James Amos

How Many Fallen Angels Can Twerk on The Point of a Pin?

Okay, so the title sounds familiar but it’s wrong. And why does it matter? For the record, the actual quote is more like “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? It comes from philosophers in the Middle Ages. Before I get to the point of all this nonsense, I have to tell you I was shocked to find an actual equation formulated by a guy named Anders Sandberg that can help us find the answer—if we ask the right question. Sandberg says we can get the right answer if we reformulate the question. This would mean you can’t use the head of the pin, but should use the point.

That makes so much sense. Why didn’t I think of that?

Anyway, Sena found an article (“Humanity Will Need to Survive About 400,000 Years if We Want any Chance of Hearing from an Alien Civilization”) that says something called the Drake Equation shows that it’ll take about 400,000 years before we have contact with an alien civilization. The Drake Equation tries to estimate how many Communicating Extraterrestrial Intelligent Civilizations (CETIs) there are. The equation has been called flawed because of the unpredictability of quantifying the probability life may appear on a suitable planet. It’s a matter of conjecture. I don’t get the math, but the concept is interesting.

Now the author of this blog post (it’s actually a WordPress blog called Universe Today) cites a study from a couple of researchers that essentially ask a different question, mathematically speaking. The researchers think of this as a thought experiment and give a rather pessimistic outlook on the whole thing.

Now look back at a 2016 New York Times article, “Yes, There Have Been Aliens,” an opinion piece written by astrophysics professor Adam Frank. He is more optimistic about the Drake Equation and cautions us to “…ask the right question.”

You’ll have to subscribe to the New York Times if you can’t read Frank’s full opinion piece in one sitting. Not that I have any dispute with him, but this reminds me of Agent K in Men in Black who praised supermarket tabloids as having the “Best investigative reporting on the planet; read the New York Times if you want, they get lucky sometimes.”

Again, the math is beyond my little pinhead, but Frank was a lot more optimistic about contacting aliens. It sounds like the outlook on this depends a lot on how you set up the equation. Get the point?

Now, haven’t these guys checked the news and watched the paranormal TV shows? Are they not aware of the large population of UFO watchers out there? One source says that Canadians are spotting up to 3 UFOs a day.

Hey, aliens even stop to admire our lawns. Giorgio Tsoukalos, AKA, the hair guy, from Ancient Aliens would say the aliens contacted us a long time ago. So, why do we need the Drake Equation?

That’s why we need to ask the right question. So how many times do aliens grab their groins while rapping unintelligible lyrics on the point of a pin?

That’s right; the answer is zero—aliens don’t have groins. You’re welcome.

Featured image picture credit: Pixydotorg.

NAMIWalks Today and Beyond!

We drove by Terry Trueblood Recreation Area today and were amazed by the big crowd of people. We found out about the NAMIWalks today because of the signage and people everywhere at the park.

The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) has been around since 1979, and you can read more from the top fundraiser for today’s event, Margalea Warner!

COVID-19 Transmission Level Medium in Johnson County, Iowa

The CDC has reported that the level of COVID-19 transmission in Johnson County, Iowa is Medium. It’s recommended to adopt appropriate safety precautions accordingly. The Swiss Cheese Model is an easy way to remember:

Learn more about how to keep yourself and others safe.

University of Iowa Participating in COVAIL Trial on Covid-19 Vaccine Boosters

University of Iowa Health Care is participating in a multi-center Phase 2 clinical trial evaluating various additional COVID-19 vaccine boosters. It’s the COVID-19 Variant Immunologic Landscape (COVAIL) trial, sponsored by the National Institute of Allery and Infectious Disease (NIAID). The trial “will test new and existing booster vaccines in various combinations to see which ones provide immune responses that cover existing and emerging COVID-19 variants.”

Making The Tear Drop Jim Picture

I had so much fun making the picture of me crying me, meaning what I now call Tear Drop Jim, as the featured image for my blog post, “Jim’s Only Kidding Endlessly” (which by the way contains the acronym JOKE).

The tearing and light sensitivity after the retinal detachment surgery was a nuisance. It’s gradually resolving.

I made a screen recorder video of how I created the image using PowerDirector 17.

Black Psychiatrists in Iowa: A Brief Update

I was just googling the search terms “Black Psychiatrists in Iowa” and “African American Psychiatrists in Iowa” recently after finding a broken link in my 2019 blog post “Black Psychiatrists Iowa.”

I always think it’s funny that the results of my web search invariably show mainly a couple of mistakes. One is that I typically find my colleague, Dr. Donald Black, MD, a white male, misidentified as Black. The other mistake is that the search engine makes is confusing psychologists with psychiatrists, as though there were no difference. This happens every time, even nowadays in what many would call the era of wokeness.

The broken link was to what I thought was The 2018 Greater Iowa African American Resource Guide. I discovered the link leads to Iowa State University Diversity, Equity and Inclusion web page along with the “Page not found” notice. I could not find a 2018 issue of the guide on the web.

I found the 2019 guide, which showed that there were only two Black psychiatrists listed, me and Dr. Rodney J. Dean who founded the Dean and Associates psychiatry clinic in Sioux City, Iowa. I guess now there might be only one Black psychiatrist in Iowa.

I could not find later editions of the guide following 2019. I don’t know they were compiled or published by Kimberly Baxter, Director of the Iowa Accountability Program (IAP). According to the director, the guide was widely thought of as useful (see page ii of the guide). I wonder if the Covid-19 pandemic played some role in halting production of the guide.

However, I found a newsletter published (I didn’t see a date) on the Iowa Judicial Branch web page of Iowa Court dot gov web site, indicating the IAP was still active in domestic violence prevention programs. The IAP received a $900,000 continuation grant from the US Department of Justice, Office on Violence Against Women to continue court services for domestic violence victims. Thankfully, Kimberly Baxter is still active as Executive Director of Special Projects.

I don’t know if there will ever be another edition of The Greater Iowa African American Resource Guide. I think it did a better job of tracking how many Black psychiatrists there are in Iowa than Dr. Google ever did.

Jim’s Only Kidding Endlessly

Title: Jim’s Only Kidding Endlessly

It has been a little over 3 weeks since my retinal detachment surgery. I got a scleral buckle and didn’t need a vitrectomy in which you get a gas or oil bubble placed and have to keep your head down which would have made it even easier for me to not see dirt.

By the way, I mostly complied with the postoperative recommendation against lifting anything over 20 pounds. However, a few days after surgery I felt like I could restart with half my usual exercise routine so I tried 30 reps each of 800-pound squats, 600-pound curls, 1200-pound bench presses, and I guess about a half hour into that routine, my scleral buckle popped out, ricocheted off a couple of walls and the ceiling, landing on the floor. Boy, I cleaned that mess up right away, but had a little trouble getting it buckled up again. It’s tricky doing that in front of a mirror.

It’s normal to have a lot of tearing after this kind of surgery. I looked like I was crying constantly out of one eye for a good two weeks after the procedure. It’s gradually slowing down. I quit taking one or two doses of acetaminophen a day for pain after two weeks.

I don’t see the shadow in the top part of my visual field anymore. I noticed that after only a few days, at least after the swelling went down enough so that I could at least open my eye. I was pretty light sensitive, but that’s eased off.

But I cried a river for a couple of weeks. I dabbed at the runoff with a lot of tissues, which I suspect contributed to the irritation. After a while I wondered whether there might be another procedure which could slow it down or at least divert the flood.

You could name the procedure Retinal Implant Diverting Irritating Cascading Unrelenting Liquid Ophthalmic Urinary System. Of course, this would divert tear flow to your bladder.

I suppose that might make you run frequently to the bathroom instead of to the tissue box.

The other option would be to divert the tear runoff to a small tank (hangs on your belt) of reverse-engineered alien ray gun chemical ammo which, as everyone knows, reacts with the acidic tears and can kill dandelions and crabgrass from about 50 yards as well as deodorize Bigfoot.

The federal government denies all of this, but the Freedom of Information act allowed me to obtain documents which, despite the heavily redacted content, proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that I should be the star of my own paranormal TV show.

Thank you for your time.

Chin Technique for Sofa Table Assembly

There are a few handy man jobs Sena lets me do around the house. They tend to be chores like Knock Down Furniture assembly. The most recent job was a small sofa table. You know, usually the companies send you a cheap tool to put things like this together. This time they didn’t enclose a hex head wrench—because they didn’t use hex head screws. The sofa table came with Phillips head screws—but no Phillips head screwdriver. No problem; I have one of those.

In the video I made, I mention the chin technique to use when you’re putting stuff like this together by yourself. You just hold on to the parts with your chin pressing against your shoulder. I don’t have a patent on it yet.

CrossCribb Marathon Rookies

We finally started making a video of us playing CrossCribb. It took a while, partly because it takes more time to finish a game than we thought it would. If we’re playing it right, each hand or round takes about 8-10 minutes including scoring. We figure you’re supposed to play to 31, according to the rules. We played and filmed 6 rounds before our camera’s battery had to be recharged. We were 30-29 at that point with me leading.

Later when the battery was recharged, we played the 7^th round. I won by a nose.

I’m not sure that making an hour long CrossCribb video will win any academy awards so I might plan this as a series of videos, one per round.

Playing it is a lot of fun! No wonder it has won awards. Knowing how to count cribbage points in cards gives you a leg up on playing and scoring.

You can find the rules on the web site.

Iowa City Nature Challenge Begins!

The Iowa City Nature Challenge began on April 29, 2022. It’s sponsored by the University of Iowa Office of Sustainability and the Environment. According to their web site:

“From April 29^th to May 2^nd, find and photograph plants and animals in your backyard, in parks, along city streets, on school grounds—anywhere you find nature in Iowa City. Then, simply use the iNaturalist app to upload your photos and add them to the Iowa City project!”

It sounds fun. Read all the instructions carefully. This reminded me of my own amateur naturalist post back in 2019 about a toeless Mourning Dove.

Video Description from my YouTube post:

This is a rather sad little video about a Mourning Dove without toes who visited our back porch in early August 2018. The first slide is of a bird with normal feet, followed by several shots of the bird with abnormal feet.

There’s a slide with a bird seemingly sitting in its own poop, which is said by some to cause the problem–which is doubtful.

The last shot is that of a pair of doves trying to nest in our window box, which was full of sharp, plastic artificial plants, which was painful to watch and I wonder if their hazardous habits could lead to injuring their feet.

Speculation about the causes of these injuries range from something called string foot (string or human hair used to build nests getting wrapped around toes leading to amputation), sitting in poop leading to infections, and frostbite.

I think frostbite is plausible, and so did a birdwatcher named Nickell, who published an article about it over a half century ago; Nickell, W. P. (1964). “The Effects of Probable Frostbite on the Feet of Mourning Doves Wintering in Southern Michigan.” The Wilson Bulletin 76(1): 94-95, complete with hand-drawn illustrations that look exactly like the one in the video.

String foot is also plausible, but I’m reminded of an essay by E.B. White, Mr. Forbush’s Friends, White, E. B. (1966). “Annals of birdwatching: Mr. Forbush’s friends.” New Yorker. 42(1) or in White, E. B. (1999). Essays of E.B. White. New York, Harper Perennial, in which White recounts the book, Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States by Edward Howe Forbush, in which you can read one of the many anecdotes from amateur ornithologists about bird behavior that Forbush collected for his book, which was published circa 1929:

“Mrs. Olive Thorne Miller. Reported case of female tufted titmouse stealing hair from gentleman in Ohio for use in nest building. Bird lit on gentleman’s head, seized a beakful, braced itself, jerked lock out, flew away, came back for more. Gentleman a bird lover, consented to give hair again. No date.”– Forbush, Edward Howe, 1858-1929. Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States. [Norwood, Mass.: Printed by Berwick and Smith Company], 192529. I wonder why a bird would risk string foot by using hair in nests?