“Woodland, N.C., has rejected a proposed solar farm after residents expressed fears that it would consume too much sunlight. Resident Jane Mann told the town council that the farm would steal sunlight that plants need, while another resident warned that it might ‘suck up all the energy from the sun.’ The council rejected the proposal, despite assurances that solar panels do not ‘draw additional sunlight.'”
The Week September 1, 2023
More and better education is important.
Just before leaving for the holidays, the republican controlled congress, after doing absolutely nothing all freaking year but fighting amongst themselves and attacking their perceived enemies, whilst forgetting about Ukraine and Israel, migration, the border, etc., did deign to do one thing to make amends for the waste of time and salaries, they agreed to pass legislation that will bring whole milk back into our public schools. Their disdain for public schools and the kids who go there is clear, in their actions and inactions, but whole milk; we gotta give ’em that.
“The DNA of wapiti deer as well as that of a woman was extracted from a Denisova Cave deer-tooth pendant.”
Harpers July 2023
This DNA could be from 300,000 to 50,000 thousands years old. Ponder that. DNA, as we all know it, can be grabbed from a cup or a glass or a straw to bust some murderer from the 1970s. But now, it can be grabbed from deeply in the past. And the present. Like, you getting up from your chair. There’s DNA – we can grab that.
People are all concerned about facial recognition. Which, now that I think about it, I am also concerned about. But your DNA is practically permanent – in the right circumstances. DNA describes who we are and why. And your’s and mine could be nabbed off something a hundred thousand years from now – or possibly way more.
I have no issue with this in any direction. I’d love to have my DNA looked at in 100,000 years by whoever that might be. And I’d be happy to help with any murder by spitting in a cup.
The point is, science is just so incredibly fascinating right now, I’m surprised Americans aren’t way more interested. It would take them away from their politics and grievances, as a start.
Percentage of eligible Americans who vote: 63
Of Hungarians: 71
Of Uruguayans: 95
I was paging through a Harpers Magazine on my desk to see if I’d already read it, which surprisingly, isn’t an exact science, as in, I just have to look at the words to see if I have already read it. It doesn’t work that way. How many of you have started a book and got dozens of pages into it and then realized that you’d already read the book? That’s what I’m talking about. I often read the letters in one month’s magazine about stories from a month or two back and can’t recall what on god’s green earth they’re lettering about.
It’s memory and attention and focus and all things I struggle with, and you probably struggle with, as we all struggle with the phones, the Internet, apps and the games and the movies, shows and the videos; blockbusters, podcasts and now, god damn it, AI and Chat GPT. That’s kicking a man when he’s down. It’s all too much and it’s evolving so fast. None of this was here when many of us were growing up and even adults. And it’s a firehose. No wonder we’re all barking at each other and fighting amongst ourselves about pointless issues – while the robber barons rob us bare, of course. Our phones and tablets scream at us, so we scream at one another. It’s about that simple.
And all of that distracts us from important things like voting.
Two fascinating articles from the New York Times yesterday, both of which stopped me in my tracks. The first is about the protests in Israel and how one woman – a particle physicist – has become the “face” of the protests. This paragraph is what surprised me:
“Dr. Bressler sealed her status as a symbol of the protest movement last month when she led a miles-long column of demonstrators on a multiday march to the hills of Jerusalem from coastal Tel Aviv. It evoked a biblical pilgrimage, and they picked up tens of thousands of supporters during the journey.”
If you look at the accompanying image (below), you cannot not be struck by how that is exactly what it looks like – a pilgrimage (with lots of flags), and what Jewish communities have been doing for millennia – walking, marching, traveling, in this case, to the capital city, to stand up to those intent on suppressing them and their freedoms.
The next story is two babies accidentally switched at birth. One baby was born of a French Canadian father and a mother who was Cree and French Canadian, a Métis. He was given the name Richard Beauvais. The other’s parents were the children of Ukrainian immigrants. They were prosperous farmers and also had a general store and post office in a town. That baby was named Eddie Ambrose.
So, the kid with Ukrainian ancestry was taken home with the Cree and French Canadian mother, and ended up on the reservation after the death of the other baby’s father. The child of the Metis mother ended up with the well-off Ukranian parents. They both came to figure this out recently after family members convinced them to do DNA testing while researching their respective family’s history.
It’s an amazing story all-around and destined for a movie, I would think, but I found it absolutely fascinating what the Ukrainian boy endured along with his family as a child and at the hands of the Canadian government. The article states:
Then, when he was 8 or 9, came what he called “the worst day” of his life. Government workers swooped into the log house to take custody of the children, who had been left by themselves.
Mr. Beauvais remembers hitting and kicking a worker who had slapped a sister, who was crying, then being thrown off a low roof. The children were eventually taken to a room with pink walls where, he said, they were picked “like puppies” by foster parents and he “was the last one to go.”
“There was no compassion,” Mr. Beauvais said. “If you were Native, the government workers didn’t care.”
But he was not Native, right? Or is he, for all intents, purposes and a lifetime of living, and being treated, as a Native? Fascinating! I won’t comment any more and allow you to read the stories, if you’re interested.
“What we measure is the Earth kind of moving in this sea. It’s bobbing around — and it’s not just bobbing up and down, its bobbing in all directions,” said Michael Lam, an astrophysicist at the SETI Institute and a member of the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav),*
I was thinking about joining NANOGrav. 😐
*I’ll find the source if anyone wonders.
I”m going to just share whatever it is musically, but lots of ambient and mellow stuff. The Sea and the Cake “The Moonlight Butterfly“.
Here’s a relatively new release for your listening enjoyment. This is Ian Hawgood’s Mysterious Shapes and Remembered Rivers, which makes one think of China Crisis’s Difficult Shapes and Passive Rhythms. It came out in 2022. He does a song with Stijn Huwels, with whom he’s done a lot of great music, and Friends We Found, who I know nothing about, but will. It’s just great ambient music. That’s all.
Being that we’ve veered a bit from Sunday, let’s veer a bit from traditional Ambient. Susumu Yokota‘s “sakura“. It’s an amazing record by a young man that I came across in 2014 and started following him and he died suddenly in 2015. It was a really strange feeling. I had the same experience with Mitch Hedberg. But this record is just a stellar example of what this man created. Check him out! If you’re into that sort of thing.
“It was reported that nearly a third of all shoplifters arrested in New York City were the same 327 people”
This fascinates me. But it also makes great sense. We tend to think that we’re surrounded by bad people, but bad people will always make up a tiny fraction of people in general. There are people I know who won’t come to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, because they’re certain they’ll be shot. This just due to listening to the news, which, of course, reports murders in the Twin Cities – as they would anywhere. But it never seems to occur to them, if they actually read the articles in any detail, that most of those murders are just people who know people and are mad at those people and so, for whatever reason, kill them. Being randomly killed anywhere in the world, and even here in the land of school shootings, is exceedingly rare. Yes, you should fear coming to the Twin Cities, if you’re meeting that guy, to whom you owe a lot of money, to purchase some more drugs, and tell him you made love to his girlfriend. If not, go for it. You’ll be fine.
Luke Soiseth 