Wednesday, August 22, 2018

Emotional Mastery: Staying Present With Unpleasant Feelings









I thought this was an interesting "self-help" YouTube video to watch. The upshot is that unpleasant emotions cause a unpleasant physical reactions felt in the body, in waves, each for about a 90-second duration. The "one choice" is to decide "remain present." Rather than avoid these waves of unpleasantness -- through various means of denial or distraction -- try to "surf through cascade of physical sensations in the waves" and experience them. Watch the video for more detail. I thought the label-list of unpleasant emotion-sensations was rather good...


Sunday, August 19, 2018

Zen Gardens





















Frank Lloyd Wright 



Frank Lloyd Wright 



Frank Lloyd Wright 



Frank Lloyd Wright 



Frank Lloyd Wright 


Frank Lloyd Wright 



Frank Lloyd Wright 




Explore Two of Rockford’s Hidden Architectural Gems

Docent-led tours focus on the architectural components of two homes with Japanese cultural design influences but distinctly different character.  Guests will be granted exclusive access to Anderson Japanese Gardens’ 16th century Sukiya-style Guest House and the Laurent House, the only home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright specifically for a client with a physical disability.





Thursday, August 16, 2018

Max Dalton: Jazz Album Art

Max Dalton



Max Dalton



Max Dalton



Max Dalton



Max Dalton



Max Dalton



Max Dalton


Some hip Max Dalton jazz album covers -- I especially like the Winsor McCay riff on the Monk cover -- double-collectible...

'Max Dalton lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and has been drawing since he was two or three years old. Max has too many interests to list here -- from writing to painting to playing music and reading about animals -- but his all-time favorite is drawing. He is the illustrator of "The Lonely Phone Booth," "The Lonely Typewriter," and "Extreme Opposites."'






Tuesday, August 14, 2018

Seeing Earth's Magnetic Fields: Cryptochromes and Blue Light




Birds Can See Earth's Magnetic Fields -- And We Finally Know How That's Possible

By Michelle Starr

The mystery behind how birds navigate might finally be solved: it's not the iron in their beaks providing a magnetic compass, but a newly discovered protein in their eyes that lets them "see" Earth's magnetic fields.

These findings come courtesy of two new papers -- one studying robins, the other zebra finches.

The eye protein is called "Cry4," and it's part of a class of proteins called "cryptochromes" -- photoreceptors sensitive to blue light, found in both plants and animals. These proteins play a role in regulating circadian rhythms.

There's also been evidence in recent years that, in birds, the cryptochromes in their eyes are responsible for their ability to orient themselves by detecting magnetic fields, a sense called "magneto-reception."

We know that birds can only sense magnetic fields if certain wavelengths of light are available -- specifically, studies have shown that avian magneto-reception seems dependent on blue light.

This seems to confirm that the mechanism is a visual one, based in the cryptochromes, which may be able to detect the fields because of "quantum coherence."

To find more clues on these cryptochromes, two teams of biologists set to work. Researchers from Lund University in Sweden studied zebra finches, and researchers from the Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg in Germany studied European robins.

The Lund team measured gene expression of three cryptochromes, Cry1, Cry2, and Cry4, in the brains, muscles and eyes of zebra finches. Their hypothesis was that the cryptochromes associated with magnetoreception should maintain constant reception over the circadian day.

They found that, as expected for circadian clock genes, Cry1 and Cry2 fluctuated daily -- but Cry4 expressed at constant levels, making it the most likely candidate for magnetoreception.

This finding was supported by the robin study, which found the same thing.

"We also found that Cry1a, Cry1b, and Cry2 mRNA display robust circadian oscillation patterns, whereas Cry4 shows only a weak circadian oscillation," the researchers wrote.

But they made a couple of other interesting findings, too. The first is that Cry4 is clustered in a region of the retina that receives a lot of light -- which makes sense for light-dependent magnetoreception.

The other is that European robins have increased Cry4 expression during the migratory season, compared to non-migratory chickens.

Both sets of researchers caution that more research is needed before Cry4 can be declared the protein responsible for magnetoreception.

The evidence is strong, but it's not definitive, and both Cry1 and Cry2 have also been implicated in magnetoreception, the former in garden warblers and the latter in fruit flies.

Observing birds with non-functioning Cry4 could help confirm the role it seems to play, while other studies will be needed to figure Cry1's role.

So what does a bird actually see? Well, we can't ever know what the world looks like through another species' eyes, but we can take a very strong guess.

According to researchers at the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, whose researcher Klaus Schulten first predicted magnetoreceptive cryptochromes in 1978, they could provide a magnetic field "filter" over the bird's field of view (like in the picture above).

The zebra finch study was published in the "Journal of the Royal Society Interface," and the robin study was published in "Current Biology."

















Robert Cika: Cortlandt Manor

Robert Cika



Robert Cika



Robert Cika



Robert Cika



Robert Cika



Robert Cika



Robert Cika



Robert Cika



Robert Cika


Shades of John Lautner! Designed by architect Robert Cika, Jackie Gleason's two UFO-inspired party houses were constructed by a Norwegian shipbuilder, who shipped the completed pieces to Cortlandt Manor for final assembly.

Gleason personally oversaw the project, which cost $650,000 -- roughly equivalent to $5.6 million today --and took five years to complete (in 1959). It was a marvel, and one that he shared with his many celebrity guests, including Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, and Joe DiMaggio.

The "Mothership" was the main house. Designed to host large parties, it has two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and two bars -- the centerpiece being a 14-person, curving bar, which had a baby grand piano, and a microphone that would emerge from the marble floor to the delight of Gleason’s guests.








Jonny Quest Tech

Doug Wildey, Jonny Quest



Doug Wildey, Jonny Quest



Doug Wildey, Jonny Quest



Jonny Quest



Doug Wildey, Jonny Quest



Doug Wildey, Jonny Quest



Doug Wildey, Jonny Quest



Jonny Quest



Jonny Quest


I still love all that Mid-Century Modern "Jonny Quest" tech...








Sunday, August 12, 2018

On the Reading Table: "No Middle Name: The Complete Collected JackReacher Stories"

Lee Child

It's been a long time since I've read some mystery/ crime fiction. I've been reading mostly non-fiction for quite a spell. I've long enjoyed the crime fiction writings of Lee Child -- they remind me of the work of another favorite, John D. MacDonald -- which makes perfect sense -- since I read somewhere that Child was inspired by MacDonald in his approach to storytelling. Anyway, I snagged this recent "Jack Reacher" paperback from a "Little Free Library" in Anchorage, and finally started my pleasure reading


"This anthology compiles the complete collection of 'Reacher' short stories to date and includes an original novella, 'Too Much Time,' which leads into 'The Midnight Line' (the 22nd Reacher novel) alongside eleven reader favorites -- 'Deep Down,' 'Everyone Talks,' 'Guy Walks into a Bar,' 'High Heat,' 'James Penney’s New Identity' (the original version which is longer), 'Maybe They Have a Tradition,' 'No Room at the Motel,' 'Not a Drill,' 'Second Son,' 'Small Wars,' and The Picture of the Lonely Diner.'"

Friday, August 10, 2018

Good Social Connections Are Healthy












Social Pain -- is often caused by loss, rejection, and deep embarrassment. Isolation, exclusion, submission, and appeasement -- are all evolutionary harmful psychic forces to be aware of. Try to connect and be kind to your fellow people. Bullying (workplace, social media, or otherwise) is wrong. That is all.