flâneur

Elijah Bodden

13 followers · 13 following · 679 views

on the atlas — 40

highlights — 194

  • I’ve experienced it years ago, in an intense period of C programming. I went out for a walk and my mind was parsing other people as structs.
    Have you ever experienced Tetris syndrome with programming? What was your experience? | Lobsters
  • I had to stop coding right before going to bed because of this. Instead of falling asleep, my mind would start spinning incoherently, thinking in terms of programming constructs (loops, arrays, structs, etc.) about random or even undefined stuff, resulting in complete nonsense but mentally exhausting.
    Have you ever experienced Tetris syndrome with programming? What was your experience? | Lobsters
  • To notice what previously I had only seen: the joy in a mother’s eyes as she plays peekaboo with her baby boy in a coffee shop, the leathery lines on an old man’s face, the infinite texture of tree bark, the sunlight that cuts through the branches, the generous warmth of dawn that ripples goosebumps across chilled skin, the way the water spills like glass over riverbed rocks
    slowness as an ideal - Tommy Dixon
  • The same phenomenon occurs when I cover my TV with art or shut off my phone. I’m forced into the sticky world of enjoyment, instead of mere stimulation.
    slowness as an ideal - Tommy Dixon
  • Everyone talks about living longer (extending horizontal time) but few talk about living deeper (expanding vertical time). It’s tempting to treat time as an objective unit, like centimeters or kilograms, but experienced time is subjective. Five minutes can feel like an hour. Five hours can feel like five minutes. A decade can pass like two years, while two years may acquire the weight of a century.
    slowness as an ideal - Tommy Dixon
  • But the faster I move, the less I feed the part of myself that is hungry for silence and quiet and thinking hard about the same thing for half an hour. When that part starves, it's felt in the body as a sense of sadness, emptiness, dread. A certain motion sickness from the turn of the earth.
    slowness as an ideal - Tommy Dixon
  • Maximize blocks of uninterrupted time. Maximize the environment for opening up the world, deferring to children's interests. Allow the children to make their own environment, like the people that they are.
    Harms and possibilities of schooling
  • It's Sunday afternoon. My father wants me to visit our grandmother. Let's say my father is a traditional authority. What would he be doing? He would probably tell me something like, "I don't care how you feel; it's your duty to visit your grandmother. Be polite to her and so on." Nothing bad about this I claim because I can still rebel and so on. It's a clear order. But what would the so-called post-modern non-authoritarian father do? I know because I experienced it. He would have said something like this, "You know how much your grandmother loves you, but nonetheless I'm not forcing you to vi…
    Harms and possibilities of schooling
  • If the work I give you is comically fake, well did you expect it to be real? You're only a child.
    Harms and possibilities of schooling
  • We're driving in our cars on our way to and from important things, and you better get out of the way. They're very important things, they aren't for you, go play (somewhere else).
    Harms and possibilities of schooling
  • In standard schooling, kids aren't around adults in adult environments doing adult activities for adult reasons. There's the real world, the adult world, where everything of Import is, and then there's the kid world, which has to make way for the adult world.
    Harms and possibilities of schooling
  • it appears that when lower primates are in the wild, and fending for themselves, their behaviour is 'civilized', certainly in comparison with their behaviour when they are confined and cared for, which is when they most behave 'like animals'.
    Harms and possibilities of schooling
  • In the natural habitat the welfare of the troop as a whole is paramount, the authority of the experienced animal is accepted, the idiosyncrasies of members of the troop are respected. But when the same species is confined and overcrowded the toughest and least-sensitive animal comes to the top
    Harms and possibilities of schooling
  • We own space, and decide where you ca... MAY go.
    Harms and possibilities of schooling
  • Your attention isn't you or yours; you're at war with your attention, it says no but your teacher--and implicitly your parents and college admissions and society, and "you"--insist.
    Harms and possibilities of schooling
  • Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in.
    Seven Lessons Taught in School - by John Taylor Gatto | Wanderings
  • Thirty years ago [in the early 60s] these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten up most of that time
    Seven Lessons Taught in School - by John Taylor Gatto | Wanderings
  • schooling, which, through its hidden curriculum, prevents effective personality development
    Seven Lessons Taught in School - by John Taylor Gatto | Wanderings
  • they have a poor sense of time past and time to come. They are mistrustful of intimacy like the children of divorce they really are (for we have divorced them from significant parental attention)
    Seven Lessons Taught in School - by John Taylor Gatto | Wanderings
  • a philosophy that locates meaning where meaning is genuinely to be found -- in families, in friends, in the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent independence and privacy, in all the free and inexpensive things out of which real families, real friends and real communities are built
    Seven Lessons Taught in School - by John Taylor Gatto | Wanderings
  • The current debate about whether we should have a national curriculum is phony. We already have a national curriculum locked up in the seven lessons I have just outlined. Such a curriculum produces physical, moral, and intellectual paralysis, and no curriculum of content will be sufficient to reverse its hideous effects
    Seven Lessons Taught in School - by John Taylor Gatto | Wanderings
  • School takes our children away from any possibility of an active role in community life -- in fact it destroys communities by relegating the training of children to the hands of certified experts -- and by doing so it ensures our children cannot grow up fully human.
    Seven Lessons Taught in School - by John Taylor Gatto | Wanderings
  • until someone asks and then move fast while the mood is on.
    Seven Lessons Taught in School - by John Taylor Gatto | Wanderings
  • reading, writing, and arithmetic only take about one hundred hours to transmit as long as the audience is eager and willing to learn.
    Seven Lessons Taught in School - by John Taylor Gatto | Wanderings
  • things were very different in the United States. Originality and variety were common currency; our freedom from regimentation
    Seven Lessons Taught in School - by John Taylor Gatto | Wanderings
  • Surveillance is an ancient imperative, espoused by certain influential thinkers, a central prescription set down in The Republic, in The City of God, in the Institutes of the Christian Religion, in New Atlantis, in Leviathan, and in a host of other places. All these childless men who wrote these books discovered the same thing: children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under tight central control
    Seven Lessons Taught in School - by John Taylor Gatto | Wanderings
  • There are no private spaces for children, there is no private time.
    Seven Lessons Taught in School - by John Taylor Gatto | Wanderings
  • The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents but should instead rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth.
    Seven Lessons Taught in School - by John Taylor Gatto | Wanderings
  • I teach that your self-respect should depend on expert opinion. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged. A monthly report, impressive in its provision, is sent into students' homes to signal approval or to mark exactly, down to a single percentage point, how dissatisfied with their children parents should be
    Seven Lessons Taught in School - by John Taylor Gatto | Wanderings
  • Commercial entertainment of all sorts, including television, would wither as people learned again how to make their own fun.
    Seven Lessons Taught in School - by John Taylor Gatto | Wanderings
  • this process is not strictly necessary for fertilizing an egg, since round spermatids are capable of producing live offspring if injected directly into eggs.
    Epigenetics of the mammalian germline - by Metacelsus
  • replace their histones with protamines, which are small, positively charged proteins that package the DNA very tightly
    Epigenetics of the mammalian germline - by Metacelsus
  • After meiosis, histone marks change even more as the resulting spermatids differentiate into spermatozoa. Notably, mature sperm have barely any histones
    Epigenetics of the mammalian germline - by Metacelsus
  • However, there are substantial changes to histones as spermatogonia complete meiosis. In addition to phosphorylating H2AX at recombination sites, male germ cells also add this mark, and other repressive marks, to the histones on the un-synapsed regions of the X and Y chromosomes. This process, known as meiotic sex chromosome inactivation,16 shuts off transcription on the sex chromosomes that could otherwise disrupt meiosis.
    Epigenetics of the mammalian germline - by Metacelsus
  • In males, imprinting is established when PGCs differentiate into spermatogonial stem cells, which takes place in late fetal development
    Epigenetics of the mammalian germline - by Metacelsus
  • After a near-complete erasure in PGCs, DNA methylation is re-established by the de novo methyltransferase DNMT3A as the PGCs differentiate into mature gametes. This sets up sex-specific imprinting.
    Epigenetics of the mammalian germline - by Metacelsus
  • efore sex-specific imprinting can be established, the previous imprinting must be erased. This takes place in PGCs. As PGCs proliferate in the early gonad, they replicate their DNA while shutting off the activity of the maintenance methyltransferase DNMT1. They also upregulate TET enzymes which actively remove DNA methylation (although the passive demethylation is more important). In any case, the result is a drastic drop in DNA methylation throughout the whole genome, with only about 5% of the CpG sites remaining methylated.13 For comparison, typical genome-wide methylation levels are 70–80%.
    Epigenetics of the mammalian germline - by Metacelsus
  • A major developmental process taking place in the early embryo is zygotic genome activation. The oocyte contains large quantities of stored maternal mRNAs that support the first few cell divisions, but in order for the embryo to develop properly, it must switch over to mRNAs transcribed from its own genome. In humans this process is complete at around the 8-cell stage.
    Epigenetics of the mammalian germline - by Metacelsus
  • The overall effect is to erase most of the parental epigenetic marks, with a few important exceptions at imprinted loci.
    Epigenetics of the mammalian germline - by Metacelsus
  • maternal protein DPPA3 (which is only found in mammals) inhibits maintenance DNA methyltransferase activity, leading to a global drop in DNA methylation during the rapid cell divisions of the early embryo
    Epigenetics of the mammalian germline - by Metacelsus
  • g. The sperm and egg each contribute one pronucleus, with its own pattern of epigenetic marks. But these marks change rapidly as embryonic development begins. For example, 5-methylcytosine in the paternal pronucleus is oxidatively demethylated by the enzyme TET3.
    Epigenetics of the mammalian germline - by Metacelsus
  • Spermatogonia are unipotent stem cells of the male germline: they can either self-renew, or differentiate into spermatocytes, which undergo meiosis and further differentiate into spermatids
    Epigenetics of the mammalian germline - by Metacelsus
  • Interestingly, the oocyte does not actually complete meiosis until after fertilization
    Epigenetics of the mammalian germline - by Metacelsus
  • In a process that takes a few days in mice and a few weeks in humans, the PGCs migrate into the developing gonads. Once inside the gonads, they undergo several rounds of division, and largely erase their DNA methylation
    Epigenetics of the mammalian germline - by Metacelsus
  • metastable epialleles (MEs) are loci where the extent of DNA methylation (DNAm) is variable between individuals but correlates across tissues derived from different germ layers within a given individual. This property, termed systemic interindividual variation (SIV), is attributed to stochastic methylation establishment before germ layer differentiation. Evidence suggests that some putative human MEs are sensitive to environmental exposures in early development.
    Metastable epialleles in humans: Trends in Genetics
  • Uncontrolled retrotransposition is bad for both the host organism and retrotransposons themselves so they have to be regulated
    Retrotransposon - Wikipedia
  • SINEs do not encode a functional reverse transcriptase protein and rely on other mobile transposons, especially LINEs.
    Retrotransposon - Wikipedia
  • LINE-1 (L1) retrotransposons make up a significant portion of the human genome, with an estimated 500,000 copies per genome. Genes encoding for human LINE1 usually have their transcription inhibited by methyl groups binding to its DNA carried out by PIWI proteins and enzymes DNA methyltransferases
    Retrotransposon - Wikipedia
  • Most LINE copies have variable length at the start because reverse transcription usually stops before DNA synthesis is complete. In some cases this causes RNA polymerase II promoter to be lost so LINEs cannot transpose further.[15]
    Retrotransposon - Wikipedia
  • Many vertebrate genes were formed from retroviruses and LTR retrotransposons
    Retrotransposon - Wikipedia