10% vs 90% :)

A photo showing raised human hands.

Tima Miroshnichenko/Pexels

Handedness, yours truly is a lefty, 90% of the human race are righties but it seems it's baked in:)

About nine out of every ten humans on Earth are righties. This strange imbalance stretches across cultures, continents, and history itself. No other primate species comes remotely close to showing such a strong population-wide preference. 

Now, a new study from researchers at the University of Oxford suggests the answer may lie in two evolutionary changes that transformed our species more than any others: walking upright and growing unusually large brains. 

The researchers propose a two-stage explanation for human handedness. First came bipedalism. As early human ancestors began walking upright, their hands were freed from locomotion. 

This likely created new evolutionary pressure for specialized hand use during tasks such as carrying objects, manipulating tools, or gesturing. The study found that locomotion strongly influences handedness patterns across primates. 

The second phase came later with brain expansion

Using evolutionary models, the researchers estimated handedness in extinct human relatives. Early hominins such as Ardipithecus and Australopithecus likely had weak right-hand preferences similar to modern apes. 

However, the bias strengthened in species such as Homo erectus and Neanderthals before reaching its modern extreme in Homo sapiens. “It is with the emergence of the genus Homo, and particularly the onset of significant encephalization, that we observe a marked increase in MHI values,” the study authors added.

The significance of these findings

The study suggests human right-handedness may be deeply rooted in the same evolutionary changes that transformed how our ancestors moved and interacted with the world. 

However, some important questions remain unanswered. For instance, scientists still do not know why left-handedness survived throughout human evolution, or how much human culture helped strengthen right-hand dominance over time.

The study is published in the journal PLOS Biology.

But thereare other variables. Chirality and the handedness of the weak nuclear force
as it only works left handed. So does life. 

Two enantiomers of a generic amino acid that is chiral

Scaling it up ...

The Primitive Node ...

The initial stages of human embryonic development (embryogenesis)

How the Node Breaks Symmetry

The connection between the node and "left-handedness" relates to embryonic left-right asymmetry (how our internal organs are arranged) rather than hand preference.

• Nodal Flow: The ventral surface of the node contains hundreds of microscopic, rotating hairs called cilia. These cilia tilt and spin in a specific clockwise rotation, creating a leftward flow of extracellular fluid. This fluid movement pushes signaling molecules to the left side of the embryo.
• Gene Activation: This leftward flow triggers the localized expression of specific genes—most notably the Nodal gene and the Pitx2 transcription factor—strictly on the left side.
• Biological Outcomes: This chain reaction dictates that the heart, liver, and other asymmetrical organs develop in their proper anatomical positions.

In essence ...

Embryonic asymmetry: The left side gets all the best genes

This is why lefties like yours truly are still around. :)

Not so simple ...

Specimen "Sue", Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago (with some bones reconstructed)

T Rex was an 8 ton version of an Ostrich and moved like one. Agile, precise and not lumbering
as seen in movies like Jurassic park. As proof ...

A new study provides new information about Tyrannosaurus rex locomotion and gait. The researchers postulate that T. rex struck the ground with its toes first.  The Everything Dinosaur Evolution Tyrannosaurus rex display base features three-toed theropod prints that have been modelled based on real tyrannosaur tracks.
Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur.

Not only that but Theropods and non-avian dinosaurs communicated like birds because after all,
the environment in which they lived was complex and dangerous to the nth degree and sophisticated communication among species was an absolute requirement in order to survive.

Forget the Roars: This Exceptional Fossil Reveals Dinosaurs
Communicated More Like Birds Than Movie Monsters

Scientists have recently discovered evidence suggesting that some dinosaurs
communicated in the same way as modern birds.

The skull of Pulaosaurus qinglongin left lateral view. Image credit: Hailong Zhang/PeerJ, 2025

Picture a dinosaur opening its mouth. What sound comes out? For decades, film and television answered with a guttural roar, a noise borrowed from lions and scaled up for monsters. A fossil pulled from rust-colored sandstone in northern China tells a quieter story, one written in throat bones smaller than a finger joint.

The animal was no giant. Pulaosaurus qinglong stretched about 72 centimeters from snout to tail, a two-legged herbivore that scurried through Jurassic forests 163 million years ago. But inside its throat sat something paleontologists had seen only once before in a non-avian dinosaur: an ossified larynx, the bony framework of a voice box, preserved clearly enough to reveal how the creature made sound.

Researchers named the species after Qinglong County and after Pulao, a dragon from Chinese mythology known for its thunderous voice. The choice fits with quiet irony. A creature named for deafening sound probably made none. Instead, it called through the forest in frequencies that might have carried between individuals without broadcasting danger to every predator within earshot.

Seems Jurassic Park needs to revisit how T Rex and company communicated without question. :)

Montage of two species within the bird genus Struthio (the ostrich). Featuring from left to right: common ostrich and somali ostrich. These files are already on Commons with their respective licenses. This montage was made for the article Ostrich on Wikipedia. File:Avestruz (Struthio camelus), Tierpark Hellabrunn, Múnich, Alemania, 2012-06-17, DD 02.JPG File:Struthio molybdophanes, male, Samburu National Reserve, Kenya.jpg

Next time, when you think about T Rex, think ostrich. :)

23 years ... & counting :)

 

https://beyondrealtime.blogspot.com/2003/

Hard to believe BRT's been around that long. I thought 2007 was the start date as the blog remained dormant for 4 years before a good friend of mine said, You seem to know a lot. Prove it.
Hopefully I am, 23 years later. :)

Channeling Frank :)

05-15-2026

Seems black hole mergers and violin strings have a lot in common because both produce waves and harmonic overtones, thus proving the Principle of least Action applies. Additionally, scale invariance also applies as it matters not the size of the event in question, it's the process in question and waves are analog. :)

The Wiener process is scale-invariant

Black holes ring like bells - and scientists just mapped the vibrations

After two black holes collide, the resulting object vibrates as it settles down. Those vibrations carry information about nearly everything the new black hole is.

It gets better ...

Catching hidden harmonics

A team at the University of Cambridge has built a tool that draws those quieter notes out cleanly. Richard Dyer, an astronomer at Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, led the work with co-author Dr. Christopher Moore.

The vibrations they wanted to map are called quasinormal modes. Theory holds that each one is set by the black hole’s mass and spin, making those frequencies a fingerprint.

Read more than one mode cleanly, and you can check whether those frequencies relate to each other the way Einstein’s equations actually predict.

Click here for the paper. 

Frank Zappa would agree. :)

I can't do adult ...

Illustrations: Cat Sims

Question, what's the difference between man and boys? Answer, their toys.
With AI, many guys get totally addicted. So far, this rube's still ok. :)

Meet the Sad Wives of AI

Are you married to a man who’s obsessed with AI? I’m so, so sorry.

If i had to listen to another minute of my husband talking about Claude Code, I might have actually died. It was 11 pm in Berkeley, California, where I was home alone with our 10-month-old daughter, and 2 am in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was visiting for his newish job in AI. “JUST LOOK AT THIS!” he shouted. The FaceTime camera zoomed toward a laptop sitting on a hotel bed. “SEE?!”

See what, I thought. I wanted to shower. I still had to take the dog out.

“ARE YOU LOOKING?” he shouted again. I wasn’t. I was looking at our real baby. But that’s the thing. There are two babies in this household now: the small human one and the large language model. Both demand constant attention. Both keep us up at 2 am.

Is this a Sophie’s choice kind of situation? Please. I’d kill the AI baby in an instant.

This also applies to smart phones. :)

49,000 ...

Getty / Futurism

The Water Thief looms but in this case, it's power as data centers need it more then people, right?

The data center scramble feeding off the AI boom is no longer just raising utility prices for nearby civilians — it’s rerouting their utilities entirely.

Bombshell new reporting by Fortune details the plight of residents in Lake Tahoe, on the border of California and Nevada, whose electrical supplier is cutting them off in order to supply more energy to nearby data centers.

According to the magazine, Nevada-based utility company NV Energy gave residents notice that they’ll stop providing power after May of 2027. That leaves California-based energy transmission company Liberty Utilities with a major gap in its supply chain, because NV Energy supplied 75 percent of its total power.

To understand exactly what’s going on, we have to untangle the mess of transmission lines and energy suppliers that makes up the US electrical grid. Taking a look on Open Infrastructure Map, an open source tool for mapping the world’s utility infrastructure, it’s clear NV Energy supplies the bulk of residents on both the California and Nevada side of Lake Tahoe. In all, Fortune reports the decision could leave as many as 49,000 residents in the dark — literally.

“It’s like we don’t exist,” Danielle Hughes, a Lake Tahoe resident and supervisor with the California Energy Commission’s Efficiency Division, told Fortune.

The Water Thief which is about a future in which
"corporations own everything, even the air we breathe".

Sound familiar?

Inbreeding ...

@ Gizmodo

A snarky but good article by Gizmoto points out how Aislop is making man and AI increasingly crazy as hallucinations by AI going up on the web is being used as input to train ever larger systems, a process akin to inbreeding of the royals and we all know how that went with Queen Victoria/hemophilia and Charles II of Spain, an end result of extreme in-breading by the Habsburgs. 

Portrait by Juan Carreño de Miranda, c. 1685

Intramarriage accentuated the so-called "Habsburg jaw", a physical characteristic common in both Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs. One contemporary reported this was so pronounced in Charles that he swallowed his food without thoroughly chewing, leading to frequent stomach problems.

Queen Victoria's descendants with haemophilia and known female carriers

There’s a theory that a rising tide of LLM-generated nonsense will eventually drown both LLMs themselves and the internet as a whole. The idea goes like this: The first generation of LLMs is trained entirely on “real” material: the Gutenberg project, 4chan, that one article from Thought Catalog a decade ago, and everything in between. But as the output of those LLMs spreads across the internet, it also becomes part of the training data of future LLMs—and much of it is bullshit.

As a result, the quality of newer LLMs’ training data is inferior to that of their predecessors—and by extension, so is their output. And as that output accumulates on the internet, it becomes part of future training data, and the cycle continues. With each passing day, the proportion of the internet that’s low-quality LLM-generated bullshit increases, until eventually all that’s left to train LLMs is the gibberish created by their predecessors.

Looms

Stratos ...

Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images

Worse than tulips, totally insane but it's money, right? Silicon no longer works, period. Between the heat issue and the fragility issue, the need to move to photonics is now but according to the "boffins" wanting to build this monster, it doesn't matter. Another question to ask is, for what problem is this project intended to solve and, because tech never sleeps, will the tech be current when this bad boy is turned on? Simply incredible without question.

Dubbed the Stratos Project and backed by the celebrity venture capitalist Kevin O’Leary, the sprawling facility will devour up to nine gigawatts of energy, its developers say, which is more than double the electricity used by the entire state. 

That epic energy bill comes with another cost, albeit the kind that won’t show up on the developers’ books. On top of the nine gigawatts of power, the facility will produce another 7 to 8 gigawatts of energy in the form of waste heat, according to Robert Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University who shared his calculations with The Salt Lake Tribune.

That brings its entire “thermal load” to a jaw-dropping 16 gigawatts

It gets better

Petitioners react as the Box Elder county commission announces approval of a large datacenter
on 4 May 2026 in Tremonton, Utah. Photograph: Natalie Behring/Getty Images

The Stratos artificial intelligence datacenter footprint will cover more than 40,000 acres (62 sq miles) over three sites in Box Elder county in north-western Utah. The facility will require about 9GW of power, which is more than the entire state of Utah currently consumes, and suck up a significant amount of water in an area that has been hit by severe drought in recent years.

Last week, the project was approved by the county’s commissioners, despite thousands of objections lodged by Utah residents. Environmentalists have warned that Stratos could imperil the Great Salt Lake ecosystem, including a critical migratory bird habitat, which is already under severe stress.

The lake is shrinking due to water diverted for agriculture and the impact of the climate crisis, placing inhabitants of the nearby Salt Lake City at possible risk of toxic dust clouds as the lake bed dries up.

Better still ...

Channeling Stratos ...

Exacerbating the issue, the Stratos Project is anticipated to use on-site gas power generators that run round the clock, allowing the facility to operate off the local power grid — a common modus operandi for large scale data centers that need a way to quickly secure huge amounts of electricity. 

The problem, however, is that this concentrates all the waste heat into the same area, when it’s typically dispersed far from the power plant itself at the homes and businesses it sends power to. 

And that area, in the case of the Stratos Project, is the Hansel Valley, which already acts as a bowl for trapping air.

The magnitude of the disruption is difficult to comprehend. In a jaw-dropping illustration, Davies calculated that the project would be the “equivalent of about 23 atom bombs worth of energy dumped into this local environment every single day.”

“What happens if you deposit that much energy continuously into a topography like this?” Davies told The Salt Lake Tribune. “Right at the north end of the Great Salt Lake, a watershed that’s in collapse. A high desert environment? A valley?”

If nuclear bombs are hard to wrap your head around, try Walmart Supercenters. In acreage, the Stratos facility will be equal to about 2,000 of those big box stores — but its energy footprint will be that of 40,000 Walmart supercenters, or 2,000 Walmarts stacked 20 deep, he wrote in a summary of his findings.

WTF applies

BRT wrote about the ticking time bomb regarding the Great Salt Lake. Read it if you dare.

Kissing the ring ...

 

The Godfather 1st poster

Kissing the ring applies as The Donald does what Bibi wants, the end of Iran. Let's think about this. As asked before in BRT, is Iran a threat to us? No. But to Bibi wanting a greater Israel, Iran is indeed a threat but Israel can't do it as Israel is akin to Hopper, the villain in A Bugs Life so Bibi, as Iago, whispers in Trump's ear ... Iran must go. Question, do you think Ike would accept this claptrap or Kennedy? If Trump does the unthinkable, the Levant is gone and the world descends into chaos with the TA declaring a national emergency and eliminating the midterms as violence becomes part of the equation and America must be protected. WTF applies here. 

Hopper

Trump says he’s not thinking about Americans’ finances ‘even a little bit’ in Iran talks

Trump said the “only thing” that matters is Iran “can’t have a nuclear weapon.”

The Levant

As for Greater Israel ...

An approximation of the "Royal Grant" to Abraham consisting of all the land east of the Brook of Egypt and west of the Euphrates, north of Kadesh and south of Hamath, from a 1919 book by Clarence Larkin.

Any questions?

A legend in his own mind ...

Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images

A legend in his own mind ...

To whit

1817 draft of Ozymandias. Bodleian Library, Oxford.

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desart.[d] Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

— Percy Shelley, "Ozymandias", 1819 edition[16]

& this ...

The first page of Shakespeare's Macbeth from the First Folio

Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing.

— William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, Scene V, lines 17–28

The difference is: 

Ozymandias was a king

Macbeth was a king

 Trump is not

To be continued