When I was a youngster, I was both repelled and fascinated by skeletons and the remains of the dead. While bones will always retain a tinge of horror, anguish, revulsion, and all the associations of graveyards and slasher-movie screams, I also now find a beauty and magnetic charisma to their naked simplicity and inferred motion.

Fossils and trips to museums helped to pry skeletons away from the realm of night-terrors, towards a sedate landscape of appreciation and admiration for the rhythms of anatomy. …

Jeff Bridges — New S**T has come to light

Just so we’re clear, that handsome middle aged duuude is not me. That is The Dude. Jeff Bridges. And he (as The Dude) is my profile photo. If you have not seen The Big Lebowski, starring Jeffrey Leon Bridges as The Dude, you have to check it out. Bridges is not only an inspiration for my Medium persona, but also for checking out the disease he has just been diagnosed with.

I first saw Bridges in Starman, for which he earned an Academy Award nomination. I saw it at that impressionable age where the young brain stores profoundly useless items…

“…whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.” — C. Darwin

Working backwards to the origin of life…

William F. Martin, Ph.D. is a former carpenter, born in Bethesda, Maryland, educated in Texas, who after hammering nails in Dallas moved to Hanover, Germany to get his degree in biology, and then to the Max-Planck Institute in Cologne for his Ph.D.

In July 2016, Madeline Weiss et al. from Martin’s lab published a paper in Nature Microbiology that worked backwards from today’s organisms to…

Amazing, wonderful images and essay, beautiful descriptions duuude! I can feel the waves on my couch here duuude... ;). SD

This is my inaugural WotWU story. A am reposting it now to try and get it a little love and attention!!! The subject is supposedly about me building a piano bench for the kids. But really, it is about persevering and pushing “lost causes” to completion because, if nothing else, you will learn something. And sometimes, the lost will be found. I hope you enjoy.

1. In the beginning…

A few years ago my wife requested furniture for the kid’s electric piano that we got them one Christmas. I had already made a keyboard stand. Now she wanted a bench.

This is the story…

The heartwood of WotWU!!!

Happy Sunday, April 17, to the readers, writers and followers of WotWU (Woodworkers of the World Unite!!!). Thank you for being the heartwood of our humble digital home for wayward words!

The heartwood in a tree is the core of the tree, where the strength resides. The heartwood is often where the beautiful, rich, and dramatic color of species like cherry or walnut or oak develops.

And that describes y’all, the core of WotWU, it’s strength, and source of the beauty, richness, and dramatic color housed within its imaginary walls.

The problem with metaphors and analogies is that they are…

My Moderna Shots…

Last week on Friday, April 9, I got my first vaccine against COVID-19. The wonderful nurses working on the front lines administering the shots said that it was by Moderna. This is ironic given my history of posts on the various mRNA vaccines. I ultimately came out in support of both the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines based on their data, but I still distrust Moderna’s top executives given their grasping, unsavory, and unethical behavior. But I know that many of Moderna’s staff are top-notch, and the worker-bees tremendous good work resulted in successful clinical results and a good product.

Here…

Hey Simon, awesome article! Just thinking of neuro (not my thing) in terms of other sciences which have had to adapt as new data arose - like physics describing light in terms of phenomena like vision and color, then diffraction and refraction, then mathematical wave properties, then understanding them from a quantum perspective with both particle and wave properties, and modifying the math again... won't neuro have to do the same? We currently define memory from the perspective of our own perceptions and phenomena... but need to describe mathematically what it it functionally doing - and realizing that in biology there are multiple evolutionary solutions to a problem (like eyes, wings, legs, etc., each independently evolved). A computer's memory can be magnetic, optical, holographic... so why can't biological memory have multiple solutions? Anyways, loooove them slime molds!! ;). SD