Ummagumma

  This commercial tree crew was exactly what we needed.  The guy is sawing limbs that use to be completely upright before the large branch broke loose. The second half of May and into the first few days of June were a time in my life that I would much rather forget.  It was one seemingly unceasing disaster (of varying degrees) after another.  Thank goodness life isn't this way all the time, though I'm sure for some people it is.  I'm sorry if that's the case. It started at my mom's house.  The electricity went wonky.  Out of nowhere, there was too much power in some rooms, not enough in others.  Light bulbs burst in one part of the house and would not come on at all in another. Freaky stuff.  And a potential hazard for an electrical fire in the house.   The cable modem was fried and had to be replaced.  But that would be later, this all happened on a Sunday.   Miraculously, I was able to get an electrician out there....

The cover of my kindle edition. Note:  This is the second installment of my review of great 21st century literature.  Read my review of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize winning Gilead here . There's ash everywhere. No electricity. No automobiles. Nothing works. No animals or insects. The trees are dying and falling. There are earthquakes. The sky is always overcast, the air unfit to breath. But the buildings are all standing, unless one of the scattered fires has burned them down. What food there is left to eat is in cans or jars. Isolated people seem to be aimlessly roaming around. They wear face masks, if they can find any. No real groups or bands. Except for the scavengers and cannibals. Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a bleak post-apocalyptic tale of America that refuses to explain itself. Our protagonists, a father and his son, remain nameless. “The man” (also called “Papa” by his son) and “the boy” trudge through a world rendered in shades of gray where the sun neve...

[ Read Part One ] [ Read Part Two ] [ Read Part Three ] Am I too optimistic? Despite remarkable technological advancements and an explosion of neuroscientific data, we remain profoundly distant from truly understanding how brains function. In October 2023, neuroscientist Per E. Roland of the University of Copenhagen published an article in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience that presents a sobering assessment of the current state of neuroscience, arguing that the primary obstacles to progress are not primarily technical but conceptual in nature. As Roland directly states: "The reason why neuroscientists do not understand how brains and central nervous systems work is that there is no theory of brains and central nervous systems." According to Roland, the fundamental issue is that neuroscience lacks a comprehensive theory of the brain. While we have made significant progress in understanding cellular biology and molecular mechanisms, we still cannot explain how neurons ...