Mid-morning. You sit with fingers on the
keys but words are not rendered up. Carol is having breakfast with her retired Blue
Ash teacher friends. While visiting Kim and Paul the car’s exterior was damaged
by spray/spillage on the road. State Farm, and the Joseph Toyota Collision
Center has not identified the substance but the collision center has concluded
it will ‘rub out’. Next Tuesday they will have the car for the day and the
paint will be fully restored as well as a reapplication of the Xzilon treatment
you paid for with the original purchase of the car. – Amorella
0910
hours. Mary Lou's friends, Dee and Tony, gave us a wonderful framed recent portrait of Mary Lou – it captures
my sister-in-law’s outgoing and distinctive personality – just looking at it at
breakfast. I am more deeply saddened by her passing than I suspected I would
be.
A step in the right direction, boy. The
heart has many river-like passageways – the ebbing and flowing are not always
intuitive or counter-intuitive for that matter. Common shared memories are more
easily resurrected than understood. You knew each other for forty-nine years of
family time, especially with Kim and her daughter Sharon being born less than a
year apart – lots of shared trips to Florida to see Carol and Mary Lou’s mother
and father as well as Linda and Bill and their girls, Jean and Jen. Ventures
throughout Florida and the best of times at Key West were all a major part of
your lives together. – Amorella
0925
hours. Obviously, Mary Lou has had more bearing on my private family life than
I was willing to think on. Mary Lou and Sharon, Linda and Bill and Jean and Jen
have an impact of the lives of Carol and myself and Kim and Paul. Mary Lou was
a very important to our family’s private lives. I need to accept this sorrow in
a broader context, and as the needed phrase says, move on.
You and Carol had lunch at Penn Station and
Carol is getting ready for her last physical therapy at home. – Amorella
1544
hours. Yesterday when Dr. Thomas asked Carol to bend her knee sitting down she
did so naturally and efficiently that his excitement was caught in the surprise.
I also was surprised, almost as much so as when she first walked without a
walker or cane. The bend movement was certainly more than the 120 degrees he
was looking for. The only therapy to work on is keeping the knee straight when
stretched; it is within 5 degrees of straight. He wants it straight. She has
two sessions as the Mason Community Center a week and will start a week from
Monday. Once this is accomplished her leg strength will continue to grow and
within three months the replacement should be completely ‘naturalized/normalized’
by relearned leg muscle. It was completely cool to see the X-rays of the
artificial knee. I am very proud and amazed with Carol and her progress. She
sat and bent her knee for Dr. Thomas like it had been there her entire life. It
was her best performance. No hesitation or jerkiness – just a natural bending
of the knee more than 120 degrees while sitting. Most cool.
You found a good BBC science article today,
one that gives you more hope that comets indeed helped seed life in the
universe. Add and post. - Amorella
** **
Science & Environment
Comet yields 'rich array' of organics
Science
editor
The spacecraft which made a spectacular landing on a comet last
year has discovered a rich array of carbon compounds.
One leading scientist has even described the chemicals as
"a frozen primordial soup".
The
Rosetta craft is still orbiting 67P and took image on 28 April 15
This supports the theory that comets may have seeded the early
Earth with the ingredients for life.
The findings came after the lander, known as Philae, touched
down on comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko 67P in November.
It was dropped by the European Space Agency's Rosetta
"mothership" in the climactic stage of a ten-year mission.
Results from the lander's seven instruments are published in a
special collection of papers in the journal Science.
One team running a device called COSAC found no fewer
than 16 organic compounds, four of which had not been known to
exist on comets before.
Ancestral material
Prof Ian Wright of the Open University, who leads another
instrument, Ptolemy, said the results were "really interesting".
"I see this cometary material that we're analysing as
frozen primordial soup. It's the kind of stuff that if you had it, and warmed
it up somehow, and put it in the right environment, with the right conditions,
you may eventually get life forming out of it.
"What we may be looking at here is our abiological
ancestral material - this is stuff that went into the mix to produce life.
"In many
ways it's quite a humbling thing to be working on, because this is life before
life happened."
One of Ptolemy's most
significant discoveries is of a compound known as
polyoxymethylene, a string of relatively simple molecules forming a polymer of
formaldehyde.
Prof Wright said: "The simplest unit of this polymer is a
single carbon, two hydrogens and a single oxygen, and this then repeats itself.
That same ratio of elements occur in carbohydrates and sugars so it's very
interesting and implicated in the biological cycle we have on Earth."
In a separate
paper, Fred Goesmann and colleagues describe the 16 compounds
found by their COSAC instrument, and their possible importance for the development
of life.
Hydroxyethanal is "an efficient initiator in the prebiotic
formation of sugars", they write.
And methanenitrile is "a key molecule in the prebiotic
synthesis of amino acids and nucleobases and even offers an elegant pathway to
sugars".
The authors conclude that the complexity of the comet's chemical
makeup, and the presence of organics containing nitrogen, "imply that
early solar system chemistry fosters the formation of prebiotic material in
noticeable concentrations".
None of the papers suggests the presence of more sophisticated
compounds such as amino acids - though further analysis of the findings may
yield that.
'Hardware shop'
Professor Charles Cockell, director of the UK Astrobiology
Centre, was not involved in the mission but told the BBC the results were
"very significant".
"Finding simple organic compounds on a comet out there in
space, showing us that they could have been delivered to the early Earth, early
in the history of our planet, is tremendously exciting.
"It gives us better ideas about how those building blocks
of life may have formed and where they may have come from.
"It
confirms there is organic chemistry throughout the universe, that
carbon-containing compounds, some of which are very complex, could be being
formed on comets in our solar system."
Prof Mark McCaughrean, the European Space Agency's senior
science advisor, told BBC News: "Imagine you want to build a house and you
go to a forest, where there are trees, mud and rocks. You could make a house
out of that, but it would be hard work.
"Well, we've now discovered the comet is more like a
hardware shop - lots of pre-made building blocks, like door frames, bricks etc.
It gives you a head start.
"One of the big questions, though, is this material made on
the comet? Or is it made first in space and then incorporated into the comet?
We don't know the answer to that yet."
The data published today was gathered during Philae's chaotic
landing on the comet. Ptolemy had been programmed to switch on ten minutes
after touching down.
Prof Wright told the BBC: "The idea was we'd just have time
for a sniff of the air - there was no great reason to do it, it was to check
the instrument had survived landing, an insurance policy to get some data as
soon as possible."
As things turned out, Philae did not anchor itself to its
original landing zone but bounced back up which meant that Ptolemy's 'sniff'
took place while the spacecraft was airborne.
Despite this, the instrument successfully got readings of
whatever material had entered its vent pipe.
"We've
just got a snapshot of some dust that was flying around as we landed but we've
got some very significant data," Prof Wright said.
After a long silence, the Philae lander made contact last month
but the link has been intermittent and the spacecraft's fate is unclear.
One theory is that it may have been dislodged or tipped over by
a jet of gas emerging from the rocks beneath it.
And gas jets are becoming more intense as the comet approaches
the Sun - with its closest approach, known as perihelion, coming up shortly on
13 August.
Another idea is that because Philae is believed to be sitting at
the foot of a cliff, it may have been hit by falling debris, dislodged as the
surface warms.
But those involved in the mission are determined to remain
optimistic that the lander has survived and will resume contact.
Even if it does
not, several loads of data, collected and sent back in the Philae's first 60
hours on the comet, are still being analysed and have yet to be published.
Selected and
edited from - http://www.bbcDOTcom/news/science-environment-33720951
Carol is in her last home session and you
are mulling over moving ahead with chapter nine. Let’s check and see where you
are. – Amorella
1630
hours. First, I was reading an article in the ‘Mind over Matter’ section of the
September issue of Discover. The article is “Talking Heads – What happens when scientists try to
eavesdrop on the inner voice?” by Cassandra Willyard. Here are a couple excerpts.
** **
“In the
search for answers, I [Cassandra Willyard] began combing through the scientific
literature. One man’s name appears again and again: Lev Vygotsky, a Russian
psychologist. He proposed in the 1930’s that our inner voice evolves when we
are still children . . .. We’ve all heard children talk to themselves as they
build Lego battleships or whip up imaginary pancakes. Eventually, Vygotsky
wrote, these private conversations begin to take place silently inside our
heads.” p. 22
Charles
Fernyhough of Durham University in Britain says, “Inner speech is just private
speech that has been fully internalized.” p. 22
“Try
having a thought and documenting it at the same time, and you’ll begin to
understand the problem scientists are up against.” p. 22
“Dolores
Albarracin, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
says it typically appears ‘when you are really worried or really anxious.’
Albarracin and her colleagues found that negative situations and internal
struggles tend to elicit a ‘splitting of the mind’ that transforms the inner
voice into something of a surrogate parent.” p. 24
“Inner
speech also seems to help people perform cognitive tasks.” p. 24.
Selected
and edited from – Cassandra Willyard, “Talking Heads”, Discover,
September 2015.
** **
1740
hours. This article fits very easily around my situation, first, as a child with a
private internal friend who looked and sounded like Aunt Jemima and later in
life morphed into an angelic-like Amorella. This is one of my hypotheses for my
inner writer phenomenon anyway.
I find no argument against the above as a
hypothesis. – Amorella
1747
hours. I am documenting my/your thoughts in any case.
You
reworked and completed Brothers Nine and feel the better for it. Post. –
Amorella
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