A different prespective to Life

I have always loved space and was very excited by the Viking Program  for the exploration of Mars and followed the various space probes to the bigger outer gas giants and their corresponding moons. The robotic space probes Voyager, Voyager2, New Horizons, etc sent back excellent photographs and terrific data, they expanded our knowledge of the universe. Then  probes sent to travelling asteroids and comets, that gave us a fresher experience of these visitors and their elliptic journey within our solar system from slinging close to our sun to the extremely cold temperatures of far beyond. With the discovery of an underground lake of water on Mars, a subsurface ocean on Europa (a moon of Jupiter) and Enceladus (a moon of Saturn). Finding liquid water as essential in our thinking for life, "as we know it", has rekindled our efforts to find life, be it microscopic or primitive in our solar system.  Then, there are millions and millions  of galaxies  in...

Doubt is the product What this book says, and the film elucidates is there is a selective specific group of "scientists" who have a particular playbook to discredit, confuse and "muddy the waters" against scientific research for their sponsors. What these group of people or interest groups have learned from the days of dealing with the tobacco industry, is that they need not concern themselves with trying to prove anything or to disprove the scientists. All they need is to seed doubt and confusion in the market of public opinion, their main motto is "Doubt is our product". As, when people are confused and the policies are difficult to interpret because they are complicated, ambiguous, inconclusive, etc then there will be great difficulty in organizing widespread opposition to it. They deliberately frustrate governments into inaction, blocking them by using their lobbyist and "experts" and hence stop all ways of finding effective solutions...

Just finished watching the 13th on Netflix by Ava DuVernay With only 5% of the world population the US has 25% of the world incarcerated. One in 4 out of the people in prison anywhere in the world is an America. South Africa's apartheid was taken from the US segregation laws, then mass incarceration. The "I am not a crook" Nixon used the Southern Strategy and the "War on Drugs". Then Ronald Reagan continued the war on drugs and harsher sentences placed on crack than on cocaine.  Minorities, especially African Americans, were disproportionately incarcerated. More that 80 percent of federal prisons serving crack cocaine sentences were black. In August 2010 President Barack Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 to “restore fairness to Federal cocaine sentencing“ laws.  The war on drugs was like a war on blacks and I used to like Reagan. And these like other terms are codes for "war on blacks" like "state rights", "forc...

I recently watched a film " The Big Short ", this is a wonderful film it is more of a documentary-like film, with the actors who played main characters in causing the crises, sometimes taking breaks and explaining directly to the camera exactly -what was happening. They also used different additional clips and sketches, with beautiful actors and actresses doing exotic things to explain very complex financial instruments. The film starts with a coat from Mark Twain It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so. The story was traced back to the 1970's when banking could be said to be boring. There was a particular person, named Lewis Ranieri of Salomon Brothers, who is said to have created  mortgage-backed security   ( MBS ). These are a group of mortgages bundle together hence lowering the risk and raising the yield or profit. Now there was no problem as long as these MBS main con...

In the gym, there is a usual atmosphere of health and joy. It seems everybody knows one other and be it in the swimming pool, sauna, steam room, squash court, exercise room, etc you have a set of friends that you talk and joke. As it could be very boring if you just go through the motions in silence. Also especially when bathing, shaving, etc it seems you become less uninhibited especially with endorphins flowing in your bloodstream and freer with your fellow gym members and most of the time you are semi-naked. Topics from politics, health, sex, children, etc are discussed openly and freely. I talk on topics of health being the chief resident health adviser as I had trained and worked as a medical doctor. I have a belief that we should try to avoid seeing doctors except for checkups to see everything is going on smoothly, by living healthy lives and preach this message vigorously. I happen to be a big man and have a large voice. I had finished swimming and was relaxing in the stea...

I have always loved astronomy from the days of Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Brian Cox and most recently Neil deGrasse Tyson. I followed the Moon landings and the space probes, Pioneer, Voyagers 1 and 2, Galileo, etc and the Viking Lander on Mars. Those pictures and data they brought back were fantastic. It seems my love of space seems to be infectious as all my children read religiously all my books on space, the planets, stars, and explorations with a lot of pictures of the landscape of the Moon - the Apollo programs, Venus, Mars, and more recently the dwarf planet Pluto by New Horizons. Recently, when on YouTube I came across a whole range of celebrities and icons, who still believe that the earth is flat. I thought that this issue was settled by the ancient Greeks, Pythagoras, Anaxagoras, Aristotle, etc and Aristarchus and Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth and knew it's placed in our solar system. If these great thinkers could deduce this with non...