Just this and that

 

"​The impossible union of spheres of existence is actual-  And the fire and the rose are one - The light is still at the still point of the turning world - The point of intersection of the timeless with time - The life of significant soil"

TS Elliot quotes on Susan Seddon Boulet's art.

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That one neuron connects to about 7,000 others. Your brain has 86 billion of them. Do the math and you get somewhere around 100 trillion connections inside your head. More connections than stars in 1,500 galaxies.

And each connection point is way more complicated than anyone expected. A Stanford lab found that every single connection contains about 1,000 tiny switches that can store memories and process information at the same time. So your brain is running roughly 100 quadrillion switches right now, while you read this sentence.

The wild part is the power bill. Your brain runs on 20 watts. That’s less energy than the light in your fridge. The world’s fastest supercomputer needs 20 million watts to do the same amount of raw calculation. A million times more power for the same output.

We’re still nowhere close to understanding how any of this works. In October 2024, a team of hundreds of scientists finished mapping every single connection in a fruit fly’s brain. Took six years and heavy AI help. That fly brain had 140,000 neurons. Yours has 86 billion. Google and Harvard also mapped a piece of human brain last year, a speck smaller than a grain of rice. That speck alone contained 150 million connections and took 1,400 terabytes to store. The lead scientist said mapping a full human brain at that detail would produce as much data as the entire world generates in a year.

A tiny worm had its 302 brain cells mapped back in 1986. Almost 40 years later, scientists still can’t fully explain how that worm’s brain keeps it alive. Your brain has 86 billion of those cells, each one wired to thousands of others, each wire packed with a thousand switches, all of it humming along on less power than a lightbulb.

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Gratitude:

... for the advancement of stem cell research that could help those with osteoarthritis (like me.) Research revealed this week that new biomarkers were found that could help determine treatment for cartilage regrowth for those with the disease.

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An 8,000-year-old statuette of what could be a fertility goddess unearthed at Çatalhöyük Neolithic site in Turkey.  It was wrought from recrystallized limestone between 6300 and 6000 B.C. That material is rare for an area where most previously discovered pieces were sculpted from clay.

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Saying goodbye to winter...at least for most of us.

Lake Tomahawk by Rey Castillo Jr. Feb 1, 2026

 

Leading psychologist Ethan Kross on the benefits of creative visualization to gain perspective in life.

"Engage in mental time travel. Another way to gain distance and broaden your perspective is to think about how you’ll feel a month, a year, or even longer from now. Remind yourself that you’ll look back on whatever is upsetting you in the future and it’ll seem much less upsetting."Source: Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It