Taomeow

It depends on your definitions I guess. IMO "wild" science is science -- and superior to the "domesticated" kind -- but that's for a different thread. But if we're going to use computers, it makes me feel better about it when I take into account that they are based on the binary mathematics transmitted to Leibniz via correspondence with a missionary friend in China who translated and sent him the I Ching. It was taoist sages who invented it... and who am I to tell them they weren't wild enough for my anprim ideals? There's ideals and then there's reality, I try to judge each on its own terms.

What's the source of this opinion? I've read Nikola Tesla's biography, he was an extraordinary guy, with many weird quirks (geniuses are prone to those... comes with the extraordinary territory) but "au contraire" is not about him. He was quite idealistic and did believe that science serves mankind, and good science serves it well. (He got screwed over by the less idealistic types, Thomas Edison et al.) The quote was from his letter to his mother (whom he considered a greater inventor than himself -- minus education and opportunities, she merely invented things around the house to make her hard peasant work easier, brilliant practical innovations.) That's confucian indeed, but taoists of antiquity were the first serious scientists, trying to understand many things and coming up with both theoretical frameworks some of which are only today being rediscovered (without giving credit of course), and practically inventing a whole lot of things we take for granted today. (The list is very long and exceedingly impressive. My favorite is a taoist nun who both invented vaccines -- in the 13th century! -- and insisted that they should never be mass administered or mandated -- going all the way to the emperor and successfully convincing him to reverse his mass vaccinations edict.) Many, many taoists were cultivators of both ming and xing... "leaving the world" and "coming into the world," emulating tao in this pattern.

Himalayan Lynx ( (Lynx lynx isabellinus) Photo Credit: CGNP, Camera trap clicks. Chitral Gol National Park, Pakistan

The hurricane/tropical storm is a couple hours away from us per latest predictions, but some fire hydrants in downtown decided to help it along ahead of schedule. Video: https://packaged-media.redd.it/k703vjwl1bjb1/pb/m2-res_1280p.mp4?m=DASHPlaylist.mpd&v=1&e=1692572400&s=6d053c7ae8deeab4e038fffffacb9f5afa090978#t=0

The year corresponding to 1966 in the 60-year cycle will be 2026. That's your years of the Yang Fire Horse, which are far more dangerous in terms of plane crashes (as well as many other things.) I'm pretty sure Raymond Lo will be predicting that when he's writing up 2026. In general, he's a mixed bag far as accuracy of his forecasts is concerned. This often happens when an authentic enough master is also an ambitious and successful public speaker, writer, and teacher of large groups. He serves two gods, so to speak -- the god of authenticity and the god of popularity, and those two seldom get along. I haven't read his 2025 forecast beyond the first couple of paragraphs (due to the unfortunate white letters on black background presentation, something I normally refuse to strain my eyes to deal with), but already noticed that clash. However, he's got better stuff than most online diviners, although his habitual obsession with Fire as the decisive phase (which he considers auspicious, always offering grimmer forecasts for Fire-deficient years and brighter ones for Fire-excessive ones) makes me think that his own chart is Fire-excessive. (Did enough bazi readings over the years to know the signs. )

Yeah, we're badass here.

I don't know any Cantonese, alas, but I know this system, and should perhaps mention that in the sexagenary cycle the coming year is No. 42. Which evokes a peculiar Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy association. (For those who haven't read it or forgot this bit -- the great supercomputer, Deep Thought, took seven and a half million years figuring out the answer to "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." The answer was 42.

It's different, but there's many versions around the same idea. Pelmeni are valued by their connoisseurs when they are the smallest one can make by hand, but in West Asia and Caucasus region there's also hinkali which are bigger, manti which can be humongous, and so on. Another similar Russian and Ukrainian staple, vareniki, are bigger than pelmeni and have other kinds of fillings. My favorite are made with sour cherries, but they can also be stuffed with cottage cheese, potatoes and fried onions, cabbage, or cooked meat (which is not used in pelmeni.)

I'm jealous! In my gluten-free home they practically went extinct... I managed to modify many recipes so I can make many traditional comfort foods with rice flour etc., but pelmeni won't yield... all my experiments trying to create a GF version were an epic fail. Back in the day, we would sometimes organize pelmeni parties -- a bunch of friends would arrange to socialize on a weekend by sitting around the table and making a million of them, a fancy version with a mix of two or even three different kinds of freshly ground meat for the filling. Then cook our creations in a humongous pot and then the party proper would start. That version was particularly delicious. Good old traditions... Sour cream is a must (one of the improvements on the Chinese original -- China missed that particular train), as is black pepper (and/or very hot mustard which some prefer), but going back to Asia whence they hail -- have you tried them with ponzu or yuzu sauce instead of vinegar?

My winter comfort food is oxtail soup or stew. This was the first ever taoist recipe I learned. Been making it whenever oxtail is available, although modified it many times, from the original Chinese version to Japanese, Ukrainian, or proprietary.

I'll look into that. Before I do, chapatis and dahl are not off the table. Not after I found out that pelmeni, as Russian a dish as it gets, were invented by the Chinese. (The Russian version, which originally came from China via Manchuria to Siberia, tastes better though... so whoever invents whatever, there's always room for improving on it by someone else.)

I dunno... Every time I look deeper into something this or that people is supposed to have invented ("it is known..."), I discover that everything has been invented by the Chinese. Of course Australian aboriginal things you mentioned earlier may be an exception. Now that the member who belongs altogether elsewhere has been dis-membered and there's no risk of getting more of the same filth (at least from this particular source), I would like to mention in passing that "sources" are falsifiable. With utmost ease in our time -- but they have always been falsifiable. Some of them -- fakery made to look as coming from this or that group, usually to divert any and all grievances toward them -- have cost people lives, millions of lives. (Did you know that the Black Plague, at the time it happened, was believed to be caused, not by the yersinia pestis which was to be discovered only centuries later, but by Jews "poisoning the wells?" A number of mass massacres all across Europe promptly followed. Just one example, out of too many.) So, just wanted to mention something I found peculiar back in the day. While that text attributed here to Marx is fake as fuck, I did read Marx's real letters to Engels and discovered that Marx was blatantly antisemitic. Yes, it happens -- self-hating Jews are a phenomenon perhaps related to the Stockholm syndrome, or a misguided desire to be accepted by the majority on the basis of sharing what is perceived as the majority's sentiment... whatever the reason, they exist, and Marx was one of them. His letters are interspersed with many antisemitic slurs and attacks. If he posted here some of what he wrote to Engels, he'd be banned too. (And good riddance it would be if you ask me.)

All these years I have spent at the service of mankind brought me nothing but insult and humiliation. -- Nikola Tesla

Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten, daß ich so traurig bin...

Trump is unlikely to be reading TDB so if he does get this idea I'm not the one responsible!!! -- I just can't help thinking... you guys down under don't have any guns anymore, do you?..

Thank you. Looks horrible.

I lost my Swiss Army knife.

We have a similar derivation -- from a medieval turkic city of Taman-Tarkan we got "tmutarakan'" meaning lands far away/god knows where. Which, while being nonsensical, is also funny since its components evoke associations with "darkness" and "cockroaches." That's how lands far away that are "not ours" and "not us" are imagined.

Cultural appropriation is a made-up problem in all cases except when you're stealing someone else's thunder and claiming it for your own. Japan is a country that historically has fully "appropriated" Chinese culture, acknowledging and accepting the fact, and then working all things Chinese into their own cultural expression the Japanese way. Russia, since the 18th century, was a product of "cultural appropriation" by the tzar Peter the Great of the European ways -- he studied them personally (even working as a carpenter at Dutch shipbuilding yards -- in order to learn how to build a modern fleet) and enforced them relentlessly, from beard-shaving and fashion to social structure, education, architecture, the calendar, you name it. (Some Russians still haven't forgiven him for that though -- while some Americans still aren't buying that Russia is a European country. The former pine for the "unique" and "native" ways which they idealize the hell out of, while the latter simply aren't that great at either history or geography due to educational peculiarities.)

In Lima, Peru, I visited a 500-year-old Franciscan Monastery, where they have a huge painting of the Last Supper on the wall of the monks' dining hall. In that painting Jesus and the apostles are drinking ayahuasca and eating a guinea pig. While this cuisine is far removed from what they could have been consuming at the Last Supper in Jerusalem, I think it's the art of translation doing its best -- translation not of texts "as is" but of complex cultural references, philosophical and spiritual ideas separated by time, space and very different human experiences. In this case, the translation into the local idea of spirituality was perfect. I don't think any locals at the time could possibly grasp how anything can be holy without ayahuasca. Matter of fact, I've trouble believing that any religion that has rid itself of entheogens is more than a cargo cult. Whereas in their presence, the sacraments "explain themselves" directly, so to speak, and may help bridge the space-time-experience rift between cultures.

But you can't have a wardrobe stuffed with hundreds of items of mass-produced clothes made of plastic made of oil (that's what polyester is) using this! Can't have fast fashion, can't have landfills choking with billions of jeans (because the fashion once decreed that they have to be bell bottoms but then straight but then skinny but now wide leg -- gotta keep up!)

20 years is generous. In March, one hail storm destroyed 4,000 acres of a solar farm in Texas. And in April, a storm destroyed the world's largest floating solar farm in India. There are more, and bigger, problems there though. Start to finish, it's such a god-awful environment-destroying scam... I sometimes wonder if there's anything left in today's world that isn't. You look under the hood of any industrial process blessing us with our technologies, it makes your hair stand on end. Steam is much nicer, that's for sure. As for older tech lasting much longer, and being fixable when in need of repair... well, I have a Norwalk hydraulic press juicer made in the 1970s, an exact replica of the original 1934 model, all solid stainless steel and 1/2 horsepower motor. I bought it used (heavily) from a juice bar going out of business in the late 1990s. (They are crazy expensive when new, and don't depreciate much as time goes by... so I jumped on that bargain.) I subjected it to heavy use over the years, sometimes super heavy for long stretches of time. About ten years after I bought it, I had to refill the hydraulic fluid (did it myself), and another 10 years later, I had to replace a rubber belt on the motor pulley (also did it myself). Nothing else has ever been wrong with it, it still makes the best juice under the sun the likes of which no newer design models can hold a candle to.

Yeah, they're called grass and hay. Cows are not equipped to properly digest corn seasoned with ground dead cows, their typical factory farm feed. They don't fart that much on grass and hay, if at all. At least I don't remember it being a problem with privately owned cows I've encountered in the countryside (where they also didn't spray anything on the grass the cows grazed on). Incidentally, I have pictures of my kids from one of those trips, standing beside cows who were milked five minutes earlier, drinking raw milk. In those pictures they are 5 years old. My son always had trouble with store bought milk (allergic) and couldn't drink it (still can't), but with raw milk there were no adverse reactions. By the way, there were no fewer than 60 million bison in North America in the 1800s, in perfect balance with their ecosystem. No farting issues. And no soil erosion issues until they were all killed in order to starve the Native Americans whom they sustained for tens of thousands of years.

So they are working very hard on replacing all energy sources (and all pastures) with solar panels, and simultaneously on sun-dimming technologies. Interesting.