gardening, editing and writing. That’s about all we’re doing.
Editing and writing, editing and writing…
by CJ | Jun 4, 2016 | Journal | 27 comments
27 Comments
Submit a Comment Cancel reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
It’s summer. That’s what you are supposed to be doing. Howsomever; do remember to go have some totally unrelated fun at least once a week!
I trust not much gardening this weekend! We were busting records all over Saturday, 101.5° F here. I had the windows all open all night, but when I got up the thermostat said it was still 74°! The air’s not moving. 🙁
104F yesterday in my neighborhood, and I have a stand fan running to move air.
Oh, go soak your head! No, seriously! I’m not joking.
When the weather gets hot and you’re home without air-conditioning, go take a shower and shampoo! Cool, not cold, water. If it doesn’t feel really good, you have to “get used to it”, you’ve got it too cold. Don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be cold. Water is a really good heat conductor, way better than air–even cool water will pull the excess heat out of your body.
Shampoo too! Your brain takes a prodigious amount of your blood supply. Running the cool water over your head turns it into, well, a “radiator”? That dumps even more heat, faster. This is one time when you can let that clean hair “air dry”, getting extended evaporative cooling.
This is when you don’t need to take a “military” shower! Stay in there twice as long as you normally would. Just before you step out, turn the water up to “tepid” for a moment to open your pores.
Ain’t Science grand?
On hot summer nights, I take just such a shower before bed and, since I have very long, thick hair, simply wring it out so it isn’t dripping and go to sleep with still wet hair. It slowly drys as the night progresses and I have free, evaporative cooling all night long!
I’m in California, so water isn’t that abundant.
Fortunately, the fog came in and cooled everything down. We’ll be cycling for a while, cooler days and warmer days.
You heard about the Bakken oil train fire out in the Columbia Gorge at Moser? It was next to and damaged their waste water treatment plant, so for a couple days nobody could run any water of any sort down the drains. So you’ve got water, you can’t use it unless it goes out on the lawn! Is that better or worse?
Their current workaround is intercepting the pipes at the plant, pumping it into tankers and hauling it off elsewhere.
It’s going to take a couple months before the plant can be repaired and rebuilt!
Sounds like a great way to spend your time!
Although the heat is excruciating in some parts of AZ, we are not quite at 100 in the mountains here. On the other hand it is exceedingly dry, so the temperature doesn’t feel that bad even when it is in the 100s. ReadyGuy and I are helping ReadyDaughter get packed for a big move to Virginia. We may or may not drive with her and her U-Haul truck, depending on how much “stuff” she sheds before the trip. Still left to do: vet visit for Miss Halloween kitteh; outprocessing her old job; pack the truck from apartment, storage unit, and leftovers at our house; and final clean of her apartment. I love these moves where you have six weeks from the time you get told “the job is yours” until first day at your new job. Gotta love the government, at least they will help her break her lease.
There’s a reason moving can be as stressful as a death in the family! Best fishes to ReadyDaughter on her new job and digs. Six weeks isn’t too horrible as far as notice goes; once I got 2 weeks notice that I would be moving to another island, and you can’t exactly rent a U-Haul boat or plane!
There are a few stressors coming up in my life. I am applying once again for the head librarian position I was beaten out of six years ago; the person who took that job is moving on, partly because of wanting to have a schedule that would let her spend more time with her 3 year old twins. I have no idea who I will be competing with, but I do have eight years more experience under my belt, so we’ll see. Next weekend, I’m going to do Round 1 of replacing the supports on our back lanai roof. The part I’m most concerned about is making sure I have it well braced while I pull out the old columns and set in the new ones. It has to be done, though; the termites have found the current posts, so out they go, and in go the concrete ones.
We just escaped the rain in VA. Sunny, humid, mid 80F.
My first move was one of those government-paid moves. Don’t forget to weigh the truck empty and full on the certified scales (unless they’ve changed the process).
Unfortunately, the move isn’t paid for by the government because she isn’t getting a promotion or in the military… The only benefit is tax deductible expenses that anyone can claim. It’s really just a matter of pre-positioning herself for a better job in a year or so.
is she going to the DC area or around the Hampton Roads area? Just curious……
Metro DC-Crystal City on the line between Alexandria and Arlington right next to Reagan Airport.
A.D. Skinner from the X-files lived in Crystal City 🙂
That’s very convenient to plenty of things to do.
Just sayin’, we have not yet received a report on how the denizens of the pond have made it through the winter, and its practically summer.
They are all doing well. During the blackout I was firing up a Weber charcoal starter (with charcoal) and setting it on the ice to burn a gas-exchange hole to keep releasing the co2 buildup, but they emerged unscathed and hungry, and are all doing fine. Ari’s head wound is almost undetectable now—if you didn’t know there’d been a quarter sized hole there several years ago you’d not spot it.
We appreciate the writing and editing and look forward to reading it when it is done
All four volumes of BBC – Mary Beard’s Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit are now on YouTube. If you don’t see an URL in the reply below, it’s in the spam filter. Just search YouTube for the title.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYjnRAFFy4g&list=PL2nHaF_3Q37V9yXjiQIdh0K5H22eXIXwa
http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/07/health/fish-human-face-recognition-study-trnd/index.html
Archerfish, at least, can distinguish between human faces. They really are archers: they squirt water to knock down insects for food. They also school only as young, apparently to learn from their peers how to shoot better.
So, we’ve seen some level of intelligence in monkeys, porpoises, parrots, crows, octopi, and now fish. Oh, and a bunch of organized sand from Google. Maybe human intelligence isn’t as unique as we think. After all, it took us 60 years to figure out this AI stuff: we don’t even seem to know how to think.
I just finished reading the cognitive ethologist Franz de Waal’s new book, “Are We Smart enough to Know how Smart Animals are” on animal cognition. I’ve heard him talk before at an American Anthropological Association meeting and he came to Harvard last month to speak on the book, where I bought it. While fairly loosely/chattily written (rather than in a scientific/research paper format), it is fascinating and stimulating. I am contemplating using sections of it for a Primate Ethology course I have been trying to get off the ground (not enough enrollment for this summer semester but I will try again in the Fall).
I wonder if Animal Ethology might do better? We have found parallel teaching of stick usage to get ants in primates and birds. Now, we might call it Imitative Methodology or some such, to preserve our human uniqueness, yet every time we try to nail down human uniqueness rigorously, we find some species that can meet our rigorous test. “Survey of Animal Cognition”? Seems to me I had some grad courses with titles like that….
Animal Cognition — A few points:
At a guess, we probably have to admit a sliding scale, not an absolute borderline, to intelligence (sapience or sentience), and it’s a complex of many factors. A growing list of animals fit somewhere along semi-sapient to sapient.
There’s aslo thinking style, communications and language abilities, teaching styles, memory retention, things like empathy and imagination, the ability to predict or plan for the future, abstract or symbolic thought, and the ability to manipulate the environment through the body or through found or created tools.
I am convinced that cats and dogs have some sort of intelligence. They are sometimes very smart and other times pretty not-smart. But then, that’s true of the humans I know too. But cat and dog thinking are essentially different from human-style thinking. In what ways are they better at it than we are? In what ways orse or roughly equal? For that matter, my cats’ emotions are similar yet not the same as humans. There is a distinct cat-like quality to them, a dog-like quality to dogs, a human-like quality to humans. Even if it is difficult for us to pin down scientifically what we mean by that, I think even those who’d disagree on “intelligence” would recognize there’s a truth to that cat-like, dog-like, human-like thinking and emotional life, that we humans recognize from experience as true. So it should be classifiable, if not quantifiable or easy to agree on.
From a standpoint of a threshold for legal or scientific definitions, personhood or intelligence may be difficult to define past being human. Semi-sentience? Yet other apes (besides humans) show some level of intelligence, as do dolphins and some other creatures, even octopi and cuttlefish. So possibly a range needs to be there for protection of semi-sentient or developing species.
I’ve been rewatching a few documentaries on early hominids lately, older and recent findings. These also help call that question of intelligence and semi-sentience into play. At what point were our ape-like ancestor species “human” enough to be considered intelligent, as persons? Two fairly recent NOVA specials, “Birth of Humanity” and “Dawn of Humanity,” both call that into focus.
At some point, we still might find some isolated species, either something new or one we’d thought was extinct, which blows our current theories out of the water, or challenges them so much we have to come up with new theories and definitions.
There’s also the big question of, if we ever do discover alien life, however primitive or advanced, being able to communicate with any intelligent life, being able to understand any life at all as life but alien, are real challenges. — Cetaceans use “song” (audible sound or biosonar or both) to see/hear the world around them, but possibly (probably?) to communicate. They’re mammals from right here on Earth, yet we don’t know what they’re saying, and we’re not entirely sure if they are *saying* something, though that seems likely. So if we ever hope to communicate with alien intelligent life, then it seems like understanding cetaceans, and understanding animal intelligence and behavior and communication, ought to be priorities to solve.
Maybe also we have to admit that many mammals and some higher vertebrates (and invertebrates) have some innate level of semi-intelligence, but defining that, though hard, seems like a good idea.
It might not make us comfortable from a scientific, legal, or religious viewpoint, yet other creatures do have something to them. They’re not just wind-up toys that perform only pre-programmed functions. Uncomfortable though it might be, philosophically difficult though it might be, still, we might as well admit it and work to understand it.
Monkeys in the stone age. Macaques, actually. A population of macaques got isolated on a Thai island where food is very much harder to get to than on the mainland. So, they developed stone tools at least 50 years ago to open nuts and shellfish, possibly thousands of years ago.
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160607-monkey-stone-age-secrets-unveiled
And, since posting links seems to be working well just now, Homo floresiensis (Hobbit) and Homo erectus artifacts dated to c. 1 million years ago have been found in Java, so the whole human diaspora from Africa needs some serious re-dating.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/the-hobbit-was-tiny-already-by-700000-years-ago/
I dunno ’bout that. I submitted a reply a few days ago that had two links to the online Asperger’s Quotient test that got ate and disappeared.