I ignored his remarks, and of course came here yesterday, when Moishe was sitting at home doing the Shabbat, avoiding to manually switching on any light or cooker, let alone a computer or anything else related with work.

I was happy to do a large batch of gene-expression measurements that nicely filled an entire 96well reaction plate. I also was happy to find a new batch of the qRT-PCR master-mix, from a company which just promoted their more reliable, more sophisticated, simply cooler enzyme and fluorescence formula. Everything went pretty smooth, and after pipetting the cDNAs and the primers and the master-mix I happily quitted the “Are you sure you want to start the run” button, locked the lab door and jumped on my bike to ride home.

Today when I came to collect and analyzed the results I immediately recognised something fishy had happened. The usually very smooth and nice ordered kinetic curves all looked like the footpathes of a crowd of drunken teens. They were jumping up and down on the diagram and simply did not made any sense at all.

So I thougth to consult the FAQ page of Agilent, the supplier of the new qRT-PCR kit I used first time on Shabbat. One question was “How much of the internal fluorescence dye standard should I add to the reaction” ? What they mean by “adding an internal fluorescence dye standard”, usually all other kits we used before had this already pre-mixed. Only Agilent, for their own enigmatic reason, decided to ship it separately, and have it added by the customer himself.

The consequence of my insistence to work on the holy Saturday: I worked 2 hours for nothing, and I wasted the reagents for 96 reactions (at a price of 0,80 € per reaction plus consumables, i.e. about 100 € in total).

I promise I wont turn to any religious faith now, but maybe I try a little bit of Superstition.

Yet the official results are not announced, but this time the Iranian officials have a valid explanation for this: against all forcasts, the 2013 ballots were frequented by more than 70% of all eligible voters and thus had to be kept open for an additional 5 hours.
It seems that when the counting started at 9 pm CET or midnight in Tehran, the volunteers had a long and sleepless night to spent. Now, with the first pre-result estimates (after counting 90% of all votes) there seems to be a likely winner: Hassan Rouhani, who recently gave an enthusistic speech and demands more freedom, less dogmatism: a agenda, that was greeted with passion by his young and active supporters. If the estimates are right, than 51% of all Iranians trust Rouhani to lead their country into a better future. But it would be to simple to judge the election simply by numbers and percentages, as done in Western countries with their standard and almost boring regular democratic selection process. In Iran, the election day is also colourful and vivid, and looking into the faces of the voters makes us understand a little better what a nation of 80 millions dream of.

Bill posts showing the presidential candidates on Tehran streets. This particular candidate, Mr. Saeed  Jalili seems to attract much less attention from his own people than he got 4 month ago at the Munich Conference for International Security affairs. He is counted as a hard-liner and not much loved by the Iranian people who are desperatly hoping for change.

Long queues mark the polling stations and voters are waiting patiently to exploit their right to select the new president.  Due to the unexpected high voter turnout, the polling offices had to stay open till midnight.

Will this man, Hassan Rouhani end the 12 years of dim and rediculous Ahmadenijad leadership of the country ? Currently, at 11 am local Tehran time the estimates give Rouhani more than 51 %, almost 3 times more than the 2nd next.  In case that the remaining ~ 10% of yet uncounted ballots can not support Rouhanis winning position, there will be a run-off between him and the second best, Tehrans current mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf.

As always in public activities, Iranian laws require a separation between men and women. At this well lid, fabric covered polling bay woman stay among their likes and might not only debate about the president to come, but also about where to buy cheap food and how to raise the children. In any case, both issues will also be strongly depend on the new president whom they give their votes here.

Men, in contrast, like to pose for the camera.

… And if one dares to wear blue glasses, he leaves no doubt whom he will support. The young, educated and modern Iranians hope that Rouhani will be the next president. Mr. Blue-Eyes and Blue Finger on this photography, however, is an Iranian expat in Washington D.C. So for him showing up a liberal and secular life style is easy.

For this Iranian young beauty, however, going to the polls with some inches of hair leaking under her chador is a demonstration of pride and courage.

Thanks BBC for the nice photographs. I hope you don’t mind me putting some intelligent captitions on them. In terms of copyright issues, I guess that you have neither asked the Iranian people whom you photographed for permission of publishing them at the BBC website.  So f…k up, old aunty BBC and let me give the people at least a more righteous voice.

Ghazal Dear, I still regret that you have been so much occupied with shopping here in Munich, but we never used any of the fine occasions to go out to one of the music clubs in town (except for the Bayerischer Hof Nightclub).  This year many of the Munich clubs announced their parties, and I think they might attract at least some of the tourists that come here every summer from Arab countries and – very much like you – usually associate Munich only with shopping.

Shopping and Raving in Munich – Burkas wellcome

Take Care, my Dear

Michael

On its concert tour through Israel a German chanson singer introduced one of his songs (about the mutual dependence of men and woman) as following:

“A woman needs a man mainly for two things: First, to open the champaign bottles, and second, to explaine things.”
One of his fellow musicians, a violinist girl replied after a few seconds “Hold on, wasn’t there one more thing, I just can’t remember what it was”.
I guess you are referring to our duty to wait for her at the side of the pool, with the a fresh towel ?
Yes, you are almost right. It has something to do with waiting. But woman don’t need a man who waits for them, but they need a man they can wait for, like Penelope was waiting for Odysseus.

A more modern version, although from last century is the below graphic that Marina gave me last year for birthday. It shall symbolize me leaving in the morning for work, and returning home in the evening. I have to admit, the most realistic on this image is the happiness of the dog.

Ghazal, my Dear,
We recently discussed the issue of translating poetry from one language to another. You told me ones that in Persian language there are no gender specific prepositions, as there are HE and SHE in English or IT for all un-animated items. In German, in contrast, also un-animated objects usually are assigned a male or female gender, which has its roots in very ancient understanding of the world and the role of all devine creations. So if a poem is translated from German to English, the natural gender of un-animated objects is lost, cause they all turn neutral in English (LOST IN TRANSLATION).
But, this is what my british colleague told me about the common practice of assigning a gender to unanimated objects in poetry. Whether you choose male or female depends not simply on the context, but on the “character” that this item carries. So I guess if the poem is about a gently blowing summer wind, this will be a SHE, but if it is about a horrible thunderstorm, this must be a HE.
A nice, colourful, delicate and well-smelling flower will most likely be assigned a female gender. But if the poem is about a carnovourous plant, ugly looking and nastly smelling, it would be more appropriate to assigned it a male gender.
Unless, of course, an american trash musical such as “Little Shop of Horrors” introduces a man-eating nasty plant and calls it “Audrey II” (where – I guess – this conflict between expectation and reality is crucial for the humor).
There are some fixed cases of assigned gender: The Sea is always male, whereas ships are always female. In contrast to German, where the Sea is female (but the Ocean is male (?), and ships are neutral.
So british poetry, like the british character in general, takes a very pragmatic position, in contrast to German, where you have to follow the rules of grammar, does not matter whether you write a sonett or a car damage report.

best regards, TAKE CARE , Michael

did you ever wondered why so many people are fascinated by the moon, which in fact has much less an impact on our physical life than the sun? Is it only its position close to the earth and the notion that the movement of the moon is completely depending on the existence of earth? Since unlike the sun, which is like a superpower that nurishes us with its energy but in fact could easily exist without the Earth, the moon is more like the Earth little sibling. Assuming the Earth would suddenly disappear, the moon would leave its orbit and escape into the endless space with a velocity of about 8800 km/h. The sun, however would not even recognise that the earth has disappeared.
It is perhaps this fascination that a large object as far as 380 thousand km away is still completely dependend on us that makes us feeling a some sort of almost intime relationship with the Moon.

Some people believe that the moon phases have a direct and immediate influence onto living organisms on Earth. But appart from the obvious change in night darkness between new and full moon, and the corresponding impact on sleep or nocturnal activity of creatures and people, there is very little solid scientific proof that human health or plant physiology changes with the moon cycle.
But it is not only myself who is amazed ones every month when the full moon rises above the horizon. Have a look at this short video sequence some astronomer did in New Zealand during January full moon. It is a real-time video shot at night with people observing the rising full moon (source: NASA Astronomers Picture of the Day).

It is most likely that the idea of the moon interfering with human physiology and health has its origin in the coincidental similarity of the period of femal oestrus cycle with the duration of the lunar cycle.  But despite the apparent similarity between the 29.5 days lunar cycle period (or 27.3 days rotation period around the Earth) and the average 28.5 days of the femal oestrus cycle, there is no synchronity between these two oscillations.

But there was one observation that – for a short moment – made me wonder:  Almost with the same frequency that I send to you images of the full moon every 28 days, you send back answers. It did not matter whether I send you just one or twenty e-mails per month: You always answered one per month, and this in very fixed intervalls. Therefore I was almost wondering if it is not so much your free will to write me occasionally, but more the result of a regular hormonal up and down that prompts you to reply to my letters.

Take Care
Michael

Dear Michael,

All the big stars, i.e. those with a mass exceeding the sun’s mass by a factor of 1.3, gain most of their energy by a hydrogen-fusion reaction that involves a catalytic cycle, known as the Bethe-Weizsäcker or CNO-cycle.

During this reaction cycle,  protons (i.e. hydrogen nuclei) are added four times into a cycling reaction that converts carbon through various nitrogen and oxygene isotopes back to carbon, while releasing helium as the net reaction product and, of course, the enormous amount of energy which fuels the star.

This cycle in its logic resembles the citric acid cycle, during which all aerobic organisms convert energy from nutrients (i.e. carbohydrates, fat, and sometimes proteins) into ATP.  Similar to the Bethe-Weizsäcker cycle, successive transfer of protons (in this case released from water) are an important feature of this energy conversion.

But beyond this similarity in the reaction cycle, the CNO-cycle (providing stars with their enormous energy) and the citric-acid cycle (providing energy to living organisms) are connected by a much more fundamental link:  The Bethe-Weizsäcker CNO cycle is the first reaction in the formation of our universe that produces Oxygene and Nitrogene from Carbon and Hydrogene (Carbon is directly produced by 3-alpha fusion of Helium nuclei).  And it is these three elements, namely Carbon, Oxygene, Nitrogene and Hydrogene, that are the basic elements of all living matter. All Carbohydrates are made of C, H and O, as are all fatty acids. All proteins are made of C, H, O, and N  (with a trace of Sulphur).  And essential element that is missing is Phosphorus, an integral constituent of DNA and RNA. But in molar amount, it is much less than C, H, N, and O.

So we have to acknowledge that the main constituents of our body (and of any other living organism as well) were a by-product of the stars engine.

Or as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young put it in their songs lyrics:

We are Stardust

Well I came upon a child of God, he was walking along the road
And I asked him tell where are you going, this he told me:
(He) said, I’m going down to Yasgur’s farm, going to join in a rock and roll band.
Got to get back to the land, and set my soul free.
We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon,
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

Well, then can I roam beside you? I have come to lose the smog.
And I feel myself a cog in something turning.
And maybe it’s the time of year, yes, said maybe it’s the time of man.
And I don’t know who I am but life is for learning.
We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon,
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong,
And everywhere was song and celebration.
And I dreamed I saw the bomber jet planes riding shotgun in the sky,
Turning into butterflies above our nation.

We are stardust, we are golden, we are caught in the devil’s bargain,
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden

————————————————————————————————-

Ghazal, my Dear,  I always believed that you came from another star. What you wrote above shows that you brought from there some interesting ideas with you.

Take Care, my Dear

Michael

PS:  I think we also have something in common, in our dialogue that is going on for about 3 years now.  Whereas I always tried my best to misunderstand you, to fill the empty spaces in your messages with a meaning that perhaps was never there, you in contrast always managed to not understand anything from what I wrote. When I imagined that there are words between the empty spaces in your letters, you decided that the long sentences from me were void of any meaning.  How long can this go on ?

Dear Michael,

It is no secret that many Iranian woman do not value their impressive, arian noses very high. In contrast, they tend to follow a very questionable beauty picture that more and more seems to be coined by the Japanese manga figures. For them, a nose is merely anything more than a small ridge to hide the nostrils.
The historical form of Iranian noses, however, is impressive, and if an ancient myth is true that the nose is the main site of human character, than Iranians must have a lot of it (which I believe many of them will agree).

The more I regret that low self-esteem of Iranians when it comes to the shape of their facial “center of gravity”. Iranian woman try to raise their competetiveness in hunting for a good match on the vanity fair, and the men, beeing either the driving force behind this or the obidient donkey, quickly got trapped by this.

Here I will explaine to you (based on what I feel as a young woman and what I learned as a young geneticist) the short and the long term consequences of this:

1) In the short term, there will be a constant drop of beauty among Iranian woman, because more and more of them afford a “Nose Job”. So very soon, you will see less and less Iranian ladies whom their strong and proud character is clearly located in an equally strong, sharp and expressive nose. We might be confused soon, that Iranians with strong self-esteem decline to western beauty standard, have their face irreversibly damaged only to fill the pockets of those medics, who as all their colleagues from other disciplines agree, are the least qualified ones to distinguish between health and disease, let alone to cure any real sick patient.

The Iranian woman who had this attribute of an ancient, devine beauty surgically removed, will in fact increase her chances to catch a husband and have more children. That is what we know from natural selection of the fittest, which if we like it or not, becomes the natural selection for the most attractive in the human population.

But, thanks to genetic laws, there is not only hope in sight, as I will explaine in the following, but in the long term these “Iranian Nose Jobs” even have the potential to rescue the Iranian Nose from becomming extinct by natural selection.

2)  Because on the long term,  of course, no plastic surgery can change the genetic code, which over hundreds of generations turned Iranians, considered to represent the original Arians, as representatives of the niceest, sharp, impressive noses. No ordinary medic, let alone the half-educted plastic surgeons, have any clue where in the Iranian genome the key for nose shape is hidden, or how this could be manipulated. So with the current genetic knowledge and the status-quo of molecular technologies, the real treasure of the Iranian nose is still hidden and safely deposited deep in our genome.  So even if all Iranians have their “noses done”, the next and all following generations still carry the fertile seeds to grow proper Iranian noses again.

But this is only half of the truths, the real excitement comes here:  Without plastic surgery, large Iranian noses could in fact become extinct due to genetic admixture from (Iranian x Non-Iranian) partnerships (introgressing the Small-Nose-Gene-Variant from East-Asian or US or Latin-Americans) followed by preferential marriages between the descendents inheriting the Small-Nose-Genes (and consequently growing these dwarf nose variants reminiscent of a Hobbit face). Over just a few generations, there would indeed take place a natural selection for the Small-Nose-Gene-Variants, resulting in irreversible loss of the Iranian Large Noses.  But this, in fact, does not happen, thanks to the plastic surgeons and their messing up with the natural link between beauty, genes, and attractiveness, thus interfering with genetic evolution.  By virtually “hiding” the real (heritable) Iranian Nose variant behind a fake, non-heritable small nose, natural selection is fooled. Therefore, nose jobs to Iranian woman will guarantee that in the long term the precious Iranian nose shape with its distinct and impressive sharpness will always comes back in every new generation.

Hello, my name is Nofretete, and I was born in Luxor in Egypt.
1912 some archeologists recovered me from this dark grave in the earth and brought me back to light. I, who together with my beloved husband Echnaton were so much fascinated by the divine nature of the sun had to spend 3400 years in the dark. When I was recovered and brought to Berlin, this not only caused a real Egyptomania and Nofretete-cult amongst the ordinary people, but the sun itself started to shine brighter and stronger for happiness to have me back.

The Egyptians were always afraid of my beauty. 3400 years ago they hated my preference of the sun against all the single, little minor gods they were worshipping. Thats why they banned my statue and burried me deep under ground. After the German archeologists under Ludwig Borchardt excavated me 100 years ago in the meter deep dust in Amarna, and brought me back to sunshine, the Egyption authorities several times attempted to get hold of me. They ordered reviews from French lawyers that should proof how the Germans had violated a contract with Egypt and insidiously betrayed them by highjacking me to Berlin. I have to admit, that my escape from Egypt to Berlin did not happened against my own will: Without exchanging words, both Borchardt and myself understood that the Berlin New Museum would provide a more adequate place for me than an Egyptian dust bin. We were afraid that in Egypt, they again would try to hide my beauty from the peoples eyes.
Now, 2012, 100 years after my rebirth, they introduce in Egypt the Sharia, ordering every woman to hide her face and her beauty. Returning to Egypt, wouldn’t they put me under a hijab or a burka, before showing me in the public ? Or will the Salafists who just occupied a couple of parlament seats and  governmental posts attack me altogether, destroy me as they did with other statues in Afghanistan and in Mali, because they fear that people will worship my beauty ?
In Berlin in the New Museum, people from all over the world come only to see me, and yes, they worship my beauty. They like me, and I like them, and therefore I will stay in Berlin forever. I am nobodies property, I belong to the entire mankind. But in Berlin they always took care of me, and I know they will do so forever. During the bombings of the 2. world war, when the entire city turned into a pile of debris, they found a safe shelter for me somewhere far away in a mountain village. They were so intrigued by Nofretete, that first  emperor Wilhelm II and later the East-German government (who lost me to West-Berlin) both ordered identical copies of my statue.
I am nobodies property, not the Germans and not the Egyptians. But I am and will stay a Berliner. The local people call me a “Berliner Göre”, and although this sounds turkish, it is their slang for “naughty little girl”. Although this of course is a (typical Berlin) understatement of my beauty, I can life with it.

About ten years later, rich Arabic families from the Emirates and Saudi Arabia discovered Munich as a save, convenient and pleasant place to spend the summer time, escaping the heat at home, spending large sums at daily shopping walks and visit high-class medical clinics for annual check-ups. It might be, that the Arabs were fascinated by the idea that the name “Arabella-Hotel” was a reference to their home.

I tried with little success to shoot a picture with one of them, and the record cover of the Stones “Black and Blue” in front of the former entrance to the Musicland studios. It took me several days to find out a trick, since none of the black veiled women or their husbands were very fond of appearing on a photograph, with reference to the Stones rock music.

Black and Blue - in front of the former Musicland Studios