Alphafold and His/Her/Their/Its Designs
It's Wednesday morning, August 4, 2021, 11:41, and this Web page is finished. This program didn't get on the air on time. In fact it was put on 21 minutes late. I'm still trying to find out why that happened. Our program is too frequently getting either put on very late or not put on at all. In any event, the archive of this program has been fixed, pretty much, and it's all there. I've added some graphics and some more of the stuff we did on this radio program. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ This Web page is getting posted later than I usually post these program Web pages. The reason is that some odd things suddenly happened with my system while I was getting ready to put this Web page together. It's possible that I was getting probed by people who wished me no good. It was possible that my system was actually getting attacked when I noticed it and stopped it. It's also possible that I misinterpreted what was happening and wasted a great deal of time scanning my computer for malware using several different applications. In any event, this all took a great deal of time and I was not able to get this Web page posted on time. And then the program didn't get on on time.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
Did you know that I've got a brief synopsis of some of the WBAI LSB meetings? Well, I do, and I've recently updated some of that.
I have also posted a whole lot of the minutes of the Pacifica National Finance Committee on this Web site. I'm a member of that committee because I'm the WBAI LSB Treasurer.
The next WBAI LSB meeting is scheduled to be held on Wednesday, August 11, 2021, it will probably be held as a teleconference meeting, as the 22 previous public meetings were because of the pandemic.
The WBAI LSB met on Wednesday, July 14, 2021.
The LSB meeting was sort of the usual, with some grandstanding.
Before the meeting I had put out a written Treasurer's Report for all to read.
Some years ago the WBAI LSB voted to hold its regular meetings on the second Wednesday of every month, subject to change by the LSB, which gives us the following schedule:
All of these meetings are set to begin at 7:00 PM.
WBAI has a program schedule up on its Web site. The site has gotten many of the individual program pages together to provide links and such, so check it out.
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Here is WBAI's current Internet stream. We can no longer tell if the stream is working without testing every possible stream. Good luck.
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WBAI is archiving the programs! WBAI has permanently switched to yet another new archive Web page! This one is more baffling than the previous one. For some time I was unable to post archive blurbs, then I could, and then I couldn't again. You can take a look at it and see if I've been able to post anything on it lately. There are still some limitations, but I am assured that I can plug in the archive blurbs that were lost in the latest upgrade.
This is a link to the latest version of the official WBAI archive. The archiving software appears to have been at least partially fixed. To get to the archive of this program you can use the usual method: you'll have to click on the drop-down menu, which says Display,
and find Back of the Book on that menu. We're pretty early in the list, so it shouldn't be too difficult. Once you find the program name click GO
and you'll see only this Back of the Book program. Management has fixed some problems that we'd been having with the archives.
For programs before March 23, 2019, we're all out of luck. The changes that took place once WBAI Management took control of the WBAI archives seems to have wiped out all access to anything before that date in March. You'll have to click on the same drop-down menu as above, which says Display,
and find Specify Date
, it's the second choice from the top. You are then given a little pop-up calendar and you can choose the date of the program there. Then click GO
and you'll see a list of programs that aired on that date. For those previous programs you can get the audio, but nothing else, since I can't post anything to those pages anymore. Yeah, it looks like they'll have some alternating program's name prominently there, but if you have the right date it'll be our program. Good luck.
Since the General Manager has banned Sidney Smith from WBAI he's not alternating with us on the air. As of November 2020, Back of the Book airs weekly.
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Our friend, fellow WBAI producer and Saddle Pal Uncle Sidney Smith has been banned from WBAI by General Manager Berthold Reimers. The General Manager will not say why. He won't even tell Sidney why he's banned! This is grossly unfair to Sidney and constitutes abuse of Staff. Why did Berthold ban Sidney?
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On this program we talked about a group called Deepmind working out of London, England. They have come up with an AI they've named Alphafold. What Alphafold does is produce designs of the shapes of many types of proteins, including enzymes. The Deepmind group released a database of about 350,000 shapes of enzymes a little more than a week ago. Of those protein shapes about 250,000 were new to science. The database includes all of the proteins that are made by the human body, which sounds like it has a hell of a lot of potential to be useful to scientists in the future. They also include proteins made by mice, which are frequent experimental models for biological work, fruit flies, which are used to test how things will affect genetics because they produce new generations very quickly and the Escherichia coli bacterium which lives in every human being's gut and has a large effect on us.
We talked about the history of enzymes a little bit, and we talked about how enzymes work. They're not just any collection of chemicals, they have certain shapes. These shapes allow them to interact with other proteins and create new proteins from them in ways that could never be done with simple chemistry. Basically, enzymes do things like change the shape of other proteins by a process called folding,
sometimes permanently and sometimes just long enough to add a little something to that protein and thereby change its behavior.
So we have an AI here that's already doing great work for humanity.
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Pickles of the North talked about the smoke that we're still getting from the fires out on the Western part of North America. The smoke is extensive, because the fires are so numerous and are burning up so much forest land. The Jet Stream is carrying the smoke along the northern United States, and southern Canadian provinces, and we're certainly getting it here in Greater New York.
People with asthma and other respiratory issues are especially affected by the smoke. In fact everyone is getting harmed by it. The smoke is in everyone's lungs and such fine particles can end up staying in your lungs permanently.
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On the last program we talked about a discrimination suit filed last month by a guy in Minnesota. He's alleging workplace discrimination on the basis of religion. He was fired from a debt collection agency because he refused to get fingerprinted, which is a part of the bonding process. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is taking his side in court.
We noted that some other superstitionists have scored six figure settlements against employers in the past several years because they didn't want to get fingerprinted or didn't want to use a biometric hand scanner as a security measure at work because they claim this is all the Mark of the Beast,
which they say will prevent them from getting into Heaven. Measures like fingerprinting and having a photograph taken are, in some cases, required by law for certain jobs. But I have to wonder how these cases go in court.
After the previous program I looked at the so-called Book of Revelations a little bit and I found that in Chapter 14 it says that only 144,000 people will go to Heaven. Also, those 144,000 people seem to be males only. One of the people who sued because she didn't want to be fingerprinted because the Mark of the Beast
would prevent her from getting into heaven was female. According to the Book of Revelations she couldn't have qualified for entry into Heaven anyway. And the 144,000 Heaven-bound people are further described as, These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins.
What do you want to bet that the other superstitionists suing employers don't qualify here, either? Haven't lawyers fighting this nonsense brought up these parts of the thing the lawsuits are based on in court? Or are they scared of doing so? I'd do it.
The so-called Book of Revelations is the final book of the Catholic Bible. It is quite a hoot. The people who wrote this thing must have been so high on something when they sat around making it up. If you want to get an idea of how absurd a religion that many people claim to adhere to can be you should check out the so-called Book of Revelations. This is the part of the Bible where the talk of The End Times
comes from. So when you hear some sky pilot or other religious fanatic talking about end times they're basing what they say on this pile of silliness. Just browsing through it shows what nonsense it all is. It also shows, as in these discrimination lawsuits, that the superstitious people who try to use this nonsense writing as a battering ram to bash others with are clearly cherry-picking the parts they want and ignoring the other parts right next to what they want in these lawsuits. Politicians, and sky pilots, all do this. They couldn't stand bringing all of the nonsense that's written in the Book of Revelations into their sermons and they certainly wouldn't do well spouting this crap on the campaign trail. I still don't understand how they can win trials when the thing they cite says they don't qualify for heaven. And the EEOC is a party to these farces! 🤦
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I think that these 2020 Olympics, which are being held in 2021, are unique in that athletes are being removed from competition in their sports for testing positive for a disease that's running wild in the host country. I'm seeing a report that 220 Olympic-related Covid-19 cases have been reported since the start of the games. Athletes who test positive for Covid-19 have to isolate for 14 days, which means that their participation in these Olympics is over. They really ought not to have held these Olympics at all. Japan is suffering a big surge in Covid-19 cases, and the delta variant is especially virulent. Athletes are getting infected at the Olympics and they are bringing the disease home, all except for the one young woman who is seeking asylum rather than be brought back to the Republic of Belarus to be imprisoned for criticizing her coach.
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As we were getting ready to do this program we got a couple of pieces of news relating to that traitor Donnie Bonespur
Trump. The Office of Legal Counsel for the Department of Justice said in a 39 page opinion that Congress — specifically the House Ways and Means Committee — made a legitimate request
to review the former president's tax records. The Justice Department opinion says that, under federal law, there is ample basis
for the Department of Treasury to hand over the returns to the committee for the principal stated objective of assessing the IRS's presidential audit program — a plainly legitimate area for congressional inquiry and possible legislation,
and that The statute at issue here is unambiguous.
The House Ways and Means Committee has been trying to get the Treasury Department to cough up Trump's tax returns since 2019, because it was considering bills and oversight in connection with federal tax law. Oh boy, the Manhattan D.A.'s Office has them, so does the New York State Attorney General's Office. Now Congress is getting them. Oh, I hope we see Trump go to prison for tax evasion, among other things.
Something else that just came out yesterday (July 30, 2021) was that, according to notes released by the House Oversight Committee, Trump urged senior Justice Department officials to declare the 2020, election results corrupt
during a phone call on December 27. According to handwritten notes from one of the people who was in that meeting Trump said at one point to then-Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen.
The R
meaning Republicans. Committee Chair Rep. Carolyn Maloney has issued a statement that says, These handwritten notes show that President Trump directly instructed our nation's top law enforcement agency to take steps to overturn a free and fair election in the final days of his presidency.
And 10 days later Trump directed his delusional followers to start an insurrection at the Capitol. Lock him up!
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There are a lot of issues that are considered hazardous to talk about on the air at WBAI, even though the gag rule was lifted in 2002. However, there is the Internet! There are mailing lists which you can subscribe to and Web based message boards devoted to WBAI and Pacifica issues. Many controversial WBAI/Pacifica issues are discussed on these lists.
One open list that no longer exists was the WBAI specific Goodlight
Web based message board. It was sometimes referred to on Back of the Book as the bleepin' blue board,
owing to the blue background that was used on its Web pages. This one had many people posting anonymously and there was also an ancillary WBAI people
board that was just totally out of hand.
In June 2012, I ended up having to salvage the bleepin' blue board, and so I was the moderator on it for its last seven years, until it got too expensive.
Sometimes we used to have live interaction with people posting on the Goodlight Board
during the program.
Our very own Uncle Sidney Smith, whose program Saturday Morning With the Radio On used to alternate with us, has a blog these days. You can reach his blog here.
There used to be a number of mailing lists related to Pacifica and WBAI. Unfortunately, they were all located on Yahoo! Groups. When Yahoo! Groups was totally shut down in December 2020, all of those mailing lists ceased to exist. One year earlier their file sections and archives of E-mails, had been excised leaving only the ability to send E-mails back and forth among the members. Now it's all gone. Older Back of the Book program Web pages tell a little more about those lists.
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