Category Archives: AllTrails

Air Quality, AllTrails, Art, Book Review, Colorado, Covid 19, Dogs, Exercise, Family, Fort Collins, Horsetooth Mountain Open Space, Pandemics, PurpleAir, Religion, Science, Space, Trail Running, Wildfire

MUSINGS FOR FRIDAY 24TH, SEPTEMBER 2021

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“Science is the one human activity that is truly progressive. The body of positive knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.” Edwin Powell Hubble

This image was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. It is a picture of what is know as the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) – a dwarf galaxy. Another name it goes by is Nubecula Minor. In Latin, Nubecula means little cloud. The SMC is visible from the entire Southern Hemisphere, but can be seen low on the southern horizon from latitudes south of 15 degrees north. Meaning – To see it in North America, you would have to be in the Southern Caribbean or further south. The SMC is about 210 thousand light years away with a diameter of about 7,000 light years. It contains several hundred million stars. In comparison, our galaxy the Milky Way, contains an estimated 100 billion. The SMC is one of the nearest intergalactic neighbors to our galaxy and one of the most distant objects that can be seen with the naked eye. Image credit: NASA, ESA and A. Nota (STScI/ESA). If you would like to learn more about the SMC please visit these sites: https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/brilliant-hot-young-stars-shine-in-the-small-magellanic-cloud and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Magellanic_Cloud

“You are what you know. Fifteenth-century Europeans ‘knew’ that the sky was made of closed concentric crystal spheres, rotating around a central earth and carrying the stars and planets. That ‘knowledge’ structured everything they did and thought, because it told them the truth. Then Galileo’s telescope changed the truth.” James Burke

This is an image of a part of the Gemini Constellation. It is located in the norther celestial hemisphere. It’s name means “the twins” in Latin. The constellation was first catalogued by the Greek astronomer Ptolemy in the 2nd century ce. The picture was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and features a stellar nursery named AFGL 5180. It is about 5000 light years away. Due to the stellar dust associated with star formation, it can be difficult to see the newly formed stars. But Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 was designed to do this very thing by capturing detailed images in both visible and infrared light. Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. C. Tan (Chalmers University & University of Virginia), R. Fedriani (Chalmers University); Acknowledgment: Judy Schmidt. If you want to learn more about this image please check out there links: https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/star-formation-in-the-constellation-of-gemini-the-twins and https://www.constellation-guide.com/constellation-list/gemini-constellation/ and https://www.sciencealert.com/hubble-s-latest-image-release-is-so-beautiful-it-should-be-illegal

“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” Werner Heisenberg

This image is showing the Lagoon Nebula or Messier 8. The picture was created by using X-ray data (pink color) from the Chandra X-ray space telescope and optical images from the Mt. Lemmon Sky Center in Arizona (Blue and White Color). Messier 8 is about 4000 to 6000 light years from earth. It was first discovered in 1654 by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Battista Hodierna. This star-forming cloud of interstellar gas is located in the constellation Sagittarius and can be slightly visible to the naked eye in a very dark sky. Image Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona. If you want to learn more about this image or the Sky Center in Arizona please see these links: https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/the-lagoon-nebula-gives-birth-to-stars and https://skycenter.arizona.edu/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagoon_Nebula

“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” Max Planck

This is an image of the spiral galaxy NGC 2276 taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. It lies about 120 million light years away in the northern constellation Cepheus. One of its spiral arms contains an intermediate mass black hole with 50,000 times the mass of the sun. First discovery credit is given to Friedrich August Theodor Winnecke in 1876. Of course at that time it was not understood that it was a separate galaxy from our own. That would have to wait until Edwin Hubble came along. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, Paul Sell (University of Florida). If you want to learn more about his image please visit: https://hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/2021/029/01F60K4CF8WRAD8GQ03HEBNBMQ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_2276

“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.” Carl Sagan

This is an image showing Dr. Nancy Grace Roman (third from left), Nasa’s first Chief of Astronomy and “The Mother of Hubble” visiting the Space Telescope Operations Center at the Goddard Space Flight Center in 2017. This was about one year before her death (1925 to 2018). Pictured left to right are: Beverly Serrano, Morgan Van Arsdall, Nancy Grace Roman, Olivia Lupie, Padi Boyd, and Erin Kisliuk. Nasa posted this picture on August 26th, 2021 to celebrate Women’s Equality Day. The day is celebrated each year on August 26th and commemorates the passage of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote in the United States in 1920. Image Credit: NASA/GSFC/Jim Jeletic. If you would like to learn more please visit these sites: https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/paving-the-way-for-future-generations-of-women-in-stem and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women’s_Equality_Day and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Roman

HEY!! I AM LOOKING AT YOU!! THAT’S WHO!! LOLOLOLOLOL

If you are reading this then you have continued to survive Covid 19 so far and so have I!! And that my friends is a very, very, good thing for all of us. I am still crossing my fingers and now my toes, hoping that I can keep saying this for the next year. I really mean that. I am hoping that I can.

The virus is back and with a vengeance. The death toil has skyrocketed again and when I started to write this blog post on September 7th, we were at 669 thousands death. This was an increase in the last 30 days of 36,000 individuals. To put this in perspective, between June 6th to July 6th we only had 9,000 deaths. A significant drop, and it really looked like things were headed in the right direction. Of course “the experts” were warning about the Delta variant by this time and did we listen? No, not really. Events that were planned back earlier in the year for July, August and September were not canceled or modified for the most part and have been going off as planned. So the last 30 days has seen a huge increase in infections and death. 36,000 thousand individuals and counting… My question is how high is this going to go??

Well it has been 9 months since I got the initial two doses of the Pfizer Vaccine for Covid and when the third shot became available, I jumped on it. So did my wife. By the time of publishing it will have been 3.5 weeks since I got the third booster and no side effects so far. There has been some debate from the FDA, CDC and the President’s health advisory committee about whether the booster is needed for the general population. At the time of publishing it was not being recommended for the general public in the United States, unless you were a health care worker, over the age of 65 or immunocompromised. In Israel, it is being offered to everyone over the age of 30 and at least 5 months since their second shot.

By the middle of the month, September 15th, we had added another 16,000 deaths since September 7th. Wow, that is only 8 days and 16,000 more deaths. And that is with several states, like Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa and Wyoming not reporting on a timely basis. So the toil is probably much higher. Or to put this another way: one person in every 500 individuals dies because of Covid now in the United States.

By the time of publishing on the 24th, the death toil was over 700,000 thousand individuals in the USA. So what that means is that we added another 30,000 plus deaths in 17 days or 70,000 deaths since August 6th. A little more than 35,000 for each month of August and September. Unreal. And again, this is with some states not reporting in a timely manner. How high will the toil go by the end of the year?? My guess is that it will be 800,000 to 1 million deaths. Especially with Thanksgiving coming up and of course you have X-mass and New Years… Almost all of this has been preventable. From the Grand Cheeto’s debacle in how he handled the early part of the pandemic to now with the anti-vaccine people.

Of course much of the morbidity and mortality in this fourth wave of Covid is due to the unvaccinated. So if there ever was a time to get vaccinated, it is now. Actually it is past time. So do yourself and your loved ones a favor and get vaccinated.

If you want to see the numbers for yourself check out this link: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

I am tired of talking about Covid but what are you going to do? You are not going to get anywhere by ignoring it. But life does go on, so lets move on to something a little different and somewhat better. During the month of August there were only a handful of days that the air quality was good enough to really get out and push the pedal to the medal so to speak. I did get in a few trail runs but nothing like I did in June and July. Believe it or not the air quality went from bad to worse by the end of August. It was really not until the second week of September that things started to improve a little bit.

This picture was taken on August 8th, 2021 at about 7:45pm in the afternoon. It is looking West and you can see the smoke in the area. I wanted to post this picture because this was pretty much everyday for the month of August. Most of the air quality alerts for the month ranged from Moderate to Unhealthy. Not really good for any kind of heavy training in the outdoors. The only good thing to come out of the smoke is that it made for some spectacular sunsets in the area. Every morning the first thing to do was to check the Purple Air Map (https://www2.purpleair.com/ ) and the Open Summit Map (https://opensummit.com/ ) for current air quality and smoke forecast. You could not even get away from it by going up into the mountains. The entire state was covered.

This picture was taken on August 13th, 2021 at about 12 noon and it is one of the last days that I ran in the Horsetooth Open Space behind Fort Collins. This was due to smoke issues. If you look between the trees you can see the haze out east. The wind had made a tiny window of opportunity to get a run in before the smoke came back and made things unhealthy.

The next three pictures were taken on a hike / run with my oldest daughter. It was in a wilderness area called the Rawah’s. It is in Northern Colorado, about 70 miles west of Fort Collins. The elevation ranges from 8500 feet to over 12,000 feet.

This picture was taken on August 21st, 2021 at about 10am in the morning. It is a picture of my oldest daughter Kayla and me. We are just a couple of hours into a hike / run on the West Branch Trail in the Rawah Wilderness Area.

This picture was taken on August 21st, 2021 about 10:30am in the morning and it is a view of Clark Peak. It is the highest point in the Rawah’s at 12,950 feet and part of the Medicine Bow Mountain range: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicine_Bow_Mountains In this picture I am standing on the West Branch Trail looking West.

This picture was taken August 21st, 2021 at about 11:45am in the morning. Here we are sitting at the end of the West Branch Trail, elevation over 11,000 feet. It was a great hike/run and fun to do with Kayla, Marvin and Marvin’s dog buddy Cash. Again, I cannot over emphasize the issues with the smoke this year. Even though the sky in the pictures looks clear, the air quality was moderate to moderate high for 2.5 particulates and we both experienced some upper respiratory symptoms after the run. This is a great area to go hiking, running, back packing, etc… A good app to check out this area is on AllTrails: https://www.alltrails.com/trail/us/colorado/west-branch-trail

The next three pictures are from a third and last trail run in August. The air quality had dramatically improved for a day with the passage of a weak cold front and associated rain. It is in the same general area as the above three pictures but with much better air quality on this date.

This picture was taken on August 24th, 2021 at about 12:00noon. In the first couple of miles of the West Branch trail there is a huge grove of Aspen Trees. The stark white bark of the aspens contrasting with the dark green foliage of the spruce and pines makes for an interesting landscape. I am planning to come back here later in the fall to see the leaves changing color.

This picture was taken on August 24th, 2021 at about 2:30pm in the afternoon. Here Marvin and I are on our way to Twin Crater Lakes. We took a fork in the West Branch Trail at about 3 to 4 miles in and headed up a different drainage. There were lots and lots of deadfall on this trail from the previous winter. Most of the trail clearing effort was still being focused on repairing fire burned areas from last year. It made for some interesting trail acrobatics to say the least! Lol.

This picture was taken August 24th, 2021 at about 3:30pm in the afternoon. Marvin and I had made it to one of the lakes. Here we are enjoying the sunshine at about 11,000 feet. It was a beautiful windless day. There were a few people up here with us either fishing or just enjoying the view like we were. You can check out this route via the AllTrails app: https://www.alltrails.com/trail/us/colorado/west-branch-to-north-forks-trail-and-twin-crater-lakes

Due to the poor air quality and high temperatures for Colorado’s front range, we decided to divide our walks with Marvin into smaller segments for August. Heavy exercise outdoors such as running was not something I wanted to do. It made no sense to put in all that effort, only to make things worse due to breathing in bad air. The days for August went something like this: easy walk in the AM with Marvin, heavy workout indoors using Rower, Nordic Track, or Spin Bike, easy walk with Marvin in the afternoon. This was one time I wished that I had a quality treadmill but that will have to wait until next year.

This picture was taken on August 26, 2021 at about 11:45am in the morning. Janet and I are just finishing up a morning walk with Marvin. The temperature was already in the high 80s but would continue to climb into the mid nineties by the afternoon. Air quality was in the moderate range as it was most mornings, but would climb to a much unhealthy level by afternoon with the addition of ozone created by the higher than normal temperatures.

With the rise of the Delta variant of Covid and the continued unhealthy air quality in Colorado the prospects of competing in my planned ultrarunning events (Leadville 100 and Run Rabbit Run) did not go off as planned. Oh well what are you going to do? I know that there were those that pushed the safety zone and did these events regardless of the risk factors. But that is not for me. I get it, it is hard to not do something that requires so much training and self sacrifice and then have the world throw you curve balls. It is like getting ready for a huge “party of the year” and at the last minute, while your heading out the door, canceling it. You experience a sense of loss. And for some, that is hard to work around. I am 59 years old and I still want to be doing the ultra running thing when I am in my 80s. So the risk was not acceptable.

I did get a lot of reading done with the “Marvin Walks” in the sense that I listened to several audio books. So I would like to review a couple of them.

The first one I would like to start with is The Premonition written by Michael Lewis. Let me say that this is not a book just about the current pandemic and who did or did not do what they were suppose to do. It is about several different public health experts and their stories over the last 10 to 20 years and what roles they played at the start of the current pandemic. If you were looking for an anti-trump book then you might be disappointed. It does point out the fallacies of the Trump admiration but not in an over bearing manner. I would say that over all this book paints a very negative light on the CDC that started way before the Trump era. If anything needs to change, it is the CDC and how they advise the public, handle data and help other public health officials dealing with public health issues. None of the characters, outside of the CDC, paint the organization in a glowing light. And to me that says a lot.

The author does a good job of bringing what can be a dry topic ( public health) to life. I would say that it almost reads like a novel. I listened to this book as an audio book but I feel it would work well in any format.

From the Amazon site: Michael Lewis, the best-selling author of The Undoing Project, Liar’s Poker, Flash Boys, Moneyball, The Blind Side, Home Game and The Big Short, among other works, lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, Tabitha Soren, and their three children.

You can find this book at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Premonition-Pandemic-Story-Michael-Lewis/dp/0393881555/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=The+premonition&qid=1632257294&sr=8-1

The next book I would like to talk about is “Why Trust Science?” by Naomi Oreskes. I first heard about Naomi Oreskes from a YouTube video from “The Royal Institution.” This is a channel were scientist talk about their research and sometimes promote their book about said research. If you interested in her talk, check out this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7PwqiiQmVM

I would have to say that the book did not disappoint. It was published in 2019 and is very relevant to the issues of today and the future. She gives a good historical perspective on science from the past all the way up to today. What I liked best is that she uses case studies to show where science got it wrong so to speak. And how we have learned from those mistakes.

In the book she does not shy away from some of the issues associated with the scientific process of today. The proliferation of what is know as “preprints” and how they are good to get information out but at the same time have a down side in that they have not had a formal peer review in a scholarly or scientific journal. And the whole idea of “Publish or Perish”, that creates issues for scientist to get something out “there” as quickly as possible before all the data collected can be fully analyzed. And she addresses some of the issues with corporate backed research. You do have to ask yourself is there going to be a “conflict of interest” in this research if XYZ corporation is backing it?

This is a great book if you want to understand, even with all of the issues in scientific research, why we should trust science. I listened to this book as an audio book but I think it would work great in any format.

Naomi Oreskes is an American historian of science and author. To learn more about her please visit this link: Naomi Oreskes – Wikipedia

Of course you can find this book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Why-Trust-Science-Naomi-Oreskes-audiobook/dp/B07W99GTG3/ref=tmm_aud_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1632430393&sr=8-1

Well last but not least I would like to showcase one piece of newly finished art work before I go. It is a pen and ink with water color drawing of Jesus of Nazareth, except I have given it a little more of my own personal interpretation. Lol. I call this piece “Jesus of Borg.” Now if you are not a Star Trek fan you might not know who the Borg are in the series. But in a nutshell they are cybernetic organisms linked in a hive mind called “The Collective.” They are known to assimilate others into their collective whether they want it or not. If you are interested check out this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borg

I started this piece with anger over the Texas GOPs enactment of the anti-abortion law. I have three adult daughters and while they might not agree on whether it is right or wrong to get an abortion, they all agree that it is “their right” to choose. And I agree with them. So that is how the piece started out but it morphed into something a little different. Did you know that there are at least 10,000 different denominations of Christianity in the world. Of course some say this number is much higher but I figure 10,000 is a safe estimate. Knowing this I thought why not make up my own Jesus?! A lot of other people have. So I did! And what I came up with was a bad ass LGBT SiFi Jesus. A Jesus that would assimilate all other Jesuses, even Republican Jesus, into a hive mind and create an accepting and loving collective for all people and all religions. In Star Trek, the Borg are considered the enemy but in my version I have turned it around and made “Jesus of Borg” the good guy, the savior. What is Jesus of Borg’s religion? Why Science Fiction of course. All religion is mythology and so is Science Fiction, therefore the largest religion in the world and the only one that has a chance of ever coming true is SiFi.

This drawing is done in pen and ink with water color and is protected with a traditional picture frame and glass. It measures approximately 12 inches wide by 15 inches tall.

“Jesus of Borg”

This piece and others are for sale and can be found on my Etsy site: https://www.etsy.com/shop/strugglingprotoplasm/edit?ref=seller-platform-mcnav

Wow! I have come to the end of another blog post and before I close, I want to say this again, if you have not thought about the mindset of “Minimalism” you should. The consumeristic culture we have created is not sustainable. That is if we don’t want to destroy the very environment that makes all human life possible. I have no doubt that the earth will survive, but will humanity? That remains to be seen.

Ever since the early 1900s when the people that make light bulbs decided to limit their lifespan so that consumers would have to buy more, we have been locked into this engineering and marketing principle of “planned obsolescence.” According to “Free Market Capitalism” we have to grow, grow and grow – therefore corporations have to sell us more stuff every year, after year, after year, with no end in sight. They have to make more in profit each year than the year before. They cannot just be profitable but have to make more each and every year or they are looked at as a failure. When I seriously think about this I am always reminded of the maxim: “Growth for growth’s sake is the definition of a Cancer Cell.” And that is what we have. Our economic system in the United States could be considered a cancer. And it needs to change.

So you might be wondering what YOU can do to help kill this cancer?! Well the first thing you can do is to become Minimalist! Stuff is stuff and you can have too much of it. Just like food. Too much of a good thing is going to cause problems. Cut out the empty calories so to speak by buying less and making good decisions on what you buy. Buy used when possible, pass it on when you are done with it, care for the stuff you already have, and if you absolutely have to buy new – look for durability, fixability, sustainable, and ethically made products that will last for years. Become the change you want to see.

Ok, ok enough of the soap box but if your interested in “minimalism” a good place to start is here: https://www.theminimalists.com/minimalism/

So take care my friends and if you have not gotten vaccinated then get it done. Like the Nike slogan says: “Just do it!” We all want this “Groundhog Day-Covid-Marry-Go-Round” to stop. Until next time! Adios!!

“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous…, leading to the most amazing views.” Edward Abbey