Nacirema The Island

Something interesting happened recently: Can we use apps like Sickweather to predict public health problems in the future? Here is your location for reference. What do you think?

Today on LinkedIN I learned the three most interesting facts since joining that website two or three years ago. 1. Our economy is looking like the Roaring Twenties . Income inequality is high, but the real fear is the declining population due to rising education rates (and the corresponding drop in replacement rates) will cause a housing bubble pop. This will be like 2008 but much much worse. 2. We can vaccinate mice against Lyme disease so that the ticks have less Lyme disease to spread when they bite you. We feed them MnM like kibble so that they can get the vaccine into their body without having to hunt them down and inject them. #vaccineswork https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/vaccinating-mice-may-finally-slow-lyme-disease/ \ 3. Populism is a Modern (read: the last 500 years since Columbus) Affairs. It isn't new! Charles C. Mann is golden. https://www.axios.com/charles-mann-1493-global-world-columbus-created-382e2a9a-71dd-45e6-950c-dae963b0fa60.html

Both Brandon Flowers and the Script are commenting on America at large. This is not normal from listening to their music. They state that they usually avoid politics and religion. These are also people who place rather more conservative views on religion in their music than other groups I have heard, and so I wonder if this is a fundamental shift in how they view the world. Land of the Free Divided States of America--the Script

Why do we sell Christmas ornaments in Halloween? Why do we sell Thanksgiving goods in the middle of October? Why do we start campaigning two years before an actual election? This man Marcus K. Dowling, as weird as some of his other thoughts  are , has hit the nail on what the next election will hang on: finding the lowest common denominator such as money and centrist appeal to satisfy America's desire for the bitter infighting we have seen lately in our politics. https://medium.com/@marcuskdowling/the-bull-moose-democrats-will-allow-for-trumps-2020-re-election-a5c0d616729f This is a Bull Moose by the way.

A little late, but I really enjoyed this article. It felt like my values were being represented in Congress again, and in the Republican Party! https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mitt-romney-the-president-shapes-the-public-character-of-the-nation-trumps-character-falls-short/2019/01/01/37a3c8c2-0d1a-11e9-8938-5898adc28fa2_story.html

:The manners of the Americans of the United States are, then, the real cause which renders that people the only one of the American nations that is able to support a democratic Government; and it is the influence of manners which produces the different degrees of order and of prosperity that may be distinguished in the several Anglo-American democracies. Thus the effect which the geographical position of a country may have upon the duration of democratic institutions is exaggerated in Europe. Too much importance is attributed to legislation, too little to manners. These three great causes serve, no doubt, to regulate and direct the American democracy; but if they were to be classed in their proper order, I should say that the physical circumstances are less efficient than the laws, and the laws very subordinate to the manners of the people. I am convinced that the most advantageous situation and the best possible laws can not maintain a constitution in spite of the manners of a countr

One hundred years ago, the first great advances in genetics, based on Mendel's work, were made. So were advances in physics, chemistry. All of these to me were pure, real science that really made leaps forward. These men knew their math, and basic chemistry so well, that they were nothing but precise. They, unlike us, who are dependant on their great stores of knowledge, had to stab in the dark in the right place, and they did so well, that we don't even think to thank them. Their biology classes did not have the information they pioneered for us today. They literally had to do guesswork to explain what they were seeing. We need to quit being so arrogant about the knowledge we so easily obtain today because of their hard efforts. For example: In 1900, when Mendel’s work was rediscovered and biologists began to apply his principles of heredity, the relation between genes and chromosomes was still unclear. The theory that genes are located on chromosomes (the chromosome t