Modern Dinosaurs

 This is not about alligators or sharks or any other animal that may still exist in something like the form they had back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. It is not about some lizard or other creature that looks like it belongs in the age of the dinosaurs.

This is about people. More specifically, people of a certain age in their life. If you have reached retirement, you might recognize yourself in some of the scenes I describe. This is your notice that you are not alone.

Perhaps you are younger than retirement age. If you have parents or grandparents who are retired, you might want to consider what I say and reflect how these situations might affect your older relatives.

This is not exactly a rant, although it started out as one a few days ago. More of a dirge for possibilities and opportunities that seem to have slipped us by.

And this is about technology, among other things.

First, the physical problems. They are likely to sneak up on an aging person, who probably is busy living their life and not thinking about muscles, bones and joints that need a little more attention than they used to. The wake-up call may come when they stumble and fall, or have difficulty lifting a pan to drain the water, or they can’t open a jar of their favorite condiment because they can’t get a firm grip on the cap. I don’t know what causes the uncertainty with one’s balance, but I suffer from it, and now my hubby is beginning to recognize it, too.

I have heard that it is possible to get something like ‘occupational therapy’ to help counter these effects of aging. Is it possible to get some of this without spending time in the hospital, recovering from a fall or a scalding first? I don’t know. Happily, I have a wellness check with my doctor in a few days, and I will definitely be asking questions about that. I have learned that half an hour of walking, 5 days a week, help with my balance uncertainty, and help strengthen my leg muscles so that getting around is easier. And there appear to be exercises one can do to help regain some flexibility in your body, which is so important when trying to check traffic when driving. Alas, all of those I have found start out with ‘Sit on the floor’, and getting up and down from the floor is a major, time-consuming effort.

Second, the mental effects. Even without dementia, the brain starts to fail the person involved. It usually starts with embarrassing events like forgetting the word you need to finish the sentence you’re saying. It’s not just in conversation, either. As a writer, I have that happen to me while I am writing. I have become adept at using my dictionary and thesaurus to try and track down the work I was looking for. There are other lapses of memory, too. These days, I have a daily ‘to do’ list, which I consult several times during the day. If something like a doctor’s appointment doesn’t get added to my to do list, it gets forgotten! I now rely on shopping lists, too.

I’ve been told that doing puzzles and playing games helps the brain stay active, that certain herbal supplements will help the brain. Unfortunately, the latest article from AARP that I read on that subject is that puzzles and games help the brain be good at puzzles and games, and that there is no proof that any of the usual supplements are of any help at all. Bummer.

Third, the senses problems. As one gets older, the senses get tired. I have specifically noticed it with eyesight, hearing, and taste. If the world is a bit dim, for instance if the sky is heavily overcast or the sun is somewhere below the horizon, I need more light than our house is set up to provide. I have lamps all over the place. I may also need my crafter’s magnifying glasses. My husband is constantly complaining that I mumble too much. And I’ve noticed I’ve been dumping more salt and pepper onto food, trying to make it taste like it used to.

Of course there are eye exams and hearing exams to help deal with fading eyesight and hearing. I wear glasses all the time now, and still need more help when the lighting is dim or I’m trying to do my crafts. I haven’t heard of anything to help with a fading sense of taste.

Fourth, the technology. We are surrounded with technology these days. It seems to have a planned obsolescence to it, so that 18 months (or less) after you get a new phone, laptop, computer, whatever, you are expected to replace it. And yet, these items are so complex, I am still learning to use it after 18 months, so I am not inclined to replace it and have to start the learning process all over again. Especially not with phones.

There doesn’t seem to be much support to help people learn how to use their technology. I once heard of a class held by the local library and community college to help people solve any problems they were having with their gadgets. I took my e-reader, because I couldn’t figure out how to download any new books to it. It was old at the time, on its way out, but it still worked, so why should I replace it with something even more complicated? No one there could help me figure it out.

And in a related note, the techno-expectations. We recently visited Disney World’s Hollywood Studios for a long and rather frustrating day. We wanted to ride the newest ride, which had a ‘virtual line’, which you are expected to join using an app on your cell phone. My husband has the app on his cell phone, but it kept wanting to update, and update, and... we had to ask a staff member to help us, which they were reluctant to do, because it’s ‘just a matter of using the app.’ Yes, our phones are smart phones, because they are smarter than us. But they aren’t THAT smart. Having gotten our time slot to ride, we then enjoyed the park until about noon or a little after, when we started wearing down (remember the physical effects?). So we started looking for a place to grab a bite to eat. We tried 3 different places, and each one expected us to have ordered our food before we got there by using an(other) app on our phone. The third place could finally accommodate us without using the app, but they let us know this was a special arrangement.

I’m not ready to kick the bucket yet. I’m hoping for another 40 or 50 years. So I have to take care of myself. I know that. I’ll probably have to start relying even more on technology. I just hope I can find a mentor to help me figure out how to get my cyborg parts to work.

Archaen Eon

 

The Archean Eon is the second of the four geologic eons of Earth’s history. (The first was Hadean Eon.) During the Archaen Eon, which lasted roughly 4,000 to 2,500 million years ago, the Earth’s crust cooled enough to allow the formation of continents and the beginning of life on Earth. Sounds like a busy time, doesn’t it?

The oldest rock formations on Earth’s surface are Archean. They are found in Greenland, Siberia, Canada, Montana, Wyoming, Scotland, India, Brazil, western Australia and southern Africa, as well as other regions. Volcanic activity was much higher than it is today, producing many different kind of volcanic rocks.

The continents started to form during the Archean, although details are still being debated.  Although this is when the first continents formed, rock of this ages makes up only 7% of the present world’s land mass. Allowing for erosion and destruction of past formations suggests that only 5-40% of the present area of continents formed during the Archean Eon.

By the end of the Archean, plate tectonic activity may have been similar to that of the modern Earth. For those who know how to read it, evidence demonstrates that liquid water was prevalent and deep oceanic basins already existed.

The Archean atmosphere had very little free oxygen, yet temperatures appear to have been near modern levels. The moderate temperatures may be because of greater amounts of greenhouse gases. Or, the Earth may have reflected less sunlight and heat due to having less land area.

There is substantial evidence that life began either near the end of the Hadean Eon or early in the Archean Eon.

The earliest identifiable fossils consist of stromatolites, which are microbial mats formed in shallow water by cyanobacteria. The earliest were found to be 3.48 billion years old. They were found throughout the Archean and became common late in the Eon. Cyanobacteria were instrumental in creating free oxygen in the atmosphere, and created so much of it that later, there was a crisis of sorts, when the life that existed at the time could not cope with the high level of oxygen. (I read that somewhere and have included it in one of my other blogs, but at this time, I can’t remember where I got that from.)

It is generally agreed that before the Archean Eon, life as we know it would have been severely challenged by the hostile environmental conditions then found on Earth.

Life during the Archean consisted of simple single-celled organisms such as Bacteria.

However, fossilized microbes from terrestrial microbial mats show that life was already established on land as long ago as 3.22 billion years.

So, it was a busy time. Lots of water sloshing around, lots of volcanoes creating land masses, and life beginning to get a first grasp on the place. If we wound up crash-landing on a planet like that, could we survive? Could we cultivate cyanobacteria to create more oxygen for us? Doing that to any large extent might strip out some of the greenhouse gases, which could lower the temperature of the planet. Which only goes to show that you have to be careful what you do to make a place your home.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archean#:~:text=The%20Archean%20Eon%20(%20%2F%C9%91%CB%90r%CB%88,beginning%20of%20life%20on%20Earth.

Ichthyosaurs

 

Ichthyosaur is Greek for ‘fish lizard’, and is the name for a group of large extinct marine reptiles. They lived during the time of the dinosaurs, but formed a separate group from them and may not have been closely related.

Ichthyosaurs thrived during much of the Mesozoic era. Based on fossil evidence, they appeared about 250 million years ago, and at least one species survived until about 90 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous. During the early Triassic period, ichthyosaurs evolved from some unidentified land reptile that returned to the sea. In a case of convergent evolution, they gradually came to resemble modern dolphins and whales, which evolved from land-dwelling mammals millions of years after the ichthyosaurs returned to the ocean. These ‘fish lizards’ were abundant until the later Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, when they were replaced as the top aquatic predators by the Plesiosauria, another marine reptilian group.

Ichthyosaurs averaged 2-4 meters (6.6 to 13.1 ft) in length. Some specimens were as short as 1 ft, while other species were much larger. During the Triassic, the Shonisaurus popularis was about 15 meters (49 ft) long. The Shastasaurus sikanniensis was estimated in 2004 to have been 21 meters (69 ft) long. Some lower jaw fragments found in England indicated a length between 20 and 25 meters (66 to 82 ft).

Weight estimates indicate a 2.4 meter (8 ft) Stenopterygius weighed around 163-168 kg (359-370 lb), while a 4 meter (13 ft) Ophthalmosaurus icenicus weighed 930-950 kg (2,050-2,090 lb). That would be a lot of tuna! Or salmon.

The earliest members of the ichthyosaur lineage were eel-like, but later members resembled more typical fishes or dolphins. Their limbs had been fully transformed into flippers, and some species had a fin on their backs and a more vertical fin at the rear of a rather short tail.

Their heads were pointed, and the jaws often came equipped with conical teeth to catch smaller prey. Some species had larger, bladed teeth to attack large animals. Their eyes were very large and the neck was short. Later species had a stiff trunk with a more vertical tail fin, which made for a powerful propulsive stroke. Ichthyosaurs were air-breathing, warm-blooded and bore live young. It’s possible they had a layer of blubber for insulation.

They may have looked like fish, but they were not. They were reptiles. They adapted so well to their environment that some of them developed dorsal fins and vertical tail fins without their ancestors having had anything there to be adapted.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthyosaur

Quarks

 I actually did study quarks in high-school chemistry, but that was so long ago, I thought I’d take another look at them. And, no, I’m not talking about the bar owner on Deep Space 9; my high school days were long before that particular TV show came along.

I’m very glad to report that what I learned in high school chemistry is still true, that a quark is a fundamental piece of matter, making up protons and neutrons, the things that make up atomic nuclei in all matter.

Quarks have various properties; electric charge, mass, color charge, and spin. They also are the only elementary particles that experience all 4 fundamental interactions; electromagnetism, gravitation, strong interaction and weak interaction.

There are 6 types of quarks, known as flavors. These are up, down, strange, charm, bottom and top. (My personal favorite flavor is lime green with orange polka dots, but that flavor hasn’t been discovered yet.)

The up and down quarks have the lowest mass. The heavier quarks rapidly change into up and down quarks through a process of particle decay, the transformation from a higher mass state to a lower mass state. This generally makes the up and down quarks the most stable and the most common in the universe.

For every quark flavor, there is an equal but opposite antiquark. Yes, the antiquark differs from its corresponding quark in that some of its properties have equal magnitude but opposite sign.

As my high school teacher said, quarks are strange little things. They have a fractional electric charge value of either -1/3 or +2/3 of the elementary charge, depending on their flavor. Those with +2/3 e include the up, charm and top quarks, while the rest have -1/3 e. Antiquarks, of course, have an opposite charge to their corresponding quarks; the up, charm and top antiquarks have charges of -2/3 e, and the other antiquarks have a charge of +1/3 e.

In the atomic nuclei, Neutrons have no electrical charge, because they are made of 2 down quarks (-1/3 e each) and 1 up quark (+2/3 e). Similarly, the proton has a positive charge of 1e, because they are made up of 2 up quarks (+2/3 e each) and 1 down quark (-1/3 e).

So, I learned some new stuff about quarks, couldn’t make sense of other stuff in the article. May have to consider getting a new chemistry textbook, or maybe a textbook on particle physics. And then find the time to actually study it.

Oh, I did see that quarks have a color (red, green and blue), as well as a flavor, but alas, still no lime green with orange polka dots. I’m sure they’ll show up eventually.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark