Summary:
Researchers have found that omega-3 levels in blood erythrocytes are very good mortality risk predictors. The study used data from a long-term study group, the Framingham Offspring Cohort, which has been monitoring residents of this Massachusetts town, in the United States, since 1971 and concludes that, 'Having higher levels of these acids in the blood, as a result of regularly including oily fish in the diet, increases life expectancy by almost five years.'
Summary:
Researchers have found that omega-3 levels in blood erythrocytes are very good mortality risk predictors. The study used data from a long-term study group, the Framingham Offspring Cohort, which has been monitoring residents of this Massachusetts town, in the United States, since 1971 and concludes that, 'Having higher levels of these acids in the blood, as a result of regularly including oily fish in the diet, increases life expectancy by almost five years.'
This is interesting. Recently, on the nightly news programs, they were all carrying on about how "a new study" has shown that fish oil supplements do not have any effect on users health. No impact.
What is interesting to me is that it seems that every time "a new study" is released, the news carries on as if this were the new final truth for us all to digest, ignoring all the other studies that went before. Which leaves me wondering, does the fish oil help?
I dunno. I took the supplemental fish oil tablets for the last couple years, and I love fish, especially ocean varieties, and ended up with 5 bypasses to the heart at age 65. Of course, given my lifestyle when I was younger, and my family history, it's a thousand wonders that I lived past 50 years anyway.
Guess I'll just enjoy my borrowed time, and keep eating fish, because I like it.
WARNING: The above post may contain thoughts or ideas known to the State of Caliphornia to cause seething rage, confusion, distemper, nausea, perspiration, sphincter release, or cranial implosion to persons who implicitly trust only one news source, or find themselves at either the left or right political extreme. Proceed at your own risk.
"If you do not read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain
maybe with your 5 bypasses and eating oily fish you will live 5 years longer than average. High blood hdl levels protect the liver from the free radicals released by gut bacteria.
“It has been a source of great pain to me to have met with so many among [my] opponents who had not the liberality to distinguish between political and social opposition; who transferred at once to the person, the hatred they bore to his political opinions.” —Thomas Jefferson (1808)
Eternal Change for No Energy: A Time Crystal Finally Made Real
Like a perpetual motion machine, a time crystal forever cycles between states without consuming energy. Physicists claim to have built this new phase of matter inside a quantum computer.
Below Zero by C.J, Box. A good read about a Montana game warden. Elk, mule deer, antelopes, eagles, falcons, trout, poachers, etc. Box has won just about every fiction award that there is.
"Emerson had long worried about how the emerging industrial division of labour was forcing Americans into roles, reducing their capacity to live authentic and integral lives. People were taking on specialised employments – as clergymen, lawyers, mechanics or sailors – and beginning to think primarily through the demands of those employments. ‘The priest becomes a form; the attorney, a statute-book; the mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope of a ship.’ People seemed indistinguishable, in other words, from the tools they used. Religious or moral considerations took a back seat to their professional roles. Markets made people into specialists, rendering them divided and inauthentic, and the resulting division of labour produced shrunken and limited thought. The attorney or the merchant no longer thought like a human being – weighing moral and existential questions with the seriousness that they demanded – but reasoned from the confines of what was good as a lawyer or cotton trader. Privately he wondered whether leading abolitionists were also playing a role, that they ‘had only a platform-existence, & no personality.’"
I think maybe ole Ralph was on to something. We're certainly suffering repercussions from the trend to think "What's in it for me?, Scrue everyone else."
WARNING: The above post may contain thoughts or ideas known to the State of Caliphornia to cause seething rage, confusion, distemper, nausea, perspiration, sphincter release, or cranial implosion to persons who implicitly trust only one news source, or find themselves at either the left or right political extreme. Proceed at your own risk.
"If you do not read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain
"reading" The Bomber Mafia on audible. I'm weary of any audiobook narrated by an author I've never heard of. Way over-produced, but the stories are very good. Thanks to whoever recommended it on the vherf!
Disclaimer: All trolling is provided for the sole entertainment purposes of the author only. Readers may find entertainment and hard core truths, but none are intended. Any resulting damaged feelings or arse chapping of the reader are the sole responsibility of the reader, to include, but not limited to: crying, anger, revenge pørn, and abandonment or deletion of ccom accounts. Offer void in Utah because Utah is terrible.
@ShawnOL said:
That doesn't count as reading.
-2 points.
It's not available as an actual book. But still, you're right. It's not a song so it doesn't go under the music category. Maybe I'll start a what are you listening to thread!
Disclaimer: All trolling is provided for the sole entertainment purposes of the author only. Readers may find entertainment and hard core truths, but none are intended. Any resulting damaged feelings or arse chapping of the reader are the sole responsibility of the reader, to include, but not limited to: crying, anger, revenge pørn, and abandonment or deletion of ccom accounts. Offer void in Utah because Utah is terrible.
Although many species are intensely colored—orange, coral pink, or red—others are white or clear. Some take on the color of what they eat: ingesting algae will cause a few slime molds to turn a nauseous green. Physarum polycephalum, which recently made its debut at the Paris Zoo, is a bright, egg yolk yellow, has 720 sexual configurations and a vaguely fruity smell, and appears to be motivated by, among other things, a passionate love of oatmeal.
Throughout their lives, myxomycetes only ever exist as a single cell, inside which the cytoplasm always flows—out to its extremities, back to the center. When it encounters something it likes, such as oatmeal, the cytoplasm pulsates more quickly. If it finds something it dislikes, like salt, quinine, bright light, cold, or caffeine, it pulsates more slowly and moves its cytoplasm away (though it can choose to overcome these preferences if it means survival). In one remarkable study published in Science, Japanese researchers created a model of the Tokyo metropolitan area using oat flakes to represent population centers, and found that Physarum polycephalum configured itself into a near replica of the famously intuitive Tokyo rail system. In another experiment, scientists blasted a specimen with cold air at regular intervals, and found that it learned to expect the blast, and would retract in anticipation. It can solve mazes in pursuit of a single oat flake, and later, can recall the path it took to reach it. More remarkable still, a slime mold can grow indefinitely in its plasmodial stage. As long as it has an adequate food supply and is comfortable in its environment, it doesn’t age and it doesn’t die.
Here in this little patch of mulch in my yard is a creature that begins life as a microscopic amoeba and ends it as a vibrant splotch that produces spores, and for all the time in between, it is a single cell that can grow as large as a bath mat, has no brain, no sense of sight or smell, but can solve mazes, learn patterns, keep time, and pass down the wisdom of generations.
Remarkably, in the brilliant light of these names, there was in fact a scientist who surpassed all others in sheer intellectual virtuosity. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), pronounced ‘purse’, was a solitary eccentric working in the town of Milford, Pennsylvania, isolated from any intellectual centre. Although many of his contemporaries shared the view that Peirce was a genius of historic proportions, he is little-known today. His current obscurity belies the prediction of the German mathematician Ernst Schröder, who said that Peirce’s ‘fame [will] shine like that of Leibniz or Aristotle into all the thousands of years to come’.
Charles Sanders Peirce c1859. Courtesy Harvard University Archives
Some might doubt this lofty view of Peirce. Others might admire him for this or that contribution yet, overall, hold an opinion of his oeuvre similar to that expressed by the psychologist William James on one of his lectures, that it was like ‘flashes of brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness’. Peirce might have good things to say, so this reasoning goes, but they are too abstruse for the nonspecialist to understand. I think that a great deal of Peirce’s reputation for obscurity is due, not to Peirce per se, but to the poor organisation and editing of his papers during their early storage at and control by Harvard University (for more on this, see André de Tienne’s insightful history of those papers).
Such skepticism, however incorrect, becomes self-reinforcing. Because relatively few people have heard of Peirce, at least relative to the names above, and because he has therefore had a negligible influence in popular culture, some assume that he merits nothing more than minor fame. But there are excellent reasons why it is worth getting to know more about him. The leading Peirce scholar ever, Max Fisch, described Peirce’s intellectual significance in this fecund paragraph from 1981:
Who is the most original and the most versatile intellect that the Americas have so far produced? The answer ‘Charles S Peirce’ is uncontested, because any second would be so far behind as not to be worth nominating. Mathematician, astronomer, chemist, geodesist, surveyor, cartographer, metrologist, spectroscopist, engineer, inventor; psychologist, philologist, lexicographer, historian of science, mathematical economist, lifelong student of medicine; book reviewer, dramatist, actor, short-story writer; phenomenologist, semiotician, logician, rhetorician [and] metaphysician … He was, for a few examples, … the first metrologist to use a wave-length of light as a unit of measure, the inventor of the quincuncial projection of the sphere, the first known conceiver of the design and theory of an electric switching-circuit computer, and the founder of ‘the economy of research’. He is the only system-building philosopher in the Americas who has been both competent and productive in logic, in mathematics, and in a wide range of sciences. If he has had any equals in that respect in the entire history of philosophy, they do not number more than two
Although many species are intensely colored—orange, coral pink, or red—others are white or clear. Some take on the color of what they eat: ingesting algae will cause a few slime molds to turn a nauseous green. Physarum polycephalum, which recently made its debut at the Paris Zoo, is a bright, egg yolk yellow, has 720 sexual configurations and a vaguely fruity smell, and appears to be motivated by, among other things, a passionate love of oatmeal.
Throughout their lives, myxomycetes only ever exist as a single cell, inside which the cytoplasm always flows—out to its extremities, back to the center. When it encounters something it likes, such as oatmeal, the cytoplasm pulsates more quickly. If it finds something it dislikes, like salt, quinine, bright light, cold, or caffeine, it pulsates more slowly and moves its cytoplasm away (though it can choose to overcome these preferences if it means survival). In one remarkable study published in Science, Japanese researchers created a model of the Tokyo metropolitan area using oat flakes to represent population centers, and found that Physarum polycephalum configured itself into a near replica of the famously intuitive Tokyo rail system. In another experiment, scientists blasted a specimen with cold air at regular intervals, and found that it learned to expect the blast, and would retract in anticipation. It can solve mazes in pursuit of a single oat flake, and later, can recall the path it took to reach it. More remarkable still, a slime mold can grow indefinitely in its plasmodial stage. As long as it has an adequate food supply and is comfortable in its environment, it doesn’t age and it doesn’t die.
Here in this little patch of mulch in my yard is a creature that begins life as a microscopic amoeba and ends it as a vibrant splotch that produces spores, and for all the time in between, it is a single cell that can grow as large as a bath mat, has no brain, no sense of sight or smell, but can solve mazes, learn patterns, keep time, and pass down the wisdom of generations.
Sort of depressing to think slime is smarterer then I is.
Just finished Off The Grid by CJ Box and starting Masked Prey by John Sandford. If You like our American Western Mountain Culture read Box. His main character is a Montana game warden and his fiction has won every award they have.
@ShawnOL said:
That doesn't count as reading.
-2 points.
It's not available as an actual book. But still, you're right. It's not a song so it doesn't go under the music category. Maybe I'll start a what are you listening to thread!
I use audible quite a bit. For me it’s a great tool when i’m driving. My commute to work is about 45 minutes, so i can get through some books fairly easy. Currently listening to East of Eden by John Steinbeck. I also have 1984 by George Orwell in the que.
A selective antibiotic for Lyme disease
Highlights
d A selective screen against B. burgdorferi led to the
rediscovery of hygromycin A
d The mechanism of selectivity is puzzling because
hygromycin A targets the ribosome
d Hygromycin A is smuggled into spirochetes by the
conserved transporter BmpDEFG
d Hygromycin A is efficacious in a mouse model without
disturbing the microbiome
Authors
Nadja Leimer, Xiaoqian Wu, Yu Imai, ...,
Linden T. Hu, Helen I. Zgurskaya,
Kim Lewis
Correspondence
k.lewis@neu.edu
In brief
The use of broad-spectrum antibiotics to
treat specific pathogens can damage the
host microbiome and contribute to
antibiotic resistance. Hygromycin A is
selectively taken up through a nucleoside
transporter specific to spirochete
bacteria, providing a highly selective
antibiotic for spirochete infections, such
as Lyme disease.
a quick overview of the trouble in Lebanon from the NYT daily newsletter:
A national Ponzi scheme
Weekly grocery bills can equal months of a typical family’s income. Banks are refusing to let people withdraw money. Basic medicines are often unavailable, and gas-station lines can last hours. Every day, many homes lack electricity.
Lebanon is enduring a humanitarian catastrophe created by a financial meltdown. The World Bank has called it one of the worst financial crises in centuries. “It really feels like the country is melting down,” Ben Hubbard, a Times reporter who has spent much of the past decade in Lebanon, told us. “People have watched an entire way of living disappear.”
It’s a shocking turnaround for a country that was one of the Middle East’s economic success stories in the 1990s. Given the scale of the suffering and the modest media attention it has received while the rest of the world remains focused on Covid-19, we are devoting today’s newsletter to explaining what has happened in Lebanon, with Ben’s help.
How did this happen?
As often happens with a financial crisis, the situation built slowly — and then collapsed quickly.
After Lebanon’s 15-year civil war ended in the 1990s, the country decided to tie its currency to the U.S. dollar, rather than allowing global financial markets to determine its value. Lebanon’s central bank promised that 1,507 Lebanese lira would be worth exactly $1 and that Lebanese banks would always exchange one for the other.
That policy brought stability, but it also required Lebanon’s banks to hold a large store of U.S. dollars, as Nazih Osseiran of The Wall Street Journal has explained — so the banks could make good on the promise to exchange 1,507 lira for $1 at any point. Lebanese firms also needed dollars to pay for imported goods, a large part of the economy in a country that produces little of what it consumes.
For years, Lebanon had no problem attracting dollars. But after 2011, that changed. A civil war in Syria and other political tensions in the Middle East hurt Lebanon’s economy. The growing power of the group Hezbollah, which the U.S. considers a terrorist organization, in Lebanon also deterred foreign investors.
To keep dollars flowing in, the head of Lebanon’s central bank developed a plan: Banks would offer very generous terms — including an annual interest of 15 percent or even 20 percent — to anybody who would deposit dollars. But the only way for banks to make good on these terms was by repaying the initial depositors with money from new depositors.
Of course, there is a name for this practice: a Ponzi scheme. “Once people realized that, everything fell apart,” Ben said. “2019 was when people stopped being able to get their money out of the banks.”
Officially, the exchange rate remains unchanged. But in everyday transactions, the value of the lira has plummeted by more than 90 percent since 2019. The annual rate of inflation has exceeded 100 percent this year. Economic output has plunged.
Even before the crisis, Lebanon was a highly unequal country, with a wealthy, political elite that has long enriched itself through corruption.
Some people have resorted to sifting through trash.Bryan Denton for The New York Times
Three new problems
Three developments since 2019 have worsened the situation.
First, the government tried to raise money by imposing a tax on all WhatsApp calls, which many Lebanese families use because phone calls are so expensive. The tax infuriated people — many of whom saw it as another example of government-imposed inequality — and prompted large and sometimes violent protests. “People outside looked at the country and said, ‘Why would I involve my business in a place like that?,’” Ben said.
Second, the pandemic hurt Lebanon’s already vulnerable economy. Tourism, which made up 18 percent of Lebanon’s prepandemic economy, was hit especially hard.
Third, a huge explosion at the port in Beirut, Lebanon’s capital, in August 2020 killed more than 200 people and destroyed several thriving neighborhoods. “A lot of people couldn’t afford to fix their homes,” Ben said. (This Times project takes you inside the port and shows how corruption helped to make the explosion possible.)
What now?
Lebanon formed a new government last month, for the first time since the explosion. The prime minister is Najib Mikati, a billionaire who held the position two previous times since 2005.
The French government and other outsiders have pushed the Lebanese government to enact reforms, but there is little evidence it will. The Biden administration, focused on other parts of the world, has chosen not to become deeply involved.
Many Lebanese families are relying for their survival on money transferred from family members living in other countries. “The only thing keeping a lot of people afloat is that most Lebanese families have relatives somewhere abroad,” Ben said.
A selective antibiotic for Lyme disease
Highlights
d A selective screen against B. burgdorferi led to the
rediscovery of hygromycin A
d The mechanism of selectivity is puzzling because
hygromycin A targets the ribosome
d Hygromycin A is smuggled into spirochetes by the
conserved transporter BmpDEFG
d Hygromycin A is efficacious in a mouse model without
disturbing the microbiome
Authors
Nadja Leimer, Xiaoqian Wu, Yu Imai, ...,
Linden T. Hu, Helen I. Zgurskaya,
Kim Lewis
Correspondence
k.lewis@neu.edu
In brief
The use of broad-spectrum antibiotics to
treat specific pathogens can damage the
host microbiome and contribute to
antibiotic resistance. Hygromycin A is
selectively taken up through a nucleoside
transporter specific to spirochete
bacteria, providing a highly selective
antibiotic for spirochete infections, such
as Lyme disease.
Nobody's going to tell me when I have to take a Lyme disease vaccine! I'm an American!
Disclaimer: All trolling is provided for the sole entertainment purposes of the author only. Readers may find entertainment and hard core truths, but none are intended. Any resulting damaged feelings or arse chapping of the reader are the sole responsibility of the reader, to include, but not limited to: crying, anger, revenge pørn, and abandonment or deletion of ccom accounts. Offer void in Utah because Utah is terrible.
Ohio State University. "How highly processed foods harm memory in the aging brain: Study in animals suggests omega-3 may reduce effects." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 14 October 2021. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/10/211014172753.htm>.
Comments
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210722113004.htm
Summary:
Researchers have found that omega-3 levels in blood erythrocytes are very good mortality risk predictors. The study used data from a long-term study group, the Framingham Offspring Cohort, which has been monitoring residents of this Massachusetts town, in the United States, since 1971 and concludes that, 'Having higher levels of these acids in the blood, as a result of regularly including oily fish in the diet, increases life expectancy by almost five years.'
This is interesting. Recently, on the nightly news programs, they were all carrying on about how "a new study" has shown that fish oil supplements do not have any effect on users health. No impact.
What is interesting to me is that it seems that every time "a new study" is released, the news carries on as if this were the new final truth for us all to digest, ignoring all the other studies that went before. Which leaves me wondering, does the fish oil help?
I dunno. I took the supplemental fish oil tablets for the last couple years, and I love fish, especially ocean varieties, and ended up with 5 bypasses to the heart at age 65. Of course, given my lifestyle when I was younger, and my family history, it's a thousand wonders that I lived past 50 years anyway.
Guess I'll just enjoy my borrowed time, and keep eating fish, because I like it.
"If you do not read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain
maybe with your 5 bypasses and eating oily fish you will live 5 years longer than average. High blood hdl levels protect the liver from the free radicals released by gut bacteria.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/07/will-tech-help-totalitarians.html
https://www.quantamagazine.org/first-time-crystal-built-using-googles-quantum-computer-20210730/
Eternal Change for No Energy: A Time Crystal Finally Made Real
Like a perpetual motion machine, a time crystal forever cycles between states without consuming energy. Physicists claim to have built this new phase of matter inside a quantum computer.
Below Zero by C.J, Box. A good read about a Montana game warden. Elk, mule deer, antelopes, eagles, falcons, trout, poachers, etc. Box has won just about every fiction award that there is.
Coverage on a study that reveals how smell receptors work.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/secret-workings-of-smell-receptors-revealed-for-first-time-20210621/
The Back of Beyond by C. J. Box 2011
love the American Transcendentalist movement.
https://psyche.co/ideas/why-ralph-waldo-emerson-would-really-hate-your-twitter-feed
"Emerson had long worried about how the emerging industrial division of labour was forcing Americans into roles, reducing their capacity to live authentic and integral lives. People were taking on specialised employments – as clergymen, lawyers, mechanics or sailors – and beginning to think primarily through the demands of those employments. ‘The priest becomes a form; the attorney, a statute-book; the mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope of a ship.’ People seemed indistinguishable, in other words, from the tools they used. Religious or moral considerations took a back seat to their professional roles. Markets made people into specialists, rendering them divided and inauthentic, and the resulting division of labour produced shrunken and limited thought. The attorney or the merchant no longer thought like a human being – weighing moral and existential questions with the seriousness that they demanded – but reasoned from the confines of what was good as a lawyer or cotton trader. Privately he wondered whether leading abolitionists were also playing a role, that they ‘had only a platform-existence, & no personality.’"
I think maybe ole Ralph was on to something. We're certainly suffering repercussions from the trend to think "What's in it for me?, Scrue everyone else."
"If you do not read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain
https://psyche.co/ideas/why-some-of-the-smartest-people-can-be-so-very-stupid
"But dumbness alone is rarely the driving threat: at the head of almost every dumb movement, you will find the stupid in charge."
Painted Ladies by Robert Parker, one of the last Parker wrote before he crossed over.
https://pipesmagazine.com/forums/threads/impact-of-bowl-shapes-on-smoking-quality.63145/
Interesting theories.
Twelve Mile Limit by Randy Wayne White. The Florida Keys, fishing, intrigue, diving and boats. White was a fishing guide for many years. Well written.
"reading" The Bomber Mafia on audible. I'm weary of any audiobook narrated by an author I've never heard of. Way over-produced, but the stories are very good. Thanks to whoever recommended it on the vherf!
That doesn't count as reading.
-2 points.
Trapped in the People's Communist Republic of Massachusetts.
give Frank a break, he types with his thumbs or uses voice to type.
It's not available as an actual book. But still, you're right. It's not a song so it doesn't go under the music category. Maybe I'll start a what are you listening to thread!
from:
https://orionmagazine.org/article/what-slime-knows/
Although many species are intensely colored—orange, coral pink, or red—others are white or clear. Some take on the color of what they eat: ingesting algae will cause a few slime molds to turn a nauseous green. Physarum polycephalum, which recently made its debut at the Paris Zoo, is a bright, egg yolk yellow, has 720 sexual configurations and a vaguely fruity smell, and appears to be motivated by, among other things, a passionate love of oatmeal.
Throughout their lives, myxomycetes only ever exist as a single cell, inside which the cytoplasm always flows—out to its extremities, back to the center. When it encounters something it likes, such as oatmeal, the cytoplasm pulsates more quickly. If it finds something it dislikes, like salt, quinine, bright light, cold, or caffeine, it pulsates more slowly and moves its cytoplasm away (though it can choose to overcome these preferences if it means survival). In one remarkable study published in Science, Japanese researchers created a model of the Tokyo metropolitan area using oat flakes to represent population centers, and found that Physarum polycephalum configured itself into a near replica of the famously intuitive Tokyo rail system. In another experiment, scientists blasted a specimen with cold air at regular intervals, and found that it learned to expect the blast, and would retract in anticipation. It can solve mazes in pursuit of a single oat flake, and later, can recall the path it took to reach it. More remarkable still, a slime mold can grow indefinitely in its plasmodial stage. As long as it has an adequate food supply and is comfortable in its environment, it doesn’t age and it doesn’t die.
Here in this little patch of mulch in my yard is a creature that begins life as a microscopic amoeba and ends it as a vibrant splotch that produces spores, and for all the time in between, it is a single cell that can grow as large as a bath mat, has no brain, no sense of sight or smell, but can solve mazes, learn patterns, keep time, and pass down the wisdom of generations.
https://aeon.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=89c6e02ebaf75bbc918731474&id=ab3a89f6fe&e=9f58af0695
Remarkably, in the brilliant light of these names, there was in fact a scientist who surpassed all others in sheer intellectual virtuosity. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), pronounced ‘purse’, was a solitary eccentric working in the town of Milford, Pennsylvania, isolated from any intellectual centre. Although many of his contemporaries shared the view that Peirce was a genius of historic proportions, he is little-known today. His current obscurity belies the prediction of the German mathematician Ernst Schröder, who said that Peirce’s ‘fame [will] shine like that of Leibniz or Aristotle into all the thousands of years to come’.
Charles Sanders Peirce c1859. Courtesy Harvard University Archives
Some might doubt this lofty view of Peirce. Others might admire him for this or that contribution yet, overall, hold an opinion of his oeuvre similar to that expressed by the psychologist William James on one of his lectures, that it was like ‘flashes of brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness’. Peirce might have good things to say, so this reasoning goes, but they are too abstruse for the nonspecialist to understand. I think that a great deal of Peirce’s reputation for obscurity is due, not to Peirce per se, but to the poor organisation and editing of his papers during their early storage at and control by Harvard University (for more on this, see André de Tienne’s insightful history of those papers).
Such skepticism, however incorrect, becomes self-reinforcing. Because relatively few people have heard of Peirce, at least relative to the names above, and because he has therefore had a negligible influence in popular culture, some assume that he merits nothing more than minor fame. But there are excellent reasons why it is worth getting to know more about him. The leading Peirce scholar ever, Max Fisch, described Peirce’s intellectual significance in this fecund paragraph from 1981:
Who is the most original and the most versatile intellect that the Americas have so far produced? The answer ‘Charles S Peirce’ is uncontested, because any second would be so far behind as not to be worth nominating. Mathematician, astronomer, chemist, geodesist, surveyor, cartographer, metrologist, spectroscopist, engineer, inventor; psychologist, philologist, lexicographer, historian of science, mathematical economist, lifelong student of medicine; book reviewer, dramatist, actor, short-story writer; phenomenologist, semiotician, logician, rhetorician [and] metaphysician … He was, for a few examples, … the first metrologist to use a wave-length of light as a unit of measure, the inventor of the quincuncial projection of the sphere, the first known conceiver of the design and theory of an electric switching-circuit computer, and the founder of ‘the economy of research’. He is the only system-building philosopher in the Americas who has been both competent and productive in logic, in mathematics, and in a wide range of sciences. If he has had any equals in that respect in the entire history of philosophy, they do not number more than two
Sort of depressing to think slime is smarterer then I is.
Just finished Off The Grid by CJ Box and starting Masked Prey by John Sandford. If You like our American Western Mountain Culture read Box. His main character is a Montana game warden and his fiction has won every award they have.
I use audible quite a bit. For me it’s a great tool when i’m driving. My commute to work is about 45 minutes, so i can get through some books fairly easy. Currently listening to East of Eden by John Steinbeck. I also have 1984 by George Orwell in the que.
this is good news:
A selective antibiotic for Lyme disease
Highlights
d A selective screen against B. burgdorferi led to the
rediscovery of hygromycin A
d The mechanism of selectivity is puzzling because
hygromycin A targets the ribosome
d Hygromycin A is smuggled into spirochetes by the
conserved transporter BmpDEFG
d Hygromycin A is efficacious in a mouse model without
disturbing the microbiome
Authors
Nadja Leimer, Xiaoqian Wu, Yu Imai, ...,
Linden T. Hu, Helen I. Zgurskaya,
Kim Lewis
Correspondence
k.lewis@neu.edu
In brief
The use of broad-spectrum antibiotics to
treat specific pathogens can damage the
host microbiome and contribute to
antibiotic resistance. Hygromycin A is
selectively taken up through a nucleoside
transporter specific to spirochete
bacteria, providing a highly selective
antibiotic for spirochete infections, such
as Lyme disease.
full paper here:
https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(21)01058-8.pdf
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/archaeologists-discover-12300-year-old-tobacco-use-2019581
a quick overview of the trouble in Lebanon from the NYT daily newsletter:
A national Ponzi scheme
Weekly grocery bills can equal months of a typical family’s income. Banks are refusing to let people withdraw money. Basic medicines are often unavailable, and gas-station lines can last hours. Every day, many homes lack electricity.
Lebanon is enduring a humanitarian catastrophe created by a financial meltdown. The World Bank has called it one of the worst financial crises in centuries. “It really feels like the country is melting down,” Ben Hubbard, a Times reporter who has spent much of the past decade in Lebanon, told us. “People have watched an entire way of living disappear.”
It’s a shocking turnaround for a country that was one of the Middle East’s economic success stories in the 1990s. Given the scale of the suffering and the modest media attention it has received while the rest of the world remains focused on Covid-19, we are devoting today’s newsletter to explaining what has happened in Lebanon, with Ben’s help.
How did this happen?
As often happens with a financial crisis, the situation built slowly — and then collapsed quickly.
After Lebanon’s 15-year civil war ended in the 1990s, the country decided to tie its currency to the U.S. dollar, rather than allowing global financial markets to determine its value. Lebanon’s central bank promised that 1,507 Lebanese lira would be worth exactly $1 and that Lebanese banks would always exchange one for the other.
That policy brought stability, but it also required Lebanon’s banks to hold a large store of U.S. dollars, as Nazih Osseiran of The Wall Street Journal has explained — so the banks could make good on the promise to exchange 1,507 lira for $1 at any point. Lebanese firms also needed dollars to pay for imported goods, a large part of the economy in a country that produces little of what it consumes.
For years, Lebanon had no problem attracting dollars. But after 2011, that changed. A civil war in Syria and other political tensions in the Middle East hurt Lebanon’s economy. The growing power of the group Hezbollah, which the U.S. considers a terrorist organization, in Lebanon also deterred foreign investors.
To keep dollars flowing in, the head of Lebanon’s central bank developed a plan: Banks would offer very generous terms — including an annual interest of 15 percent or even 20 percent — to anybody who would deposit dollars. But the only way for banks to make good on these terms was by repaying the initial depositors with money from new depositors.
Of course, there is a name for this practice: a Ponzi scheme. “Once people realized that, everything fell apart,” Ben said. “2019 was when people stopped being able to get their money out of the banks.”
Officially, the exchange rate remains unchanged. But in everyday transactions, the value of the lira has plummeted by more than 90 percent since 2019. The annual rate of inflation has exceeded 100 percent this year. Economic output has plunged.
Even before the crisis, Lebanon was a highly unequal country, with a wealthy, political elite that has long enriched itself through corruption.
Some people have resorted to sifting through trash.Bryan Denton for The New York Times
Three new problems
Three developments since 2019 have worsened the situation.
First, the government tried to raise money by imposing a tax on all WhatsApp calls, which many Lebanese families use because phone calls are so expensive. The tax infuriated people — many of whom saw it as another example of government-imposed inequality — and prompted large and sometimes violent protests. “People outside looked at the country and said, ‘Why would I involve my business in a place like that?,’” Ben said.
Second, the pandemic hurt Lebanon’s already vulnerable economy. Tourism, which made up 18 percent of Lebanon’s prepandemic economy, was hit especially hard.
Third, a huge explosion at the port in Beirut, Lebanon’s capital, in August 2020 killed more than 200 people and destroyed several thriving neighborhoods. “A lot of people couldn’t afford to fix their homes,” Ben said. (This Times project takes you inside the port and shows how corruption helped to make the explosion possible.)
What now?
Lebanon formed a new government last month, for the first time since the explosion. The prime minister is Najib Mikati, a billionaire who held the position two previous times since 2005.
The French government and other outsiders have pushed the Lebanese government to enact reforms, but there is little evidence it will. The Biden administration, focused on other parts of the world, has chosen not to become deeply involved.
Many Lebanese families are relying for their survival on money transferred from family members living in other countries. “The only thing keeping a lot of people afloat is that most Lebanese families have relatives somewhere abroad,” Ben said.
I'm sure life in Lebanon is unimaginably difficult. Another great example of how the decisions of a few impact the lives of many.
"Class Act" by Stuart Woods. Just finished "Shoot First" by him also.
Nobody's going to tell me when I have to take a Lyme disease vaccine! I'm an American!
Ohio State University. "How highly processed foods harm memory in the aging brain: Study in animals suggests omega-3 may reduce effects." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 14 October 2021. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/10/211014172753.htm>.