Saturday, June 19
BACK PORCH...
Friday, June 18
Back Porch Cogitations
The Valley was hot today... in the 90's but the humidity was low so it was rather comfortable out on the back porch. However, the cats prefer outside in the warmth rather than inside in the air. The day reminded me of some of those old movies that take place in the south and there is always a big ole hound dog or two laying around on the wooden porch or dirt ground.
I waited until after 6:00 pm to mow the lawn to keep out of the heat of the sun so that I could continue to wear shorts and a t-shirt rather than cover up with long sleeves. There was no one else outside, but then again, there seldom is as our neighbors like to spend most of their time indoors. And, for that matter so do I but for different reasons, I suppose.
I watched only a little news this morning as it was SOS and please don't confuse this with the SOS served in the Navy mess halls... but, it appears that national news stations get fixated on one or two topics and then spend the rest of the day and week, running those topics into the ground with redundant coverage.
Chicken Noodle News (CNN) was the first to do this when they started 24/.7 news coverage.
We have had several Hollywood actors decide to get into politics and their reasons are unclear other than they want to use their celebrity status to acquire votes so that they can attempt to force their thoughts and beliefs on others whether they are right for the people or not seems not to be of any concern to them.
I suppose they have a "right" to do this but I doubt very seriously if they would be kind towards a politician who tried to make it in Hollywood... but for many... turnabouts is never fair play. Still that does not seem to matte... especially to those who woke up being WOKE.
I have no sympathy for woke people, nor do I have any sympathy for those cities where crime and violence is on the increase because they have defunded the police departments so that money can be diverted to helping black people can have better SUPPORT ORGANIZATIONS on their way from childhood to adulthood.
I also don't give a rat's ass about being told that I am an oppressor because I was born white and free, like the lions in Africa. I am not who my father was nor his father nor his father nor his father or the one before that. I am me from 1947 to the present... no more no less... and, my grandfather was a druggist but neither was my father or me... so, there was no influence there...
My father worked for the federal government all of his career while staying in the naval reserves and when he retired he received TWO PENSIONS... I did not work for the government, nor did I work anywhere long enough to have received a pension. How frigging different can I be than that?
I was born in NC which makes me a Southerner. And, like I said, I was born white and free. I was born with natural athletic abilities that were never developed and I was born with artistic abilities that were never developed either. I am not as wealthy as my father was and I have no idea if I am more happy or not.
I enjoy who I am and what I have become.
Being a Scorpion
Scorpio is my birth zodiac sign... and, if you believe in that nonsense then according to the positive side, I am:
- determined
- brave
- loyal
- honest
- ambitious
- jealous
- secretive
- resentful
- controlling
- stubborn
Rows of Houses
When I was growing up just outside of Alexandria, VA, we lived in a community called Wellington Heights where the houses were close to each other but not that close... still, I remember my father saying that he did not want to live in a community where he could reached out the bedroom window and touch the house next door. Now, this was an exaggeration but I have driven through communities where this is the norm... like the photo on the left... and most of these houses are fairly large, there is precious little room to go outside and be alone unless you construct a privacy fence in between the houses on your left and right as well as the one behind you... obviously there is a road in front of you otherwise you would have to be air-dropped onto your property.
Thursday, June 17
It's All Good
I don't care to do that
Bless her little heart
It's all good
The first one really means I don't mind doing that... and, the second one is said when you want to give someone the benefit of the doubt for being stupid... and the third one is said, when you really don't give a shit about being pissed off anymore.
As long as I might live, I cannot ever imagine that I will ever stopped getting pissed off at something or someone... it is just in my nature... including getting pissed off at myself... I mean, I can't really bitch about anyone or anything unless I am willing to bitch at myself...
AND... it will NEVER BE frigging ALL GOOD... that shit just ain't possible.
Somewhat Interesting
Using CRISPR
To synthetic biologists, the answer is yes. The central code for biology is simple. DNA letters, in groups of three, are translated into amino acids—Lego blocks that make proteins. Proteins build our bodies, regulate our metabolism, and allow us to function as living beings. Designing custom proteins often means you can redesign small aspects of life—for example, getting a bacteria to pump out life-saving drugs like insulin.
All life on Earth follows this rule: a combination of 64 DNA triplet codes, or “codons,” are translated into 20 amino acids.
But wait. The math doesn’t add up. Why wouldn’t 64 dedicated codons make 64 amino acids? The reason is redundancy. Life evolved so that multiple codons often make the same amino acid.
So what if we tap into those redundant “extra” codons of all living beings, and instead insert our own code?
A team at the University of Cambridge recently did just that. In a technological tour de force, they used CRISPR to replace over 18,000 codons with synthetic amino acids that don’t exist anywhere in the natural world. The result is a bacteria that’s virtually resistant to all viral infections—because it lacks the normal protein “door handles” that viruses need to infect the cell.
But that’s just the beginning of engineering life’s superpowers. Until now, scientists have only been able to slip one designer amino acid into a living organism. The new work opens the door to hacking multiple existing codons at once, copyediting at least three synthetic amino acids at the same time. And when it’s 3 out of 20, that’s enough to fundamentally rewrite life as it exists on Earth.
We’ve long thought that “liberating a subset of…codons for reassignment could improve the robustness and versatility of genetic-code expansion technology,” wrote Drs. Delilah Jewel and Abhishek Chatterjee at Boston College, who were not involved in the study. “This work elegantly transforms that dream into a reality.” TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...
Wednesday, June 16
K I S S Theory
KISS...
Keep
It
Simple
Stupid
What I have found over my lifetime is that:- if something is simple describe it with complex words and concepts
- If something is complex describe it with simple words and concepts
Occam's razor (or Ockham's razor) is a principle from philosophy. Suppose an event has two possible explanations. The explanation that requires the fewest assumptions is usually correct. Another way of saying it is that the more assumptions you have to make, the more unlikely an explanation....
C H O I C E
I remember someone telling me that another person told them that
whatever it was that they did was done because this other person made them do it...
My first blush reaction and comment to this statement was THAT'S BULLSHIT FRED...
Of course, Fred was not his real name.... at least, not at the time.
NO ONE MAKES US DO ANYTHING... not even if they have a loaded firearm pointed at our heads... We make the choice to respond/react or do nothing.
But, if we did not do that, we would have been killed is the rebuttal, and yes that is true, but we all die eventually. If we die, we will miss out on all sorts of things... and, yes, that is true too. But, we did not have the choice of whether to be born or not either... and, had we had that choice, we may have decided not to be born...
Religion and Brains
A new, preregistered study out of the Netherlands, published in the European Journal of Neuroscience, sought to test prominent hypotheses in the literature relating brain structure to religious experience by way of a high-powered (i.e., having a large sample size), methodologically robust study on religiosity and structural brain differences.
The need for this, according to the authors, stems from myriad methodological inconsistencies in previous research, including small sample sizes, improperly validated testing tasks, and conceptual confusion regarding the structures being measured.
Thus, while the authors readily admit that brain connectivity measures may provide a more nuanced and accurate picture of the brain-religion relation, their primary aim was to “establish the (absence of the) relation between religiosity and structural brain differences at a level of methodological and statistical rigor that we hope will set a new standard for future studies.”
In other words: to dispel notions of the most basic and simplistic relations between brain structure and religious experience, paving the way for more sophisticated approaches.
Three theories were put to test. TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...
Tuesday, June 15
American Insanity
- Prices are starting to creep up
- Immigration is highest its ever been
- Taxes are increasing
- National Debt is increasing
- Military is decreasing
- Police are retiring or quitting
- Crime in cities is increasing
- Employers cannot fill jobs
- Educators say whites are bad
- Conservative voice being censored
- Covid leaked from a lab in China
- Quality of life decreasing
- Abortion rates increasing
- Divorces are increasing
- Americans lead the world in the purchase of illegal drugs
- Police Departments are being defunded
- WOKENESS is illogically stupid
- Boys want to be girls
- USA is no longer a role model/leader
- USA is DIVIDED permanently
Write WHITE Write
Parallel Universes
Multiverses and parallel worlds are often argued in the context of other major scientific concepts like the Big Bang, string theory and quantum mechanics.
Around 13.7 billion years ago, everything we know of was an infinitesimal singularity. Then, according to the Big Bang theory, it burst into action, inflating faster than the speed of light in all directions for a tiny fraction of a second. Before 10^-32 seconds had passed, the universe had exploded outward to 10^26 times its original size in a process called cosmic inflation.
Monday, June 14
Taking Breaks
The researchers found that during rest the volunteers’ brains rapidly and repeatedly replayed faster versions of the activity seen while they practiced typing a code. The more a volunteer replayed the activity the better they performed during subsequent practice sessions, suggesting rest strengthened memories.
“Our results support the idea that wakeful rest plays just as important a role as practice in learning a new skill. It appears to be the period when our brains compress and consolidate memories of what we just practiced,” said Leonardo G. Cohen, M.D., senior investigator at the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and the senior author of the study published in Cell Reports.
“Understanding this role of neural replay may not only help shape how we learn new skills but also how we help patients recover skills lost after neurological injury like stroke.”
The study was conducted at the NIH Clinical Center. Dr. Cohen’s team used a highly sensitive scanning technique, called magnetoencephalography, to record the brain waves of 33 healthy, right-handed volunteers as they learned to type a five-digit test code with their left hands. The subjects sat in a chair and under the scanner’s long, cone-shaped cap. TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...
Sunday, June 13
Sunday Sermon
- they are burning more gas than they need to
- they are causing more unconscious internal stress
- they are spending more money on gasoline
- they are endangering themselves and their passengers
- they are setting bad examples to other drivers
- they are endangering other motorists
- they are increasing health care costs if injured
- they are using valuable medical resources if injured
Saturday, June 12
Back Porch Written Reflections
Americans are different from the rest of the world because we live in a Democratic Society with a Democratic Republic form of governments that values FREEDOMS above all else except for maybe GREED and MONEY.
Many people on the LEFT SIDE of our freedom fence are saying that ALL WHITES are bad, evil, and OPPRESS all other races and ethnic groups, especially BLACKS and that this practice MUST STOP,
Many people on the RIGHT SIDE of our freedom fence are saying that we value of freedom, especially our freedom of speech that allows the LEFT to say whatever it is that they want to say.
These two views are so different that we are tearing ourselves apart because of our DIVISION; and, while that concerns me a little, what concerns me more is that our global enemies will take advantage of that divide.
While there are BAD PLAYERS in America on both sides of our Freedom Fence, we should be more concerned about the following:
- Our quality of education or the lack thereof
- The care we give our disabled veterans
- A growing economy with less than 3% inflation
- An economy that has close to FULL EMPLOYMENT
- A strong global military presence
- An open immigration program
- Equalizing the salary/wage scales
- Keeping all taxes as low as possible
- Reducing to the point of eliminating debt
- Ending our dependence on illegal drugs
- Becoming and maintaining energy independence
- Having politicians everyone can trust again
- Having leaders everyone can trust again
- Having managers everyone can trust again
- Having supervisors everyone can trust again
Released: Jim Morrison's Writings
To be published June 8th by HarperCollins, The Collected Works of Jim Morrison: Poetry, Journals, Transcripts and Lyrics promises to be something of a Morrison motherlode. At nearly 600 pages long, the book — compiled with the cooperation of his estate — pulls together most of his previously published work, from song lyrics to poetry (“Horse Latitudes,” “The Celebration of the Lizard”), as well as the entirety of the posthumously published writing collections Wilderness and The American Night.
But roughly half the book consists of previously unpublished material, including unrecorded lyrics, handwritten excerpts from 28 recently discovered notebooks, and 160 photos and drawings (including rarely seen family photos). Among the excerpts from Morrison’s notebooks will be his thoughts on his trial in Miami in 1970 (he was found guilty of indecent exposure and open profanity), as well as what are believed to be Morrison’s final writings — the contents of a Paris notebook from shortly before his death, “reproduced in full reading size,” according to the publisher. TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...
Friday, June 11
Back Porch Reflections
It "B" a rainy day here in East Tennessee this morning and my 3 cats are somewhat irritated that I slept in as long as I did this morning. However, I am up now, they have been given a treat and fed, at least a little, and I am sitting on our back screen-in porch listening to the rain and the bird...
BEST DAY EVER
The bluebird house I built with old deck boards that I sanded down is the home to a couple of unknown birds, as it seems that the bluebirds I saw visiting decided to live somewhere else.
Yesterday, after mowing the yard and showering, I drove the mile and a half down to Weigle's to purchase 2 large French Vanilla Cappuccino coffees in their largest cup possible that I was planning to drink today... which I am... and, I got these drinks as refills, so I only had to pay $.98 which included taxes instead of the original $1.50 each. I put clear boxing tape around the cup so that it will last longer.
BEST DAY EVER
What is great about living in this area, or at least where I live, is the fact that it is INCREDIBLY QUIET all the time.
This morning, there are NO SOUNDS from:
- unmuffled vehicles
- ambulance/police sirens
- lawn mowers, blowers, weed eaters, chainsaws
- loud music from neighbors
- barking dogs or cows
- yelling and angry neighbors