View to the night sky in August, to find the Perseus constellation from where the Persides appeares to originate.

Tonight and 10 years later, the night was warm and the sky cloudless, so I sat in the garden and tried to spot the Persides again. During 20 minutes, I saw four quite impressive ones. But at the same time, I saw 6 slowly moving objects in the sky, that displayed continously shining tiny points and which moved slowly via one third of the sky. I think that these have been man made satellites of the Star-Link projects (by Elon Musk).

A picture of Tübingen town hall at night (long exposure). The dotted line on the dark sky (in the center of the picture) is a swarm of the Star-Link satellites (visible to the naked eye)

But even by following these rules, one does not has to sacrifice all its personal relationships.

Is the sky really the only limit ???  Yes, the least for human creativity, in arts, science and technology. Just see how Elon Musk has shown us not to listen to all the nay-sayers, but look for allies who join you in making your wildest dreams come real.

I will have the chance to take a three year sabbatical from our research center, during which time it will go through a mayor re-structuring. And these are my plans for the three years:

1st year: Take a lecturer position at University of California Irvine (medical stem cell research) and improve my guitar skills

2nd year:  Guest professor in Shenzhen University, China, and on weekends work as a nude model for the UK journal “The Garden”

3rd year:  Work as guest research associate at the Weizman Institute in Rehovot / Israel, and develop together with the IDF an automated detectors for air-born corona-virus,

Actually, I also have an offer to lead a research group in London on cancer stem cells, but considering that I’m already working for the UK journal “The Garden” as a nude model, I probably will leave this for later.

But in a foreign language, in particular if you are still in the early learning phase, the different ways how the characters are designed are a constant source of miss-reading.

Here are a couple of frequently used style variations of the letter “Shin” that you can find within 10 min walking through any mayor city in Israel:

Common variants of the letter “Shin” in modern writings. (Bottom left is the classical style one might find in the Tora)

Also very variable is the typografie of the letter “Lamed”. Oddly enough, some variants even resemble German runes as were used by the notorious anti-semitic SS.

Variations in typografie of the letter “Lamed” commonly used in modern writings. The one in the middle of the lower lane again is classical Tora style.

These are the original sign-posts from which I collected the two letters.  You can see, they come from swimming pools, elevators, car-parks, fire extinguishers, pre-election campaign posters, number plates of cars and others.

]]> http://persian-cat.de/?feed=rss2&p=4539 0 http://persian-cat.de/?p=4532 http://persian-cat.de/?p=4532#comments Tue, 26 Feb 2019 06:20:17 +0000 radius http://persian-cat.de/?p=4532 (more...)]]> Despite my utmost reluctance to those notorious “xxx rules for a successful life/project/date” list that one can find on many blogs, I always wanted to summarize the reasons why I still consider the James Bond 007 movies quite an intelligent piece of philosophy (or shall I better call it “lesson for life” ?)

Although the Bond movies are mainly viewed as a regular and meanwhile slightly repetitive piece of entertainment, I always saw them as a source of learning particular aspects of life. Here are some useful lessons I took from the 20+ sequels of Bond movies:

• For a man, some scratches or scarves on the skin shall be weared with pride. They are a mans real jewelry.
• For a cool man, it is absolute acceptable to disappear occasionally, so nobody, in particular bosses or admin people dont know where you are (Moneypenny: “James, where have you been. The prime minister desperately wants to talk to you !!!”
• You shall leave no doubt of how little you appreciate any hierarchy, and how little you seek climbing up the career.
• At the end, it is the lonely cowboy who will seduce the most beautiful girls and experience highest pleasure with them. The higher ranks behind their office desks get thin hair and back pain instead.
• It is not considered a treason if you start a romance with a beauty from the opposing force. She will soon turn from an enemy combattant to a curring pussycat (and beside the pleasures she will give, she might even become your most loyal ally).

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So with our current knowledge it is clear that anyone who would have killed Khomeini would have earned great merits for deliberating the Iranian people from tyranny. And indeed, when in the afternoon of February 1st 1979 the airplane with the Ayatollah on board entered Iranian territory, there were fears among the passengers – Khomeini was accompanied by several political allies and reporters such as the German Peter Scholl Latour – that the air defense troops still bound by oath to loyalty to the Shah might shoot them off the sky.

Its somehow a tragedy, that at this moment the army was already paralyzed by the defection of their supreme commander, and apparently none of the lower ranks had the courage of committing a proactive tyrannicide against Khomeini.

Tyrannicide has been morally justified by several politicians, philosophers and theologists, such as Thomas de Aquin, Plutarch, Benjamin Franklin, John of Salisbury, Abraham Lincoln or John Milton. The German writer Frederik Schiller in his ballad “The Pledge” (German: “Die Bürgschaft”) showed the high moral standard of the central character, Damonius, who is caught after an attempted assassination of the gruesome tyrant Dionysius.

Die Buergschaft (engl.: The Pledge) by Fredrik Schiller. One of the rather few cases that a German thinker morally defends a tyrannocide.

But in the cases of the airplane which carried Ayatollah Khomeini back to Iran, and the idea of shooting them down with a ground-to-air anti-aircraft missile one has to partially understand the dilemma of the air defenses troops and their commanders: Perhaps not even in the darkest imagination could they foresee in January 1979 the scale of atrocities, violence, tyranny, which the Islamic leaders would commit against the Iranian people during the next 40 years. The idea to prevent a crime by arresting (or eliminating) the criminals before they become active is still a fantasy in a Spielberg Movie “Minority Report”. But for a political crime (like tyrannic dictatorships) which involves the destruction of the life of so many innocent people, this would be a great gift to humankind.

But one even does not has to go as far as to Darwinian evolution and survival of the fittest to find reasons against affirmative action:  Already on the submicroscopic level of macro molecular structure, the proper folding and hence functionality of proteins is governed by rewards and penalties which follow eternal, naturally given rules. Positively and negatively charged amino acids have a tendency of attraction, hydrophobic groups hide in the the center and hydrophilic groups are more exposed at the periphery of a protein. Affirmative action should encourage us (for the sake of justice) to equally allow also the hydrophobic amino acids to be exposed at the proteins periphery. Wouldn’t it be morally wishful to give any amino acid – independent on its inherent properties- the chance to be “visible to the outer world” ? And indeed this would be possible, at least in a lab environment: Just heat up the proteins, and let them cool down slowly, and they will take any random configuration, with any of its amino acids having the same chance to pair with any other one, and equally likely being located on the outer surface or in the inner space.

By increasing the thermal energy (i.e. the temperature) the protein first unfolds to a more or less “anarchic” state. And when one reduces the temperature again, it will adopt all sorts of non-native meta-stable configurations (as shown by the local minima in the curve above), at which most of the amino acids occupy positions that are non-canonical but random. Here we might have an endless debate about what is canonical and what is not. Maybe one preferes one of the many metastable protein configurations much more than the native state. In fact you might like or dislike what you want, but fact is that the protein functions only in its native state. So whatever our moral subjectivity tries to tell us, there is only one configuration that works. And at this native configuration, all amino acids occupy their intended position. All the non-native states at which amino-acids are allowed to adopt non-canonical positions will in most cases lead to severe funtional impairment and diseases. In fact, some of the most devastating diseases – and some of the less treatable ones – are known today as being caused by protein misfolding. Alzheimer disease, Parkinson, Morbus Huntington, Cystic Fibrosis or other so-called proteopathies are of cause not the result of affirmative action by a benevolent human being, but of the detrimental interplay between genetic mutation, environmental factors and maybe a slow decline in  cellular check-up machinery. But the result is the same: The distortion of a native state and the formation of random and hence pathogenic states.

As a scientist, I therefore have big objections to a widespread use of affirmative action. I don’t think it serves any good to promote – for good intention – a self-declared suppressed minority by discriminating the rest of the society. The human society is so diverse and complex that one can easily and arbitrarily define sub-groups (“tribes” to use a modern term), which by using questionable surveys can be shown to “suffer” from one or the other form of social discrimination.

Take for instance something very obvious: your home address. When we lived in London, our house was in the nice middleclass neighborhood of Battersea/Wandsworth. Our postal code was SW11 2AZ. A friend at work then asked me how it feels to live in such a wealthy borough.  Wealthy boroug ??? I asked him, after I had been involved in a fight with a drunken neighbor a few days before. It appeared that SW11 is in general considered to be of a good socio-economic background, and indeed just a few hundred meters away lived bankers, layers and folks from the media business. I was told that with my address and the SW11 postcode, I could easily apply for a well paid job in the financial industry. In the UK (and apparently other coutries like the US as well) your address postcode is used as a synonyme for your social status. On the other hand, of course, living at the “wrong” postcode (for instance Bethnal Green E2 6AU or Peckham SE15 5RJ) can be a really obstacle if you want to get a good job or intend to apply for a mortgage (“location, location, location, that’s what counts”). When we believe in the beneficial effects of affirmative action, then we should turn this upside down and provide special quota of job positions or mortgages to be given to applicants from “dodgy postcodes”.  With my SW11 postcode, I would have than been blocked from getting a good job or an affordable mortgage. But wait, our address in Battersea/Wandsworth was Jansen Walk 13, and isn’t number 13 known to be considered also a bid scary ? Maybe I should have tried to promote myself as member of the discriminated tribe of No.13 residents. With some lobby work and some social media activities it should be possible to raise enough attention to fight for my (or OUR) case. At least in the case of getting a negative answer to a job application I could accuse the employer of discrimination because of my house number 13.

Janson Walk 13 in London SW11 2AZ: Excellent postcode, but suspicious house number.

Affirmative action is not such a big issue here in Germany, (except for womans quota) and maybe that was the reason that against my own judgement I recently followed my heart and not my mind. It happened at the refugee camp nearby, where I regularily help the school kids of the asylum seekers with their home work. And sometimes the parents of the kids also ask me for help with the language or with some beaurocratic issues. Nilab, a young mother from Afghanistan initially wanted me to help her with the language. She currently attends an integrative school to make her fit for a proper job training. For this, she already applies for apprenticeships as construction draftswoman. After a written application at a technical college she was asked to participate in an online test (obviously, the college forwared all applications to an assesment center).  Nilab was pretty nervous, considering that she is still not 100% familiar with the German language, and the online test requires a really quick understanding and answering.  So I agreed to “assist” her with the online test, which of course is against the rules. And “assisting” did not ment explaining her the question (which would have taken much to long), but I answered about 80% of the questions myself. I knew that this was not right, somehow in violation of my feeling that one should not positively discriminate a person to provide her with an advantage in a competitive situation.  I found the proper term for my doing, “Affirmative Action” only recently in the book “12 rules for life ” by Jordan Peterson. Whereas in many points I can agree with his arguments, in the special situation of Nilab, a war refugee from Afghanistan, who is running her young family, living in a single studio of a refugee camp, learning a difficult new language, and above all is committed to learn a good and ambitious profession I saw no problem of promoting her against many obstacles of a western society.

Just for fun, and because the time between the years (i.e. 25th of December till 6th of January) generates silly ideas, I tried my first big data analysis today. I was inspired by the frequent notion of woman curating arts exhibitions. Was it just my selective perception, or is there something real behind ?
I used a public German website that provides information on all arts exhibitions during a selected time period. The site http://www.kunstausstellungen.de/suche/ I searched for all exhibitions between 01.01.2018 – 31.12.2018. I got a long list (perhaps still anything from complete) of 210 events, covering private galeries, municipal exhibiton halls and big and famous museums of national and international fame. Of those 210 exhibitions, 181 could be associated with a single artist (the remaining 29 were group exhibitions). Counting the male and female artists, these are the results:

   Distribution of men and woman among artists and curators of 210 randomly selected exhbitions in Germany (2018)

]]> http://persian-cat.de/?feed=rss2&p=4498 0 http://persian-cat.de/?p=4527 http://persian-cat.de/?p=4527#comments Sat, 19 May 2018 13:25:48 +0000 radius http://persian-cat.de/?p=4527 (more...)]]> I know that what I am going to tell you now could fundamentally damage the picture that you have of me. I hope you will forgive me this unrequested confession. But I have to tell this to someone, who might view it from some distance, and who knows me only as a pen friend using e-mails. And I also think that because you don’t live an ordinary life, rather a life full of ups and downs, you might have a better understanding of me. I hope you will forgive me this uninvited confession.

Nine years ago I had a master student in my lab. She came to Munich from Stockholm/Sweden, because we are members of an international graduate school. Although being born in Stockholm, she was Iranian. Her name was Ghazal, and her parents were political emigrants from the 70s. I found her very attractive, physically and also because of a certain secret magic that emanated from her. If a young woman arrives as a stranger to a new place, she naturally inspires a man to offer her assistance and company. And for some reason, despite being about 20 years my junior, Ghazal soon agreed to go out with me not only once, but on a more and more regular base. We spend many afternoons and evenings together, visitting the galeries, the parks, many beautiful places, or just go out walking in the green or sitting on the river-side. I began to badly fall in love, and I seriously wanted to change my entire life, and asked her to marry me. If she would have not repeatedly denied, if she would have say only one time “maybe, lets wait for a while”, my life would have taken a completely different direction. In this year, 2010, I probably was really crazy. I was willing to sacrifice everything for the prospect to spend the rest of our life together. Nothing else seemed of any relevance any more: my family, our house, my friends, my job as scientist, even politics and the whole world suddenly became secondary, as compared to my love for this girl with her blue eyes, her dense eyebrows, her dark curled hair and her guttural voice.

But for Ghazal the relationship with her parents in Sweden was much more important, and she always felt homesick. For her it was simply unthinkable to start a new life far away from home. She was, in a certain sense, provincial and too much focused on continuing a life with a high level of security. And Sweden is of course the prototype of a super-secure society. At the end, when Ghazal finished her master project, she packed her suit-case, and after we said good-bye and exchanged kisses and hugs at the airport, I literally cried a river driving home alone.

In the following 3 years, we occasionally met aside of scientific meetings. We talked, and for me it was always painful to know that it is only for a few hours. Once in 2012, we spend a night walking through the empty Pompeij, what was most magical. But I still don’t know if she felt the same. I am quite sure that in Ghazals whole life, our visit to Pompeij was an experience of the the highest cultural and intellectual level. Probably at this night, she was not aware of this, but I am sure one day she will understand. I had hoped that instead of living together physically, we could at least stay in contact with words. But writing mails was not her biggest strength. She was very secretive regarding her feelings, and neither did she liked to tell lengthy episodes of her life. In fact, too often it was me who told her stories of her life, stories which I invented expromptu starting from just a few keywords that she told me. When she wrote something, it was usually restricted to a few sentences, and only touched superficial things. I always knew that in case I could have seduced her up to point to live together, I would have to educate her a lot in terms of culture and intellectual depth. I knew it would have been a “Eliza Dolittle and Professor Higgins” affair.

It took me about 5 years to get over the sadness that this loss has inflicted. And then suddenly the story seemed to start its 2nd series: I met an Iranian-Armenian girl who did her PhD project in another institute on our University campus. She was married in Germany, but lived virtually separate from a boring German husband. She was extremely lonely, and had some problems also with her colleagues and with her family ( who occasionaly came from Isfahan, but caused stress to each other).

We began to meet more and more often, and we both had our reasons to let things go freely. It did not took very long, when we started to take a hotel room only to sleep together. It became a very regular thing, that we had love at any occasion: in her appartment, in the appartment of her relatives, in the car, in hotel rooms. It was very exciting, and I always recognized that at the moments of ecstasy, Lidas face changed so much, that all the stessful tension went away and I could feel how her eyes were seeing something magical.

For me it was all nice as it was: We would meet once or twice a week for physical pleasure, but outside of the bedrooms we continued our own life.

But for Lida this was not enough. She required more and more that I make a decision in favour of het. I understoud her somehow, she was early thirty, with the science career lagging a bit behind, and a broken mariage behind. She was hoping that me, an 18 year old senior of her with an established position, could give her stabilit, probably by living with het and marrying her.

But what I was desperately wishing just 5 years before with Ghazal did not bear any attraction any more now with Lida. I don’t know, if I had changed so much within 5 years, or if it is a general phenomenon that men lose their interest in sharing their life with girl when they have already consumed love often enough. Maybe my years long heartache after Ghazal left was only, because we never consumed love, but had only a 1 year platonic romance.

So my advice to every girl or young woman from this story would be: dont give a man to quickly what he wants. Let him fight for your love hard. When a man had to fight a long battle to conquer you, he will always value you much higher. You will be like a rare jewel, which will always reminds him of the energy he had to spend on you. Like a miner who had to work a long and hard time to find a precious gem.

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