Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Marian L. Tupy: The World's Getting Better All the Time (HumanProgress)
[…] now is the perfect time to reflect upon the positive difference humanity has made to the world over the past 12 months. How have we advanced as a species? We often underestimate the progress we make because it is incremental: an algorithm here, a genetic tweak there… But all these things combine to improve our future.
Peter Aldhous: More Than A Million Reasons To Be Cheerful About 2017 (BuzzFeed)
Despite hurricanes, wildfires, and the looming threat of nuclear war, globally the number of disaster deaths was quite low this year.
Robin Denselow: "The Ramones at the Rainbow: 'very loud, very slick and very very simple' - archive, 1978" (The Guardian Archives)
3 January 1978 Hailed as New York's top punks, their style is totally different to that of other new wave bands.
Rebecca Nicholson: Are the 9.1 days you spent watching Game of Thrones a waste of a life? (The Guardian)
An online 'streaming consumption calculator' lays out precisely how much time you gave up to binge on your favourite shows. But one TV writer maintains she has no regret.
Steve Rose: Peggy Cummins, Gun Crazy's iconic femme fatale, dies aged 92 (The Guardian)
Irish actor Cummins never quite conquered Hollywood but she made her mark in the 1950 film noir classic, as well as cult horror Night of the Demon.
Jonathan Romney: "Caleb Landry Jones: 'Working with Frances McDormand terrified me'" (The Guardian)
Hollywood's 'go-to oddball' on his new movie, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, his intense acting style and why Syd Barrett is his guy.
Lucy Mangan: Why are our wardrobes full of unworn clothes? Because most purchases are not rational (The Guardian)
We often buy dresses for the people we'd like to be, and hold on to things because they remind us of good times. But a new survey has revealed that UK shoppers own £10bn worth of clothes they do not wear.
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David Bruce has over 80 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
Presenting
Michael Egan
took the day off.
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
from Marc Perkel
Marc's Guide to Curing Cancer
So far so good on beating cancer for now. I'm doing fine. At the end of the month I'll be 16 months into an 8 month mean lifespan. And yesterday I went on a 7 mile hike and managed to keep up with the hiking group I was with. So, doing something right.
Still waiting for future test results and should see things headed in the right direction. I can say that it's not likely that anything dire happens in the short term so that means that I should have time to make several more attempts at this. So even if it doesn't work the first time there are a lot of variations to try. So if there's bad news it will help me pick the next radiation target.
I have written a "how to" guide for oncologists to perform the treatment that I got. I'm convinced that I'm definitely onto something and whether it works for me or not isn't the definitive test. I know if other people tried this that it would work for some of them, and if they improve it that it will work for a lot of them.
The guide is quite detailed and any doctor reading this can understand the procedure at every level. I also go into detail as to how it works, how I figured it out, and variations and improvements that could be tried to enhance it. I also introduce new ways to look at the problem. There is a lot of room for improvement and I think that doctors reading it will see what I'm talking about and want to build on it. And it's written so that if you're not a doctor you can still follow it. It also has a personal story revealing that I'm the class clown of cancer support group. I give great interviews and I look pretty hot in a lab coat.
So, feel free to read this and see what I'm talking about. But if any of you want to help then pass this around to both doctors and cancer patients. I need some media coverage. I'm looking for as many eyeballs as possible to read these ideas. Even if this isn't the solution, it's definitely on the right track. After all, I did hike 7 miles yesterday. And this hiking group wasn't moving slow. So if this isn't working then, why am I still here?
I also see curing cancer as more of an engineering problem that a medical problem. So if you are good at solving problems and most of what you know about medicine was watching the Dr. House MD TV show, then you're at the level I was at when I started. So anyone can jump in and be part of the solution.
Here is a link to my guide: Oncologists Guide to Curing Cancer using Abscopal Effect
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
BANISHED FROM THE TRUMP WORLD.
YUCK.
STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES.
"STRAIGHT OUT OF CENTRAL CASTING."
STEVE BANNON HAS "LOST HIS MIND".
DIVING IN THE DEEP END.
MANO EL MANO.
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Lots of fog, no rain.
New Postage Stamps
'Game Of Thrones'
Britain's postal service, the Royal Mail, is celebrating HBO's epic fantasy drama "Game of Thrones" with the release of a new set of 15 related postage stamps.
Ten characters, including Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner), Jon Snow (Kit Harington), Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) and Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke), are featured.
The collection recognizes the "very significant British contribution" to the hit show, the Royal Mail said in a statement Wednesday.
Most of the filming takes place at Titanic Studios in Belfast, Linen Mill Studios in Banbridge, and on location across Northern Ireland, it said.
"Additionally, the acclaimed cast is predominantly British and Irish, and British expertise is to the fore in many areas of the production, including award-winning costume design and prosthetic special effects," the service added.
'Game Of Thrones'
Wedding News
Page - Portner
Huge congratulations are in order for Ellen Page and Emma Portner!
The Juno star secretly married her dancer girlfriend recently, and they have the sweetest pictures to show for it. Page announced the news on Wednesday to her followers through an Instagram that gave an intimate look at the next chapter of the couple's lives.
"Can't believe I get to call this extraordinary woman my wife. @emmaportner," she captioned a trio of photos. The pictures showed the couple's new wedding bands, a still of them cuddling, and a portrait of Portner:
Page and Portner seem to be totally in sync, since Portner posted two of the same of pictures with a remarkably similar (but no less lovely) caption.
Page - Portner
DNA Reveals New Clues
Ancient Infant
Around 11,500 years ago, at a place that is now called the Upward Sun River, in the region that has since been named Alaska, two girls died. One was a late-term fetus; the other, probably her cousin, was six weeks old. They were both covered in red ochre and buried in a circular pit, along with hunting weapons made from bones and antlers. "There was intentionality in the burial ceremony," says Ben Potter from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, who uncovered their skeletons in 2013. "These were certainly children who were well-loved."
Now, several millennia after their short lives ended, these infants have become important all over again. Within their DNA, Potter's team has found clues about when and how the first peoples came to the Americas.
They did so from East Asia-that much is clear. Today, Russia and Alaska are separated by the waters of the Bering Strait. But tens of thousands of years ago, when sea levels were lower, that gap was bridged by continuous land, hundreds of miles wide and covered in woodlands and meadows. This was Beringia. It was a harsh world, but you could walk across it-and people did.
The Upward Sun River infants, who have been named Xach'itee'aanenh T'eede Gaay" (Sunrise Girl-Child) and "Yelkaanenh T'eede Gaay" (Dawn Twilight Girl-Child) by the local indigenous community, were found at a crucial point along this route. Few human remains have been found from such a northerly or westerly part of the Americas, or from such an ancient time. "It's hard to impress upon you how rare they are," says Potter. "The window into the past that these children provide is priceless."
By analyzing the older infant's genome, Potter and his colleagues, including José Víctor Moreno Mayar and Lasse Vinner, have shown that she belonged to a previously unknown group of ancient people, who are distinct from all known Native Americans, past and present. The team have dubbed them the Ancient Beringians.
Ancient Infant
Court Orders Dentist To Pay Mother
Taiwan
Taiwan's top court has ordered a dentist to pay his mother around Tw$22.33 million (US$744,000) as reimbursement for the money she spent raising and educating him.
The supreme court Tuesday upheld a previous ruling that the 41-year-old, identified by his family name Chu, should honour a contract he signed with his mother 20 years ago promising to refund her.
The plaintiff, surnamed Lo, divorced her husband in 1990 and raised their two sons on her own.
Worried that nobody would look after her when she got old, Lo signed the contracts with her sons after they both turned 20, stipulating that they must pay her 60 percent of the net profit from their incomes.
She filed the lawsuit eight years ago when they refused to honour the contracts. The older son eventually paid her Tw$5 million to settle the case.
Taiwan
Shut Down
Voter Fraud Commission
President-for-now Donald Trump (R-Crooked) abruptly shut down his signature voter fraud commission on Wednesday and instead kicked the issue to the Department of Homeland Security.
The announcement comes just a week after Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R-Sock Puppet), who has been running the commission's day-to-day operations in place of Vice President Mike Pence (R-Mother), its official chairman, said the panel would meet later this month.
Trump formed the commission last May to examine the U.S. electoral system for evidence of large-scale voter fraud. He has claimed, without evidence, that millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election.
The commission, formally called the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, has been bedeviled by internal dissension, threats of litigation and the refusal of some states to provide information. Its last known meeting was Sept. 12.
"Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today I signed an executive order to dissolve the Commission, and have asked the Department of Homeland Security to review these issues and determine next courses of action."
Voter Fraud Commission
Turns On Bannon
T-rump
President-for-now Trump (R-Corrupt) issued a lengthy and striking statement on Wednesday slamming his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, over comments that appear in an upcoming book about Trump's first year in office.
"Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency," the statement read. "When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party."
Bannon, the Breitbart chief executive who became Trump's campaign chief in 2016 and his chief strategist in the White House, departed the White House in August. But Breitbart remained staunchly pro-Trump and Bannon said he remained in contact with the commander in chief. (Upon Bannon's departure from the West Wing, Trump thanked "Steve for his service" in defeating Hillary Clinton.)
"Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn't as easy as I make it look," Trump said. "Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country. Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans. Steve doesn't represent my base - he's only in it for himself."
"Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was," the president continued. "It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books."
T-rump
Cancer Dispute
Monsanto
Monsanto Co has won support from eleven U.S. states in its attempt to stop California from requiring cancer warnings on products containing glyphosate, ratcheting up a legal fight over the company's popular weed killer.
Missouri, home to Monsanto's headquarters, along with other farm states including Iowa and Indiana, said in court documents on Tuesday that the warnings would be misleading because there is no definite link between glyphosate and cancer.
Midwest businesses would need to include warnings on glyphosate products if California requires them or stop selling such goods because they may end up in the Golden State, according to the states' filing.
California added glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup herbicide, to its list of cancer-causing chemicals in July 2017 and will require products containing the chemical to carry warnings by July 2018.
The state acted after the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer concluded in 2015 that glyphosate was "probably carcinogenic."
Monsanto
Mosque Pays Fines For Vandal
Arkansas
An Arkansas mosque has paid off the remaining court fines of a man who helped vandalize their sacred space ? doing its part to make sure he doesn't have to serve any more jail time for the crime.
Hisham Yasin, social director of the Masjid Al Salam in Fort Smith, told HuffPost on Tuesday that his congregation had forgiven the convicted vandal, Abraham Davis, long ago. Paying the more than $1,700 in fines Davis still owed was a way to put that forgiveness into action.
Now, Yasin wants Davis move on with his life.
"He needs to keep going, don't even look back. The back is gone," Yasin said. "I look forward to seeing him work and study and become something in the future. And at that time, he'll talk about what happened with him ... how he flipped his life from bad to good."
Davis has expressed deep regret for the crime, writing the mosque a letter of apology from jail.
Arkansas
Australia
'Nature's Smallest Rainbow'
When a male Australian peacock spider wags its bottom at you, it's impossible to look away. In the throes of courtship, the spider's glittering badonkadonk shimmers with all the colors of the rainbow, diffracting intense iridescent light like a living Lisa Frank sticker.
Scientists calls the spectacle "nature's smallest rainbow" - in fact, peacock spider bodies measure at most 5 millimeters (0.2 inches) long, according to a new paper published online in the journal Nature Communications. The researchers also noted that the flashy display is the only known example in nature of males deploying all the colors of the rainbow to entice females during courtship.
The team of researchers from the United States, Belgium, the Netherlands and Australia think they know how two species of miniature peacock spiders (Maratus robinsoni and Maratus chrysomelas) get the dazzling job done. The trick, the researchers say, is in their scales.
"M. robinsoni and M. chrysomelas have two types of visually distinct abdominal scales: rainbow-iridescent scales and velvet black scales," the researchers wrote in their new paper. "These scales show strikingly different morphologies: The black scales are brush-like and randomly oriented, while the rainbow-iridescent scales are more orderly aligned, cling to the cuticle surface and have bulky 3D shapes."
The researchers took a closer look at these bulky, iridescent scales using a variety of imaging techniques, to better understand the surfaces' unique rainbow-scattering properties. The team discovered that each iridescent scale contains a series of three-dimensional, parallel grates used to split different wavelengths of light at different angles.
'Nature's Smallest Rainbow'
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