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.
Barb 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.
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…
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.
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.
This logic inevitably leads to the third world war. And if right now the further involvement of the West in the conflict in Ukraine is not stopped, then the full-fledged, “hot” war between Russia and NATO will become inevitable.
Moreover, due to the superiority of the United States and NATO in the field of conventional weapons, this war will certainly go to the nuclear level.
This catastrophe has been a long time in the making. In 1993, for instance, the annual deficit amounted to 3.8% of GDP, and the debt, which seemed astronomically high at a “mere” $4.4 trillion, was Lilliputian by today’s standards.
The trend goes back longer than that. The growth of the U.S. government in modern times is the story of post-WWII America. President Dwight Eisenhower seems to have been the last guy in the post-WWII era who understood that the welfare state, the warfare state, and tax cuts not backed by tough spending cuts are incompatible with fiscally responsible government, or at least with reasonably-sized government. His predecessor, Harry Truman, who had funded the Korean War effort, left Eisenhower a level of federal spending equivalent to 18.5% of GDP. Between then and now, both parties, with short-lived exceptions, have pushed both the defense and domestic budgets exponentially higher.
It’s now come down to this. Unless a new generation of leaders has the courage to cut such “untouchables” as the defense, education, justice, and homeland security budgets, and privatize the Social Security program (as more than 40 countries wisely have done), sooner or later, the current trajectory of federal finances will lead to an extremely ugly place. If you think things are bad now, just wait.
Centenarians, once considered rare, have become commonplace. Indeed, they are the fastest-growing demographic group of the world’s population, with numbers roughly doubling every ten years since the 1970s.
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We found that, on the whole, those who made it to their hundredth birthday tended to have lower levels of glucose, creatinine and uric acid from their sixties onwards.
Although the median values didn’t differ significantly between centenarians and non-centenarians for most biomarkers, centenarians seldom displayed extremely high or low values.
For example, very few of the centenarians had a glucose level above 6.5 mmol/L earlier in life, or a creatinine level above 125 µmol/L.
For many of the biomarkers, both centenarians and non-centenarians had values outside of the range considered normal in clinical guidelines.
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Keeping track of your kidney and liver values, as well as glucose and uric acid as you get older, is probably not a bad idea.
That said, chance probably plays a role at some point in reaching an exceptional age.
But the fact that differences in biomarkers could be observed a long time before death suggests that genes and lifestyle may also play a role.
If the cancer and dementia in my family history don’t take me out and civil/WWIII doesn’t make a negative contribution to my health I probably have a higher than average, but far from good, chance at reaching 100.
There is probably more truth in this than I would like to admit.
Prepare appropriately.
This evening I spent 2.5 hours on the cat discing my summer fallow in preparation for planting wheat on it this fall. I guess this sort of makes me a farmer.
Things would be “interesting” if the commies in this country attacked the farmers like they did in other countries. I have a rifle and know how to use it. And I know I’m not the only farmer with similar tools and skills.
Scientists have longed for some sort of technology that can propel humans faster than what physics says is possible, and now a new online tool is helping engineers make a warp drive the sole property of Starfleet. Last week, Applied Physics, which is an international group of scientists and engineers, announced that they’d created an online toolkit for “analyzing warp drive spacetimes” called the “Warp Factory.”
This comes only a few years after a flurry of papers reported that constructing warp drives — built on the idea of spacetime-folding warp bubbles — could be theoretically possible. Warp Factory provides an online playground for researchers to test warp engine ideas.
“Physicists can now generate and refine an array of warp drive designs with just a few clicks, allowing us to advance science at warp speed,” Gianni Martire, CEO of Applied Physics, said in a press statement. “Warp Factory serves as a virtual wind tunnel, enabling us to test and evaluate different warp designs. Science fiction is now inching closer to science fact.”
Interesting. I’m a bit skeptical but it is still interesting. I brings up a flood of memories for me.
In late 1999 my contract at Microsoft was not renewed and I was looking for a job. I called up Eric Engstrom who, the last I had heard, was still working at Microsoft. I thought he might know of a group that was hiring. He had left Microsoft a few months earlier and was about to start his own company. He was thrilled I had called him. His employment agreement at MS prohibited him from recruiting MS people for some period of time after he left. But since I contacted him and was no longer at MS I was fair game.
His recruiting pitch for me to join his startup was unique.
We were going to become billionaires by using a different business model and out competing MS in the Microsoft Office suite of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.
If you think that was grandiose…
And once we had the money stream we had sucked away from Microsoft we would start working on immortality. Immorality would give us the luxury of being able to, “Wait around for warp drive.” We would be able to travel the galaxy.
Every time I hear of warp drive outside of a Sci-Fi environment I think of Eric. And if I ever take a cruise on a warp drive powered ship and you see me sad it will be because I’m thinking of Eric.
On a happier note. Warp drive will enable the colonization of other planets. We no longer have the option to move to a new frontier (Idaho, Oregon, Utah, and Washington) as my great-great grandparents did when things got unpleasant in the Midwest in the lead up to the civil war. Short of the ocean and perhaps parts of Antarctica there just isn’t any place on this planet that isn’t infected with overbearing government busybodies or outright tyrants. The moon and Mars are sort of promising but the cost of living there is going to be really high for a long time. The environment is just too hostile.
With a Star Trek like warp drive there will be hundreds of planets with hospitable environments available. A few million free minded could make one a new home and not have to worry about the dismal political situation on earth. It would be better if the free minded people could persuade the busybodies and tyrants to do the move. But as I believe it has always been the case before here on earth, that the freedom loving people had to do the moving rather than government loving busybodies.
Scientists at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) has recently developed a revolutionary RNA-based strategy for a universal vaccine capable of combating any virus strain effectively and safely – even in infants and the immunocompromised. This innovative approach could transform how vaccines are developed and administered across the globe.
This could significantly reduce the threat from bio terrorists. And of course the more natural deadly threats like Marburg, Ebola, Hantavirus, HIV, etc..
Roll up your sleeves. Effective new vaccines have hit the market for everything from pneumonia to shingles to RSV to, of course, Covid-19. And that’s just the beginning.
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Pharmaceutical companies are currently developing everything from personalized cancer vaccines that could cost tens of thousands per patient to vaccines that prevent developing-world diseases like malaria or tuberculosis. Improved flu, pneumonia, and meningitis vaccines will also be available in your neighborhood pharmacy.
Scientists are testing vaccines to prevent a virus believed to cause multiple sclerosis in some people. Someday, vaccines could routinely treat acne, protect against peanut allergies, and even prevent heart disease or help treat Alzheimer’s disease.
This is all of great interest to me. Cancer took my dad, who also had heart problems. His father died of a heart attack. Mom, her brother, and their mother had dementia. Mom and her mother had heart problems as well.
Daughter Jaime frequently teases me about her being glad she didn’t inherit the packrat gene from me. It’s true that I keep a lot of stuff around that I haven’t used, especially books, since college or before. Barb also sometimes harasses (in a good natured way) about this. It could be environmental rather than a gene, but I know it is definitely something my family does. There are tools in my brother’s shop that belonged to our great-grandfather and haven’t been used since I can remember. As I have grand children those tools will be seen by original owner’s great-great-grandchildren.
In my brothers houses there other things too, canning jars, folding beds, and lots of books that belonged to my parents and grandparents. It’s just tough to throw so much of that stuff away. As my brother Doug and I say, almost in unison, “They MEAN something to me.
Around the barn and in the woods behind the house there are farm implements that haven’t been used in 50 years. I don’t think there is anything that belonged to my grandparents but there is stuff that my grandfather saw my father using.
Back to Jaime. Because this is my chance to get back at her for all those decades of her teasing me.
Jaime is a software developer for Microsoft and during COVID obtained permission to work from home “forever”. With the Antifa and BLM riots and others stuff going on she sold her condo in Bellevue, walking distance to the Microsoft main campus in Redmond and moved to Black Diamond about an hour south of her condo. In another few years she plans to move to Idaho. She bought five acres of land a couple years ago and will start building a house soon. It used to be farm land and without any attention the weeds are taking over. I told her I would help her get the weeds under control but she will have to take over. I told her we need to cultivate it about every two weeks all summer. The weed seeds will sprout, and then be easily killed by the cultivation before they very big. In the fall we will plant grass and in a couple of years the grass with dominate almost all the weeds.
But how to cultivate it? She needs a little tractor and a cultivator. We can get a rototiller for the first take at the ground this spring, but need something else to hit the weeds with every couple of weeks.
I couldn’t find or rent the type of cultivator that would be appropriate for the job. Talking to brother Doug about the problem I said, “I wish we had something like the old spring tooth I used to pull behind the D4 when I was in grade school.” Doug immediately told me, “It’s down in the woods, near the well. And that would be almost perfect.” We discussed it and as we remembered it, it probably was made of four, 4-foot sections. One of those sections could probably be pulled by a medium sized lawn tractor.
Today my brothers and I restored a two sections of that old spring tooth I spent hundreds of hours pulling behind the tractor when I was of grade school age.
Here are the pictures.
You can barely see it in the grass and brush, but brother Doug is attaching a chain and we pulled the four sections out with brother Gary’s pickup.
All four sections had some damage from a tree being fell on them by a logger a decade or so ago. We selected the best three, one to use for parts and the other two for restoration, and took them to the shop.
Some of the fittings for connecting the four sections together for a 16-foot implement had to be cut off with a cutting torch. The bolt were rusted solid. All the other repairs we had to do involved bolts which need less “persuasion” and we were able to reuse.
Here is the end result:
This is what is left of the section we used for parts.
I still need to attach a cable to it for a hitch. I cut the cable to the proper length and will get the clamps and stuff tomorrow. In two weeks Jaime will visit Idaho, we will attach the cable and after she admits having a packrat gene comes in handy sometimes, we will transport her spring tooth to her property.
I’m reminded of Dad and Brother Doug talking to grain buyers about selling crops from the farm. The buyers would explain, in great detail and confidence, why the price would go up/down and encourage the farmers to hold/sell accordingly. Almost without exception you could count on their advice being exactly backward to the best interests of the farmer.
The recent experiment was conducted by Laura Battistel and involved four climate chambers with temperature control set between 23 and 25 degrees Celsius. The study included twenty-six participants, comprising an equal number of 13 men and 13 women. These volunteers were tasked with comparing pairs of chambers by moving between them and then determining which chamber felt warmer and which felt colder.
Each person made 120 comparisons between pairs of rooms, resulting in a total of 3120 comparisons. Analysis of the data revealed an average threshold for perception of temperature differences of 0.92 degrees Celsius. Moreover, all the participants showed very similar temperature sensitivity. “This indicates that this may be an inherent characteristic of our species,” Battistel says. “We are all endowed with a pronounced sensitivity to environmental temperature, although we are not aware of it.”
This comes as zero surprise to me. Barb and I joke about her temperature comfort range being plus or minus 0.1 F. While that is a joke it is probably about plus or minus 1 F. I’m guessing her detection range is approaching 0.1 F.
Oh, and Barb and I are very aware of our temperature sensing abilities.
The exposure-response relationship suggested that consuming around 3 cups of tea or 6–8 g of tea leaves per day may offer the most evident anti-aging benefits.
If anybody has enough money to insulate himself from the damage created for society, it would be Zuck. That’s sort of what it is. He’s destroyed the government and society, and now he can go to Hawaii and build a fort.
The cost rivals that of the largest private, personal construction projects in human history. Building permits put the price tag for the main construction at around $100 million, in addition to $170 million in land purchases, but this is likely an underestimate.
I wonder why he thinks he needs something like that?
Other billionaires, like PayPal and Palantir founder Peter Thiel, have built or been planning doomsday bunkers in remote places worldwide.
There are several reasons why billionaires feel worried about the future and are compelled to build doomsday bunkers, some of which include spillover risks of the Russia-Ukraine war, possible regional conflict in the Middle East, imploding Western cities into crime-ridden hellholes, the surge in illegal migrants across West, deteriorating financial conditions in the West, and the list goes on and on.
