SeniorJunior

...While You Are Looking at Melting Permafrost I'm just bubbling with CO2, mercury and germs. There are visible, dramatic effects of the rapidly warming Arctic. The permafrost – up until now, permanently frozen land and soil – is thawing out, and revealing its hidden secrets. Alongside Pleistocene fossils are massive carbon and methane emissions, toxic mercury, and ancient diseases. This is a fake but, you know, dramatic! The "ancient diseases" are from thousands of  reindeer killed by anthrax, frozen and now thawing and releasing their microbes. I didn't know about the mercury.   "The Arctic is home to the most mercury on the planet. The US Geological Survey estimates there’s a total of 1,656,000 tonnes of mercury trapped in polar ice and permafrost: roughly twice the global amount in all other soils, oceans, and atmosphere."  Who wudda thunk? Worse, of course, it that as the permafrost in the Arctic melts, the extra CO2 and methane will ac

"I’m losing the ability to communicate the magnitude of change," said  Jeremy Mathis, current board director at the National Academies of Sciences.   "I’m running out of adjectives to describe the scope of change we’re seeing."* It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's Arctic Ice doing a nosedive! It must be really frustrating trying to get the public (thee and me) properly exercised about our climate sinking into chaos.  We've got more important stuff to think about, don'tcha know. * Mashable ME

Our Prez is doing something I like! (...and you know that doesn't happen often.) Let's all line up and rip people off! White House to Issue Executive Order  to Disclose Pricing  Across the Health Care Industry Published: May 24, 2019   By Alex Keown [Excerpt]  President Donald Trump is expected to issue an executive order next week that will  mandate price disclosure across the health care industry , the  Wall Street Journal  reported this morning. The move would be highly disruptive to the industry, which is not used to having a spotlight shined on its pricing policies, the  Journal  noted. Citing unnamed sources who are familiar with the matter, the  Journal  said the Trump administration will wield the power of the federal government to force the price disclosures as part of an effort to drive down health care costs. In particular, the  Journal  said that the order could be aimed at “regional monopolies of hospitals and health-insurance plans over conce

Artificial Intelligence, The Future of Everything The bigger you are, the more you can use A.I. This pretty much says the big will get bigger, the strong will get stronger, the weak will fall further behind. So this chart is bad news for the U.S. Down in that light blue "Other countries" category are places like  Germany, Bahrain, South Korea, and spectacularly, Israel.  While the U.S. overwhelms the world in conventional military power, the new battlefields are forming up in cyberspace. The cyber nukes are the A.I.s   I (humbly of course) propose that spending priorities be shifted from the existing military industrial complex to the new A.I. development complex. War is hell, but less hellish when fought in The Cloud. And WAY less hellish when you win. Think that's scary? Check this out: The Chinese A.I. Leapfrog (...and 16 other Worries About China)

 Eye in the Desert Researching Western Australia for the book I'm currently hammering on (it's about  Super i ntelligence), this wonder leapt right out at me.  I SEE that person to your right. It's the Wolfe Creek Meteor Crater, on the easter edge of Western Australia. The Picasso part is the tiling collage effect of merging satellite shots. I thought you might like to see it.  I know you are just dying to know something about this new book!  Working title: What Would Supe Do?  Perhaps I should weave in something about the Wolfe Creek Crater.

Why Is This My First Recommendation to Watch Fox News? Because this guy is so handsome? Handsome is as handsome does. Some Much Needed Clarification CLICK THIS AND HANG ON TIGHT TO YOUR PRECONCEPTIONS. Scooter the Tooter

A Mysterious Infection, Spanning the Globe in a Climate of Secrecy                                                                                       NYTimes There is a fungus among us - maybe at a hospital near you - AND YOU WONT HEAR ABOUT IT! I just LOVE hospitals! Super investigative story on the front page of the NY Times!  Scary, enlightening, infuriating... everything good investigative reporting provides, this story should win a Pulitzer. It's about a drug resistant fungus that blossoms in hospitals.  It is one bad  dude of a "germ,"  Candida auris. "Nearly half of patients who contract C. auris die within 90 days." (Some reports say 60%.) "With bacteria and fungi alike, hospitals and local governments are reluctant to disclose outbreaks for fear of being seen as infection hubs . Even the C.D.C., under its agreement with states, is not allowed to make public the location or name of hospitals involved in outbreaks. "

                        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 :\