don't know if  I had heard of sea hares until now.

From page 19:

In the late 1960s, Don Maynard has astutely recognized the crustacean stomatogastric ganglion as particularly promising because it was an independent neuronal network with a countable number of neurons, an apparently simple single input nerve, and an output to accessible stomach muscles. Maynard  introduced this preparation to other neuroscientists, including the three pioneers, Allen Selverston, Dan Hartline, and Maurice Moulins, who were to become what you might all the founding fathers of stomatogastric ganglion studies.