Bargain
Unlike the verb version of bartering, the noun version of bargain comes down to being defined as a good deal, whether it's a discounted price on a vacation or on a clearance item at a store; but in general we all tend to love getting a bargain (conversely, we resent it when we discover that we didn't do our homework and find out that our "bargain" was anything but). Perhaps my recent bargains have come from my library which is reducing their inventory by closing out their extra movies, music, and books...in the summer everything was just five cents, and now with the arrival of winter (and perhaps inflation) everything has jumped to a quarter. Still, picking up a double disc set of David Bowie or a 9-disc audio book for 25 cents is almost too good to pass up. Which of course only adds to my clutter which drives my wife crazy, for try as I might to "catch up," the items seem to keep coming in which she is quick to point out --along with the almost OCD Marie Kondo-- and it has indeed led me to begin (again) the process of clearing out...unfortunately, that means shedding a portion of my miscellaneous pile of information, pieces I somehow found interesting and kept but am now dumping onto you; so apologies to present you with this slurry once again but at the very least, you can rest easy that a very small pile of papers has left my desk and files. You may even consider this a "bargain."
I'll quickly begin with an elaboration on the previous post of quantum physics and point you to a pictorial on quantum computing "explained" from WIRED which elaborated on qubits (quantum+bits) and who is likely ahead in this race to "float" atoms and break away from the old idea of 0s and 1s and move onto: ...a state called quantum superposition, something like being both 0 and 1 at the same time. Whaaa?? Along with the CIA, there's NASA, Google, and JP Morgan Chase (as well as auto companies) working away at this latest method of processing (don't worry, the militaries of most major nations have been on this for awhile). And speaking of the military, those of you not in the U.S. have likely heard about our government shutdown, now reaching its financial tendrils into our air traffic controllers, farmers and even food & drug inspectors (not to mention the Internal Revenue Service as taxes comes due; and did I mention that the FBI will soon lose its funding as well?); a quick glimpse of where our government monies goes is graphically presented by many sites but back in 2017 TIME reported that neck and neck were the military and health costs, each taking an average of $3,000 from every $10,000 contributed by the average taxpayer (the next largest amount, at $1420, was to pay the interest on our national debt; a quick calculation shows that minus those amounts and you're left with just 25% of the budget to run everything else in the entire U.S. government). But according to The Atlantic, even the U.S. military is growing tired of its seemingly endless fighting as morale and recruiting is dropping rapidly-- it's a story worth reading (on a side note, even today's gamers may be tiring of war as sales of the new Battlefield V were discounted 50% just a week after its release due to low sales, said Barron's).
Tie all of that in to a story from National Geographic on the Japanese internment camps from WWII, when 120,000 Japanese --80,000 of whom were U.S. citizens-- were rounded up and their possessions forcibly abandoned or taken which meant homes, businesses, and whatever else they owned; said the piece, the anti-immigrant mood began decades earlier when in 1924 Congress approved an immigration ban: ..on all Asians, including Japanese people, saying that they could not become citizens, no matter how long they lived in the United States. Only their children, if born in the U.S., could be citizens, as guaranteed by the Constitution (this is something the current administration is currently trying to remove as well, says Forbes). The sentiment was that they were taking away American jobs. Hmm, does that sound familiar? But people still try to come to the U.S., although contrary to the fear mongering portrayed by the current administration, the majority of illegal drugs (90%) entering the U.S. arrives through one of 48 main ports of entry said the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency), adding to the disruption of common myths about drug trafficking. But what IS real is the steady flow of human traffickers helping to bring in these immigrants throughout the world; you can get an inside look at the life of a South American smuggler as presented in TIME (surprise, the majority of immigrants trying to enter the U.S. from the South comes from India; and the BBC reported that: In 2017, Canadians made up the largest group of these illegal migrants that entered by air or sea port of entry).
Okay, let's jump to a bit of happier news...our food. It's gotten better, considering that a quick review of The Poison Squad from The Atlantic said: We tend to think of our 19th-century forefathers thriving on farm-fresh produce and pasture-raised livestock, happily unaffected by the deceptive food-manufacturing practices of today. In this we are wrong. Milk offers a stunning case in point. By mid-century, the standard, profit-maximizing recipe was a pint of lukewarm water for every quart of milk—after the cream had been skimmed off. To whiten the bluish liquid, dairymen added plaster of paris and chalk, or a dollop of molasses for a creamy gold. To replace the skimmed-off layer of cream, they might add a final flourish of pureed calf brains. Fakery and adulteration ran rampant in other products as well...Ground insects could be mixed into brown sugar, often without detection; their use was linked to an unpleasant condition known as “grocer’s itch.” And speaking of milk, what exactly is the definition? That is the ongoing court battle as dairy farmers seek to stop nut and other producers from labeling their products as "milk" (almond milk, coconut milk, soy milk, etc.). Enter Coke, yes that Coke, as they attempt to upsell their Fairlife "designer" milk said Bloomberg Businessweek. And Forbes went a step further and asked what is the definition of rice, mayonaise and meat (zucchini noodles, anyone?). And jumping to meat, one has to now wonder what the definition of meat is since Memphis Meats (based in San Francisco) grows "meat" from pig and cow cells, freshly matured and raised humanely in labs from cultured cells (to date, the cost is a bit high at $2,400 per pound). Fortune wrote of other companies making raw tuna from tomatoes, all in addition to a bunch of other veggie or lab products now appearing on your grocery shelves, which echoed the sentiments of Popular Science in the quest for the artificial cow with lab-produced collagen, cartlidge, insulin (yes, a majority of those items really do come from cows), meat and leather. Said the piece: Scientists are synthesizing the substances we normally get from cows by using bovine cells, yeast, and even bacteria. Ah yes, yeast, which apparently doesn't do as well as expected when dehydrated so enter the argan tree. Said Scientific American its oil may aid in the production of wine. Whaaa??
And as long as we're on the subject of additives and variants, what about Teflon (trivia fact: Teflon was needed to properly seal the pipes in the faseous diffusion plant where uranium was enriched to make the first atomic bomb, reports Fortune). But its new "replacement" chemical, C8, might also be proving to be cancer-causing and yet is still being dumped into rivers and released into the air (the article is both scary and prescient as to what we may not be aware of when it comes to our food and water). Teflon was discovered by accident, much like the glue for Post-Its, and Velcro, and Gorilla Glass (a result of a furnace overheating by 300 degrees F). But imagine if you had no engineering skills, and were locked up in a federal prison. This is what led Herbert Williams to create an underwater turbine design which is: one of the first and still-biggest source of tidal power sold to consumers through the U.K. grid. Continues the piece in Bloomberg Businessweek: Companies have found it tough to adapt turbines to the stresses of water, which is 800 times denser than air. All of this is not to discount the difficulty of what a jet engine goes through, a problem Pratt & Whitney took 30 years to overcome, which was a longer time than the age of the 28-year old engineer who helped solve the problem, said the same magazine.
Ah science, fascinating, almost as much as nature. But just how does one tell the difference between an underground explosion (say, a nuclear detonation) and a natural collapse (say a large mine)? Why different compression-wave signatures (whaaa???), said Scientific American. Or this from Popular Science: Planting apples is a game of chance in which every seed is a wild card. The pome's genetics are so diverse that kernels from the same core sprout into entirely different varieties. Though all cultivars are the same species, we've bred them into more than 7,000 types. Growers must select the best and graft their branches onto new trees to propagate each distinct fruit. But then little of that might matter as we begin to take more and more pills, not only those for feeding and supplementing us but ones which will give you shots, clear obstructions and unfold like an accordion to properly distribute medicines, said AARP.
Goodness, what a mish-mash of information; and the bad news is that's there's more (whaaa???). But I'll depart here with a final piece, a pictorial that perhaps showed the technological side which we take for granted and yet allows you to read this...that of fiber optic cables. I've always wondered how such cables can bend and be spliced because aren't they really just glass? Faster, more energy efficient, and a complicated maze that runs directly below many of us, said Popular Science, this was about as fascinating as the additional piece on the shrinking size of computers -- imagine a carry-on bag with the power of 4 refrigerators, 56 cores (and you thought your quad-core laptop was fast), and 10 gigs per second speeds. Yup, it exists...and one final tid-bit: remember that earlier post on London's Heathrow wanting to expand and add an additional runway and more flights (it's already the world's busiest in Europe with 78 million passengers)? Take a guess which city is planning to zoom past it and take over the title with an expected capacity of 100 million passengers? All that and more...later!*
*Okay, I'm not that mean. The city is Warsaw in Poland.
I'll quickly begin with an elaboration on the previous post of quantum physics and point you to a pictorial on quantum computing "explained" from WIRED which elaborated on qubits (quantum+bits) and who is likely ahead in this race to "float" atoms and break away from the old idea of 0s and 1s and move onto: ...a state called quantum superposition, something like being both 0 and 1 at the same time. Whaaa?? Along with the CIA, there's NASA, Google, and JP Morgan Chase (as well as auto companies) working away at this latest method of processing (don't worry, the militaries of most major nations have been on this for awhile). And speaking of the military, those of you not in the U.S. have likely heard about our government shutdown, now reaching its financial tendrils into our air traffic controllers, farmers and even food & drug inspectors (not to mention the Internal Revenue Service as taxes comes due; and did I mention that the FBI will soon lose its funding as well?); a quick glimpse of where our government monies goes is graphically presented by many sites but back in 2017 TIME reported that neck and neck were the military and health costs, each taking an average of $3,000 from every $10,000 contributed by the average taxpayer (the next largest amount, at $1420, was to pay the interest on our national debt; a quick calculation shows that minus those amounts and you're left with just 25% of the budget to run everything else in the entire U.S. government). But according to The Atlantic, even the U.S. military is growing tired of its seemingly endless fighting as morale and recruiting is dropping rapidly-- it's a story worth reading (on a side note, even today's gamers may be tiring of war as sales of the new Battlefield V were discounted 50% just a week after its release due to low sales, said Barron's).
Tie all of that in to a story from National Geographic on the Japanese internment camps from WWII, when 120,000 Japanese --80,000 of whom were U.S. citizens-- were rounded up and their possessions forcibly abandoned or taken which meant homes, businesses, and whatever else they owned; said the piece, the anti-immigrant mood began decades earlier when in 1924 Congress approved an immigration ban: ..on all Asians, including Japanese people, saying that they could not become citizens, no matter how long they lived in the United States. Only their children, if born in the U.S., could be citizens, as guaranteed by the Constitution (this is something the current administration is currently trying to remove as well, says Forbes). The sentiment was that they were taking away American jobs. Hmm, does that sound familiar? But people still try to come to the U.S., although contrary to the fear mongering portrayed by the current administration, the majority of illegal drugs (90%) entering the U.S. arrives through one of 48 main ports of entry said the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency), adding to the disruption of common myths about drug trafficking. But what IS real is the steady flow of human traffickers helping to bring in these immigrants throughout the world; you can get an inside look at the life of a South American smuggler as presented in TIME (surprise, the majority of immigrants trying to enter the U.S. from the South comes from India; and the BBC reported that: In 2017, Canadians made up the largest group of these illegal migrants that entered by air or sea port of entry). |
| An argan tree and how it relates to wine: from Scientific American |
And as long as we're on the subject of additives and variants, what about Teflon (trivia fact: Teflon was needed to properly seal the pipes in the faseous diffusion plant where uranium was enriched to make the first atomic bomb, reports Fortune). But its new "replacement" chemical, C8, might also be proving to be cancer-causing and yet is still being dumped into rivers and released into the air (the article is both scary and prescient as to what we may not be aware of when it comes to our food and water). Teflon was discovered by accident, much like the glue for Post-Its, and Velcro, and Gorilla Glass (a result of a furnace overheating by 300 degrees F). But imagine if you had no engineering skills, and were locked up in a federal prison. This is what led Herbert Williams to create an underwater turbine design which is: one of the first and still-biggest source of tidal power sold to consumers through the U.K. grid. Continues the piece in Bloomberg Businessweek: Companies have found it tough to adapt turbines to the stresses of water, which is 800 times denser than air. All of this is not to discount the difficulty of what a jet engine goes through, a problem Pratt & Whitney took 30 years to overcome, which was a longer time than the age of the 28-year old engineer who helped solve the problem, said the same magazine.
Ah science, fascinating, almost as much as nature. But just how does one tell the difference between an underground explosion (say, a nuclear detonation) and a natural collapse (say a large mine)? Why different compression-wave signatures (whaaa???), said Scientific American. Or this from Popular Science: Planting apples is a game of chance in which every seed is a wild card. The pome's genetics are so diverse that kernels from the same core sprout into entirely different varieties. Though all cultivars are the same species, we've bred them into more than 7,000 types. Growers must select the best and graft their branches onto new trees to propagate each distinct fruit. But then little of that might matter as we begin to take more and more pills, not only those for feeding and supplementing us but ones which will give you shots, clear obstructions and unfold like an accordion to properly distribute medicines, said AARP.
Goodness, what a mish-mash of information; and the bad news is that's there's more (whaaa???). But I'll depart here with a final piece, a pictorial that perhaps showed the technological side which we take for granted and yet allows you to read this...that of fiber optic cables. I've always wondered how such cables can bend and be spliced because aren't they really just glass? Faster, more energy efficient, and a complicated maze that runs directly below many of us, said Popular Science, this was about as fascinating as the additional piece on the shrinking size of computers -- imagine a carry-on bag with the power of 4 refrigerators, 56 cores (and you thought your quad-core laptop was fast), and 10 gigs per second speeds. Yup, it exists...and one final tid-bit: remember that earlier post on London's Heathrow wanting to expand and add an additional runway and more flights (it's already the world's busiest in Europe with 78 million passengers)? Take a guess which city is planning to zoom past it and take over the title with an expected capacity of 100 million passengers? All that and more...later!*
*Okay, I'm not that mean. The city is Warsaw in Poland.
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