Category Archives: …and other stuff

miscellaneous postings by Lawrence R. Spencer

WHO ARE THE REAL VAMPIRES?

Republished by Blog Post Promoter

A Vampire is an Immortal Spiritual Being.  He or she cannot die.  Yet, they cannot inhabit a living human body either.  They are conceived to be dependent on beings who inhabit living bodies.  Vampires worship and covet  human bodies.  Their depraved state of being includes the notion that “only beings who have a body can have a real life”.  The idea that a disembodied spirit needs to drink the blood of a living human in order to have energy and longevity is part of the mythology about Spiritual Beings invented by priests attempting to frighten people away from disembodied spirits! PRIESTS do not want people to communicate with spirits!  If you communicated with spirits directly, like gods and ghosts, priests would lose their power, wealth and control over you!

Of course, an Immortal Spirit is Immortal with or without a body.  Learn more about how to live without a body in my book:  1,001 Things To Do While You’re Dead.

  Support independent publishing: Buy this book on Lulu.

 

READ MORE ABOUT VAMPIRES ON WIKIPEDIA.ORG:

Tales of supernatural beings consuming the blood or flesh of the living have been found in nearly every culture around the world for many centuries. Today, we would associate these entities with vampires, but in ancient times, the term vampire did not exist; blood drinking and similar activities were attributed to demons or spirits who would eat flesh and drink blood; even the Devil was considered synonymous with the vampire. Almost every nation has associated blood drinking with some kind of revenant or demon, or in some cases a deity.

Ancient Greek and Roman mythology described the Empusae, the Lamia,and the Striges. Over time the first two terms became general words to describe witches and demons respectively. They were described as having the bodies of crows or birds in general, and were later incorporated into Roman mythology as strix, a kind of nocturnal bird that fed on human flesh and blood.

Vampires are mythological or folkloric beings who subsist by feeding on the life essence (generally in the form of blood) of living creatures, regardless of whether they are undead or a living person/being.Although vampiric entities have been recorded in many cultures, and may go back to “prehistoric times”,the term vampire was not popularized until the early 18th century, after an influx of vampire superstition into Western Europe from areas where vampire legends were frequent, such as the Balkans and Eastern Europe, although local variants were also known by different names, such as vrykolakas in Greece and strigoi in Romania. This increased level of vampire superstition in Europe led to mass hysteria and in some cases resulted in corpses actually being staked and people being accused of vampirism.

While even folkloric vampires of the Balkans and Eastern Europe had a wide range of appearance ranging from nearly human to bloated rotting corpses, it was interpretation of the vampire by the Christian Church and the success of vampire literature, namely John Polidori‘s 1819 novella The Vampyre that established the archetype of charismatic and sophisticated vampire; it is arguably the most influential vampire work of the early 19th century, inspiring such works as Varney the Vampire and eventually Dracula. The Vampyre was itself based on Lord Byron‘s unfinished story “Fragment of a Novel,  published in 1819.

However, it is Bram Stoker‘s 1897 novel Dracula that is remembered as the quintessential vampire novel and which provided the basis of modern vampire fiction. Dracula drew on earlier mythologies of werewolves and similar legendary demons and “was to voice the anxieties of an age”, and the “fears of late Victorian patriarchy“.The success of this book spawned a distinctive vampire genre, still popular in the 21st century, with books, films, video games, and television shows.

HOW BIG IS YOUR GENOME?

Republished by Blog Post Promoter

GENES

(According to Earth “scientists”), genes are the fundamental units of inheritance in living organisms. Together, they hold all the information necessary to reproduce a given organism and to pass on genetic traits to its offspring.

Biologists have long debated what constitutes a gene in molecular terms but one useful definition is a region of DNA that carries that code necessary to make a molecular chain called a polypeptide. These chains link together to form proteins and so are the bricks and mortar out of which all organism are constructed.

Given this crucial role, it is no surprise that an ongoing goal in biology is to work out the total number of protein-coding genes necessary to construct a given organism. Biologists think the yeast genome contains about 5300 coding genes and a nematode worm genome contains about 20,470.

But the number for humans has been the subject of constant revision since biologists first began the task of estimating them in the 1960s. Then, they believed humans could have as many as 2 million protein-coding genes. But by the time the human genome project began in the late 1990s, the highest estimates put the number at 100,000 and the number has continued to shrink.

That’s an interesting result that is partly a reflection of the state of genomics. The human genome is by no means fully defined and biologists are still in the process of refining their gene models and withdrawing genes in the process.

Indeed, in the most recent update of the genome release, geneticists have withdrawn 328 of the 2000 genes that Ezkurdia, Tress and co identify as potentially non-coding.

And on this evidence, the human genome is set to get smaller still. “Our evidence suggests that the final number of true protein coding genes in the reference genome may lie closer to 19,000 than to 20,000.”

Which means that humans have fewer protein-coding genes even than nematode worms.

Geneticists long ago debunked the idea that more complex organisms require more genes. The water flea, for example, has 31,000 genes, the most in any animal, while the organism with the largest genome is thought to be the Paris jabonica, a rare flowering plant native to Japan.

The fact that the human genome is so parsimonious raises an interesting question. What exactly is it about the human genome that gives rise to our staggering complexity, in the brain for example, compared to other animals such as monkeys, worms or even water fleas?

A good answer to that question will win prizes!

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1312.7111 : The Shrinking Human Protein Coding Complement: Are There Fewer Than 20,000