Once in a Billion Years

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“In the 4-billion-odd-year history of life on Earth, primary endosymbiosis is thought to have only happened twice that we know of, and each time was a massive breakthrough for evolution. The first occurred about 2.2 billion years ago, when an archaea swallowed a bacterium that became the mitochondria.

The second time happened about 1.6 billion years ago, when some of these more advanced cells absorbed cyanobacteria that could harvest energy from sunlight. These became organelles called chloroplasts.  

And now, scientists have discovered that it’s happening again. A species of algae called Braarudosphaera bigelowii was found to have engulfed a cyanobacterium that lets them do something that algae, and plants in general, can’t normally do – “fixing” nitrogen straight from the air, and combining it with other elements to create more useful compounds.”

Endosymbiosis.  That’s a good name for it.  The article says this process has been going on for a 100 million years and is still probably a work in progress.  These nitrogen fixing cyanobacteria haven’t reached the advanced state of dependence that mitochondria and chloroplasts now display.

Well, the biologists will be playing around with this experiment in progress for the next hundred years and I expect they’ll learn plenty.  One day we’ll probably have chloroplasts of our own and spend a few hours in the sun every day to improve our green complexions.

Sawdust and Forever Wars

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Well, the boys from the road crew were back today and finished off the job, but good.  A tractor trailer was blocking my driveway and the trailer was an open topped box that was rapidly filled by an enormous wood chipper that ate whole sections of tree trunks that were ten feet around.  The noise that came off of this thing was considerable and the hounds were incensed.  The chipper finished off the big white pine in less than an hour and that included all the scraps that they had trimmed off the trunk.

Then they moved on and took care of the two ash trees.  These were smaller but the hardness of the wood gave the machine a different sonic tone as it spat the sawdust into the trailer.  And the wood was a lighter, cleaner looking stream as it flowed into the box.  And soon they were gone too.  Of course, gone didn’t include the debris that the crew left far and wide.  Between sawdust, small branches and pine needles I’ll be cleaning up the tree bits for the whole of the spring.

But I’ll have to say I’m impressed by the state of the art in robotic forestry.  It sort of reminded me of a Dr. Seuss book where some absurdly complicated string of machines reprocesses some thing into a completely different substance.  The only thing missing were the absurdly bright primary and secondary colors along with Thing One and Thing Two running the machinery.  And come to think of it, the foreman did look a little like the guy who didn’t want to eat the Green Eggs and Ham.

Well, after they finished, I went to work and when I got back home the temperature had dropped down into the forties and it was once again raining cats and dogs.  You know I’m pretty sick and tired of the rain.  Last year it rained endlessly from April to the end of June.  I dream of kidnapping Camera Girl and dragging her to Southern Utah.  When I was there, there was a little snow but the ground looked like a desert and at this point that would be A-OK with me.  But the lure of the grandkids is too powerful for her.

So, I heard a little while ago that Israel counterattacked in Iran and some other places.  Well, that’s a little disturbing.  The way Joe Biden has been talking I think maybe they’re ready for some really bad things.  I can’t say I’m terribly surprised.  I guess I’m just sick and tired of the forever wars.  Maybe I’m so tired of it I’m willing to see it all blow up now.    Just fire them all and let God sort it all out.  It sounds right.

But then I think of the kids and the grandkids and of course I don’t want that to happen to them.  So apparently, I’ll have to let the morons we have running our foreign policy continue on with their insane games and their demented strategies.  Ukraine, Iran, Israel, Syria, China.  All that crap.

Humans are the most remarkably clever animals. Look at those machines I saw working today. Reducing those trees to dust was an acceleration over nature of many orders of magnitude. They reduced the work of twenty or fifty years of natural processes to machine minutes. We are that paragon of animals that Shakespeare mentions. But simultaneously we are led by gibbering idiots. They could reduce the whole human race to dust in minutes. So, there it is.

What is Wrong with This Picture?

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Look at where the country is headed in the next few months.  Donald Trump is the popular choice for president with about half of the voters in the United States.  And he is almost certainly going to be convicted of felonies in up to four different state and federal court legal trials.  Theoretically he could be given a combination of sentences that easily exceeds his life expectancy.

Now what is anyone to make of this?  It’s patently absurd.  Without even going through the charges like the hush money trial which obviously stretches the underlying statute completely out of its jurisdiction, all the charges are political prosecutions that have never been used in the way they are being presented.  An obvious example is the case involving classified documents.  Joe Biden had many classified documents in his possession and was in fact proven to be allowing someone without a security clearance to access these documents and he has been completely exempted from criminal penalties.  The naked fact that these are political prosecutions is impossible to obscure from insiders or the general public.

If Trump loses or is excluded from the presidential race then his future looks to be as a political prisoner in the banana republic jail that the Democrats now maintain for their enemies.  But even if he wins the election there may be state charges that even as president, he cannot pardon himself from.  What are we to imagine about the legitimate president of the United States officiating over his office from a state penitentiary?  Will he be allowed to leave the jail cell for the State of the Union speech?  How will his secret service detail spend their time behind bars?  Will they have to spend time watching over him in the dining room, the prison yard and in the workshop making license plates?

The blatant overreach and the pretense that all of this is legal and measured will probably strike anyone who isn’t a Democrat partisan zealot as proof that we’ve completely left equal treatment under the law far behind.  And that is the part that I believe makes this present situation novel.

What we will see will be the delegitimizing of the claim that this is a nation of laws.  There will be an ironclad example that proves that justice in present day America is no different than what existed in Stalin’s Soviet show trials or Mao’s Cultural Revolution struggle sessions or the Committee of Public Safety during the French Revolutionary Reign of Terror.  “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”

So, this is a lesson that I learned over the course of the last four years.  Now the rest of America, even the most brain-dead will get a clear view of this on display.  I suppose the rest of the world will see it too.  And the myth of equal justice will be laid to rest.

But there’s a follow-on test we will observe.  What happens after this lesson is learned.  If the Left gets away with this and Americans just knuckle under to it, then we’ll also see another myth exposed.  That’s the one that says that Americans are proud of their freedom and won’t tolerate a tyrant.  That’s the one I’m waiting to find out about.  I can’t say I’m overly hopeful about this second one either.

Of Raspberries and Road Work

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, OCF, photog's Corner

Princess Sack of Potatoes is on Spring Vacation from Kindergarten so she is visiting. And so, she and Camera Girl went to the local lakeside park to play on the jungle gym and swings with the other paroled inmates of the local centers of lower education.

They’ve left me on my own recognizance and I am reveling in the freedom and using it to inspect my domain in the cloudless sunshine of the day star (Sol, G-type main-sequence star, G2V; approximately 4.6 billion years old).  And right away my leisure is disturbed by the state road crew and their private contractors come to remove the dying ash trees that threaten the power and communication lines during wind and snow events.  Unfortunately, one of the largest trees along the road is an enormous ash that adjoins the west field.  And his last day is now at hand.  The crew has a machine of incredible strength and capability.  It’s a gigantic arm that grips the tree near the top of the trunk with hydraulic fingers and then brings into play an enormous saw that cuts off the tree below the grasping hand.

Then the arm, defying gravity and inertia rotates at the shoulder and deposits the top of the tree on the side of the road.  Then it takes a purchase farther down on the trunk and repeats this operation a few times and voila, no more ash tree.  Just a pile of logs.  The crew then takes a conventional but enormous chain saw to the stump and bring it down to the ground in a few minutes and then off down the road to the next victim.  Ah well.  These ash trees have been dying off for decades.  My area is relatively off the beaten path so I guess it’s finally caught up to us.  American Chestnut, Elm, Ash.  Good heavens, what will be left in another few generations, you have to ask.  But I guess there is some hope.  The project to restore the American Chestnut either by selective breeding of the survivors or by genetic engineering of a hardy strain is slowly (but hopefully surely) reaching the end point where the trees will be released in to the world for regeneration of that majestic species in Eastern North America.

The thornless red raspberries that I planted a couple of years ago are back in leaf again and spreading nicely in the bed where I planted them.  They have been a rare case where the product lived up to the advertising.  They produce abundant, large, delicious fruit and they seem to thrive enthusiastically in the very boggy spring soil of that part of the property.  And since both Camera Girl and Princess Sack of Potatoes are big fans of this fruit, I have gained great praise for my project in introducing them to the yard.  This summer I hope for a bumper crop of many quarts of the fruit.  The only real hazard is the local black bear population.  With both blue berries and raspberries on site an ursine prowler is something to consider.  Well, I’ve got my bear spray.  Yogi beware.

Well, the girls are back so I must adjourn.  We must be at play in the fields of the Lord.