The Blaisdell Blog

Does this equation, VM = PQ/M , have any meaning to you?   It does to me.   What is more, it has a face.   But, perhaps, a little back story is needed. Saturday morning, I had no choice.   Despite careful planning and buying ahead, I had to go to the grocery store.   The fact is you can only buy so many bananas ahead of time.   Perishables need to be replenished.   So, early on a rainy morning I headed to the stores, armed with a positive attitude, patience and my hand sanitizer. I was already heading for my second store, still looking for the milk and eggs that seem to go fast these days, when the rain set in in earnest.   Without an umbrella, I joined a line of orderly people being allowed in a large grocery store in manageable pulses.   Everyone was polite, showing both kindness and good humor.   Nowhere was this more evident than when the man behind me in the line moved his huge umbrella over me as we stood there.   Usu...

Most anthropologists will say that it is not the wheel (certainly a worth invention) but agriculture that was the most significant invention of mankind.   And agriculture is an invention of women.   It was the women of the clan who were often relegated to the home fires by virtue of the constraints of childbearing and it is they who would have noticed an interesting phenomenon.   While most clans were nomadic, they followed set patterns, visiting the same spots in order as they followed game and weather.   These tribes tended to dispose of their wastes and garbage in one central area of each campsite.   The women, sitting around the fire, heavy with child, nursing or too old to hunt, busied themselves with the “sit” work of the extended family.   These women would have noticed that season after season the areas of trash disposal were also where the grains and vegetables were sprouting up.   They made use of, relied upon, and eventually encouraged t...

St. Patrick's Day has once again come and and I almost missed it until too late.  I know it comes in March, but so does March Madness and who can remember that date?  At least the Ides of March gives you a numerical frame of reference.  I will try to remember that it is the 17th, but next year help a sister out and give me a hint some time around the 10th.              This brings to mind a much larger question.   Why does the whole country celebrate St. Patrick’s Day (March 17, as it turns out) but nobody celebrates St. Olaf’s Day (July 29)?   I am mostly Norwegian (though on St. Patrick’s Day I am allowed to be Irish through the use of large amounts of green and/or beer).   I know a little about St. Patrick, and a great deal more about St. Olaf and I can think of no reason for the lack of celebration for one and too much celebration for another except, maybe, good press.   ...

Viruses are the Schrodinger’s Cat of biology.   That is, they can be both alive and dead at the same time.   In the famous thought experiment by Erwin Schrodinger, the Nobel Prize winning physicist postulated that a cat in a sealed box could be both alive and dead at the same time.   In Schrodinger’s defense he was illustrating the absurdity of quantum superposition, where it is assumed that two opposite positions can exist in the same place at the same time.   But in the case of a virus it is, like Schrodinger’s cat, both alive and dead at the same time.               Viruses are considered life forms, not living things.   There is a difference.   In the words of Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone , viruses exist in the, “shadowland” between animate and inanimate life forms.   A virus existing all by itself is not a living thing.   It is not a cell.   It has no protoplasm...