Via an email tip from Peter. Who found them at Meme-etic – According To Hoyt:
I’m not saying they are wrong. But just so you know… The deeper you go the tougher the problems with:
Faster please:
Scientists believe that by the 2030s humans could live forever
Humanity’s quest to defy aging is entering a transformative phase. The concept of “Longevity Escape Velocity” (LEV) now serves as a cornerstone in debates over the future of human life.
This idea suggests that advancing medical technology could enable life expectancy to outpace the passage of time, potentially leading to a form of immortality. But such a possibility raises profound ethical, societal, and economic challenges.
LEV borrows its name from physics, where “escape velocity” describes the speed required to break free from a gravitational pull. Applied to aging, it envisions a scenario where biomedical advancements outstrip the aging process, potentially rendering death from old age obsolete. Although still speculative, the theory has gained both ardent supporters and cautious skeptics.
Leading geneticist George Church believes this vision could materialize within our lifetimes. Similarly, Sourav Sinha of the Longevity Vision Fund predicts that with sufficient investment, LEV could be achieved in a few decades. Their optimism is rooted in breakthroughs in gene editing and cellular rejuvenation.
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Dr. Aubrey de Grey, who coined the term LEV, criticizes society’s resignation to aging, likening it to accepting bad weather. His optimism is shared by futurist Ray Kurzweil, who anticipates the arrival of LEV by 2028. However, this timeline seems ambitious given the rigorous approval processes for new medical treatments.
Kurzweil also predicted LEV would be reached by 2024. I figured I would make it that far, and he moved the goalpost. I expect it will be moved again. The only way I see it not moving is if a black market appears for some treatment.
This is not what I want to be reading in the news:
President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday formally lowered the threshold for Russia’s use of its nuclear weapons, a move that follows U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to let Ukraine strike targets inside Russian territory with American-supplied longer-range missiles.
The new doctrine allows for a potential nuclear response by Moscow even to a conventional attack on Russia by any nation that is supported by a nuclear power.
I really wish I could live in an underground bunker in Idaho for the next few months.
I recently installed a new weather station near my pistol range in Idaho. Barb gently mocked me about it because it is less than three-quarters of a mile from the Boomershoot weather station. The pistol range is also about 120 feet higher in elevation. I insisted the Boomershoot site has different weather than the pistol range. She just smirked as I tried to explain.
Here is today’s proof.
Boomershoot temperature, humidity and wind:
Pistol range temperature, humidity, and wind:
This is from October 25th.
This is straight off my cellphone. No enhancements.
This is from, essentially, the same location as these sunsets.
Eight years later, after being dragged from courthouse to courthouse, two assassination attempts and being labeled a “fascist” by his opponents daily, Trump has a real chance at another victory against long odds. The Daily Caller spoke to various experts across the political landscape about what to expect if that happens. From violence in the streets, to Democrats’ plans to contest a Trump win, to the media meltdown, to election lawfare from Democratic super-lawyer Marc Elias, they all predicted a much more dangerous and extreme response this time around if the “threat to democracy” is democratically elected.
McGinniss told the Caller he is preparing for unrest across the country that will be more intense than what was seen in 2016. He says nearly a decade of persistent anti-Trump messaging will be an accelerant for extremism.
“[We’ve been] told that, effectively, our country is going to be under a dictatorship if Trump wins,” McGinniss told the Caller.
He predicted that violent activists throughout the country would target the nearest avatar of the government they could find, whether that be federal courthouses or police precincts.
Julio Rosas, a national correspondent for The Blaze who has years of experience covering riots and social unrest, had a similar prediction, adding that migrants who have been let into the country under the Biden-Harris administration may join in big cities such as New York and Chicago. Above all, Rosas said protests can be expected because violent demonstrators have never learned their lesson.
Reagan Reese
October 27, 2024
What Happens If Trump Wins? (msn.com)
Expectations by other people are similar.
I don’t want to be in the city for the next few months. Unfortunately, my employer insists we be in the office four days a week. And, I don’t have an underground bunker in Idaho to live in. It is a lot of work to keep my small camping trailer there livable in the winter. And with two people in it, it is miserable to live in for extended periods.
These pictures were taken in the last two weeks from my property in Idaho.
Elk:
This was the first time I have ever got a picture of a woodpecker: They tend to be very shy birds. It is just stretching its wing. There is nothing wrong with it:
I didn’t even know there were raccoons in the area:
Mostly unrelated, but early this morning I saw the Northern Lights for the first time ever. This picture was taken from the door of my camping trailer in Idaho. The lights were too far away to be very impressive, but still, I saw them:
The Nobel prizes are coming out. These Are the Winners of the 2024 Nobel Prizes. Therefore, this is an appropriate time to bring this up.
Last May, Barb and I visited the Scandinavian countries. One of the places we visited was Stockholm. The Airbnb we stayed at had a few issues, but location was not one of them. We were capable of walking to many interesting places and nearby public transportation enabled quick access to many others.
Barb had a list of places to visit, and we connected with all of them. But just a three-minute walk from our Airbnb I saw this:
What??? We just stumbled upon the Nobel Prize Museum? Wow!
When I was in grade school, I really loved science. I entertained a dim fantasy of someday winning a Nobel Prize.
Barb wasn’t as enthusiastic as I was, but we had the time and visited the next day. She became more enthusiastic as we went through the museum. I was excited and shared bits of history she didn’t know. For example, Alford Nobel earned his money by inventing and manufacturing dynamite. He created the peace prize to compensate. He wanted to balance the war destruction enabled by his invention. We would be watching a video and without first mentioning the person, their accomplishments or difficulties would be described. I would whisper, “That must be Niels Bohr!”, or Marie Curie, or someone else I knew about.
The museum contained a lot of Nobel’s history, family, and friends. And even more exhibits of particularly well-known prize winners. Some of the things I found most interesting, included items from the prize winners that were related to the prize. This included things like the actual equipment used to make a particular discovery. Or a shawl worn while giving a famous speech. I was in awe. This is the actual equipment they used to discover “X”! Or the original notes leading to their discovery. It was awesome!
It was rather dim and since no flash photography was allowed, I didn’t get many good pictures.
Photo by Barb
From the notes to the video:
Took home the Single Stack National Champion title at the 2024 USPSA Handgun Nationals.
Less than 2% separating Dave Sevigny and myself for the title in the end. Was one hell of a race the whole weekend.
Pistol used was a Rafferty custom guns single stack 1911 in 40 Smith & Wesson.
John is my son-in-law. Daughter Xenia told me about it two and a half weeks ago. But I just now got around to looking for the video.
Congratulations John! That is awesome!
The rain on day two must have been really miserable. I have shot a high-level match in terrible rain conditions, but I was well prepared and, it being a steel challenge match, I didn’t need to move from target to target. My heavy waterproof boots were not an issue. John appears to have shot the second day of the match in soaking wet feet.
Barb and I saw some of the terrifying videos of the destruction caused by hurricane Helene:
We are so pleased we don’t live in a hurricane zone.
Instead, we live in a place with earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes.
Not far from Boomershoot, I have a piece of property with a pistol range, a small camping trailer, utilities, and other useful improvements.
The nearest neighbor is over 0.5 miles away. The nearest stop sign is over two miles away. The nearest stop light is nearly 40 miles away. And the nearest interstate freeway is over 130 miles away.
It turns out what I regard as a feature some claim this isolation is, in software development terms, a “bug.”
It all depends on your design goals. I’m designing for quiet, safety, stability, and resilience. I think it is an appropriate location for uncertain times.
Your design goals may vary.
Yesterday, Barb and I visited Prosser Washington to see the Prosser Balloon Rally.
At 6:00 AM it was a little cool and Barb was prepared:
I had often wondered how they got hot air in the balloon without burning them. Once they are inflated, sure, not really a problem.
They inflated them on the ground with a fan. Then, they poke the burner (they probably have a different name for them) in and put hot air in until the balloon lifts off the ground.
Last month my daughters arranged a family reunion/”camping” trip at the Freeman Creek Campground at Dworshak State Park. Xenia had a cabin, Barb and I stayed in a cabin, Kim, Jacob, and their son stayed in a tent. We went on a boat ride, a hike, and spent a lot of time sitting around talking.
Today I downloaded the pictures Xenia took.
This is a map of the area. As per Xenia’s request, I’m pointing to the place where I shot the rattlesnake when backpacking with her and her siblings back in the mid 1990’s. I mentioned this years ago on this blog.
These are the leaves of a plant my Grandmother Huffman called Mountain Tea. I found some along the trail and showed it to Barb, Kim, and Xenia. I suspect it belongs to the mint family. It is very aromatic and does make a pleasant tea. It can be brewed either green or dried with a completely different taste in the two forms.
Continue readingBarb and I recently visited Central Europe. In Vienna we were walking from our Air B & B to some sort of public transportation to visit Schönbrunn Palace (the main summer residence of the Habsburg rulers set on what amounts to a 400-acre park) when I saw this and did a double take:
What? Oh, yeah, Freud was from Vienna!
In high school there was a psychology class, and I heard other students talking about the Id, Super Ego, Oedipus Complex, etc. I read a little about it and was not impressed. It wasn’t like so many other classes I took, like the math and science stuff which once the teacher introduced a topic it “just made sense”. Of course this was right, it fit in with everything else I knew. This psychology stuff was something different. Did the human mind really work like this? It just didn’t make sense to me and I didn’t take the class.
In college I had to take some “humanities” classes and in what I think was my second or third semester I took Psych 101. One of the first things the professor said was, paraphrasing:
Freud created the science of psychology. Other than the existence and importance of the unconscious mind, we have painstakingly proved everything he said about the human mind is not true.
Freud was such a powerful figure it had taken two generations after his death to finally reach the point where people called B.S. on his work. And to this day we still have remnants of his legacy with Markley’s Law.
I loved that psychology class. It wasn’t the “this makes sense” type of stuff to the extent of the of math and the hard sciences but it was based on decent research and did make a certain amount of sense. I took numerous other psych classes throughout my undergraduate years and probably was close to having a minor degree in psychology. It was really easy and I got A’s in all of them.
Now here I am, a two-minute walk from Frued’s office and residence. Whatever I think of Freud’s work, I have to see this museum. The next day, on September 1st, we visited the museum.
It was a little disappointing, but I’m glad I did it. Here are a few pictures:
Barb reading about the family tree:
This is an art exhibit at the museum, it is not his real couch:
Growing up on the farm one of the things I did in the summer was work the summer fallow. I started at a young age. I know I started driving tractor about a month before my eighth birthday. And I remember driving the tractor in from the field working summer fallow at lunch time one summer, walked into the house and found my Aunt Mardelle and family had arrived from California. She greeted me and asked where Dad was. I said he would be in soon. She was a bit confused and asked, “But I heard the tractor come in.” I told her that was correct, I had brought it in, and Dad was working a different field and would drive the pickup home for lunch. She was shocked, “But you’re just a kid! They let you drive a tractor.” I straighten her out with, “I’m ten years old.” That didn’t satisfy her, and she said, “Yes. I know!” When Dad came home there was a short discussion between Aunt Mardelle and Dad with him mostly convincing her that I could handle the tractor just fine.
I remember the tremendous amount of dirt and heat you had to endure. None of the tractors had cabs and the top layer of the field was dry and created a lot of dust. I remember the dust piling up so deep on my watch I would have to turn my wrist over to dump the dust off so I could read it. I remember blowing my nose and having mud come out for a day or so after finishing. You could not see the bottom of the wash basin after washing your head, hands, and arms. The water in the basin looked like a mud puddle.
Probably five or ten years after I left the farm, they stopped using summer fallow as a cycle in the crop rotation. There were new chemicals that could be used to control the weeds and by planting a crop every year the risk of an unusually heavy rain causing excessive erosion was eliminated.
I expected I would never work summer fallow again and my children would never see it or experience it either. That changed this summer.
Daughter Jaime purchased five acres of Idaho farmland to build a house on in a few years. Last year the weeds grew up and it was a mess. I discussed it with her. Ultimately, she wants grass and trees and certainly not weeds. So, this spring we rented a small tractor from Brother Doug with a rototiller on the three-point hitch and took turns driving it. The It was cold, damp, and it took us two days to grind up the weeds and hard soil. That was not the summer fallow I remembered.
It should have been done sooner, but due to our schedules we could not get out there to work it again until July 13th. Jaime rented the tractor and rototiller again and worked for about 1.5 hours before she got a flat tire. She got it repaired but it was so old it went flat again within a very short time. Doug knew the tires were failing. They were over 25 years old and were no longer made. They had been patching them for years and now they were so rotten they wouldn’t hold a patch.
Jaime took it back to the farm and after some research by me, Doug, and others had a solution. There were tires that would fit but were slightly smaller than the original tires. As it is a four-wheel drive tractor there would be some “issues” if we didn’t take it out of four-wheel drive on hard surfaces, but it should be fine in the fields.
July 20th it was more convenient for me to work the summer fallow. It was going to be hot. It was going to be dusty. There was no cab on the tractor. It was going to be like what I remembered. I was glad I was doing this rather than my daughter.
The next-door neighbor, a retired farmer, came out spoke with me briefly and even though I had a cooler full of water bottles, twice filled up my thermos with cold water for me. I chugged them.
Around 4:00 PM I noticed something I had not remembered. My arms sweated so profusely the dust on my arms turned to mud:
By 6:00 or so the dirt on my arms was dried out again. That was a bit odd, I thought.
It took 12 hours. I finished up just before dark and the neighbor came out again and chatted with me as I tied the tractor down on the trailer. He told me it got up to 103 degrees that day. He thought I didn’t need to know that as I was in the field. That explains the muddy arms. I don’t think I had ever worked summer fallow when it was that hot before.
By the time I got back to my little camping trailer it was nearly 10:00 PM and I was more than ready for a shower and bed. But first I had to send Barb a message and a picture.
I asked her, “Should I take a shower before coming home? Or do you love me just the way I am?”
She didn’t really answer the questions:
Oh my. I’m laughing so hard I have tears in my eyes.
Here is another picture of my arm back in the camping trailer:
August 11th, Jaime did it all on her own. It was much cooler. I don’t think it got hotter than the mid 80’s. Good. I would rather she didn’t have to deal with some of the worst conditions I had ever experienced.
I arrived just after she had returned the tractor and rototiller:
This picture is after she changed out of her dirty clothes. She wore a long sleeve shirt that blocked the sun, a mask over her mouth and nose, and a large hat.
I never imagined any of my children would work summer fallow. She rented a trailer, loaded and tied down the tractor, drove with a trailer behind her car, drove the tractor, refueled it multiple times, and did a great job on the field work. I am very proud of her.
These are not good signs.
US Nuclear Sub, Carrier Strike Group Gets New Orders as All-Out War Appears Imminent
An American carrier strike group is being redeployed to a new area of operations ahead of a war that looks almost certain, and the warships will be joined there by a nuclear submarine that can bring a knockout punch to any fight.
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These powerful naval assets are being moved to the military’s Central Command area, which covers the Middle East and much of central Asia. The number one command priority of the force is to “deter Iran.”
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“Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III spoke with Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant today,” a release from Pentagon Press Secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder reads. “Secretary Austin reiterated the United States’ commitment to take every possible step to defend Israel and noted the strengthening of U.S. military force posture and capabilities throughout the Middle East in light of escalating regional tensions.
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“Reinforcing this commitment, Secretary Austin has ordered the USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN Carrier Strike Group, equipped with F-35C fighters, to accelerate its transit to the Central Command area of responsibility, adding to the capabilities already provided by the USS THEODORE ROOSEVELT Carrier Strike Group.
“Additionally, the Secretary has ordered the USS Georgia (SSGN 729) guided missile submarine to the Central Command region.”
The USS Abraham Lincoln strike group is being pulled from the Pacific region.
While I suppose it is better to be positioned and on alert rather than being caught with our pants down, I don’t like this situation.
I wish I could be in an underground bunker in Idaho for the next month.
Rolf’s comment about the lava flows of Washington I posted about lead me to reading more. I then realized Barb and my visit to Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho last month was totally relevant. It was the same hotspot that created the lava flows from British Columbia through Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Idaho, and finally Wyoming where we it created the features of Yellowstone National Park
Here is the governments video of the Craters of the Moon National Monument:
Here are some of my pictures:
The picture on the sign was taken in the late 1950s. A core from the tree showed it was at least 1,350 years old. The lava flow the tree grew from is radioactively dated at about 2,000 years old.
I have wanted to visit Craters of the Moon since grade school. My cousin Janis told our class about visiting with her parents. I would occasionally mention to my parents I would like to visit it someday, but it was over 400 miles from home and not on the way to or from any other place we routinely went. I was eternally envious of Janis’s visit.
Early this year Barb asked if there was anything I wanted to do over the 4th of July. I told her not particularly. Someday, I would like to visit the Craters of the Moon but that didn’t have to be anytime soon…
Of course, Barb being who she is, couldn’t help but make it happen. We flew into Boise, rented a car, visited Birds of Prey National Conservation Area, Craters of the Moon, and the Shoshone Ice Caves.
On a recent trip to Idaho I saw this sign at a rest stop in central Washington:
Over 50 lava flows! Each of them from more that 100 miles to the east!
I knew Idaho was mostly covered by lava flows but I didn’t realize so much of Washington was too.
Molecule restores cognition, memory in Alzheimer’s disease model mice
In a study, published in the journal The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a molecule identified and synthesized by UCLA Health researchers was shown to restore cognitive functions in mice with symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease by effectively jump-starting the brain’s memory circuitry.
If proven to have similar effects in humans, the candidate compound would be novel among Alzheimer’s disease treatments in its ability to revitalize memory and cognition, the study authors said.
Mom, her only sibling, and her mother all had severe dementia before they died. My brothers and I watch the medical news for stuff like this in hopes that even if the dice roll the wrong way there will be an effective treatment for us.
Common claims about U.S. self-defense law’s “exceptionalism” and “inhumanity” fail under closer scrutiny. Observers in the media, academia, and elsewhere tend to conflate access to deadly force (via firearms) with the legal authorization of the same. England and Germany’s self-defense laws, for example, far from being more “humane” toward the alleged attackers, place comparatively less legal restrictions on the circumstances under which deadly defensive force can be used.
Beyond assertions about U.S. self-defense law’s “harshness” being factually off-base, they are distractions. They get in the way of our embarking on a more informed national debate about the proper role of, and justification for, self-preferential deadly force in a modern, democratic society.
Eugene Volokh
March 15, 2022
Comparing U.S., English, and German Self-Defense Law (reason.com)
Interesting. I was under the impression that self-defense was essentially illegal in England. What about the stories such as a U.S. woman in England defending herself from attack with a nail file and being convicted?
Perhaps the law and the reality of prosecution are two different things.
Does anyone know more about this topic? This is kind of important to me. My step daughter is currently living in England.