I arose from my bed at 2:00 p.m. having decided to take half day off. I know that in the Natural World, wounded animals and those who need to take time to recover from something, exhaustion for example, retreat away from the herd and stay there until they are better. In other words, the intelligence of the body knows what is required for homeostasis so we have to give it the opportunity, in other words the time, to correct itself.

Many problems with my computer, though not all, are solved by rebooting. In other words turning off and turning on again. Nerds will know that there are two types of reboot. The first one is a cold reboot in which the power to the system is physically turned off and then back on again. The second version is a warm reboot in which the system restarts while still powered up.

This does give me an idea about rebooting when I myself get stuck on a particular matter or in a state of mind. Someone said, if you don’t know what to do next, take a walk in nature. This could be seen as a warm reboot. The mind cannot easily over problem when it is continually thinking about it and as I tell my clients, sometimes the best approach is to forget all about it and do something else completely, preferably something that requires a different set of skills.

The brain, if it could speak, would say ‘ oh thank goodness the pressure is off, now I can get on with what I do best which is making connections between topics that apparently do not have connections’. We can draw the principles associated with one set of actions and apply them to another.

I had a dream this morning about the Venus Fly Trap and its cousin the Trumpet Pitcher. Yes, there are such things as carnivorous plants.

The Trumpet Pitcher exudes a very tempting sweet smell. Insects in the vicinity are attracted and peer over the top of the fly trap  to see where more of this lovely substance resides. They then tumble over the edge onto a greasy surface where there is no escape and then they full into the acid juices at the bottom of the plant and are duly digested.

The Venus Fly Trap is very much like a mouse trap. The action of a fly landing on the upper surface triggers the spines to lock together in a fraction of a second and the fly is drawn in two the plant to be digested

Human beings have learned this behavior.

Something is attractive to the senses, but only in the short term. People fall for it, only to realize the implications of far more serious and convoluted and they then realize and are in serious trouble. A very simple example is signing a contract without reading the small print. Another example is getting evolved with someone without wanting to look at their background because you have become  intoxicated by the odor of that particular person.

Another is buying a property unseen because you like the picture on the Internet and you hope that the details will ‘look after themselves’. Buyer Beware is probably one of the most boring bits of advice but we ignore it at our peril.
As we say ‘The Devil lies in the detail’.

Red Alert: Tap-To-Pay Terminals Can Reach Into Your Wallet Or Purse And Charge You For Things You Haven’t Even Purchased

I am fortunate that many people send me useful articles and links to support the various websites that I populate. This one popped up a couple of hours ago and prompted me to do something practical. It’s about credit card fraud which is running in the United States at 34 billion dollars in 2022 and in this country, the United Kingdom, 727 million pounds.

You can read the article in full if you wish but basically, the regulations and restrictions on the radius that a machine can pick up card details there is beyond the claimed three to four inches. On the principle that you can hear a whisper when no one else is saying anything it may be that the detecting machine has a bigger range if there is no one else with a credit card around. It is a good read and made me do something straight away which was rummage in my filing cabinet for this RFID protector.

I only have three credit cards so I’ve decided to leave one of them behind since I do not use it and put the other two in the pictured item. I know it’s a nuisance having to fiddle and take it out but I’d rather do that than find someone as taken funds without my being aware of it. The ones to watch out for are the tapin TapOut ones on buses. I do not believe that the manufacturers have any bad intention, it may be that there is no such thing as the perfect setting. I’m just passing this on as a tip.

You can get cheap and cheerful cards from Amazon or Ebay by typing in ‘RFID’. Here is a link (one of many). They are about £4.

Finally a well meaning but completely inaccurate article about carbon dioxide. They state ‘The world biggest direct air capture plant opened this month in Iceland’ Its an old article, September 24, 2021. It sounds good but doe not make the ‘problem’ any better.

Trees put back Oxygen. This machine sucks out the CO2 and does not replace it.  Also we read that it will pump about 4,000 tons of captures CO2 underground per year.   Excuse me that’s rather a lot of gas. How much energy is consumed in building these vast underground receptacles?

A friend of mine did this calculation: That represents 0.1% of the man made CO2/year which about 0.0001% of total CO2 in the atmosphere which, in turn, is 0.042% of the total atmosphere. What an achievement!!