SeniorJunior

                        Wired Magazine   There IS NO PATH back to "normality" if by normal you mean like it used to be. Not the 1950s or the '80s, or the '10s or yesterday . Things are just changing too fast and too much. It's going to get stranger and stranger. The fine article (and podcast) in Wired is actually about how sci-fi writers are getting more political, and how the "abnormality" is Trump, etc., but this back-to-normality thing is way bigger than politics.  Science is becoming science fiction. Artificial intelligence, CRSPR gene editing, hypersonics, supercomputing, crowdsourcing, gravity waves, Instagram,  augmented reality, virtual sex, quantum stuff, nanotech, fracking,  climate freaking change... And, really, don't get me started on world politics.  There's not a path back to when all that isn't happening. Are you going to the sock hop tonight? Being a science fiction writer myself (I'm com

What's Going to Wreck Our World? (If we are not careful) The Plasticocalypse? No,  AMBIVALENCE! (Heres an example) Shell Oil is spending huge ($10 billion) on a giant plant outside of Pittsburg to make   Polyethelene Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! To make a lot more of this.....  The Shell plant will turn 1.6 billion gallons of ethane into 3.3 billion pounds of little white polyethylene beads. Annually. Sounds (and looks) gross. But the ambivalence sets in with: "More than 6,000 tradespeople and laborers will be on the site during the peak summer construction period. Some 600 full-time workers will manage automated technology to operate the completed plant. A 97-mile pipeline from gas separation installations in Ohio and West Virginia will supply ethane; a 250-megawatt gas-fired electrical generating station will power the plant." Manufacturing on the rebound in America!  Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson... Think about 3.

We Forget How Many Ways America Is Changing The British Newspaper The Guardian Reminds us... (Those Brits, always reminding of stuff we'd rather forget) The American family farm is disappearing I miss my people. 1950  (Scooter was in the 7th grade)         Total population: 151,132,000; farm population: 25,058,000 ; Number of farms:          5,388,000; average acres: 216 (About 5 folks per farm family) 1998 (Olde Scooter was about to retire) Total population: 275,900,000; farm population: 2,987,552 ; Number of farms: 2,143,150; average acres: 461 (About 1.4 folks per farm "family") I.e. In one man's work life, about 22 million folks left their farms. Huge "industrial" farms frequently have NO ONE living on the farm.  Maybe a few thousand hogs or tens of thousands of chickens, or endless waves of grain - soy and corn mostly. We sort of know all this.  It just slips out of consciousness without a reminder now and then.  How Americ

* En garde! Ten-year-Long study!  Half a million kids!  Super study and incontestable findings. So you anti-vaxers better come up with some other excuse.   Just sayin'..... * Good summary

A Short, True Tale... ...From my days in San Francisco Get's another "Pick" from the NYTimes. I apologize. When AIDS was just coming out, I was home in Texas and the subject came up. I was chatting with an old pal who said, "It's just a queers' disease." I told him it was already proven that anyone could catch it, which he denied ferociously and went on to give HIV a Biblical twist.  Then today, I saw a story in the NYTimes by a Houston doctor bemoaning how HIV is still rampant in Houston while San Francisco has it mostly under control.  Up bubbled my memory of that old conversation, and I wrote a cynical "comment" that picked on the South - mostly unfairly.  Some comments moderator agreed with my umbrage and 'picked' my comment.  I apologize for being a categorical insulter, a category I mostly despise. This one I'm not that proud of :\

That Darn 'Invisible Hand' Sometimes it scratches the wrong itch. China has a massive global lead in the absolute number of new factory robots, and is pouring large sums into developing AI.* Hey, I never said the invisible hand was perfect.                                               Adam Smith "The position  in this country has been to let the market dictate what happens with tech and science, and I think that's going to prove to be a catastrophic mistake," says Amy Webb, a professor at NYU and author of a " The Big Nine ," a forthcoming book on the future of AI. Even as U.S. industry and top universities invest in future technologies, China is vastly outpacing the West in national planning and investments in AI and robotics, experts say. Sigh... Olde Scooter's closet of scary Chinese news: " Winning" China's   Pharma  Invasion It's  China  More Than Russia China Becoming  World Science Leade

Stuck in the Middle With You Just seems like a fitting old song for what it's like to be a "moderate" these days.  Clowns to the left of me Jokers to the right. 1972 toe tapper.

Franco-German.    Wouldn't you know it? Look, Ma, no tail! It's a concept drawing, but I love it. It'll be on the market in a decade or so. Maybe. Read about it here.

You Know Olde Scooter (that would be me) Is Seriously Interested in the Human Microbiome** Thing is, every living thing on this wonderful planet has a microbiome. Plants, animals, bugs, birds, even microbes themselves. A new scientific discipline is studying all this wondrous mega-commensalism... * Let's share microbes! Why  Meta ge no mics ? Microbes run the world. It’s that simple. Although we can’t usually see them, microbes are essential for every part of human life—indeed all life on Earth. Every process in the biosphere is touched by the seemingly endless capacity of microbes to transform the world around them. The chemical cycles that convert the key elements of life—carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur—into biologically accessible forms are largely directed by and dependent on microbes. All plants and animals have closely associated microbial communities that make necessary nutrients, metals, and vitamins available to their hosts. Through fermentation an

So a Friend Brought His Knife Sharpeners Over for Me to See.... ...and Alexa Listened In I HEAR you! I swear, affirm, affidare, this to be true: THERE WAS... NO shopping on line for sharpeners...    NO queries to Google or Bing or Yahoo for sharpener info... i.e.        ZERO ways the mighty marketers of the Internet could know... EXCEPT, all the sharpener talk (I sharpened three of our knives, and said "wow" a lot over how sharp they became) were within earshot of our Amazon Echo, home of the solicitous Alexa.  This morning, ads for knife sharpeners started showing up all over   my usual news sites, NYTimes, WaPost, Google News, etc. HOW DO IT KNOW? ( Punch line to old thermos joke)       .... Well, it must constantly listen to hear the activate command, "Alexa." Duh.  So you think Amazon is just going to ignore all that other stuff it hears all the time, or maybe, perhaps, possibly, USE that info to pump up the Bezos boogie? Think of all

More Big Bucks for Longevity Quest  Pharma Newsletter: Longevity will eventually “dwarf the dotcom boom.” (Story in Big Pharma  newsletter ) Peter Diamandis’ right hand man Sergey Young wants to reverse aging via his $100M Longevity Vision Fund by  natalie grover —  on  February 4, 2019 09:00 AM EST I'm Young , and I'll pay to stay that way! Inspired by British billionaire Jim Mellon, chairman of anti-aging upstart biotech venture  Juvenescence , Sergey Young unveiled a $100 million fund on Monday to catalyze the development of a comprehensive solution to counteract the damaging consequences of aging. As you might suspect, this is a topic of interest to my 82 year-old self. Other posts: [Click 'em] Can You Buy Some Extra Years? Anti-aging Pills Aplenty More Longevity Stuff Senolytics! All In on Senolytics Now I need to work on the "Millionaire" part.

That's My Hometown Paper In   !! Talk about a media rush. I'm thumbing through The New Yorker , checking out the cartoons first as always, and ZOWEE! There is a picture of The Bonham Daily Favorite. Holy cats , etc.   The Daily Favorite is more to me than my home towner; I was once an employee. I was a "combo announcer" at KFYN, the 250 watt, 1420 kHz, AM daytimer station when it was owned by the Favorite. That was in 1952.*  Hey Olde Scooter, recognize me? It's in THIS edition. Jan 28, 2019 THRILLS COME IN THE DARNDEST WAYS. Bonham, Texas has about 10,000 souls now, 7000 in 1952. A growth market! update, UPDATE      I was so excited about seeing the picture of the Daily Fav, that I rushed to blog about it.   Then I read the piece. It's really an extraordinary,  15 pager by Pulitzer winning biographer Robert A. Caro on his experiences researching his massive The Years of Lyndon Johnson biography, five volumes, going o