CNN Photos of the Week 8/31/2025

https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/28/world/gallery/photos-this-week-august-21-august-28

Un-genographics

The first time I had my DNA analyzed, it was done through the National Geographic Society's Genographic Project.  The head of the project, Spencer Wells, was quoted somewhere about the mixing of populations so that particular human traits are getting less and less connected to specific geographic locations.  So now, we have people of widely varying backgrounds and heritage all over the globe.  He said that migration, air and ship travel had disconnected locations from particular genealogy and from physical traits. The Genographic Project closed down in 2019.  

Our elderly appetites

Most of the guys I lunch with order soup and salad.  I am impressed at how our desire for food as well as our capacity for food have shrunk. The two of us sometimes split a meal advertised for one and there are even times when there are leftovers from the split meal.  There are situations where we know the former weights and portions of what we ate but are not interested or capable of eating that quantity now.

It seems done!

He has dementia but we couldn't find a place close by.  After a couple of years, we found one.  Yay!  Less driving!

Pop-up

I was surprised the first few times I was reading a web "page" and some ad popped up right over the words I was reading. I realize that I didn't create the code for the page. I don't know what choices the coding gives the creator of the page.  I realize that a web "page" is not a paper page regardless of what it is called.  I guess the coding is used more often these days to create a short video with distracting movement and scene change almost at the point I am up to in reading but not quite.  I still consider such practices examples of poor choice and poor manners.

Vitamins, meds & pharmocracy

I am somewhat interested in the history of daily vitamins and meds.  One of our daily medicines is supposed to be taken on an empty stomach and not to involve a meal for an hour.  That and other restrictions and special conditions makes me guess that a highly motivated political party in the future will use people's avoidance of death to further disrupt lives.  I envision "special conditions" that include "this important med is to be taken only with a glass of Ike's Beer between 3 AM and 4AM first day of each month of the year."  I imagine with your powerful imagination, you can cook up other memorable instructions.

Eve: How the female body drove 200 million years of evolution

This book is sub-titled "How the female human body drove 200 million years of evolution".  I read a sentence yesterday that grabbed me. "There is a moment in every girl's life when she realizes she is being watched.  That her body is a thing that is seen and that men are the ones doing the watching."  My wife dated fully and she said she definitely had that moment more than once.

CNN Photos of the Week 8/24/2025

https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/21/world/gallery/photos-this-week-august-14-august-21

Changing

I read in BBC news that Denmark is discontinuing its postal service for letters.  It will continue to move parcels.  That changes a 400 year tradition.  Seems like an important mark of a changing world.  The world is always changing but some changes are more noticeable.

Helen Slater

I came across her name and recognized it as the actress who played one of the kidnapers in "Ruthless People."  I read that some teen girls just hope that nobody ever dislikes them, which struck me as an outlandish wish.  As a guy, I expected to be disliked by other, lesser guys for my brilliance, verve and sophistication.  There are a couple of shots of Helen Slater's face in Ruthless People that communicate the agony of being strongly disliked, maybe hated, when you really don't want that to be how anyone at all feels about you.  As her "husband" explains to the character, the woman they have kidnapped and are keeping chained in their basement is SUPPOSED to hate Helen's character because she is one of her CAPTORS.

In looking at this, I saw the name of "Dale Launer", the screenwriter of Ruthless People and two other movies that tickle me, "Love Potion No.9" and "My Cousin Vinny". You see them on streaming.

Storyworth questions

My daughter gave me a Storyworth subscription.  That is a deal where the Storyworth people send a subscriber a question each week for a year, As I posted before, this group emphasizes that the customer is free to modify the question or to ask a different one, but I found forming a reasonable answer to their typical, more or less standard questions helped me think about pivotal events in my life.

I am confident that $100 would be wasted by people who face writing and self examination with dread.  However, if you have an ok feeling about forming answers to questions about your life and writing or typing the answers, you might be mighty thankful for those abilities and for the experience of working out the Storyworth questions.

I so much enjoyed and benefitted that I gave her a subscription also and now I have the pleasure of reading her take on events that often included me or my wife.

It is often "Me", #2

Yesterday, I wrote a post entitled "It's Me, Most of the Time".  I wanted to emphasize that thoughts, decisions, likes and dislikes come from ME.  I don't think I have poor judgment and I am interested in evidence for and against ideas, goals, directions, causes.  But since my perceptions, decisions, likes and dislikes come from ME, it makes sense at times to take a minute and ask myself where it seems a tendency comes from.  I have lived with myself a long time but many important and influential aspects of ME are subconscious or unconscious and can't easily be brought into the light.  Being unconscious makes my tendencies difficult to see clearly.  Being that way doesn't mean they need to be changed but it doesn't guarantee they are the best I can do.

It's me, most of the time

Mothers and those who mind and educate little kids don't usually find their children using syllogisms, computers or AI.  Like adults, their brains do many things for them and their vision, hearing and memory supply their brains with up-to-date information.  Well, in most cases.  There can be deficits and disabilities, not to mention damage from accidents and mishaps.  

The book "Incognito" by David Eagleman is one that underlined for me how much of my self is governing me, directing me, helping me without my conscious effort.  It is not true that all of that is beyond my ability to affect but training or modifying my habits can be quite a bit more difficult that modifying a sentence.  Generally, if a person is breathing and has a heart that is beating and a series of organs that digest food, none of those essential activities are due to that person's conscious efforts.  It can be surprising how much of being alive for one day or more is taken care of by one's body without knowledge or awareness of the brain.

Rainy days

We haven't had flooding, or damaging winds, or lightning damage that I know of.  But it has been raining intensely several days in a row.  They have been strongly overcast so we don't have good sunlight and sharp, intense shadows.  Just low lighting, hour after hour.

I sometimes wonder if those with ancestry from the British Isles, stuck out there in the ocean, have any special inherited ability to function well in spite of rainy overcast days and nights.

We have been subject to what I think has been an unusual amount of scattering. They make it quite possible to have no rain in one place and intense rain nearby.  Such conditions make it difficult to explain in words what the weather "here" is or isn't.  We get reports of rain in this community and we can see that parts on radar maps over there are getting pelted while we aren't.

CNN Photos of the Week 8/17/2025

https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/14/world/gallery/photos-this-week-august-7-august-14

Dr. Therese Huston

I got an email advertising Huston's book "Sharp: 14 Ways to Improve Your Life Using Brain Science".  I knew I had purchased the book but I hadn't tried it.  I tried searching Amazon books, not thinking that many murders, mysteries and scary books emphasize how sharp the big monster's sword or knife is.  Inserting the author's name brought the book right up.

She is a clever writer.  For instance she cites on her vita an article entitled "Men can be so hormonal", which seems true to me but rarely stated that way.  I began reading "Sharp" but also went back to her books and bought "How Women Decide".

Education and credentials

I read the other day that some rural hospitals have an emergency room that has zero "doctors" on duty.  I am interested in education and credentials.  Many people use the word "doctor" to mean "physician".  I am a doctor, in that I hold a doctorate degree, obtained from the Graduate School of the University of Maryland.  But don't expect me to prescribe medicines for your child's sore throat.  An associate degree is often a degree obtained after two years of "higher education".  A bachelor's degree usually means four years of higher education.  A master's degree means 1 or 2 years of graduate education beyond the bachelor level and a doctorate may mean 3 or more years beyond the bachelor level.  

Tough or kind or both

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-13-2025

Most days, I at least look at "Letter from an American" by the historian Heather Cox Richardson.  I don't read recent history much but she often writes about something I would like to understand better.  

I was born in 1939, the year that World War II started.  As I was growing up, I heard about Germany and the Nazis, but I also heard about the Great Depression. I guess that the idea of the individual was so strong that the notion of the US government actually helping its citizens was, and still is, strongly frowned on.  Photographs and writings about the Great Depression, 1929 to the start of WW II, made it clear that it was a hard time. t.ly/tQfti

The link at the top of the page leads to Richardson's statements about Frances Perkins, a woman who was in the center of the creation of the US Social Security, something that did not exist until 1935.  I have read about the struggle to deal with sources of energy other than human muscle and about the struggle to create factories and human schedules that involve showing up at a given time.

Cinematic art by Dr. Lynn Kirby

She reminded me this morning that she has performed other arts than pottery.  She has been a potter/ceramicist for 15 to 20 years.  But she has completed works of slide-tape, too.  One of her works is "The Reasons for Steven Point", which reviews some of the history of Stevens Point and motivations for people being here.  For my 40th birthday, she and her friend and mentor, Dr. Riggs, created a disc of "Bill Kirby, This is Your Life" using the format of the tv show "This is your life".  Her dissertation was about the problem of knowledge of importance not stored in paper books but in other media, such as films, CD, DVD, computer files, etc.

There might be yellowjackets in your clothes

It was our first date.  We were students at the same college.   Another couple invited me and a guest to a picnic at his house.  The four of us walked through a park at a stop on the way.  On the walk, she was last in our line of four walking along a path.  It turned out there was an underground nest of yellowjackets. Their nest had a single small hole right in the path.  After three of us walked over their nest, they reacted.  They buzzed around her and she began to yell.  I came back to help drive them away from her.  I began to look into her blouse and pat down her hips.  "What are you doing??"  "They might be in your clothes".  "They aren't, thank you very much!"  That experience emphasized her attractive body for me but I have forgotten all about it now.

Length of tv shows and movies

I wonder if tv streaming companies like Netflix and Amazon Prime pay much attention to the length of their shows and movies.  We like to clean up the dinner dishes and stream something at 7 PM.  After about an hour, we like to have me read aloud, usually from a book selected by her book club or mine.  After another hour, we like to watch a 2nd streaming show and go to bed at 10 PM.

We do sometimes watch for about an hour and return to the place we left off on the next evening.  We often turn away from shows that are more than two hours. None of this is set in stone but it is fairly firm.

I was pleased to see a line of choices on Netflix labeled "shorter shows".  We found the show "Reba" that fit our schedule nicely.  Most of the Call the Midwife shows fit unless we stumble onto a Christmas special.  

CNN Photos of the week 8/10/25

https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/07/world/gallery/photos-this-week-july-31-august-07

One way to reawaken

When we compare memories, hers and mine often don't match.  Sometimes, they do, of course, but it is only natural that two people of different genders, with different backgrounds, would sometimes be struck by different things.  We have both noticed our own increasing tendencies to strike the "senior pose", the body and head position that a person often takes when trying to recall something once known but now refusing to come to mind.

I now realize that some forms of forgetting might refresh my world.  If I have met you but I don't remember you, I might take a new look at you and your virtues and abilities, being surprised at how pleasing or helpful you can be.  

Same with my backyard and neighborhood.  When I spot a jerky little chipmunk or a splooting squirrel, it is a new sight despite my seeing a chipmunk and a splooter yesterday.  Just another gift from aging.

Two books on being a young Muslim woman

One is "Defiant Dreams" and the other "Love in a Headscarf".   I enjoyed the first one more.  I would have a difficult time with the ritual of formalized courting, family from the male and the female getting together at a prearranged time, with the couple glancing at each other but not showing too much interest.

Defiant Dreams tells about a highly intelligent Afghan girl in a culture that frowns heavily on girls being educated.  She did, though.

Addresses and alphabetical order

If I just think about writing a book about addresses or one about alphabetical order, I think they might not be rich enough subjects to support a whole book.  Yet, we have enjoyed "The Address Book"by Deirdre Mask and "A Place for Everything" by Judith Flanders.

Mask invites the reader to think about life in a city without addresses.  A person might explain "I live near the beech tree".  She makes clear there are good-sized cities in the world that don't have a system of addresses.  The street we live on was evidently begun with one address system from one urban authority and then furnished with addresses by a different government. The result is a puzzling gap in the house numbers.  

Flanders has written several books about life in the Victorian era.  She is an expert on the subject.  Lynn was a professor of school librarianship, you know those school rooms that have been the subject of controversy since they can furnish children with books that introduce subjects that some parents don't want their children to know about.  I read that large libraries have existed that had basically no system for placing the books in some order.  An author said about such libraries that a patron's best hope was to ask a librarian where a given book might be.  

Physically small books might be stored together or maybe all the books with blue covers together.  Flanders says that it was centuries before someone suggested using the 2nd or later letters of an author's name after storing all the books by an author whose name began with R.

Not a bug

We have a dropmore scarlet honeysuckle vine growing against our dining room window.  Every now and then, a bug flies up to the trumpet-shaped flowers except it is not a bug. It is a hummingbird.

https://www.americangardener.com/dropmore-scarlet-honeysuckle-vine/

We read "The Hummingbird's Gift" by Sy Montgomery.  I just found out that is a woman naturalist who has written several books.  Lynn started with Montgomery reading "Secrets of the Octopus" and very much liked it.  When the two of us toured Cuba with Elderhostel, I picked up a lifesized wooden hummingbird and it hangs demurely from the dining room chandelier.

As I have looked at the wooden model, I can imagine a hummingbird asking God "Why me?"  It is true that the bird's bill and flying abilities perfectly match the task of sucking pollen from small trumpet-shaped flowers but few other sources of food can be consumed.  We read that hummingbirds fly from the Florida coast to central America for winter.

Choice

When I got to the point where I was supposed to write a dissertation in my PhD program, I felt I should remember what had interested me and read in those topics widely.  I settled on decision making.  What topic, what book, what movie, what food, what woman to ask out, what, which…

I had heard many times about listing pros and cons.  I learned that Ben Franklin had a system of listing and then striking out a pro along with a con or several that seemed of equal weight.  I was suspicious of the concept of equal weight determined by opinion or some sort of judgment or sense.  That was in 1967 and 68.  

Much later, I learned that I could look up a question or a decision in Google Search or Duckduckgo and find inspiration and aspects of the matter from the output that showed related questions that others had asked.  This reminds me of what happened with Storyworth, one of several programs that asked me questions about my life history.  That company emphasized that I could alter their questions to better suit me but I found that forcing myself to answer their questions led to new and very worthwhile memories and insights into my life.

I am certainly not original in finding that others' comments, reactions and ideas assist me in thinking and exploring.  That is true for any sort of thinking and exploring.

Lots of bots?

I read this item for Numlock News this morning. 

 iRobot(s)

If you are, for some reason, still on X like I am, you may not find the following revelation very surprising: 76% of X users are bots. More broadly, 50% of all internet traffic comes from "non-human sources." Yes, I knew X's "For You" page was essentially run by guys in moldy basements with computer setups straight out of The Minority Report. But the idea that three out of every four accounts on X is a bot is still mind-numbing. How many times have I argued about LeBron James' legacy with a computer program?

Ashley Lutz and Nich Lichtenberg, Fortune

I find it interesting that the authors seem to question the worth of arguing with a computer program.  I find that "arguing" with a computer program is not very different from arguing with a deceased author.  Or questioning a hypothesis proposed by somebody.

Kirby's Five Things

1. I usually carry a coin in my pocket for assistance in making decisions.  If I want heads and I get heads, I am happy. If I don't know what I want, my reaction to what I get tells me.  If I get tails but I want heads, I ignore the coin.

2. I was surprised when I was little and we got an additional family member.  I knew girls existed but no one had mentioned that we might get one.  Once we are into August, I think of meeting my sister since it happened then.

3. CNN photos of the week: https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/31/world/gallery/photos-this-week-july-24-july-31/index.html?

4. This blog started with writing about the Buddhist/Quaker habit of meditating.  If you are looking for an introduction to the activity, take a look at "Take a Moment" by Paul Christelis.  It is a children's book but former children can find quick, direct, clear discussion in it.

5. Pope Gregory XIII and me - The first assignment we had in computer coding class was to write a program that would yield the number of days between two dates.  In our research, we learned the pope's astronomers told him in 1582 the Christian calendar was badly out of alignment with the actual time.  He declared October 4 would be followed the next day by October 15.  There were riots protesting the Papal shortening of living people's lives!!

Nails

I think it is surprising how much I use my fingernails.   Scratching is way better using nails than just finger tips.  Many stains or bits of food and other drips and accidents can be handled better with nails.  I know that women can make a big deal of colors and designs on their fingernails.  So far, I have resisted painting my nails or having them done.  I included a photo in this blog of a young woman's hand with quite long nails.  She used a keyboard all the time in her work but she said she has gotten used to working with those nails.  I am glad I am not in the position of those Chinese gentlemen who were forced by the custom of the day to show high rank and leisure by wearing very long nails.  

Transmission speed

Recently, I signed in.  Got rejected for not agreeing with their records.  I knew the info was right.  I signed in again.  Rejected again.  Signed in again.  Accepted.

I verified that I did the correct info all three times.  Why rejected by mechanical devices and then accepted?  I put the event down to a matter of what I call transmission speed.  It wasn't at an unusual time, just normal business hours but I hadn't tried to use those circuits earlier.  I have found previously occurrences that seem to me as though the series of connections and actions was "unexpected", that the machinery wasn't ready.  I guess somebody arranged for me to get a short statement of rejection instead of a long blabby statement of explanation.  Maybe I am just not welcome.