Spent the last few days baking for relatives.

Chocolate Cream Pie with Coconut Whipped Topping

Chocolate Nut Pie

Tomorrow I'll be doing four Coconut Cream pies. 

Couple of days ago I cranked out four dozen Pizzelle cookies, four dozen Cranberry, White-Chocolate-Macadamia cookies, and four dozen Mexican Wedding Cookies.

The holidays have arrived!!

Been depressingly busy lately. Ex-wife LM was diagnosed with throat cancer couple of months ago. I have been taking her to daily treatments (radiation every weekday; chemo every three weeks; hydration twice a week with extra days thrown in as needed).

As a result, days are pretty busy and I'm limited in what I can get accomplished. Next to what poor LM is going through, however, my needs are inconsequential. She's getting to the end. Last chemo was past Wednesday; last radiation will be coming Wednesday; hydration over at the end of the month. She's almost there.

Yesterday, in fact the whole weekend, was spent making changes around the house. I upgraded my machine. It was time. Kept the old one because it had thousands of dollars of software that wouldn't run on newer computers. There is much of it I no longer use but need occasionally. Unfortunately, a new machine just wouldn't run them. Spent the entire weekend transferring stuff I could use or finding modern alternatives to those programs and/or data files.

New unit is so much faster.

Yesterday I spent time crawling around on the floor removing wiring and simplifying the wires that make everything run together. Can't believe how much wiring I managed to remove.

Also retrieved some furniture I put in storage when K got sick and moved it myself. Back feels it today.

Interesting day.

Washed and waxed Toyota for KM's imminent visit on Friday.

Decided to finally construct couple of Winogradsky Columns. (Best described as "an enclosed self-sustaining microbial system.) Here's what they look like:

Cost was very reasonable: Plaster of Paris ($7.43), Calcium carbonate (garden lime) ($3.78), vases ($6.00).

Also need pond/stream water and mud.

Assembled tools (bucket, shovel, machete for the undergrowth, empty gallon jug, gloves.)

Went across the street to swamp area only to find that it was completely dry. Drove to nearby town where I knew there was a large pond. Parked car at wide bend in the road and hopped road guard fence. Gathered material, then promptly fell into the pond.

So much for white socks. Don't even want to put smelly mud socks into washing machine. Trashed.

Made two columns and set them into kitchen window to grow.

Consoled myself by buying new winter jacket from Duluth Trading. Love their clothes.

Today felt good today. Lots (LOTS) of personal errands taken care of. Things around the house. Even ironed more clothes in preparation of visit by KM from AZ. Looking forward to seeing K again. Bringing a friend who has never been east. Should be fun.

Today must really be my day. Using TV for background and by chance I've come upon Avatar. Possibly the film I've seen most in my life. Cheesy storyline but the portrayal of what other worlds could be like is terrific.

Our politics have become an homage to the WWE. Laughable if it weren't so damn important.

Random thoughts:

Finally finished Sean Carroll's "The Big Picture." Tough sledding but so worth it. First part of the book dealt with the current state of physics; the second half tied the underlying physics of the universe to the rise of human consciousness. Amazing work. Nearly as much philosophy as science. Starting to go through it again to solidify my understanding. Wish my brain was young again.

Ryan Lochte: 

"Before he became known as the ultimate symbol of U.S. arrogance, white privilege and the delusion of American exceptionalism, Ryan Lochte seemed like a relatively harmless dudebro who we all forgave for being a douche because he won swim races and has a very symmetrical face. He even seemed to be in on, and playing along with the joke, as much as he was capable of getting it, cameoing as a sex idioton 30 Rock (“I get to play myself…so, it’s not too much acting that I have to do,” he really, no kidding, actually said); reducing TV anchors to tears of laughter over his general confusion about almost everything; trying to copyright a stupid term he didn’t even invent; and being the good-natured butt of parodic skits put on by his own teammates." (Taken from Huffington Post)

Why we insist on making people like this rich and famous is beyond me. (I put the Kardashians in the same category.) What exactly does he contribute to the betterment of our society? Because he swims fast? Seems to me that his contribution to society is overshadowed  by every single nurse (doctor, teacher, scientist) I've ever met.

Louisiana:

"Louisiana is entering recovery mode after devastating flooding killed 13 people and damaged at least 60,000 homes across 20 parishes.

But as Louisana Gov. John Bel Edwards told CNN, that process is "going to take many months." He added that even though this flooding was "unprecedented and historic," many are "just now realizing how significant it was."

The Red Cross said the Louisiana flooding "is likely the worst natural disaster in the United States since 2012's Superstorm Sandy," and response efforts are "expected to cost at least $30 million." (Taken from CT NPR)

Just the beginning of climate change, folks. Add this to the broiling temperatures around the country this summer, the fires in California, the melting of Alaska and its seems obvious that our country and its population are under increasing dire straits.

Having dinner with another person and thus the opportunity to dive into another being and compare notes on being, common likes and fears, goals, outlooks, experiences, expectations, etc.. gives me hope. Strangely, the energy with which I left the encounter, lead to a contemplation of death.  People with whom I have come to be double-bonded somehow are getting to be of ages that put them on the down hill slope of a life expectancy bell curve.

That got me to thinking of the hereafter. Not that I believe in the heaven that I grew up with. My idea of the hereafter is more akin the wondering what the pattern of energy each human entails results when we die. I'm given to understand from reading that there seems to be a surge of energy at the moment of death in the brain. I've also read that the energy that comprises a person is relatively weak. But then while gravity is "weak," it is also one of the four known forces that permeate our reality. (And not an insignificant at that.)

Tragedy struck home today. The two kittens I was planning to adopt to keep Buddy company in his old age were killed by a car. Two wonderful little life forms snuffed out.

My cat has replaced my wife.

That realization made me face the fact that I was a poor excuse for a human. How could any decent person feel that a cat could replace a beloved wife whose unexpected passing left such a chasmic hole?

It's only coming to me now that the universe has somehow given K back to me. Both in the physical sense as her ashes are in a niche in the room in which I spend  most of my existence and in the not physical indication of her essence being here.

I didn't believe it at first but thinking about that hypothesis made me begin assembling observations to determine whether I was crazy or have stumbled onto something more. That got me to reviewing Buddy's history with me.

I can show (as can others) that Buddy Tiptoe changed the very nature of my immediate environment upon his arrival. This house transformed from a lonely place of despair to one filled with calm. From roiling agitation to Zen-like peace quiet.

Clues:

The way he eats. He is finiky. He's willing to try anything but if he doesn't like it, you might as well throw it away. But he is pretty tolerant for the most part for whatever he gets.

The way he organizes the spaces he inhabits. For the most part, Buddy is always close by. It's gotten to the point where I always have to look down before I move. This is especially true when I'm in the kitchen. If I'm sitting in my chair watching the tube at night, he will use me as a pathway to get from the chair's arm to the TV table to his own chair. On days when I'm sad or depressed he seems to sense it and will often jump into my lap, sit there and look at me. On the other hand, he is also quite independent. He often decides to take a break from me by going upstairs to sleep, and he will later reappear like a crewman materializing on Star Trek.

His eyes. When you look him in the eye he really looks back into yours. His eyes are beautiful to look at but you can never be certain what he's thinking.

He moves smoothly. Unhurried. But he always gets to his destination. When he has a case of the poop crazies, he rockets around here like a supersonic dust mop.

All of these traits comfort me. They surround me like an fluffy blanket. Somehow, K is still here.

It's a most wondrous pain. She still is giving me the will to continue one more day.

I should be here more frequently trying to solidify my thoughts about so many things. Lately, though, a steady diet of news from multiple sources, has me flying in all directions. So many practical things to be done before the bifurcation. I fear the coming elections may be the trigger point. Our whole experience of daily life is in danger of a system collapse/explosion. And as Prigogene points out, there is no way to know what the resulting new system will be. If I believed in prayer, I would hope that most of us don't become just a pile of bones that future scientists and scholars pick through trying to figure out who we were and how we lived. Thousands of distinct civilizations have disappeared. What makes this one so special?

To decompress from the buffeting that comes from being immersed in a straining economic/geographical/racial/age/social standing/intellectual/physical reality, I have been turning to a book I'm reading (struggling through is more like it). It's titled "The Big Picture" by Dr. Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology among other things (author, speaker, awards, memberships, etc.)

Up until Dr. Carroll arrived on the scene, the man who best brought understanding of "the universe out there" to millions of people was Dr. Carl Sagan with his presentation of "Cosmos." It laid out how insignificant we are as physical entities in an astounding universe.

So far, Carroll seems to be the Sagan of our day but with a far heavier task. Where poor Carl Sagan was limited to tying together the realities of the universe, Sean Carroll and his ilk are ferreting out what lies beneath all that stuff. (So far I've been led down a path to where particles like electrons and protons and neutrons are manifestations of fields that are interacting at those points. I think.)

After getting through that stuff (book is as much yellow highlighter as white so far), he is now in the process of linking what lies below our perception of reality to how life itself manifests.

It's stupifying stuff really. Luckily, Dr. Carroll is an excellent explainer. Hard slogging but seems to be worth the effort.

I'm sure there will be more to come.

Meanwhile, I have to worry about the state of our political system, economic system, social system, education system. So many systems to juggle.

And so it starts.

Apparently Google, which purchased an AI company a while back, is starting to use an AI to lessen power usage in one of its facilities. Here's a graph of what the AI is doing.

Here's some of the article.

DeepMind used historical data -- such as temperatures, power and pump speeds -- that had already been collected by thousands of sensors in its data centers and used it to train the A.I.'s neural networks on the average future PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness), "which is defined as the ratio of the total building energy usage to the IT energy usage."

Additional neural networks were then used to predict the future temperature and pressure of data center in order to recommend actions.

"Our machine learning system was able to consistently achieve a 40% reduction in the amount of energy used for cooling, which equates to a 15% reduction in overall PUE after accounting for electrical losses and other non-cooling inefficiencies. It also produced the lowest PUE the site had ever seen," Google said.

Imagine if this kind of knowledge is applied to more and more facilities. Even a reduction of 15% overall would be a tremendous achievement.

Are you there yet, AI?

Oh how the mighty fall.

The hubris of Roger Ailes: A dose of “accountability” for someone who thought he was untouchable

Ailes is being fired from Fox for sexual harassment. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

Except maybe for this guy.

Twitter Bars Milo Yiannopoulos in Wake of Leslie Jones’s Reports of Abuse

Another misogynistic creep bites the dust.

MeWorld is in turmoil. Populations are shifting in vast numbers, climate changing, monetary systems being controlled by a few "emperors, religious factions tearing at one another. Life is getting  tougher for everyone.

Solutions seem possible.

First some basic assumptions:

1. To survive, people need water, food, shelter from the elements (ranging from clothes to housing), electrical power, and, (in order to have some control of personal space) transportation.

2. People are generally more comfortable with their own kind. This is not a call for segregation but simple recognition that different groups have different cultures and feel most comfortable when living with others of similar culture (language, morals, religions, etc.). This is also not intended to prevent those who wish to live in other cultures the right to do so.

I propose that the populations who are shifting to find a better life be asked to return to those areas. Right now millions from the Middle East are moving. There are so little resources in many of these vast spaces like the Middle East (besides their oil reserves) that eking out a living is difficult. But if people had access to inexpensive water, food, and power, life would be much more tolerable for those souls trapped in barren lands.

So. First water. We lend  our scientists and engineers to help them construct desalination plants. We still have lots of ocean water despite its now less than pristine nature. Building and maintaining plants will offer jobs to the population, but, more importantly, pumping millions of gallons of fresh water into arid areas will go far in meeting the second need: food.

Here again, we could help put barren land into production of food. More jobs. (And great practice for turning the barren lands of other planets into something that will sustain humans?)

Most places already have housing, electricity and transportation systems. Where they don't, we can build them.

I think having "advanced" groups helping those less fortunate might ease tensions.

Instead of letting the very few control the financial system perhaps we should just change systems. Maybe something like Bitcoin. Or a whole new systems entirely. Make their money relatively worthless. (Vigilance in preventing them from taking over the new system.)

What a day.

My TV has been acting up with some channels so I had to call Comcast. Nightmare.

On a personal level, today was very productive.

First Weight Watchers first thing this morning. -4.2 lbs for total loss of 40 lbs. Then a stop at Big Y for ingredients for Pho. (Making it for family.) Hot coffee at McDonald's then back home. Finished Pho and packaged bowl for brother. Did laundry and vacuumed downstairs. Started to mow lawn but tractor broke down. Luckily I remembered similar symptoms years back and actually managed to get tractor running again. Finished lawn, took shower, folded clothes, and cleaned up kitchen.

The main news today is the horrific shootings of people in Dallas, Louisiana and Minnesota. Certainly nothing I can add to the discourse already taking place.

A bright note for me is the ongoing legal battle between Gretchen Carlson and Roger Ailes. She's suing him for sexual harassment. Ailes asked the judge to dismiss the case because he says the suit is a publicity stunt by Carlson. Six women have come forward since the filing to claim he did the same to them. What an ego on that guy has. The case should be dismissed because he says so. Maybe this beagle-jowled emperor will finally get his comeuppance.

Despite finding myself swimming through a sea despair, I see a twinkling lighthouse in the distance. A ray of hope.

I speak of Juno, the spacecraft NASA sent to Jupiter. It arrived last night and supposedly has fallen into orbit around a planet so big that it is double in size of all of the other planets combined! So amidst my angst at the state of humanity in general and my country in particular, I am buoyed by the realization that despite my own failings as a human, there are those among us who can achieve the miraculous.

A few facts: Juno traveled 1.74 billion miles traveling at 165,000 mph for 5 years. It is intended to orbit the planet 37 times in the next 20 months. Stunning numbers. People did that.

And if that achievement alone wasn't mind-bending enough, more humans imagined and built a metal machine that is a bunch of more miracles interacting together on our behalf. They have so many cool things on this machine.

• Gravity Science – GS
• Magnetometer – MAG
• Microwave Radiometer – MWR
• Jupiter Energetic Particle Detector Instrument – JEDI
• Jovian Auroral Distributions Experiment – JADE
• Radio and Plasma Wave Sensor – Waves
• Ultraviolet Spectrograph
• Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper – JIRAM
• JunoCam

Pretty obscure until you read about the Instrument Overview on the NASA web site. May not have the intelligence to understand explanations of each instrument but am smart enough to be thrilled by the kind of stuff we can learn. 

And there is the box protecting vital parts. Taken directly from NSAS site:

"Juno is basically an armored tank going to Jupiter," said Scott Bolton, Juno's principal investigator, based at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "Without its protective shield, or radiation vault, Juno's brain would get fried on the very first pass near Jupiter."

An invisible force field filled with high-energy particles coming off from Jupiter and its moons surrounds the largest planet in our solar system. This magnetic force field, similar to a less powerful one around Earth, shields Jupiter from charged particles flying off the sun. The electrons, protons and ions around Jupiter are energized by the planet's super-fast rotation, sped up to nearly the speed of light.

Jupiter's radiation belts are shaped like a huge doughnut around the planet's equatorial region and extend out past the moon Europa, about 650,000 kilometers (400,000 miles) out from the top of Jupiter's clouds.

"For the 15 months Juno orbits Jupiter, the spacecraft will have to withstand the equivalent of more than 100 million dental X-rays," said Bill McAlpine, Juno's radiation control manager, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "In the same way human beings need to protect their organs during an X-ray exam, we have to protect Juno's brain and heart."

The strategy? Give Juno a kind of six-sided lead apron on steroids.

With guidance from JPL and the principal investigator, engineers at Lockheed Martin Space Systems designed and built a special radiation vault made of titanium for a centralized electronics hub. While other materials exist that make good radiation blockers, engineers chose titanium because lead is too soft to withstand the vibrations of launch, and some other materials were too difficult to work with.

Each titanium wall measures nearly a square meter (nearly 9 square feet) in area, about 1 centimeter (a third of an inch) in thickness, and 18 kilograms (40 pounds) in mass. This titanium box -- about the size of an SUV's trunk – encloses Juno's command and data handling box (the spacecraft's brain), power and data distribution unit (its heart) and about 20 other electronic assemblies. The whole vault weighs about 200 kilograms (500 pounds).

The vault is not designed to completely prevent every Jovian electron, ion or proton from hitting the system, but it will dramatically slow down the aging effect radiation has on electronics for the duration of the mission.

That's some pretty amazing stuff.

So while some people slaughter their fellow man (and women), others help us explore the (for all practical purposes) environment in which we are embedded. What a dichotomy.

Everything will turn out to be nothing. That small crowd who have taken everything will finally get what they want: everything. But at the moment people realize what's happened, the system will explode. It has in the past, and it's about to again. Just like Prigogene postulated. Boom!

Having spent my life observing people, what I think is likely to occur will be less than pleasant. First we will kill one another over limited resources. The weak will die by the thousands. Ten of thousands. Those totally unprepared will perish by the millions. Then the–at-first individual but later organized large-group–killing is likely to whittle survivors down by millions more. And that powerful elite who brings it all about will be sitting in their hidden,well-stocked, fortified, easily defended, luxurious aeries will find themselves the owners of nothing. Ashes. Bands of savages roaming what's left.

Their gene pool will be severely limited and it won't take many generations before the world one again experiences the madness of the Roman emperors. Even if there is an "economic" aspect for being a food provider for the elite, those people will still be slaves. All of the survivors are likely to be slaves or rebels.

If members of that elite don't find a way to redistribute resources quickly we are likely to lose it all. The world is already engaged in genocide, the collaspe of the most influential civilization will be the tipping point for the rest of the world as well.

When I look around me as dispassionate as I am amble, my observations scare me. I think we are already in the process of collapse and I haven't an idea of how to influence any of it.

Wow. Didn't expect here tonight. I read this headline:

Bernie Sanders Pens Powerful Indictment of 'Oligarchic Control' of Our Politics and Economy

That set my head off to the above. Now I'm going to go back and see what Bernie has to say.

Not what I thought it was going to be but the stuff I read just reenforces my belief 

Check this out. Guess our society has its priorities all messed up.

Been semi-depressed as of late about the reality outside these walls. The problems all around us as a species are staggering. Look around. It's all in turmoil. Not just here (where we are supposed to be the epitome of civilization), but all over the world. 

I've spent hours wondering about the state of things only to be overcome by the enormity of situation. I just didn't see any way to get the mental competency needed to chip away at the problems in any meaningful way.

But I just realized that perhaps two aspects of my life can serve to assist me; perhaps they are already.

I am beginning to master time and space. 

Time I have experienced for a significant number of years. I have experimented with it for many years. I have reached a point in my experience where I can control its flow around me. (I hate the fact that I didn't realize I had this ability a couple of years ago. I could have used it then and K would still be here. I could have held her in near stasis while the medical world outside our bubble skyrockets in understanding to where we hit the time they found an antidote to her illness.)

My mastery of space is harder to explain because space itself is such a multifaceted part of reality. Different levels. Each of which is mind blowing. 

Most recently, I've been thinking about systems. They are like insects in their diversity and number. They are everywhere. Everywhere! So many systems. And all of those disparate system combine into larger and larger systems. A bazillion bubbles of systems. Foam on the wave of space sweeping us along.

Of particular interest are systems out of equilibrium as discussed by Ilya Prigogene in his book. In addition to the physical chemical systems he studied, I think his ideas could apply to social systems as well. To see examples of social systems out of equilibrium, check out any newspaper, the web, TV. So many systems jostling one another. 

The bifurcation is coming.

Once again, conflicted.

A North Carolina man faces ethnic intimidation charges after leaving bacon at a mosque and making death threats to its members as they prepared for worship in observance of Ramadan, Islam’s holy month, authorities said on Friday.

Russell Thomas Langford of Fayetteville was arrested late on Thursday, the Hoke County Sheriff’s Office said. He is a major in the U.S. Army Reserve, WTVD-TV in Raleigh said, quoting officials at Fort Bragg military base in North Carolina.

On Thursday afternoon, members of the Masjid Al Madina in Raeford found two packages of bacon at the mosque entrance, the sheriff’s office said.

Observant Muslims are prohibited from consuming pork products. Ramadan is Islam’s holy month, during which believers abstain from eating and drinking during daylight hours.

Langford is charged with ethnic intimidation, assault with a deadly weapon, going armed to the terror of the public, communicating threats, stalking and disorderly conduct, the sheriff’s office said in a statement.

Officials with the sheriff’s office and Fort Bragg military base could not be reached for comment on Friday.

“We have called for stepped-up police presence not only for that mosque but others in that state,” said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group.

“Every mosque all over the country has nightly Ramadan activities, so they’re vulnerable,” he said.

A Chevy Tahoe was in the parking lot when the bacon was found, and the driver of the Tahoe, later identified as Langford, followed one of the members home, the sheriff’s statement said.

The suspect returned in the evening, showed a gun to one of the members, a retired Army captain and Muslim chaplain at Fort Bragg, and threatened to kill him, according to a report by WRAL-TV in Raleigh, N.C.

The chaplain invited him inside to talk, but the man left, the report said. Later, the man returned in his SUV and tried to run over a group of people who were going inside the mosque for evening Ramadan prayers, the report said.

Investigators found firearms, ammunition and other weapons inside Langford’s vehicle, according to the sheriff’s statement.

(Reporting by Karen Brooks in Fort Worth, Texas; Editing by Howard Goller)

My first (Liberal/Progressive) reaction is to declare: Another racist on the loose. (Who looks the most humane in this tableaux? The retired Army captain who is a Muslim chaplain at Fort Bragg.)

A second reaction is realizing that maybe this Army Reserve major saw things in a different light. Maybe he's spent time in a land where he found it impossible to distinguish between friend and foe and where foe often hid amidst friend. 

That's just curiosity however as I have no real info on this guy. He is a major which means he's been in the service of his country for a number of years. At his rank, he's also been exposed to a number of relatively high-level positions. 

Like the Stanford rapist case, this is another example of having to ask ourselves "what role should a person's history play in judging his/her current actions?" What is a mitigating circumstance? Is the severity of the crime a determining factor in what significance previous history should play?

I wanted to think more about volunteering to become a sentient space ship but recent events have brought me back to social realities. The latest events concern a Stanford student caught in the act of raping an unconscious women, going to trial, and being sentenced to six months by a judge who is an alum of the same school. The following is a steal from USA Today:

The Stanford University swimming star convicted of raping an unconscious woman outside a fraternity party told his sentencing judge he was "shattered by the party culture" during his four-month stint as a student at the iconic school.

The Guardian obtained and published a section of Brock Turner’s full statement to Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky. Turner sought probation but last week received a six-month jail term that has been criticized as too lenient.

Turner, now 20, acknowledges he is the "sole proprietor of what happened" on the infamous January 2015 night. Most of the excerpt discusses the impact on him rather than his 23-year-old victim. He says his dreams are haunted by the physical and emotional damage he did to her.

"During the day, I shake uncontrollably from the amount I torment myself by thinking about what has happened," he says. "I can barely hold a conversation with someone without having my mind drift into thinking these thoughts. They torture me. I go to sleep every night having been crippled by these thoughts to the point of exhaustion."

Turner blames his "poor decisions" on binge drinking and "sexual promiscuity," which he in turn blames on peer pressure.

This piece-of-shit human is broken. (And, in my usual rush to judgment, I glance at his father.)

"A recall effort against a California judge was announced on Monday in a sexual assault case at Stanford University that ignited public outrage after the defendant was sentenced to a mere six months in jail and his father complained that his son’s life had been ruined for “20 minutes of action” fueled by alcohol and promiscuity."

"Twenty minutes of action"???? Any guesses as to how this guy feels about women? Looks to me like this kid has been dragged along an all together too familiar path for his entire life.

But that doesn't excuse his sociopathic actions. For that he has to be put away until he understands the enormity of his crime. 

Same with that "affluenza" kid down in Texas who killed a bunch of people in a car incident and who then got off of serious consequences because "he was too rich to understand" his bad actions.

What are we raising here folks? There seems to be a special class of people in this country who feel somehow above societal norms. Getting easier to see why a lot of people hate white people.

Blueberries.

I try to buy American whenever possible. I'm not fanatical about it as I recognize our economic engine it so unchangeably tied to the economic network blanketing the earth. Sometimes even good intentions come to naught. Bought a camera bag and an electronic sensor from Amazon. Camera bag was mailed from France; the sensor from China.

Anyway, got a large container of large blueberries.

They were huge and fresh. Product of USA.

And they don't taste like anything. Nothing. It's like eating tiny grapes without grape flavor. They are texture only. Bummer.

A white mother and her two sons attacked a 15-year-old black boy while yelling racial slurs at an Illinois campground, police said. Carrie Weller, 42, and her sons Shane, 19, and Corry, 21, are being charged with hate crimes for punching, kicking and throwing the boy into Canton Lake on Sunday, according to court documents. Weller egged on her kids during the beating, records showed.

I can just hear them: "We hates those black folks. They steal our jobs, our women and all them government benefits while we white folks who love America are struggling to pay our bills." (Yeah, like their meth bill.)

My first response is to be astounded by these clowns who somehow feel high enough on the social pecking order to feel justified bringing injury to another for looking different. But in my moment of condemnation, I thought I could see the precursive forces whose interactions with these particular people led to this event.

My flippant distain at an imagined meth bill contains within it my fear that some day I too could surrender to the allure of changing a reality I hated for one in which I am someone special. Drugs offer alternate realities when people cannot cope with the realities they perceive before usage. No education, no jobs, no future, no hope. 

The reality in which I perceive myself to be has failed these people. (Not without their own complicity and poor choices in life.)  

I want contact lenses that not only see our usual spectrum of visible light, but which can also distinguish ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths. The spectrum should be selectable by the wearer. As a bonus, it would be nice if the lenses allowed expanding our visible light range in both wavelength directions.

------------

A scientist is investigating coloration changes in octopi. (Science News, May 28, 2016, page 23 included in article called Strange Visions) Says:

Exposure to light can trigger waves of yellow and brown even in bits of skin completely detached from the octopus -- no connection to brain needed!!

He digs into the phenomenon to see if there is a distance limitation.

Events lead him to conclude the octopus is a digital construct whose program doesn't generate effects to a highly exacting precision. Leads him on quest to find out if there are more examples of "flaws" in other real-world perceptions.

-------------

Just entered the world of Looney Tunes.

For several reasons, I decided to peek in at the CERN Open Portal on the Net. CERN operates the Largte Hadron Collider in Switzerland. The stuff I found there is enough to explode one's brain! You can not only see actual data the machine generates, but you can break down which machine (there are four massive detectors with different jobs) you want to peruse. This site allows anyone to look at data being generated. Just like the scientists who run it.

Anyway, the complexity of the tools the site offers made me interested in learning more about the collider and, if lucky, that individual detectors and what they do in regular people language.

I jumped onto uTube to see what might be available after finding nothing on NetFlix (other than "Particle Fever," a documentaty on the discovery of the Higgs Boson and my favorite documentary of all time) or Amazon Prime, and that's when I jumped into the rabbit's hole.

The first video was entitled "Urgent Alert This will affect everyone! MUST SEE

I jumped in figuring it was an update to the latest status of the machine (the largest, most complex machine mankind has ever build) only to find some guy in the woods having something very important to tell us which starts out with the deaths/not deaths of some celebrities. Got off of him pretty fast.

The second was called "CERN: Earthquakes & TOME TRAVEL ACCIDENTLY" Curious, I checked it out to find something being narrated by what sounds like a robot imitating a woman reader.

The third was "Here's what CERN is Not Telling You! What They Are Really Hiding" Mainstream media keeping stuff hidden from us. Apparently has a lot of evidence via the weather we're experiencing.

Evidently will have to look in other places.

Spent the first week of May visiting Arizona. Went on a guided tour. Stayed at the Hilton Sedona Resort.

Spent the week touring Sedona, the Grand Canyon, and Jerome. Also got to take two train rides: one to the Grand Canyon; the other on the Verde Canyon Railroad (the highlight of the tour for me). The finest part of the week was getting to visit my BFFs K & A M. Here's one of the sites we got to visit:

The strangest thing is happening with this blog.

Something in the entry for March 2 has attracted 90 TIMES more visits than the average readership for just about any other entry. And I can't figure out what exactly about that day is attracting page views.

The entry is about a heat sensor I was using in an Arduino experiment. The only things about the entry of significance was a Chinese address from which I had obtained the sensor and the specific name of the sensor: DHT22.

That page can't be attracting readers because it is important or funny or significant in any way. The page views must be from specific searches or robots programmed to look for certain key words.

In either case, the only two things likely to be of such specific inquiry are the sensor (and that Chinese address. Everything else in the entry is vanilla information.

To test my theory, I added the Chinese address at the bottom of a subsequent entry. If people or content robots were looking for that address (or part of that address), I should see a rise in its page view. So far, nada.

I guess a second test will be this page: the specific name of the sensor. DHT22

DHT22

DHT22

I am convinced that The Donald really has no desire to be president. I think he's in it for the publicity. He's still peddling his "brand." What a douche.

I realized today that I feel sorry for middle easterners. Not the ones who try to kill us; they deserve whatever punishment we administer. Not them, the rest. The people who just want to live doing something to earn a living, find someone to share the experience of life with, grow old peacefully while watching one’s family expand. And they get to do that in the middle of sand and rocks, dryness and heat.  Seems like the one thing that makes life out there even possible is the ocean of oil they sit on.

Up to now, the oil has been their ticket to wealth but that flow is choking off. It is a finite resource and societies today seem to be more inclined to find alternate ways of deriving energy.

I see this as a wonderful opportunity for the Arabs to segue their oil money into the next means of energy generation–what they have most of–the sun. Then they should create a bazillion new jobs building solar farms, stringing wiring, storage, transmission, etc.  Hell, they could run wires to foreign places to provide electricity.

Being able to create energy, alter its form, then transmit it from one point to another to do work, is a pretty valuable skill for mankind’s prosperity.

Also, any nation (including ours) that borders an ocean, should be creating new jobs by building desalinization plants. Lots of work for lots of people. Scientists to determine design and location allowing for sea rise, engineers to build, people to construct, workers to run and maintain the plants. The plants would become beehives of economic generation stemming from the ability to turn seawater into fresh; billions will be created by providing the liquid of life in a steady availability.

Virtually unlimited water can then translate into food (and luxury).

Have to add another book to my virtual library.

The Terror by Dan Simmons.

The book is a fictionalized telling of Britain's John Franklin expedition in 1845 whose purpose was to discover and map the Northwest Passage. Inthralling story. Naval version of the Donner Party in some ways. Nearly one thousand pages of amazing work considering that's a thousand pages of description of the arctic. Not an easy task. And yet, he pulls it off.

Within those 1,000 pages of frigid exposition is a shipload of doomed men who endure—until they don't—horrific experiences. The characters are so finely drawn that you get to know many as individuals. You also get to know much about boats, the Royal Navy, survival, ice, despair. It's all entwined. Including the presence of a malevolent monster who whittles away expedition members in varied gruesome ways.

I'm ordering a book on the real expedition to compare it to this historical novel. (From what I've learned so far, The Terror meshes with what's actually now known about the fate of the expedition–minus the monster, I'm guessing. (Unless one sees the monster as a metaphor.)

A fine read.