LifeItself

Scientifically speaking,  stupid  people harm themselves while also harming others. In addition, stupid people are irrational and erratic, and are very dangerous to others. After discussing the destructive role of the stupid in any society whatsoever, I will focus on the delicate interplay of actions of intelligent and helpless people, who in balance make or break a functioning democracy.  Unless things change fast in the US, we can kiss our democracy goodbye for decades. If you want to see how a virulent ascent of the stupid looks up close, and what implications it has for our fight against social injustice and climate change, please watch the brilliant " Don't Look Up " movie. Unvaccinated people demonstrating in Los Angeles. There are tens of millions of the raving mad and/or angry, stupid people in the US and other developed countries. Source: New York Times , 12/25/2021. I overlapped at UC Berkeley with Professor Carlo M. Cipolla for a decade, until his death in t...

 Five years ago, I described this very famous 1980 wager  here . Wikipedia has a good, understated description  of the wager.   Ehrlich-Simon wager according to the Wall Street Journal, Jonathan V. Last , August 30, 2013, more less when I started analyzing this wager. The fact that Ehrlich "lost" according to the omnipotent neoliberal economists was used broadly as a vindication of the power of economics in predicting what would happen in the physical world.  But were the economists mostly spouting nonsense, as is their long-standing tradition? Natural copper.  Copper is one of the most important metals in the global economy that gravitates towards the "low carbon solutions" (whatever this term may mean to you). Source: Wikipedia. In short, Simon challenged Ehrlich to choose any raw material he wanted and a date more than a year away, and he would wager on the inflation-adjusted prices decreasing as opposed to increasing. Ehrlich chose copper (Cu), ch...

 Dear Friend, I do not mention your name, for you can be anyone on the whole Earth. You could have any color of skin, and belong to any tribe and clan. You could give offerings to any Gods and believe in any myths. In modern impersonal terms, you could be of any race, nationality, religion and political creed, and be of any sex whatsoever.  It took us a million years to develop that big, complex brain of ours. Some 100,000 years ago, in the harsh, frigid climate of Europe and Asia, there were perhaps a few hundred of us left on the brink of extinction.  But we did not go extinct then and here we are, my friend and brother, all 7.8 billion of us. Gregory, John Walter 1896 - 1968, The Great Rift Valley. London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd. This Sketch by Gregory from his expedition to East Africa in 1892-3. shows "Mount Kenya from the Kapte Plains west of Machakos". Learned people say that we must have come from Africa, mostly from the Great Rift Valley : "Our species, Hom...

In the first week of August 2020, I was back home from the famous cancer hospital in Houston, MD Anderson, in which I received a brutal chemotherapy to control my lymphoma.  How the lymphoma ran away is a separate story of poor decision making by a junior doctor at MD Anderson, and me not dumping him two months earlier and starting on Acalabrutinib that has kept me alive until today.  Because of the rather sloppy administration of the support IVs, over four days they pumped into me a net 10 kilograms of liquids, and I was swollen like an elephant. How do I know this?  Because I weighed myself each day and at the peak I gained 10 kilograms. The doctor who burst in for a 5 minute visit, disputed my finding, arguing that it did not agree with the nurse's notes about my urine production. More about notes soon. I asked him quietly if mass conservation did not hold in medicine?  He was somewhat embarrassed, but then again, he was busy running from one patient to another, a...

Here is the welcome visited upon us by one of our neighbors.  After arrival at our home in Austin, TX, on July 10, 2021, we found three adult foxes, one male and two females, and a young fox poisoned with a rodent poison, possibly laced with arsenic. Later we found two tiny newborn fox babies lying by their dead mother. Through tears, I posted to the neighborhood group bulletin this gentle reminder:  "No matter how you feel about wild animals, please note that putting out rat poison is very dangerous to your pets, dogs and cats. If they eat it or bite on a poisoned mouse, they can die too. Poisoned mice and rats, when eaten by other wildlife - foxes, racoons, coyotes and birds of prey – will kill them too, and so a cascade of deaths will continue. These foxes have lived happily on our property for at least two years."  This male fox had been our companion during the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020, and brightened our days. He was smart and funny, and approached us with certain...