My brother-in-law, a Canadian, died suddenly in a New England state today. He was travelling by automobile with my sister. Been a long day for my sis who had to make arrangements with a local funeral parlour to look after cremation and shipment of remains back to Canada. Meanwhile she has decided to drive back and is currently 4hrs from NY/Canada border. I mean this is happening fast but she feels it’s the best way to handle it without getting some of the family involved. Local Funeral home deals with funeral home in Canada and they do everything. We wait for her safe return.

https://www.infoprocedures.com/death-abr...%20Canada.

Intriguing and original spin on the post-nuke dystopian adventure/comedy by the creative mind behind Westworld. Watching the first 3 episodes and it follows the exploits of 3 very different renegade characters in a desolate post-apocalyptic wasteland. Give it shot!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-mugKDQDlg

According to Prem Thakker
https://x.com/prem_thakker/status/1835447741318905956

"Ryan Routh voted for Trump [in 2016]; donated to Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, Tom Steyer, Beto O'Rourke, Elizabeth Warren; and then has tweets like this yearning for a Nikki Haley/Vivek Ramaswamy ticket — which is to say it's a bit hard to put him in a convenient little political box."

---

Photo copies of X posts (before removed)
https://www.timesnownews.com/world/us/us...-113374678

7/17/24 (Ryan Routh)

@KamalaHarris: "You and Biden should visit the injured people in the hospital from the Trump rally, and attend the funeral of the murdered fireman. Trump will never do anything for them....show the world what compassion and humanity is all about."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

date not discernable (Ryan Routh)

@realDonaldTrump: "While you were my choice in 2016, I and the world hoped that President Trump would be different and better than the candidate, but we all were greatly disappointment. And it seems you are getting worse and devolving. Are you retarded? I will be glad when you are gone."

---

According to Gabe Kaminsky
https://x.com/gekaminsky/status/1835452478986375491

"Looks like Ryan Routh has a bit of a rap sheet in North Carolina: including for 'weapon law violations,' according to public records."

---

Would-be Trump assassin ID’d as Ryan Routh, 58, of Hawaii
https://nypost.com/2024/09/15/us-news/wo...i-sources/

EXCERPTS: Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, has been identified as the suspect who was arrested after allegedly pointing an AK-47 assault rifle at former President Trump while he golfed, according to law enforcement sources.

Routh frequently touted his do-gooder credentials and championed left-wing causes on social media.

His LinkedIn shows that he attended North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, but relocated to Hawaii sometime around 2018.

Routh describes on LinkedIn as “mechanically minded” and enjoying “ideas and invention and creative projects with artistic flair.”

[...] Routh is the owner of Camp Box Honolulu, a shed building company with few positive reviews. While Routh hadn’t posted on his X account in a year, he frequently criticized politicians including Trump, current President Joe Biden, and celebrities like Bruno Mars.

Many of his replies are nonsensical, including one directed towards X’s owner Elon Musk, in which he seemed to entertain purchasing a rocket from the billionaire. “I would like to buy a rocket from you. I wish to load it with a warhead for Putin’s Black Sea mansion bunker to end him. Can you give me a price please. It can be old and used as not returning,” Routh wrote.

Routh was a supporter of Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley, according to one of his posts in which he encouraged the Republican presidential candidates to continue their races. “You cannot quit. Why. You must stay on the ballot to the end. You must fight. You must continue giving speeches and push all the way to election day no matter the election results. Do not give in. Join Nikki and keep working. Never give up,” he wrote.

Routh is also a staunch supporter of Ukraine and Taiwan in their respective conflicts against Russia and China. He claims on X that he tried to “sell” the idea of having former Afghanistan troopers fight for Ukraine in Russia, but was denied multiple times before giving up after six months.

He also visited Kyiv and claimed that he would be willing to fight on the front lines, if he were permitted to.

---

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-su...ch-1954191

EXCERPTS: Chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst John Miller reported Sunday afternoon that Routh's social media accounts have focused on his "self-proclaimed involvement" in the war in Ukraine, including his supposed effort to recruit soldiers to fight in the conflict. Routh also claimed to have fought in Ukraine as it continues to hold off Russia's invasion.

Miller said that Routh has been living in Hawaii and was formerly a construction worker in North Carolina.

[...] Dave Aronberg, state attorney for Palm Beach County, said his prosecutors are working up warrant and pretrial detention applications. Aronberg indicated the suspect will initially be charged at the state level, but could also be charged with federal crimes.

"Our filing of the warrant and charges at the state level does not preclude the federal charges that could be coming," Aronberg said. "But in the meantime, it looks like the warrants and a pretrial detention motion will happen first."

How scientists debunked one of conservation’s most influential statistics
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/...ersity-aoe

INTRO: The statistic seemed to crop up everywhere. Versions were cited at UN negotiations, on protest banners, in 186 peer-reviewed scientific papers – even by the film-maker James Cameron, while promoting his Avatar films. Exact wording varied, but the claim was this: that 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity is protected by Indigenous peoples.

When scientists investigated its origins, however, they found nothing. In September, the scientific journal Nature reported that the much-cited claim was “a baseless statistic”, not supported by any real data, and could jeopardise the very Indigenous-led conservation efforts it was cited in support of. Indigenous communities play “essential roles” in conserving biodiversity, the comment says, but the 80% claim is simply “wrong” and risks undermining their credibility.

The carefully worded article, written by 13 authors including three Indigenous scientists, had been about five years in the making. But it raised other questions: including how a foundationless factoid got so much traction – and what other inaccuracies were circulating.... (MORE - details)

https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/202...-its-cost/

INTRO: We have the tools and innovation to make cultured meat: what we lack is the ability to do it at scale. That has held back the technology and made it unaffordable for commercial production. But now researchers have found a way to leapfrog this hurdle, upscaling the production of lab-cultured chicken, and bringing it down to the price of organic meat.

Their success relies on a new method of culturing animal cells that allows their continuous growth, setting it apart from more laborious methods that drive up costs. Typical cultures are made by growing animal cells in bioreactors that are constantly stirred. These bioreactors are huge—about 15,000 liters each—yet cells can’t be grown at huge densities because the waste from their production accumulates too quickly, limiting production.

An alternative the researchers explore in the Nature Food study is a method called perfusion, which enables a continuous flow of a liquid medium through a membrane on which the cells are growing: this refreshes them with a constant flow of the nutrients that they need to survive, and also allows waste to be moved along and cycled through the system. Researchers can also build growth membranes in a stacked formation, increasing their surface area... (MORE - details)

https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/is-go...range-loop

INTRO: I recently hobnobbed with a writer, I’ll call him Bob, as obsessed with the mind-body problem as I am. The problem concerns, in a narrow sense, how matter makes mind, but it also encompasses the puzzles of consciousness, intelligence, free will, the self, meaning, morality…

The mind-body problem, in short, is the mystery of what we are. And should be. The key puzzle is consciousness, without which nothing else matters. I don’t feel like defending this proposition, I’m just asserting it as an axiom.

Bob’s been pondering recent advances in artificial intelligence, and whether they favor this or that model of cognition. I told Bob I’m not a fan of any leading mind-models. I had in mind integrated information theory, the global workspace widget and the Penrose-Hameroff contraption.

The only model that strikes me as true, I told Bob, or at least on the right track, is Douglas Hofstadter’s strange loop, which rarely gets mentioned in mind-body debates. Below I’ll describe Hofstadter’s loopy idea. Or try... (MORE - details, no ads)

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critic...-about-cam

INTRO: There must be a template for this.

Time and time again, I have seen journalists cover so-called complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in a way that is so similar, it’s making me think they must teach that template in journalism school.

It’s a story structure that sounds good at first. It aims to be balanced in giving voice to both patients and practitioners, as well as proponents and skeptics. It uses storytelling to grab the reader’s attention. All the ingredients are seemingly there to cover the topic responsibly.

I was recently interviewed by a CBC journalist on the topic of traditional Chinese medicine (which is nowhere near as traditional as its name implies), and in the process I ended up squeezed into that template. (Article here, video here.) And that’s a problem, not just for me but for anyone seeing a piece of media hoping to truly understand what the evidence says about the benefits of CAM.

Here's the template.

• The Protagonist. Open with a named patient who has an illness and is using the CAM intervention. Alternatively, open with a named practitioner and showcase their amazing clinic.
  
• The Believers. Quote well-regarded people who believe in this CAM intervention and who will make unverified claims to its benefits. They can also explain the pre-scientific belief system that underlies it, which the journalist can then repeat in a non-judgmental, anthropological way.
  
• The Researcher. Find a researcher who is willing to say that they don’t fully believe in this CAM but they’re interested in researching it because it might prove to work. Importantly, this researcher must act as if we have zero studies into this CAM and we’re starting fresh. The goal is research-oriented open-mindedness.
  
• The Token Skeptic. Open a paragraph with “but some are wary” or “but not everyone agrees,” and distill a 45-minute conversation with an evidence-based skeptic into a single paragraph.
  
• A Note of Hope. End the article by returning to The Protagonist and including a statement about the untapped and promising possibilities of this CAM intervention.
  

Once you understand this template, you will never read another health story the same way again. This skeleton will glow through the flesh of the article... (MORE - details, no ads or few)

https://montrealgazette.com/opinion/colu...d-problems

EXCERPTS: . . . Obviously, recycling, reusing and cutting down on non-essential uses of plastics are desirable goals. But we also need to discover ways to source the raw materials from renewable sources and develop plastics that degrade into harmless substances in the environment. This is where bioplastics come into the picture.

“Bio” means life, so bioplastics are plastics that are at least partially made from raw materials derived from living organisms, or are biodegradable. Biodegradable means that they can be broken down by bacteria, fungi or microbes into simple compounds such as carbon dioxide and water that can be reabsorbed by the environment, ideally without causing any pollution.

Bioplastics are classified according to either their origin or their biodegradability. [...] At this point, only about one per cent of all the plastics produced are bioplastics — hardly an amount that has a great impact.

Microbes can not only break plastics down, they can also produce them. Bacteria and fungi are like little chemical factories that produce special proteins called enzymes that catalyze chemical reactions [...] PLA is the most commonly used bioplastic, suitable for disposable cutlery and compost bags. It is biodegradable, but only in an industrial composting facility. It will not biodegrade in a home compost pile. In the anaerobic conditions of a landfill, it will eventually biodegrade, but the product then is methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

The second-most widely used bioplastic is PHA, which stands for polyhydroxyalkanoate. PHA is actually a family of polyesters that are naturally produced by some bacteria. For example, the soil bacterium Cupriavidus necator can produce a variety of PHAs depending on the nutrient it is fed, which can be methane, starches or fats from plants or animals.

The great advantage of PHAs is that they will biodegrade in ambient environments, even the ocean. This makes them suitable for single-use products like food packaging, straws and cutlery. Their downside is cost: PHAs are about 10 times more expensive than PLAs.

Some clever chemistry has led to another biodegradable plastic that, while not as readily biodegradable as PHAs, has physical properties that come close to matching those of conventional plastics. It goes by the tongue-twisting name of polybutylene adipate terephthalate, or PBAT...

[...] There is no question that there is some interesting chemistry in the quest for better bioplastics, but these materials will not solve the world’s plastic problem... (MORE - missing details)