Dreams of My Elbows

There's this strange recurring dream that I've had since I was a teenager. I discover that the skin covering the outside of my elbows is actually just a thick sort of flap. I can work my fingertips into the gap, and pry it loose, and underneath my elbow joints are actually mechanical, made of steel and plastic. This surprises me, every time. I wonder how I never noticed before. I can inspect them, and sometimes oil them (always with silicone) as well. That's the whole thing right there. A curiously inconsequential dream, yet one that has recurred on and off for years.

The obvious interpretation is that it's something to do with my arthritis, but I've been dreaming that since I was in high school. One might argue as well that it represents some fear or hope of becoming mechanical, but it's only the elbows, and never anything else.

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Puffballs from Mars

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351252619_Fungi_on_Mars_Evidence_of_Growth_and_Behavior_From_Sequential_Images

There comes a time (and I think it was reached back in 1976, honestly) when you have to invoke Occam's Razor. It's somewhat disconcerting to have one's image of a clean, dry Mars, lifeless for a million years, replaced by that of a mouldy, stinky Mars where puffballs grow on everything, but that seems to be what we have.

A few times a year of late, it seems, we have another indication that free water is much more common on Mars than we'd expected. While increased amounts of water favour solubility-based mineral processes, life is, in general, more efficient at scavenging and conserving water than is abiotic mineral growth. Something else I'd very much like to hear the abiotic faction address (or if they have, I've not heard of it) is how iron peroxide, which was positted as a rather remarkable explanation for Viking's rather remarkable tagged oxygen results, could exist in an environment wet enough to grow mineral excrescences?

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Current Events

It appears that Israel has blown up the Al Jazeera building. Tragically, all of the journalists seem to have escaped beforehand.

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Not content with the 600k Americans he's already killed, Dr. Tedros tries to add some children to the tally. One ought to admire a man with ambition, I suppose.

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Interesting Canadian research on administering mixed dose of vaccine.

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For some days, there've been reports of bodies, partially-burned and otherwise, being fished from the Ganges. CBC is claiming that the unburned ones are being tossed into the river from rural villages that have run out of firewood. That would not surprise me in the least.

What does this imply, then, for India's future? Humans regenerate their population far faster than trees. Will India end up looking like Haiti? I'd hate to see that, as I actually like India and the Indians, despite their rather odd ideas about so many things. They actually try to carry their own weight, and contribute to the world at large, which is vanishingly rare for a Third World nation. I think it's far and away the most likely outcome, though.

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More fretting about vaccine passports, and how they might "discriminate", or create a "two-tiered society". The PURPOSE of a passport, ANY passport, is to discriminate. That's by design. It divides the world into those who can be safely allowed to travel, and those who cannot. This is no different. I kind of wonder why a separate document is proposed, even, instead of just a stamp or certification in your existing document?

While I support vaccine passports for international travel, they shouldn't be used within the US. Biden, in one of his rare moments of resolve and lucidity, got right to the heart of the matter: "Americans don't show their papers". My virtual hat is off to him. One of the standard horrible, tension-filled moments in WWII and Cold war movies is when the police ask with cold politeness to see someone's papers.