Racism Explained, as the meme goes.

A surgeon wrote that we all look about the same on the operating table, under the skin.

A single organ, the skin, is the biggest information sheet about ourselves.

 

Full Self Driving Car Beta Test in the City: Decide for yourself

 This 13 minute video of real city conditions is awesome and scary at the same time. You follow two drivers in the cab, a display screen, and the straightaways between major decision points are speeded up. Think "Google Voice" five years ago.  A half dozen frightening and puzzling car decisions are embedded in a cautious but nearly flawless execution of other moves.  The men think FSD may be reasonably safe in a suburb but not downtown.  (h/t  smalldeadanimals, sourced at Road and Track).

Does the US have a president? Decide for yourself. Lost man opens mouth while propped before camera.

Oh My Goodness. This is so embarrassing. I swear this is unedited. pic.twitter.com/Sad3mBOkXc

— Brigitte Gabriel (@ACTBrigitte) March 25, 2021

If you want more, Biden said at the same viewing, "The US should return to the type of filibuster that existed when I came to the senate 120 years ago".  Search to hear this painful clip too.  

If I were China or Iran, I'd be focused on quickly. pushing all boundaries.  Or Russia.  Or North Korea.  Or anyone who smells blood in the water.  I wouldn't want to be living in Taiwan just now.

Power play by a Covid Scold crashes spectacularly in front of Cruz.

 h/t Instapundit.

Supreme Court Is Part Of The Gentry Class

 "The Supreme Court, like the rest of the judiciary, is fundamentally a Gentry Class institution no matter who appoints its members. That’s why non-textual rights, like abortion, that are important to the Gentry Class get more solicitude than textual rights, like the right to arms, that are not."

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit. 

Interracial violence: Who's doing it?

Who is attacking whom?   Number 1: Blacks on Whites.  Number 2  Hispanics on Whites.  Number 3 is Whites on Hispanic.Smallest group is Hispanics on Blacks.  Second smallest is Whites on Blacks.  The differences are immense.    The TV and the papers and the politicians pick on just one (White on Black) and ignore the 9 times greater attacks in reverse, Black on White.  They tell it backward.  That means to me, "They are lying".  Remember, this chart is for "Incidents" and doesn't give a rate.  The black communities are smaller than the white ones in America.   Race doesn't cause the different incident totals but it determines what gets reported.

 

Unamiguous Evidence From Wuhan Social Media: Covid-19 started in Wuhan on a couple streets between the two virus research centres.

The first people who sought help from Covid-19 or the Wuhan Flu are mapped.  The City of Wuhan map below shows the first intense cluster from before January 20 2020 was on a couple streets between the two virus research sites. (There was a second site nearby).  The fish market and other early reporting incidents are few in number and scattered far.   The article claims the people in the scattered reports had visited that same two street area.

UPDATE:  The above is from Gateway Pundit's report but it links to an underlying  China-sourced document with extended documentation.  It is published at mdpi as "Exploring Urban Spatial Features of COVID-19 Transmission in Wuhan Based on Social Media Data". (Peng,Wang, Liu and Wu).The data was collected incidental to a larger study and is based on geotags of the people who voluntarily went online to ask for help. (The larger study looks at ages of the reporting patients, and the distribution of cases at later dates, again relying on geotags and cellular phone location data.) During the early spread, medical resources were overstretched and many turned to social media Sina Weibo which built an on-line medical help channel.   This is the only tightly documented mapping I have seen of the early virus spread.

The triptych is from the study, showing Wuhan-based flu social media mapping in three different time frames.  The one on the left covers Dec 20 to Jan 22nd and is reproduced in greater detail below as printed by Gateway Pundit.  The red dot is the notorious sea food market.  The Black Star is the Wuhan institute so often in the news.  The yellow square is a lesser know virus research location near  the former.

Coming Soon: China's Population Smaller Than US Population (Chang)

"China this century is on track to experience history’s most dramatic demographic collapse in the absence of war or disease. Today, the country has a population more than four times larger than America’s. By 2100, the U.S. will probably have more people than China."

The fertility rate is falling fast and stats at every level of governance are fudged to hide it.

The current population and wealth of the nation and surplus of young men mean risks of war are at their peak now, not later.    This is an important article by Gordon Chang.  Flag the topic and watch for corroboration.

Migraine Fix Is Nearer. Watch 3 D molecule explanation.

 Migraine is unlike other headaches and not linked to blood flow.  Instead it stems from signal molecules housed in the the fifth cranial nerve, the trigeminal nerve.  The target molecule is a pain receptor and it's motion can be dampened by a second molecule (CGRP) which allows a couple other types to hitch onto the pain target.  Watch the 3D visualization.  The whole sequence is now understood pretty much at the level of an individual atom.  Next up is a fix to break the chain that binds pain messengers to the target molecule.  Soon!   (Below is an image, not a video, because it's in PIP format.  The link has the PIP video.)

Watch the 3D visualization

They cried "Wolf" too often. Impeachment is over.

 

Extraordinary Weather Map February 17 2021

 The entire continent apart from the coasts in a unified deep freeze with a temperature gradient along the margin like the Grand Canyon.  Sourced ventusky.com

Canadian Politics: Half the voters live in an urban enclave south of Seattle's latitude.

 

20 Years Tracking A Single Eagle: Hangouts and Migration

 

McConnell Makes More in the Minority Selling Votes Than in the Majority Buying Votes.

 This opinion is presented and scrutinized at Conservative Tree House.

"McConnell does not fear being in the minority; the color of the flag atop the spire of the UniParty senate does not matter to those underneath it. McConnell maneuvers with just as much power in the minority as he does in the majority; factually, he makes more money selling his DeceptiCon caucus votes to Chuck Schumer (on behalf of Wall Street) than he does in the majority where he is forced to purchase them."

Water ice hundreds of feet thick at the surface on Mars, up Dao canyon. Looks promising and close to the equator..

 This imagery is looking good:  A seasonal reflection off dusty ice and a wash-out canyon that starts where the ice shows.   Water to drink, water to break into oxygen for breathing and hydrogen and oxygen to power vehicles and return trips to Earth, water to grow stuff, and apparently over 100 meters thick.  .  Reported at Behindtheblack.com

Ice exposed at head of Dao canyon?

Reincarnation Math Doesn't Add Up. Choose the path prompting you to experiment.

 Since world population 2000 BC was under 100 million and is now close to 7 billion, it's not possible for every individual to own a single thread of multiple lives on earth.  A good answer is to say there is no disharmony because there is no reincarnation.  A double-down answer is to say that each individual has their own thread of lives but some are lived on other worlds or alternate worlds to our own.  Sounds complicated but the alternate worlds has a place in modern physics speculation.  A third answer that reconciles the numbers and keeps reincarnation as a not-disprovable hypothesis is to say all lives past and present are connected nodes of the same being.   There are then many possible pathways back in time for you to trace, they just are not uniquely you.

              How do you decide?.  Or, what is a good test?   What questions does reincarnation resolve?
              The pursuit of happiness suggests that the choice that opens the most possibilities to you now is a good one. If two explanations exist, one boring and one exciting, and adopting either is low risk, why not go for the one that inspires you to experiment?                  The search for contradictory conclusions from the same premises so as to rule out a theory, is one I like better.      The search for an absolute determination of truth is even better but how ever can that be done?        

Tests and experiments appeal to me.

Convergent evolution of cars

 Maybe it's wind tunnel performance combined with fads, but mid-size SUV's look almost identical these days.   What triggered this post was me waiting at the ferry terminal when a lady opened the back door and started to load her dog aboard.  She was one row and one space out of position.  To fix this, I bought 3" diameter adhesive red dots and put several on my CRV.

Left colun:
Subaru Forester
Volvo Estate
Honda CRV
Buick Encore

Right column:
Audi Q7
Ford Escape
Toyota Rav 4
Mitsubishi Express

Watch Lightning From Space. Looks Like Music.

 

The first 25 seconds is Lightning Mapper promotion, then beauty.
To see the music comparison, look at Bach's Brandenburg #4 presented as if seen from a satellite, seen from Johann's sublime perspective.

Shoe ownership by sex in America

Even little things are influenced by sex chromosome #23 and that includes shoes.
A lot of men and women are in the same group, owning 6 to 10 pairs of shoes.
In the 5 pairs and under group, there are twice as many men.
In the 11 pairs and over, there are twice as many women.
And one oddity:  The extreme ownership group includes almost as many men as women.

Covid, Cancel Culture and Xenophobia: Battleground for control of new human wealth: DATA

 

A pitched battle is underway to control new wealth.  Covid lockdowns with masking is one battle ground and so is Cancel Culture and so is control of elections.  The new wealth is data on almost every human being alive and the ability to exploit it and to throttle it cheaply at the speed of light.   Who is the top dog?   We don’t know yet.  Governments are trying for the lion’s share but give ground to large operations in Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.  Mass media, the papers, and entertainment purveyors are in there tweaking and stealing and corralling data.  The big surprise is that NGO’s and private interest groups and even individuals own some of the internet space because access to millions of followers is so cheap and so fast.   The power structure is changing rapidly.   If government gets the upper hand, expect to see Chinese Communism with American Characteristics featuring mass surveillance and behaviour interdiction.  More likely is a mixed recasting of federal-corporate-interest-group powers.

Human nature is reverting to the tribal in this setting.   Behind “woke”  “white privilege” and other badges of approval and shame is the old time simple fact of xenophobia, fear of strangers.  Sadly, the strangers are fellow citizens who don’t live in my bubble.  

If we own our own data and can capitalize it, not just have it snuffled up or stolen by a few big players, perhaps this will change. Don't expect justice but hope for a measure of competition between thieves of freedom.

"In the modern world, data is wealth"