I find that once you start volunteering the opportunities to volunteer more just pour in. I’m the board chair of our Foundation with lots of volunteer roles under that, I’m on the Public Advisory Roundtable of the American Thoracic Society, I’m co-director of a public-private partnership between Industry and the FDA advancing drug development tools in my rare disease, and I sit on the data safety monitoring boards of two different NIH studies. All this five years after first getting involved. But I wouldn’t call myself a ‘supercitizen’. Those seem like more local community star volunteers. When we moved to my suburb a decade ago I had thoughts of getting involved locally. That doesn’t seem likely anymore. In my particular case my experience is better focused on beating this disease.

@wtg said in Neuroarchitecture: So many restaurants seem to be total noise machines. Tall ceilings, hard floor and wall materials, and loud music. I've had trouble talking to people at the same table. Most unpleasant. Yep, I dislike that immensely. I really don’t get the appeal. And it seems like restaurants with this problem are increasingly common too. There are restaurants we’ve gone to and they were so loud, we just never go back, regardless of how good the food is.

I saw that. He was such an icon. RIP

Excellent!

Sweet!

• Suspect will be tried as an adult: Colt Gray, who is being held at the Georgia Department of Juvenile Justice, is slated to remain there while in custody until he turns 17, Glenn Allen, the agency’s spokesperson, told CNN Thursday. Under Georgia law, a juvenile aged 13 to 17 who commits a serious crime is automatically tried as an adult.. https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/07/us/apalachee-school-shooting-georgia-saturday/index.html

It's regularly on the menu at Cafe Notte, a restaurant on Ohio River Blvd. (PA Route 65) in Emsworth, PA outside of Pittsburgh, Their menu describes it as"A Mediterranean sea bass, pan seared and served over creamy Asiago risotto & and broccoli." I agree that it's a very tasty fish. Big Al

On average a person works 40 hours a week, but "round-the-clock in-home care" means 24x7=168 hours a week of dedicated labor, more than 4x of the typical 40-hour work week. IOW, it takes four people's labor to provide for one person's "round-the-clock in-home care." Of course it's expensive! At scale, few societies can ever afford this with human labor. It will be a long while before robots become advanced enough to be competent caregivers. May take longer still to transfer our consciousness into machines so we don't have to age in decrepit biological bodies. Interim solutions are centralization/statistical multiplexing like nursing homes and having most people dying quickly as to not need round-the-clock care for long once they started needing "round-the-clock care. Centralization/statistical multiplexing means giving up "in-home" care. The "die quickly" option also has its shortcomings. From a public policy perspective, support legal euthanasia to make the "die quickly" option more palatable, especially if you want such on option to preserve some dignity.

@Steve-Miller said in Heading home from Pittsburgh: @Mik No, just lunch at the train station. Our guide on the city tour told us that everyone there used to say y’unz but that switched to y’inz some time in the 80’s. I had never heard of y’unz. Or y’inz. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/yall-youuns-yinz-youse-how-regional-dialects-are-fixing-standard-english

Sad news. Big Al

"Putin is a scumbag, but I just happen to agree with him on most points and have happily been his useful idiot for lo these many years ..."

I think the opposition to the merger/takeover (however you might characterize it) is more politics than economics. The global steel industry has been subject of a lot of acquisitions, mergers, and sales. Ultimately, the largest threat to US steelmakers has been China, but the various tariffs on steel imposed by the Bush II, Trump, and Biden administrations have fended that off to a large degree, possibly at the expense of the consumers or the larger US economy. Locally in the Pittsburgh area, opposition does not seem as strong as some reports suggest, particularly among local US steelworkers who have legitimate concerns that the modernization of local US Steel plants could be jeopardized by rejection of Nippon's offer. The US steel industry saw some substantial takeovers by India's Mittal Steel earlier, but those were reversed when Mittal sold those holdings to Cleveland Cliffs, a US-based company. The major Russian steel company, Severstal, had significant US holdings in this century, but those were sold off as well. The world iron and steel trade is a very complicated marketplace, influenced not only by economics, but also politics and concerns of national interests and security. I think the name US Steel plays into reactions to the proposed merger because it sounds like a takeover of an industry, not a single company to people who know relatively little about it. Big Al

I took the "cross-grade" offer and is transitioning to Dorico. Just ran through a few of the demos that shipped with Dorico 5. So far so good. Dorico takes up even more (a lot more) disk space than Finale. If nothing else, at least Dorico is Apple silicon native -- something I suspect MakeMusic/Finale will not be able to do just because it doesn't look like MakeMusic can afford to invest enough to make the transition to Apple silicon. At some point I will also have to try to move some Garritan virtual instrument sounds/libraries that I have paid good money (to MakeMusic) for over to Dorico. MakeMusic says that will work, but we will see.

@Axtremus