Santa Claus off the East Coast seems to open his mouth and drive an ape with a steering wheel mounted to his head toward the West Coast or Southern California. Perhaps is the whosh of winter wind driving men towards West Coast "sonny beaches". Coincidentally, today I had a few words via email with Mandy O. Smith at GAIA Herbs in North Carolina, basically requests for more detail concerning the composition of GAIA Herbs Astragalus Root Extract.

Well, today I was the victim of a hilarious practical joke that nudged me out of a site I have been using for R&D featuring superior facilities. It must have been a horselaugh to the Almighty. I was conned into diving in towards a workstation after an official-looking manager in a way that startled a chief librarian in a medical science library when she showed up a few minutes after opening time, so that she found me guilty of a violation of acceptable protocol by implementing premature entry and gave me the heave-ho at the hands of the security management of the facility. Perhaps the man I followed owned the place. (At least I escaped with my 1GB Flash Drive, after telephoning the security staff to secure it for me as a separate operation. I was startled into leaving the terminal without extracting my memory stick.) It was crucial NOT to get the jump on the medical science librarian by following other senior staff in at opening time. I had been using the science library for quite a while, and really should have known better. Their computers have software that lets investigators build link nests more rapidly than at most public facilities. For some reason, library administrators in less prestigeous research environments (or Microsoft programmers) often wound the browser editing system command line handling, forbidding users to conveniently pick up site addresses with a single keystroke and stuff them into an address list to build a link nest. Convenience is disabled sometimes in a way that keeps public library researchers in the dark, fumbling to enter long address lines with odd spelling instead of just picking them up and stuffing them where they should go to build a link nest quickly, say for a self-study guide application. They think this makes the world too smart for them, it seems. I am sorry that the public seems comparatively ill-served by an attack on its capacity for constructing higher intelligence to help itself. Meanwhile, your physician in a medical science library can probably whiz right along at building a hyperlinked self-study guide, zooming way out in front, while investigators in Wichita public libraries get stuck with a lengthy string of strange symbols to enter with their fingers in order to do the equivilant thing.

If Link-On did, he might get depressed and take some heavy ribbing from his Heavenly Father about it. No, I guess Link-On should probably cool down and concentrate on top hat problems, and leave the wig to Little Orphan Annie. The wig seems to be preparation for soulful moments that are an analgesic for pain and of service to the spirit of another fellow, or an investigation of the psychologically possible, perhaps. Abraham Lincoln would have focused on medicine like flavoring or circumcision for his case of the hypo to prepare for some other brand of fishing, no doubt. Circumcision discourages phimosis, paraphimosis, urinary tract infection, and cancer of the penis, possibly the motive for its introduction by the original Abraham of Abraham and Sarah. And it made life sweeter in many cases. But the below-the-belt issues are often secondary in business to preparations of the mind symbolized by the stovepipe hat of a top cat, such as product or service planning, marketing, and problems involving diligence usually having little to do with the politics of ecstasy associated with wigs, beauty, and superior stirring equipment. Securing enough money will help fix those teeth, pay for the operation, secure the best medicine for our anti-aging predicament, get better clothing, and make normal romance possible and maintainable. On the other hand, there is little need now for a beard to shield one against the sun or the cold wind, the kind of protection required by outdoorsmen in olden time. Glamour is an interesting thing to consider, but it often seems to grow weaker. Meanwhile Orion rises above the horizon like a Phoenix in the East at the 1st hour of sidereal time as the leading breast of Cassiopeia passes through the Meridian, a sight perhaps correlated to the above scene. As he rises in his pursuit of Andromeda bearing his chalice of Taurus like a toast (to her soulmate lips of Perseus, the Pleiades, and Aries), Aquarius, showing some bottom, slips moonwalking backwards over the Western horizon. At twilight November 2008, Venus (-4) and Jupiter (-2) are visible in the West not far from each other as the zero hour ray of the Vernal Equinox begins its passage through the meridian's zenith.
Music: Jokerman

My friend suggested lunch, and when I suggested a spot, he drove me there. However, we spoke primarily on engineering, technical, and medical topics without delving into the romping rump topic zone.
Music: Free Man in Paris by Joni Mitchell, Help Me by Joni Mitchell.
Pursuit of Life
Dear Friend,
Thanks for lunch and the sparkling coversation over cookies, yogurt, and chips. Incidentally, when I speak of rejuvenation rates, I refer to the telomere reconstruction rates measured by labs like Repeat Diagnostics or TA Sciences. One loses about 50 base pairs of telomere DNA every year to cell division telomere loss. This applies to mitotically competent cells like blood granulocytes, leukocytes, and to some adult stem cells. Thus, a telomere reconstruction rate of 400 base pairs (bp) per year corresponds to a rejuvenation rate of 8 years per year. TA Sciences has measured telomere reconstruction rates of 9 years per year (460 bp/year) with TA-65, an astragaloside-derived chemical which I strongly suspect is cycloastragenol, judging from Geron patent literature. As I say, telomeres get shorter as cells divide until a loop opens up at the end of the chromosome after 50 cell divisions or so for many adult cells. This exposes a DNA double-strand break that triggers a cell cycle checkpoint, and the cell enters the senescent state, in which its patterns of gene expression change and cause the cell to change its morphology. In particular, dermal fibroblasts enlarge about 3x, and begin to secrete collagenase and stromelysin to the extracellular matrix, which degrades the extracellular matrix. In addition, the cell stops secreting TIMP1 and TIMP3 matrix metalloproteinase inhibitors that protect the extracellular matrix. One can regrow telomeres by applying small-molecule telomerase activators in a cyclic manner, until the telomere t-loops close again and the cell returns to the youthful state. Dermal fibroblasts then secrete collagen and elastin to maintain the extracellular matrix, rather than collagenase and stromelysin to degrade it. Rejuvenated adult stem cells replace hair melanocytes, restoring color to grey hair. However, the process is glacially slow at 9 years per year, like aging itself, and so we have just recently learned to keep it up until youth is restored. Until recently, we could put in plasmids to activate telomerase to repair telomeres, but now we can just maintain cyclic treatment with astragalosides to eventually get similar results. As I say, a DNA double-strand break leading to the condition of cellular senescence usually is aquired by mitotic cell division, and the associated condition is termed replicative senescence. However, DNA double-strand breaks also occur via oxidative damage, so that vitamin C, an antioxidant, lowers the DNA double-strand break rate. The associated DNA double-strand repair rate can be accelerated, if memory serves, by Cat's Claw Extract or AC-11. The associated rejuvenation process may be modeled mathematically using the aging rate B, which I have named after Dr. Calvin B. Harley, whose name appears on many Geron patents associated with small molecule telomerase activators to enable DNA repair leading to a rejuvenated condition of the cells. B < 0 corresponds to rejuvenation, where the model age t = t0 + B(delta_t), and t0 is the initial age. For a rejuvenation program, the time required to reach a desired model age t from initial age t0 is
delta_t = (t - t0)/B.
For astragalus extracts, -9 < B < -7, for TA-65 -9 < B < -8, where B is given in years of rejuvenation per year. The usual situation for life-extending drugs like vitamin C is 0 < B < 1, corresponding to deceleration of the aging rate. B =1 represents normal aging, and B > 1 represents accelerated aging, such as we observe in diabetes when high blood sugar drives up protein carbonylation leading to higher generation rates for free radicals, thus yielding a higher rate of double-strand DNA breaks per unit time, so that more cells per unit time arrive at the senescent state by a DNA damage mechanism associated with diet, rather than with cell division. Under the circumstances, a quick and easy way to measure telomere length is in demand, so that experimenters can measure how their choice of DNA protectants, DNA repair accelerators, and telomere DNA repair enzyme activators is working to fix up old age problems. The rejuvenation rate associated with telomere growth rate is a measurable variable associated with the process that is expensive to measure, costing at least $650.00 per measurement. However, it is how you may guage the effectiveness of treatment with respect to the old-age senescent cell problem. Microprocessor-controlled systems for semiautomatic telomere measurements seem to be feasible, and now we have telomere-centromere FISH available for measuring every single telomere in the cell seperately, 92 telomeres in each human cell. Interestingly, it turns out that small mammals age differently, being dominated by mitochondrial aging that is best controlled in humans by a mixture of acetyl L-carnitine, alpha lipoic acid, and arginine. It is also useful to do lipofuscin removal on aging cells using CoQ10 and alpha lipoic acid, or perhaps Piracetam. It may turn out to be useful to use small molecule telomerase activators like astragaloside IV and cycloastragenol in liposome creams for application to the skin. I am not sure that astragalus extracts in glycerin will do it. Thanks for mentioning the stimulating problem of LED panels and 2D display technology in its present state. It is good to be up on it, as many a new product idea depends on a good display. Thanks again for a wonderful lunch experience and memorial chips.
Yours Truly,
Jim Green http://greenwoodstore.tripod.com/longevity.html