Posts

Good News Among the Bad

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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

Finding a Pearl

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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

Why Aren't We Hearing From Space Aliens?

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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

How Much Is It Going to Hurt, Rich Person?

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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

The Most Read Worst News

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...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

Baby Book Blog

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

The Scariest Sentence I Ever Read

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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