The Saturday after the big day and the shoppers are out and I am in my office….You have one month to get your Christmas shopping completed….good luck!

My local stuff….the weather has finally turned cooler and we even got a bit of rain….and we re-elected the idiot we have as governor….so all in all a mixed month.

The big news for us is that the New Orleans Jazz Fest will have the Rolling Stones, those geriatric rockers….tickets will be $225 a bit pricey from the other groups that are participating….tickets went on sale Friday, 25Nov and I just cannot pay that kind of money to see some 80 year old acting like a 20 something rocker….kinda pathetic.

Ever wanted to be a lawyer?  Well Oregon maybe the place for you….

If you’re a law school student who breaks out in a cold sweat at the thought of taking the bar exam, good news if you live in the Beaver State: A “more inclusive” way to becoming an attorney is here, according to the head of the Oregon Board of Bar Examiners. The Washington Post reports that now, in lieu of the “widely dreaded” two-day standardized test, students can complete an apprenticeship instead, an option approved by the state’s Supreme Court last week. Students in an American Bar Association-accredited law school who choose the Supervised Practice Portfolio Examination over the traditional bar exam will log 675 hours doing legal work under the supervision of an attorney, after which they’ll submit a portfolio based on their experiences and complete other requirements.

Oregon is the first state to offer this alternative path. The Oregonian notes that the 675-hour regimen was set up to approximate how long students typically study for the bar. Advocates of the program say it will give students who freeze up during tests a viable path, help decrease racial disparities in the law field, and lower financial roadblocks. “They won’t have to stop working to take two to three months off to prepare for the bar, or incur the cost of exam review courses,” Jo Perini-Abbott of the Lewis and Clark Law School’s Advocacy Center tells the Post.

But critics have various concerns about this new option, including that the apprenticeship isn’t long enough—one local judge says it should be closer to 2,000 hours—and will lead to inadequately trained attorneys. “I think the bar exam has value, actually,” Lane County District Attorney Patricia Perlow tells KPIC. “It requires you to focus … on a wide variety of topics, and so people who choose to go the experiential training path are going to be limited in what they know.”

Alien creatures walk among us….

The microscopic creatures are so bizarre that they’ve left some scientists wondering if they arrived here on a meteorite.

The tiny creatures mostly live in aquatic environments but can exist anywhere, including on your face.

Studies have found they can survive without water and temperatures around 300 degrees Fahrenheit.

As a blog from the Ohio State University explains: “Some theorize that tardigrades traveled to Earth millions of years ago via meteorite.

“Traces of biotic material have been found on 4.1 billion-year-old rocks in Western Australia.

https://www.the-sun.com/tech/9646054/alien-on-earth-tardigrades/

Personally I think it is the octopus that is the alien.

Medical news is interesting….

Researchers in Texas have developed a method to keep a brain alive and functioning for several hours without being connected to the body — a truly weird scientific experiment that recalls the head in jars bit in the iconic cartoon “Futurama.”

A team led by the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas took two pigs and severed connections between their heads and bodies, instead hooking the brains up to a device they call the extracorporeal pulsatile circulatory control (EPCC), which they detailed in a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. The machine keeps blood pumping through the brain, mimicking the natural flow when it’s connected to the rest of the body.

The intent behind this nightmarish procedurewas to study the brain independently from other bodily functions that may influence it, but the system may also lead to better-designed cardiopulmonary bypass, a process in which machines take over your heart and lung function during surgery.

https://futurism.com/neoscope/device-keep-brain-alive

All you need is a cybernetic body and viola….immortality.

Here’s an interesting thing about pollution….

If you’re feeling guilty that you haven’t yet bought an EV or installed solar panels on your roof to cut down on your portion of greenhouse gases, you’re (somewhat) off the hook—you can blame the 1% for a lot of that pollution. A new Oxfam International report points the finger at the world’s richest for generating as much carbon emissions in 2019 as the world’s poorest two-thirds, a “grave portrait” as climate experts continue to try to combat global warming, per the Washington Post. According to the report, the 1% was behind more carbon emissions than that spewed out by all car and road transportation worldwide that year, with the wealthiest 10% responsible for half of the global carbon emissions.

The Guardian parses that 1% down even more, reporting that the greenhouse gas emissions from the homes, yachts, jets, and financial investments of a dozen of the Earth’s richest people—including Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos—exceed the yearly emissions from 2 million other homes, or from nearly five coal-fired power plants. All together, those 12 billionaires account for 18.7 million tons of carbon dioxide and equivalent greenhouse gases. Topping that list: Mexican businessman Carlos Slim, with Gates close behind and then Bezos. To put it in context, Oxfam says in a release that it would take most regular people 1,500 years to emit as much carbon as the wealthiest billionaires do in one year.

Oxfam adds that these emissions from the 1% will lead to upward of 1.3 million excess deaths caused by heat between 2020 and 2030, which the anti-poverty group notes is roughly the population of Dublin. Amitabh Behar, Oxfam International’s interim director, says it’s time to “end the era of extreme wealth,” adding that “the super-rich are plundering and polluting the planet to the point of destruction, leaving humanity choking on extreme heat, floods, and drought.” The group asserts that “fairly taxing the super-rich would help curb both climate change and inequality.” It suggests a 60% tax on the 1%, which it says would “cut emissions by more than the total emissions of the UK and raise $6.4 trillion a year to pay for the transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy.”

It is the holidays and some seem to party and drink way too much…now AI can tell you ‘just how wasted am I’?

Start practicing your tongue twisters, because artificial intelligence might be judging your sobriety on how well you recite them soon. At least that’s what some researchers suggest after conducting a study analyzing intoxication levels based on speech that had remarkable accuracy. The Guardian walks through the findings in their paper, published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs earlier this month. In what may go down as the most fun experiment to sign up for, 18 adults of legal drinking age were given doses of vodka gimlets until they became intoxicated. The participants were then asked to recite tongue twisters every hour, while their breath alcohol levels were recorded in thirty-minute intervals.

Noting changes in voice pitch and frequency during different levels of drunkenness, the researchers then trained AI to analyze the findings—and the program was able to predict if someone was within legal sobriety limits of driving with 98% accuracy. “With the proliferation of smartphone sensors, we can now harness digital signals to more accurately predict when drinking episodes happen, enhancing our ability to intervene at the most effective moments,” Dr. Brian Suffoletto, lead author on the study, told the Register. Suffoletto, an associate professor of emergency medicine out of Stanford, believes that several real-world applications will be easy enough to develop.

“The most obvious one is as a form of ignition lock on cars [that] would not allow someone to start their car unless they could pass the ‘voice challenge,’ which could be used in certain high-risk workplaces like school bus driver or heavy machine operator to ensure public safety,” he said, per the Guardian. He added that restaurants and bars could enable devices to help manage when to cut off patrons from purchasing more drinks. While the tech behind the concept is interesting, the study only included a small sample size and racial makeup (all participants were white). “I believe that there is the potential for exciting developments that could eventually be really useful,” said Petra Meier, a professor of public health. “But obviously one would first want to test this approach in larger and more diverse samples.”

That is the round-up for this Saturday….I hope all will have a relaxing and restful day.

Be Well and Be Safe….

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”