Two Soups

    My wife and I have a small garden every summer that consists ofd squash, zucchinis, cucumbers, peppers, and tomatoes.  We did not use a tiller to break up the ground but built boxes out ot 2X6's and each box is devoted to each vegetable.  we plant about 9 of each...

    And, we have a dehumidifier in the basement that pulls out the water from the moisture that we use to water our garden  each day...  do we save any money between using water from the city or buying electricity to operate the dehumidifier...  not sure, and don't really care.  With an abundance of squash, zucchini, and cucumbers, I have created (not from any recipe just off the top of my head as the mood strikes me) the following soups:

First...  is my cucumber soup...

• Dice up 4-6 cumcumbers
• 1 large onion
• 1-2 large tablespoon of minched garlic
• a ton of coarse pepper
• 1 frozen package of spinach artichoke dip
• 1/2 cup of Ranch Dressing

Cook until soft then use a submersible mixer and blend until smooth.

2 Meals at 320 calories each

Eat cold or hot

Second...  is my vege spaghetti...

• Dice up 3-5 middle size zucchini
• Dice up 3-5 yellow squash
• Dice up 1 large onion
• Chop up 1-2 cups of mushrooms
• 1-2 large tablespoons of minced garlic
• 1 jar of spaghetti sauce or pizza sauce
• 1 package of Ramen Noodles - beef flavored

Cook on low-medium heat in a large fying pan until veges are a little soft but not mushy.  Pour in the sauce and cook for 20 minutes on low heat.  Dump in noodles, cover, and cook for 15 minutes on low heat.  Break noodles up until all are separated and stir around so that they are evenly divided among all the ingredients.

2 meals at 415 calories each.

Reheat in microwave on full power for 2-3 minutes or until as hot as you desire.

The Face

Colorful Turtle

 

White People

Keeping Safe

 

The Edge of Chaos

Researchers have demonstrated how to keep a network of nanowires in a state that's right on what's known as the edge of chaos – an achievement that could be used to produce artificial intelligence (AI) that acts much like the human brain does.

The team used varying levels of electricity on a nanowire simulation, finding a balance when the electric signal was too low when the signal was too high. If the signal was too low, the network's outputs weren't complex enough to be useful; if the signal was too high, the outputs were a mess and also useless.

"We found that if you push the signal too slowly the network just does the same thing over and over without learning and developing. If we pushed it too hard and fast, the network becomes erratic and unpredictable," says physicist Joel Hochstetter from the University of Sydney and the study's lead author.

Keeping the simulations on the line between those two extremes produced the optimal results from the network, the scientists report. The findings suggest a variety of brain-like dynamics could eventually be produced using nanowire networks.

Conceptual image of randomly connected switches. (Alon Loeffler)

"Some theories in neuroscience suggest the human mind could operate at this edge of chaos, or what is called the critical state," says physicist Zdenka Kuncic from the University of Sydney in Australia. "Some neuroscientists think it is in this state where we achieve maximal brain performance."

For the simulations, nanowires 10 micrometers long and no thicker than 500 nanometers were arranged randomly on a two-dimensional plane. Human hairs can be up to around 100,000 nanometers wide, for comparison.  TO READ ENTIRE ARTICLE, CLICK HERE...

Vertical Landing

 

Profound Implications

Peering down a row of magnets leading to the particle storage ring at Fermilab’s Muon g-2 experiment. The results have theoretical physicists around the world frantically working through ideas for explanations. Credit: Photo by Cindy Arnold/Fermilab

The news that muons have a little extra wiggle in their step sent word buzzing around the world this spring.

The Muon g-2 experiment hosted at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced on April 7 that they had measured a particle called a muon behaving slightly differently than predicted in their giant accelerator. It was the first unexpected news in particle physics in years.

Everyone’s excited, but few more so than the scientists whose job it is to spitball theories about how the universe is put together. For these theorists, the announcement has them dusting off old theories and speculating on new ones.

“To a lot of us, it looks like and smells like new physics,” said Prof. Dan Hooper. “It may be that one day we look back at this and this result is seen as a herald.”

Gordan Krnjaic, a fellow theoretical physicist, agreed: “It’s a great time to be a speculator.”

The two scientists are affiliated with the University of Chicago and Fermilab; neither worked directly on the Muon g-2 experiment, but both were elated by the results. To them, these findings could be a clue that points the way to unraveling the last mysteries of particle physics—and with it, our understanding of the universe as a whole.

The Muon g-2 ring sits in its detector hall amidst electronics racks, the muon beamline, and other equipment. This impressive experiment operates at negative 450 degrees Fahrenheit and studies the precession, or “wobble,” of particles called muons as they travel through the magnetic field. Credit: Reidar Hahn/Fermilab  Setting the Standard

The problem was that everything was going as expected.

Based on century-old experiments and theories going back to the days of Albert Einstein’s early research, scientists have sketched out a theory of how the universe—from its smallest particles to its largest forces—is put together. This explanation, called the Standard Model, does a pretty good job of connecting the dots. But there are a few holes—things we’ve seen in the universe that aren’t accounted for in the model, like dark matter.

No problem, scientists thought. They built bigger experiments, like the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, to investigate the most fundamental properties of particles, sure that this would yield clues. But even as they looked more deeply, nothing they found seemed out of step with the Standard Model. Without new avenues to investigate, scientists had no idea where and how to look for explanations for the discrepancies like dark matter.

Then, finally, the Muon g-2 experiment results came in from Fermilab (which is affiliated with the University of Chicago). The experiment reported a tiny difference between how muons should behave according to the Standard Model, and what they were actually doing inside the giant accelerator.  TO READ ENTIRE ARTICLE, CLICK HERE...

Animals

 

A Digital Euro

FROM THE ASSOCIATED
PRESS...

The European Central Bank said Wednesday it is launching a two-year investigation on whether to introduce a digital version of the euro that would complement cash, taking a cautious step toward introduction as central bankers around the world eye digital currencies and their potential impact on policy and the financial system.

The ECB said in a statement that the digital euro must be able to meet consumers’ needs while helping prevent illegal activity such as money laundering and must not have an adverse impact on financial stability and monetary policy.

Digitalization “is reaching all areas of our lives,” Fabio Panetta, a member of the ECB’s executive board, wrote in a blog post. “The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has shown just how fast such change can happen. And this is affecting the way we pay. We are increasingly buying digitally and online.”

He said that there were many questions to be answered and that “a decision about whether or not to issue a digital euro will only come at a later stage.” If the idea gets a green light at the end of two years, it would take three more to actually develop the digital euro.  TO READ ENTIRE ARTICLE, CLICK HERE...

A Routine of Routines

For the next 3 weeks, I have no doctor's appointments or treatments of anykind except an unexpected trip to the clinic, I suppose should anything out-of-the-ordinary arise with which might cause me some concern.  

My tasks because weekly maintenance of the yard, trash, recycle, and the cleaning of the pool, along with daily activities of hygiene, writing and posting articles and/or poems, blog maintenance, and adding to my in progress novels, of which I currently have 4, but can obviously only focus on one at a time.

There are no out-of-town vacation plans scheduled nor are there any plans to go to restaurants although we will no doubt go out for breakfast or brunch at least once a week.

Outside of watching FOX News in the mornimg, for me, the television screen will remain off and there are no plans or desire to stream anything to my cell phone or laptop or tablet.

Our 3 cats pretty much take care of themselves durimng the day, except when they take a notion that they need attention and/or food and then become a pestering pet until I get up off of my dead ass and do something for them.

My health remains stable and good and I will always spend a couple of hours every other day to prepare some type of meal that will last me 2-3 days with the focus being on squash, zucchini, tomatoes, or cucumbers out of our garden.

 

Jon Voight

 

LOKI Streaming

 

Cat Dance

 

Our Consciousness

When I see red, it’s the most religious experience. Seeing red just results from photons of a certain frequency hitting the retina of my eye, which cascades electrical and biochemical pulses through my brain, in the same way a PC runs. But nothing happening in my eye or brain actually is the red colour I experience, nor are the photons or pulses. This is seemingly outside this world. Some say my brain is just fooling me, but I don’t accept that as I actually experience the red. But then, how can something out of this world be in our world? Andrew Kaye, 52, London.

What’s going on in your head right now? Presumably you’re having a visual experience of these words in front of you. Maybe you can hear the sound of traffic in the distance or a baby crying in the flat next door. Perhaps you’re feeling a bit tired and distracted, struggling to focus on the words on the page. Or maybe you’re feeling elated at the prospect of an enlightening read. Take a moment to attend to what it’s like to be you right now. This is what’s going on inside your head.

Or is it? There’s another, quite different story. According to neuroscience, the contents of your head are comprised of 86 billion neurons, each one linked to 10,000 others, yielding trillions of connections.

A neuron communicates with its neighbour by converting an electrical signal into a chemical signal (a neurotransmitter), which then passes across the gap in between the neurons (a synapse) to bind to a receptor in the neighbouring neuron, before being converted back into an electrical signal. From these basic building blocks, huge networks of electro-chemical communication are built up.  TO READ ENTIRE ARTICLE, CLICK HERE...

Holding Their Place In Line

 

Aquatic

 

Fireflies Sync Their Flashes

Swarms of synchronous fireflies are rather like melting ice, or at least that’s how Raphael Sarfati, a physicist, sees it. Ice remains solid until it warms to a certain temperature and becomes a liquid. Likewise, a loose swarm fireflies will flash the lanterns in their abdomens randomly. But when the swarm reaches a certain density, the fireflies begin to blink in unison.

“Above that threshold, it is almost perfect synchronization,” with rhythmic, coordinated waves of light, said Sarfati, a postdoctoral associate at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

The spontaneous synchronization of certain species of fireflies, such as Photinus carolinus in the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina and Tennessee, has long baffled humans who observed the peculiar mating ritual, in which blinking males strive to attract the attention of ground-level females. 

Early-20th-century scientists dismissed the phenomenon as accidental or blamed it on puffs of wind or the twitching eyelids of the people who made these reports, according to one 1935 review in Science.

In the past 50 years, scientists collected anecdotal observations of these unified flashes but not enough empirical data to truly study firefly synchronization’s mechanisms.

Now, Sarfati and Orit Peleg, a physicist and assistant professor also at the University of Colorado, have filmed the mating hordes of P. carolinus and mapped their flashing patterns in three-dimensional space. 

Their research, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, adds to evidence that the insects sync their flashes, and suggests what may drive that coordination. TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE, CLICK HERE...

You Gotta See This

 

Dancers

 

Learning From Cuba

The Democrats Always Suupport China

Russia, China and Iran all Side with Cuban Government, Blame U.S. and Warn Not to Intervene | Gregg Jarrett

 

COOL

 

Open Borders

 

Voters

 

OPDIVO Day

Nivolumab, sold under the brand name Opdivo, is a medication used to treat a number of types of cancer.  

This includes 

melanoma, 

lung cancer, 

malignant pleural mesothelioma, 

renal cell carcinoma, 

Hodgkin lymphoma, 

head and neck cancer, 

urothelial carcinoma, 

colon cancer, 

esophageal squamous cell carcinoma, 

liver cancer, 

gastric cancer, 

and esophageal or gastroesophageal junction (GEJ) cancer.  

It is used by slow injection into a vein.

The most common side effects include fatigue, rash, musculoskeletal pain, pruritus, diarrhea, nausea, asthenia, cough, dyspnea, constipation, decreased appetite, back pain, arthralgia, upper respiratory tract infection, pyrexia, headache, abdominal pain, and vomiting.  

Nivolumab is a human IgG4 monoclonal antibody that blocks PD-1. It is a type of immunotherapy and works as a checkpoint inhibitor, blocking a signal that prevents activation of T cells from attacking the cancer.  

The most common side effects when used in combination with chemotherapy include peripheral neuropathy (damage to the nerves outside of the brain and spinal cord), nausea, fatigue, diarrhea, vomiting, decreased appetite, abdominal pain, constipation and musculoskeletal pain.

Nivolumab was approved for medical use in the United States in 2014.  It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines.   

It is made using Chinese hamster ovary cells.

NOTE:  I have had over 40 infusions of Opdivo which includes 12 infusions in conjunction with YERVOY prior to 6 treatments of radiation to combat metastatic melanoma that migrated from my foot to my groin to my neck.  

Ongoing treatments are being conducted to keep it suppressed.

Medieval Islamic Tombs

Thousands of medieval Islamic tombs in eastern Sudan were arranged in hard-to-detect patterns, with sacred "parent" tombs hosting subclusters of emanating burials, according to archaeologists who studied the funerary monuments with a method designed for cosmology.

The team used satellite imagery to identify the locations of more than 10,000 monuments in the Kassala region of eastern Sudan. The monuments include tumuli, which are made of stone and are "relatively simple raised structures, widespread throughout African prehistory and history," and "qubbas," which is a term that referred to Islamic tombs and shrines in the pan-Arab world, a team of researchers wrote in a paper published July 7 in the journal PLOS One.

After the team mapped the funerary monuments, they had trouble interpreting the data, given that few of the monuments had been excavated.

"We faced the challenge of interpreting the creation of the funerary landscape with almost no traditional archaeological data, but [we had] a large enough data set to be able to hypothesize the presence of complex processes both at regional and local scale[s]," Stefano
Costanzo, a doctoral student in archaeology at the University of Naples L'Orientale in Italy and lead author of the journal article, told Live Science.

"To the naked eye, it was clear that the clustered tombs were conditioned by the environment, but deeper meaning may have been implied in their spatial arrangement," Costanzo said. He and other members of the team searched for statistical modeling techniques that could help them detect patterns. Ultimately, they decided on a method called the Neyman-Scott cluster process, which was originally developed to study the spatial patterns of stars and galaxies. As far as the team knows, archaeologists have never used the technique.

"The biggest feature of this model lies in the fact that it can deal with archaeological data sets that [lack excavation data and historical records] but are composed of a very large number of elements, which is the basis to meaningful statistical analyses," Costanzo said.  TO READ ENTIRE ARTICLE, CLICK HERE...

Leaks

 

Quantum Entanglement

 

Quantum entanglement is a physical phenomenon that occurs when pairs or groups of particles are generated or interact in ways such that the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently of the others, even when the particles are separated by a large distance—instead, a quantum state must be described for the system as a whole.

Measurements of physical properties such as position, momentum, spin, and polarization, performed on entangled particles are found to be appropriately correlated. For example, if a pair of particles are generated in such a way that their total spin is known to be zero, and one particle is found to have clockwise spin on a certain axis, the spin of the other particle, measured on the same axis, will be found to be counterclockwise, as to be expected due to their entanglement. However, this behavior gives rise to paradoxical effects: any measurement of a property of a particle can be seen as acting on that particle (e.g., by collapsing a number of superposed states) and will change the original quantum property by some unknown amount; and in the case of entangled particles, such a measurement will be on the entangled system as a whole. It thus appears that one particle of an entangled pair “knows” what measurement has been performed on the other, and with what outcome, even though there is no known means for such information to be communicated between the particles, which at the time of measurement may be separated by arbitrarily large distances.


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Such phenomena were the subject of a 1935 paper by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen, and several papers by Erwin Schrödinger shortly thereafter, describing what came to be known as the EPR paradox.

The EPR thought experiment, performed with electron–positron pairs. A source (center) sends particles toward two observers, electrons to Alice (left) and positrons to Bob (right), who can perform spin measurements.


Einstein and others considered such behavior to be impossible, as it violated the local realist view of causality (Einstein referring to it as “spooky action at a distance”) and argued that the accepted formulation of quantum mechanics must therefore be incomplete. Later, however, the counterintuitive predictions of quantum mechanics were verified experimentally.


Experiments have been performed involving measuring the polarization or spin of entangled particles in different directions, which—by producing violations of Bell’s inequality—demonstrate statistically that the local realist view cannot be correct. This has been shown to occur even when the measurements are performed more quickly than light could travel between the sites of measurement: there is no lightspeed or slower influence that can pass between the entangled particles. Recent experiments have measured entangled particles within less than one hundredth of a percent of the travel time of light between them. According to the formalism of quantum theory, the effect of measurement happens instantly.It is not possible, however, to use this effect to transmit classical information at faster-than-light speeds.

Quantum entanglement is an area of extremely active research by the physics community, and its effects have been demonstrated experimentally with photons, neutrinos, electrons, molecules the size of buckyballs, and even small diamonds. Research is also focused on the utilization of entanglement effects in communication and computation.

All Different