New at Rock Hounding

I loved collecting rocks as a kid. I've returned to this passion. I'm brand new to a FB group called South East Missouri Rockhounds and I'm brand new to owning a rock tumbler (a Thumler brand, Model B). A couple weeks ago I scooped up some rocks from a creek near Farmington, Missouri. I just finished washing them off after tumbling them for a week with rough grit.



Wow. Such details that I couldn't originally see when I picked up the rocks. It will be fun to see how these look after several more rounds of tumbling, three weeks from now. I'll somehow turn these into Christmas gifts, even if it's merely little bags of tumbled rocks.

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The complexity of the human immune system

The immune system is an unsung hero most days of our lives. We would all quickly die without its efficient functioning. But how complex is it. Take a look at this animation which is an extremely simplified version of this incredibly complex system. Then thank your immune system for doing a good job today. For another animation focusing only on the production of antibodies, see the following:

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Read more about the article Walk in the Garden

Walk in the Garden

I can see the stone wall of the Missouri Botanical Garden from my front porch. It often beckons to me. Though my walks are often brisk, I bring a camera to slow me down to catch a brilliant color, an engaging pattern or a playful reflection. Sometimes, I sit for 5 or 10 minutes and try to meditate. IMG_0266 MBG Music night At the MBG, there's people watching, of course, and this often causes me to think of the people I care most about--how could this not be the case in such a beautiful place? IMG_0358 MBG Music night But the two things come to my mind almost every time I visit the garden:

1. David Attenborough's "Private Life of Plants." (It's about the only thing I keep my VCR for - it's not available in Zone 1 on DVD). It's a beautiful video series that blurs the line between flora and fauna, when plant growth is run in fast-motion.

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About blacks, whites and the other so-called races

In the NYT, Carl Zimmer writes about the so-called races, based on real evidence:

In 1924, the State of Virginia attempted to define what it means to be white.

The state’s Racial Integrity Act, which barred marriages between whites and people of other races, defined whites as people “whose blood is entirely white, having no known, demonstrable or ascertainable admixture of the blood of another race.”

There was just one problem. As originally written, the law would have classified many of Virginia’s most prominent families as not white, because they claimed to be descended from Pocahontas.

So the Virginia legislature revised the act, establishing what came to be known as the “Pocahontas exception.” Virginians could be up to one-sixteenth Native American and still be white in the eyes of the law.

People who were one-sixteenth black, on the other hand, were still black.'

...

On average, the scientists found, people who identified as African-American had genes that were only 73.2 percent African. European genes accounted for 24 percent of their DNA, while .8 percent came from Native Americans.

Latinos, on the other hand, had genes that were on average 65.1 percent European, 18 percent Native American, and 6.2 percent African. The researchers found that European-Americans had genomes that were on average 98.6 percent European, .19 percent African, and .18 Native American.

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