Snowflake's Forum

  Elon Musk can’t wait to move to Mars.  Even though the place is lacking things such as water, air, food, and everything Earth has…people still willing to go. Would you go and establish the first colony?  Would you go if there already was a self sufficient colony?  (Think Total Recall).  What about colony station in space?  Would you leave the planet for such a chance, or stay home? Bunny staying put. J. P. Bunny

  Every Saturday, the New York Times has an interview with an author.  The last question is, which three authors, living or dead, would you invite to your dinner party? Bunny shall expand on that.  Which three famous / historical people, living or dead, would you invite?  Bunny would go for Elizabeth I, Mark Twain, and Tesla.   Who will it be for you? J. P. Bunny

I recall granny making soap using lye and hog fat. She heated the smelly concoction over a fire in a black cast iron cauldron hung from a tripod. Old time witch's brew sort of thing it was. Granny actually used a bit of technology like this wall phone.  She had what used to be called a "party line" where other people on the same line could listen in to other people's conversations. It was great for small town gossips. Party lines went extinct, but we still have telephones. That is exactly what granny's phone looked like. I even got to make a call on it once. She had to hold me up to be able to reach it to turn the hand crank. That advanced technology of the day looked like this on the inside. Other technology around that time looked like this, outside and inside. Zenith 12S-471 radio Very nice wood,  now mostly extinct on radios Inside of the 12S-471 Fast forward to 2025: My son just bought a new gaming machine. It's transparent so the outside doesn't obs...

 Mr. Bunny asked on his last thread how we deal with time. As in being on time, or late, or early. BUT how much of time controls us? Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin' Into the future Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin' Into the future Suddenly you find you have run out of time. Or as the saying goes "time flys" or "where did the time go." Is it any wonder I've got  too much time on my hands? It's ticking away with my sanity I've got too much time on my hands It's hard to believe such a calamity I've got too much time on my hands Is it any wonder I'm not crazy? Is it any wonder I'm sane at all? Let me be more specific. Have you ever started a project and run out of time? Have you ever used the excuse you don't have enough time to visit Snowflake's forum? Or gotten into a fight with you significant other and said to him/her "I don't have time for this?' Is time a friend, or an ene...

  Time.  How do you handle it?  Bunny is horribly anal about it.  Must arrive early.  If a place is closing within the hour, need to get out.  On the other hand, Mrs. Bunny is terrible with it.  Doesn’t matter if we should have left 10 minutes ago, still plenty of time. How are you with time?  Punctual?  Anal?  Relaxed?  Don’t care? J. P. Bunny

This is a four pictures from my smartphone; two are pictures from the real world, and the others were produced by an AI program on my little talk-toy.  Take a really, reeeally good look at all these pictures, and tell me which ones you like better.  I must say, the fakes are pretty impressive; at least you can recognize the objects in them. Posted by Jennifer A. Nolan  

  The world is full of news, most of it depressing or disturbing.  This is for the interesting news in your area.  The world will not care, but interesting or relevant to you. Bears have always been sited near populated areas here, especially in the fall.  The visits rare.  This year, they are all over the place.  Many wandering through town streets, and breaking into buildings.  Several deaths.  One dragged someone from an outside hot spring, dragged him into the forest, and ate him.   Last week a bear spotted on the other side of the hills from Bunny’s warren. Anything of interest in your area? J. P. Bunny

  Meanwhile, to go back to an old theme, traffic is once again WAY down. And more and more sad news keeps coming my way. We all know about milo leaving us. I hope we haven't lost Susan as well. I have kept in contact with her through email and without giving too much away, her hubby is recovering from open heart surgery, and between the stress that this is putting on her and the responsibilities of looking after his care, she may or may not be back with us any time soon. Another regular who I know to be elderly, I have only seen post the odd comment and has become more and more infrequent on here. I sent him an email and have yet to receive a reply. Others have either left or have been more infrequent for various reasons. Some don't want ANY politics and even the most innocuous threads sometimes have people making political comments. Some have decided we aren't political enough or not far enough to the left enough, so they have departed for where they can be more verbose in...

SciTechDaily reports that the boffettes and boffins at Boston Children’s Hospital, in collaboration with Broad Clinical Labs and Roche Sequencing Solutions have set new speed and cost records for sequencing a person's entire genome. Out of a batch of 15 people whose DNA was fully sequenced, one was completed in less than 4 hours at a cost of ~$200. Sequencing a whole genome was within hours was possible, but those efforts did not employ data analysis protocols practical for widespread clinical use. Now that has changed.   The first human genome was finally sequenced in 2003 after a 13-year effort that started as The Human Genome Project. That little task cost ~$2.85 billion to complete the job. Here, the job was not just sequencing the DNA. It included genetic analysis data that medical professional could use to treat genetic diseases.  Monica Wojcik, MD, MPH, Attending Physician, Divisions of Newborn Medicine and Genetics and Genomics at Boston Children’s and the s...

  Not actual people in history, but those from the movies, TV, and books.  Quips and quotes you enjoy, and, maybe use yourself. J. P. Bunny

  Salespeople.  People selling a religion.  Pollsters.  People that disturb you at home.  Do you mind them?  Politely tell them you are not interested?  Rudely tell them to shove off? Bunny never happy with such.  Leave a brochure in the mailbox, but don’t bother Bunny.   How be it with you? J. P. Bunny

 What did y'all do yesterday? Participate? Watch the event on TV? Do something else?  AND............ What was your experience with what you did?  Organizers said nearly 7 million people turned out Saturday to more than 2,700 No Kings protests across the U.S. — 2 million more than at the previous round of  rallies in June . Dang, I missed one hell of a party.

 Some of us have brothers and sisters.  Were you alike or different when young?  Has that changed over time? Bunny a cat person and a big reader.  Brother a dog person and not much of a reader. J. P.  Bunny

 We all notice it, don't we? Kids on their cellphones texting instead of talking. Kids running home to be on their gameboys (or whatever the latest gadgets are) instead of just having conversations. Adults, no better. Instead of face to face discussions, they find their favorite echo chambers to discuss issues with similar minded people. X, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Snowflake's Forum, all designed to entertain us, work us up, feed us misinformation, but mostly distract us from enjoying sex or a good movie. OR............ am I being too gloomy? Too negative?  Admittedly on some forums, you know, like THIS one, the average age group seems to be towards the geriatric. But when I go to a restaurant, as Geri and I often do, and we see an entire family NOT talking to each other because the kids are on their cellphones, you know this is not going to go well. The average person spends  2 hours and 24 minutes  on social media every day. The average American checks their mo...

  At work.  Are you a part of the team or prefer working alone?  Same for leisure activities.  Bunny was the loner at work.  Just save the team spirit activities and let him do his job. You? J. P. Bunny

 BECAUSE............. it's Thanksgiving. Here in Canada. Most retail outlets will be closed but it's not mandatory. Government services and banks definitely are.  As for what Canadians do on Thanksgiving......... Much the same as Americans, family gatherings, lots of food, but............ Canadians celebrated FIRST. I know, a shocker, eh?   The first Thanksgiving is said to have happened in 1578, when  Sir Martin Frobisher  sailed from England to Newfoundland, Canada. He celebrated with his crew over salt beef, mushy peas, and biscuits, giving thanks for their safe passage across the ocean. The Canadian Thanksgiving is a lot more chilled out than the US Thanksgiving. The US throws massive events at Thanksgiving like Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City. But the Canadians are a bit more low-key, with smaller, local events. While the US is known for the mayhem of Black Friday, it’s just not a thing in Canada. Yeesh, that last line is outta date, as...

  Are you into absolutely power and wealth?  If you could go back in time, before the Industrial Revolution, would you go back if you could be a historical biggie?  Caesar, Napoleon, Henry VIII, the Tsars…all had their word as law.  Your word would be law.  You would be the top banana. But, such simple things as taking a hot shower when you feel like it is out of the question.  Headache?  No aspirin, just quackery.  Toothache?  Forget it.  Fruit out of season?  Shampoo?  Nope. Bunny not an extrovert and rather quiet.  Even if could rule from behind the scenes, or had minions to shield Bunny, he wouldn’t give up his modern creature comforts for the power and position. What sayeþ you? J. P. Bunny

[Click or touch to enlarge] Let me know if you want out. 😱  Or, see this thread another way and want in. 🥰 (by PrimalSoup)

Day before yesterday, while I was driving through a poorer neighborhood, I saw a man with a little girl (judging by her height, she was maybe 5 or 6) by a house decorated up with Halloween images: skeletons, witches, other (I imagine) scary props that are meant to evoke feelings of fear in the observer. As the little girl was standing front and center, absorbing/soaking it all in to her impressionable little brain, I thought to myself, “What must go through her mind, as she contemplates these images?”   I wondered what kind of future (or even immediate) effect it might have on her delicate psyche.   How is she built, DNA-wise?   Built in  a way to pass it off as "no big deal," just some innocent fun?   Is it psychologically helping or harming her, long term-wise?   I also wonder that same thing about people who enjoy horror movies, crime shows, and other (I’ll call it) “negative entertainment” that many are attracted to. Are displays of negativity just ...

 I hear, though I have never done so, that people keep a locket of hair from their children or loved one who has passed away. And some people make it a hobby, start a museum, and make money off of the idea: INDEPENDENCE, Mo. (AP) — Century-old wreaths made from human hair fill the walls of Leila’s Hair Museum, and glass cases overflow with necklaces and watch bands woven from the locks of the dead. There also are tresses purported to come from past presidents, Hollywood legend Marilyn Monroe and even Jesus. ?? For about 30 years, this hair art collection in the Kansas City suburb of Independence attracted an eclectic group of gawkers that included the likes of heavy metal legend Ozzy Osbourne. But the museum’s namesake, Leila Cohoon, died last November at the age of 92. Now her granddaughter, Lindsay Evans, is busy rehoming the collection of more than 3,000 pieces to museums across the country, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the National Museum of Women...

As we all know, superforecasters are people with an innate extraordinary talent for predicting future events . Science shows that predictions by experts, politicians, pundits, propagandists, demagogues, blowhards and idiots are about the same as random guessing. On binary (right or wrong) predictions, they are wrong about 47% of the time. That includes experts with access to non-public information. Superforecasters just know how to predict without any special training or knowledge. They do tend to have traits like 1) being comfortable with numbers and probabilities, 2) open minded, 3) Bayesian (willing to change opinion and predictions based on new information), and 4) being "dragonfly eyed", i.e., actively seeking ways to see things from different points of view. Those folks are the consummate pragmatic rationalists.  The data shows that superforecasters who are not experts and who do not have access to data sources such as secret intelligence databases outperform intellige...

The study of psi phenomena focuses on things like remote viewing (the ability to perceive distant locations without conventional sensory input), precognition (predicting or knowledge of future events before they occur), telepathy (direct mind-to-mind communication), and psychokinesis (mentally moving or influencing things too small to be seen, e.g., a computer's random number generator).  Psi phenomena involve unknown information transfer mechanisms that appear to operate outside the capabilities of our known senses such as vision and hearing. However, auditory and visual hallucinations, including experiences of "talking to God," are not psi phenomena. They don't involve information transfer from external sources such as a God. Instead, those are documented neurological phenomena with identifiable brain correlates and mechanisms. Religious hallucinations are understood as internally generated perceptual experiences, often with clear neurological triggers such as tempo...

 I see a beautiful lake. But I am not necessarily talking about MY window. I could be looking out any window. What I will see is BEAUTY. Why am I raising this? People nowadays, especially nowadays, see things they don't like. They are always looking to see what is wrong with the world.  My parents, bless them, were the perfect example. My mom especially. She lived by the window. Look at what the neighbors are up to. OH NO, is that a black family moving in down the street? Doesn't even have to be racist in attitude. Why is that girl dressed like THAT going to school? OMG, look at the lawn on that house - does no one there cut their lawn?  Or, I see smog, I see dirty streets, I see crowds, I see a dog shitting in a park.  Now, I am NOT saying we are all like this. Maybe even not the majority of people are like this. BUT for me it is an attitude thing. You look out the window to see what there is you don't like to see. Hell, I did it too. From time to time. But you get ...

  W ot the hell is this? Why it's the first book ever banned in America, way back in colonial days. "On the Meritorious Price of Our Redemption" so offended our Puritan forebears that they burned almost all copies and drove the author, William Pynchon, back to England. And, yep, this Pynchon really is an ancestor of our own Thomas Pynchon, whose latest book, Shadow Ticket,   is being published today. So, it is BANNED BOOKS WEEK!  What banned books have you most enjoyed? AlextheKay is a bit of a bibliophile