Dancing Robots

 Slow start, then freakier and better and better:  "Do You Love Me"

Longing for a Sweetheart

 The longing for a sweetheart and a darling is so great that it puts a burden on hetero friendships.  I remember what it’s like having a big puppy climb onto my lap while I was driving. It was licking my face, wriggling around, half out the window and wanted to drive too.   That’s hard to manage

.  The No-Puppy version is normal friendship.  The With-Puppy version is when the longing comes along for the ride and pops up everywhere.  

Plaque on 3700 year old teeth shows what people ate and reveal a trade network.

 The stuff they scrape off your teeth at the dentist is a petrified residue from bacteria.  In that calcareous plaque, specks of food are trapped.  Researchers at the ancient city of Megiddo in modern day Israel have examined teeth of a dozen bronze age people.  They found turmeric and bananas and soy and proof of trade out of Asia centuries, even more than a thousand years earlier than previously guessed.  Science Daily News.

I'm not glad artists and musicians are having a hard time with Covid, but...

 The New York Times reports on musicians, artists and dancers, over half of whom have no job at all now.  This is shocking but it isn't 100 percent bad news for me.  The Arts along with Academia, and Insiders-with-Power are the main support for top-down commands about masks and lock-downs for your own good and safety.  For some of them to suffer painfully the consequence of their standard bearers' decisions is good.  That will shorten the Lawmaker's learning curve and allow average people to get back to making their own choices sooner.     This link is to a sympathetic and well-researched story about those in the arts and out of work.

 

COVID Behaviour is political

 This September Gallup poll shows a sharp worry & compliance distinction between Democrats and Republicans. The sub-story is that the Democrat men and women are indistinguishable on the issues but the Republican women and men, besides being very different from Democrats, are often quite different from each other, the men expressing greater confidence and willingness to risk changes.

 

 

Tribal power not truth is what passes for MORAL nowadays. Example from Politico: Hunter Biden corruption before and after the election.

 

Puget Sound salmon deaths traced to tires, not climate change.

 Urban streams in the Puget Sound and Seattle area have Coho salmon mortalities of 50% before reaching spawning areas, notably after big rainfalls.  The easy villain was "climate change".  The surprise villain is leached tire preservative combined with ozone in urban stormwater runoff.  This was confirmed in the Los Angeles and San Francisco area too.  See University of Washington report (hat tip Alan Watts)

Picture at WU story

The detective work reported is fascinating leading to an unsuspected chemical whose general formula they figured from the salmon deaths but whose source they initially knew nothing about.

6PPD is added to extend tire life. Particles worn away from tires have a byproduct of 6PPD-quinone after reacting with ozone.  The chemical signature with 18C 22H 2N and 2O matched.

The most economical and recommended fix is to look for other tire preservatives.  Treating storm water at that level is impractical.

YouTube Chokes Opinion: Not Allowed Question: Was their fraud in key US election counts?

From a legitimate question publisher.

YouTube announced Tuesday it will take down videos questioning the integrity of the U.S. presidential election that millions of Americans, most notably President Trump, believe was stolen through numerous fraudulent actions, lawfare chicanery and computer manipulation.

From an illegitimate question publisher: 

YouTube said content “that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome” of the presidential election will be removed. ... YouTube said Wednesday it will start removing any content uploaded to its platform that contains allegations of widespread fraud or errors in the 2020 presidential election after Tuesday's so-called safe harbor deadline that essentially locked in President-elect Joe Biden's victory.

Does "Bureaucracy" Explain Washington Better Than Saying "Politicized Institutions"? "Who's the boss?" is the question.

Yes, Washington institutions are staffed by Democrat types and generally work against their current president, Donald Trump.   Richard Grenell, previously acting DNI, points to another factor in this Epoch Times interview.    Transparency is not welcome in Washington because controlling information is power and to open up is to lose power.  That explains why so many officials said publicly they had evidence the Russian Collusion story was real but under oath and away from the cameras, they said they did not.  If they wished to be transparent, the matter would have been settled in a few weeks and the initiative would be from the Executive Branch and not from their Fiefdom.   Who's the boss?  Institutions as high up as FBI, CIA, Justice have been significantly captured by inside players.  Regulatory capture.

Glaucoma fix coming soon. "Hydrogel"

 My grandmother took eyedrops every six hours for twenty years by night and by day to save her sight from glaucoma

.  Now a major fix is coming.    Glaucoma has a build up of fluid pressure inside the eye that eventually damages the optic nerve and turns you blind.  Coming soon:   A tiny injection twice a year slips some hydrogel between two outer layers of the eyeball and this hydrogel adjust to hold open a tiny channel that allows pressure to drain away.    

The aqueous humor fix has been done in animals, not people and lasted four months, not six months yet but seems like a sure thing.  Glaucoma is the main cause worldwide of irreversible blindness. 

Story at medicalxpress.com/news

Become less ignorant about the Caucasus struggle: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Russia.

Read over this article from Defenceindepth.co in London and adjust opinions about the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict.   The bits of news easily available helped me to the ignorant belief that I knew something of the region.    At the link you'll get a much bigger view based on Russian sources.   Another resource to follow is Mike Doran at Twitter's doranimated where you'll get an insider's view from a connected American who was in Azerbaijan during the conflict.

The key points are that Russia likes frozen conflicts in its near abroad with all parties looking to them for military peacekeepers and clout, thus keeping NATO out of the area.  It also means that Turkey is getting hit harder over in Syria as a message that it's role (with Israeli support) was unwelcome even though the outcomes are satisfactory for Russia. 

Van Morrison says:

 "I'm not telling people what to do or think", Van Morrison  says, "the government is doing a great job of that already".

 

 

ISRIB: A pill to fix dementia.

 Age-related declines in memory and mental flexibility, or a significant component thereof,  have been reversed in mice and almost with a single dose.  Source is at medicalpress.com

The back story.  When cells are stressed by viral or cancer gene attacks, they try to throttle protein production in those cells.  Aging brain cells are getting some of this throttling too.    "ISR" is "Inegrated Stress Response" and "IB" is "Inhibitor".   ISRIB turns off the throttling and a couple doses seems to restore quite a bit of the cognitive decline in aging and brain-damaged mice without stopping the body's ISR defense against viral and cancer gene attacks.  A single treatment was enough to get aging mice to try flexible maze solutions like their younger counterparts.

An implication:  Senility may be more about idled repair machinery and less about long term degeneration of nerves.

This is almost too good to want to believe, that a generic response to stress casts its net too wide.

Liquid water can have another form. One is 20% less dense than the other, but elusive.

 At -63C, liquid some H20 water molecules restructure to a 20% less dense form.  Because no one could observe water at that temperature without it turning to solid ice, this couldn't be proven until high speed recording captured the change before the solid ice could form.  It seems to be a dynamic equilibrium at local levels and the authors wonder if this property of water might appear at body temperatures in minute loci, affecting biological communication.  The geometry behind the density isn't described at the link.

A new look at World Wars 2 from Victor David Hanson

 The review linked here has many surprises.  The Axis mostly killed and starved non-combatants and the Allies mostly killed combatants.  LeMay repurposed the B29 bomber for low altitude flights with much higher bomb loads.  The Japanese jet stream played a role.  WW2 was multiple wars.  Production dispersed away from the battlefield helped Russia (factories moved east of the Urals) and Japan (factories dispersed in civilian areas which were not attacked initially) and USA  (no serious effort was made to bomb the USA).  In an existential war, the side that can destroy the other side's homeland is the winner.  Hitler's unforced move to declare war on the USA is highlighted again as a major failure.  The London Blitz was a strategic mistake after Berlin had been bombed when Hitler should have stayed focused on bombing air fields, aircraft factories and radar.  And more.

Update:  I'm just finishing my copy.  Very readable.  The exceptional can redirect a war but outcomes favour the one building and delivering the most killing resources.  Immense detail included about tanks, planes, infantry weapons and repair issues and how many were fielded and how fast they were fielded.