Open Thread Friday 4-3-2020
Seasons come, seasons go and the cycle continues. Most of Americans life revolves around seasons defined by the market place and man-made events. What wrapping paper message in on the boxes of chocolate in the stores. Is it Easter, Christmas, Valentine or Happy Halloween? Which sports season? I became confused as they began to overlap. Is it flu or allergy season? What should I be celebrating or complaining about?
It all stopped. A virus came along. Our carefully constructed illusion of mankind controlling the enviornment is under attack. Mother nature just gave us a time out.
Look at the small patterns to learn about the big
Study the big patterns to understand the small
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAGNTjorz58]
The bright yellow slime mold, dubbed Physarum polycephalum, is a brainless organism that produces networks of slimy tendrils which can somehow 'solve' spatial problems that are surprisingly complex. By studying its growth patterns, researchers have produced oddly accurate models of the wider universe.
Previous models based on this particular mold have solved mazes, calculated the shortest distance between two points and reconstructed the entire Tokyo rail system – no small feat, by any stretch of the imagination.
...
Inspired by the work of German media artist Sage Jenson, the UC Santa Cruz team created three-dimensional models and fed in the coordinates of 37,000 galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) – a group collectively known as the 'Local Universe' – into the algorithm.Then the magic happened on a celestial (but digital) scale, as the algorithm churned out a visualization of what the scaffolding which holds the universe together might look like.
I did my monthly grocery and feed shopping this week. In spite of seeing news reports of shortages it was still unsettling to see so many empty shelves. Have not seen the empty space since childhood grocery store visits when winter roads over mountain passes were not always open to keep the shelves fully stocked. Fortunately there are a number of grocery and feed stores within a short distance and I was able to replenish by supplies.
This pattern of extended gaps between grocery runs may be our reality for a while. I am going to share some of my practices and if you have something to contribute please do. Some of these ideas may seem insignificant or too obvious, but wasn't able to ask for feedback while writing and someone may benefit. Late summer and fall is the traditional season to stock up. In spring plants are ready to grow and need to watch closer for spoilage or sprouting.
Vegetables: Fresh vegetables with the least processing and not over hydrated will stay unspoiled for a longer time if handled properly. Get them out of the shipping plastic and into oversized bags for air circulation. Lettuce add a paper towel to stabilize moisture, squeeze out when gets too wet. Vegetables traditionally kept in a root cellar or in the ground with a mulch over winter are the easiest to keep for a while before using. For example, whole cabbage last longer than lettuce. For both plant remove broken or cracked leaves before storing. Peel off leaves as needed to cut, tear or chop. The partial heads can last three to five weeks in the refrigerator. If the head is cut with a knife it will start to spoil on the cut edges. If edge is discolored cut about 1/4 inch of and discard that portion.
Restaurants offering lettuce salads included with a meal narrowed our definition of salad. Salads have a rich history of using all kinds of fruits and vegetables with different types of dressings. Don't limit your imagination.
Radishes, carrots, beets and turnips with green stem trimmed to 1 to 2 inches will keep themselves in a state to start growing again and the greens damaged in shipping do not spoil. If only using part of summer squash and cucumber trim 1/2 piece off bud end and use toothpick to seal cut.
Frozen has a better nutritional value than canned. Harvest is generally coordinated with processing, often better nutritional value and flavor than several day old fresh vegetables. Cut a corner off a bag and pour out what you need, or buy a variety pack and sort out what is needed for the recipe.
Keep your potatoes stored in darkness to prevent greening. Green skins and flesh are toxic, trim and discard. The rest of my vegetable and fruit trims goes into dog and chicken food.
Fruit: looks good, then spoils quickly and spreads to other pieces. After awhile you can recognize the odor and salvage some of the piece.
Dairy: Real sour cream, cottage cottage cheese and yogurt without stabilizers are cultured products with beneficial bacteria that prevent mold growth. When Carrageenans, gaur gums, acacia gum and xanthan gum area added mold can grow easier in these products.
Sources of yeast prior to individual packets. (9.17 min)
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leC_cCs4i5w]
Continuing the Journey into Chinese Medicine
Chinese medicine has been receptive to incorporating new ideas over the centuries. Technology is now widespread in their medical model of providing national health care. It was an integral part of the COVID-19 response. There are many valid discussions we can have on privacy concerns, market manipulation, abuse for profit and changes in patient care. The scope and speed of implementation changes our health care environment.
China stopped the epidemic by combining conventional public health measures with the largest application of information technology to public health in history, including locational tracking of likely carriers, identification of probable nodes of infection, continuous monitoring of the vital signs of a large proportion of its 1.4 billion people, and the use of smartphone apps to regulate the quarantine of individuals.
....
But this isn’t a “propaganda offensive.” It’s a technological paradigm shift. Chinese propaganda as usual is crude, culturally myopic and unpersuasive. But China’s accomplishments in public health are real, according to the world’s largest pharmaceuticals firms. On March 30, for example, the German pharma industry leader Boehringer-Ingelheim announced the opening of a second digital laboratory in Shanghai. A company statement explained, “The concept of BI X is to use digital innovation to accelerate the development of healthcare solutions and to help discovery of breakthrough treatments for humans and animals. Since its start in 2017, BI X has delivered many projects with a strong impact worldwide. Using iterative processes and continuous development, Scrum Masters, Data Scientists, Engineers and UX Designers working at BI X test and prove new applications within months.”Michael Schmelmer, a member of Boehringer-Ingelheim’s board, added, “With this step we are strengthening our footprint in a market that is very strong in digital innovation in healthcare and has a unique technological landscape. The close proximity to our Chinese patients and customers will enable us to develop better disruptive products for them and tap into the high digital capabilities in China.” The company has annual sales of over US $20 billion.
...
Huawei, the world’s largest telecommunications equipment firm, has spent years developing AI applications to health care. In 2017 it signed a joint venture with the Dutch electronics firm Philips “to build a new, cloud-based healthcare solution for deployment in China,” Healthcare magazine reported. “The country is becoming home to an increased aging population and limited resources, which has seen the need for the healthcare industry to become increasingly digital and patient centric. The use of digital technologies will therefore deliver increased accuracy within diagnostics and analytics and enable the ability for medical professionals to provide exceptional medical treatment surrounding chronic, long-term condition. Testing surrounding Huawei and Phillips’ healthcare solution has now been completed, at which the project is now looking towards a future where cloud and machine-learning will digitalize and disrupt the healthcare vertical with unprecedented speed and reach.”In an October 2019 interview, Huawei’s Chief Technology Officer Paul Scanlan told me, “This is what we mean by the ‘control point.’ We don’t want to do everything ourselves. If you are a pharmaceutical company, you won’t have to duplicate our investment in AI. You simply rent time on the Cloud using our AI servers and obtain access to our data. The key is gathering and porting the data to servers where it can be put into usable form. That’s our contribution. We don’t want to control everything. We want partners who are best in class in every field. ”
By providing the medical data and the capacity to manipulate it, China has become a magnet for the world’s leading pharmaceutical firms.
All topics are welcome for discussion.
Comments
Good morning
Thanks for the food storage advice and Chinese medicine exploration, SoE.
Our lettuce isn't quite ready but we will have bunches here in a couple of weeks. Our technique is to wash in a spinner, drain well and air dry for a little while (minutes only), then store as flat leaves layered with moist (paper) towels in a flat plastic container in the fridge. To give someone a bunch we will bundle and wrap with a moist (paper) towel and put in a bag. If it really gets ahead of us, I make lettuce soup...better than it sounds. This is similar to my recipe. I use an immersion blender one of my fave kitchen tools.
https://www.thepaleomom.com/lettuce-soup/
Here in the South with almost year round harvests, the game is to eat with the season supplementing with stored foods. Last night for example we ate ham (from our local producers), collards we harvested this week, and sweet potato from the pantry. We cooked three football sized sweet "pie" potatoes. Today I'll mash some and bake sweet tater treats with shredded coconut, raisins, egg, salt, baking powder, and perhaps a little coconut flour if they look wet....NO sugar! If you can't deny your sweet tooth, you can add some mashed banana, but they are plenty sweet if you use cured potatoes. These can be frozen and doled out as needed.
We're stuck with COVID for a while. Make use of this time to cook and garden! Hope you all are having a beautiful spring (or fall for you deep south types).
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Started using store bought lettuce in a number of hot dishes
after salmonella became a bigger problem in the commercial farms and product distribution system. Use as a substitute for spinach when not available. A quick cooked green in stirfrys. Large leaves of lettuce or cabbage as a wrap for sandwiches.
Ordered some sweet potatoes starts. Going to try and grow some this year. On the recipe, do you generally cook it as a loaf, cake, muffin or cookie? It sounds tasty.
Still yourself, deep water can absorb many disturbances with minimal reaction.
--When the opening appears release yourself.
it's a cookie sized treat
Not too big, not too small, just right!
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
With at least
6.6 million people out of work, food insecurity and housing insecurity are going to be huge problems. The time to organize and try to address these issues is now, before people are starving and before they are exposed to the elements in horrific ways. Where do we begin?
Can every family who lives in the suburbs convert their yard into a victory garden? Can people who live in the cities organized other creative solutions? We have the internet, we can do much of the organizing online without violating social distancing precautions. Many people have solved these problems for their own families and some have addressed these problems for small communities. We are all lost though if we can't prevent our society from unraveling this way.
I meant to include
in my comment above that WoodsDweller wrote a column yesterday on the topic of food shortage and in the comments I noticed Lookout is planning to expand on this topic on Sunday.
All this is relevant to storing and preserving food in the best possible way so thanks for your ideas. I also enjoyed the video on yeast...very nice. I don't make bread anymore...but we may have to start making 'Ale'.
Need to start at the first stage and perfect it
then maybe proceed to a good dark bread to go with the Ale.
Still yourself, deep water can absorb many disturbances with minimal reaction.
--When the opening appears release yourself.
I do love
a good dark bread, unfortunately my body doesn't. Bread has been off my diet for many years. I've never been a fan of either ale or beer, but the rest of my family like them both.
Good morning soe. Just a quick comment here:
Just sayin'
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
From ucsc
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAGNTjorz58]
Physarum polycephalum - Wikipedia
This is the mold that they used for modeling
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physarum_polycephalum
Stop Climate Change Silence - Start the Conversation
Hot Air Website, Twitter, Facebook
Fungi are fascinating thanks for the link n/t
Still yourself, deep water can absorb many disturbances with minimal reaction.
--When the opening appears release yourself.
Good morning, soe ~~
I love your phrase - mother nature is giving us a time-out. So appropriate! Everyone needs to take a breather, sit back, and refocus efforts.
Have a lovely Friday, folks!
"The “jumpers” reminded us that one day we will all face only one choice and that is how we will die, not how we will live." Chris Hedges on 9/11
thanks for checking in
Just seeing your cheerful thumbnail makes me smile. Spent many hours as a small child playing with a deck of Raggedy Ann and Andy cards.
Still yourself, deep water can absorb many disturbances with minimal reaction.
--When the opening appears release yourself.
Good morning Redux. I see up there, under Chinese
Medicine, a discussion of BI X in which it is claimed that
Estoy baffled. I went to a school thta had a very strong Rugby team, of all things, and know all about Scrums, so the very existence of this term and its connection to things digital and sciency bewildered me. After doing a quick search on the term and looking and the various result headings I found that it is neologistic bafflegab combining some aspects of term leader and facilitator, but when and how did it arise and how long has it been "the thing", either replacing or supplementing Demming's fantasies? Does anybody know?
Shortages: All things vary with locality, especially across the urban - suburban - rural divide, but shortages are likely to be with us for a while, and, especially tp. Consider the workforce. I'n normal times they are up and out maybe a quick breakfast at home, or maybe they grab one in transit. There are coffee breaks, and lunch to be eaten out, sometimes dinner too, or sometimes take-out is brought home. A ton of food prep is done by others, outside of the home, as is the clean up. A lot of bathroom visits occur at work or in eateries of some sort. Then thee's the gym.
Come stay-at-home, a lot of that food prep, consumption and clean up are shifted to the dwelling unit, along with all of those bathroom breaks. People who used to rarely use their kitchens and bathrooms are now living at home. They're accustomed to drinking bottled water all day, so that flies out of stores by the caseload. Toilet paper? How many million flushes are now no longer done outside the dwelling unit? "Food" and snacks? Even if they're ordering in, a lot of the places they order from will be now competing for foodstuffs.
So maybe get used to it?
be well and have a good one.
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
Originally a Rugby term, explains why so many sport analogies
Read an article comparing software development to the game of Rugby, write a book, create an organization, develop a certification process and market like mad.
Scrum comes with its own set of rules, culture and buzz words.
Still yourself, deep water can absorb many disturbances with minimal reaction.
--When the opening appears release yourself.
Heh, and maybe lol
A scrum is a form of unarmed combat from which one combatant emerges with temporary possession of the ball
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
BERNIE TV
Bernie Joins Ali Velshi at 3:00 est on msdnc.
NYCVG
thanks - watching now n/t
Still yourself, deep water can absorb many disturbances with minimal reaction.
--When the opening appears release yourself.
An emergency food bank has just been set up in town.
My brother said they were handing out sacks of fresh fruit and vegetables. He said the line was long.
I am glad the food is nutritious, but depressed that it is coming from that source, and that the line is long.
I am very frustrated that a judge set a hearing for Monday. 3 lawyers, 3 kids, 4 witnesses, 2 parties. All in a small space.
Not to mention, jail inmates, several prosecutors, and 3 or 4 essential court personnel, and God only knows how many other lawyers and parties will be present in the room.
Opposing counsel's habit is to arrive late. Always.
I can be held in contempt, jailed, fined, sanctioned in a dozen punishing ways if I do not show up.
There are no masks available for purchase.
Dammit.
There is plenty of time left in this day for something else to go horribly wrong, no doubt.
I seem to be on a roll.
I am better prepared on the food front than the crowded room front.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
I can send you
a home-made mask if you like. There are also many how-to instructions online for masks. You could possibly have enough time to make a mask for everyone in the room. Many of the mask instructions are very basic and don't take much time to assemble but you will have to obtain all the various components. I will gladly help if I can.
Thank you.
I just put in a call, sent out an email to opposing attorneys, asking if anyone had an objection to my appearance by telephone.
The attorneys have no objection. Let's see just how big of a p...k the judge is.
I am running a slight temperature.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
Add safty glasses to wearing a mask to improve
prevention of droplet to eye transmission. Hopefully a nationwide directive to wear masks will prevent the Judge from ordering removal of protective equipment in the small room.
Still yourself, deep water can absorb many disturbances with minimal reaction.
--When the opening appears release yourself.
Has anyone talked about this?
link
ggersh brought it up yesterday,
but it was mostly ignored.
IMO it's worthy of discussion. From what I've picked up, the Trumpsters are down with the "he violated chain of command and therefore, the firing was correct." Seems wrong to me, but would like to hear from those that have more education on historical precedents.
Also would like to hear from a military historian on
significance. It was authors on C99 that created awareness for me on the effects of lower level military personnel actions ending conflicts (World War I and Vietnam.) Not taught in traditional history courses or regular MSM (main stream media) celebration of past wars.
Still yourself, deep water can absorb many disturbances with minimal reaction.
--When the opening appears release yourself.
not here, I believe, but it is well worth to be discussed
and learned more about.
https://www.euronews.com/live
Needs discussed, Monday March 30 the Pentagon
issued orders for installations to stop reporting coronavirus cases as military-linked infections.
Would appreciate a conversation between knowledgeable members to better understand the situation. Many of the current events decoupling economies, mass movement of citizens back to their country of citizenship, civilian economic restrictions and limiting information flow from military is creepily similar to historical accounts of activities just prior or after starting a major hot war.
Still yourself, deep water can absorb many disturbances with minimal reaction.
--When the opening appears release yourself.
Nice video of the crew cheering for him as he left the boat
https://theweek.com/speedreads/906644/navy-captain-ousted-over-coronavir...
Marilyn
"Make dirt, not war." eyo
Well gee this is a big surprise ain't
.
Of course he is still making his tenants that live in his slum rentals continue to pay their rents. Mnuchin is saying that people without a bank account on record with the IRS might not get their checks until May. The IRS could open a website for people on SSI and veterans to put in their bank account, but that would be too easy. Hey did the corporations get their bailout money on time without and effing means testing to see if they even need it?
Check out what this airline workers spokeswoman has to say. It's beyond heartbreaking the sadness and outrage she expresses here. F this government that doesn't care what happens to the people that they are supposed to represent. We have a had a huge failure of representation, but this epidemic is sure exposing the cruelty behind their masks of empty promises.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bsNJMc6-5g]
This bat needs to retire today. STAT in fact!
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RECgHAQRhT4]
Jimmy is putting out some great stuff and this doesn't disappoint.
"Cheese in a trap"
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxGrgReuXPY]
AOC, Bernie, Kamala, Warren and others are pleading with the Trump administration to do more for us lowly peons. But they have absolutely no leverage to demand that happens right gawd damn now because they didn't hold out for them before they voted. AOC made sure she stood up on the house floor and ranted about how badly FUBAR'd the bill was just before she voted for it. Hmm anyone know if Tulsi is saying anything about this? UBI going to get passed? Not according to McConnell. He says no more bills are going to be considered. Surprised aren't you?
People gave Maisey a lot of crap for asking for a voice vote. He was warning us about how bad the bill was, but people like John Kerry, the inmates and others were saying he was just grandstanding. But then not even he put a hold on it like Jimmy points out.
With so many people staying home they have more
time to pay attention to current events. The bait and switch by the Democrats was noticed faster that normal. Thanks for the info and links.
Still yourself, deep water can absorb many disturbances with minimal reaction.
--When the opening appears release yourself.
Oh thank gawd. It's not real
.
BTW Jimmy is pissed that no one stopped the bill and Mike won't answer his fing question. Yes they could have put a hold on it because we saw how republicans did just that over and over and over.........
"The road to voting for progressives in the DP lead to a graveyard." Great comment.
I worry for his BP. Take care, Jimmy.
Where will millions of homeless people live if all the parking lots are full? You go, Jim!