Disco in the Alzheimer’s ward. This party is gonna be lit with pounding music. Gonna bring back memories of the good old days.
Sound and light actually may reverse the plaque deposits of Alzheimer’s and restore some memory functions. The process being develop works in rats. The sound doesn’t need to be loud, just in the gamma wave length, and when combined with flashing lights, the results were very promising.
Seems that Alzheimer’s impedes gamma waves. By running sound at that wave length, the gamma waves are pushed through and get to do their thing – notably simulating blood vessels to cleanse poisons out of the brain.
So many songs about pudding, you would think it is a central dish to holiday season. Which it was throughout history until mixed foods, associated with mixed immigrants, became verboten in the white-bread vanilla-paste backlash from the USA melting pot.
Pudding now-a-days is a single flavor not-liquid not-solid dessert – chocolate, rice, vanilla, etc. Banana pudding – with banana chunks, Nilla wafers, and whipped topping on top is closest to the concept of old puddings. A mix of everything. Christmas fruitcakes are close to the sweet puddings of Christmas – moist and full of all kinds of things.
The savory puddings have been removed by history. (But would be really cool to bring back in a science fiction or history fiction piece.) Meat puddings, vegetable puddings, bag puddings, etc.
Find out more about the history of this gastrological missing link by exploring the below posts and articles … maybe even experiment with a few dishes for Geeking Science.
An artist’s depiction of the Hayabusa2 spacecraft passing near Earth. Credit: JAXA
The Japanese probe, Hayabusa2, is typical of most probes, hard-working with multiple missions. Once we (humanity, no matter the nation) get something out of the Earth’s gravity, we use it hard.
The first mission was visiting Asteroid Ryugu, get a sample using a German lander, then return the sample to earth in a flyby. Taking pictures, of course. Next up is another asteriod in 2026 and then a third in 2031.
All of these missions will give us information regarding questions about asteroids and planet formation, how our solar system, and possibly other systems, evolved.
Meanwhile on Earth, JAXA is sharing their samples with NASA, which is sharing samples from their own missions back with the Japanese space agency “to give scientists everywhere as much material as possible to closely study and compare”. (NASA) International cooperation is essential to understanding and, eventually, living in the big black. We think places like Antarctica and Australia are anti-human life, or North Carolina in the middle of July, but Space is even more inhospitable. It’s going to take all of us to get out of the cradle.
And our hardworking probes with their multiple missions.
“Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft is scheduled to return a sample of asteroid Ryugu to Earth this week. This image of Ryugu’s rocky surface was taken in 2018 by MASCOT, the German Aerospace Center’s Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout lander, which separated from Hayabusa2 to land on Ryugu in preparation for sample collection. Image credit: MASCOT/DLR/JAXA.” (The Planetary Society, 12/4/2020)
It takes more than one to retain a Movement against the backwash of the status quo.
Why are we having to go through the sixties all over again? Fighting for women’s rights and black rights, only we are calling it #MeToo and #BLM now. Because society doesn’t change quickly, and unless someone is out front leading … and more importantly, other people are following, the movement will dissolve to statis. Inertia will ground it to a halt.
Remember it’s not just important to be a leader, but also be a follower. Supporters keep momentum going.
Really, the world undervalues followers. Everyone wants to be the person everyone is looking to, but that is not how to change the world. The leader is the one who creates a group that everyone then wants to join. A leader must have followers. A movement must have supporters – and they will range broadly from mindless hivemind followers and educated devotees.
Ms. Kellerman (2007) breaks followers into five groups by levels of engagement for business purposes:
1. Isolates – People who standby passively, supporting the status quo by inaction.
2. Bystanders – People who might get involved if their self-interest is invoked, and may show up at things if entertained and fed.
3. Participants – People engaged enough to devote time and money.
4. Activists – Heavily involved people, devoting significant money and energy to the process. Sharing the news and converting others.
5. Diehards – People so involved they cannot move their stance, and may turn on the leadership if they try to steer the ship away from where the diehards have decided it should go. These are both pro-whistle blowers protecting society and self-destructive fanatics destroying things for their ideal.
Examples in USA voters: isolates are non-voters, bystanders are voters who show up to vote only, participants attend some meetings and send money to a party or person and maybe put out a yard sign, activists organize the meetings and make sure handouts are available and go door-to-door and make phone calls, diehards refuse to accept the results of voting if it doesn’t go their way.
Ms. Kellerman’s study described in the Harvard Business review is interesting when focused on through the lens of today (the 2020s), looking back at the hope from fifteen years ago. To put the time-culture in perspective, the article is published 2007 (so most research was likely finished around 2006) and Facebook started in 2004. Around 2006, MySpace was the social media champ. The decentralization of subordinates from managers snowballed during the COVID Zoom era.
A second way to split up movement of leadership and followers is the Initiator. The person with the idea or action. Then First Follower. The person who thinks the “crazy” on their own isn’t as crazy, or maybe, their type of crazy. The Second Follower, well now with three, it’s a group. A movement can snowball from there when VISIBLE.
This video really captures the first crazy to the movement of a dancing mob of activist followers using their energy and time in the moment.
Now not everyone has the energy to be a full activist follower all the time for every cause they want to support. There is only so much “me” to go around, and only so much of “you” at any given moment. It’s okay to step forward and step back as needed.
I wish every movement was as fun and easy as a dance mob.
Instead, the leader-followers often put themselves and their families on the line by raising their hands. Sometimes they might not even comprehend just how big an impact they will play, or how quiet the world will be after they risk everything.
Four years after Brown vs. the Board of Education (1954), a woman was fired because she raised her hand at a PTA meeting for the segregated high school her children attended saying she wanted her children to have better foreign language offerings. She knew the school system had better offerings at the white school, because she worked as a cook there. The hand raise added her to a civil rights lawsuit against the obstructionist actions being taken by leader against the integration of the school system – and the school system did what systems do when the status quo is challenged. It squashed her. (McElhatton, 2018)
She survived, but many don’t.
Being a second follower is no joke.
It’s easy to hide in a mob.
It takes more than one to make a Movement.
It takes huge amounts of time and energy and resources to make lasting long-term change in society.
It takes making habits for the followers and have them do the habits every hour, every day, every year, and convince others to do them too.
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Mark 12:31, New King James Version)
Be a leader, be a first follower, be a second follower, be an activist and a diehard.
The more things change … the more things *we think* remain the same.
Not a result I was expecting, and yet, also, exactly true.
Some people call it a version of mission creep. Not just adding more things to be done, but refusing the acknowledge progress by expanding the problems to be resolved as some are solved.
Among the traumatized, threats never go away. PTSD sets a person threat-awareness at a certain level, and the way humans are set up makes it hard to change.
For writers and other creatives, the “I suck” remains the same even as product quality and quantity increases.
In 2018, three studies gave a look into perceptual and judgement creep, and jointly published under “Prevalence-induced concept change in human judgement.”
The study most people focused on was where the scientists asked volunteers to judge threatening faces, but decreased the number of threatening faces over time. The participants reported numbers close to steady, with previously benign faces becoming threatening. (Schneier)
Another study had people review ethical vs. unethical proposals. When the percentage of unethical proposals lowered, the participants started identifying previously benign proposals as unethical. (ScienceDaily)
The kicker was having people judge blue dots, in case you think it is just high-level assessments. When the blue dots decreased, participants started picking purple dots to make up the difference. (Science.org)
Even when the participants were warned about the judgement-creep might happen, it continued. Even when paid to watch out for it and resist it, “prevalence-induced concept change” remained in effect.
Social problems may seem unsolvable because we keep seeing and processing the same amount, even though the overall percentage has changed. “I always found 10 homeless, there are always 10 homeless. This problem can’t be solved.” (Never mind that during the broad census, the area had 10,000 in 2010 and 5,000 in 2020 (random statistics as an example, not actually real) – what was processed remained unchanged.)
Schneier points out “This has a lot of implications in security systems where humans have to make judgments about threat and risk: TSA agents, police noticing “suspicious” activities, “see something say something” campaigns, and so on.” (Schneier)
Daniel Gilbert, the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology, who organized the studies with his post-doctoral student David Levari, states “these studies suggests that there may be a need for institutional mechanisms to guard against the prevalence-induced concept change.” (ScienceDaily.com)
“Anyone whose job involves reducing the prevalence of something should know that it isn’t always easy to tell when their work is done,” <Gilbert> said. “On the other hand, our studies suggest that simply being aware of this problem is not sufficient to prevent it. What can prevent it? No one yet knows. That’s what the phrase ‘more research is needed’ was invented for.” (ScienceDaily.com)
Being aware is half the battle, the question is what the other half of the battle?
For creatives, be aware your perception of your writing and art should change with time. For childhood or adult-onset PTSD, be aware that the threat detection matrix in your mind is not giving your correct information (which you were already aware of, but now you have another scientific study explaining how the brain is wired).
I believe one of the best ways to fight it within society in general, and maybe individuals, is statistics. Numbers may not be the greatest way to hack into the emotional programming, but logic can help some.
Good luck. Fight the mission creep by clearly defining goals. Fight the threat assessment by working on rewiring threat processing.
