Moomintroll and the Snork Maiden
It's Friday morning, August 15, 2025, 11:43, and this Web page is finished. I had already added the link to the archive, and now I've added a piece on the directive that NASA put a nuclear reactor on the Moon. And there is also a little information about a portable nuclear reactor that's been developed that could be installed in places where it might not be smart to put them. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ Below is most of what we talked about on this program. We are, to a slight degree, ignoring Donnie Bonespur
Trump's flood the zone
antics for this week — mostly. Pickles of the North followed on her discussion of the late author Tove Jansson's work from the previous program. R. Paul went on about a scientific breakthrough this past week that answers some questions and may raise more questions, some of them quite serious. This Web page is mostly done, but I may add some more to it in the near term. So you might want to check back for any updates.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday August 13, 2025, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security.
Some years ago the WBAI LSB voted to hold its regular meetings on the second Wednesday night of every month, subject to change by the LSB, so we have the following schedule:
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. Now I can again and there are a whole bunch of archive blurbs up there now.
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. Good luck.
Since the former General Manager 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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Pickles here, fresh from visiting the Tove Jansson and the Moomins
exhibit at the Central Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, right next to Prospect Park. I met our dear pal Mis at the library's promenade, which now has tables and chairs! We yakked up a storm sitting in the shade of the building before taking in the exhibit. We needed something sweet to look at after discussing the ongoing downfall of democracy, yikes. It was a great exhibit, lots of first printings of Jansson's Moomintroll books,(stories about little mythical creatures) and everything else she wrote, including her books for adults and some original letters to one of her dear pals, and large photos of Jansson and her partner of thirty years, fellow artist Tuulikki Pietilä. There was even a Moomin house you could walk into and admire all the pictures on the walls of Moomintroll and his family and friends. And Mis and I took a look in the Children's Room where they had even more of the exhibit that kids could zig and zag through. All very bright and cheery! We even laughed out loud! And there was a good number of little kids and their adults enjoying themselves going in and out of the exhibit pieces.
Then Mis and I headed out to a diner, ate and yakked some more, and took a stroll through Prospect Park. We even got to see a less smoky sky through the trees. We both felt better after zigging and zagging through the exhibit. Well, after that and a few cups of coffee!!
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Proteins are mostly what all living things, that we know of, on Earth are made of. The unit of life on Earth is the cell. Cells have to use DNA to make proteins.
An organism's total DNA is called its genome. In humans the genome consists of about three billion base pairs in each of our cell nuclei plus there's the additional mitochondrial DNA that we each carry because we are a bunch of eukaryotes.
Bacteria have much smaller genomes, and they, being prokaryotes, have their DNA in a tangled loop in the cell called a nucleoid and they also have some of their DNA in plasmids, rings of DNA that float around in the bacterial cell.
Even in bacteria there are a huge number of base pairs consisting of the nucleotide bases adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine which fit together in a specific order. and it has been discovered that it's pretty redundant. This redundancy is noted in humans where most of our DNA is called junk DNA
because it doesn't seem to do anything.
All proteins are made of amino acids. Every living cell in your body is using DNA to produce proteins for every second of your life. Scientists have been curious about this so-called junk DNA since it was discovered when the human genome was sequenced years ago. A question that's been hanging over scientists' heads has been why is that extra, apparently unused, DNA there and does it possibly play a role in our lives? So far those questions are far from being answered.
Ethical protocols prevent some experimentation with actual human DNA. But bacteria are considered fair game for experimentation.
A pair of scientific teams have been competing to answer the question of whether the redundancy of DNA is an accident or something useful and necessary. The cell reads DNA sequences three pieces at a time, these pieces are called codons. Each codon is used to produce one of the 20 amino acids that life on Earth uses to make proteins. It turns out that almost every living thing on Earth relies on the same 61 codons to produce those 20 amino acids. Each set of codons ends with an additional three codons to signal that it's the end of the sequences. So multiple different codons make the same amino acid. And that redundancy is at the core of the question these scientists have been puzzling over.
So I'm reading in a recent The New York Times article by Carl Zimmer that both teams of scientists have been trying to eliminate some of those 64 codons in certain cells to see if their absence makes a difference. The scientists are using the bacteria Escherichia coli, which is usually referred to as E. coli, which each of us has an abundance of in our gut. What the scientists do is rather painstaking work in that they remove certain codons and replace them with others. It turns out that the E. coli cells that the scientists have been experimenting on can function without the full 64 codons.
A very interesting part of this whole deal is that the scientists are able to actually create an E. coli genome from scratch! So they're assembling the genome with some codons substituted for others and not just taking the genome that's already in the E. coli and editing it. This is pretty amazing stuff to me.
In the The New York Times article they quote a synthetic biologist at Harvard Medical School named Akos Nyerges who has been working on this question about cells being able to function on fewer codons and he said that with these techniques, You can start exploring what life will tolerate. We can finally test these alternative genetic codes.
The Medical Research Council team has come in first and reduced the number of redundant codons to produce an E. coli bacteria with only 57 codons instead of the 64 they usually have. They call their strain of E. coli Syn57.
To get there they had to try out many different varieties of their genome. Many changes just killed the E. coli bacteria off. The E. coli bacteria that had the substitutes that worked is being referred to as extremely feeble.
Natural E. coli usually takes an hour or so to double its population; Syn57 needs four hours.
To me it's amazing that science has gotten to the point where scientists can actually create their own genome for an organism and have that organism function at all.
So the The New York Times article speculates that these techniques could be used to create bacteria that could make new kinds of drugs or other useful molecules.
Of course they could also be used to do bad things with.
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Sean Duffy, the Secretary of Transportation who is now also the acting administrator for NASA, has issued a directive that says that the space agency is to put a nuclear reactor on the Moon by 2030, as part of a race to colonize the Moon. Yes, there is a race to see who's going to try to colonize the south pole of the Moon. Based on the results of some probes it may be possible that there are pockets of water ice in a crater or craters that are right on the south pole of the Moon. The crater's rim would shield the regolith at the bottom of the crater from the Sun's rays, so water might be there. Water would make a Moon colony much more likely to be viable since in that case water wouldn't have to be sent to the Moon via rocket, which is a very expensive proposition. Getting the reactor parts up to the Moon probably wouldn't be that difficult, but getting the nuclear fuel there could be dicey. Once there, however, no one would have to worry about contamination of nearby towns, at least.
And there is a news item that a nuclear reactor has been developed that is small enough to fit on a flatbed truck. It can be moved from place to place, as needed. It could be installed in a small space such as a factory. The Golden Chest Mine in Idaho wants to have such a small rector to help them drill for gold. The Department of Energy says that the Uranium pellets that would be the fuel for the reactor would be made in such a way that they can't melt down. So it would be possible for these nuclear reactors to be set up in industrial neighborhoods in cities or brought around by truck to wherever they might be needed. What could possibly go wrong?
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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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