Tuesday, December 15, 2015
Food / Drink ...
When I was a kid, I ate a typical suburban 1960’s breakfast — i.e., cereal and milk. What kind of cereal? Oh, whatever I saw advertised on TV. Maybe Frosted Flakes, maybe Crispy Critters, maybe Captain Crunch, maybe Cocoa Puffs. My mother was nice enough to stock the kitchen with a variety of popular cereals, so my brother and I had the luxury every morning of deciding whether it would be Kixx, Trix or Apple Jacks. As we got a bit older (say into the teen years), our tastes matured a bit — we would sometimes forgo the pre-sweetened stuff and go with Special K or Rice Chex or even Shredded Wheat (but actually, we still added our own sugar).
A lot of people gave up on breakfast as they got into college and then into the early adult years, but I never did. At some point, however, maybe in my mid 30’s or so, I gave up on milk and (soggy) processed grain in a bowl, and went over to yogurt, usually mixed with fruit or oatmeal. This wasn’t all that different from my earlier breakfast days (it still combined dairy product and grain), just a bit more cultured and fibered and whole-grained. That would get my day going for many years.
But in late 2000, start of a new century, I was trying to re-boot my career by going through a 4-month all-day computer programming crash course (Chubb Institute’s long-gone “Top Gun” program for mid-career professionals), and I decided that I needed to kick my breakfast up a notch. By then I was a committed vegetarian, so pancakes and bacon and sausage patties weren’t going to do it for me. I decided on a fairly unconventional breakfast item — cooked lentils. I have cooked for myself since I got out of college, and » continue reading …
Friday, December 11, 2015
Foreign Relations/World Affairs ... History ... Technology ...
I read up recently on international military news. Once you get past all the crazy, never-ending Middle Eastern stuff, you next get a big dose of bad news from China. You’d think that the main Chinese threat would be its huge army, but no more; times have changed. In the past few years, the Chinese have been designing and building an increasingly sophisticated network of high-tech satellites, drones, stealth planes, subs and missiles, with the intent of keeping the US Navy and any of its cronies (especially Japan) far away from its coastline. Thus leaving China to do as it pleases with Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, etc.
Until recently, the US Pacific Fleet, even with its huge sitting-duck aircraft carriers, could cruise the Taiwan Straits and South China Sea feeling relatively safe. The Chinese Navy generally couldn’t find our ships, as it didn’t have the sea-borne tracking and recognizance capacities that we do; and even if it could, it didn’t have enough modern subs and jets and destroyers to put up a credible challenge. That ain’t so today. What’s even worse, the Chinese now have missiles that can be launched by land or sea which are accurate enough (when coupled with a monitoring system of satellites and airborne radar drones and tracking planes) to hit a ship out in the open sea, thousands of miles away. Nuclear warheads are not needed; these missiles and their guidance systems are so good and so accurate that they can hit a carrier deck out in mid-ocean with a heavy conventional explosive warhead.
So, that’s a big headache for the US. And as if that weren’t enough, you can throw in what the North Koreans and Iranians are doing to develop long-range nuclear missiles, which in a few years could reach the US mainland. Yes, we are building anti-missile systems, but we are not sure if they are ready for prime time yet. As for the Chinese anti-ship missiles, the US Navy has » continue reading …
Saturday, December 5, 2015
Brain / Mind ... Science ...
Our brains are obviously very important to all of us, and society is thus making a lot of effort to get to know it better. Human brains do a whole lot of things, but one of the more interesting things that they do is to retain and make available a mental replay of certain thoughts, feelings, perceptions and experiences from the past. I.e., our brains give us our memories. Human memory is a wide-ranging thing. In addition to giving us a “video replay” of sorts for past experiences, it stores facts, skills, emotional impressions and various other things on both a conscious and sub-conscious basis (e.g., we pick up a lot of fears, attractions and various other tendencies without being aware of them, even though they will influence our behavior nonetheless). So, the human memory has been the subject of a lot of research effort on the part of science and psychology.
Since the brain and its interactions with our bodies and our lives is such a complicated subject, our species has found many ways of studying it. On one level, we address our memories from the perspective of familiar conscious impressions and experiences, along with the behaviors that result from them; this is generally the realm of the psychologist. Even before Freud, the notion that our memories are key to determining our current behaviors and our feelings of contentment or discontent with our lives has been a key principle in the practice of psychoanalysis.
Freud expanded the concept of memory with the realization that a lot of our memories lie beneath the surface of conscious awareness, and yet they play a critical role in directing our behavior. Psychology has come a long way since Freud, and today uses better, more scientific methods to record and analyze human behavior patterns relative to our current environments, along with » continue reading …
Monday, November 30, 2015
Photo ...
Here’s Mr. Steve, our building super, raking the leaves in the driveway outside my window. Another autumn is fading away, another winter approaches.
Friday, November 27, 2015
Foreign Relations/World Affairs ... Politics ...
Back in December of 2006, I posted a blog here entitled “IRAQ: WHAT TO DO“. Basically, I said that the Bush Administration should give up on the idea of a unified Iraq and split the nation into a Shia nation in the west and a Kurdish nation in the north-east, with a rump state in the west (Anbar Province) as a semi-independent Sunni nation. I say semi-independent, because I envisioned this state to be in a loose confederation with the new Kurdistan. In effect, I proposed that the Kurds would share some of their oil revenues with the Sunni state and generally “keep an eye on it” so as to prevent it from falling into terrorist hands (back then, al Qaeda . . . or more accurately, al Qaeda in Iraq . . . which was destined to later become . . . well, more on that in a moment).
But of course, a partition didn’t happen. The dream of a unified Iraq was held onto by Bush and then Obama. Iraqi President al-Maliki, under pressure from Iran, decided that US military presence was no longer needed or welcomed, and Obama was more than happy to oblige him. Starting in late 2007 and ending in 2011, the US gradually withdrew all of its previously extensive military presence in Iraq. Negotiations with Maliki on keeping a residual US force of around 10,000 troops for training and intelligence broke down when the pro-Iranian / anti-US Sadrists in Parliament blocked such an agreement. Maliki politically favored the Shia factions over the Sunnis in a variety of ways, making the central government increasingly unpopular in the western provinces.
And then, al Qadea in Iraq morphed into ISIS, the Islamic State. A dormant form of political cancer suddenly grew and metastasized, as cancers often do. Had Obama pushed back more vigorously about keeping some forces in Iraq in 2011, we probably would have seen it coming much earlier, and President Obama may have avoided » continue reading …
Sunday, November 22, 2015
Current Affairs ... Society ... Technology ...
Driverless cars are now being developed by a number of high-tech enterprises that are out to make a buck . . . eventually (this is not an easy way to get rich quick). The most famous driverless car venture is probably led by Google, which has set-up a small fleet of prototypes and has actually been trying them out in the real world. Some people think that driverless cars will start being sold and regularly used between 2020 and 2025 (5 to 10 years from now). That’s going to be interesting.
I’ve seen a number of articles (e.g., here and here and here and here and here) about the moral quandaries that the designers of driverless cars will need to face. When you make and sell a regular car controlled by a human, you don’t worry so much about the moment-to-moment decisions being made by the driver (although increasingly, automated systems in the car constantly monitor what the driver is doing, and try to warn the driver when they or someone else near them does something really bad . . . like when they are about to ram someone else’s vehicle while backing up in a parking lot, or when they start making a left while an oncoming truck is getting too close). When you design and sell a driverless car, by contrast, you have to program all of the driving decisions into the vehicle. So, in effect it’s you, the builder of the car, who makes the big decisions (through the computer program that you put into the vehicle to run it).
As such, people such as philosophy professors are pointing out that those who program these cars will need to decide what to do in morally conflicting situations. E.g., say your driverless car is cruising down the road, and it detects that a group of four people have suddenly run out into the road » continue reading …
Tuesday, November 17, 2015
Outer Space ... Science ... Technology ...
It looks like the whole “space-plane” idea is not dead, even though the US Space Shuttle program ended in late 2011. The British “Skylon” idea has been generating increased press attention lately (you can see the November bump for it on Google Trends), even though the Skylon idea has been kicked around at least since 2000.
The Skylon spaceplane would be different in many ways than the Shuttle was, although the overall goal is similar (i.e., a rocket that takes off into orbit, drops off a payload in space, and then returns to a landing field so as to be used again). In an important sense, Skylon is even more of a “space-plane” than the Shuttle was; it looks more like a regular airplane than a rocket (somewhat reminiscent of the X-15 “semi-spaceplane” experiment of the early 1960s). By comparison, the Shuttle was just the reverse — mostly a rocket with a plane on its back.
So Skylon’s differences from the Shuttle are significant; one big factor is that Skylon would be a “single-stage-to-orbit” vehicle, something that hasn’t yet been achieved. But these differences might also be seen as an evolution of the overall space-plane concept, and not as a radical shift from the Shuttle’s basic intent. Skylon would be a bit smaller than the Shuttle was, perhaps around half as large. It would be un-manned, and is designed to put a 15,000 kg payload into low earth orbit. The Shuttle, by comparison, » continue reading …
Tuesday, November 10, 2015
Food / Drink ... Health / Nutrition ... Science ...
Here’s another “interesting article” post from me. Yea, yea, I know, people usually do this sort of thing thru Twitter, and do it with a lot fewer words. Seems much more efficient, right? Well maybe, but I try to squeeze all the “juice” that I can out of an interesting article and share it with the world. And that wouldn’t go so well on Twitter. So, here’s another article post for you, this time from the October, 2015 Scientific American (gonna be about science, right?).
This one is called “The Fat Gene”. Sounds like it’s about the question of genetics and obesity — many people claim that obesity is driven largely by genetics and not all that much by eating and exercising habits. Thus, the fact that they are overweight is not their fault. There is some solid evidence for the existence of such “fat genes”, although it remains that for most people, being overweight is driven more by eating and exercise patterns — i.e., too many calories go in, and not enough go out. Although heredity may make it harder for some people than others to maintain a proper weight, in most cases, genes are not destiny with regard to weight.
But the article in question is not about that. Instead, the authors are searching for clues about how modern humans evolved from the great apes and early hominids. Many aspects of our past are written within our genes, and scientists are » continue reading …
Thursday, November 5, 2015
Brain / Mind ... Society ...
“Let me let you in on a little secret,” said [former Secretary of State Condoleeza] Rice, a Stanford Graduate School of Business professor. “There is no such thing as an international community. There are self-maximizing, self-interested states that will push their interests as far as possible.”
This quote comes from a recent article about Russian President Vladimir Putin on the Bloomberg site. The article says some interesting things about Putin, but the grander implications of Rice’s quote have attracted my attention. That is, for the human race as a whole, tribalism trumps one-world mentality.
The question of whether humans are hopelessly tribal or are moving (however slowly) towards a “one humanity / one planet” mentality is an important one; it ultimately forms the foundation on which every nation, especially the most powerful ones, build their foreign policies. It sets the tone on how we act in getting along with other peoples from other nations. Can we proceed with ultimate trust, or do we need to forever stay on the defensive? The question applies not only at the international scale, but in our own lives today, as we increasingly interact with peoples and groups who have different customs and cultures than our own (whether they currently live within or without our national boarders).
Obviously then, the tribalism question has become a political one. Liberals say that tribalism is not destiny. Here’s a good quote from Rosabeth Moss Kanter in the Huffington Post:
Some social scientists say that in-group/out-group biases are hard-wired into the human brain. Even without overt prejudice, it is cognitively convenient for people » continue reading …
Saturday, October 31, 2015
Food / Drink ... Personal Reflections ... Photo ...
For the past few years I’ve been trying to grow flowers on a little plot next to the parking lot in my landlord’s back yard. The soil is pretty bad back there, full of red clay and rocks. Morning glories and moonflowers have taken pretty well to it, but most other plants (other than weeds) don’t do well, or never get going in the first place.
This past spring I tried to start a number of different flower seeds back there, but only the nasturtiums took to it (I also had some sunflowers come up, but they hardly reached 3 feet and then keeled over after pushing out a few small flowers). During July and August, a handful of petite yellow and orange nasturtium blooms would sometimes greet me on my return home from work. But this summer was quite dry, and by early September only the green leaves and stems remained. And as it started to get colder over the past few weeks, even they made their resolution with the coming of winter. But a few plants decided to play die-hard, and yesterday one managed to rage against the dying of the warmth by popping out one last bloom.
So, enjoy this last little act of defiance against the inevitable from my backyard plot. If all goes well and I’m still here in the spring, I definitely plan to buy a variety of nasturtium seeds in different colors and shapes (and maybe I’ll give them a boost by laying down a bag of manure). For now, one last look, and then on with another winter. Oh, PS — I see that nasturtiums are actually edible, all but the seeds. They are related to watercress, and the flavor is supposed to be a cross between mustard and slight sweetness for the flower, and the leaves are peppery. Perhaps I’ll give that a try — next year.
