David > Recent Status Updates

Lee has gone to college, taken up law, dropped out of law school 6 weeks short of graduating, moved to NYC, lost her mother to cancer only 1 day after diagnosis, her 30-year-old brother to a brain aneurysm, and her father sold the house where she grew up. We know how her story goes with Mockingbird still to come, but what a crucible she's going through.

We've covered the murder victim, and the defense attorney, and the trial (a spectacle for sure), now we're moving on to learn background about Nelle Harper Lee and how this was to be a long-awaited follow-up to Mockingbird.

Lawyer Big Tom goes from defending pastor Willie to defending the man who shot him in front of 300 witnesses. Should be an interesting trial. Oh, and the defense? Insanity!

Oh the Radney campaign and the threats he received as a southern delegate supporting a Kennedy and later a lieutenant governor candidate supporting integration all sound like things that ARE happening (still) today. The bigoted racist playbook seems not to have changed all that much in 50 or 60 years.

Here's the entry from May 30 of this daily reader:

"30 MAY
A NOTE TO YOURSELF
Dear Self,
You deserve to be surrounded by people who lift you up and see your true beauty. You deserve genuine love, pure acceptance, and eternal patience. Please do not accept less than that. I need you.
Love, Me"

Here's one example of seemingly simple but ultimately difficult guidance, from May 30:

"[E]valuate what you are doing, why you are doing it, and where accomplishing it will take you. If you don’t have a good answer, then stop."

Even this 2nd time through there are statements that just strike me because they basically point out that being a good person is the core of success as a human. Yet just because the traits of goodness are basic does not mean they are easily accomplished!

Done with Darwin, Mendel's been mentioned, now on to talk about DNA. More astounding stats to come, I'm sure, but one so far is that the number of genetic combinations possible within DNA is a number with so many digits it would take about 5000 average size books to write it down.

Starting on Darwin now, and the processes leading to evolution. So many random connections and twists to the story, as in many others.

Here's a project for someone (not me!) that I hadn't really imagined till reading this chapter on life on earth: try to catalog all the different species of life. You might limit it, say, just to bacteria, to narrow it down.
The estimated number of such creatures is astounding! In one example, 2 researchers got a gram of sand from a forest area (essentially a pinch) and there were 4 or 5k species, same in a 2nd case.

So are we more likely to suffer catastrophe from a meteor smashing into us or from a volcano erupting under us? It seems either might happen at any time, and either could be essentially cataclysmic.
Maybe the interesting aspect is how much people have deduced (rightly or not, we don't know) about how such things work, whether from observations in space or by experiments confirming hunches.

Plate tectonics is more recent than I realized: basically in my lifetime. Scientist were tough to persuade, and some insightful amateurs were not able to publish their ideas that turned out to be right because the publishers couldn't be convinced!!

Physics of the small is TRULY weird.