#book: "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand

I have decided to re-read "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand. 

It was the choice between "Atlas Shrugged" and "Fountainhead". The choice between complicated, sophisticated Dominique, my namesake, and Dagny, the ideal of "objectivism". 

These two books are giants of thought, analyzing two different aspects of individuality. Both books explore ideas of personal independence and personal excellence. Both were highly influential in my life.

The triggering reason for this re-read was my recent visit to Europe and meeting many of my old friends, with whom I had many, sometimes heated, discussions. I have met with such a variety of different opinions that it has forced me to re-evaluate my own beliefs. 

The anti-current-government opinions in Poland are heard in most of the conversations in the city. In fact, it seems, that every conversation ends in government bashing. I am used, from the USA, that democrats think of republicans as "flat-earth" believing, barely human brutes, right above the apes in intelligence. The republicans are thinking of democrats as communists that never did a single day of honest work in their life and want to re-distribute their hard-won money on the public programs that always fail. This article is not about politics, so I will just say that we all need a large dose of objectivism in our political candidates, journalism, and individual opinions.

Some people I talked to are pro-business, some are extremely leftist, some work hard, and some "hardly work". Most are highly educated, due to excellent and inexpensive public education, but only very few are using their fine education in creative or cerebral endeavors.

My observation was that, with very few, bright exceptions, the ideology was border-lining on religion. I have seen nihilism bordering on religion (I know it is a contradiction in terms). I have seen leftist ideology which I would fully classify as religion. I have seen Catholocism with the level of zeal, our XIV century ancestors would be proud of.  I have seen environmentalism which is also a modern religion (I will write about the very positive use of solar panels separately). And, of course, I have seen epicureanism, with many people only thinking about the next glass of wine, the next cigarette (a shock to my system), and the next night's outing.  The overarching trend that I noticed was that people had a strong ideology, but very little individual action.

This mix of impressions, plus my own current struggles at work due to a very difficult situation, really made me ask some existential questions. Who should I be and which values should I live by? 

The "Atlas Shrugged" book provides a simple answer, "I should live by my own standards that are hard-won in years of struggle and refined by my own experiences and hundreds of books I have read." 

It is a 1200 pager, so I probably will add to and re-write this post a few more times before I am done with it.



What can we learn from the story of Atlantis by Plato?

I have never taken the story of Atlantis, as told by Plato, seriously -- neither as curiosity nor an anthropological subject. 

However, this video is making a fascinating point. 

The convergence of the geologic ice-age cataclysms that might have spelled doom for sea and shore-dwelling cultures, the appearance of sophisticated temples in Turkey (Turkiye) hunter-gatherer societies.

• https://youtu.be/S7mRLjL6ZVY

Zig Ziglar quote for the night

 Not every day is great. Today, was rather rough.

I am adjusting to the time zone shift of 6 hours, adjusting to the keto (sugar-free) diet after the absolute bliss of European cuisine. First day at work after the break. More stuff, uncertainty in life.

At the moment, I was about to shut down the computer for the night, I read this quote by Zig Ziglar:

"

Life is an echo.

What you send out,

comes back.

What you sow,

you reap.

What you give, you get.

What you see in others,

exists in you.

"

And it keeps me from giving up. It motivates me to continue and try harder. 

Thanks, Zig, you have been my motivation 30 years ago and you still are today.

Mitologia Słowiańska by Aleksander Brückner

The author starts the book by ripping apart anyone who has ever dared to write anything, before him, about Slavic culture. The level of hubris is simply revulsive.

Wikipedia

Aleksander Brückner was a Polish scholar of Slavic languages and literatures, philologist, lexicographer and historian of literature. He is among the most notable Slavicists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the first to prepare complete monographs on the history of Polish language and culture. 

Born: January 29, 1856, Berezhany, Ukraine

The Philadelphia Story, Casablanca, at al.

A few days ago, thanks to a YouTube show on "transatlantic accent", and entirely by chance, I discovered a new passion.

I will never see Hollywood the same way. 

In 2014, we spend much of that year in Hollywood with Natalia, and honestly, we did not regard the place as impressive. I never thought about "Hollywood" movies as more than 1980 and 1990 cliche, movies I grew up on.

Today, I see Hollywood totally different, the way it is supposed to be seen.

I discovered 1940s movies and I absolutely love them.

"Casablanca"

"All about Eve"

"The Philadelphia Story"

They feel refreshing comparing to a lot of new, woke, stuff on Netflix. They are surprisingly current, as if people did not change in last 80 years. 

Heck, as an anthropologist, I knew people did not change much in last 80 thousand years, but I never felt it.

These movies are like time capsules that make us feel the life so long ago. We feel for the actors, we love them, we cry for them. They are real.

I am very surprised, how outspoken the women were, honestly, today's corporate conversations are more polite and sometimes more reserved.

The clouds of cigarette smoke and constant sessions of drink area not off-putting, but then that was my childhood, too.

The acting, I expected to be stuffy and theatrical, but, no, it is quite refined and often much superior to modern movies.

I sincerely recommend this genre, and I hope you would love it as much as I did.

kefir

Some people consider kefir a secret of long life.

Before I go further I have say that I am talking about kefir with no sugar, no flavors, no preservatives added. The stuff you buy in store often tastes bad, or it is full of “flavors”.

I start with quality milk, it has to be milk with A2 protein as our bodies have a problem with digesting common American A1 protein milk. At this moment there are couple of companies distributing A2 milk, including one pictured, and I think Costco/Kirkland does, too.

Second, it has to be whole milk, the fats in the milk (i.e. butter) are very healthy. 

I would love if it also said “pasture raised”, but I have not found one yet.

To make kefir, I buy a few types of  “natural” yougurts or commertial kefir and mix them with the milk. This is done to get the initial bacterial cultures. If you mix only one type, there is a good chance it will not become kefir, despite that label says “live cultures”. The more types of microbes you can collect, the better.  You have to do it only the first day.

Every day I pour out and drink about 80% of the kefir from the jar, add fresh milk to fill, mix, and leave at the counter in room temperature for the next day.

It is important not to keep the kefirt too long, as first it tastes super yummy, then it becomes sour like the one from the store, then it will start spoiling and smell bad and you will have to throw it out and start over fresh.

If you cannot drink your kefir because you are going for vacation, you can leave your kefir in the fridge and it should be OK for a few days.

It is important that the jar is loosly covered and out of the direct sunlight and heat.

When the kefir is made, most, but not all sugars are consumed by the microbes, this is when it tastes best. Kefir can be diet, or keto food. In addition all the proteins and fats are still there as well as all other microelements that mother cow gives the calf to grow.

Kefir in addition to have the healthy microelements, helps to maintain healthy gut microbiom, and I think that is the true secret of kefir.  

 

How to syntax color the code inside the blockquote HTML tag?

That is a good, if not easy, problem to solve!

In the result, I would like to take the following code in <blockquote> tag

function fold(initial, desired)
    folds = 0 # initial number of folds
    achieved = initial # initial thickness
    results = []
    while true
        achieved = achieved * 2 # fold
        #if achieved >= desired break end # if you want to exit before achieving
        push!(results, achieved) # add to results
        folds = folds + 1 # increment
        if achieved >= desired break end # if you want to exit after achieving
    end
    return results
end

 and color it by the language-specific keywords to look something like that:

What are the steps I would take?

1. In JavaScript, I would find the next blockquote element
2. Extract the text from it
3. Parse the comments ( from # to the end of the line)
4. Parse text by the white space (preserving white space)
5. Compare each WORD token to the dictionary of the reserved word
6. Do something about variable names
7. Do something about variable values
8. Wrap reserved words in <span color> tags
9. Re-assemble to content of the <blockquote>

Since this is a several-evenings project, I will leave it for later.

If you are doing this, or have done something similar, please let me know in the comments.

How to calculate number of paper folds to get thickness equal to distance to the moon?

I wanted to try how a programming exercise would translate to a blog post.

I opened Brilliant.com and the first exercise was a puzzle of folding paper. I decided to solve it using Julia language.

How thick is a sheet of printer paper?

For this exercise, let's assume 0.097mm to 0.1mm depending on the "weight" of the paper.

# define known variables
building = 828             # units: m -- Burj Khalifa building
moon = 391000000     # units: m; distance to the moon
sheet = 0.1 / 1000        # unit: m -- thickness of 100 sheets is 1 cm

function fold(initial, desired)

folds = 0                                              # initial number of folds

achieved = initial                                # initial thickness

results = []

while true

achieved = achieved * 2               # fold paper

if achieved >= desired break end # check if time to exit the loop

push!(results, achieved)               # add to results

folds = folds + 1                           # increment

end

return results 

end 

results = fold(sheet, moon)                         # replace moon with building
folds = size(results)[1]                               # size is a tuple, get first element
thickness = results[folds] /1_000_000
print("We used $folds to get $thickness thousand km.")
println()
data = results ./ 1000.0                               # data need to be Array{Float64, 1}, in km
increments = size(results)[1]

using Plots

using PlutoUI

How to create a slider in Julia?

I use that slider to show me the progression of thickness from 1 fold to as many as it takes.

@bind slider_ui Slider(1:increments) # one widget per cell

How to create a drop-down menu in Julia?

@bind plot_type Select(["scatter","line","bar"])

How to draw a simple diagram to visualize the data?

 

plot(

data[1:slider_ui], 

seriestype=Symbol(plot_type), 

title="x=$slider_ui folds, y=km, $plot_type plot"

)

 

So, what is the number of folds to get to the moon?

Only 42 folds will take us to the moon and a bit further!

How to add Facebook LIKE, Recommend, and Share buttons to your Blogger?

How to generate Facebook CODE specific to my site?

1. Visit the following site and choose the options you like.

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/like-button/

How to update the Blogger.com page?

WARNING:

• Please backup your blog first, see below. 
• I assume that you have some experience with HTML/CSS/JavaScript

2. Open your Blogger.com > Design > Theme > Customize (please backup here) > Edit HTML

3. Control-F to find: <body

4. Paste the first script provided by Facebook

<body expr:class='&quot;loading&quot; + data:blog.mobileClass'>
<!-- START Facebook buttons Recommend and Share -->
<!-- https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/like-button/ -->
<div id='fb-root'/>
<script async='async' crossorigin='anonymous' defer='defer'
nonce='Om0b5IFR'
src='https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&amp;
version=v14.0&amp;appId= SOMETHIG FOR YOU &amp;autoLogAppEvents=1'/>
<!-- END Facebook buttons Recommend and Share -->

5. Control-F to find: post-icons

6. Paste the second part of the script generated by Facebook

<!-- START Facebook buttons Recommend and Share -->
<br/><br/>
<div class='fb-like'
data-action='recommend'
data-layout='button_count'
data-share='true' data-size='large'
data-width=''
expr:data-href='data:post.url'
/>
<br/><br/>
<!-- END Facebook buttons Recommend and Share -->
</span> <span class='post-icons'>

Please note that I replaced the URL you provided to Facebook with expr:data-href='data:post.url'

This will load the given post's URL and not the static link you provided.

You should be able to see the blue buttons underneath this post, please click BOTH!

How to Write a novel Using the Snowflake Method? by Randy Ingermanson

The approach the author proposes matches my approach of writing in a blog.

The idea of the "snowflake" is to have a kernel of an idea and gradually build around it adding more and more details. 

It is a good audiobook and pleasant to listen to while you are doing other things.

References

• Amazon Kindle, Audible and paper

1000cc

I take my medicine in 1000cc doses, it provides instant psychological stress relief, and the shoulder/neck pain from a whole day in front of the computer just disappears. On a nice day like today it has a sauna effect, and as you can see, the "visions" on it, are first class.

Let's call it vitamin K6.


You say, I overdose, 600cc would be plenty, I know, guilty.

References:

• Wikipedia Suzuki GSXR 1000 K6

What is really the cause of the heartburn?

My whole life, I am everyone around me, had it WRONG. I am writing this post because despite the correct solution being widely available, it is suppressed by the sheer amount of old ideas and pharmacological advertisements. This post is not medical advice, but an individual observation. 

What is the TRADITIONAL definition of "heartburn"?

Heartburn is also called acid reflux, or GERD.

If you look in the number of dictionaries you will find something similar to this:

"A burning sensation, usually in the middle of the chest, caused by the reflux of acidic stomach fluids that enter the esophagus."

This is both correct and EXTREMELY misleading at the same time.

If you look for remedies you can find the following WRONG ways to treat it:

1. Drink more water - which will dilute the acid
2. Drink a mixture of baking soda and water - which will neutralize the acid
3. Avoid lying down - this is equivalent to "don't stand on a broken leg"
4. Chew a chewing gum - sugar in the gum and saliva will make the stomach more alkaline
5. Eat bananas - same as above
6. Avoid wine, etc.
7. Tums - calcium carbonate - antiacid, the name says it all
8. Zantac - which I took for years - may cause CANCER
9. etc. the list can be LONG

What is the correct definition of "heartburn"?
If I was to write it, it would be:

A burning sensation in the chest that is caused by LOW acidity of the stomach (achlorhydria) that in turn is causing an inability to close the stomach entrance (Pyloric Sphincter) from the esophagus, causing acid reflux.

My remedy recommendation would be:

1. A diet DEVOID of any processed SUGAR, high in organic leafy vegetables, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar while occasional whole organic fruit is advised.
2. A glass of water with a teaspoon (2.5ml) of organic apple cider vinegar

It boils down to keeping a healthy microbiome (controlling yeast such as Candida albicans) and sufficiently high acid levels (1-3 PH) in your stomach.

My personal observation is that I do not have any old GERD/esophagus symptoms after changing my diet. 

You can learn more from Dr. Berg on YoutTube:

How do I use Google Keep as a notepad for remembering anything?

Every day, I come across dozens of articles that may look interesting, but most of the time, I do not have time to read.

I quickly save them to Google Keep, and sometimes, I add a label and a quick comment.

Later, when I think about a given subject, work on a post, or an article, I search and pull the list of related items.

Editing in Google Keep it's relatively easy, as long as I work in the portrait mode. I do that usually on my tablet, or a phone.  Regardless that I do have a Bluetooth keyboard, I usually find a comfortable position that is not a desk sitting and I use the Swipe function on my Google keyboard.

When i am ready, I transfer the note to the Blogger app to start a new article.

The world's oldest trees reveal the largest solar storm in history

The world's oldest trees reveal the largest solar storm in history.

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/oldest-trees-solar-storm/

How to adjust the page width with CSS?

I am adjusting this blog to scale width dynamically. 

I am focusing on the desktop size as the mobile has a separate CSS code which works well.

What are the most popular Desktop display resolutions?

In 2022, the global statistics for the Desktop and Tablet display width are the following:

width x height	global usage %
1920×1080	21.5%
1366x768	16.7%
1536x864	10.6%
1280×720	5.8%
1440x900	5.4%
768x1024 (flipped to portrait)	3.8%

Based on the statistics, I decided to make to CUT OFF the width at about 1024 pixels wide. This matched my empirical experience of making the narrowest possible window with the tinies of fonts before the page is unusable.

Before you copy and paste my code into your page, please remember that,
like anything in life, it will require try-and-error practice.

// START HORIZONTAL / WIDTH SIZING SECTION 

body {

  width: 95%;   

//max-width: max-content;

margin: auto;

}

.columns-inner {         // container that hold both main and right columns 

width: 100%;

min-width: 670px;   // number above which the content starts sliding beyond RIGHT margin of the browser

}

.column-center-outer {

width: 75%;

}

.column-right-outer {  

width: 25%;

min-width: 14.1em;  // empirically derived, moves the RIGHT colunm to the BOTTOM if it shrinks to less than that

}

// END HORIZONTAL / WIDTH SIZING SECTION 

What were the results of the width adjustments?

The full 2K display looks like this

The minimal "full-width" page looks like this

and, the minimal page width looks like this

Summary

Overall, I am very happy with the result. It took way too long, but it was fun to get back into HTML and CSS Web development, it is something, I used to be very good at but did not practice for a while.

Resources:

• Statistics are taken from https://gs.statcounter.com/

Younger You: Reverse Your Bio Age and Live Longer, Better by Kara N. Fitzgerald

I just purchased this book, updates will come soon.

In the meanwhile watch Kara on YouTube, links below.

Resources

• Find Kara Firzgerald on YouTube.com

What is the definition of anthropology?

"The scientific study of the origin, behavior, and physical, social, and cultural development of humans."

Photoshop King Takes Photo-Editing Requests Way Too Literally

 I usually do not publish jokes, but this one has to do with Photoshop skills and it is really witty:

https://constative.com/lifestyle/photoshop-demands/64/

Questions and Basic English Sentence Structure for NLP.

When working on machine learning (ML) for natural language processing (NLP), we have to understand the relationships between the parts of the statement.

My personal interest is in the question-answer pairs because I am working on the bot answering the questions. If you know me I am not in the idle chat. 

Let's take an example sentence.

text = "I went to the Home Depot store, to buy the weed-cutter line because I have to go Up North to cut the tall grass and bushes."

Now let's ask ourselves a few questions.

Who is doing the work?

The subject (S) of this sentence is "I".

What is being done?

The verb (V) of this sentence is "went".

What is the tense of this sentence?

The sentence is in the "past simple". 

A tense is required in English to compose a proper sentence. 

For example, "Be!, is still a (borderline) sentence as it implies something similar to "You must persevere in your existence and be." 

"Go!", "Swim!", Read!", are other, and easier-to-understand, examples.

Where is the action located?

The sentence is referring to "the Home Depot store" as a location of the (past) action.

The statement "where" describes Complement (C) to this action.

What is the Subject-Verb-Complement(SVC) English sentence structure?

The Subject-Verb-Complement or SVC, as it is commonly abbreviated, is one of a handful of basic English sentence structures.

In the graph, I could represent the 

S <-- who is doing --  -- what is done -->  V -- where is done --> C

What are the next steps?

Later, I will analyze the rest of the sentence. And show how, based on the question posed, we can combine the answers and compose the answer.

 

How to add a new font to your HMML pages using the Google Fonts service?

When designing a Web page, it is crucial that the fonts we choose actually show up for the viewer. 

In order to do that we have to ensure the right font is being downloaded to the viewer's browser.

How can I find and download fonts?

Usually, you would find and download the font you like from the Internet, then post it on your Web server and reference it on the given page.

In the case of the Blogger, I do not know how to do that, but I use a handy service provided by Google Fonts that will hos the fonts for me.

How do I implement a font into my page?

Here are the simple steps (refer to the images)

1. Open Google Fonts and find the one you like, in my case Garamond.
2. Select a couple of variants in my case:
   - regular 400 weight
   - regular 400 weight, italic
   - bold 700
3. On the RIGHT panel, a <link> is created, copy it.
4. Pase the <link> into your HTML template HEAD section.
5. Please note the proper usage for the CSS rules:
   font-family: 'EB Garamond', serif;
6. Update your body HTML tag with the 
   
   

Opening Blogger Theme > Edit HTML

Example of the LINK tags

<!-- START: Google Fonts -->
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com" />
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin="anonymous" />
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=EB+Garamond:ital,wght@0,400;0,700;1,400&#38;display=swap" rel="stylesheet" />
<!-- END: Uki's changes -->


</head>

NOTE: My code differs from that provided by Google Fonts in order to FIX a couple of the parser problems:

• Attribute name "crossorigin" associated with an element type "link" must be followed by the ' = ' character.
• The reference to entity "display" must end with the ';' delimiter.

How to set up the body CSS rules

body {

  font-style: normal;

font-weight: normal;

font-family: 'EB Garamond', serif; // from "Google Fonts" service

font-size: 1.2rem; // 120% of browser setting, because bigger is better

  color: #6f6f6f;

  background: $(body.background); // mountains

}

Design Tips

• Do not use more than a couple of fonts on the page,
  in my case, I use Garamond for writing and MONO for CODE samples.
• Identify your page's font in the body CSS and nowhere else,
  other tags can change the weight (normal, bold) and size 1.6rem

Share it

If you liked this post, please share it with the following accreditation:

Uki D. Lucas. 2022. http://uki.blogspot.com/2022/07/fonts.html

References

• Google Fonts: Garamond:
  https://fonts.google.com/specimen/EB+Garamond?query=Garamond

What is a body fat percentage for a healthy man 5'10"?

When looking for the answer to What is a body fat percentage for a healthy man 5'10" you can find "some" doctor prescribed averages. 

These healthy averages immediately will send you to the fridge-section of the supermarket for a pint of ice cream just because you are doing great.

 In the long term, the extra 10% of flab will make you feel too lazy to go for a hike, run, or bike ride. The dietary habits associated with extra weight will cause a chain of auto-imune diseases which in the end may result in diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's dementia and an early death.

So after looking for a while, instead of looking at government (still "some" doctors) statistics, I found these pictures in mensjournal.com which leave no question what is healthy.

In my 50 years, I have been to my share of doctors, I compare them to repair technicians: no need to fix that, my translation: it is not worth his time to fix it, yet.

By now, in my life, I know that the right (natural paleolithic) keto diet has cured me from numerous auto-imune afflictions. One of them caused me not to be able to swallow - thightening of esophagus (doctors were hopeless for a decade). Another, a "frozen shoulder" did not allow me lift my hand over my shoulder, for which they only prescribed physical therapy as if the right diet and uric acid levels had nothing to do with it.

Please remember the doctors today have almost no dietary, auto-imune and epigenetic training in their medical schools. And they do not care because there is no profit in preventive maintenance, good diet and body self-healing.

The exceptions are brilliant people like Dr. Berg that via his YouTube channel probably helped more people than the army of general physicians.

Today, I am at 16% after 2 weeks of keto diet, but by the time I turn 50, I want to stabilize at about 13%.