https://gizmodo.com/new-evidence-reveals-a-17-000-year-old-coastal-route-in-1826427608
Category: Blog Posts
Spent a week at the Toklat Cabin at Mile 53 inside Denali National Park to complete, edit, and finalize Found, book # 3 in a series about the Olympic Peninsula and North Pacific Coast, which started with Strong Heart in 2017 and will see Adrift in September 2018 (copies now sent to reviewers!). The cabin, used by the Toklat Ranger in the summer (the park road is closed 30 miles away until later this month) and by Denali dog sled teams in the hard winter, is 14 by 16 feet, one room, simple, quiet, and perfect for working on tales. 
Spectacular country.
Two articles here, demonstrating that we think we now so much more than perhaps we do. The first discusses the recent discovery of a second type of DNA, just found, quite different from the “standard” DNA first found in the middle of the 20th Century. The second article discusses how an entirely new organ has been found in our body – this after how many centuries of robbing graves and dissecting cadavers?
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/04/23/the-moral-mask/
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/03/interstitium-fluid-cells-organ-found-cancer-spd/
This article from Nature, which is really a plea to maintain and increase funding for ocean current research (and in my view a worthwhile plea to make), touches on an interesting dilemma. One impact of rising temperatures, at least in the northern hemisphere, is the dumping of enormous amounts of icy meltwater into the Atlantic from the Arctic and Greenland. This water sinks to the deep ocean, but if enough pours into the Atlantic it can push aside the warm Gulf Stream, push it south, weaken its flow. This, in turn, means that Europe is not warmed, and this in turn means that snow doesn’t melt, forming the basis for the growth of ice sheets. And, whether the weakening of the Gulf Stream flow started at the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850 when the earth warmed, as one model suggests, or started in the mid 1900s due to human impacts, as another model suggests, the outcome is the same – a future of cold, not warmth. And, it seems, a future that might fall upon us very rapidly, once it happens.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04322-x?sf186776719=1
This video is long but well worth it as a detailed and easy to follow summary concerning the current state of our economic health and status. Worth watching, I think.
I joined Facebook years ago and never used it much. I tried to cancel my page, also years ago, and they made it so difficult I gave up, just let the site lie dormant. Then when it seemed a book was going to be published, Strong Heart, I followed the mantra of everyone, it seems, in the writing community – get a social media presence, join Twitter, Facebook, etc….Get a web page – this one here – and build a community. Your scribe is, he fears, old school, a reluctant warrior, entirely unwilling to become a slave to feeding the social media beast….I spoke to a highly successful writer, who broke into the big time through a free Kindle approach and now has bestsellers, a few years ago at one of the two wtiter’s conferences I had the budget (and stomach) to attend, and after he told me he spends “only” two to three hours a day keeping up with his web page and social media messaging I felt a great cloud descend upon me. That cloud lingers, and, now this, these reveals about Facebook, how everything done here is known, how we are all just “products” and all we do is used to sell us stuff. The article below sums up very well some of the issues facing each of us, and suggests the so called Facebook problem may be part of a much bigger agenda. It’s enough to encourage me to take deep breaths and, once again, start the arduous process of fleeing Facebook forever…
Remember those WMDs in Iraq? Those aluminum tubes? The herd-like rush to war? It’s happening again, it seems……
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/03/the-novichok-story-is-indeed-another-iraqi-wmd-scam/
