This is Priceless

Civilization in 2021

� Our Phones - Wireless
� Cooking - Fireless
� Cars - Keyless
� Food - Fatless
� Tires -Tubeless
� Dress - Sleeveless
� Youth - Jobless
� Leaders - Shameless
� Relationships - Meaningless
� Attitudes - Careless
� Babies - Fatherless
� Feelings - Heartless
� Education - Valueless
� Children – Mannerless

We are-SPEECHLESS,
Government-is CLUELESS,
And our Politicians-are WORTHLESS!

I'm scared - Shitless!

Only in This Stupid World ......do we leave cars worth thousands of dollars in the driveway and put our useless junk in the garage. ‍ ️

Only in This Stupid World ......do drugstores make the sick walk all the way to the back of the Store to get their prescriptions while healthy people can buy cigarettes at the front. ‍ ️

Only in This Stupid World.....do people order double cheeseburgers, large fries, and a diet Coke.. ‍ ️

Only in This Stupid World.....do banks leave vault doors open and then chain the pens to the counters.. ‍ ️

Only in This Stupid World ...........do we buy hot dogs in packages of ten and buns in Packages of eight.. ‍ ️

Only in This Stupid World .....do they have drive-up ATM machines with Braille lettering. ‍ ️

EVER WONDER ...


Why the sun lightens our hair, but darkens our skin ‍ ️

Why don't you ever see the Headline 'Psychic Wins Lottery' ‍ ️

Why is 'abbreviated' such a long word ‍ ️

Why is it that Doctors call what they do 'practice' ‍ ️

Why is lemon juice made with artificial flavor, and dishwashing liquid made with real lemons ‍ ️

Why is the man who invests all your money called a broker ‍ ️

Why is the time of day with the slowest traffic called rush hour ‍ ️

Why isn't there mouse-flavored cat food ‍ ️

Why didn't Noah swat those two mosquitoes ‍ ️

Why do they sterilize the needle for lethal injections ‍ ️

You know that Indestructible black box that is used on airplanes? Why don't they make the whole plane out of that stuff !! ‍ ️

Why don't sheep shrink when it rains ‍ ️

Why are they called apartments when they are all stuck together? ‍ ️

If con is the opposite of Pro, is Congress the opposite of progress ‍ ️

If flying is so Safe, why do they call the airport the terminal ‍ ️ ‍

Snowfall

An Oddball Earth

How rare in the galaxy are rocky planets like Earth in similar orbits around Sun-like stars? The question turns out to be surprisingly difficult to answer.  One of the strangest things in the cosmos might be – us.

Among the thousands of planets confirmed to be in orbit around other stars, we’ve found nothing quite like our home planet. Other planets in Earth’s size range? Sure, by the bushel. But also orbiting a star like our Sun, at a comparable distance? So far it’s just one, lonely example. The one beneath our feet.

A big part of this is likely to be the technical difficulty of finding a sister planet. Our telescopes, in space and on the ground, find planets around other stars by two main methods: wobbles and shadows.

The “wobble” method, or radial velocity, traces the subtle back-and-forth motion as orbiting planets tug their star this way, then that, because of gravity. The larger the tug, the “heavier” the planet — that is, the greater its mass.

In the search for shadows, planet-hunting telescopes wait for a tiny dip in starlight as a planet crosses the face of its star — a crossing known as a “transit.” The bigger the dip, the wider the planet.

In both cases, large planets are much easier to detect than small ones. And in the case of transits, small, rocky planets about the size of Earth show up much better against very small stars known as red dwarfs. In a sense, they cast a bigger shadow that blots out proportionally more of a small star’s light, so instruments like NASA’s TESS space telescope can more readily find them. A Sun-sized star won’t dim as much when an Earth-size planet passes by, making their transits harder to detect.

Apollo 11 Earth image. Credit: NASA Johnson Space Center

And there’s another troubling issue: time. A planet orbiting a star at Earth’s distance from the Sun would take about 365 days to make one revolution – just like our planet’s “year.” But to confirm such an orbit, your telescope would have to stare at that star for, say, 365 days to catch even one transit — and to be sure it’s truly a planet, you’ll want to see at least two or three of these transit signals.

All of these difficulties have placed such planets largely out of reach for today’s instruments. We’ve found plenty of small, rocky planets, but they’re nearly all orbiting red dwarf stars.

In our galaxy, red dwarfs are far more common than larger yellow stars like our Sun. That still leaves room for billions of Sun-like stars and, maybe, a significant number of habitable, Earth-sized worlds circling them.  Or maybe not.  READ MORE...

Over the Cliff

 

Triassic Sea Monster

An illustration of Cymbospondylus youngorum in a Triassic ocean teeming with life. Ammonites and squid were abundant in this open ocean environment. (Image credit: Illustration by Stephanie Abramowicz, courtesy of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM).)

A sea monster that lived during the early dinosaur age is so unexpectedly colossal, it reveals that its kind grew to gigantic sizes extremely quickly, evolutionarily speaking at least.

The discovery suggests that such ichthyosaurs — a group of fish-shaped marine reptiles that inhabited the dinosaur-era seas — grew to enormous sizes in a span of only 2.5 million years, the new study finds. 

To put that in context, it took whales about 90% of their 55 million-year history to reach the huge sizes that ichthyosaurs evolved to in the first 1% of their 150 million-year history, the researchers said.

"We have discovered that ichthyosaurs evolved gigantism much faster than whales, in a time where the world was recovering from devastating extinction [at the end of the Permian period]," study senior researcher Lars Schmitz, an associate professor of biology at Scripps College in Claremont, California, told Live Science in an email. 

"It is a nice glimmer of hope and a sign of the resilience of life — if environmental conditions are right, evolution can happen very fast, and life can bounce back."  READ MORE...

Horse on Beach

 

A Real Life Warp Drive

A team of physicists has reported the accidental discovery of a real-world "warp bubble" whilst observing the structure of Casimir cavities – a small step towards building a potential warp drive.

The Debrief reports that Dr. Harold G. "Sonny" White and his team stumbled upon the existence of a warp bubble whilst conducting DARPA-funded research into Casimir cavities and the energy density present in those structures. White acknowledged the significance of the fluke findings but asserted that it was only a small step forward in regards to actually building a warp drive.

"Our detailed numerical analysis of our custom Casimir cavities helped us identify a real and manufacturable nano/microstructure that is predicted to generate a negative vacuum energy density such that it would manifest a real nanoscale warp bubble, not an analog, but the real thing," White explained in a statement to the publication.

He emphasized that the findings recorded by his Limitless Space Institute (LSI) team centered around "a real, albeit humble and tiny, warp bubble" as opposed to a warp bubble analog, and confirmed that the structure "predicts negative energy density distribution that closely matches requirements for the Alcubierre metric," hence the significance of the observation.

IGN previously referred to the Alcubierre metric and the possibility of warp drives becoming a reality, as Space.com noted that "a concept for a real-life warp drive was suggested in 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre; however, subsequent calculations found that such a device would require prohibitive amounts of energy."  READ MORE...

The Kiss

Life's Little Ironies (Just Another Brick in the Wall)

 

Since tonight ended up being a late night for me, I decided to spend my last few minutes putting my thoughts down in this article while listening music from iheart online radio and the playlist that I recently created that has 420 songs or about a little less than 30 hours of music that will never be listened to straight through unless I am on my death bed and I can see hear.

What actually prompted my thoughts was the song FORTUNATE ONE by Credence Clearwater Revival now known as CCR.  The title of the song says it all, and the lyrics address how the singer is not a fortunate one...  however, that is not necessarily true because the musicians and the musical groups of the 1960's and 1970's as well as other decades that followed and now in 2000 to 2020 (rounding for simplicity) are MULTIMILLIONAIRES, especially CCR and the lyrics no longer applies to their current lifestyle.

But, that is only PART OF THE IRONY...  the other part is all the people who remain in the lower income levels of our American Society are the ones that made them MULTIMILLIONAIRES which to me is incredibly interesting to say the least.

Middle Class Americans and I am talking about those who earn an annual salary of somewhere between $35,000 to $60,000 and we could push that up to $75,000 or even $100,000 if you just focus on households and not necessarily individuals.

IRONY:  the purchases of the Middle Class create the Millionaires and Billionaires in this great, full of opportunities America or USA which would be more accurate, since we have Central America and South America as well.

IRONY COROLLARY # 1:  80% of the population with create the wealth for 20% of the population.

It is not just the record that the middle class purchases, but it is:

• Concert Tickets
• Records/CD's/Downloads
• Musical Groups/Individuals Memorabelia 
• Silver Screen Movie Tickets
• Professional Athletic Events
• Professional Athlete Memorabelia
• Painters, Sculpters, Print Makers, Photographers, etc.
• Fiction/Nonfiction Authors

IRONY COROLLARY #2:  the middle class will continue to buy these songs about what if feels like to be poor from the Millionaires because their lyrics make them temporarily feel better even though their purchases simply make them wealthier.

Late Nite Cooking

Once a month, I go in for my IVIG infusion to strengthen my immune system and once a month I receive premeds that prevents me from going to bed and accomplishing my evening's goal of falling asleep, and every month I forget to take 2 benadryl in the early evening so I fall asleep somewhere around the time that I am supposed to fall asleep.

Black Bean & Lentil Soup Without Diced Tomatoes

Once a month, I either watch something stupid on HULU or Netflix or Amazon Prime that I am not interested or I decide to get ahead on my blogs researching, writing, and then set a publishing date sometime in the future...  But tonight, I decided to do neither of those activities after taking my 2 benadryl...  instead, I decided to COOK...  imagine that...

I measured out a cup of black beans and lentils and dumped them into our instant pot and after pouring in the required water, I closed the lid, set the device on top not to release the pressure and set the timer for 10 minutes.

During those 10 minutes, I cut up 2 onions, 1 pepper, and took our two frozen turkey burgers and placed them in a frying pan with olive oil and a generous amount of pepper.  As the burgers cooked on one side, I would turn them over and scrap off the top cooked layer until there was nothing left to scrap off.  

I poured in the diced onions and peppers and added a large tablespoon of minced garlic and put a lid overtop of the mixture so that greese would not splatter out and up onto our cabinets.

The beans cooked, I released the pressure and when it was safe to release the top, I did so and poured in the cooked mixture from the frying pan along with a can of diced tomatoes as I do not like big chunks of tomatoes in my soups.

Everything is pretty much cooked and chopped in around 15 minutes but I want to slow cook it for another hour for the juice to thicken while I wait for my 2 benadryls to complete their work on my body.

When that hour is completed, I will let the soup cooled down while I wash ewverything except for the inside liner pot of the instant pot.  Once somewhat cooled, the soup is then ladled into 4-5 plastic containers (it usually fills after 3 ladles) and I have just cooked enough soup to last for 4-5 meals with each meal either 325 calories or less.

Bean and Lentil soup is an excellent source of protein, an excellent way to warm the body on a cold or chilly day, and an excellent way to maintain my blood sugar levels so that I am not always craving food.  Actually the trick is to eat 5 small meals throughout the day or have some have suggested eat small portions every 3 hours.  For me that would be at 9:00 am, noon, 3:00 pm, and 6:00 pm with maybe an apple or banana snack at 9:00 pm although it is not a good idea to eat anything after 7:00 pm.

A easy remedy for me would be to simply start my 3 hour meal plan at 10:00 am instead of 9:00 am.

IVIG Day

Every three weeks, I receive my IVIG infusion which lasts about 2 hours for the purpose of boosting my immune system which has been destroyed by my 13 years of cancer treatments...  My port is accessed so an hour before the procedure, I put on some cream over the port which minimizes the pain of using a rather large needle.

I usually request an early morning time slot (7 or 7:30) so that I will be assured of finding a parking slot close by and don't mind paying the price of getting up early to have that opportunity.  My drive is just under an hour, so I am up at 5:30 am.

However, this morning I was up at 3:30 because I woke up to pee and could not fall back to sleep, so I laid in the bed until 4:30 and when I looked outside saw that snow had fallen and remebered being told that we would be getting 3-5 inches.

As a result, I decided to leave the house 30 minutes early and if there were no problems, I did not mind waiting for 30 minutes in the car which is exactly what happened.  The snow was falling so fast that at times, it was blinding but the road was clear because the temps were somewhere between 32 and 34 degrees which is not cold enough to do any damage, even if ice had fallen previously.

This was our first snow of the year, and I was the first patient to check in for 2022 whatever the hell that means or does not mean....

I have 3 weeks off until my next doctor's appointment...

Sky News Australia