Does Size Matter?

Posted on July 5, 2018 by Professor Taboo

My intelligence officer frantically bursts through my plastic door, salutes with the wrong hand and reports to me in broken sentences and insufficient oxygen-intake THE terrible crisis which has befallen us:

Highly General! We’ve been hit by a surprise attack that is of the scale and deadly precision of… yes… Dec. 7th, 1941… “A date which will live in INFAMY!“

Stunned and not sure whether I left the refrigerator door open this morning or not, and whether I remembered to apply my under-arm deodorant, I asked my IO “Alright, so how bad is it? What’s the damage report?”

Sir of Highlyness, the reports are still preliminary, but all sectors are fighting gallantly in all directions! But there is just TOO MANY of them. We are being overrun!

I scramble to find somewhere on my big desk in front of my BIG chair underneath all my “kinky surveillance photos” and questionable magazines, “Where is that file? I know it’s here somewhere!” Shuffle, shuffle, push, push… “HAH! There it is!” My IO with the utmost attentiveness of a feline inside a pet-bird store snaps “WHAT!? What is it your Highlyness!?”

I open up the top-secret file labelled “Top Secret” to read valuable national security data for kitchens:

If you have been seeing small flies or gnats in your kitchen, they’re probably fruit flies. Fruit flies can be a problem year round, but are especially common during late summer/fall because they are attracted to ripened or fermenting fruits and vegetables.

There it is. The Coup d’état of preemptive covert preparations in early to mid-April. Yes, APRIL! What good does that do us in June under piles of kinky photos and unconventional magazine… research!? The extensive report continues:

Adults are about 1/8 inch long and usually have red eyes. The front portion of the body is tan and the rear portion is black. Fruit flies lay their eggs near the surface of fermenting foods or other moist, organic materials. Upon emerging, the tiny larvae continue to feed near the surface of the fermenting mass. This surface-feeding characteristic of the larvae is significant in that damaged or over-ripened portions of fruits and vegetables can be cut away without having to discard the remainder for fear of retaining any developing larvae. The reproductive potential of fruit flies is enormous; given the opportunity, they will lay about 500 eggs. The entire life-cycle from egg to adult can be completed in about a week.

Obviously I cannot confirm the red eyes because the little f*ckers never stay still, especially when I try to look up close directly at their eyes! Tan bodies? What!? Are they migrating here from Caribbean beaches of UV-coconut lotion? Wow, what a life!

Eggs on fermenting foods or organic materials? That is unequivocally wrong! I have nothing fermenting within my zone-of-defense and most grocers don’t sell anything organic, at least not at reasonable prices! Damn, these little pecker-pests have figured out another method of infiltration and penetration! And I am NOT talking about Karen McDougal or Stormy Daniels. HOLY SHIT! 500 eggs!? “The entire life-cycle from egg to adult can be completed in about [30-seconds].” Well, at least that’s much much longer than Donnie T’s endurance.

As I am reading this Top Secret file I have three enemy flies/gnats buzz me. One tries entry into my nostril the other tries my ear like my skull is the Death Star and they have delusions of Luke Skywalker grandeur! “OH HELL NO!” I’m swatting my hands everywhere like M.C. Hammer on steroids firing laser-machine-guns! BAAM! BOOM! gnatty-ness carnage everywhere!

But within minutes there’s another wave of horny-for-500-more fruity flies flying to my kitchen and to every orifice on my body… I presume because I do not have enough organic produce! Hence, I am the fruiter’s target. I must read the rest of the Top Secret fruit-fly files FAST… EEER!

ERADICATION – or Counter-attacks:
Once a structure is infested with fruit flies, all potential breeding areas must be located and eliminated. Unless the breeding sites are removed or cleaned, the problem will continue no matter how often insecticides are applied to control the adults. Finding the source(s) of attraction and breeding can be very challenging and often will require much thought and persistence. Potential breeding sites which are inaccessible (e.g., garbage disposals and drains) can be inspected by taping a clear plastic food storage bag over the opening overnight. If flies are breeding in these areas, the adults will emerge and be caught in the bag.

Are you fuckin’ kidding me? I have to find areas with 500 eggs? And we thought Easter was fun!?

I scream at my IO, “Corporal Klinger! It is time to call-in SEAL Team D-O. We have no choice, no hope of clean orifices if we do not call-in the Specialized DO-ers.”

Cpl. Klinger, Intelligence Officer

Cpl. Klinger stares forward and stares forward… “KLINGER!” He jumps to attention, “SIR!?” I give him the piercing reprimand-stare, “This is no time for daydream believers and homecoming Queens! Make the call!” He salutes proudly, “Yes sir. Right away sir! I’m sure the Black-Ops of Drain-O squad will see to it that Operation Orifice is a resounding success!”

“Well, it better be or we will become the 30-second breeding ground of eggs-galore! Can you imagine being violated like that in 30-seconds?” Both of us pause a few seconds and remember the long, long history of patriarchal plunder. Cpl. Klinger begins to open his mouth to respond. “STOP! Do not answer that.”

“Right now we have a formidable fruit-fly foray requiring our finest feats of ferocity! Are you fit for this forthcoming fatal function of fracas fruit-fly…” I must pause to wipe my lip and chin… “FARNAGE!“ the Cpl. blurts out! “You are indeed my fashionable Intelligence Officer. Go call SEAL team DO-ers!”

The Battle-Smoke Slowly Clears, the Smell of Apple Vinegar Lingers with Fly-Bodies Floating Lifeless Everywhere

💀 💀 💀 💀 💀

It was near disaster. There were so many. They just kept coming and coming and coming. Three bottles of apple-cider vinegar (squirted with Dawn dishsoap) gone, strategically dispersed throughout our fortress defenses, precision counter-attacks by the SEAL DO-ers, and orifices brilliantly booby-trapped… the war had been won, but at what cost? Would we be able to withstand the next attack? Unless we breed like our fruity enemy do we have a chance? Yes, we were victors, for now. Like the dinosaurs we are big and mighty, for now. But can we last?

Do numbers matter? Scary still, does size matter? We face an uncertain future with those levels of reproduction and libidos. I don’t think we hetero males will keep up. Have we been deluding ourselves over the millenia with dreams of superiority?

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Live Well — Make Love Much More? — Laugh Often at our Arrogance — Learn Always from the Tiny Details

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Reading Once Unreadable Ancient Scrolls

Posted on June 30, 2018 by Professor Taboo

This is groundbreaking news for science and most of all for future rewriting, reexamining, and changing historical “traditions” into historical facts and more compelling plausibilities. What is remarkably ironic is that this technology has been introduced by an American computer scientist named Brent Seales, who is also an evangelical Christian. I wonder if he fully realizes what he has ushered in?

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In the 1730’s Italian well-diggers hit and stumbled across an ancient Roman villa. Over the next three decades as commissioned by the King of France, two engineers headed up the excavations of the villa and its contents. They eventually uncovered over 1,800 papyri scrolls from 1st century CE Roman life prior to the 79 CE eruption of Mount Vesuvius just a few kilometers away. Like all the inhabitants of Herculaneum, items such as papyri scrolls were either vaporized or incinerated under the 300+ degree Celsius (≅ 600 Fahrenheit) heat blast. These scrolls managed to be only charred due to various storing techniques that the Villa’s owner (probably the father-in-law of Julius Caesar, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus) maintained for his large library. Nevertheless, for the next 250-years after their discovery scientists assumed their words would be impossible to ever read. They had attempted to carefully unravel some, but only turned them into fragments and dust; certainly more undecipherable.

Fast forward to the computer age…

Later, while earning his doctorate, at the University of Wisconsin, [Seales] became fascinated with “computer vision,” and began writing algorithms to convert two-dimensional photographs into 3-D models—a technique that later enabled vehicles such as Mars rovers, for example, to navigate terrain on their own. Seales went to work at the University of Kentucky in 1991, and when a colleague took him along to the British Library to photograph fragile manuscripts, Seales, captivated by the idea of seeing the unseeable, found the challenge thrilling.

From there Seales continued improving upon the improvements of computed tomography (CT).

He began to experiment with a medical-grade computed tomography (or CT) scanner, which uses X-rays to create a three-dimensional image of an object’s internal structure. First, he tried imaging the paint on a modern rolled-up canvas. Then he scanned his first authentic object—a 15th-century bookbinding thought to contain a fragment of Ecclesiastes hidden inside. It worked.

…to read the full Smithsonian article click here…

Fast forward thirteen more years. Once pulling out or highlighting the metal-laden letters within the scrolls, how does one go about unwrapping them on their proper page in correct order? Seales admitted that at the time that process was just simply beyond their algorithms.

What makes virtual unwrapping such a complex challenge is that, even if you imaged the inside of a rolled-up scroll written in ink that glowed brightly in scans, you would still only see a dizzying mess of tightly packed letters floating in space, like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle—but without a final picture to use as a guide. To decipher that jumble of letters, Seales’ key innovation was to develop software to locate and model the surface layer within a wound-up scroll, which analyzes each point in as many as 12,000 cross-sections. Then he looks for density changes that correspond to the ink, and applies filters or other techniques to increase the contrast of the letters as much as possible. The final step is to figuratively “unroll” the image for reading.

Now today with phase-contrast tomography in combination with X-ray phase-contrast tomography (for carbons), then mapping all the images the scrolls are virtually unfurled to read the full texts:

After Seales returned to Kentucky, he and his colleagues spent months mapping all of the available 2-D images onto the 3-D template produced by the Artec Space Spider. This past March, they returned to Oxford to present the results on a big screen to a packed conference room. At such a high-resolution, the charred papyrus resembled a dark-brown mountain range as seen from above, with lines of text snaking over the ridges and peaks. There was a gasp from the audience as Seales’ student Hannah Hatch rotated the image, then zoomed into creases and peeked over folds, flipping seamlessly between high-resolution photographs, infrared images and even the disegni drawings—all matched up to the 3-D template.

Now that this proven scientific method, via subatomic physics to be exact, for reading once unreadable brittle ancient scrolls has been established, it has unsurprisingly caused a frenzy in scholarly paleographical circles.

Successfully reading Herculaneum scrolls could trigger a new “renaissance of classical antiquity,” says Gregory Heyworth, a medievalist at the University of Rochester in New York. He points out that virtual unwrapping could be applied to countless other texts. In Western Europe alone, he estimates, there are tens of thousands of manuscripts dating from before A.D. 1500—from carbonized scrolls to book covers made from older, glued-together pages—that could benefit from such imaging.

“We’d change the canon,” Heyworth says. “I think the next generation is going to have a very different picture of antiquity.”

“A very different picture of antiquity“? Hah! True, but an interesting way of putting it. I’d say not necessarily different, but more importantly accurate rather than on biased pseudo-traditions. This is why science works better for the benefit of humanity. It need not be feared, unless there is something(s) shameful to hide.

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Live Well — Live Scientifically — Love Much — Laugh Often — Learn Always

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Every 405,000 Years

Posted on June 8, 2018 by Professor Taboo

For decades astronomers have theorized that like our Moon impacts our tides, over tens of thousands of years our closest and largest planets in our solar system (Venus and Jupiter) have influenced Earth’s climate. Since Serbian astrophysicist Milutin Milanković hypothesized his Earth orbital-cycles of variations in the 1920’s affected Earth’s climates, there simply hasn’t been any sufficient physical proof for his cycles theory. Until last month.

With the further advanced technology and methodologies used on geological formations and strata (magnetostratigraphy) in correlation with the Newark–Hartford APTS (Astrochronostratigraphic Polarity Timescale) published May 7, 2018 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, now:

…provide[s] empirical confirmation that the unimodal 405-kiloyear orbital eccentricity cycle reliably paces Earth’s climate back to at least 215 million years ago, well back in the Late Triassic Period.

This conclusion was based on the geological research of three different cores: two from two different sites of ancient lake beds in New Jersey and New York, and one rock core 1,500-feet long from the Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park.

The geologists noticed that lake sediment cores would disclose a consistent pattern of ancient lakes drying up then refilling over the course of hundreds of thousands of years forming different geological strata. This suggested cyclical changes in climate. The difficulty was that at the time they lacked the extensive methods to accurately date those climatic shifts. Fortunately, the Arizona Petrified Forest core, contained layers of ash from volcanic eruptions. These could definitely be dated because they contained radioisotopes.

Scientists compared and aligned the Arizona core dates to the NJ-NY ancient lake cores using bands found in all of the cores, indicating reversals in Earth’s magnetic fields. Yes, “reversals”! This allowed them to more precisely study the records. The analysis then demonstrated that the climate swings did indeed take place every 405,000 years for at least the last 215-million years, which is back through the Late Triassic Age when dinosaurs walked the Earth.

What does all this have to do exactly with Venus and Jupiter? Understanding gravitational forces by mass, Venus — the closest planet to us at 24-million miles — tugs us slightly closer to the Sun, and Jupiter — the largest planet in our solar system at 318-times more massive than Earth — tugs us slightly further from the Sun. At the peaks of those infrequent elliptical orbits, Earth has indeed historically experienced (the last 215-million years) hotter summers and colder winters with more extreme times of rain-flooding and dryer droughts

Antarctic ice strata also determines Earth’s climate millions of years in the past

Dr. Dennis Kent at Columbia and Rutgers Universities, specializing in paleomagnatism, states:

Scientists can now link changes in the climate, environment, dinosaurs, mammals and fossils around the world to this 405,000-year cycle in a very precise way. The climate cycles are directly related to how the Earth orbits the sun and slight variations in sunlight reaching Earth lead to climate and ecological changes.

Beyond Earth’s ancient past and astrophysics this study is a substantial breakthrough for the methods in which geologists are able to date cores and present a reliable more accurate timeline of Earth’s geologic past. It will also assist in many other scientific domains!

Paleontologist of the University of Edinburgh, Dr. Steve Brusatte:

[With the aid of APTS and newest magnetostratigraphy it] is a really important study for clarifying the Triassic timescale and untangling the sequence of events that occurred as Pangea began to split up and the dinosaurs originated and then diversified. It’s mostly a study of how to tell geological time rather than of how changes in climate relate to evolution.

Most people want to know the more immediate concern: Where are we currently in the Venus-Jupiter climate-cycle? And could Venus’ and Jupiter’s tug-cycles be responsible for our current climate-changes?

Bad news climate-change deniers. Astronomers and astrophysicists calculate that we are about in the middle of the 405k cycle. Earth’s orbit is very close to circular, not elliptical, and presently not near enough to cause disruptions in climate or global warming. The changes we have been experiencing come from some 238-years of outsized human output and input in the release of greenhouse gasses.

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Live Well — Love Much — Laugh Often — Learn Always

Phenomenological Primitive Cognition

Posted on May 31, 2018 by Professor Taboo

I am taking a brief pause from my 4-5 week (so far) MASSIVE project (Page) I’m currently working on to share this wonderful blog-post from a blogger I follow. I think some of you would really enjoy it, as I did.

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∼ ∼ ∼ § ∼ ∼ ∼

“Crossing Cognitive Chasms with P-prims.” He begins…

Apparently, roughly 10% of humans still believe that the Earth is larger than the Sun. Do they believe this because they haven’t been properly educated? Possibly. Do they believe this because they’re stupid? Probably not.

In fact, the most likely explanation is that the individuals concerned just haven’t thought that much about it. The Earth looks big; the Sun looks like a small disc in the sky; ergo, the Sun is smaller than the Earth.

The individuals are relying on what Andrea diSessa (1988) would call a phenomenological primitive or p-prim: “These are simple abstractions from common experiences that are taken as relatively primitive in the sense that they generally need no explanation; they simply happen.”

What is a p-prim (phenomenological primitive)?

More from E=mc2andallthat…

One of the concepts I took away from E=mc2’s excellent post was that so very much of our own perspective, our own measurements, are greatly influenced by our own TINY experiences and background compared to all other perspectives and measurements. Fascinatingly, E=mc2 used a science lab experience of heat radiation emitters and absorbers to support and explain various applications:

…a substance [or idea, or behavior] that is good at one thing can also be good at its opposite.

Be sure to click on his “Father Dougal” video-link! Hahaha!

Does it benefit someone and humanity when one person or a large group maintain a fairly stable cognition of opposites so that each can be understood more deeply and appreciated fairly? Personally, I am very, very fond of my habit of continually understanding and appreciating my good and my evil, as well as others who like crossing that chasm! 🤩 😈

What are your thoughts?

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Live Well — Love Much — Laugh Often — Learn Always

Brain Secretion Byproducts

Posted on January 28, 2018 by Professor Taboo

“God” is a secretion of the human brain, says Michael McGuire and Lionel Tiger.

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In their 2010 book “God’s Brain,” McGuire and Tiger strongly suggest and demonstrate that the concept of God, or a God, is a byproduct of human cerebral secretions. Historically the various divine tenets, revelations, traditions, and expressions of social orders around the world are encapsulated from that specific culture’s or civilization’s perceived, geographical, organizational needs not just for survival, but for their perceived perpetuation, then recorded and implemented in a Code of Principles relevant to their time-period. McGuire and Tiger state there is simply no compelling evidence for any type of cosmic, monistic Being manipulating us and Earth’s events.

Now that Homo sapiens are more evolved, at least intellectually and socially no matter the multitude of progressive and digressing methods, historically speaking have our cerebral secretions of Gods and religions been helpful? On a micro scale Tiger has an intriguing perspective on the question:

I found Tiger’s elaboration of the individual and social functionality of ‘optimism’ or hope — that it seems to be a useful tool for survival and perhaps for thriving throughout life — to be of special interest. Why? Because its use requires no patent or jurisdiction other than culturally, in a specific time-period to a specific locale. How is trust defined by those people and their circumstance? One thing is evident, none of this religious human behavior can be adequately or universally traced to one source.

On a macro scale E.O. Wilson of Harvard University (retired) goes in a different direction. Organized religion has a dark side and ugly track-record.

[Intent of religious deities have] “been perverted many times in the past — used, for example, to argue passionately for colonial conquest, slavery, and genocide. Nor was any great war ever fought without each side thinking its cause transcendentally sacred in some manner or other.”

Hence, this could beg the question: Have we modern humans evolved or should we humans further evolve to a more practical, more progressive new social Code of Principles? What are/would those principles based upon? How many social affiliations should/can a human(s) be involved? Are the affiliations beneficial or detrimental to them and their family? Non-family? Do you already have affiliations and belief-systems that are more highly evolved than others?

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I think whether you agree or disagree with Tiger’s assessments of transcendental beliefs or empirical biological consequences concerning the origin of God and religions, it is paramount to develop and maintain a certain amount of scrutiny, or neutrality, or critical-thinking when considering this source or that source and its mechanisms.

Critical-thinking is not to be confused with agitation, or argumentative, or a personal attack upon someone. Critical-thinking actually helps us acquire more knowledge, expose ignorances, refines our theories, improves collaboration and construction, and strengthens or weakens premises for what they are. I feel one of the most beneficial aspects of applied critical-thinking is that it promotes “thinking outside the box,” a very healthy form of human empowerment and creativity. These two conditions are not achieved to their fullest in a restrictive or constraining closed-system typically preached and protected by religions. They are best achieved in environments of freedom of thought and scrutiny, as well as positive support for a person’s and all person’s natural-born abilities. Agree? Disagree? Why or why not? Share your thoughts below.

Live Well — Love Much — Laugh Often — Learn Always

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