There you go! Gorgeous creatures. As Thomas Wickman recently said: “I read there are 900 million dogs in the world and 76,811,305 dogs in the US (American Veterinary Medical Association.)”
I read recently a review of the most popular dog names by State.
This was an article on US News dated November 6th. It showed the names for our dogs in the U.S. in a table:
The article also reported that dogs and puppies were living in more than half of the nation’s households. That is one heck of a lot of dogs and it just shows how great dogs are as companions to us humans.
Then the article went on to declare the most popular dog name by State, and there was another graphic:
So much for the names of our three remaining dogs: Brandy; Cleopatra; Oliver.
We take it for granted! Of that I am sure. But the question of how oxygen first came to be built up in our atmosphere is fascinating. There was a recent article written by Elizabeth Swanner, who is Associate Professor of Geology, Iowa State University that was published in The Conversation. It makes for a very interesting read.
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A layered lake is a little like Earth’s early oceans − and lets researchers explore how oxygen built up in our atmosphere billions of years ago
Researchers sample water from various layers to analyze back in the lab. Elizabeth Swanner, CC BY-ND
Little Deming Lake doesn’t get much notice from visitors to Itasca State Park in Minnesota. There’s better boating on nearby Lake Itasca, the headwaters of the Mississippi River. My colleagues and I need to maneuver hundreds of pounds of equipment down a hidden path made narrow by late-summer poison ivy to launch our rowboats.
But modest Deming Lake offers more than meets the eye for me, a geochemist interested in how oxygen built up in the atmosphere 2.4 billion years ago. The absence of oxygen in the deep layers of Deming Lake is something this small body of water has in common with early Earth’s oceans.
On each of our several expeditions here each year, we row our boats out into the deepest part of the lake – over 60 feet (18 meters), despite the lake’s surface area being only 13 acres. We drop an anchor and connect our boats in a flotilla, readying ourselves for the work ahead.
Researchers’ boats on Deming Lake. Elizabeth Swanner, CC BY-ND
Deming Lake is meromictic, a term from Greek that means only partially mixing. In most lakes, at least once a year, the water at the top sinks while the water at the bottom rises because of wind and seasonal temperature changes that affect water’s density. But the deepest waters of Deming Lake never reach the surface. This prevents oxygen in its top layer of water from ever mixing into its deep layer.
Less than 1% of lakes are meromictic, and most that are have dense, salty bottom waters. Deming Lake’s deep waters are not very salty, but of the salts in its bottom waters, iron is one of the most abundant. This makes Deming Lake one of the rarest types of meromictic lakes.
Postdoc researcher Sajjad Akam collects a water sample for chemical analysis back in the lab. Elizabeth Swanner, CC BY-ND
The lake surface is calm, and the still air is glorious on this cool, cloudless August morning. We lower a 2-foot-long water pump zip-tied to a cable attached to four sensors. The sensors measure the temperature, amount of oxygen, pH and amount of chlorophyll in the water at each layer we encounter. We pump water from the most intriguing layers up to the boat and fill a myriad of bottles and tubes, each destined for a different chemical or biological analysis.
My colleagues and I have homed in on Deming Lake to explore questions about how microbial life adapted to and changed the environmental conditions on early Earth. Our planet was inhabited only by microbes for most of its history. The atmosphere and the oceans’ depths didn’t have much oxygen, but they did have a lot of iron, just like Deming Lake does. By investigating what Deming Lake’s microbes are doing, we can better understand how billions of years ago they helped to transform the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans into what they’re like now.
Chlorophyll colors water from the lake slightly green. Elizabeth Swanner, CC BY-ND
At Deming Lake, my colleagues and I pay special attention to the water layer where the chlorophyll readings jump. Chlorophyll is the pigment that makes plants green. It harnesses sunlight energy to turn water and carbon dioxide into oxygen and sugars. Nearly 20 feet (6 meters) below Deming’s surface, the chlorophyll is in cyanobacteria and photosynthetic algae, not plants.
But the curious thing about this layer is that we don’t detect oxygen, despite the abundance of these oxygen-producing organisms. This is the depth where iron concentrations start to climb to the high levels present at the lake’s bottom.
This high-chlorophyll, high-iron and low-oxygen layer is of special interest to us because it might help us understand where cyanobacteria lived in the ancient ocean, how well they were growing and how much oxygen they produced.
We suspect the reason cyanobacteria gather at this depth in Deming Lake is that there is more iron there than at the top of the lake. Just like humans need iron for red blood cells, cyanobacteria need lots of iron to help catalyze the reactions of photosynthesis.
A likely reason we can’t measure any oxygen in this layer is that in addition to cyanobacteria, there are a lot of other bacteria here. After a good long life of a few days, the cyanobacteria die, and the other bacteria feed on their remains. These bacteria rapidly use up any oxygen produced by still photosynthesizing cyanobacteria the way a fire does as it burns through wood.
We know there are lots of bacteria here based on how cloudy the water is, and we see them when we inspect a drop of this water under a microscope. But we need another way to measure photosynthesis besides measuring oxygen levels.
Long-running lakeside laboratory
The other important function of photosynthesis is converting carbon dioxide into sugars, which eventually are used to make more cells. We need a way to track whether new sugars are being made, and if they are, whether it’s by photosynthetic cyanobacteria. So we fill glass bottles with samples of water from this lake layer and seal them tight with rubber stoppers.
We drive the 3 miles back to the Itasca Biological Station and Laboratories where we will set up our experiments. The station opened in 1909 and is home base for us this week, providing comfy cabins, warm meals and this laboratory space.
In the lab, we inject our glass bottle with carbon dioxide that carries an isotopic tracer. If cyanobacteria grow, their cells will incorporate this isotopic marker.
We had a little help to formulate our questions and experiments. University of Minnesota students attending summer field courses collected decades worth of data in Itasca State Park. A diligent university librarian digitized thousands of those students’ final papers.
My students and I pored over the papers concerning Deming Lake, many of which tried to determine whether the cyanobacteria in the chlorophyll-rich layer are doing photosynthesis. While most indicated yes, those students were measuring only oxygen and got ambiguous results. Our use of the isotopic tracer is trickier to implement but will give clearer results.
Graduate students Michelle Chamberlain and Zackry Stevenson about to sink the bottles for incubation in Deming Lake. Elizabeth Swanner, CC BY-ND
That afternoon, we’re back on the lake. We toss an anchor; attached to its rope is a clear plastic bag holding the sealed bottles of lake water now amended with the isotopic tracer. They’ll spend the night in the chlorophyll-rich layer, and we’ll retrieve them after 24 hours. Any longer than that and the isotopic label might end up in the bacteria that eat the dying cyanobacteria instead of the cyanobacteria themselves. We tie off the rope to a floating buoy and head back to the station’s dining hall for our evening meal.
Iron, chlorophyll, oxygen
The next morning, as we wait for the bottles to finish their incubation, we collect water from the different layers of the lake and add some chemicals that kill the cells but preserve their bodies. We’ll look at these samples under the microscope to figure out how many cyanobacteria are in the water, and we’ll measure how much iron is inside the cyanobacteria.
That’s easier said than done, because we have to first separate all the “needles” (cyanobacteria) from the “hay” (other cells) and then clean any iron off the outside of the cyanobacteria. Back at Iowa State University, we’ll shoot the individual cells one by one into a flame that incinerates them, which liberates all the iron they contain so we can measure it.
Biogeochemist Katy Sparrow rows a research vessel to shore. Elizabeth Swanner, CC BY-ND
Our scientific hunch, or hypothesis, is that the cyanobacteria that live in the chlorophyll- and iron-rich layer will contain more iron than cyanobacteria that live in the top lake layer. If they do, it will help us establish that greater access to iron is a motive for living in that deeper and dimmer layer.
These experiments won’t tell the whole story of why it took so long for Earth to build up oxygen, but they will help us to understand a piece of it – where oxygen might have been produced and why, and what happened to oxygen in that environment.
Deming Lake is quickly becoming its own attraction for those with a curiosity about what goes on beneath its tranquil surface – and what that might be able to tell us about how new forms of life took hold long ago on Earth.
I cannot easily put my words together about this iconic British rock band formed in 1960; I was 16 then.
‘Now and Then’
The final song from the iconic English rock band The Beatles was released yesterday, a track that relies on AI-enhanced vocals from former co-frontman John Lennon. Listen to the song, titled “Now and Then,” here. Regarded as one of the most influential bands of all time, The Beatles are the bestselling artists in music history, having shipped more than 180 million albums. Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and (for most of the time) Ringo Starr, were nominated for 21 Grammys in the span of six years beginning in 1965. The group broke up in 1970, and Lennon was tragically killed by an angry fan in 1980. The new song was originally written by Lennon in 1977 and surfaced in 1994 by McCartney but was shelved due to Lennon’s voice being muffled by a piano. New technology reportedly allowed Lennon’s vocals to be isolated and enhanced to the point of being usable.
Now for some reason I cannot play that YouTube link but hopefully it will be alright when I publish it.
I was looking through posts from a few years ago and came across ‘Dogs – their deep ties to man” and thought it would be a grand post to publish again.
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Dogs – their deep ties to man!
It’s impossible not to admire, respect and love a dog
(First published on the 4th August, 2009but it relates to an event even before I left the United Kingdom. I met Jean in December, 2007 and Pharaoh and me travelled out to Mexico a year later.)
An incident last night reminded me of the complexity of the dog’s mind. It has not been the first time this has happened.
Our 6 year-old German Shepherd dog, Pharaoh, was given a bone as a treat during the previous day and, as sometimes happens, it was a bit tough on his stomach. So at around 1.30 am, I was woken up. Nothing so special about that. But reflect on how this happened.
1.30 am is the part of night where, hopefully, we are in that very deep phase of sleep. How then does Pharaoh calculate the best way of awakening me so that he can be let out into the yard? One might consider the various options:
– He barks
– He paws at the bed
– He jumps on the bed
– He scratches at the door
and so on.
What Pharaoh did (and has done before, so this is a calculated behaviour) is very gently put his damp nose onto the side of my face, just below my left ear, which was the part of my face nearest to the edge of the bed. It woke me so gently from my deep sleep but made me immediately aware (as a parent is when their young child cries) that Pharaoh required urgent attention.
A moment later he was standing by the bedroom door, letting out that soft, quiet whine that is only used when he needs to use the yard. Within seconds his collar and lead were on and he was outside doing what nature was prompting him.
Pharaoh resting on an English lawn
No big deal but it stayed with me this morning as I reflected on the empathetic way that Pharaoh had communicated with me during the night.
Dogs sensitivity to the world around them is a powerful reminder that the less we focus in on ourselves the more we learn.
I thought it very worthwhile to repeat this, plus a real treat at the end of the post!
Scamming in all its forms has only got worse in the last couple of years, since I parted with $9,000 in 2021!
As a direct result of that error, I changed my bank, installed a VPN at home (Proton), changed my email account to ProtonMail, and also changed my calendar (also to Proton).
But I still do not take it as important as it is. I guess because it is not my first thought whenever I come across an unfamiliar email.
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Please read this; and do not make the same mistake as me!
The Story of a Scam
(or how I lost the thick end of $10,000.)
On Friday, 6th August, 2021 at 05:51 in came the following email:
Norton Customer ,
User name:paulhandover
*we like to confim you that the NortonDesk re-newal. has been done on your request*
It is very easy to unsubscribe it,
and related to your any query, reach us at +1-(860) – (852) – (6259).
Product-Name : NortonDesk
……………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Price : $475.04
……………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Subscription ID : 8837-77942826-947192-8126
……………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Expiration Date : 3 Year from the Date of Purchase
………………………………………………………………………………………………
* If you wish to Cancel this Membership then please feel free to Contact our Billing department as soon as Possible*
……………………………………………………………………………………………………..
*Please do not write to this mail address, that will not help*
Reach us on +1 – (860) – (852) – (6259)
……………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Regards,
Billing department
Contact: +1 – (860) – (852) – (6259)
693 Amwell Rd, Hillsborough, NJ
My first mistake was not to check the incoming email address. It was mahaliashomakerxhv928@gmail.com
I telephoned the number given and told the person that I wanted to cancel this membership. Indeed that I had never subscribed for this membership in the first place.
I spoke with ‘Adam’. I was then asked to go to a webpage where I filled in a Refund Application Order form. I filled in my details including the refund amount and my bank details: Sort Code & Account Number.
I then submitted the form and imagine my surprise when a few minutes later I was informed that I had received the sum of $10,000. I quickly checked our bank account online and there was the $10,000 credit in our checking account.
My second mistake was me not examining the total in our accounts. I have the facility to show the total funds in our accounts. Why I didn’t do that I can not explain.
Then it was back on the telephone and Adam also was surprised (later I realised that this was a feigned surprise and all part of the scam) and said could I go to the bank and fill in an International Wire Transfer for the amount of $9,500. Adam also said that he would give me the details of the person in Thailand that was to receive the funds, and could I say this was for a medical operation because it would save ‘Norton’ the taxation.
My third mistake was not to discuss this with Jeannie and to assume that it was just a harmless error.
The details came through and I went to our bank in Grants Pass. I got to the bank a little after 09:00. I saw a staff member of the bank and explained what I needed to do. The bank member queried this and said that it sounded like a scam. I lied and said I knew the woman in Thailand and wanted to go ahead. That was what I had been instructed to say.
My fourth mistake was not listening to the woman at the bank. (And I still thought that the ‘Norton’ funds were in my account.)
The International Wire Transfer was completed and I signed it. I also asked the balances on our two accounts. It was about $10,000 less than I expected and I queried it but was told that there had been a transfer from my savings account to my checking account of $10,000 for Norton. I thought that this was still a little low but that I could check it carefully once I got home. I had a thirty-minute window to change my mind.
Mistake number five, a huge mistake, was while at the bank not to ask them carefully to go through all my transactions that day because that would have revealed that the receipt of $10,000 that I had seen online had mysteriously disappeared. Indeed had never been received. That would have enabled me to stop the wire transfer within the thirty-minute window.
I returned home and found out the truth. I had been scammed out of $9,500.
The strange thing was that ‘Adam’ of the billing department of so-called Norton kept ringing me throughout the day to say that the funds would be sent back to me and gave me the details of three wires and that the funds would be back in my bank account on Monday, 9th August!
Later that morning I rang Kevin Dick who manages our investments and told him the tale. He said that there was a huge amount of scamming about and that I should make three phone calls: to the bank and report the fraud; to the Sheriff’s office and report the fraud; and to my insurance company. The first two were done straight away. Kevin also told me to close my bank accounts and amend my email address. Alex, my son, said to use my Proton mail account and straight away I started to make the change.
A person from the humanists group that we belong to said also to inform The Daily Courier.
On Monday morning Ryan of ‘Norton’ called me at 07:15 and said that Adam Prescott was no longer with the firm. Ryan said that their General Manager, Ron Cooper, would call me shortly. Ron did indeed call me and said that they would return the money but that the minimum cheque they could write was $30,000. I was then told that in advance of me receiving the money I would have to pay a small amount to them. At this point I put the phone down for it was clearly a second attempt to steal more funds from me.
Finally we went back to the bank on Monday morning. We were informed that there was never a credit of $10,000 but that a clever switch of the money from one account to another made it look as though the money had been credited. The event had been reported to the bank’s fraud department.
On Tuesday morning, the 10th August, the bank said that as well as our two accounts being locked out from us and that only cheques and cash withdrawals would be honoured for the time being, the fraud department had made the decision to issue us with a ten-day notice to terminate our accounts. In other words, within ten days the bank would no longer want us as customers. Since then I have done much research and found out via the Forbes website that this was more to do with the bank being ultra conservative than anything else. Indeed Kevin said that he had spoken with his IT department and they thought that it was strange that my ex-bank had terminated us so quickly. The IT department thought that the teller at the bank realised that she had been partly culpable.
However the bank did recommend another bank to go to in Grants Pass.
I have since reset my iMac and changed my email address.
It is a most humiliating affair. I have beaten myself up several times over and have at last understood the frame of mind that I had gotten myself into.
To explain that, first of all I thought that I needed to stop the billing urgently and because it was early on a Friday morning thought that the best thing to do was to call immediately.
Secondly, during the call that scammers spoke to me in friendly tones and quietly complimented me on my integrity. I am sure that this ‘spoke’ to my psychological fear of rejection that I have had since I my father died in 1956.
Then in the morning of the 11th August I received a call from a regular contact at the English company who manage my UK SIPP. He wanted to check if I had tried to log on at 09:00 UK time and I replied that there was no way that was me for that UK time was 01:00 Pacific time. There were apparently three attempts to log on. Unsuccessfully as it turned out and my SIPP account is temporarily closed as a result.
The scammers are very thorough in their crooked craft!
Now as of Thursday, the 12th August, we are pretty much out of the grim shadow of this event. We have new accounts at The People’s Bank here in Grants Pass. I have changed my email address and yesterday afternoon I decided that the only safe way of protecting myself was to get another iMac. I was speaking to the sales department of Apple and mentioned the scam and the woman immediately said I should speak with their Technical Support and transferred me. Then I was helped via screen sharing to go through many pages deleting unnecessary files and other stuff. And the helpful woman found another item of malware that was deleted and removed. She spent 54 minutes getting me properly cleaned out and then forwarded an email with all the links for me to do the same process at a later date. It was a superb experience.
So that is it.
Now watch these two YouTube videos. The first is just 5 minutes long and is important to all who use computers and want to be protected against scammers. (NB: This first video is now not included.)
and then watch this slightly longer video from Jim
Be safe! Please!
An addendum dated Saturday, 14th August, at 7am Pacific Time.
Only to say that I also posted my scamming report on Ugly HedgeHog under their General Chit Chat forum. Of the many responses that came in I wanted to post here two of them.
The first from ‘Stanikon’:
Sorry you had to go through this. Your first clue should have been the grammar and phrasing of the original email. That would have given it away. Legitimate companies go to great lengths to make sure their grammar, phrasing and language are correct. I have avoided several scams by paying attention to that so there is some value in being slightly OCD.
and the second from ‘Red6’:
The safest thing to do in these situations is simply not to open the email. I receive on a daily basis, emails telling me that the items I ordered are being shipped, my subscription to something has been renewed etc, etc. 99.9% of these are scams and nothing bad will happen if you just delete them. Older working people often have the fear that there’s a bill out there that has not been paid and they are afraid of getting a bad credit report. So they aggressively try to send someone money for something they cannot even recognize. If it is a true debt, you will be reminded of it several times before any reports are made.
I follow several simple rules in preventing scams. There are many more but this will take care of most of them.
1. Examine the sender’s email address, if you do not recognize it then DO NOT OPEN and DELETE immediately. Most of these scammer’s email addresses will not have the company name in the email address OR it will be combined with other names. Most will not have the .com, .org, etc but will be gmail, Hotmail, or other generic URL. Many of these scammers “broadcast” their emails to everyone on a purchased email list not knowing whether some or valid or not. If you open or reply to these it verifies your email as valid and active and worthy of more attention. Also, if it is an unknown email address, it could be a carrier of a virus or some other bad computer/software infection.
2. If you do get involved with something that does not feel right and you take it to the bank – TRUST THE BANK if they tell you it is suspicious. They see these things every day and develop a feel for them. I received a cashier’s check for something I sold on craigslist. I took it to the bank to deposit and the bank rep immediately recognized the cashier’s check as a fake. She even called the bank the check was supposed to be drawn on and they checked the records and told her that it was counterfeit. You trust your bankers, credit union, etc with your money every day so trust them when they tell you something does not seem right.
3. Scammers know that many older people do NOT like to use credit cards. So a lot of their dealings involve checks, bank transfers, and other forms of older less secure payment methods that older citizens are comfortable with. I NEVER, NEVER send money for something I purchase or order online unless it is through a credit card. In fact, I rarely buy ANYTHING anymore that does not go on the credit card. They are safer, quicker, and easier. If somehow you do get something on your bill that you did not authorize, the credit card company will investigate and go after the person or company that charged you. This is one more safety step that protects the consumer. This does not always apply to debit cards. Debit cards are issued by individual banks or credit unions and some have policies in the fine print that they do NOT have the same policies as the big credit card companies and may not forgive or relieve the user for bad charges made to their debit card.
4. Just do not believe anyone or any company that says they sent you a huge refund or overpayment or some amount of money by mistake. That rarely happens. It is even rarer if they also tell you to return the money to some foreign address, email, or wire transfer. When in doubt, wait for a week or so before you do ANYTHING. If they sent you the check, transfer etc, wait to see if it clears or is valid. We are conditioned by TV and movies that we need to act immediately in situations such as this. This is rarely the case. Take time to see what happens. During this cooling-off period check them out, research the internet to see if others have experienced this scam. It is almost a sure thing that if you are being scammed, others have been also and it has been reported somewhere with law enforcement agencies or on websites on the internet. Check them out before acting. Or better yet, do nothing for a while and most likely they will just go away. Much like the telephone scammers, they make their money on volume, calling as many as possible in the least amount of time. Scammers will not waste time working on you for days, they have thousands of other emails, accounts to call. Remember, they are after the fastest, easiest targets – the low-hanging fruit.
If it is a true mistake or debt you owe then most likely you will receive some official correspondence in regards to the debt. A good example is the IRS and Social Security phone scams in the past couple of years. You get a call from the IRS or Social Security informing you that you may have committed fraud and law enforcement is on their way to arrest you. But if you arrange repayment with their representative, an arrest can be avoided. The IRS and Social Security NEVER take action without first sending several official US Postal letters to you. If you are still inclined to send money to someone in a foreign country then discuss it with your bank and listen.
Hope this helps.
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All very sound advice and as relevant today as it was when first published.
Finally, for something completely different; have a look at the recent Hunter’s Moon as featured on YouTube.
My feelings when I look at these pictures are nothing new but that doesn’t diminish at all my despair at these poor dogs. At least there are a few photographs of people loving them but they are intelligent, caring animals and in an ideal world we wouldn’t have strays.
Learning from Dogs 