The Mandelbear's Musings

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Sweet Home Chicago.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Colorado and the Midwest.

N and m ride the California from somewhere west of Denver to Chicago. With bonus playlist of train songs. How many do you recognize? What have we missed?

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is The Coast Starlight.

Side note -- I rode that train from Oakland to Seattle 50-odd years ago. Beautiful route.

Boosting the signal for siderea | US SOUTH: ALERT: Extreme Wet-Bulb Temps Fri 6/30 [meteo, US]. Also NOAA's "severe weather warning"

Severe thunderstorms that may produce tornadoes, along with scattered severe gusts and large/damaging hail, and heavy rains will impact portions of the Great Lakes region southward into the Lower Mississippi River Valley. An oppressive and persistent heat dome will continue producing dangerous heat and humidity in Texas and spread into the lower Mississippi River Valley.

I think "dangerous heat and humidity" may be an understatement -- they're talking about wet-bulb globe temperatures in the 90's. This is not quite extreme as equal wet-bulb temperatures, which are measured in the shade, but it's still well into the potentially deadly range.

Be safe out there.

Signal boost for siderea | Move [US, pols, Patreon]. (Also noted by @catsittingstill.)

I don't know who in the US needs to hear this: it's time.

If you have a uterus, or love someone who does. If you're trans, or love someone who is – especially if they're a child. If you were married to someone of the same sex. If you are otherwise LGBQ, or your child is. If you are someone who provides medical care that is or is about to become criminalized.

Definitely, if you live in Florida. Probably, if you live in Texas. There's a whole bunch of other states that aren't looking too good either.

If you're one of those people living in one of those places in the US...

It's time to think about moving.

There's more -- go read the whole post. I'll wait.

My extended family includes people in all of the categories at risk. I have already advised my kids, including my trans son, to get their damned passports renewed. Washington (state) is still safe for the moment; all bets are off after 2024, and the US Supreme (kangaroo) Court is already makings things difficult. That will only get worse.

In addition to Florida and Texas, dangerous states include Idaho, Indiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee (all mentioned in comments on Siderea's post); there are others.

Note that the Nazis went after queers first. They didn't stop there. Good luck.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Postcard from Florence, July 2022. You're getting a postcard, a day late, because Naomi's been taking care of two sick kids and I spent yesterday as a zombie thanks to a COVID booster (Moderna, bivalent). Bivalent apparently means that it can kick my butt twice as hard.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Traveling With a Guitar. It's been hanging out on the sidelines since sometime in July, waiting for a day when the planned weekly post didn't get finished. That would be today, when two kids' first day of school and three cats' vet appointments collided somewhere along Aurora Avenue.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Ay-yi-yi-yi, The Open Road is Home.

We take a break from the Italy trip report to tell you about the road trip, which is finally happening even as we speak. I’m writing this from a Best Western in Barstow, California. If all goes as planned then we’ve got two more days till we get to Albuquerque...

It's immediately followed by a Bonus Post – Photos from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, because the Aquarium deserved a post all by itself. If were reading this blog before 2012, you'll know that it was a frequent weekend destination for me and my family while we were living in the Bay Area.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog (following last week's out-of-order interruption) is St. Peter and St. Christopher, recounting N and j's visit to St Peter's Basilica in Rome, followed by a bit of an adventure getting back to their hotel.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Another Country. The world's smallest country, as a matter of fact.

I'm not sure why this is coming out so late -- the GoingSideways post came out Tuesday. Well, better late... It's been a weird week.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Scattered Chunks of Antiquity. N and j visit Rome's Jewish Quarter and Piazza Navona, and encounter random bits of history in between.

I don't think I've ever used "awestruck" in my Mood field before. But the James Webb Space Telescope's first images are worth it.

Here's the (recorded) livestream where they released the first images and spectra.

Additional links: Webb Telescope: First Science Images Packet | Science Mission Directorate and Webb's First Images & Data | Flickr

Finally, a personal note: this was an unexpectedly intense emotional experience for me. My father was one of the pioneers of infra-red spectroscopy, and Mom worked on the Hubble (they both worked at Perkin-Elmer, where the Hubble's mirror was made). The software that finds the spectral lines is (most likely) based on the Savitzky–Golay filter. When they put up the spectrum of WASP-96B I was close to tears.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Exploring at Home.

One of the most common pieces of advice travelers get is, if you can’t go anywhere right away, go traveling in your own town or city. There are reasons why people go to visit pretty much everywhere for the fun of it, from the wilds of Borneo to urban Seattle to small-town Iowa. Find the reasons why someone who isn’t from your city would go touring in your city, and do it yourself. Sounds easy, right?

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Frankly, It’s a Sick Truck.

Frank the Truck [which ... um... who?? you might remember from last week] is unwell.

The conclusions from the inspection were mixed, but worrisome. On the one hand, his body is in good shape, without any of the rust that ruled out one truck for us, and most of his systems seem to be fine as well. On the other hand, he’s getting engine issue codes that could mean anything from a cam shaft or timing chain problem to the need for an entire new engine. And right now, we don’t know which we’re dealing with, since the mechanic who did the inspection can’t diagnose him with more specificity than that. We need to take him to a Ford dealer, they told us.

This threatens to put a definite kink in everybody's plans for the next month or so. Look for an update next week.

I was pointed at a couple of fascinating health-related articles (which I should have posted about Tuesday, but procrastinated):

First, Drinking Coffee Daily May Stave Off Early Death, Study Suggests. Which I was already assuming from prior reading, but this is good confirmation. What was new to me was that a teaspoon of sugar actually enhances the effect -- I don't use it, but generally eat something fruit-like with it, which presumably counts. Good to know, given my liter/day habit.

(Supported by this research article: Association of Sugar-Sweetened, Artificially Sweetened, and Unsweetened Coffee Consumption With All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality: A Large Prospective Cohort Study: Annals of Internal Medicine.)

Second, On Your Back? Side? Face-Down? Mice Show How We Sleep May Trigger Or Protect Our Brain From Diseases Like ALS | IFLScience tl;dr: side. Lately I've found that I can't get to sleep lying on my back (I used to; darned if I know what changed), so it's good to know that side-sleeping is healthier as well.

(Supported by The Effect of Body Posture on Brain Glymphatic Transport - PubMed The Glymphatic System – A Beginner's Guide - PMC.) The glymphatic system was apparently discovered in 2013; this set of articles was the first I'd heard of it.

Sleeping on one's left side, in particular, is better for other reasons, including reducing heartburn. (See "Side Sleeping: Benefits and Which Side to Sleep On | Sleep Foundation" and "6 Hidden Health Benefits of Sleeping On Your Left Side That You've NEVER Heard About" -- although I'd already heard about several of those.) The benefits for sleep apnea and back pain appear to be less side-dependent, and there seem to be arguments in favor of both directions, e.g. Right vs. Left Side Sleeping: What's the Best for Your Health? - Sleep Junkie.

Edited to correct paste error in the coffee study link text.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Racking Up the Miles -- the next installment in the continuing saga of C's search for a truck.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Things I Learned in Africa.

Seems to have been a short week. Of course, some of that was due to my having gotten my second COVID-19 (Moderna) booster Wednesday morning, with the result that I spent Wednesday evening and all day Thursday with chills and muscle aches, doing very little except being somewhat miserable. I expect that my reaction to the real virus would be considerably worse, so I'm not complaining.

Despite that, I actually got a few things done. The big one was writing and publishing a post on GoingSideways.blog, titled St/rolling, about life with Colleen and her scooter. So naturally I failed to signal boost it here Friday after I wrote it. This will have to do.

I sense a curmudgeon post approaching.

I also got one of my 1099R's entered yesterday. (Two more to go, then the other 1099s, the Schedule C, and the deductions. Blarg.) It's starting to look like 2021 might have been a bad year. I'll find out soon enough.

I've been learning about, and experimenting a little with, WordPress "block themes". Which are supposed to be a lot easier to customize, but complicate things in other ways, and don't come very close to solving my current problem, which is theme lock-in. Or if they do, I don't see how.

( Notes & links, as usual )

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Catching Up to Now - getting caught up with the recent past, and plans for the near future.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Shipping Out -- Naomi's visit to the National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam.

I don't seem to have signal-boosted the last few posts in GoingSideways.blog -- time to fix that.

Impenetrable is probably the best post so far:

It sounds so much like a fairy tale, doesn’t it? First there’s a long climb, high into the steep and scary mountains. Then you hack your way with swords into a place called the Impenetrable Forest. And it’s all in order to meet a kind of gentle giants who live nowhere else in the world… giants who are almost, but not quite, human.

Cut and Run, wherein the consequences of Breaking the First Rule finally catch up with her.

At that point, the determination which had kept me going through six hard days of illness gave out. Screw it, I thought — why am I still pushing myself? I’ve done all the things that were most important to me here. I’ve visited rhinos and I’ve boated on the Nile. I’ve seen chimpanzees up close, and gorillas have walked up and touched me. I’ve gutted my way through three different camps despite severe illness just because there were a few things I didn’t want to miss, and I haven’t missed a single one of them. Now I am DONE.

And today's post, On the Water, wherein Naomi starts the last leg of her trip, visiting her oldest friend in Amsterdam.

Right now, as I write, I am touring Amsterdam on a boat. I am also living, for the week, on a boat. Different boat. Amsterdam is very big on boats. This happens when your entire city is below sea level and therefore most of it’s built on piles just to keep it out of the water.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Trip Diary: Breaking the First Rule.

What first rule, you wonder? Well, they do depend on who you ask. My mother’s first rule was always, “Never hit anything that’s harder than you are,” and a good and sensible rule it is. Thankfully, I didn’t break that one; thataway lie broken bones and concussions. But I did do something maybe even stupider. I broke the first rule of international travel, the one every tourist hears the moment they announce their first expedition beyond the boundaries of their own country (at least if they live in the west)...

The latest post on GoingSideways.blog: Trip Diary: The Rhinos, the Road, and the River. Naomi's first stop in Uganda — the headwaters of the great Nile, and Ziwa Rhino Sanctuary – Africa's Rhino Paradise.

Trip Diary: Soft Camp, Hard Landscape - GoingSideways.blog

After the excitement of leopards and hyenas and dead lions, I said goodbye to my friends at Splash Camp and caught a bush plane for the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans, in the middle of the Kalahari desert. I was supposed to be headed for a modest place called Camp Kalahari — about the luxury level of Splash Camp — but I was upgraded again. Same reason as at Old Drift: too few guests spread out over too many camps. But this time the upgrade was a really big one. This time, I was offered a stay at Jack’s Camp.

The latest post on GoingSideways.blog is Trip Diary: Where Are All the Elephants?. (Don't worry -- you'll find out soon.)