Aim to die broke. Give to your beneficiaries before you die; it’s more fun and useful. Spend it all. Your last check should go to the funeral home and it should bounce.
That's the best advice I learned this year. Once again, Kevin Kelly advice list is phenomenal!!
Most of it is already been adopted into my life and some of it is new and I don't agree on handful .
Every moment is precious. Everyone knows this but unfortunately not everyone follows it.
What Max taught me to go back to the basics - roots of our evolution (thanks to evolutionary biology). What matters in life is more or less captured brilliantly in our evolutionary roots. One doesn't need magic, religion or psychedelics or definitely no need ponder about "meaning of life".
In other words - Biophilia wins always.
Big data is also telling us the same (ignore the word happiness and just call it fulfilling moments)
The most important happiness study, in my opinion, is the Mappiness project, founded by the British economists Susana Mourato and George MacKerron. The researchers pinged tens of thousands of people on their smartphones and asked them simple questions: Who are they with? What are they doing? How happy are they?
From this, they built a sample of more than three million data points, orders of magnitude more than previous studies on happiness.
So what do three million happiness data points tell us?
The activities that make people happiest include sex, exercise and gardening. People get a big happiness boost from being with a romantic partner or friends but not from other people, like colleagues, children or acquaintances. Weather plays only a small role in happiness, except that people get a hearty mood boost on extraordinary days, such as those above 75 degrees and sunny. People are consistently happier when they are out in nature, particularly near a body of water, particularly when the scenery is beautiful.
The findings on the data of happiness are, to be honest, obvious. When I told my friends about these studies, the most common response was, “Did we need scientists to tell us this?”
But I would argue that there is profundity in the obviousness of the data on happiness.
Sometimes, big data reveals a shocking secret. At other times, big data tells us that there is no secret. And that’s the case with happiness.
This is crucial to keep in mind for the many of us who are not doing the obvious things that make people happy. We are falling for traps that the data says are unlikely to make us happy.
May 21st 2006, 8 weeks old Max came home. 31 year old version of myself had no idea how that moment would alter my life.
Years of reading and listening to others about the bond with their dog had sparked my curiosity to live with a dog. I do give credit to myself for making that decision and changing my mind. Everything else what happened since then was purely because of the bloody joy of life called Max.
There are no alternate histories. I am so grateful for that.
Sixteen years had since passed since that magical moment. Max is no more. Sooner or later, I will be no more. The thirteen plus years we lived together cannot be altered; it will remain etched and preserved in a metamorphic amber of time.
But who gives a fuck about pondering about an uncertain future which we have no control?
The time between now and before I kick the bucket what I do and act according to goodness learned from Max is what matters. That's the only thing that matters. Action is the only thing that matters.
So I try.
I miss you Max.
Like proteins, messenger RNAs are long chainlike molecules composed of building blocks. The four building blocks that make up messenger RNAs form what is known as the genetic code. As their name implies, messenger RNAs carry messages: messages that are translated by your body in order to create proteins. Thus messenger RNAs are the language of life. And the human body has a lot to say.
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mRNA's are transient. The amount of protein produced is dependent on how much of that mRNA is present. And they can be induced over and over again to produce the same effect. So wow, it seems so simple. If we could treat a disease, if there's a protein that's missing to treat a disease, then we could simply give a few copies of an mRNA to the body for it to produce that protein. If that protein's only needed once, then maybe a single dose would suffice. If a protein is needed multiple times, then we can dose mRNA over and over again. And that's exactly what's happening. So when I went on clinicaltrials.gov this morning, it turns out that there are over 175 clinical trials now open using mRNA-based medicines that are recruiting patients. Another 54 clinical trials are waiting in the [wings], ready to be opened. So there is a coming tsunami of mRNA medicines.
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And for cancer patients, we're creating personalized cancer vaccines. These vaccines are meant to train their bodies, their immune systems, to attack their cancers. These are truly personalized medicines, one vaccine for one person.
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Now for personalized cancer vaccines to be the most effective, we need to get them made and back to the patient as quickly as possible. We aim for a turnaround time of 45 days. By January of 2020, we had already manufactured, quality-controlled and delivered to several dozen patients personalized cancer vaccines. So we had the know-how and the capacity to manufacture vaccines quickly. Thus, when the sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was posted to a public web server on January 10, 2020, we got immediately to work. Within two days, we had agreed with our collaborators at NIH on exactly which form of the spike protein to put in our vaccine. Because we had done so so many times before, it then took our mRNA design team just one hour to design the mRNA that we immediately put on to our manufacturing equipment. We were then able to make that RNA, get it quality-controlled, fill-finished and shipped off to NIH for the clinical trial in 45 days.
What I find truly remarkable is that that mRNA sequence that took us one hour to design is the same mRNA sequence that went into your arms, that ended up in Spikevax, our now fully approved vaccine. One hour to design a medicine that has saved countless lives.
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Having learned to speak the language of mRNA, the language of life, we can now use it to create medicines that are just for one person, like a personalized cancer vaccine, or can be rapidly produced and distributed to entire populations, like the COVID-19 vaccines. And the best part? The best part is we're simply tapping into your body's own ability to make its own medicines.
- Melissa J. Moore, RNA researcher
I was upset about the insanity of anti-vaccination but yet I prefer to live in a world where diversity of compliance (amongst other things as long as it doesn't cause pain and suffering) thrives. Otherwise, this blue planet will be one big North Korea. People should not follow trends blindly and learn to pause and question everything to distill the truth.
Diversity instigates randomness which feeds the complex systems and in turn helps with evolution albeit we don't know if that evolution would be good for humans or not.
The main issue is here is not polarization of vaccination compliance but its the skin in the game.
It is extremely sad that a virus and a break through in medicine has also become a victim of political polarization. As much as it makes me sad, I understand this is part of evolution unfolding in front of our eyes and I am grateful we haven't become North Korea.
I will try to explain in simplistic terms for people not driven by ideology nevertheless got caught in the fear mongering:
There is slight probability that you will die of choking every time you eat but yet you eat everyday. Most food made by corporations fucks with your immunity and factory farm dead bodies of animals who went through hell on earth will certainly fuck with your immunity.
Like everything else in life there is a probability that mRNA vaccine might kill you or fuck with your immunity but its much lesser than the probability of covid fucking with your immunity or killing you.
This is one of my favorite scenes from the movie Zero Dark Thirty and how Maya's character struggles to explain the difference between certainty and probability.
[In a CIA Conference room with CIA Director, his deputies and Maya]
CIA Director: I'm about to go look the President in the eye, and what I'd like to know, no fucking bullshit, is where everyone stands on this thing. Now, very simply, is he there, or is he not fucking there?
Deputy Director: We all come at this through the filter of our own past experiences. I remember "Iraq WMD" very clearly, I fronted that, and I can tell you the case for that was much stronger than this case.
CIA Director: A fuckin' yes or a no.
Deputy Director: We don't deal in certainty, we deal in probability. I'd say there's a sixty percent probability he's there.
The Wolf: I concur. Sixty percent.
George: I'm at eighty percent. Their OPSEC is what convinces me.
CIA Director: You guys ever agree on anything?
Dan: Well, I agree with sixty, we're basing this mostly on detainee reporting and I spent a bunch of time in those rooms. Who knows? I'd say it's a soft sixty, sir. I'm virtually certain there's some high value target there, I'm just not sure it's bin Laden.
CIA Director: This is a cluster-fuck, isn't it?
Jeremy: I'd like to know what Maya thinks...
Deputy Director: We're all incorporating her assessment into ours...
Maya: A hundred percent he's (Osama bi Laden) there. Okay, fine, ninety-five percent because I know how certainty freaks you guys out, but it's a hundred.
Non Human Rights Project (NhRP) president Steven M. Wise life is a paragon of perseverance, persistence and patience.
Three P's - perseverance, persistence and patience are the only traits needed in the arsenal while boarding the voyage through time to make change happen.
I am not talking about changing people's minds. That rarely happens.
I am talking about carrying the un-distilled message of moral change through time until the death of people who laughed at the message and the new generation adapts to the moral change.
Make no mistake - the new generation is no morally superior but mere exposure to the message since their brith would make them include new morals inside their skull. It is that simple. Moral change happens only when a funeral happens.
Read his story on the NhRP blog but I am going to post it here so that the probability of this precious message not getting lost is minimized.
Nearly forty years ago, I decided to devote my career to confronting the core problem facing nonhuman animals and their advocates: nonhuman animals’ rightlessness.
In those early days, my work was mostly done at my kitchen table, surrounded by dozens, then hundreds of books and papers–every written source I could find on the origins of legal rights, the long history of struggles for those rights, and the science that helps us humans understand who other animals are (for we humans are, of course, also animals).
In the following years, building on what I had gained from this extensive research and my experience as a lawyer, I began to add my own law review articles and books on why nonhuman animals are entitled to legal rights as a matter of justice and scientific fact. I started teaching Animal Rights Law in eventually nine law schools, including Harvard and Stanford. I had concluded that the work ahead needed to be laser-focused on persuading judges to transform at least some nonhuman animals from legal “things” with no rights to “persons” with fundamental rights, just as courts had transformed oppressed humans from things to persons following centuries of struggle in and beyond courtrooms.
In 1995, ready to move forward with this mission, I founded the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP)–which was then, and is now, the only civil rights organization dedicated solely to securing legal rights for nonhuman animals.
Soon, other lawyers joined me at the table. Then law students eager for change. Then scientists, including Dr. Jane Goodall, who studied nonhuman animals around the world and would begin to help us lawyers and eventually judges understand their findings. Then animal advocates who had witnessed firsthand the appalling limitations of animal welfare, which they saw play out time and time again in the lives of beings whose only crime was to not be human.
This was only the beginning.
Like me, the people in this ever-growing community, and on our ever-growing NhRP team, were deeply troubled by nonhuman animals’ thinghood and the pervasive suffering and injustice it perpetuated. We came together to work to change their archaic, unjust legal status, and build a world where nonhuman animal rights are protected alongside human rights–a future where nonhuman animals are not trapped in endless torment behind literal and figurative walls which we built and which we can dismantle. Which we must dismantle.
In 2007, after twenty-two years of deep preparation, we began to prepare unique lawsuits: common law habeas corpus cases on behalf of nonhuman animals. We knew the fight in court and the overall struggle would be complex, serious, and long because it involved persuading judges that the question of nonhuman animal rights must depend not on the mere identity of the species, i.e. whether or not they’re human, but upon judges’ most cherished values and principles of justice, including liberty and equality, and who nonhuman animals are intrinsically.
This deep preparation took six years, until 2013, when we filed our first lawsuits–the world’s first lawsuits demanding recognition of nonhuman animals’ legal personhood and right to liberty. Once secured, this right would be enforceable–not just symbolic. It would be lasting–not able to be overturned with the changing of political tides. It would change the lives of our nonhuman animal clients, bringing them freedom and dignity–not leave them at the mercy of those who benefited from their continued imprisonment.
Already this year, Ecuador has recognized nonhuman animals as rightsholders, relying in part on a brief submitted by the NhRP and The Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law & Policy Program at Harvard Law School. On May 18, 2022, New York’s highest court will become the highest court of an English-speaking jurisdiction to hear arguments demanding a legal right for a nonhuman animal in our litigation to free Happy from the Bronx Zoo to a sanctuary, which The Atlantic has called “the most important animal-rights case of the 21st century.” Next week, we are filing our first nonhuman rights lawsuit in California, with cases and campaigns soon to follow in multiple jurisdictions in California, in Colorado, in India, and in Israel, and even more which we will share as soon as we can.
We have achieved what we have, and grown as we have, in large part because every seat at the NhRP table has been filled by talented people–lawyers, communications professionals, development professionals, legislative and grassroots campaigns professionals, and nonprofit operations professionals–who I learn from and am honored to work with every day (and many days, into the night!). Many NhRP staff members you have met at our hearings and rallies, interacted with on our Zoom webinars, or seen in news stories about our work. Some are more comfortable behind the scenes so you might see their faces only seldomly. They are all pivotal to the legal milestones we have reached in the global struggle for nonhuman rights.
Up to this point in our organizational history, I have argued all our cases, i.e. physically appeared before and made our case to the judges, whether we had ten minutes or ten hours. What many might not realize is that this moment–standing before the court, answering the judges’ questions, demonstrating the utter wrongness of what our clients’ captors are saying to try to maintain the status quo–is the culmination of, and only possible because of, those thousands of hours the legal team as a whole spends on preparation, including debating strategy and going line by line through hundreds, sometimes thousands, of pages of court filings to make sure every word is exactly right.
In part because of how deeply proud I am of everyone at the NhRP and all we have accomplished together, I am thrilled to announce that we are now expanding the roster of lawyers who will be arguing our cases, which will allow us to file more cases on behalf of more nonhuman animals in more jurisdictions and demonstrate even more powerfully how talented our team is. This will also allow me to devote much more time to what has been a fundamental aspect of our work from the beginning: educating diverse audiences, including the next generation of lawyers, about the urgent need and basis for nonhuman rights and talking to all sorts of folks, all over the world, who want to join us in this fight.
Appearing before the New York Court of Appeals in Happy’s case will be Monica Miller–a highly experienced lawyer who has been with the NhRP since our founding and served as lead counsel in over 30 federal cases, including before the United States Supreme Court. Monica is one of the youngest women to argue before the Supreme Court, and PBS has listed Ruth Bader-Ginsburg’s dissent in a separation-of-church-and-state case Monica argued as one of her five most powerful Supreme Court opinions.
Jake Davis will argue our California case, which we will tell you more about next week, including who our clients are and how you can help. Previously, Jake worked in federal court (under the Honorable S. James Otero of the United States District Court for the Central District of California), for the U.S. government (at the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of California), and in private practice (Squire Patton Boggs).
Our entire team of lawyers—in addition to Monica, Jake, and I, they include Elizabeth Stein, Kevin Schneider, and Spencer Lo—will remain fervently at work on our ongoing litigation for as many hours of the day our clients need, each bringing their immense skill and carefully considered insights to the process in the same way that has allowed us to argue these cases at all. At the same time, our Communications team (led by Lauren Choplin), our Development team (led by Mickey Suzuki), our Government Relations and Campaigns team (led by Courtney Fern), and our Operations team (led by Peggy Cusack) will continue to marshal all the resources we possibly can on our clients’ behalf, including keeping tabs on changes in policies and laws that might impact our current and future clients, engaging our supporters and mobilizing them on behalf of our clients when we need help convincing a decision-maker to do the right thing, and raising awareness of our clients’ stories and why we must protect their freedom.
I hope you are as excited as I am about this moment in the global struggle for nonhuman rights. This work will continue to take patience, persistence, compassion, scientific evidence, rational argument, and time: after all, nonhuman animals have been “things” for over 2000 years, and among autonomous beings, Happy is not alone, nor are elephants. Countless other nonhuman animals peer out from within their prisons, not knowing there are humans out there bent not on exploiting them, but on freeing them. As I express my gratitude to my colleagues at the NhRP, I also express it to you, our supporters, who are an important part of this story and fight too. We might be the ones arguing on Happy’s behalf on May 18th, but we know you are right there with us, whether you are in the courtroom that day or watching from afar. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
When Veron hypothesised reticulate evolution in corals, he had advantages that Haeckel and Darwin did not. He knew about what is called the Modern Synthesis of Evolution, which holds that, along with natural selection, factors such as genetic mutation and genetic drift play major roles in evolution. But Veron’s hypothesis came from observations and mind experiments, not genetic data.
Since Veron’s eureka moment, genetic tools have become more widespread and sophisticated. Does data support the hypothesis that species don’t just separate, they also merge? The answer is a resounding yes.
‘It’s not just rare freaks or accidents, it’s happening all the time. And in quite divergent species too,’ said Nielsen. Roving genes have been found in every branch of the tree of life where geneticists have looked. Today, the technical terms for the process of genes moving between populations are introgression or admixture.
Introgression occurs in plants such as maize and tomatoes. In mosquitoes, the entire genome except for the X chromosome can be swapped with other species. In a tropical genus of butterfly called Heliconius, gene jumping has been found to cause critical changes in the patterns of their colourful wings. Introgression has been documented in finches, in frogs, in rabbits, in wolves and coyotes, in swine, in yaks and cows, in brown bears and polar bears. And in us.
Nielsen and his colleagues found that Tibetans (and a few Han Chinese) carry a very beneficial gene called EPAS1. The protein EPAS1 gives a boost to haemoglobin, the molecule that ferries oxygen in our blood. EPAS1 makes high-altitude living easier. In 2014, the researchers discovered that the EPAS1 gene was also in the DNA of an extinct group of humans called Denisovans, known from bone fragments in Siberia and Tibet.
The prevailing hypothesis is this: ancient humans left Africa moving northward along temperate plains. When they encountered the Himalayas and their cold, high altitudes, it literally took their breath away. Those oxygen-poor conditions should have kept humans near the base of the mountains. But the ancient humans also encountered Denisovans and interbred with them, receiving the EPAS1 gene. Only those humans with the EPAS1 gene moved up the mountains, and their offspring also carried the EPAS1 gene, giving the ancestors of today’s Tibetans a critical advantage at higher altitudes.
‘I think that process of splitting up and merging back together again, and getting a bit of DNA from here to there, that’s happening all the time, in all of the tree of life,’ Nielsen said. ‘And it’s really changing how we’re thinking about it, that it really is a network of life, not a tree of life.’
- More Here
I didn't decide to watch Coda because it won the Oscar's this year; I did so for no apparent reason with no idea about the movie.
20 minutes or so into the movie, I realized this was adapted from 1996 Hindi movie Khamoshi: The Musical. Khamoshi was remake of 1996 German movie and in 2014 this was adapted into a French movie and finally, in 2021 Coda.
I haven't even watched Khamoshi (love the songs though) leave alone other German and French ones but Coda was awesome!!
Kids in this country (and most developed and developing countries) live in the Velvet Rut, if it's not already, sooner or later it will be the primal problem for this planet.
I mean, here's a piece on the ridiculous of college admission essay:
Let’s start here: It's not fair for us to ask teenagers to describe their personalities. Teenagers are endearing but ridiculous people who can barely heat up a cup of ramen noodles and whose brains won’t be fully formed for two more presidential terms. Any teenager who is asked to describe themselves and doesn’t say, “I am scared and confused and my hormones have sort of turned me into a werewolf,” is lying.
Obviously, parents are writing many of these essays. The “Varsity Blues” scandal—in which wealthy parents paid big money to a fraudulent admissions scheme—showed how far parents will go to give their kids a leg up. Incredibly, many applications include the pointless step of making students check a box to verify that the application contains their own work, which is a verification system so ineffective that it makes the “I am 18” buttons on adult websites seem like the security at a Swiss bank.
Some parents of means will hire a college admissions essay coach. These services, which commonly cost well north of $100 per hour, typically include glowing testimonials from satisfied parents, such as this one from a mother in Rhode Island:
“Julie helped my daughter take her essay from a disjointed, boring story to an essay with great flow and flair.”
Powerful testimony! Apparently, the initial essay was so bad that even someone with a genetic predisposition towards the author couldn’t hide her disgust. The writing was, it seems, such a disappointment that—judging from the words of the woman who carried the author in her womb for nine months—it made a dirty limerick scrawled in a bathroom stall look like Beowulf. But the author hired an essay coach, and now she goes to Duke! What an outstanding system!
In summary, it's ridiculous to ask the kids to write an essay about their life when most kids live a very similar lives inside their heads, decoupled from realities of life and not fully grown brains.
We live in a world where future citizens have no sense of anti-fragility and their main slogan is "me, me, me" and self train themselves to constantly seek pleasure. From food to technology leave alone developing an innate sense of morality they are inept to the core.
But I am so glad my generalization was wrong. There are outliers kids in this and every other country.
Ruby is one of them - for starters, poor gal she wakes up at 3 am to help her family before going to school. She knows how important is to self sacrifice and living a life beyond the fellow human primates do.
There are some phenomenal kids such as Ruby who take responsibilities for their families at a tender age (I am talking below 10 years) and develop maturity which most 40 year old men don't have.
I salute all those kids. Maybe, this beautiful blue planet still has hopes for humanity.
Please watch Coda. Teach your kids to be like Ruby. Learn to appreciate what you have in life. Be responsible. Get the hell of yours and your kids velvet rut.
