Decline Chest Fly aka Iron Cross - my new favorite Total Gym exercise

 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WJ2Y8n8uY2A

I raised my arms up higher to the sides. Also I have the new rolling handles - makes this exercise way more feasible. 

OK what Total Gym calls the "Decline chest fly" is actually a lateral chest fly. Dang

 OK - he calls it the Iron Cross!

With no pulley: Bench press (10 reps) Butterfly (10 reps). 

With pulley and resistance band: Kneeling triceps (10 reps). Rows (10 reps).... supine triceps (10), supine pull-ups (10), supine Side lats pull downs (10)...

With pulley and no resistance band: Rest of upper body

with no pulley and resistance band: All of lower body

5% loss a year of insects due to abrupt global warming heat: Half of life gone very soon

 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/03/climate-species-collapse-ecology-insects-nature-reserves-aoe

 forward just four decades,” Wagner says, “we’re talking about nearly half the tree of life disappearing in one human lifetime. That is absolutely catastrophic.”.........

In Costa Rica, Janzen described the fall in numbers of insectivorous birds in the reserve as “cratering”. A colony of about 20 nectar-eating bats have long nested in the dark nooks of Janzen and Hallwachs’ house, but Janzen has noticed the flowers they used to feed from are now failing to bloom.

Hallwachs began to find their small, emaciated bodies lying on the floor. “Over a period of five days, I found three of these bats dead,” she says. Researchers at another site 20 miles away told her they were witnessing the same thing.

David Archer on how long co2 lasts in the atmosphere

 University of Chicago oceanographer
David Archer, who led the study with
Caldeira and others, is credited with
doing more than anyone to show how
long CO2 from fossil fuels will last in
the atmosphere. As he puts it in his new
book The Long Thaw, “The lifetime of
fossil fuel CO2 in the atmosphere is a few
centuries, plus 25% that lasts essentially
forever. The next time you fill your tank,
reflect upon this”3.

 the oceans also release much of that
CO2 back to the air, such that man-made
emissions keep the atmosphere’s CO2
levels elevated for millennia.

 if cumulative
emissions are high, the portion remaining
in the atmosphere could be higher than
this, models suggest. Overall, Caldeira
argues, “the whole issue of our long-term
commitment to climate change has not
really ever been adequately addressed by
the IPCC.”
The lasting effects of CO2 also have
big implications for energy policies,
argues James Hansen, director of NASA’s
Goddard Institute of Space Studies.
“Because of this long CO2 lifetime, we
cannot solve the climate problem by
slowing down emissions by 20% or 50%
or even 80%. It does not matter much
whether the CO2 is emitted this year,
next year, or several years from now,” he
wrote in a letter this August. “Instead...
we must identify a portion of the fossil
fuels that will be left in the ground, or
captured upon emission and put back
into the ground.”

 

 

Floyd Trujillo family of Ghost Ranch also tied to low riders of Espaniola, New Mexico: Georgia O'Keefe's assistant

 My family had our own mecca - each summer we drove across the country from Minnesota to Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, a Presbyterian church camp vacation spot where Georgia O'Keefe had lived and painted. She then moved to nearby Abiquiu, a kind of traditional pueblo town.

 The Rio Chama valley, where Abiquiu is located, was once home to the Tewa people and other ancestral Pueblo communities, with remnants of pueblos like P'efu and Poshuouinge existing in the area. The name "Abiquiú" itself derives from the Tewa word Péshú:bú, meaning "wild chokecherry place".

 https://www.americanindianmagazine.org/story/genizaro-pueblo-abiquiu

Tewa and other Pueblo peoples farmed along its river. The creation of New Spain in 1535 and then the extension of the Spanish Empire into the Southwest in the 1600s, however, transformed the region. By the 1700s, the Rio Chama valley had become a violent imperial frontier marked by deadly clashes, retaliatory raids and a brutal trade in Native slaves. The conflicts forever altered the lives of Native peoples, including the Genízaro of Abiquiú in northern New Mexico.

The Genízaro (he'nēsərō) people of Abiquiú have a profound sense of community. They have lived upon the same land in New Mexico for nearly 300 years. Their history, however, is born out of violence and slavery.

https://aninspiredcook.com/2023/04/21/ghost-ranch-kitchen-mesa-trail/ 

This cook calls it "one of the most beautiful places on Earth."

 The cook of Ghost Ranch had sons that we played with - and their last name was Trujillo. I am told of a friend of their family who did low-rider designs - drawings. So they definitely were part of the Low-rider scene!

 I hung out with Mark Trujillo once and the brothers "played" in the dining room - I won't share the details since it was naughty.

https://www.ghostranch.org/our-staff/ 

Apparently the ranch has become very famous - maybe glitzy? Concerts are performed there! wow.

https://www.newmexicomagazine.org/blog/post/abiquiu-state-of-mind/ 

So this oral history has Jacob Trujillo interviewing Floyd Trujillo!  

Pretty sure that Jacob is the cousin of Floyd and that is the Ghost Ranch Trujillo family. 

Let's find out by reading what the interview says.

Yep Abiquiu for Floyd Trujillo! 

Oh wait - that interview is from the early 1900s on the "indigenous" period of Abiquiu! Fascinating.

Abiquiu

Wow - I even composed music at Ghost Ranch and I had a piece I called "Abiquiu Refrain."

I forgot about that. It's a very distance memory - I can't remember the song - maybe I changed the name to "Eclectic Soup" since I remember that piece.

https://www.ghostranch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Summer_Newsletter.pdf 

Floyd Trujillo Obit?

https://www.afterall.com/obituaries/FloydTrujillo 

Oh so their dad was named Floyd also.

  In the early days he was a basketball and baseball player, as well as a cook, chauffeur and friend of the late Georgia O'Keeffe. He was also a boy scout master to the youth of the area. For the entirety of his life, he loved his childhood home of Vallecito where he was nurtured by his grandmother Santanita. He made his ranchito here and spent as much time there as he could. His interest and impact in the community are impossible to fully express. Floyd worked at Ghost Ranch as the Assistant Ranch Land Superintendent in the Ranch Lands Dept. for 33 years.

 

 Patricia Trujillo is featured in the Espaniola CBS 60 minutes story on Low Riders

 Patricia Trujillo is an Espanola native, a college professor, and deputy cabinet secretary of New Mexico's Department of Higher Education. She told us the roots of the lowrider culture here stretch back to just after World War II.

 This week on 60 Minutes, correspondent Bill Whitaker took a little trip to Española, New Mexico, the self-proclaimed lowrider capital of the world. 

 So we drove through the town on the way to Ghost Ranch or back to Santa Fe - and I remember the Low riders - the city itself was considered a small one strip town back in the 1980s.

 the Kitchen Mesa trail is the most difficult and longest hike on the map yet it is described as the most beautiful hike. I have to admit it wasn’t an easy trail with some narrow cracks to climb and steep slippery sandy areas on the edge of a cliff. But we took our time and managed to make it to the top.

So my scariest experience at the top of Kitchen Mesa was the direct vertical drop and the feeling that I could fly if I jumped off - almost like the vertical drop was pulling me and of course this scared me for sure. So I backed off from the edge very fast. Then the young hiker my age from Texas got heat stroke by the time we got back! I found this very puzzling since I figured someone from Texas should know the heat whereas I was from Minnesota. But I spent all my free time at the ranch outside walking the mesa trails - so maybe I was better heat adapted or I just drank more water. I remember my canteen - a metal furry round big thing. I guzzled water from that for sure - to keep hydrated.

 

 We also hiked up Pedernal - the famous painting subject of Georgia O'Keefe. I remember the round rocks slowing us down but the hike down involved a lot of sliding after jumping. My cousin who joined us then went into Special Forces as his career - probably a good hike to inspire him.

Mass of Earth satellite data: pumping the freshwater dry causing oceans to rise in sea level!

 https://www.propublica.org/article/water-aquifers-groundwater-rising-ocean-levels

 The researchers were surprised to find that the loss of water on the continents has grown so dramatically that it has become one of the largest causes of global sea level rise.

  Moisture lost to evaporation and drought, plus runoff from pumped groundwater, now outpaces the melting of glaciers and the ice sheets of either Antarctica or Greenland as the largest contributor of water to the oceans.

 The study examines 22 years of observational data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, satellites, which measure changes in the mass of the earth and have been applied to estimate its water content...........

 Since 2002, the GRACE sensors have detected a rapid shift in water loss patterns around the planet. Around 2014, though, the pace of drying appears to have accelerated, the authors found, and is now growing by an area twice the size of California each year. “It’s like this sort of creeping disaster that has taken over the continents in ways that no one was really anticipating,”

 The earth above it collapses as the ground compresses like a drying sponge. The visible signs of such subsidence around the world appear to match what the GRACE data says. Mexico City is sinking as its groundwater aquifers are drained, as are large parts China, Indonesia, Spain and Iran, to name a few. A recent study by researchers at Virginia Tech in the journal Nature Cities found that 28 cities across the United States are sinking — New York, Houston and Denver, among them — threatening havoc for everything from building safety to transit. In the Central Valley, the ground surface is nearly 30 vertical feet lower than it was in the first part of the 20th century.

 

But with climate change, these same drying regions are seeing less rainfall.

the middle band of Earth is becoming less habitable. It also correlates closely with the places that a separate body of climate research has already identified as a shrinking environmental niche that has suited civilization for the past 6,000 years. Combined, these findings all point to the likelihood of widespread famine, the migration of large numbers of people seeking a more stable environment and the carry-on impact of geopolitical disorder.

 the Pacific Institute, has tracked more than 1,900 incidents in which water supplies were either the casualty of, a tool for or the cause of violence. In Syria, beginning in 2011, drought and groundwater depletion drove rural unrest that contributed to the civil war, which displaced millions of people. In Ghana, in 2017, protesters rioted as wells ran dry. And in Ukraine, whose wheat supports much of the world, water infrastructure has been a frequent target of Russian attacks.

 

 

Evapotranspiration Forests cool the planet much more than we realize

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co7eigqN2d8

It's not just biomass growth as carbon sequestration but rather the cooling mechanism via evapotranspiration. 

https://medium.com/@ecorestorationalliance/cooling-the-climate-5f26e233dddc

evapotranspiration, turning water into vapour that rises up to the higher atmosphere, carrying large amounts of absorbed solar energy (in the form of latent heat) with it, preventing it from turning into sensible heat and thereby avoiding the warming of the lower atmosphere. At the same time, plants also send up a variety of biological aerosols together with the water vapour, which serve as the condensation nuclei for water droplets. With that, plants cool the Earth’s surface. So this helps the water vapor to condense on these aerosols, forming clouds, increasing albedo while enabling the transport of latent heat into the higher atmosphere,

 https://www.penguinsonthinice.com/Teleconnection.pdf

A volume of one thousand cubic meters of vapor becomes one cubic metre of rain, creating a sudden vacuum which draws in air from below and from the side, creating wind. Over large forests, these processes are so strong that they drive a powerful biotic pump, which draws in humid air from the oceans, bringing rains deep inland and enabling the forest to thrive thousands of kilometers away from the coast.

The condensation nuclei cause moderate rains, minimizing the potential for extreme flash floods. An intact biotic pump averts droughts by extending the rainy season while bringing moderate rains. This also increases the production of living biomass which in turn draws down carbon

Hedy Lamarr, the eye-candy wife of a Jewish Arms munition supplier to Hitler, invented frequency hopping (kind of, Martin Baesecke was 1st))!

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghc6uab1EX4

wild....

Frequency Hopping was invented by Hedy Lamarr!? Wow. Radio-controlled Torpedo to end the war.

 Robert Price, an engineer, interviewed her - he was a pioneer in "secret communications" and he called her a "plagiarizer" - and so Robert Price thought she stole the idea from her first husband - the munitions supplier! Mandl.... She said - no way!

 a receiver hopping around in synchrony with the transmitter.

The Germans had not come across frequency hopping. (but in fact they had!)

 She was inspired by the "Philco Magic Box" radio remote dialer...

 https://antiqueradio.org/PhilcoMysteryRemoteRadioControl.htm

Philco Mystery Control: Theory and Operation - vid 

 George Antheil - the composer (who also spoke German) - collaborated with Hedy Lamarr on how to implement the idea of frequency hopping - using the concept of synchronized piano rolls for frequency hopping! 

 

 So then a Caltech electrical engineer converted the concept into actual design for the patent.

 

Actress Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil were awarded U.S. Patent 2,292,387 for their secret communication system in 1942

. This patent described a frequency-hopping spread-spectrum communication system, which involved rapidly changing radio frequencies to make radio-guided torpedoes difficult to detect or jam. 

The patent application was drafted with the help of the law firm Lyon & Lyon

 https://www.americanscientist.org/blog/the-long-view/the-seventh-claim

What was in the lost seventh claim? Irvin has solved the mystery. The inventors claimed:

7. In a radio communication system comprising a radio transmitter tunable to any one of a plurality of frequencies and a radio receiver tunable to any one of said plurality of frequencies, the method of effecting secret communication between said stations which comprises simultaneously changing the tuning of the transmitter and receiver according to an arbitrary, nonrecurring pattern.

This claim is much broader than the others; it is the very definition of frequency hopping. Had the patent examiner accepted it, Lamarr and Antheil could have made a case that they’d originated the concept. But the examiner rejected claim 7 on the grounds that frequency hopping was already known.

As evidence, the examiner cited two earlier patents that fully covered the claim. The first was U.S. patent 1,869,659 granted to Willem Broertjes in 1932, and a second was U.S. Patent 2,134,850, granted in 1938 to Martin Baesecke of the German firm Siemens and Halske.

 https://www.americanscientist.org/article/random-paths-to-frequency-hopping

 With the help of Samuel Mackeown, a California Institute of Technology engineer, George ironed out the bugs in their invention, and he and Hedy applied for a patent in June 1941. Considering the familiarity with patent conventions and technical radio concepts on display, it seems likely that Mackeown wrote the patent itself. On August 11, 1942, Lamarr and Antheil received U.S. Patent 2,292,387 (issued to Lamarr under her married name, Hedy Markey) for a “secret communication system.”...........

as to whether Lamarr originated the frequency-hopping scheme or learned of it in meetings at Fritz Mandl’s firm, the Hirtenberger Patronenfabrik. In Bad Boy, George affirms that she got her education at those meetings, and although he is not exactly the world’s most reliable memoirist, he could hardly have received the information from anyone but Hedy. Robert Price, an engineer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory and a pioneer of spread-spectrum technology, interviewed Lamarr. He told me that he came away convinced that she had heard the idea in her husband’s boardroom