Trivia & Miscellaneous

[Daniel E.]

Senescence - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Senescence or biological aging is the gradual deterioration of functional characteristics in living organisms. The word senescence can refer to either cellular senescence or to senescence of the whole organism...

More than 300 different theories have been posited to explain the nature and causes of aging. A good theory would both explain past observations and predict the results of future experiments.

The theories fall into two broad categories:

• Aging is programmed
• Aging is a result of accumulation of damage

Programmed theories of aging posit that aging is adaptive, normally invoking selection for evolvability or group selection. The reproductive-cell cycle theory suggests that aging is regulated by changes in hormonal signaling over the lifespan...

One of the most prominent theories of aging was first proposed by Harman in 1956. It posits that free radicals produced by dissolved oxygen, radiation, cellular respiration and other sources cause damage to the molecular machines in the cell and gradually wear them down. This is also known as oxidative stress. There is substantial evidence to back up this theory. Old animals have larger amounts of oxidized proteins, DNA and lipids than their younger counterparts.

 

[Daniel E.]

‘Am I even fit to be a mom?’ Diaper need is an invisible part of poverty in America

In rural areas, diaper banks are often the only lifeline for parents who cannot afford diapers, which can't be purchased with federal aid.

19thnews.org

Nationwide, studies have found that diaper need is a greater contributor to postpartum depression than food insecurity and housing instability.

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National Diaper Bank Network - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The National Diaper Bank Network is a United States-based non-profit organization that is dedicated to ensuring that every child in the U.S. has an adequate supply of diapers to remain clean, dry and healthy. NDBN is a nationwide network of independently operating diaper banks and pantries that collect and distribute over 30 million diapers for children experiencing diaper need.

 

[Daniel E.]

The Deadly Myth That Human Error Causes Most Car Crashes

Every year thousands of Americans die on the roads. Individuals take the blame for systemic problems.

www.theatlantic.com

American transportation departments, law-enforcement agencies, and news outlets frequently maintain that most crashes—indeed, 94 percent of them, according to the most widely circulated statistic—are solely due to human error. Blaming the bad decisions of road users implies that nobody else could have prevented them. That enables car companies to deflect attention from their decisions to add heft and height to the SUVs and trucks that make up an ever-larger portion of vehicle sales, and it allows traffic engineers to escape scrutiny for dangerous street designs...

And if the buck stops with the driver, automakers feel less pressure to make lifesaving safety features standard across their models—which many of them do not. Last year, Consumer Reports found that the average vehicle buyer would have to pay $2,500 for a blind-spot-detection system. Pedestrian-detection technology was standard on 13 of the 15 most popular vehicle models—but unavailable on one and part of a $16,000 optional package on another.

 

[Daniel E.]

Cuban Missile Crisis - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

President Kennedy had been told in early 1961 that a nuclear war would likely kill a third of humanity, with most or all of those deaths concentrated in the US, the USSR, Europe and China; Khrushchev may well have received similar reports from his military...

Fifty years after the crisis, Graham T. Allison wrote:

Fifty years ago, the Cuban missile crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear disaster. During the standoff, US President John F. Kennedy thought the chance of escalation to war was "between 1 in 3 and even", and what we have learned in later decades has done nothing to lengthen those odds. We now know, for example, that in addition to nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, the Soviet Union had deployed 100 tactical nuclear weapons to Cuba, and the local Soviet commander there could have launched these weapons without additional codes or commands from Moscow. The US air strike and invasion that were scheduled for the third week of the confrontation would likely have triggered a nuclear response against American ships and troops, and perhaps even Miami. The resulting war might have led to the deaths of over 100 million Americans and over 100 million Russians.

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Vasily Arkhipov - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Vasily Aleksandrovich Arkhipov (Russian: Василий Александрович Архипов, IPA: [vɐˈsʲilʲɪj ɐlʲɪkˈsandrəvʲɪtɕ arˈxʲipəf], 30 January 1926 – 19 August 1998) was a Soviet Navy officer credited with preventing a Soviet nuclear strike (and, potentially, all-out nuclear war) during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Such an attack likely would have caused a major global thermonuclear response.

 

[Daniel E.]

Resurrection Day - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Resurrection Day is a novel written by Brendan DuBois in 1999. It is an alternate history where the Cuban Missile Crisis escalated to a full-scale war, the Soviet Union is devastated, and the United States has been reduced to a third-rate power, relying on the United Kingdom for aid. It won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History that year.

 

[Daniel E.]

Voyage (novel) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Voyage is a 1996 hard science fiction novel by British author Stephen Baxter. The book depicts a crewed mission to Mars as it might have been in another timeline, one where John F. Kennedy survived the assassination attempt on him on 22 November 1963. Voyage won a Sidewise Award for Alternate History, and was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1997.

In 1999, it was adapted as a radio serial for BBC Radio 4 by Dirk Maggs.

 

[Daniel E.]

It’s time to fear the fungi

Humans have long been protected from fungal infections. Climate change could ruin that.

arstechnica.com

One of the reasons fungal infections are so common in so many creatures is that fungi themselves are ubiquitous. "This is dating myself, but you know the Sting song 'Every Breath You Take'? Well, every breath you take you inhale somewhere between 100 and 700,000 spores," says Andrej Spec, a medical mycologist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. "They've made it to the space station. They are absolutely everywhere."

 

[David Baxter PhD]

It's true. There's nothing like a funguy or fungal to brighten up a dreary day.

 

[Daniel E.]

The Fleecing of Navajo Weavers

The popularity of Navajo rug designs has allowed some fair trade businesses to thrive while Navajo weavers suffer. Ninety percent of indigenous peoples living in the southwestern United States depend on crafts as their principal or secondary source of income. Yet, of the $1 billion worth of...

www.culturalsurvival.org

Ninety percent of indigenous peoples living in the southwestern United States depend on crafts as their principal or secondary source of income.

 

[Daniel E.]

Tequila sunrise - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The tequila sunrise is a cocktail made of tequila, orange juice, and grenadine syrup. It's served unmixed in a tall glass. The modern drink originates from Sausalito, California, in the early 1970s after an earlier one created in the 1930s in Phoenix, Arizona. The cocktail is named for its appearance when served—with gradations of color resembling a sunrise.

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Tequila Sunrise Mocktail

Make this pretty peach and orange mocktail recipe for your mom this Mother's day. This non-alcoholic drink can be adapted to suit your taste preference.

whiskitrealgud.com

• 1 ½ cup Simply Orange Juice or your choice of orange juice Pulp free
• 1 cup Simply Peach or your choice of peach juice
• 6 tbsp lemon soda
• 6 tbsp grenadine
• ice

 

[Daniel E.]

20 Ways Restaurants Trick You Into Spending (and Eating) More

There's a good chance you've likely fallen for these restaurant tricks that result in you eating more food and spending more. Here's what to look out for.

www.eatthis.com

A 2009 study from Cornell University's Center for Hospitality Research confirmed that groups offered menus with dollar signs next to the prices spent far less than those given menus with only numerals. The dollar sign is a rather powerful visual trigger that reminds us we're about to lose something we value, prompting our instinct to spend with restraint.

In a 2002 six-week field study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, researchers found that adding an enticing description to a menu item increased sales by a whopping 27%. These appetizing descriptions changed customers' feelings of satisfaction toward the food and the restaurant, even influencing their thoughts about returning in the future.

In a 2003 study from the University of Leicester published in the journal Environment and Behavior, a restaurant played classical music, pop music, and no music over the course of 18 nights. The classical music inspired guests to spend more money on their meals when compared with the nights when pop music or no music played.

 

[Daniel E.]

Pro-Trump counties now have far higher COVID death rates. Misinformation is to blame

An analysis by NPR shows that since the vaccine rollout, counties that voted heavily for Donald Trump have had more than twice the COVID mortality rates of those that voted for Joe Biden.

www.npr.org

Since May 2021, people living in counties that voted heavily for Donald Trump during the last presidential election have been nearly three times as likely to die from COVID-19 as those who live in areas that went for now-President Biden.

Recent polling shows that partisanship is now this single strongest identifying predictor of whether someone is vaccinated..."If I wanted to guess if somebody was vaccinated or not and I could only know one thing about them, I would probably ask what their party affiliation is."

The rate of Republican vaccination against COVID-19 has flatlined at just 59%...By comparison, 91% of Democrats are vaccinated.

More than 90% of Republicans surveyed believe or are unsure about at least one false statement about COVID-19.

 

[Daniel E.]

Most surprising to me was the Boston Public Library since I have never heard it mentioned before.

The Nation's Largest Libraries: A Listing By Volumes Held

This fact sheet lists the top 100 largest libraries in the United States by volumes held

www.ala.org

 

[Daniel E.]

Daisy wheel printing - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Bi-directional printing​

Most daisy-wheel printers could print a line and then, using built-in memory, print the following line backwards, from right to left. This saved the time that otherwise would have been needed to return the print head to its starting point. This was sometimes known as 'logic seeking,' and was a feature on some dot-matrix printers as well.

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History of printing
Woodblock printing 200 Movable type 1040 Intaglio (printmaking) 1430 Printing press c. 1440 Etching c. 1515 Mezzotint 1642 Relief printing 1690 Aquatint 1772 Lithography 1796 Chromolithography 1837 Rotary press 1843 Hectograph 1860 Offset printing 1875 Hot metal typesetting 1884 Mimeograph 1885 Daisy wheel printing 1889 Photostat and rectigraph 1907 Screen printing 1911 Spirit duplicator 1923 Dot matrix printing 1925 Xerography 1938 Spark printing 1940 Phototypesetting 1949 Inkjet printing 1950 Dye-sublimation 1957 Laser printing 1969 Thermal printing c. 1972 Solid ink printing 1972 Thermal-transfer printing 1981 3D printing 1986 Digital printing 1991

 

[Daniel E.]

How America Broke the Speed Limit

The lifesaving law that nobody wants.

slate.com

We could do a better job training drivers. American teenagers are by far the most dangerous group of people on the road, with 16-and-17-year-olds more than three times likelier to get into a fatal crash than adults in their 30s or 40s. After 80, drivers again become more dangerous to people around them.

 

[Daniel E.]

7 Superfoods That Could Help You Live Longer

Research shows that those who follow a diet that favors fresh foods over processed are more likely to live longer and avoid cancer and heart disease.

www.aarp.org

One study of older Japanese adults found that those who drank the most green tea — five or more cups a day — were 26 percent less likely to die during the seven-year study period than those who drank one cup a day. What is it about green tea? Nutrient-rich foods that are high in antioxidants — like green tea — have been linked with longer telomeres. Like the plastic tips of a shoelace, telomeres can be found at the end of chromosomes and protect DNA. They naturally shorten as we age, but the process can be accelerated by things like smoking, stress and poor diet.

 

[Daniel E.]

Telomere - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Potential effect of psychological stress​

Meta-analyses found that increased perceived psychological stress was associated with a small decrease in telomere length—but that these associations attenuate to no significant association when accounting for publication bias. The literature concerning telomeres as integrative biomarkers of exposure to stress and adversity is dominated by cross-sectional and correlational studies, which makes causal interpretation problematic. A 2020 review argued that the relationship between psychosocial stress and telomere length appears strongest for stress experienced in utero or early life.

 

[Daniel E.]

APA PsycNet

psycnet.apa.org

Given fundamental East-West differences in self-construal (i.e., the independent vs. interdependent self), we predicted that members of Eastern cultural groups would affirm other people, rather than defend and affirm the self, after encountering conditions of mortality salience...Mortality salience promoted culturally divergent responses, leading European Americans to defend the self and Asian Americans to defend other people.

 

[Daniel E.]

How Omicron, the New Covid-19 Variant, Got Its Name (Published 2021)

The World Health Organization began naming the variants after Greek letters to avoid public confusion and stigma.

www.nytimes.com

“The Spanish flu did not come from Spain. We don’t know where it emerged from, but there’s a very good possibility it emerged from the U.S.”

 

[Daniel E.]

The Tenacious Quest to Find the World’s Best Rice

Among hundreds of Japanese brands and cultivars, it takes a blind tasting by a panel of “rice sommeliers” to determine the top of the crop.

tastecooking.com

Today, the average Japanese person eats 118 pounds (53.5 kilograms) of rice a year. That sounds like a lot—Americans eat about a fifth of that—but it’s less than half of the per capita consumption in 1962. Diversifying diets and trendy low-carb regimens are part of the reason. Japanese policymakers now fret about “kome-banare”—a collective distancing from the grain.