Somebody once wrote that:

“A boundary is not that which something stops at but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing”

I can’t be sure about the beginnings of presencing, but Westringia F points out some new ideas about how signals are transmitted along the membranes of our nerves.  She links to This paper, which  suggests that the thermal qualities of nerve cell membranes permit the transmission along them of solitons.

Westringia F writes to point out the elegance of this idea, since it accounts for an observed non-electrical component of nerve impulse transmission, and since the speed of sound at body temperature so nicely matches the speed that impulses travel along nerves.

And this theory is elegant, in this way.  But this notion also seems to add a whole new level of complexity—more Gilliamesque than Byzantine—to the system, which now consists not of neat bundles of wires, but of a sort of pneumatic system of watery tubes along which tiny impulses move as, well, motion (which seems so strange that I am almost surely pleasantly confused here).

But anyway.  The image above is of the Morning Glory—a massive fast-moving soliton wave cloud that appears yearly in the Australian outback.  If you have a glider, you can surf it.

If Westringia F (and Fischerspooner (sound!)) are right you’re surfing the Glory already.

[related link: check-out the winner of the third annual Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge]

Ok, so you may have noticed that things are slow here.  Well, I’ve been grading and the semester has been on top of me and things just may really get rather occasional around here soon and so there that’s what.

But I post briefly, from the Aroma Cafe, between papers.  The contest between Saturday’s dueling parties seems to have ended in a wash.  The Argentinian party ran good and late and involved dancing, while the philosophy party involved pyrotechnics, fire, and the Urbana police department.  So, in my book, both these were good and proper parties.

But today an odd development, wherein a certain lurker about emailed me some “blogging material,” which should by no means get third billing in a hasty and self-centered blog entry like this one.

The Viper writes to take notice of the provision under Public Law 103-199, that the U.S. government erect a large permanent anti-communist monument somewhere in D.C.  (across from the Georgetown University Law Center, wherever that might be).  While this  will not be a march-underable anti-communist arch, the statue will at least be a reminder of how lucky we are, having reached the end of history and found ourselves in this fair capitalist paradise of peace and justice.

Sadly, I must report that any plans to construct this alternative pyramidal monument seem for the moment to be on hold.

So, tonight I’ll set aside my unending grading long enough to attend a couple of parties, that are just a couple of blocks apart.  I’ll be studying the question of whether philosophers or Argentinians throw better partiers.  Results tomorrow.