Sing Along With Bartok
I deserve the Golden Fleece Award
Important stuff alert:
Absolutely silent from the East Coast today. No news is good news.
I throttled way down at Max Q today as I am still reeling from the effects of the Booster Rockets. Nancy and I only made it up to Port Townsend for a nice view of the Straits in lovely weather between Atmospheric Rivers. Then a long, intense nap. On the way, we dropped something off and she got a quick tour of my friend Robert’s optics making lab.
Tomorrow I get a Covid Test for Thursday’s bore reaming. My friend Laura reminded me to make sure the doc knows the difference between a colonoscopy and a colostomy or I could be left holding the bag. I suppose that would make it easier when consulting my feces. Liquid diet on Wednesday.
Normal food begins again on Friday and for me normal food will consist of the best Burria Tacos north of Jalisco. Barbacoa Food Truck will be set up at Bainbridge Brewing at the Coppertop from 4 until 7.
Nice amount of new subscriptions today - mostly from birthday invites from my Facebook Page. I am writing less and less on that platform. For the new arrivals and everyone really, Welcome. FYI rules etc. I am leaving comments open here but I probably won’t respond and don’t encourage it. If you have a bone to pick you can always find me on email and remember, there is always Facebook and Twitter. At least here you will only be inflamed by me, and not some troll from some other part of the world trying to corrupt your influence.
Some authors who end up with ridiculous numbers of subscribers monetize their work and that is very easily done on Substack. Its actually one of the best things for authors since movveable type printing presses. Heather Cox Richardson did that with her important page on our current history and the perk that you pay $5 a month for is that you are allowed to comment. I’m more interested in the Pandemic specifics and like to ask questions about it so I pay for this privilege on YLE which I can freely repost above even without the subscription.
Both authors have very well researched and important things to say. I am not to that poiint nor will I ever be. The extreme right-wingers have only crap, such as what will exit from me Wednesday night.. Today I saw that they have already started blaming the Democrats for the new Omicron Variant, stating that it will be used to steal the elections in 2022 or something. Its not wirth my life energy to look for what outrageous thing someone just said. These people (including the one I booted from my team this last week) have been around complaining and spewing junk for years. Their brains need a colonoscopy STAT to remove the cerebral hemorrhoids and Trump fixations. All that will be left will be black holes.
DAILY RANT ALERT!!!
Such crap has gone on for years. Here is an article from the National Enquirer about one of my favorite molluscan paleobiologists, who once received Senator William Proxmire’s Golden Fleece Award, celebrating the total Waste of Your Hard-earned Tax Dollars on basic scientific research when it could have gone to fund the Reagan Tax Cuts which we are still paying for. Reagan wanted to sell off the entire Dayton Miller Flute Collection at the Library of Congress and use the proceeds for tax cuts. We all have figured out that none of us will ever get that money that it al flows to people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and the Koch Brothers, or what is left of them. Its the Great Ripoff.
These politicians and their pundits aided by the Al Gore Intranets that they ironically hated from the start (this, I recall, was all Bill Clinton’s Fault), and the proliferations of troll bots and such, Facebook, Instagram, 4Chan, and what not spew hate, especially towards the science and scientists that our lives depend upon. Thus our current plague of anti-vax bullshit. To them, basic research such as the Moon Landing is the work of the devil. These folks call it Socialism when we decide to fix our bridges instead of building walls in the desert that easily blow down in the wind. We could use more of that kind of Socialism. The only science that they are good at if you can call it that is Gerrymandering and I am afraid they are getting away with it.
The Moon Landing saves lives. We got more out of the Apollo Program than velcro. We also got CT-scanning and MRI technology that the Government open sourced to anyone who wanted to apply it.
Brittle Stars are tiny distant relatives of the Seastars and Echinoids. I kind of look at them functionally as an echinoid with fast moving starfish arms. They are tiny and full of plates. You can see some fossil ones in the slide show from my 2006 North American Echinoderm Conference talk on the fossils I am still researching. The seafloor in Puget Sound is covered with these and many fish such as flounders eat them. These are also called Ophiuroids and first appear at 1:13. Note the tiny juvenile one embedded in this leaf fossil at 1:15. You then see cobbles that have thousands of them. I have yet to publish anything in detail on the locality where these echinoderms are found in the leaf layers. Deep water indications abound and there are transported elements such as shallow water geoducks and mussels not to mention the live oak leaves and such. I suspect this rather unique locality compared with what is adjacent was once the very bottom of a channel just a few km west of a major river, similar to the Astoria Canyon. There is much work to be done reconstructing the water source, etc.
Further down the video at 1:34 you see two amazing paleobiologists. The one on the right is Porter Kier who once was the director of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, and an expert on echinoids. He once was sued personally (since you can’t sue the Government) by the Reverend Jerry Falwell for the crime or sin of “Promoting Evolution.” Its as if the Inquisition never ended. See what we are up against? The trial lasted less than a minute and ended with the judge saying “I want all of you God-Damned Creationists to get the HELL out of my courtroom. Case Dismissed!” The reporters who expected months of modern day Scopes Trial reporting broke out in cheers and laughter.
The other scientist is brittle star expert Gordon Hendler from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County who was also one of Porter’s favorite students. Here is some of his basic scientific research that seems a waste of money. Brittle Stars have exoskeletons that consist of thousands of tiny plates which are mostly crystalline calcite. It seems that each plate has optical sensors. It seems that these sensors transmit something like 10,000 more information than a similarly sized fiber optic cable. Some of Gordon’s research gets funded by the government via NSF grants that the Republicans hate. Who doesn’t hate this particular research project is Bell Labs who are trying to figure out how to transmit more information through fiberoptic cable. Without Gordon’s seemingly worthless research, faster transmission rates of the future would remain only in the science fiction literature that the religious right will burn as Blasphemy someday.
I don’t think anything directly resulted from the Limpet study. Much science just happens and the scientists simply move on. Having done so, this one scientist that I know went onto discover many other things that matter, especially with our current climate crisis and its effect on our biosphere.
Enough ranting. To the new subscribers and everyone really, just a reminder that I scan this once for typos and then send it off in the email version. Afterwards I sometimes get around to polishing and revising and often excising the inappropriate, changing names to protest the innocent. Already my business advisor is panicking, even with the post-processed versions. I don’t care. This rough draftyness might simply be a sign of honesty. You can always go to the laurentflutes substack page and find the polished version. For the new readers, check out one of my best called “Acres of Cures”.
Lila, here is that great music by Bartok that I mentioned. The musicians, who were playing this a few meters in front of me, only made it to about the 12th measure before their instruments started exploding. I was lucky I wasn’t among the injured!
Its too bad that this recording is slow, compared to the otherwise spotless performance that 1988 summer evening when I was homeless, living the carefree life as a bicycle tourist all summer and staying in town mostly.
This, by the way, is my Happy Birthday Song that everyone sings when the cake is lit.
This is definitely not bedtime music.