Tag Archives: zenmischief

quotes

October’s Monthly Quotes

What? We’re into the last quarter of the year! How? Anyway here’s this month’s collection of quotes amusing and thoughtful – with quite a few slightly longer offerings this time around …

The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.
[Tony Puryear, https://www.facebook.com/tony.puryear]

This neatly leads us to the Minkowski view of space and time: we live in a four-dimensional space-time, where three of the dimensions are the space we are familiar with, each of which can be measured in metres. The fourth dimension can also be measured in metres, but we are travelling along it at the velocity c, the speed of light, and we interpret that as the world changing, and that gives us the concept of time. Time doesn’t “flow”; it is just us shooting along that fourth-dimensional axis. The section we have just traversed is the past and is fixed, immutable; while the section ahead is the future and is uncertain, described only by a series of probabilities or possibilities, over which we have limited control.
[John Elliott, quoted in https://www.newscientist.com/lastword/mg26335081-200-what-would-happen-if-time-stopped/]

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
[Voltaire]

When you recognise that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking. When you notice that voice, you realise that who you are is not the voice … the thinker … but the one who is aware of it.
[Eckhart Tolle]

Sometimes those who don’t socialize much aren’t antisocial they just have no tolerance for drama, stupidity, and fake people.
[unknown]

“Why do you need a label?” Because there is comfort in knowing that you are a normal zebra, not a strange horse … It is near impossible to be happy and mentally healthy if you’re spending all your life thinking you’re a failed horse, having others tell you you are a failed horse, when all along you could be thriving and understood if everyone, including you, just knew you were a zebra.
[Quoted in https://katywheatley.substack.com/p/this-is-bleak-you-have-been-warned]

If something won’t matter in 5 years, don’t waste more than 5 minutes worrying about it now.
[unknown]

Brains get good at what they do. Negative thoughts create ‘channels’ in your brain. This way of thinking can become your default. If you do a lot of negative thinking, you wire your brain to be good at producing negative thoughts. Your brain also gets good at seeing things to think negatively about. One of the many byproducts of negative thinking is stress, which then leads to more negative thinking.
[unknown]

Royals have always been terrible people who are mostly just good at stealing money.
[Eleanor Janega, https://going-medieval.com/2024/09/27/on-side-hustles/]

Love of liberty means the guarding of every resource that makes freedom possible – from the sanctity of our families and the wealth of our soil to the genius of our scientists.
[Dwight D Eisenhower]

If you are a weatherperson, you’re a target. The same goes for journalists, election workers, scientists, doctors, and first responders. These jobs are different, but the thing they share is that they all must attend to and describe the world as it is. This makes them dangerous to people who cannot abide by the agonizing constraints of reality
[Charlie Warzel at https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/10/hurricane-milton-conspiracies-misinformation/680221/]

When stripped of local symbolism and terminology, all systems [of belief] show a remarkable uniformity of method. This is because all systems ultimately derive from the tradition of Shamanism.
[Peter Carroll, quoted in Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_magic]

Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
[George Carlin]

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
[JRR Tolkien]

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries – the realists of a larger reality.
[Ursula K Le Guin]

A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone’s lives.
[Atul Gawande; Being Mortal]

Empathy requires being attuned to the patient’s perspective and understanding how the illness is woven into this particular persons’ life. Last – and this is where doctors often stumble – empathy requires being able to communicate all of this to the patient.
[Danielle Ofri; What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine]

Patients were real, often passionate individuals with real problems – and sometimes choices – of an often agonizing sort. It was not just a question of diagnosis and treatment; much graver questions could present themselves – questions about the quality of life and whether life was even worth living in some circumstances.
[Oliver Sacks; On the Move]

Be kind to yourself in the year ahead … Try to make your time matter: minutes and hours and days and weeks can blow away like dead leaves, with nothing to show but time you spent not quite ever doing things, or time you spent waiting to begin.
[Neil Gaiman; Neil Gaiman’s Journal]

personal, science

Worming into Fame?

Well now here’s a turn up for the books. I’m in this week’s New Scientist. Each week in the Back Pages, they print a couple of questions sent in by (named) readers, and answers (or at least ideas of answers) from other readers to earlier questions. And this week they’ve printed a question I sent in a while ago.

The question is printed as:

Some worms regenerate when cut in half laterally, but what would happen if they were cut in half longitudinally?
Keith Marshall, London, UK

Hmmm … I’m not sure this is quite what I meant because “worms” is going to get interpreted as “earthworms” by too many people, especially as the online version has an image of earthworms. Maybe the question is appropriate for “earthworms” and not just the “flatworms” I had intended – I don’t know.

…

But space is limited, so the question as printed is a cut down version of the question I submitted:

There’s a recent report in Scientific American, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/regenerating-deep-sea-worms-harness-live-in-algae-as-they-split-into-three/, of acoel flatworms regenerating when cut in half laterally. The head grows a new tail, but the tail grows two heads and then divides. But what would happen if the worm was cut longitudinally, with each half containing some head and some tail? Would this be viable, or is the presence of (say) a brain a binary requirement?

Nonetheless I shall be very interested to see what the readers come up with over the next few weeks. I’ll try to remember to report back.

food+drink

Culinary Adventure #114: Black Pepper

This episode of Culinary Adventures isn’t so much an adventure as an observation and question to which I cannot find an easy answer.

I’ve been using freshly ground black pepper since I was a student – so some 50 years or more. And until a year or so ago, had you asked me, I would have said that I hardly noticed it imparting a great deal of flavour.

black peppercorns

But this last year or two I’ve noticed that freshly ground black pepper is much stronger, really peppery, and really fragrant. It’s a different hotness to chilli, which I like. And it doesn’t seem to matter how finely or coarsely it is ground.

So why am I suddenly noticing the change?

Sure, we could have unwittingly recently brought a different, better, brand – but it must have happened several times over the last couple of years. Or are the peppercorns we’re getting now from a new/different cultivar? Or from a totally different growing region? Does the terroir affect the potency, in the way it affects wine? Are the peppercorns being processed differently?

Or is it that my ageing taste buds and olfactory sensors have suddenly changed? (And no, it isn’t down to Covid affecting smell & taste.)

I don’t know the answer. Has anyone else noticed this? Or does anyone have good knowledge of peppercorn production?

amusements, history, memes

October Quiz Answers

Here are the answers to this month’s five quiz questions. If in doubt, all should be able to be easily verified online.

Classical & Ancient World

  1. What is the 4th letter of the Greek alphabet?  Delta
  2. Which English city was once known as Duroliponte?  Cambridge
  3. What prized object comprises the coat of the winged ram that flew Phrixus to safety?  Golden Fleece
  4. Name the Sun-god of Ancient Egypt?  Ra
  5. In Greek mythology the Little Owl traditionally represents which goddess?  Athena

Answers were correct when questions were compiled in late 2023.

amusements, history, memes

October Quiz Questions

2 Comments

Each month we’re posing five pub quiz style questions, with a different subject each month. As before, they’re not difficult, but it is unlikely everyone will know all the answers – so hopefully you’ll learn something new, as well as having a bit of fun.

Classical & Ancient World

  1. What is the 4th letter of the Greek alphabet?
  2. Which English city was once known as Duroliponte?
  3. What prized object comprises the coat of the winged ram that flew Phrixus to safety?
  4. Name the Sun-god of Ancient Egypt?
  5. In Greek mythology the Little Owl traditionally represents which goddess?

Answers will be posted in 2 weeks time.

history, memes

October 1924

Our look at some of the significant happenings 100 years ago this month.

1. Born. Jimmy Carter, 39th President of the United States, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Yes, he’s 100 today!

12-15. Zeppelin LZ-126 makes a transatlantic delivery flight from Friedrichshafen, Germany, to Lakehurst, New Jersey

29. Died. Frances Hodgson Burnett, Anglo-American writer (b. 1849)

amusements, memes, personal

Unblogged September

Things I didn’t write abut in the last month …

Sunday 1
Well that got the second half of the houseplants re-potted – apart from two large (tall) cacti which are probably best left alone. This was mostly the larger plants: aloe vera and sansevieria, all of which needed dividing so lots of bits discarded including an enormous jade plant which was harvested for cuttings. But who knows how much of the offshoots etc. will take, and heaven knows where we’re going to find space for them all.

Monday 2
After a lovely warm, even hot, sunny day yesterday, today was dull, dismal and not very warm. Autumn is definitely on the way; the silver birch has started to change colour. It all left one thoroughly demoralised.

Tuesday 3
Today my 200th Postcrossing card arrived here. As usual I’ve just managed to get the last 50 on the corkboard, although it’s always a bit of a challenge to fit in the last 2 or 3. Anyway here are numbers 151 through 200.noticeboard covered with postcardsI wonder how soon my 200th card sent will arrive at its destination? [Actually just 2 days later on 5 September.] I have a full complement in the mail (and a few which have expired) but outgoing post seems to be generally much slower than incoming. (Although today’s 200th card has taken 2 months from Canada!)

Wednesday 4
A fun afternoon, which N and I spent at the doctors, supposedly meeting the patients as part of our patient group activity. We didn’t do a lot of that! But we did reorganise the noticeboards (which we supposedly manage) and then discovered that the contents of “our cupboard” hadn’t been touched since Covid closed everything down – despite that we had been told the Practice had cleared it out. It was crammed with books (the spares from the defunct book exchange) and 3 boxes of out of date leaflets. We brought about half the non-book material away (basically as much as we could carry); it all has to be sorted through but most of it is destined for recycling. Such unexpected fun.

Thursday 5
It’s been so dark today, I had to have the lights on all day – which I don’t expect in September. Moreover it absolutely threw it down with rain for about 15 minutes this afternoon. Real white water. It was so heavy I couldn’t see the hill a mile away.

Friday 6
Why is it that some weeks, like this week, the grocery order is so much more than usual? It’s not as if there was any more meat on it and no alcohol, which are the two things which bump up the price, although fruit and veg isn’t cheap these days.
And talking of prices, how can Royal Mail get away with yet another hike in the cost of postage. From early October first class postage goes up 30p to £1.65 (although second remains the same at 85p) and the cost of a postcard or minimal letter abroad goes from £2.50 to £2.80 – it was £2.20 in the first months of the year.

Saturday 7
It’s a bit early really, but somehow I’m already working on all my regular blog posts for next year – well the ones I can do in advance, like quiz questions and historical events; whereas posts like monthly links, monthly collected quotes etc. have to be one at the time. So the afternoon was spent finding information – in between falling asleep!

Sunday 8
As mentioned elsewhere today was our 45th wedding anniversary, and we still don’t know how we’ve managed it! Anyway we celebrated quietly this evening with a very nice piece of flatiron steak, garlic roast potatoes & mangetout (cooked by me), followed by peaches in brandy with cream, and washed down with a very nice bottle of Champagne and a liqueur. It was, as N said, restaurant quality. My cooking was always pretty good, but is getting better over the last year or so – well one of the things we said when Covid struck was that, whatever else happens, we’re determined to continue to eat as well as we possibly can; and we do, but without spending ridiculous money; we still always look for the bargains.

Monday 9
Well the week’s hardly started and it’s already gone to the dogs in a handcart. I woke up even more depressed than usual. I wish I understood it! Comes the gardener? No, comes not the gardener as he’s unwell. And I needed to move my diabetes check-up from Wednesday to the first full week of October; at least I can probably get my flu jab at the same time, though I just hope it doesn’t knock me out for days as we’re due to meet up with friends from Japan two days later (bad planning on my part; I really wasn’t awake!). As a result, nothing got done apart from a few odds & sods admin jobs.

Tuesday 10
I caught the beginning of Escape to the Country this afternoon. Parents, 2 daughters & a boy wanting to move to North Norfolk. Never have I seen such a set of gawd-blimey Essex (I assumed) chavs in my life. They all looked alike: pale podgy puddings, who survive on a mix of Big Macs, KFC, chips, milkshakes and pop; and giving the appearance of wood between the ears. But of course, everyone’s greatest desire is to be on the TV; it was probably the highlight of their lives.

Wednesday 11
At last! Cometh the man to service the boiler. We finally managed to get our diaries together a couple of weeks back, and today was the day. An excellent job as always, which took about an hour, including standing and chatting! Good job done for another year. We now just have to put the contents of the airing cupboard back.

Thursday 12
As usual I’m trying to buy something sensible, but which doesn’t exist. It seems that whatever you try buying and want options A, B, C, D, but don’t want E and F, either you have to have E but not C, or F and not B & D, or all 6 options at double the price. And every manufacturer makes essentially exactly the same two products, in the same format, but with a subtly different shape and/or colour casing. You’d think there was only one supply of the innards – there probably is, in China. It does my head in. As my father was once told “There’s no demand, Sir, you’re the fourth person who’s asked for that this morning”.

Friday 13
So what have we got available to concoct dinner from? We need to clear some space in the freezer. Ah … noodles, frozen turkey strips, a few runner beans, yellow pepper … OK so I did a stir-fry with a slightly sweet and sour sauce (brandy, lemon, light soy, HP sauce, ketchup, tomato paste, ginger, chilli …). Not my finest achievement, but it worked OK. Especially when followed by summer fruit salad (dressed with a little cherry brandy) and cream.

Saturday 14
It’s Saturday, just like it was yesterday! So of course I spent the day working; I’m inundated at the moment, having just had three extra pieces of literary society work dumped on me at no notice and without a by your leave. Some people never seem to learn that a lack of planning on your part does not constitute a crisis on mine. But then N was at the hospital, so I needed something to keep me occupied.

Sunday 15
Here beginneth a new regime. Our house is something approaching a tip; after 40+ years it’s silted up to the point of there being no navigable water. So I’ve instituted a rule: we do some clearing up every day. 15 minutes on days when N is at the hospital; 1 hour on days she isn’t. We started with an hour this morning, and it’s surprising how much you can get done, together, in that time. But you have to be a bit ruthless, although not necessarily Marie Kendo ruthless – if only because I wouldn’t get away with it! Let’s see how long it lasts.

Monday 16
I quite accidentally ended up going down a curious rabbit hole in my family history. My 2x great-grandparents (Henry Williams & Catherine Nowers) had 7 children; my great-grandmother was the youngest. I came upon my 2x great-grandparents (both dead before 1900) on the 1915 naturalisation papers as the parents of a Susannah Margaret Mann, born 1848 in Dover, but given as German and living in Eastbourne. What?! This doesn’t make sense. I go looking. There is no such Susannah Margaret Mann. And Henry & Catherine don’t have a child Susannah Margaret. Ah, but they do have Margaret Susannah, born 1847 (their second child). Right. And yes, when you follow through Margaret Susannah Williams marries a guy called Jacob Ferdinand Mann, in Dover in 1871. He’s obviously a German, and a bootmaker, as later censuses confirm. Jacob Mann dies in 1893 having fathered five children (all born in Eastbourne). So despite having been born in Dover, of parents also born in Dover, and never obviously lived anywhere other than Dover, Hastings and Eastbourne, Susannah Margaret is legally a German because she married an ex-pat German, now deceased. And thus in 1915 she needs naturalisation papers to make her British again. I shouldn’t have been surprised; this whole family is full of oddities.

Tuesday 17
A quiet morning talking to patients at the doctors – something we’ve started doing again a couple of times a month. It was so quiet that once I got home and had lunch I fell asleep for a large chunk of the afternoon – quite without wanting to. Why does this always seem to happen as we get older?

Wednesday 18
A happy half-hour this afternoon getting dust everywhere going through our 5 solander boxes of maps. As trips around are now getting difficult, we’ve kept only about 25% of what we have; the rest will go to our nearest Oxfam bookshop along with at least a couple of boxes of books.

Thursday 19
Another day. The same coalface.

Friday 20
This afternoon, as another part of our grand sort out & tidy up we went through several solander boxes of guide books. Only about 70% were kept, re-boxed and rehomed in a different shelf. End result we have the unprecedented luxury of 2 feet of empty bookshelf space!

Saturday 21
A good social call for the literary society at lunchtime. As usual only about 8 of us, but some good discussion and good to see a couple of our American friends. It always surprises me that, when you scratch the surface, how many disparate things people know, and the connections they can make.

Sunday 22
One of our neighbours hates trees; the leaves make a mess and they’re untidy. He’s probably had apoplexy as the Gleditsia in the pavement outside is shedding it’s thousands of tiny golden yellow leaves everywhere, including on his hard-standing. And because it’s wet, they’re sticking and resistant to being cleared up. In Buddhist terms “Your fate is the sum total of your stupidity”; to reduce that sum, stop doing stupid.

Monday 23
Blimey did it rain last night; I looked out of the bedroom window at one point and the gutter on our side of the road was an absolute torrent, like a mountain stream in spate, about 3 feet wide and 3 inches deep flowing down the hill at some speed. Then today, at last, we see the gardener again, and he started the autumn tidy up in the garden (despite the wet) and did a couple of odd maintenance jobs.

Tuesday 24
Yet another day at the same old coalface.

Wednesday 25
This evening I hosted a literary society trustees/executive meeting over Zoom – because the Secretary who normally hosts it is away on holiday in the Far East. But I’m not a trustee, nor an executive officer, so I opened the call and once there was a quorum handed over to the Chairman and turned off all my sound so I wasn’t privy to the business – I left video on so if needed I could be visually hailed. I busied myself with various small tasks and when they all wandered off I closed the call. Crazy, but it seemed to work OK.

Thursday 26
Once more I spent most of the morning on literary society work. This time getting all the papers for next month’s AGM online. It took forever, mainly as I’m still working out how to do things in the new system. Despite losing some more hair I eventually got there without having to ask for help from the website provider. Like every system, things work differently so you’re always having to work out how to achieve what you know you can do. I then consoled myself by ordering a couple of cases of wine.

Friday 27
Big cook-a-thon this afternoon. Apple crumble, enough for several days breakfast. Two small chicken pies for cold tomorrow evening. Small cheese roll to use the pastry remains. Tray of roast veg, and some garlic roast potatoes, to go with this evening’s steak which I pan-fried. So tomorrow’s lunch and evening meal sorted, apart from the wine, as well as this evening and several days breakfasts. Result!

Saturday 28
Much to my surprise I ended up with nothing pressing to b done today, apart from a bit of household admin. So did I have a day off? Of course not! I spent most of the afternoon thinking about a household emergency plan and getting all our important information reorganised and gathered together. So at least now I have the concepts of a plan.

Sunday 29
It’s cold, grey and miserable. And not just the weather, ‘cos that’s very much how I feel too. I’m totally out of elastic or any other form of energy supply, today.

Monday 30
Spent a surprisingly tiring 90 minutes sorting out the household filing drawer, weeding aged paperwork out for archiving (or the bin), creating some new files and discarding a couple of others. It badly needed doing as it probably hasn’t been done for several years. It’s a good job done; just don’t leave it so long next time. Now I just have to sort the pile of papers etc. for the archive.

I’ll leave you this month with a photo I took a few years back of the Gleditsia outside our house. It’s not been quite so magnificent this year as the wind has removed all the leaves much quicker than normal.Gleditsia

arts, environment, history, links, medical, science, sexuality

Monthly Links

Our packed monthly round-up of links to items you may have missed …

Science, Technology, Natural World

First up we have to highlight this years Ig Nobel prizes.

Palaeontologists have discovered several new species of extinct bone-crushing Tasmanian Tigers.

At the other end of the size scale, researchers looking in a Tibetan glacier have found over 1700 different frozen viruses.

Still with research reported in Popular Science magazine, the social white-browed sparrow weavers varying nest shapes demonstrate that birds have “culture”. Mind I thought we already knew that from the dialects of Meso-American parrots.

And while with “culture” apparently marmosets have individual “names” for each other.

Grief is well documented emotion in humans, and it seems some other species, but do cats grieve?

Scientists continue to unravel the meaning of our dreams.

So how do you know what that smell is? How does our sense of smell work? [LONG READ]

Leaving the animal world for the geological, in September 2023 something made Earth ring like a bell for nine days. [LONG READ]

Back in the early life of the solar system, it seems that Jupiter’s moon Ganymede was struck by an asteroid bigger than the one which wiped out the dinosaurs.

The asteroid Apophis is due to fly by very close to Earth in 2029, and now an astrophysicist is predicting a very slightly higher chance it may hit us.

Meanwhile, way out in the universe, researchers have discovered the largest jets ever from a black hole – and they make our galaxy look miniscule.

Health, Medicine

So how much proper risk assessment was done around Covid? And by whom? [LOMG READ]

OB/GYN Dr Jen Gunter shares some takeaways from the recent (American) Menopause Society Meeting.

Our bodies are full of nerves, but the longest one orchestrates the connection between brain and body.

While on brains, within the billions of neurons they contain there are trillions of typos – some good, some bad. [LONG READ]

And still on brains, it’s being suggested that many older people don’t just maintain, but actually increase, their cognitive skills. [££££]

And finally with things mental, a Stanford-led research group has identified six different types of depression each of which is likely to respond differently to various treatments. [LONG READ]

Sexuality

Sex historian Dr Kate Lister tries to explain exactly why women masturbate. [££££]

Environment

Nature is like art in many ways as for many humans both are subjective.

Art, Literature, Language, Music

Loughborough has installed a new memorial bell as a tribute to those who died from Covid, and a thank you to NHS and other key workers. And unusually for the UK, it’s a campanile. We need more campaniles.

In which David Hockney stimulates an academic epidemiologist and mathematician to think about four dimensional chairs.

Philip Curtis, the director of The Map House in London, talks about mapping Antarctica.

History, Archaeology, Anthropology

We reported previously that Stonehenge’s altar stone had been identified as originating in NE Scotland. Now it seems that the front runner locations, Orkney, has been ruled out.

Further up into the cold lands, archaeologists are shedding light on a little known ancient culture in northern Greenland. [££££]

In Britain we are generally pretty ignorant about the way in which ancient India shaped science and mathematics.

Archaeologists in Spain have used DNA to uncover some of the secrets of a Christian cave-dwelling medieval community.

Meanwhile in Poland archaeologists have found the burial of two children suspected of being vampires.

Henry VIII did many notable things including accidentally changing the way we write history.

London

Our favourite London blogger, Diamond Geezer, visits Theobalds Grove (one stop outside Greater London). This is my home town; I was brought up just three minutes walk from this station! Needless to say it’s changed quite a bit since I last lived there in late 1970s.

I lived a couple of hundred yards down the road to the right of the church

Lifestyle, Personal Development, Beliefs

So just why do men bother with depilation?

Emma Beddington set out to see what it’s like to spend a day as a dog, and finds it impossible.

People

A German mathematician who lived in France as a hermit, left thousands of pages of work. Now there’s a debate over whether he was a mathematical genius or just a lonely madman. [LONG READ]

Shock, Horror, Humour, Wow!

And finally some pictures of the first UK Hobby Horse Championships.