Monday, July 3
Alien Fragments
In 2014, an interstellar object – thought to be from another star system – streaked across Earth’s skies as a meteor, then crashed into the Pacific Ocean near Papua New Guinea.
Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb is now leading a sea-going search, combing the ocean floor with what’s essentially a large magnet, hoping to pick up fragments of that object. He’s found bits of wire, tiny aluminum shards and volcanic ash.
And this week (June 21, 2023), Loeb reported that his team has found tiny metallic spherules whose composition suggests an unearthly origin.
Loeb posted the news in his onboard diary, which is published at Medium. He included a photo of a few of the odd objects, which are minuscule, only about 0.3 mm (about one-hundredth of an inch) in size. And he added a couple of more photos in his latest post on June 22.
Becky Ferreira also wrote about the discovery for Vice on the same day.
Loeb likens the search to “finding a needle in the ocean.” READ MORE...
Loeb posted the news in his onboard diary, which is published at Medium. He included a photo of a few of the odd objects, which are minuscule, only about 0.3 mm (about one-hundredth of an inch) in size. And he added a couple of more photos in his latest post on June 22.
Becky Ferreira also wrote about the discovery for Vice on the same day.
Loeb likens the search to “finding a needle in the ocean.” READ MORE...
A Thought About the Fourth on the Third
Tomorrow is the 4th of July, and many people will be celebrating our Independence not really knowing its true meaning or purpose, but simply have another justification to party and drink alcohol... and, there is really nothing wrong with alcohol... it's just that I don't drink it anymore.
For me the 4th of July has always meant fireworks in the evening after eating hotdogs, hamburgers, potato salad, some sort of beans, coleslaw, potato chips, and a slice of homemade apple pie. Vanilla ice cream is sometimes put on top, but I will eat it either way.
My thoughts on July 4th do not revolve around Independence so much as they revolved around the US Constitution and in particular The Bill of Rights and of those rights is the Freedom of Speech. I care more about freedom of Speech than I do about caring a firearm.
But, like anything else, the 4th of July is only one day, and when we wake up the following day, we will act as if there had never been a celebration of Independence. It will be business as usual which means what we care about mainly is making money.
COVID-19 Links to China
US intelligence agencies are still unable to determine how the Covid-19 pandemic started, according to a declassified intel report released on Friday (23 June).
In the report, the Office of the US Director of National Intelligence states that all government agencies "continue to assess that both a natural and laboratory-associated origin remain plausible hypotheses to explain the first human infection."
The report acknowledged that researchers at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, where scientists conducted coronavirus research in the city where Covid first emerged, fell ill in the fall of 2019, shortly before the pandemic began.
The report acknowledged that several researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell mildly ill in Fall 2019. READ MORE...
The report acknowledged that several researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell mildly ill in Fall 2019. READ MORE...
Sunday, July 2
Back in the Saddle
My wife has a lower back bulging disk and I have 5 lower back fused disks, so we were handicapped from the getgo. We hired movers to transport the heavy stuff but we moved all the other stuff ourselves.
The house we found was in our same community so it was just on the next street over which helped but we still had to pack and move, bend over and lift.
We stained our deck and made a few other home improvements which many people told us not to do... instead, wait for the buyers to raise what had to be done, then lower the sale price of the house. However, we were told to figure how much those renovations would cost, then increase the sale price to cover the potential dropping of the price.
We did not like that recommendation so we did the renovations ourselves in the heat and humidity.
Anyway, we are moved and our house goes no the market today. We still have to put things away and organize in our new house but we can move a little slower with that task. Consequently, I will again return to my blog and will work to give it a more robust appearance.
Your suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Thanks for your patience.
Getting Rid of Insects
Before you reach for the chemical-laden bug spray and store-bought insect repellents, there's a natural solution you can try—peppermint.
Insects hate peppermint. In fact, the stick bug uses a milky substance it can emit from behind its head that fills the air with the scent of peppermint. The bug uses this to fight off predators, as the scent is an unbearable irritant to most insects.
Using Peppermint Around the Home
If you have spiders, ants, mosquitoes and other bugs around your home, try using peppermint oil. The scent may also help keep mice away.
To get started, pick up some peppermint oil at your local health or grocery store. Look for 100-percent pure peppermint oil with no additives.
Next, try putting a little peppermint oil on a cotton ball and place the ball in an area where you often see insects, such as on a window sill or near a door. The scent should detour insects in the area. If this doesn't work, then try bug bombs for pest control. READ MORE...
Saturday, July 1
2024 Election ISSUES
- Inflation
- Biden's Corruption
- Trump's Legal Problems
- Different Judicial Standards
- A Politically Weaponized DOJ and FBI
- Stagnant Economy
- Weakened Military
- Price of Gasoline
- War on Fossil Fuels
- Illegal Immigration
- Crime and Violence
- Illegal Drugs
- Government Spending
- BLM - CRT - WOKE
- A Divided America
NOOOOOOOOO...
I doubt that any of these issues are really going to change the outcome of the voting public.
What I do think is going to be a crucial issue is ABORTION...
Believe it or not, women are going to use their influence, power, and numbers to make abortion the key issue in the 2024 election.
It does not matter if the Supreme Court ruled that abortion WAS NOT THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT... a huge amount of women think that it should be the responsibility of the Federal Government and that the CONSTITUTION is WRONG.
The Constitution is wrong because it was written by a bunch of WHITE MALES who did not care what the females at that time were thinking or would be thinking in the future.
WHITE MALE SUPREMACY is the key here...
It has influence Blacks and Females in the decision making processes that influences their political voting.
Most media disregard females and their opinions but that is going to be a mistake in 2024...
Nobody gives a shit about anything else but what is in it for me.
What do I want?
What do I think I deserve?
What should the Federal Government DO FOR ME?
Friday, June 30
The End of the Month of June
June 30, 2023 has another significance for me and my wife and that is, this is the day that our house of 23 years is going up for sale. It has been a good home and a home that I will be sad to leave but the wisdom of age is telling us that we are too old for this house and the stairs that we have to go up and down.
For the last 20 years, June has also been the month we go on vacation, usually spending a week down at Myrtle Beach... although, at the very beginning of our life together, my wife and I used to drive to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. It was a 12 hour drive and compared to Myrtle Beach is desolate with vacationers. We stopped going to the Outer Banks because we got caught in a RIP TIDE and no telling what might have happened if there had not been someone on a float who brought us both back to waist deep water.
June used to be the month where I would start mowing the lawn but for the last decade or more, I have had to start mowing in May. We used a push mower until we realized we had saved enough money to buy a riding lawn mower. Our first riding mower was cheap, did not last many years, but got the job done. Then we purchased a Deere.
June, as a boy would be the month that my mother would finally buy me tennis shoes... that had to last me the entire summer. I remember getting tennis shoes and a pair of Levis jeans that I would put on and go outside and get the water hose and complete saturate them with water. For the rest of the day, I would wear those jeans while they dried. Once dried they fit my body perfectly.
June has a lot of memories for me, and I am sure that I will see another 15-20 of them.
Thursday, June 29
Catalyst for LIFE
A recent research study may have discovered a missing link that helps explain Earth’s uniquely oxygen-saturated atmosphere and the corresponding evolution of animal life on our planet.
The study, led by a Fellow of the Forrest Research Foundation at The University of Western Australia and recently published in the esteemed journal Nature, may hold the key to understanding why, for almost 90% of Earth’s history, oxygen levels remained too low for animals to breathe.
The first major evolutionary event of animal life occurred during an event dubbed the Shuram Excursion – between 570 and 550 million years ago – which is believed to represent a massive release of carbon dioxide and oxygen into the atmosphere and oceans as a result of increasing ocean phosphorus levels.
To test the theory, researchers used a newly developed tool to track the abundance of phosphorus in the oceans hundreds of millions of years ago, recorded in six locations in Australia, China, Mexico, and the US.
The data and Earth chemistry model revealed increasing ocean phosphorus levels could not have explained the rise of oxygen. The effect was only replicated by the model when large quantities of sulfate rock were weathered, releasing sulfate into the oceans to produce vast amounts of oxygen. READ MORE...
Holding On
In 1987, I got involved with the Total Quality Management program in the USA (it actually started in TN at Tennessee Eastman) and in1990 I relocated to TN to manage the second Center for Quality and Productivity Management in the state. I was involved with that program until 2010 and had collected over 20 file boxes of notebooks and manuals that had been given to me to help prepare my TQM classes or that had been acquired at workshops. In 2015, I threw away all those boxes into the local landfill because the home in which I was living was running out of space.
In 2023, my wife and I decided to downsize from a two level house with stairs to a single level house with no stairs. Our yard size reduced from one acre to just a couple of strips of mowing on all four sides or 3 hours of yard work down to less than an hour. In order to move into our downsized house, we had to throw away all items that we had not used or worn in the last five years. We both threw away half our clothes and filled Habitat for Humanity's Truck almost 3 times.
The point is that no one really needs all the stuff they collect nor do they need all the clothes that they have purchased presumably because of work. It is also apparent that all the photographs and memories that we hang onto are rather pointless as well. From my standpoint, I had never looked back at the photos I kept from my first marriage that ended in 1993. Over 25 years of memories that were never looked at.
We HOLD ONTO stuff for a variety of reasons but in the end, none of those items, none of those memories, none of the money that was saved, can you take with you when you die.
SO WHAT'S THE POINT?
Driven to Extinction Will be our Fault
Sam Altman, chief executive of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind and Dario Amodei of Anthropic have all supported the statement.
The Centre for AI Safety website suggests a number of possible disaster scenarios:
AIs could be weaponised - for example, drug-discovery tools could be used to build chemical weapons
AI-generated misinformation could destabilise society and "undermine collective decision-making"
The power of AI could become increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, enabling "regimes to enforce narrow values through pervasive surveillance and oppressive censorship"
Enfeeblement, where humans become dependent on AI "similar to the scenario portrayed in the film Wall-E"
Dr Geoffrey Hinton, who issued an earlier warning about risks from super-intelligent AI, has also supported the Centre for AI Safety's call.
Yoshua Bengio, professor of computer science at the university of Montreal, also signed.
Dr Hinton, Prof Bengio and NYU Professor Yann LeCun are often described as the "godfathers of AI" for their groundbreaking work in the field - for which they jointly won the 2018 Turing Award, which recognises outstanding contributions in computer science.
But Prof LeCun, who also works at Meta, has said these apocalyptic warnings are overblown tweeting that "the most common reaction by AI researchers to these prophecies of doom is face palming". READ MORE...
Dr Geoffrey Hinton, who issued an earlier warning about risks from super-intelligent AI, has also supported the Centre for AI Safety's call.
Yoshua Bengio, professor of computer science at the university of Montreal, also signed.
Dr Hinton, Prof Bengio and NYU Professor Yann LeCun are often described as the "godfathers of AI" for their groundbreaking work in the field - for which they jointly won the 2018 Turing Award, which recognises outstanding contributions in computer science.
But Prof LeCun, who also works at Meta, has said these apocalyptic warnings are overblown tweeting that "the most common reaction by AI researchers to these prophecies of doom is face palming". READ MORE...
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