Letters to a Persian Cat » Time | Letters to a Persian Cat

Superstition

radius — Sun, 03 Nov 2013 14:42:09 +0000

For my colleague from Israel it was a matter of faith, when he warned me that going to the lab on a Saturday wont be favored by God. Yes I know, I said to him, but first of all I am an bloody atheist, and second this super-ambitious student in my group occupies the RealTime PCR machine every day of the week. So to check the results of my transfected cell cultures, I have to do it on the weekend. Moishe from Israel was just smiling, saying that in Israel nobody would trust any experiments which were done on a Saturday.

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.

Sade in Munich (prenatal)

admin — Sun, 05 May 2013 18:04:55 +0000

Hi Michael, I have recently been back to Munich for a conference. It was a pity we did not met there. But guess what, on my flight from Stockholm we had these on-seat entertainment systems. I was browsing through the music-clips, and found one by Sade. It reminded me of her songs that we were listening together in your car three years ago. On the music clip it said “Munich, 1984″. Whow, I thought, so amazing music was played before i was born. But since the clip does not mention exactly when in 1984 the concert took place, in theory my mom could have been there while being already pregnant with me, and I heard the song prenataly. I found a copy of it on youtube, so enjoy Sade.
Take care
/ghazal

The Moon — one year later, but more than one year elder

admin — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 13:07:01 +0000

Ghazal my dear,

What is age, and what is aging, if everyone uses a different measure for this. This came to my mind when I did another picture of the moon tonight. Tonight it was once again the night of the Persides meteor shower. But since nothing could top the spectacular meteor that we saw together with you at the same night in 2010, I put more attention to the moon again (1). A year ago at the same night, we have been at the Bulgarian blacksea coast, and then the Persides night fell together with the full moon. This year, however, the same day in the year (11th to 12th of August), the moon looked completely different.

Its shape was already ascending to less than 25%, whereas full moon was already 10 days ago (exactly at August 2nd). So it is of some interest to understand why according to the solar calender exactly one year passed by (and even the Persides meteor showers declined to this (2), but the moon implies something different. As a proof, the picture on the left shows the shape of the moon as of tonight, and you can compare with the picture from a year ago.

The reason for this asynchrony is that the circular rotation of the moon around the earth and relative to the sun happens once every 29 days, 12h and ~4min. This means, that 12 month for the moon (or one year for it) take only 345 days, i.e. 11 days less than a normal year of 356 days. Therefore the full moon of August 2012 was visible 11 days earlier than the full moon of August 2011.

This means that for people who rely on the sun as their calender reference, a year has some 11 extra days, as compared to people who rely on the moon as a calender standard (like muslims). In the long term, after 33 solar years (which the western civilisation and the Persians use) an extra year has already accumulated for people in the islamic world. I have no clue if muslims indeed celebrate their birthdays according to the moons calender, and count one extra life year every 33 normal years. And it is not completely unlikely, that the processes of real biologically aging (or lets call it maturing) is influenced to some degree by the imagination of aging. Maybe somebody who really feels elder, if he or she suddenly discovers that instead of 33, he or she is already 34 years old. So therefore you might conclude (together with the early Beatles) that it is better to “….follow the sun”:

Sun is definitely good for a couple of physiological functions (vitamin D synthesis, production of serotonin which makes us happy and satisfied), but in higher doses it is doing the opposite: You know better than anybody else how UV-A and UV-B can accelerate the entire aging process, since you work on this issue and even got a scientific price for this. The Isar island, where some black ashes might still mark the site of our camp-fire, and which looked pretty uncosy and barely populated three weeks ago, today saw masses of locals who followed the sun and took advice from the 1960 Beatles song, rather than from your 2011 publication in Mutation Research.

I guess that now you’d like to know why I waited for an entire year, before sending you another photograph of the moon again. The reason was that after the Persides night in Bulgaria last year, my camera broke. I somehow smashed the display, and from then on it was totally black. But I did not want to throw it in the waste bin right away, since this camera was always a brave and reliable companion to us. So I left it untouched on my desk, before in a quiet moment three weeks ago I started to take it apart (like I did it with your wrist-watch two years ago). I soon realized that the broken display can be removed carefully and replaced with a new one. And soon I found through Ebay a possibility to get even seperate display units for virtually every single digital camera. I quickly located a provider with the funny name of GLOBAL-SHINING (3). Mr. or Mrs. Global Shining appeared to be a Mr. Ho, living with his GLOBAL STAR SHINING in Flat S30 1/F, Shopping Arcade, Tsuen Wan Centre, Tsuen Wan, Hongkong (4).

When I received Mr. Ho’s delivery, the small parcell contained not only the brand-new Samsung camery display, it also had as a little extra a special screw driver (not only fitting the microscopic steel screws that held together the camera back, but also of perfect size for chinese fingers) and a handwritten piece of paper saying “Thank you for considering GLOBAL SHINING as business partner”.

By help of the microscopic screw driver and some forceps from the lab I quickly managed to replace the camera display, and the pictures on todays post are the proof how well the whole camera is working again. Since I was so happy about revitalising the nice camera with the Mr. Ho’s help, I decided not only to give him excellent reference points on Ebay, but also send him some words of gratitude on a postcard showing Castle Neuschwanstein. It is nice to imagine how Mr. Ho mounts the colourful postcard to the wall of his Flat S30 1/F in the shopping arcade of Tsue Wan, Hongkong.

Is there a final take-home message from this post for you, Ghazal ? Maybe you will find one.

Take Care my Dear

Michael

Footnotes:

(1) Surely you know that the Moon symbolizes the pure, innocent beauty in Persian classicla poetry. This is independent of the exclusive role of the Sun in ancient, pre-islamic Persian culture, philosophy and science. But because poetry is very much influenced by arabic traditions, their spiritual preference for the moon as symbol in religion and arts got access into the poetry of Hafez, Rumi, Atta and Omar Khayyun.

(2) The Persides Meteor shower lives up to its name: same as the Persian people do, it follows precisely the sun’s calender. I guess that it follows in a precise and constant time after Persian Nouruz.

(3) Initially I could not figure out, if the name of the company GLOBAL-SHINING was referring to the moon or the sun. But now that I know that it is a Hongkong based company, I guess they even mean the Shining Stars.

(4) I guess Mr. Ho wont mind having his business address published here on my blog. But it might further promoted his excellent business. Just that Tsuen Wan does not have a postcode might discourage Hongkong tourists to drop into his store and buy camera displays.

The gels you left behind are still fine

admin — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 21:38:39 +0000

Dear Ghazal,
It is a rainy Friday today (the americans would say its a “vanilla sky”).
I hope you are o.k., hope my last e-mail was not too frustrating. As I told you, there are still plenty of things in the world that are amazing. For instance this one: I tried to detect a new Rb1 promotor variation today, and because I was too lazy to make a new gel, I went through the fridge were we all store our agarose gels. And guess what I found there: several plastic bags with gels, and written on them with your nice handwriting “Ghazal, 2.5% agarose +EtBr, 12-06-2010″.
Since I remember you were always working with highest quality, I thought I give it a trial and run my PCR samples on it. And if you believe it or not, but the gels still work perfectly. The only trouble is, that I could detect the Rb1 promoter only from human cell lines (MCF7). Most frightening, that DNA from myself does not contain Rb1 signal. Now I have to worry whether I am mutant (like X-men).

So you see there is always a bid to worry, even if something amazing is happening. But what made me really sad was to see that you left behind these gels, but did not stayed here yourself.

Thank you anyhow, Ghazal. In case I can do something for you in compensation for the gel: let me know.
enjoy the weekend, and write something.

Take Care, Michael

PS: I forgot what was this special chocolate waffles you liked so much ? Was it “Knoppers” or was it “Hanuta” ? Since I am not going to the Warsaw meeting I”d like to send you some – not only to say thank-you for the gel, but also to honour your achivements with the conference price that you were awarded.

The Velocity of Time (and how we experience it)

admin — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 08:11:26 +0000

Hi michael,

okay, so 4 institutes will go together and become the department of radiation research? which institutes are these?
the movie that you mentioned i have never seen before. Gustafsson is a very common name.
time pass to fast, unbelivable. just enjoying the free days that i have left. hope time goes slow!
hope you had a good weekend.

/ghazal

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Hi Ghazal my Dear,

So nice reading your mail. I just came in, we went out for a long walk because it was a beautiful Sunday, icecold but sunny. Finally, winter started here as well. This year it was a perfect program: We had almost later summer temperature till first half of November, and now, two weeks later, already winter climate. This intermediate autumn, with its wet and windy temperature lasted only two weeks.
I went swimming today in the little river next to our house (maybe you remember I wrote you in summer about it, it has several old stone bridges spanning over its cristal water). Swimming is still fine there, the water is warmer than the air (about 6 degrees I guess). After taking a bath for a minute, one gets very hot (think its like a counter-reaction of the body, like adaptive response).

The three institutes of the research-center that officially fused to form a Department are Radiation Biology, Radiation Protection, Cytogenetics and Medical Radiation Protection. I think the idea was more to save the institutes from beeing closed down, since there is actually not very much scientific exchange between the 4 institutes. Its merely political.

The center of Munich is very crowded nowadays. People start X-mas shopping, its crazy. I think people, although they are mostly catholics here, have forgotten that christmas has a non-comercial tradition. But I”m quite sure, you would also like it, to join millions of other people on their caravan through the department stores, don”t you ? What I like about the winter time in the city center is a big scating course they do on the Karlsplatz/Stachus (you might remember, where in summer-time there was the big fountain). This is really fun, one can do ice-scating, or just watch the other people doing it, or eat some grilled saussages.

I talked last week to Mrs. Friderike E-S, who studied UV-repair her whole life through. I asked her about the problem, if cells of different origin differ in their UV-repair capacity (depending on whether or not they can be exposed to sun-light at their normal position of the body). I told her that our hypothesis was that cells that origin from inside the body (lymphocytes, endothelial cells, neurons, muscle-cells and so on) might have a much lower UV-repair capacity than cells that are naturally sun-exposed (like skin fibroblasts or -melanocytes or epidermal or retinal cells).
She explained the following: There is no special DNA-repair system just for UV-induced damage. The nucleotide-excision and base-excision repair systems are essential to remove DNA damages induced by chemicals as well, like alkylating agents or free-radicals. And since these agents can cause DNA damage anywhere in the organism, most cells have the capacity to repair base-damages, 8-oxo-guanine, thymidine-dimers and all the other lesions, and therefore they are also prepared to repair these damages if they are induced by UVA-exposure in the laboratory.
I wrote some ideas about this on my blog, in case you want to read. Ghazal, I hope you don”t mind that I wrote it like a scientific dialogue, and it reads as if this fictional person “Ghazal” explains this. Hope you don”t hate that I put the words into the mouth of somebody else.

You wrote in your mail that you feel your time is passing very fast now, and you would like to slow it down a bit. I think it might depend from where you observe this. If you mean the present time, the moments you are just experience now: they seem to be short and run fast, if you are busy, if you have something important to do. Like when you did your thesis during the last weeks of September/October, I guess you felt that the few hours of the day passed away like minutes. But if you look back to such a busy period of your life, it seems as if this expanded, because you filled it up with something important. This for me is most obvious when travelling. If you finally arrive at your destinations in the evening, you just can not believe any more that 12 hours ago you still were at home. It seems as if this was many day ago. Do you know this feeling, Ghazal ? I guess so, because last year you also traveled a lot.
But this changes to the complete opposite, if one has nothing to do. Than the time one actually feels at the moment passes very slowly (for instance if you have to wait at the dentist or for a bus that does not arrive). It feels as if the minutes are hours. But later, if you look back, a period of your life where nothing important happened can appear very short.

I hope you are not fed up with all these long essays. You don”t have to answer them all, but I”m always very happy reading some words from you.

Take Care, Ghazal

PS: Yes, I would have been surprised if you would know this movie with Greta Garbo. I also saw it just by chance in the TV, because Leo Tolstoy, who wrote the novel, died 100 years ago. But if you just click on the youtube-link that shows a short scene from it, don”t you think its amazing, how Greta Garbo appeared trough the steam of train ?

Discovery of a habitable planet (also for horses ?)

admin — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 09:58:36 +0000

Ghazal, my Dear,

What a funny coincidence that today, just a couple of days after you speculated about finding a house for us on the moon astronomers from Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C announced the discovery of the first extra-terrestrial habitable planet in the universe. For sure, the moon is much closer to the earth, to your family and friends, and you probably can even spot Sweden from there if it is “Full-Earth”. According to the U.S. astronomers, however, the living conditions on “Gliese 581g” as the planet was named, should be much more convenient than the surface of the moon. O.k., I have to admit, you have to spend more for transportation (Gliese 581g is about 20 light-years or 190 billion km away from europe, moon “only” 380 000 km), but I would be ready to spend some extra money for the flight tickets, but have a nice environment instead (like on earth, the value of a property mainly depends on the three factors “location, location and location”). Talking about the living conditions there, of course one cannot expect exactly the same as on earth, but I guess we could easily accomodate to them. For instance, the seasonal year is only 37 days long (whether there ARE seasons like summer and winter here on earth is not known yet). There are, however day and night, that”s for sure. And the day-and-night rhythm seems to be much more human (first estimate is between 25 and 35 hours) than what you have in northern Sweden with their 180 days polar-day followed by another 185 days darkness.
There is one problem, and thats the mass of Gliese 581g: Since it is about 3 times heavier than the earth, physics unavoidably will give everything there a 3 fold higher weight. So the first weeks up there would be quite exhausting, walking, standing or dancing will be a tough physical exercise, untill our skelleton, joints and muscle strengthen and got used to carry this extra weight. The good thing and the best way to get around this stressful gravitational stress is the existence of water up there on Gliese 581g. Calculations show that there will be plenty of lakes, oceans and beaches, and the water should be crispy and cristal-clear. There just was no messy industry or agriculture or human sewage to spoil the water). And swimming, you should know, we would not feel our extra weight any more because of the (hydrostatic principle discovered by Archimedes).
Anyhow, whether you believe him or not and whether you like spending most of your day in the water, it is good that neither you nor me have any weight problems here on earth. This is for sure a good pre-condition to relocate to Gliese 581g, and maybe they even want to see a health-certificate for this when you ask for entry visa up there.

Hope you sleep well, and maybe in your dream discover some extra “must-sees” on this planet.

Take Care,

Michael

PS: You don”t have to prepare you luggage right now. And for sure: You first have to finish your MSc project and got the degree, because this improves your chances to make a scientific career on “Gliese 581g”.

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hi michael,

what ???? I don”t wanna go to this extra-terrestrial planet ! I just made up my mind, and after struggling with myself again and again and weighing every pro and con, and talking with my family in Sweden I declined to consider a future here in Munich. Thats 980 km away from Stockholm, and I wont accept any further distance. Not the moon (“only” 380 000 km ha, ha, ha) let alone a planet that is so far away, that even the light needs 20 years to reach stockholm. So then, everything the U.S. astronomers discovered now only shows how this planet was 20 years ago. Things can change so rapidly, michael, just have a look on our earth and ourself: 20 years ago we didn”t had mobile phones, but instead Freddy Mercury and Frank Zappa were still alive. You have been in east-berlin working in the station-bistro and I was a 4-year old baby-girl carried around europe on the arms of my beloved parents. How can we be sure that during the last 20 years no massive industrialisation started on this strange planet, or that global cooling down turn all the lakes and oceans into ice-skating courses ? Thats my last word. This planet is not an option for me.
And by the way, I came along this marvellous horse range this morning, on my way to the lab. It was a mystic scenery, how the horse appeared slowly from the morning mist..
When I was a kid, my dad used to read me persian fairytales, in which a white camel played a role, because it rescued Zartusht (or Zaratustra as you call him) from the deluge. I think you mentioned this legend also on your blog entry form July 16th. I fell in love with this camel, and the horses I met this morning reminded me of it. I think their physical strength and mental calmness are similar, and that makes both of them good companions to men. There was a display on the horse farm, and as much as I understoud german, they offered to give you one of the horses for riding out, if you agree to take care of it and clean it and feed it, it wont even cost a lot. So this, I have to admit, was one reason for me to consider staying in Munich.
I doubt that there will be horses on this far planet, therefore I also don”t want to go there.

Hope you understand my concern, michael.

Have a good night, and good dreams.

/ghazal

Quantum Entanglement, Dogs and the Problem of Longitude

admin — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 09:51:40 +0000

Hi Ghazal, my Dear,

Hope you didn” got lost on your Random Walk (swedish “Slump Promenade”) through the Olympia shopping mall.

The swedish “Slump” (for Randomness) is really a very, very strange word, isn”t it. And in research, randomness is always what we like to minimize because it tends to obscure our observations, which we would like so much to interprete as a result of shear causality. In the formular for the genetic LOD-score = log10 (Likelihood for Linkage by causative gene)/(Likelihood for Linkage by chance) it is the denominator standing below the fraction line.

Interesting, in the swedish Wikipedia-entry for Slump/Randomness there is a indirect link to a subject I already mentioned recently: Quantum Entanglement or Kvantmekanisk sammanflätning. This subject is still a hot issue between opponents and proponets of the quantum-mechanics. But there is good evidence that it works. The principle is as following: You take two particles that form a pair (having a joint wavefunction) and therefore are dependent from each other in their quantum-mechanical status. When you separate them spatially, their joint wavefunction remains and therefore their correlation is preserved. It is now believed, that by “taking on of these particles with you” wherever you go, and leave the other particle at home, you always can determine the status of the remote particle. A recent study published in NATURE estimated, that the speed by which information can be exchanged this way is about 10 000 times faster than speed of light.
My proposal, you remember, was to use our two twin DKNY watches for a permanent informational link between us, because their status I believe is already “entangled” .

A funny idea emerged in the 18th century, assuming an extra-sensual information transfer could solve the problem in sea navigations of how to keep the precise time from their home country (this was crucial to determine the longitude). There was the hilarious theory that if you take two dogs from the same litter (virtually twins), and you leave one of them at home and take the other one on board a ship that will go around the world, then the two dogs remain linked to each other by a transzendental and telepathic connection. Therefore, whenever the dog at home is hurt (for instance by peeking it with a needle), the other dog on-board the ship instantly feels the pain and howls loudely. So when the dog that is left home is hurt once a day at 12 o”clock midday, the people on board the ship hear the second dog howling and this way they know precisely when it is 12 o”clock at home. Funny idea, isn”t it.
Unfortunately (but maybe furtunately for the dogs) this project never worked ;-}, and finally the english carpenter and self-educated watchmaker John Harrison constructed in the year 1735 the first ship chronometer that run precise enough over many weeks on board the ship and therefore allowed the determination of the geographic longitude.
Although the strange idea to use dogs telepathic abilities for this purpose was born in England in the 18th century, it later appeared so hilarious that nowadays the english Wikipedia refers to it only in an entry on “Powder of Sympathy” rather than in its larger article on “The problem of Longitude“. The german, as always very open to strange and esoteric ideas, still reproduces this telepathic dog hypothesis in their Wikipedia.
But who knows, maybe today with the knowledge of quantum-mechanic entanglement we can make it work using our two watches.

Enjoy the time, my dear, don”t condemn me

Michael

Time Shift and Crystals

admin — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 06:55:21 +0000

Ghazal, my dear,
what can I say ? Your watch indeed runs pretty slow. I opened it yesterday night to clean it (but of course it was extremely clean from the inside). Between midnight and now, 8 a.m., it lost again about 3 minutes.
When you told me your observation that it regularily loses about 15 minutes per day, I thought this indicates once again that you came here from another universe. Maybe you know the TV-serie “X-Files” with Agent Scully and Agent Moulder, who always find simple evidence that people like you and me come from outer space. I think both of them would like the idea that somebody with the potential to slow down a watch (if it is in close enough contact with its own pulse, like in your case) must come from another world (where, as we all know, time is running slower, the spiderman falls into love with a swan and people are born old to get younger every day).
But coming back to your watch, which I fully understand you want to have running with earth-compatible speed. Sure enough, you are also going to spend some more time here on earth, with no flight booked yet that will bring you back to your angels universe. I heard of cases, when Angels came here just for a short visit, and suddenly started to like the wild life in our world and decided to stay for longer.
Therefore, I will do my best today to set up your watch to +/- zero. I”ll put in a new battery, later we see. In case it still runs slow, I”m afraid nobody can help you and you would probably have to return it to the shop (in this other solar-system) and ask for replacement through warranty (you have not shown to me the warranty certificate: I guess it was issued from a shop not known here on earth !!! Something like “The Unified Reverse Time Company at Zartha”).

But first, let me try to adjust it. We here on earth are good scientists and talented engineers, although we can not compete with you angels in terms of beauty and wisdom. Maybe I find a way to bring your clock-speed in synchronity with ours.

Have a nice and inspiring day, my dear.

Yours Michael

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hi michael,

im fine, yesterday was a nice sunny day as today.

thank you for taking care of the watch. i think i should bring it to the shop in sweden. maybe they can fix it. or i just have to return it. haha no im just a normal girl living in the right time. just something wrong with the watch. you dont have to change batteries. i just have it until i go back to sweden or something. but really thank you for trying to fix it.

hope it was not too hard to take back the other bike to helmholtz. i would think its hard.

i will take a look at the trailer later.

take care!!:D

/ghazal

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Ghazal, my dear,

Of course every angel tries to insist he (or she) does not come from another star, but simply from a country a bit further north. O.k., I acknowledge that you learned some swedish to convince me of this. But maybe it was just enough to guide me through IKEA, explaining to me that “Ordin” means “order” and “Äpple” means “apple”. I think I could learn this in a couple of days too. And what still makes me suspicious a lot are your blue eyes in combination with your dark hair. This, for sure is neither oriental nor scandinavian: this is celestial.

Now the latest news regarding your watch: I put in a fresh battery (guaranteed made here on earth), and have to say it seems to be 100% compatible with your extra-terrestrial DKNY watch. It runs nice and smoothly, and after 2 hours still without a second delay. I will leave it in for a couple of hours more, just to make sure it is stable. I just suspect, that your watch with its strong extraterrestrial energy has already influenced my watch at home, also causing this one to run slower now. Finally, both our watches now might run synchroneous, but are perhaps lagging behind normal earth clock-speed.

What would support this notions is the fact, that always when we have been together somewhere, like recently at IKEA or at the lake, in the coffe or just sitting with you in the car and driving the wrong way, I got the strange feeling that we were suddenly drifting into another time-zone, where everything is happening slower, but more intense. I would not say that it was an unpleasant feeling, it was just unusual. I think I could get used to it.

There is a second possibility to explain why the time around you runs 15 min slower per day. And this in fact has a scientific base, it is not a joke any more:

Some years ago US scientists wanted to understand how much is our human 24-hours diurnal rhythm (that controls when we sleep, dream, wake up, eat, work, digest etc) determined by the day-night-cycle of the earth. To study this, they recruited about 50 volunteers, who agreed to live for a month in a building that was completely isolated from any sun-light. The volunteers could only use electric light, which they switched on and off when they wanted. So finally, after some weeks in this isolated environment, the entire group had adopted its own rhythm of inactivity (sleeping) and activity (beeing awake, working, playing etc.). What was strange: their own physiological rhythm was exactly 11 min slower than 24 hours. Therefore, when the experiment was finsihed after 7 weeks, the people inside the building were almost exactly 12 hours laggig behind the day-night-cycle outside the building. This means, that we still have our own biological clock build in, that runs per day 11 min slower than 24 hours. It is only the astronomic day- and night-changes, that synchronizes us to an exact 24hours rhythm. Without seeing the sun coming and going every 24 hours, we would all live a slightly longer day. The most likely explanation for this slower running biological clock inside our body was, that it developed already in primates about 1 million years ago. And 1 million years ago, the earth was indeed rotating approximately 11 min slower per day (because the gravitational force between earth and moon continiously fasten it up).

If we use this knowledge, and remember that your watch runs 15 min per day slower, we might conclude that you came here from the past, from approximately 1 273.645 years before.
In case you think this is all very academic, have a look at these two papers that shows how DNA-repair and radiosensitivity changes with círcadian rhythm or how disturbances of the later can even increase cancer-risk.
Sorry, my dear, if I start to confuse you. It is not really my intention to cause you any headache.

I met today on the flee-market a man fro Persia, who used to sell books. I wanted to get something about Zartoscht, in case you decide to do the Pecha-Kucha about this. The man said he has a few in persian, but they are not for sale, you could only try to borrow from him. He also has german ones, but than I would have to try to translate a bid. I think it would be an interesting subject for a short talk. And you could combine it with some contemporary musicians who had or have zoroastrian roots (Freddy Mercury of Queen and former general conductor of the Munich Symphony Orchestra, Zubin Mehta).
I think due to my own interest in this philosophy, I might help you to collect some material.
But you have to made up your own mind.

At the end, Ghazal, here comes something for you just to relax:
It is a tour through the Swarovski Cristal exhibition and performance and I am absolutely sure that you will like it (it is calm, probably also runs on a slower speed and therefor more suits your rhythm of life).

Take care, don”t condemn me, relax.

Michael

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Ghazal, my dear,

Hope you had a nice day. I wish you some interesting dreams. You might dream of your wrist watch. It runs since 2 p.m. without any delay. But maybe now you are sad hearing this? Maybe this 15 min delay per day was one of the last links that connected you to your former angels universe, Ghazal.

I willl keep the old battery (the one that makes the watch running slower). If you feel to much nostalgia, I can put it back into the watch for a day or so.

Yours Michael