I Had No Idea
One can say that I was peppering you with a variety of miscellaneous information, and for the most part that would be correct. To the biologist, the linguist, the sports fan, the general go-fer, such info might be old news, or appear to be reports that are teasers or trivial enough to make you want to toss it aside...or probe deeper. It's for me a slurry on my desk, a chance once again to clear off those old papers and notes that can't quite find a home but which I nonetheless found interesting; so right off the bat, apologies to you experts-in-your-field out there for these are admittedly just summarized quips. But let's begin with that sleeping giant, China. They've made good on their promise and shut down the last of their ivory carving/retail markets, thus driving any further dealings in elephant tusks into the underground (if caught the penalties are severe); in the conservation world this two year-long effort has alone resulted in the collapse of the demand for ivory and one hopes, the reduced poaching of elephants (their numbers remain at a startling 90% reduction in their population). And jumping to another front, China has basically ignored the U.S. tariffs (30%) and continued its rise in solar panel production thus driving down the costs of renewable fuel for other countries. Tesla is going strong there with its electric vehicles as it works to create and expand funding for charging stations (China currently has 214,000 such stations and with Tesla's commitment, plans to build more), putting it on the same path as countries such as Norway, India, France and Britain which are also seeking to ban gas/diesel vehicles altogether (China's timetable is more accelerated that the others, however). Already, Shenzen's bus fleet is fully electric (taxis are next) and that means close to 17,000 battery-run buses; as a comparison, the U.S.has a nationwide fleet of 300 such buses while the remaining 65,000 run on gas or diesel (President Trump announced plans to reduce research in renewable fuel production by over 70% before next year says The Washington Post meaning his doubling down on efforts to expand fossil fuels such as oil and coal...with many environmental regulations now being rescinded by Congress, the U.S. is on track to lead the world in oil/shale production).
On the world front, you've likely read about the flaws discovered in Intel's chips; it's software talk called "speculative execution" but basically is a backdoor way in that allows a hacker to enter those files carefully "locked" in a walled-off area. Intel gave the chips access to those files in order to increase the processing speed as it "guessed" what you were going to use next. Fixing the flaw slows down the chip (as much as 30% says the piece in Bloomberg Businessweek). No big deal, you say? Only one problem, Intel's chips are in virtually everything you might own...your smartphone, your laptop, your tablet, your ISP server. Oh, and that pesky Department of Defense. Says the piece: The company makes about 90 percent of the world’s computer processors and 99 percent of the server chips in the data centers that effectively run the internet...Every PC, every smartphone, and every server in the world is exposed...For now, computer owners and data center operators will have to make an unsavory choice: Use Intel’s software patches and accept slower speeds, or skip the patches and remain at risk. (Intel has already said patches are causing some machines to reboot more often than usual.) Future designs will include hard-wired fixes that speed things up, but the first versions of those won’t appear until later this year, the company says. Did I mention that during the six months Intel worked to quietly fix the discovered flaw, its CEO sold $24 million in shares of the company. Ah no matter, because the big hackers no longer seem interested in such petty things as checking and savings accounts but rather in practicing access to electrical grids, nuclear power plants, and entire cities (Atlanta, anyone?...ironically, that city hosts an event titled HackATL come October).
Here's a bunch of other stuff that caught me off guard...that Victor Hugo wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame 31 years before his big hit, Les Miserables, all in an effort to make the cathedral anything but obsolete (he felt that the printed word was taking away from "the cathedral as the center of learning and worship" said the flyer in the play my wife and I attended). Or that it's been 50 years since Martin Luther King was shot (or for those of you readers who are younger, 20 years since Viagra was approved by the FDA). Or that we are still allowing life to go extinct as the last white rhino left this planet (the next to go might actually be the pangolin, the most poached animal on earth!...although those eels you find on U.K. menus and in sushi, they're heading out the door as well as the market for the baby "elvers" is booming along the east coast of the U.S.); and those cute penguins, they're also likely to be going extinct soon as their food (anchovies and sardines) are now getting overfished, leaving the penguins with little or nothing to eat after their long migrations -- 80% of juvenile penguins are dying annually. Or that making denim jeans and growing tobacco are two of the most toxic industries in what they use to create or grow their products, issues that Stoney Creek Colors and others are trying to fix. Or that the 187 U.S. listed open-end funds and ETFs' with assets of $75 billion is dwarfed by just 40 of the Catholic Church's organizations whose assets come to $5.5 trillion (and this is no small number for just Vanguard's index funds receive $100 million each hour). Or that over a third of our land is covered in grass lawns (and this does not include parks, schools and other public areas), and that none (yes, zero) of those lawn grasses are native grasses but are either imported or invasive* (Kentucky blue grass actually originates in Europe which in turn got many of their grasses from Africa; the new market being targeted is of all things, Australia and Africa because their seasons are opposite the current lawn market's winter). Or that smoking pot might be damaging, not for whatever you might believe of its effects but more for its unregulated growing methods; because there is not a strict growing regimen (mainly from outdoor and illegal growers, which then market to many approved sellers in storefronts), the buds that have been tested have proven laced with all sorts of pesticides and herbicides, many toxic and untested as to their effects on humans once the plant is dried, lit and inhaled. And speaking of lungs, I had no idea that you could get both lungs replaced surgically (nearly 1400 such operations occurred last year); it comes with an average cost of just under $1.2 million, about the same cost as replacing your intestines (49 people) and slightly less than the $1.4 million to start pumping a new heart (2700+ people). Or that Blockchain (remember that) was now gaining in acceptance and is being used to follow the paths of diamonds, wines, rare art and possibly global trade in general. Or that robots are now making sushi (200 rolls an hour) and mixing drinks (serving cocktails on cruise ships since 2014). Or that U.S. politicians and legislatures can seemingly be bought for a pittance: don't like fracking in your backyard?; the Texas legislature just banned any city in Texas from stopping fracking. Don't like lead paint? After just $750,000 in campaign contributions came in from a lead pain manufacturer, the Wisconsin legislature passed a law blocking any lawsuits against manufacturers who might contribute to lead poisoning. Those politicians needn't worry for deep underground Doomsday bunkers (cities really, for they come complete with doctors, police and fire departments, even water reservoirs the size of lakes, all fully staffed 24/7, 365 days a year, and fully paid by taxpayers, albeit from a "secret black budget, known to only 20 members of Congress," says the author of the book, Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself -- While the Rest of Us Die) have already been built into mountains...and yes, that was bunkers as in several such sites, all ready for Congress and other elite politicians to run to safety (more are being built).
There is, unfortunately, many more things of which I (recently) had no idea. But one of the more puzzling things for me was found among the trove of letters I recently discovered, several of which came from my brother over 30 years ago (he passed away not long after the letters were written). In them rested a troubled man, a father talking of empty refrigerators and of struggling to feed his daughters, of his business being busted (purposely by others, he felt), of a life so alien to me that I may as well have been reading a novel. So where was I? He kept thanking me for my letters and such, so I must have been writing away; but in looking back now I have to wonder how or why I took these letters as just that, letters and not a cry for help. Or maybe I did, but just wasn't in a position to do anything. Or maybe I didn't? That's the thing, you begin to forget or perhaps remember things differently, even as you read these personal glimpses that in some way or another helped to form your life and perhaps your growth. Perhaps it's out of guilt or to help you rationalize. Who knows? But here's another thing that I simply had no idea about...dealing with the passing of my mother. As her credit accounts and insurance and checking accounts get closed (many of them have taken two months to confirm), I tell friends that I feel the opposite of Michelangelo, that instead of facing a block of marble and creating a masterpiece I feel that I have been chipping away at a work of art, its pieces falling away to the ground as I shut down each segment of her life. With only a few things left her life will soon be no more and I will be staring at a pile of rubble. I don't want to forget, to let her fade from a vivid memory to that of a faint one; and yet, one does move on. It is life.
So I jump back a few years to an award-winning movie from France, The Intouchables. Take a wealthy but paralyzed man who's rough around the edges, perhaps a bit bitter at what was once a glorious life but is now severely limited; add an equally rough and tough ex-con to the mix and you have a surprisingly charming and refreshing movie. It's all there, the car chases, the laughs, the heartaches, a surprisingly compact view of life and how we can so easily make choices as to how we want to live it. We can choose to be open to change and to embrace it, or to just let life slide away as if our time were endless and that there would always be tomorrow...our talents (we all have them) wasted. My brother and my mother are no longer here, but a glimpse at what they once hand-wrote to me has reminded me to add a different piece to the broken chunks of my memory of them. Perhaps that what memory does, allows us to rebuild and recreate those we knew or those we thought we really knew but didn't. But they are also just sculptures now, frozen and patched together in an effort of preservation; yet around us are waiting not memories but people who love us, friends and families and animals. It is time to move on, to remember that we are still in this museum, still alive and surrounded by others, time to see life differently, time to recognize that those who have passed have finished their teaching whether we paid attention or not. And perhaps that has been the greatest gift to me of these letters, a reminder to pay attention. A last glimpse at my mother's hand-written letter and off it goes...thanks, Mom.
*All of this and more came from a thoroughly informative and well-presented sent of lectures titled Understanding Human and Cultural Geography; I think I learned more history in these lectures than in years of school.
On the world front, you've likely read about the flaws discovered in Intel's chips; it's software talk called "speculative execution" but basically is a backdoor way in that allows a hacker to enter those files carefully "locked" in a walled-off area. Intel gave the chips access to those files in order to increase the processing speed as it "guessed" what you were going to use next. Fixing the flaw slows down the chip (as much as 30% says the piece in Bloomberg Businessweek). No big deal, you say? Only one problem, Intel's chips are in virtually everything you might own...your smartphone, your laptop, your tablet, your ISP server. Oh, and that pesky Department of Defense. Says the piece: The company makes about 90 percent of the world’s computer processors and 99 percent of the server chips in the data centers that effectively run the internet...Every PC, every smartphone, and every server in the world is exposed...For now, computer owners and data center operators will have to make an unsavory choice: Use Intel’s software patches and accept slower speeds, or skip the patches and remain at risk. (Intel has already said patches are causing some machines to reboot more often than usual.) Future designs will include hard-wired fixes that speed things up, but the first versions of those won’t appear until later this year, the company says. Did I mention that during the six months Intel worked to quietly fix the discovered flaw, its CEO sold $24 million in shares of the company. Ah no matter, because the big hackers no longer seem interested in such petty things as checking and savings accounts but rather in practicing access to electrical grids, nuclear power plants, and entire cities (Atlanta, anyone?...ironically, that city hosts an event titled HackATL come October).
Here's a bunch of other stuff that caught me off guard...that Victor Hugo wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame 31 years before his big hit, Les Miserables, all in an effort to make the cathedral anything but obsolete (he felt that the printed word was taking away from "the cathedral as the center of learning and worship" said the flyer in the play my wife and I attended). Or that it's been 50 years since Martin Luther King was shot (or for those of you readers who are younger, 20 years since Viagra was approved by the FDA). Or that we are still allowing life to go extinct as the last white rhino left this planet (the next to go might actually be the pangolin, the most poached animal on earth!...although those eels you find on U.K. menus and in sushi, they're heading out the door as well as the market for the baby "elvers" is booming along the east coast of the U.S.); and those cute penguins, they're also likely to be going extinct soon as their food (anchovies and sardines) are now getting overfished, leaving the penguins with little or nothing to eat after their long migrations -- 80% of juvenile penguins are dying annually. Or that making denim jeans and growing tobacco are two of the most toxic industries in what they use to create or grow their products, issues that Stoney Creek Colors and others are trying to fix. Or that the 187 U.S. listed open-end funds and ETFs' with assets of $75 billion is dwarfed by just 40 of the Catholic Church's organizations whose assets come to $5.5 trillion (and this is no small number for just Vanguard's index funds receive $100 million each hour). Or that over a third of our land is covered in grass lawns (and this does not include parks, schools and other public areas), and that none (yes, zero) of those lawn grasses are native grasses but are either imported or invasive* (Kentucky blue grass actually originates in Europe which in turn got many of their grasses from Africa; the new market being targeted is of all things, Australia and Africa because their seasons are opposite the current lawn market's winter). Or that smoking pot might be damaging, not for whatever you might believe of its effects but more for its unregulated growing methods; because there is not a strict growing regimen (mainly from outdoor and illegal growers, which then market to many approved sellers in storefronts), the buds that have been tested have proven laced with all sorts of pesticides and herbicides, many toxic and untested as to their effects on humans once the plant is dried, lit and inhaled. And speaking of lungs, I had no idea that you could get both lungs replaced surgically (nearly 1400 such operations occurred last year); it comes with an average cost of just under $1.2 million, about the same cost as replacing your intestines (49 people) and slightly less than the $1.4 million to start pumping a new heart (2700+ people). Or that Blockchain (remember that) was now gaining in acceptance and is being used to follow the paths of diamonds, wines, rare art and possibly global trade in general. Or that robots are now making sushi (200 rolls an hour) and mixing drinks (serving cocktails on cruise ships since 2014). Or that U.S. politicians and legislatures can seemingly be bought for a pittance: don't like fracking in your backyard?; the Texas legislature just banned any city in Texas from stopping fracking. Don't like lead paint? After just $750,000 in campaign contributions came in from a lead pain manufacturer, the Wisconsin legislature passed a law blocking any lawsuits against manufacturers who might contribute to lead poisoning. Those politicians needn't worry for deep underground Doomsday bunkers (cities really, for they come complete with doctors, police and fire departments, even water reservoirs the size of lakes, all fully staffed 24/7, 365 days a year, and fully paid by taxpayers, albeit from a "secret black budget, known to only 20 members of Congress," says the author of the book, Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself -- While the Rest of Us Die) have already been built into mountains...and yes, that was bunkers as in several such sites, all ready for Congress and other elite politicians to run to safety (more are being built).
There is, unfortunately, many more things of which I (recently) had no idea. But one of the more puzzling things for me was found among the trove of letters I recently discovered, several of which came from my brother over 30 years ago (he passed away not long after the letters were written). In them rested a troubled man, a father talking of empty refrigerators and of struggling to feed his daughters, of his business being busted (purposely by others, he felt), of a life so alien to me that I may as well have been reading a novel. So where was I? He kept thanking me for my letters and such, so I must have been writing away; but in looking back now I have to wonder how or why I took these letters as just that, letters and not a cry for help. Or maybe I did, but just wasn't in a position to do anything. Or maybe I didn't? That's the thing, you begin to forget or perhaps remember things differently, even as you read these personal glimpses that in some way or another helped to form your life and perhaps your growth. Perhaps it's out of guilt or to help you rationalize. Who knows? But here's another thing that I simply had no idea about...dealing with the passing of my mother. As her credit accounts and insurance and checking accounts get closed (many of them have taken two months to confirm), I tell friends that I feel the opposite of Michelangelo, that instead of facing a block of marble and creating a masterpiece I feel that I have been chipping away at a work of art, its pieces falling away to the ground as I shut down each segment of her life. With only a few things left her life will soon be no more and I will be staring at a pile of rubble. I don't want to forget, to let her fade from a vivid memory to that of a faint one; and yet, one does move on. It is life.
So I jump back a few years to an award-winning movie from France, The Intouchables. Take a wealthy but paralyzed man who's rough around the edges, perhaps a bit bitter at what was once a glorious life but is now severely limited; add an equally rough and tough ex-con to the mix and you have a surprisingly charming and refreshing movie. It's all there, the car chases, the laughs, the heartaches, a surprisingly compact view of life and how we can so easily make choices as to how we want to live it. We can choose to be open to change and to embrace it, or to just let life slide away as if our time were endless and that there would always be tomorrow...our talents (we all have them) wasted. My brother and my mother are no longer here, but a glimpse at what they once hand-wrote to me has reminded me to add a different piece to the broken chunks of my memory of them. Perhaps that what memory does, allows us to rebuild and recreate those we knew or those we thought we really knew but didn't. But they are also just sculptures now, frozen and patched together in an effort of preservation; yet around us are waiting not memories but people who love us, friends and families and animals. It is time to move on, to remember that we are still in this museum, still alive and surrounded by others, time to see life differently, time to recognize that those who have passed have finished their teaching whether we paid attention or not. And perhaps that has been the greatest gift to me of these letters, a reminder to pay attention. A last glimpse at my mother's hand-written letter and off it goes...thanks, Mom.
*All of this and more came from a thoroughly informative and well-presented sent of lectures titled Understanding Human and Cultural Geography; I think I learned more history in these lectures than in years of school.
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