SeniorJunior

KLOTHO!                                                                               OLD                                                                          YOUNGER Remember that. K-L-O-T-H-O.  Sounds like a laundry product, but it's another step in the longevity ladder.   More to come. (If you can't wait, and feel comfortable reading dense science, go here . Otherwise, I'll be back with my patented dumb-down-to-my-level trick pretty soon." I'M BACK!  ("Big deal," I hear you say.)  Taking a media merger approach, I put an expanded explanation of what Klotho is all about on my YouTube channel "Spider and Olde Scooter." You can check it out by clicking THIS . If you are not into Spider solitaire, just watch the portion from 2:50 to 8:50. Five minutes of Scooter-fied enlightenment. Klotho is one of the most promising biomedicine developments I've seen lately, with promises of helping - a LOT - with Alzheimer's, not to

It Was Just a Quahog in the Estuary of Breitbart Commentors But a Small Irritant grew into a Pearl! 8/10/2017 Dateline Breitbart.com The topic was Senator Maxine Waters. I made a comment critical of the prez. Another commenter, "makwabid,"  called me a seditionist (!), then he said, "I know why you all secretly hate Trump." *                                                         High quality Quahog pearl, it was! (I quickly, an hour after that post, responded:) seniorjunior (scooter duff) makwabid • 3 hours ago I wonder why you think that is? My reasons: (and it isn't "hate." Don't project.) ..... (Then, poured forth from my fingers a succinct little position statement. To be concise is holy.) ...I believe his MAGA is a huge fraud - his racist, demagogic, jingoistic actions are destroying America's chance to be the "shining city on the hill," violating nearly all of our highest standards; He dismisses scien

Time Assumptions Are Probably Silly Sci-fi superthinker of the '80s Robert Forward invented a civilization that evolved at super speed. In Dragon's Egg , Forward put his aliens on a neutron star. Could happen! I mean after Donald Trump became president, it became clear absolutely anything can happen. And several Big Thinkers have conceived that life could evolve in any situation you can imagine. Even on humble little Earth, we've got life around super hot springs seven miles down in the Marianas Trench.      A neutron star is just a bit more exotic, with gravity squashing its surface at 67 billion times more pull that gravity here. Heavy. Time runs faster under those conditions ("Time dilation;" Einstein), and the tiny life forms  experience a "day" on Dragon's Egg in 0.2 of our seconds (neutron stars spin really fast; some spin up to way faster than even that), and a typical lifetime is about 40 minutes and seems as long to them as a life

It Actually Comes Down to This... * I assume none of these folks is rich I don't think $250,000 a year is really "rich," but it's where progressive taxation starts to nibble.  Here is a comment from a guy with income in that range. He is delightfully named Ned Friend. AUGUST 2, 2017   SEATTLE — Ned Friend has high hopes for what Seattle’s new income tax could mean for his city. The measure, passed by the city council in July, would impose a 2.25 percent tax on high-income – those who make above $250,000 a year, or twice that for couples. Mr. Friend, a software engineer whose annual income is above the threshold, sees the new cash source as a way to help ease the affordability crisis that is the dark side to Seattle’s booming tech industry. He says he’s happy to pay a little extra each year if it means more revenue for the city to address homelessness and fund public education, make taxes more fair, and defend liberal Seattle against strikes from a conse

...Spelled Out in the Most-Read Story Ever in.... Magazine Art with a terrible message* The article, in the June 9, 2017 issue of New York Magazine, was the most read in the magazine's history. It was titled, simply: The Uninhabitable Earth Pretty straight forward, no? Maybe a little hyperbolic; not every square mile of Earth will be uninhabitable, even in 50 years. Just a very great deal of our planet will be purely awful and most totally unliveable. Hundreds of millions  of climate refugees will head for what  livable  space is left. They will be desperate.  The situation, in a few powerful sentences scattered through the piece: 1.  It is, I promise, worse than you think. 2.  Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope. 3.  But no matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough. 4.  We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate (than during the larg

Just a Wee Thing As I may have mentioned, I have published a new book. Did I mention that? Every book must have its blog : Ancient Meme If you'd like to check out the just-postpartum phase of this baby, give it a click . It will grow up. scooter

Awful Truth "There’s simply too much misinformation out there, and it’s unreasonable to expect ordinary people to know how to tell truth from the lies." (From the  Salon article  by Amanda Marcott that inspired the  "Hell Spawn"  post below.) Ok, now a little moralizing. I mean this is a BLOG, is it not? Bloggers moralize the way pigs wallow in mud. It's just in our genes. "...unreasonable to expect ordinary people to know how to tell truth from lies."  Really? We "ordinaries" can't do a bit of research if something seems questionable or unlikely or probably false?                                                                                YES WE CAN!   It has never been easier to research. It's not just Google, Bing, Yahoo and all the other search engines. There are credible sources in any field of human endeavor right here on your device. You don't even have to crack a book, much less go to the library (WAY

Swimming in the Ocean of Muslimphobia As I've admitted, I am addicted to the "Comments" following stories in Breitbart.com, our National Repository of Racism, Xenophobia, Intolerance and Fake News.                                 My impression of SOME Breitbart commenters (I'm prejudiced, I acknowledge) This little colloquy followed a typical Breitbart piece about how Muslim folk are the Devil's Spawn (see below). Commenter "ArmyAviator" whipped out the meme machine (Obama-bad; Muslims want to kill us all, etc.) One brave soul "MNUSA" dared rebut one point. I agreed and generalized about how SOME Breitbarters don't like facts and many are natural-born racists. This brought out the snarling, insulting best in "Whirling Peas." I love these folks! Note the poetry in "millions by the millions" and " importing third world savages."  THE COLLOQUY guest    ArmyAviator   •   12 hours ago

Crazies, All Around Us The real fun of conspiracy theorizing - Successful Propaganda! For a couple of decades now, right-wing media has seeded fake conspiracy stories into the mainstream media to demonize political opponents and sow doubts about politically inconvenient facts. This, Carusone argued, escalated under Trump, who has used his growing media power to drive an overwhelming number of conspiracy theories into the mainstream, including rumors that Clinton’s health was failing, that millions of undocumented people voted in the 2016 election and that there’s some uncovered scandal regarding Clinton’s (sigh) emails. *                                           An editor, coping with Fake News So when a journalist tries to publicly piece together what’s going on with Trump and Russia, “ you sound like a crazy person, because the audience has been hardwired to believe that all conspiracies are akin to Alex Jones’s inter-dimensional demon,” Carusone said, referencing the I

Why Can't We Do Stuff Like This? As perhaps you know, I am a True Believer in single payer national insurance.  Belief - a schematic A pal sent me a bunch of links to relevant articles after we discussed the topic. (He's anti to my pro.) Here are just a few random excerpts. Not so much to argue for single payer but to highlight that the some countries - and some journalists! - go at health care problems in a way more low-key, fact-based, research-driven, logical (FBRDL) way than our political shouting matches . Are we hard charging, pragmatic, problem solving Americans or not? Why can't be be more FBRDL on something as important as healthcare? Those darn Danes, always showing off. One of my favorite Danes, Victor Borge, enjoying single payer. A big Danish study happens regularly that self-critiques their health care system.  Here is a single paragraph that caught my eye. Read it and imagine if you would ever see something like this in either t