“We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.” Yuval Noah Harari
These are images from the Hubble Space Telescope of two different galaxies. The dominate one is a large spiral galaxy named NGC 3227 and the second one is called NGC 3226. The two galaxies are gravitationally linked with each other. Together they have the destination of Arp 94. They are 50 to 60 million light years away in the constellation Leo. Pretty cool. Image credit: NASA, ESA, and H. Ford (Johns Hopkins University); Image Processing: G. Kober (NASA Goddard/Catholic University of America)
If you would like to learn more about these images please see this link: https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/hubble-captures-a-galactic-dance
“It takes a lot of courage to fight biases and oppressive regimes, but it takes even greater courage to admit ignorance and venture into the unknown. Secular education teaches us that if we don’t know something, we shouldn’t be afraid of acknowledging our ignorance and looking for new evidence. Even if we think we know something, we shouldn’t be afraid of doubting our opinions and checking ourselves again. Many people are afraid of the unknown, and want clear-cut answers for every question. Fear of the unknown can paralyze us more than any tyrant. People throughout history worried that unless we put all our faith in some set of absolute answers, human society will crumble. In fact, modern history has demonstrated that a society of courageous people willing to admit ignorance and raise difficult questions is usually not just more prosperous but also more peaceful than societies in which everyone must unquestioningly accept a single answer. People afraid of losing their truth tend to be more violent than people who are used to looking at the world from several different viewpoints. Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.” Yuval Noah Harari
This is a Hubble Space Telescope image of the Spiral galaxy NGC 3631. It is called a Grand Design Spiral due to it prominent and well-defined arms. It is around 50 million light-years from earth looking in the direction of Ursa Major. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Filippenko (University of California – Berkeley), and D. Sand (University of Arizona); Image Processing: G. Kober (NASA Goddard/Catholic University of America)
If you would like to learn more about his image please see this link: https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/hubble-looks-at-a-face-on-grand-spiral
“Each and every one of us has been born into a given historical reality, ruled by particular norms and values, and managed by a unique economic and political system. We take this reality for granted, thinking it is natural, inevitable and immutable. We forget that our world was created by an accidental chain of events, and that history shaped not only our technology, politics and society, but also our thoughts, fears and dreams. The cold hand of the past emerges from the grave of our ancestors, grips us by the neck and directs our gaze towards a single future. We have felt that grip from the moment we were born, so we assume that it is a natural and inescapable part of who we are. Therefore we seldom try to shake ourselves free, and envision alternative futures.” Yuval Noah Harari
This is an image from the Hubble Space Telescope of what is know as a globular cluster. This one is known as Liller 1. It was discovered by the American astronomer William Liller in 1977. These clusters are spherical collections of stars bound by gravity. They are found almost in all galaxies. Liller 1 is about 30 thousand light years from earth going towards the center of the Milky Way. Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, F. Ferraro
If you would like to learn more about his image please see these links: https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/hubble-gazes-at-a-dazzling-star-cluster and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globular_cluster and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liller_1
“There are no gods, no nations, no money and no human rights, except in our collective imagination.” Yuval Noah Harari
This is also a Hubble Space Telescope image of a globular cluster and it is called Ruprecht 106. It is named after Jaroslav Ruprecht who I believe was a Czech astronomer. This cluster is approximately 69 thousand light years from earth in the constellation of Centaurus. Most clusters contain stars of different ages, but Ruprecht is in a type of cluster where there is no formation of second or third generation stars. There are only a small number of clusters in this category. Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Dotter
If you would like to learn more please see these links: https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/hubble-investigates-an-enigmatic-star-cluster and https://www.republicworld.com/science/space/hubble-spies-star-studded-globular-star-cluster-located-69100-light-years-from-earth-articleshow.html
“People fear that being trapped inside a box, they will miss out on all the wonders of the world. As long as Neo is stuck inside the matrix, and Truman is stuck inside the TV studio, they will never visit Fiji, or Paris, or Machu Picchu. But in truth, everything you will ever experience in life is within your own body and your own mind. Breaking out of the matrix or travelling to Fiji won’t make any difference. It’s not that somewhere in your mind there is an iron chest with a big red warning sign ‘Open only in Fiji!’ and when you finally travel to the South Pacific you get to open the chest, and out come all kinds of special emotions and feelings that you can have only in Fiji. And if you never visit Fiji in your life, then you missed these special feelings for ever. No. Whatever you can feel in Fiji, you can feel anywhere in the world; even inside the matrix.” Yuval Noah Harari
HEY!! I AM LOOKING AT YOU!! THAT’S WHO!!
If you are reading this then you have continued to survive Covid 19 so far and so have I!! Yea for us again!! I am still hoping that I can keep saying this until the Covid Marry-Go-Round is done!! Enough is truly enough!!
By the 6th of June we were still in the 100,000 new cases per day range. The variant of concern was BA.2.12.1 and it was responsible for 62% of Covid cases the first week of June in the US. It has a delta mutation that appears to allow it to escape pre-existing immunity from vaccination and prior infection. The people that caught the omicron wave are not immune. The kicker is that there are two new variants that are starting to gain traction in the US: BA.4 and BA.5. They also have the same delta mutation.
Well again the picture has not changed for the number of deaths. These are still the top 10 states for mortality from Covid. What I really find interesting is that North Carolina is not in the top 10. It is listed as the 7th highest state in the country for Covid cases but drops to 13th when you look at deaths. Oh well the CDC has no power when it comes to getting states to give accurate numbers. I am guessing when this is all said and done and the true numbers are known, we will get a much grimmer picture of what the true mortality and morbidity was for Covid.
By the middle of the month (June 2022), we were still adding 100,000 cases each day officially, but some in the public health sector think this number is probably double due to unreported home testing. The death count was still about 300 people per day unfortunately. The total death count stood at 1,038,000 for a total of 4000 deaths in the last 9 days, but my guess is that number is under reported again. The good news is that even with the under reporting the mortality count does seem to be headed in the right direction. Of course we were at this same place last year before the Delta and Omicron Variant did their unfortunate things.
By the end of the month (June 2022), the total death count was about 1,043,000 or a total of about 10,000 deaths for the month of June. Or another way to see it, about 100,000 people per year die due to Covid, at the current rate. Granted that is not the numbers we were seeing last January and February but still staggering when you think about it. BA4 and BA5 are now the dominate stains in the US and we are still adding about 100,000 new cases per day. Oh well. As much as we want it to be over, it is not over.
If you interested in looking at the numbers for yourself, please see this link: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
If you interested in getting a good understanding of what is going on with Covid every other week without having to watch the news, check out this link for the Osterholm Update on YouTube: https://youtu.be/FC1G09xkOFc
And if you don’t want to listen on YouTube you can check out Apple Pod cast. Dr. Michael Osterholm is an American epidemiologist, Regents Professor, and Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Osterholm gives an update each week on where we are with the virus. Really good information directly from the source and not spun by the news media channels.
Another great YouTube channel to follow on Covid, especially if you are someone that is medical is this one: https://youtu.be/786kiTxg6Bk
It is a part of microbe.tv/twiv. Vincent Racaniello and Dr. Griffin do a great job in presenting the “information” each week. Vincent R. Racaniello is Higgins Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. Dr. Daniel O. Griffin is an American infectious disease specialist. He is an instructor in Clinical Medicine and an associate research scientist in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at Columbia University.
The month of May was another good one for getting outdoors. Cool weather and great air quality.
The above picture was taken on May 5th, 2022 at about 5pm in the afternoon. It was another beautiful cool day on the Front Range of Colorado.
The above picture was taken on May 9th, 2022 at about 6pm in the evening. Here I am looking West along the Poudre River as it flows through Fort Collins.
The above picture was taken on May 14th, 2022 at about 7pm in the evening from one of the many parks in Fort Collins. The Dandelion seed pods were popping up in many locations around the city. While walking Marvin, I came across the sun shining just at the right angle to backlight the seed pods and I thought it would make a great picture. Sometimes it is just luck to be in the right place at the right time. Lol.
The above picture and the below picture were taken on May 16th, 2022 at about 11am. This is a picture of Janet and the three daughters and Janet and I with Marvin in the bottom one. We all did a short hike together in Horsetooth Mountain Park. This was the first time we had all been together as a family in a long time.
The above picture was taken May 20th, 2022 at about 10am in the morning. While temps were gradually starting to get warmer for the month, we did get a few days where it was good to have a fire in the woodstove. These cool spells used to be more common when we first moved to Colorado in 1987, but over the years the lower temp extremes have just disappeared. After moving to Fort Collins, it was unusual to buy a new car or home WITH an air conditioner. We were told that you just did not need it like you would in the Southern States. Over time that has changed. Last year I had the air conditioner on almost everyday from the month of May through November. This was the first time we have felt we needed to do this in over thirty years of living here. Unreal.
This picture was taken on May 22nd, 2022 at about 12noon. Here Marvin and Janet are standing next to an enormous Cottonwood tree in one of the many open spaces in Fort Collins.
The above picture was taken on May 23rd, 2022 at about 6pm in the evening. Another cool day in Fort Collins. Here Marvin and I were checking out the water levels on the Poudre River. The river really does go down to a trickle in the winter months, only to swell to many times it usual size during spring run off from the mountains. Normally at this time, there would be much more water in it, but due to the change in climate, the cities in the area pull as much water from it as they are legally allowed, in order to fill all the reservoirs. Colorado is considered a “head-water” state. Meaning that we are the source of several major rivers / streams and the water we get in the mountains is pretty much all the water we get. Water is considered liquid gold in Colorado.
The above and last picture was taken on June 1st, 2022 at about 4pm in the afternoon. This is a picture of our old cat Leeloo or Lenny as the kids called her. Yes, she is named after one on the main characters from the movie the Fifth Element. One of my all time favorite Science Fiction films. I take so many pics of Marvin, I thought I would include one of her. She loves the warm weather and prefers to spend as much time outside as possible when it is hot. In the winter, it is not uncommon for her to get under the woodstove late at night to heat herself up so to speak. Lol
It was another great month for reading and I would like to share a few book recommendation.
The first one I would like to talk about is called “Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed or Fail” by Ray Dalio. Let me start by saying I had first heard of Ray at the start of the pandemic when he was speaking at a TED talk. In his talk he was offering advice on what might happen if the government did not bail out hospitals and other businesses. How the pandemic with its shut downs would create havoc on the entire economy and how we might best recover from it. All of it sounded very interesting. So I decided to get one of his books on economic history to see if I could gain a little better insight into what might be instore for the United States and the rest of the world. And I am glad that I did. The book looks at the big picture of what has happened over time, from ancient Rome to the present without getting lost in the details. This is a “big picture” type book and does not touch on all the topics that might be covered in a book say on just Great Britain when it was the global power in the early 1800s. Ray’s book looks at the bigger picture.
There is a great section towards the end of the book on China and its ongoing relationship with the USA and what that might mean for the future. He also talks about how it is difficult to predict how things might turn out when looking at the past due to unforeseen events. Like Pandemics, wars and technological advances. Of course a great example of this is the current war in Ukraine. Because the book was published in 2021, the war had not started yet. And Ray makes no mention of it. But in the book he mention several times how “big events” both natural and man-made can change national trajectories. And that is exactly what is happening globally with the war in Ukraine.
I got the book as an audio book but I think it would work a lot better in traditional format due to the number of charts and graphs the book has in it. It is a little difficult to see all of that with an audio book. Lol.
Of course you can find this book at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Changing-World-Order-Nations-Succeed/dp
The next book I would like to give a recommendation to is called Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older without Getting Old by Andrew Steele. I first hear about this book in a talk by the Author on the YouTube channel called “The Royal Institution.” The link for it is here: https://youtu.be/fX9P1xuIJGg. It is a pretty good talk and it got me interested in his book. The author did not start out as a biologist but as a physicist. And he felt that ageing was the most important scientific challenge of our time. So he switched to computational biology. In the book he covers some of the long standing beliefs on aging and disease. And how we all seem to think that Alzheimer’s, heart disease, cancer, etc.… are the big causes of death and suffering in the human population. But he tells us, in reality we have all gotten it wrong. It is “Aging” in and of itself and not those diseases that are the problem. When I was younger and starting my medical career 40 years ago, I remember hearing people say he or she died of natural causes and even then, I thought what does that actually mean. It didn’t really make sense to me. I thought, shouldn’t we treat the underlying process of aging? If treating the process would end a majority of the other diseases, why are we not doing it?
The book made me really question why are we spending so much money on Alzheimer’s, on Heart disease and Cancer? Granted we have had some success in those areas but if we shifted the lion’s share of available research dollars to slowing or even reversing the underlying cause – “aging” ; We could hit all the preverbal “disease birds” with one stone. Otherwise we are just playing Whack-A-Mole with the process and wasting billions of research dollars. This is an excellent book on the topic and the author does a great job of illustrating where we are at now and where the research might take us. There is no reason to not believe that a greatly extended and healthy lifespan could be in our future.
I listened to this book as an audio book, but it would work well in any format. And of course you can find it on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Ageless-Science-Getting-Older-Without-ebook/dp
The next book I would like to give a recommendation to is called Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom. I first heard about Nick from multiple different books on the development and potential pitfalls of Artificial Intelligence. So much so, I thought that I should check out his book. And I am glad that I did. It is a little bit older as to having been published in 2014 but after listening to it, I think the relevance for the book is still there. Especially when you look at it from a philosophical point of view, of which Nick’s book is about. It is not a book about the technical details of how to build the best neural network or computer chip for AI, no it is about what it means when algorithms are so advanced that it is very difficult for humans to keep up. The fact that you don’t even have to have a sentient AI for this to occur. It is a discussion of all of those challenges that will inevitability crop up when you put a significant part of the human population out of work due to AI and automation. No matter how, when and where the technology develops this will still be an issue.
If you have been following some of the more recent news beside the political shenanigans, you get the idea that we are already fast approaching this pivot point in human history. Think self-driving trucks and cars. Yes they are still in the development stage but there will be a time coming up when that R&D is done and you don’t need a human driver. More recently in the news was the google engineer that thinks Google’s AI program, which he has been working with, is now sentient. I think the program is called LaMDA. Even if it is not sentient, it has gotten good enough to fool an engineer that is working with it?! It is a chatbot. Imagine a very intelligent chatbot that can answer all customer questions, HR employee questions, book appointments, schedule maintenance, tell you when you are doing something wrong or right, become a virtual girlfriend or boyfriend, be your doctor, etc.…. Lol. Of course, all of this is out there now, but think of it as being 10,000 or 100,000 times better that current versions. It does not take long to realize that this will not only be fantastic (my personal opinion) but also create some truly scary scenarios if not handled correctly.
I listened to this book as an audio book. I think it would work in any version but the ideas are dense and if you are like me, you will need time to truly think about them before moving on. Of course the book can be found on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Nick-Bostrom-audiobook/dp
The last book I would like to review and give a recommendation on is called Still Running: The Art of Meditation in Motion, by Vanessa Zuisei Goddard. Let me start off saying that this is a great book for all runners both experienced and first timers. But with that said, I think it will be the experienced runners that are going to get the most out of the book. Especially someone that has put in the miles so to speak and can relate to what the author references and talks about. It is a book about “more” than just running. A lot of the principles discussed in the book can also be applied to life in general. I have to be honest; this was my second reading and review of the book. The first read through was when it first came out in 2020, and it had spiked my curiosity due to its Buddhist philosophy and the fact that I was reading several other books on Buddhism at the time. Unfortunately, I was very busy with work and I read it pretty fast and superficially. Fast forward to this year, knee injury, time to read more, and I thought I would go back though it, but much, much slower. I am so glad that I did. What is the old saying “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear?” Lol. And that is exactly what happened. It was as if I was reading and understanding it for the first time.
The author does a great job of tying together two seemingly unrelated practices, running and Buddhism, and by doing this she gives the reader a deeper insight into both. It does not matter if you’re not a Buddhist, she approaches the topic in a secular way and is not trying to convert you. We can all use a little meditation in our lives and she shows you how to turn your long hours of running into an enjoyable moving experience.
This is one of those books that I will read again and again. It is that good. I got it in traditional format. Unfortunately, it does not come as an audiobook. Of course, it can be found on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Still-Running-Art-Meditation-Motion/dp
Well no new artwork for the moment but I would like to showcase the “Jesus Brothers.” I have called these studies in Jesus by several different names, Jesus of Borg or SiFi Jesus or the current name of Transhumanist Jesus.
I decided to do these pieces initially over anger of the Texas GOP’s enactment of their draconian anti-abortion law. I had only planned to do a limited number, but now with the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe vs Wade, I will continue to make them. 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 project 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 tough but accepting 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. AND the Jesus Brothers would support all women in their right to choose! 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 from the Conservative Christian Taliban.
These pieces and other types of art work are for sale and can be found on my Etsy site: https://www.etsy.com/shop/strugglingprotoplasm/edit?ref=seller-platform-mcnav
In support of Prochoice and the Separation of Church and State, I will donate half of any sales to Planned Parenthood or the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Well I have come to the end of another blog post! Yea! I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it! Due to the craziness in the world this past month, I am forgoing my usual rant to you about become minimalist.
But if your interested and want to learn more about sustainability, minimalism and the steady state economy, please see these sites: https://www.sustain.ucla.edu/what-is-sustainability/ and https://www.theminimalists.com/minimalism/ and https://steadystate.org/ and https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2018/12/27/35-ways-reduce-carbon-footprint/
So take care my friends and if you have not gotten vaccinated, then get it done. It would be stupid to lose your life or suffer significant disability with this virus when vaccines are readily available in this country. So until next time Adios!!
“Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.” Yuval Noah Harari
May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous…, leading to the most amazing views.” Edward Abbey
