- Interesting item about drilling holes deep enough to allow geothermal energy harvesting anywhere, and not simply where magma happens to live close to the surface. It’s still a hard problem, but geothermal energy offers most of the upsides of nuclear power, and fewer of the (admittedly mostly bogus) downsides.
- What most people don’t know about EVs is that it’s very difficult (and sometimes impossible) to replace the battery pack in an EV. And even minor collisions can cause enough damage to the battery to raise the risk of fire unacceptably. Insurers often must junk the whole vehicle if the battery is damaged only slightly.
- We had an incident in Scottsdale not long ago where a Tesla was in an accident and caught fire. After putting out the blaze with tens of thousands of gallons of water, the damned thing caught fire again when they tried to tow it away. Why are lithium-ion batteries so dangerous to extinguish when they catch fire? This video lays it all out.
- Vitamin D-3 (cholecalcipherol) supplementation appears to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s Disease. The study cited isn’t the best, but it’s as good as I’ve found so far. Carol and I have been taking D-3 for years. Here’s hoping…
- A couple of years ago there was some buzz about Viagra and Cialis reducing the incidence of Alzheimer’s, but a more recent study from the NIH shows that this isn’t the case. Bummer; talk about a serious twofer!
- Heh. I’ve had this suspicion for some time, but it appears to be true: Tech companies overhired for “vanity” reasons, and to keep talent from being hired by competitors. Once cash gets expensive due to rising interest rates, carrying unneeded talent becomes untenable.
- The world’s last Meccano factory has closed. Meccano is the British metal construction system, much like the 1950s US Erector sets, but with better parts. It was my favorite toy from the time I was 7 until is was 12 or 13, and I have used it in various projects since then, especially The Head of R&D.
- Speaking of construction sets: MIT has designed a sort of Erector/Meccano set to build different human-scale robots for lunar exploration. Rather than trying to ship specialized robots to the Moon, researchers could snap together legs and other components to create robots to match specific challenges.
- I’d never heard of quercetin until the spring of 1990, when my doc told me that partnered with bioavailable zinc, quercetin could prevent viral relication, via much the same mechanism as the much-maligned HCQ. Here’s a long-form piece on how quercetin works and why it may be a better flu treatment than Tamiflu.
March, 2023:
Odd Lots
RIP Aero 2007-2023
Our little dog Aero has left us, at 16 years 7 months. Last week he was in some sort of discomfort, and by Monday it was pretty clear that his liver and gall bladder were failing. Carol set up an appointment with our mobile vet for Wednesday morning to put him to sleep. But Tuesday noonish, I checked him as I’ve been checking him for several weeks, to make sure he was still breathing.
This time, he was not.
I made sure that his heart was no longer beating, straightened his head, and with my hand on his forehead said my Prayer of Returning over him, as is our custom when dogs leave us:
From our Creator we took you;
To our Creator we return you,
That your life with us may glorify our Creator,
And in the hope that we may someday meet again.
Go with God, my good and faithful companion!
When we bought Aero from his breeder, the late Jimi Henton, in 2007, he quickly told us his name by his ears, which as a puppy often stuck straight out either side of his head, like a plane. He was on the small side for a Bichon Frise, and a little shy, so Jimi suggested that Carol start showing him. Doing this required show grooming and a multitude of other details, but Carol bore down, mastered whatever skills were necessary, and by the spring of 2010 Aero became an AKC Champion. (See top photo.)
He was a lot of fun out in the yard, chasing cheap Wal-Mart playground balls with the rest of the pack. As soon as the balls lost enough air pressure so that Aero could push his sharp little teeth against the plastic, he went for the kill and the ball popped.
His kennel name was Champion Jimi’s Admiral Nelson. He lived longer than any other dog we have ever had, both as a couple or earlier, as kids. (Chewy came close, at 16 years 4 months.) He was a lot of fun and we will always thank God for sharing such a wonderful creature with us.
Scraps: Where Are Cheezer’s Atoms?
A couple of people have mentioned in DMs that I’ve written about this before, but they can’t find it. I have indeed written about memories gone wrong, but it was a long time ago and if you’re interested, here are the four installments:
The Impersistence of Memory, Part 1
The Impersistence of Memory, Part 2
The Impersistence of Memory, Part 3
The Impersistence of Memory, Part 4
It’s an interesting series, and certainly related, but not exactly what I’m going after with Scraps. Scraps is about earworms, true, but actually a more general category that might be called “mindworms.” It’s things that you’ve long since forgotten that pop into your head for no discernable reason and with peculiar force, as though the action were somehow deliberate. I have a theory, which I’ll get to after a few examples.
At some point during the worst of the COVID craziness, a peculiar question entered my mind: Where is Cheezer now? The weird part isn’t that I remembered a childhood toy. It’s that I remembered wondering where the toy had gotten to, probably when I was in high school fifty-plus years ago.
Cheezer was a small diecast metal car of a sort that was common in the ‘50s and early ‘60s. They still exist, but (like so much else) are much fancier now than they were when I was a first-grader. The car’s name was “Cheezer” because he was the color of American cheese, of which we ate much in that era. My sister tells me that I had several other diecast cars, none of which I can bring to mind at all.
Again, the memory was a peculiar one: Some time probably fifty years ago, I went looking for Cheezer and couldn’t find him. He used to live in one of the two little drawers in a cherry-wood gate-leg table that was in our basement. He shared the drawer with some plastic toy dinosaurs and plastic Army men. I think the Army men were still in the drawer, but Cheezer was nowhere to be found.
I did some searching around the house but did not find poor Cheezer. He had some sentimental value, and I was a little annoyed at being unable to find him. And then a peculiar insight came to me: Cheezer might be lost, but he was somewhere. Or at least the atoms of which he was made were somewhere, because absent an atom-smasher, atoms are forever.
Don’t misread me here. The odd thing isn’t that I remembered a toy I probably hadn’t seen in sixty years. The odd thing is clearly remembering myself wondering where he was, right down to that nerdy insight about his atoms. Nothing triggered that memory. I marked it as silly but it kept coming back to me. Ok, COVID was a weird business that left a lot of people with a certain amount of mental turmoil. Maybe COVID was stirring some stagnant internal pot, and up popped an old and odd state of mind starring a toy car.
Except…the very same thing had happened before, more than once, and long before COVID. More here as time permits.
I’m guessing now that Cheezer was in a box somewhere that my mother threw away once it was clear that I would no longer be playing with diecast cars and plastic Army men. So he’s in a landfill somewhere, atoms and all.
One has to wonder if our brains are like landfills full of ancient states of mind, and every so often one jumps up and says, “Hi!”
Again, stay tuned.
New Category: Scraps
It happens to everybody: A song pops into your head and you can’t get rid of it. We call those “earworms,” and I’ve had my share. The other day while I was folding clean laundry, a song popped into my head. No biggie, right? Well…I don’t think I’d heard this song in almost fifty years. I didn’t remember the artist. I remembered about a third of the lyrics, but the instruments came through clear as a bell, including the interlude that had no lyrics. From the lyrics, I guessed its title was “A Special Kind of Morning.”
Curious, I looked in all my Whitburn pop song references, and found no such title listed. After it ran a few times in my head I had the insight that it was on one of my college-years 8” recorded off-the-air reel-to-reel mix tapes. I still have the typewritten index for those tapes, and yup, there it was, recorded in March, 1970. The artist was Joe Brooks. I listened to those tapes until I left home in early 1976, so that may have been when I heard the song last. I did a DDG search and there it was (like so many other obscure pop songs from that era) free on YouTube.
So. Why that song? And why then? I was folding my socks and underwear, sheesh. It was a typical pop song of no special quality, with dumb lyrics. Of several adjectives I might apply to it, “memorable” was not one of them.
My sister has a name for this sort of thing: brain sludge. She gets it too. I’m going to apply a slightly different name to it, and make it a category here on Contra: Scraps. That’s what they are: Scraps of memory that surface for no apparent reason. I have a notefile containing a few examples from recent years. I’ll present them here as time permits. All of them are peculiar, and one is definitely weird.
Stay tuned.