1 Slice Thick Pepper Bacon (natural if possible) – chopped
1 Apple – Peeled and Grated
Preparation
Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Rinse the pork chops and pat dry with paper towels. Heat a cast iron skillet (or other ovenproof skillet) over medium high heat. Sprinkle salt, pepper and sage on one side of the pork chops. When you can flick a drop of water off your finger tip into the pan and it sizzles and evaporates immediately, the pan is ready. Place the pork chops seasoned side down in the pan. Add salt, pepper and sage to the now ‘up’ side of the meat. Let the meat sear and carmelize in the pan 4-6 minutes per side (turn them only once) depending on the thickness of the chops. You are not cooking them all the way through – just searing the outside. Remove the chops to a plate and reserve. Place the chopped bacon directly in the same pan and cook over medium heat until crispy. Add the onions and the apples and sauté until the onions are soft. Add the sauerkraut. If necessary, add some chicken broth or a bit of water to give the pan some liquid at the bottom (about 1/8th of an inch or so). Add the pork chops back into pan and smother with the sauerkraut mixture. Cover the pan with a piece of foil and place in the oven for 30 minutes to allow the pork chops to tenderize and cook all the way through. Serve immediately or reserve and reheat the next day.
Sift flour, 7 tsp. sugar, baking powder, salt and soda together in large bowl. Stir in grated orange peel. Cut in butter until coarse crumbs. Set aside.
Combine cranberries, orange juice, half/half cream and egg. Add to flour mixture and stir until soft dough. Turn onto floured surface and knead 6-8 times.
Either drop by tablespoon or form dough into 8″ circles and cut into 10 wedges. Separate wedges and put on ungreased baking sheet. Brush with milk; sprinkle with remaining sugar.
Bake @ 400 for 12-15 minutes.
Cool. Glaze with mixture of 1 cup Confectioner’s sugar and 1 tbs. orange juice.
The T-V and newspaper news outlets tend not to report news about Climate Change these days. I guess it isn’t confrontational enough. But the Nature magazine isn’t afraid to be non-confrontational! In this weeks Feb 25, 2016 issue, Nature told us about a report just produced by NOAA. I am setting here in 77 degree weather in Pacific Grove, CA in February during a supposedly super El Nino season thinking how I shouldn’t really be enjoying this. To relieve my guilt, I will pass this “news” forward.
Last month was the world’s hottest January since records began in 1880, and the ninth month in a row to break a global monthly temperature record, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported on 17 February. The average global temperature was 1.04 Celsius above the twentieth-century average for January, beating the previous record, from 2007, by 0.16 Celsius. In the Arctic, which was remarkably warm for the time of year, sea ice was at its lowest January extent since records began in 1979, according to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center.
I don’t need NOAA to tell me about February — I can tell this will have been a warm month too.
thinking in 2016 – second decade in the twenty first century CE (the first century of the 3rd millennium)
CRISPR is a genetic editing tool. The name stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. The CRISPR interference technique has enormous potential application, including altering the germline of humans, animals and other organisms, and modifying the genes of food crops.
(germline in organisms refer to those cells that may pass on their genetic material to the progeny. For example, gametes such as the sperm or the egg are part of the germline.)
In the current thinking, many people feel that using CRISPR to modify germline cells in humans would be wrong. The fear is that we would be stepping into the world of “designer babies”, especially where the rich “one percent” would be able to create a master race, similar to Hitler’s breeding program.
The alternate view is that we could use CRISPR to eliminate genetic diseases, removing BRAC1/2 cancer causing genes for example, from a family line. We could potentially stamp out many of our most formidable illnesses.
Using CRISPR to modify food crops is much less controversial. We could, for example, eliminate the spoiling/browning of apples, bananas and mushrooms. Or we could create drought tolerant plants, useful in the global warming scenarios.
My view? Go for it! Eliminate diseases and the need for deodorant, stamp out mosquitoes, and let me be healthier longer.
“The greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism.” – Sir William Osler
The news was announced today, February 11, 2016. The actual detection happened about 5 months ago. It took this long to verify what happened.
Just over a billion years ago, a pair of black holes collided. They had been circling each other for aeons, gathering speed with each orbit. By the time they were a few hundred miles apart, they were whipping around at nearly the speed of light. Space and time became distorted. In the fraction of a second that it took for the black holes to finally merge, they radiated a hundred times more energy than all the stars in the universe combined. They formed a new black hole, sixty-two times as heavy as our sun and almost as wide across as the state of Maine. Then space and time became silent again.
The waves rippled outward in every direction, weakening as they went. On Earth, dinosaurs arose, evolved, and went extinct. The waves kept going. About fifty thousand years ago, they entered our own Milky Way galaxy, just as Homo sapiens were beginning to replace our Neanderthal cousins as the planet’s dominant species of ape. A hundred years ago, Albert Einstein, one of the more advanced members of the species, predicted the waves’ existence, inspiring decades of speculation and fruitless searching. Twenty-two years ago, construction began on an enormous detector, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Then, on September 14, 2015, at just before eleven in the morning, Central European Time, the waves reached Earth. This morning, in a press conference in Washington, D.C., the LIGO team announced that the signal constitutes the first direct observation
of gravitational waves.
Above text quoted from The New Yorker Magazine. CLICK HERE to read the complete story.
You can see that super simulation of the block hole collision in the following Youtube video. Or CLICK HERE if you are viewing this in the email announcement produced by WordPress.
If you want to read more about this amazing discovery, CLICK HERE and you will be taken to an excellent web site called SXS which stands for Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes.
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I posted this here tonight because if this is true, this is one of the biggest “discoveries” of the last few years! It needs to be remembered that some people really did notice.
My wife asked why it is important. Well hey, if gravity really is made of waves, then maybe those people who saw flying saucers weren’t crazy after all. Because of course they would travel by skimming on the edges of the waves, just like surfers at the beach. It would be much more efficient, and would not create as much pollution as rocket ships! All we have to do now is figure how how to build gravity wave skimmers.
We should also be able to build “telescopes” that see gravity waves instead of light waves and then maybe we can see where all the dark matter is at in the universe. We might even be able to “see” black holes! Perhaps the edge of the universe would show up too.
The only creepy part about this is that those two black holes crashed into each other so long ago. Like, what are they doing now? The only disappointing thing is that the gravitational waves only travel at the speed of light. This discovery won’t let us travel to Mars any faster. No short cuts here….
I learned in school that our ancestors came to the New World in the 1600s in search of religious freedom. While I still believe that to be true, I now believe the full story is a bit more complex than the reasons given in grammar school textbooks.
Religious freedom was a motivation for Puritans, Pilgrims, Quakers, and others, but thousands of other immigrants were members of the established church in England and had no interest in other theologies. What motivated them?
Perhaps the simplest answer is that living in England was very difficult at the time. The upper classes lived comfortably, but the majority of citizens had difficulty eking out even a mere subsistence. Starvation was not unknown, and even those who did eat regularly had diets that most of us today would reject. Without refrigeration or modern canning techniques, even those with some financial security had monotonous diets in the winter and early spring. The thought of eating turnip soup three times a day for weeks on end seems appalling today but was common in the 1600s. The Irish more likely ate potato soup. Continue reading →
The following is from the book “Surnames, DNA, & Family History”; by George Redmonds, Turi King and David Hey.
Son of Robert
Another difficult task for non-specialists is to discover what type of origin a name has and how it relates to similar names with much the same meaning. Some of the issues emerge in a study of three surnames that all mean ‘son of Robert’.
Robinson, with a total of 95,495, is an excellent example of a multi-origin name, but it is characteristic only of the northern counties of England and is not generally popular. In 1881, even after centuries of internal migration, Robinson was still very uncommon in all the counties in south-west England and was rare in both Wales and Scotland, whereas in Yorkshire over 20,000 people bore this name. Of course, the totals for the biggest or most populous counties can be misleading, and this is where the relative concentration of the name comes into question. These statistics, which are also provided on the Archer CD, show how significant a name Robinson was in the smaller or largely rural counties, notably in Westmorland, Cumberland, and the North Riding of Yorkshire, and in Lincolnshire, which was virtually the southern limit of the surname. Continue reading →
A generation is defined as the average time between a mother’s first offspring and her daughter’s first offspring. The generation length is 25.2 years in the United States as of 2007 and 27.4 years in the United Kingdom as of 2004.
“Imagine a dinner table set for a thousand guests, in which each man is sitting between his own father and his own son. At one end of the table might be a French Nobel laureate in a white tie and tails, and with the Legion of Honor on his breast, and at the other end a Cro-Magnon man dressed in animal skins and with a necklace of cave-bear teeth. Yet each one would be able to converse with his neighbors on his left and right, who would either be his father or his son. So the distance from then to now is not really great.” (From Bjorn Kurten, Singletusk: A Story of the Ice Age, 1986)Continue reading →
The following is from a newspaper article found in the Iowa State Reporter: Waterloo, May 26, 1875.
Township Histories
Poyner Township
The first settlement in Poyner Township was made by Amasa Nims on section 26 in 1850. In 1852 he sold his claim to Benjamin Winsett and moved out of the Township. John and Joseph Perry and George Arthur came soon after, the same year. Edmund Sawyer, Nathan and Tomas Poyner and John Van Etton came in 1853. When the Poyners came there were seven families in the Township. Continue reading →
Black Hawk County (BHC) was created in 1843 by the Territorial Legislature of Iowa and attached to Delaware County for judicial, election and revenue proposes, because there were few, if any, white settlers at the time.
The Saux and Fox (Meskwaki) Indians had lived here for many years, owning the area until 1837. The county was named after the renowned Sauk Chief Black Hawk, although he never lived here.
In 1845, BHC was attached to Benton County, and in 1851 to Bushman County again for judicial, election and revenue purposes. Not until Aug. 17, 1853 did BHC have its own government.
The first permanent white settlement in Black Hawk County was started in March 1845 by William Sturgis and his brother-in-law, Erasmus D. Adams. They named their settlement Sturgis Falls. The two came to the area in search of homes and desirable waterpower. Upon arriving in the area, Sturgis and Adams were charmed by both the beauty of the area, and also by the possibility of a town site in the area. Continue reading →
Between 1845 and 1850, more than a million Irish people starved to death while massive quantities of food were being exported from their country. The agricultural system just before the outbreak of the Famine had a major impact in what would happen. The land was then owned by British landlords (many absentee) who rented out plots to the native farmers. Most of the land was employed to produce crops for export, while the farmers, in order to provide food for their families, used tiny plots. The potato was the crop of choice because it could be grown in poor soil and because it produced a large yield even in a small area. The result was such that the native people of Ireland were, by 1845, dependent – for their food and to enable them to pay the rent for their living quarters – on the reliability of the potato crop.
There were, however, problems brewing on the horizon – a disease called ‘blight’ (caused by the fungus ‘Phytophthora infestans’) had already wiped out the potato crops in America (1843) and all across continental Europe (1845). It was only a matter of time before it reached Ireland, the spores of the fungus carried by the wind, rain and insects from England and mainland Europe. While the US and Europe had other foods on which to rely, the native population of Ireland was not so lucky. Continue reading →
In the days of old, I used to keep track of movies my wife and I watched. We would rate them and I built an Access database to keep track of them. That was back when you rented movies on CD — sometimes we would forget and rent the same movie over, so I wanted to help us keep track. But then Netflix hit and the CD stores moved away and I stopped updating the database. I do have some all-time favorites. The list below is just for fun, it is not necessarily a recommendation, it is more a sign of my OCPDness 🙂 I have purchased the CD version of some of these just to force someone to decide what to do with them when I die!
• 10,000 BC
• 2001 A Space Odyssey
• Absolute Power
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind
• Contact
• Ex Machina
• Meet Joe Black
• Melancholia
• Taken
• The Circle
• The Day the Earth Stood Still
• The Gods Must Be Crazy
• What The Bleep Do We Know
• Where To Invade Next (Michael Moore)
I went back and reviewed my Access database before writing this and must admit that lists of “favorites” are based on date. New things appear and old things loose their impact by sinking in memory. But if you never make a list of favorites, no one would know you cared! Remind me to add to this list next year!
“Every story ever told really happened. Stories are where memories go when they’re forgotten.” – Dr. Who
My current favorite movie is Ex Machina. I first heard about it last year and could never find it playing anywhere near here. It is a small budget film which rarely makes it to Monterey. We just bought the Amazon TV Fire Stick and found the movie free in Amazon Prime. Ex Machina was the first thing we watched on the Stick!
And I loved it…. yes, the movie and the Stick too. Meanwhile, this was written in Wikipedia.
Ex Machina is a 2015 British science fiction psychological thriller film. Ex Machina tells the story of a programmer who is invited by his employer, an eccentric billionaire, to administer the Turing test to an android with artificial intelligence.
Made on a budget of $15 million, the film has grossed over $38.2 million worldwide and received critical acclaim. The National Board of Review recognized it as one of the ten best independent films of the year. The film was also nominated for two Academy Awards; Best Original Screenplay and Best Visual Effects.
And it is 92% on Rotten Tomatoes!
If you like Science Fiction, are curious about the current Artificial Intelligence debate, like mysteries, or just like to find hard-to-find films, watch Ex Machina. I heartily recommend it.
Invite the world to surprise you by predicting what will happen!” – Anonymous
Yes, Santa Claus is getting ready to go. Rudolph and the other reindeer are getting last minute pep talks. By the way, did you know that both male and female reindeer have antlers? Yep. So Rudolph might actually be a girl! Go girl go!
Norad (North American Aerospace Defense Command) has been tracking Santa for 60 years now. They have the “official” web tracker. They were tracking before the internet was invented!!
I checked both trackers and discovered they show Santa starting at different times. I looked around and discovered that Norad starts tracking Santa at 7am GMT on Christmas Eve, and Google will be tracking Santa from 10am GMT on Christmas Eve.
Greenwich Mean Time is 8 hours ahead of Pacific Time: Norad starts 11pm Dec 23, Google starts 2am Dec 24.
So basically, he is already moving!
My great uncle Andrew Robeson (b. 7/24/1891 d. 4/17/1964) made leather billfolds and key holders as a hobby. When he died, I was given sheets and sheets of colorful leathers, which of course, I didn’t know how to use. Eventually I threw it all away – mildew had begun to grow. I wish I had all that leather now! We could make things like this.
These are called “mystery braids” or “magic braids”. These YouTube movies show how to do this braid and make some bracelets. Just be careful when you use the knife!
Watch the movie clip shown at this link to see how to wrap gifts with one piece of tape. You have to click through a commercial up front, and then be sure to avoid the other adverts. But this is the web site SLATE, so it is reasonably safe. The movie clip is then right under the headlines.
Jims BBS 