As the Water Wheel Turns
I’ve been relatively silent on social media for a while; work load & health issues (plus an upcoming new endeavor) have conspired against extensive broadcasting. But these items are on my mind and, when I clone myself, will become full-length ruminations:
1. Targeted gene editing has come of age: the National Academy of Sciences cautiously endorsed it even for germline alterations (in cases of debilitating genetic disease) and George Church declared that a mammoth — well, mammophant — birth is two years away.
2. In the wake of Likhain and Zen Cho’s posts on Requires Hate/Benjanun Sriduangkaew after the Apex and Future Fire cynical, eyes-wide-shut debacle I’m glad to see more people from SFF contingents that have been affected by her relentless venom take courageous stands. I’ve been pondering the obvious, extensive equivalences between RH/BS and Drumpf, including the roles of “useful idiots” (to use Paul Krugman’s term).
The upcoming new endeavor will become public in mid-March. Anyone who’s willing can help me light the beacons!
Related articles:
Blastocysts Feel No Pain
Miranda Wrongs: Reading Too Much into the Genome
“Are We Not (as Good as) Men?”
Genome Editing: Slippery Slope or Humane Choice?
Where Are the Wise Crones in Science Fiction?
The Misogyny We Inhale with Each Breath
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Wrecker
How Many Swallows Bring Real Spring?
Dear Athena,
At my local library, I recently came across and am reading your Star Trek book.
Having grown up on Star Trek, they could mine the expansive science enjoyably amidst the references to characters they know well, plus differentiate which Star Trek science was off, a pleasure I have enjoyed myself.
That the mind is in the synaptic connections and that there is no mind without body makes perfect sense to me in the beliefs of my faith tradition where we resurrect as ourselves, a topic I had hoped to hear your comments on. Your emphasis on free will for morals and dignity also rang true. Plus, from one of your blog posts, I liked the idea of sci fi as speculative history.
Now in the second week of Lent and following the Eastern Orthodox dietary guidelines from my studies leading to my encore career as a lifestyle coach, though I’m still teaching remedial amt to older teens and adult learners, I wondered if in Athens you do the same. Although I follow a dietitian, who specializes in Crete, Bill Bradley, RD, from your old haunt out in Worcester–https://www.mediterraneanliving.com/welcome-to-living-mediterranean-with-bill-bradley-r-d/– I am still unsure of Athens’ relation to Crete.
As far as I have been in that part of the world is the grave of St. John the Evangelist, my patron and patron of my childhood church, in Selcuk outside of Izmir, south of Istanbul.
Also, while trying to contact you, I saw your interest in Linear A, which interests me because the Cretan participants in Ansel Keyes seminal seven countries’ study were the only ones still alive 30 years later in their 90s–http://www.hormones.gr/pdf/Hormones-326.pdf [NOTE: Especially the emphasis on the intermittent fasting component, one of the four pillars of my boomer lifestyle coaching entrepreneurial effort]–and because Cretans/Minoans explored the Gaza area, part of the beginner Old Testament study I am also doing.
Maybe some of them stayed and became some of the “aboriginal” people the descendants of Abraham displaced with some of them intermarrying linguistically and otherwise. ideas I welcome your thoughts on as well.
Anyway, I am glad that you are back home, not an exile as you felt during your “Mid Journey” poem. I hope being home has had major health benefits.
Too bad I couldn’t take the commuter rail from the South Shore and meet you in Cambridge for lunch, but please email me if you would like to correspond about being back home these last few years and how health has improved with easy access to spinach pie hopefully as good as your mother’s.
All the best,
Marguerite
Marguerite, I’m delighted you’re enjoying To Seek Out New Life!
Please feel free to browse through the blog for more posts on consciousness, Linear A and the unique Minoan culture, as well as other matters of science, history and culture. The Minoans were in fact the Old Testament’s Philistines (the city-states of Philistia were Minoan colonies, like their later Greek equivalents on the Ionian coast, Black Sea and central/western Mediterranean). That part of the world is a passage and mixing cauldron of peoples for as long as humanity has existed, and the inhabitants of Greece (broadly defined) have been an integral part of it from the very start.
I’m actually living in Cambridge — have done so for my entire adult life — with annual visits to Greece to see family and friends. Thank you for your close reading and good wishes, and my very best to you!