Posted inScience

Science says first humans had black skin and tightly curled hair

Racism is ridiculous for lots of reasons. A big reason is that science finds no basis for concluding that physical differences between some members of our species, Homo sapiens, make those members inherently superior to other people. In fact, there's no such thing as race, according to science. More than 100 years ago, American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois was concerned that race was being used as a biological explanation for what he understood to be social and cultural differences between different populations of people. He spoke out against the idea of "white" and "black" as discrete groups, claiming that these…
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Posted inHealth

My eye surgery went well, though not a load of fun

When I had surgery in 2021 to repair an inguinal hernia, my motivation was to have something wrong with me fixed so I could get back to living life as I did before the hernia popped up (literally). But the glaucoma surgery I had today was tougher to get enthusiastic about. There's no way to fix damage that's occurred to the optic nerve. All that can be done is reduce the chance of further damage.  However, Dr. Young, the glaucoma specialist in Portland I was referred to after some significant nerve damage was found in my very nearsighted right eye,…
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Posted inDogs Health Home life

When life goes wrong, it can happen in bunches

Anticipating how some people are going to react to this blog post, I want to start off by making one thing clear: While my wife Laurel, our dog, and I are going through a stretch of more problems in our lives than usual, we're fortunate to have a decent income, good health insurance, and a pleasant home. Lots of people have worse problems than we do, with fewer resources available to deal with them. Like, anyone homeless. Having hopefully defused the "privilege" objection to what I'm about to say, my main point is simple: Life can be tough, no matter…
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Posted inHome life Salem

We find that Best Buy sucks and Kelly’s rocks

My wife has been going through Best Buy hell after an incompetent salesperson ordered the wrong cooktop. Laurel had taken a Consumer Reports rating of induction cooktops into the Salem Best Buy store, pointed to the General Electric model that she wanted, and trusted that the paperwork she got was correct. Sure, she should have double-checked the model number. Or I could have. We admit that we weren't completely blameless in the mixup that led to Best Buy taking out our current radiant cooktop and installing what turned out to be a newer model GE radiant cooktop. We simply assumed…
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Posted inSalem

Why Salem snow has been so much less than Portland snow

Last night on the 11 pm news on KGW, Matt Zaffino said that Salem and the rest of the central Willamette Valley would get the most snow on Wednesday and Thursday.  At that time Portland wasn't even under a Winter Weather Advisory, which was issued only for the Central Willamette Valley and South Willamette Valley until 10 am on Thursday. But if you've been watching the evening news on Portland television stations, you know that the Portland area has been getting a lot of snow. Here in Salem, hardly anything so far. On the 6 pm news today, Zaffino explained…
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Posted inHome life

Schools should meet needs of both visual and verbal thinkers

Today our monthly Salon discussion group talked about a bunch of interesting topics, including the difference between verbal and visual ways of thinking. I brought this subject up, saying that I've started to read a story in The New Yorker about Temple Grandin and how she uses her visual skills to come up with more humane ways of designing slaughterhouses.  (As a vegetarian, I don't think slaughterhouses can be humane, but if there's ways to reduce the suffering of animals, that's a good thing.) Here's an excerpt from Thought Process, the story title in the print edition, which became How…
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Posted inSports

2023 Super Bowl made me feel pleasingly united

Most seasons I watch one NFL game: the Super Bowl. That was the case this year also. I enjoy football a lot, but the college game always has appealed more to me, probably because then I get to root for Oregon teams, and Oregon doesn't have a NFL team. However, I do consider it my non-sacred duty to watch the Super Bowl. It's an American tradition. And because it's the most important NFL game of the year, I get excited watching it. Partly that's because even though I don't have any favorite team during the regular season, I read enough…
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Posted inCoronavirus Health

I get Paxlovid “rebound,” but I’m OK with being Covid positive again

Six days ago I completed my 5-day course of Covid treatment with Paxlovid, which basically puts a brake on replication of the virus, giving your body a chance to deal with it before it gets up a big head of Covid steam. I commemorated that event with a blog post, "My somewhat contrarian take on Paxlovid 'rebound.'" I said: My symptoms (nasal congestion and a cough) have been gone for a few days. The rapid test I took this afternoon was negative. So things are looking good.  And I'm not all that worried about Paxlovid rebound, which doesn't seem like…
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Posted inCoronavirus Health

My somewhat contrarian take on Paxlovid “rebound”

After getting some Covid symptoms and testing positive on a rapid test last Monday, this morning I completed the 5-day Paxlovid treatment regimen.  My symptoms (nasal congestion and a cough) have been gone for a few days. The rapid test I took this afternoon was negative. So things are looking good.  And I'm not all that worried about Paxlovid rebound, which doesn't seem like a big deal to me. Nobody really knows how many people who take Paxlovid either get Covid symptoms after the 5-day treatment is over, or test positive after testing first positive, then negative, then positive again.…
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Posted inCoronavirus Health

I test positive for Covid. And feel positive about Paxlovid.

Well, it was a good run without ever getting Covid -- about three years since the nasty virus came to the United States in early 2020.  After I had trouble sleeping last Saturday night, feeling on edge for no discernible reason, I took a rapid Covid test Sunday morning, which came back negative, even though my voice was a bit hoarse. But Monday morning I had some nasal congestion and increased hoarseness, so I tested again. Yikes! A positive result.  That kicked off a flurry of phone calls. First, I called my Salem Health family physician's office. I talked with…
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Posted inEntertainment

I didn’t like “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” I have company.

After learning that Everything Everywhere All at Once got eleven Oscar nominations, I wanted to see this movie. Through the good graces of Apple TV, I found that I could watch it at no cost on the Showtime App, courtesy of our DirecTV subscription that includes Showtime. After spending 132 minutes watching the movie over a span of several days and finishing it tonight, that was exactly how much the movie was worth to me. Nothing. Or at least, very little. Though there were brief periods at the beginning and end of Everything where I felt connected to the characters…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Entertainment

Bill Maher has become an irritating purveyor of liberal myths

I've been watching Bill Maher ever since his Politically Incorrect days. When he turned up on HBO with his Real Time With Bill Maher, twenty seasons ago, I watched him there. I still enjoy Maher. But the past few seasons, and maybe longer than that, Maher often acts like a caricature of a one-time liberal who now takes excessive pleasure in attacking what he believes are overly "woke" Democratic/progressive positions. I've got no problem with Maher doing that, so long as he doesn't twist the truth to make his point. Which, he does with disturbing regularity. Last Friday's Real Time…
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Posted inArcimoto

Arcimoto seems to be going out of business

I've been a long-time fan of Arcimoto, a company based in Eugene, fifty miles south of Salem, where I live. Arcimoto makes the FUV (Fun Utility Vehicle), a three-wheeled semi-enclosed electric sort-of-motorcycle. In Oregon you don't have to wear a helmet while driving it, so it's a unique blend of a car and motorcycle. I've been following the fortunes of Arcimoto for a long time. Heck, this blog even has an "Arcimoto" category with ten posts in it, including this one. As I said in my first post back in July 2018, I've got both Arcimoto anticipation and anxiety: I've…
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Posted inHome life

Our dog’s hip dysplasia diagnosis worries us

Pets are almost as important as children to those of us who no longer have children in the house. Or, in the case of my wife, have never had a child. So when we got a phone call from our vet tonight, giving us the results of X-rays taken when we wanted to know why Mooka, our Husky mix, was limping at times, what she told us was really disturbing. But not to Mooka. That's a plus side of being a dog. You don't know that you've been diagnosed with right hip dysplasia with degenerative joint disease.  What shocked my…
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Posted inWeb/Tech

Apple Support hindered and helped my iPhone 14 setups

This tale of my three phone calls to Apple Support a few days ago has a happy ending. My wife and I are enjoying the iPhone 14 Pro Max devices that we decided to get after using iPhone 8's since 2017. So we were six freaking iPhone generations old, something that hasn't come close to happening since we joined the iPhone cult way back when. (Too long ago for me to remember.) When the new phones arrived in the mail after ordering them from Verizon, our cellular carrier, I waited a day before taking the plunge into setting them up.…
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Posted inWeb/Tech

Another reason to hate what Elon Musk is doing to Twitter

It wasn't so long ago that I looked upon Elon Musk with admiration. Maybe even with a bit of adoration. After all, his Space X Starlink satellite internet system had rescued me and my wife from the hell of 7Mbps CenturyLink DSL, bringing our rural south Salem home into broadband heaven.  And I visualized owning one of his Tesla cars someday. Though they have their downsides (don't like relying so much on a touchscreen rather than normal controls), Tesla jumpstarted the electric car revolution that's bringing the internal combustion engine closer to a well-deserved global goodbye. When he bought Twitter,…
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Posted inEntertainment

Streaming shows I liked (but you may not)

We're all different. That's a truism. But this doesn't stop me from wanting to share streaming shows I've watched recently on Netflix, Apple TV+, and Hulu that appealed to me a lot, in hopes that maybe others would like them as much as I did. Here they are. Slow Horses - Apple TV+This is a British spy series with an appealing twist. The MI5 agents who are the centerpiece of the show are castoffs sentenced to spy-world purgatory for misdeeds they committed. So they haven't been fired, just consigned to live out their days doing usually boring menial work in…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Web/Tech Weblogs

Social media reform is needed, but the market mainly should decide

Today NBC's Meet the Press devoted its Sunday morning hour entirely to a discussion of social media: what's wrong with the way things are now on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and such, along with what needs to be done to fix those problems. It's a complicated subject with no easy answers. Here's what stuck in my mind after watching the program. Algorithms. Social media sites typically use computer algorithms to determine what gets shown to users. (Twitter is an exception, at least if a third party app is used to access Twitter, which I do. I only see tweets from…
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Posted inSports

Oregon pulls out a nail-biter over North Carolina in Holiday Bowl

After Oregon lost to Oregon State in the last game of the regular season, dooming Oregon's chance to play USC for the Pac-12 championship and potentially earn a Rose Bowl berth, going to the Holiday Bowl in San Diego struck me as a crappy consolation prize. And for most of today's game against North Carolina in the Holiday Bowl, that assessment seemed right-on. I was totally prepared for Oregon to lose, end up 9-4 on the season, and look forward to better times next year, since this season would have ended in a disappointing fashion. Then the fourth quarter happened.…
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Posted inLiving with a catheter

I’m now quite confident that diet affects how easily I can insert a urinary catheter

A bit over six months ago I theorized in a blog post, "Diet could play a role when having a problem inserting a urinary catheter."  I asked my urologist if he thought diet could play a role in the difficulty I sometimes have inserting a catheter. His answer: "Maybe." Not very helpful, as that left it to me to figure out my own answer.  After a lot of experimenting with different foods (I'm a health-minded 73 year old vegetarian), I'm pretty confident that yes, at least for me, diet does affect how easy it is for me to insert a…
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