Saturday July 11, 2026     7:00 PM ET



JULY 2026
July 14 - New Moon 21° Cancer
July 14 - Bastille Day
July 22 - Sun in Leo
July 22-26 - Comic Con San Diego
July 29 - Full Buck Moon 6° Aquarius





New & Updated Files
The simulation has created new species (insert) of giant dinosaurs
Neanderthals and Humans - 3 New Articles
Bird Evolution

Understanding Alzheimers in a new way
Psychology - 2 New Articles
A Sound Moving Toward You Can Literally Warp Your Sense of Time
Brain circuit that explains why deep sleep is essential for ...
Chemo-Free Technique Destroys 99% of Cancer Cells in The Lab
$10 Spectrometer Could Turn Wearables Into Personal Health Labs

Dark Matter Plays by its own Rules
Quantum mechanics is changing the world
Chemistry - 3 New Articles

73 Volcanic Calderas Discovered Hidden Across Ocean Floor
Oceanography - 5 New Articles




Today's Birthday

Justin Chambers - July 11, 1970 - Videos - Filmography

Life is sometimes a mysterious adventure: in space, on land, and at sea.




Ellie's World Today
World Cup Quarterfinals
Manhattanhenge
The Brain as a Computer Explains a Lot
Super El Nino 2026
Earth's Black Box


Reading with Ellie




Ellie's Archives

Crystalinks Turns 30




Ellie's Verrazano Bridge Sunset Pics




Thursday - France Defeated Morocco

Friday - Spain defected Belgium

Saturday - England defeated Norway




July 11, 2026 - 8:21 pm (full sun)



July 12, 2026 - 8:22 pm (half sun)



Manhattanhenge - sometimes referred to as the Manhattan Solstice - is an event during which the setting sun is aligned with the east-west streets of the main street grid of Manhattan in New York City. This occurs twice a year, on dates evenly spaced around the summer solstice. The first Manhattanhenge occurs at the end of May and the second mid-July.




The Brain as a Computer Explains a Lot

You process reality through your emotions. If you feel ... it is real. But there's more...

The human brain is often referred to as the most sophisticated computer in existence, processing millions of data points every second through an intricate web of neural circuitry. But just like any operating system, even the most powerful human hardware is prone to sudden, terrifying system crashes.

When a computer fails, we see spinning wheels, frozen applications, or completely corrupted data sectors. When the human brain encounters a critical error, it manifests as profound highly visible cognitive interruptions - system "glitches" that remind us just how fragile our organic processors truly are.

If we view the mind through this computational lens, the aging brain is essentially an operating system running on legacy hardware. As the machine clocks more decades of continuous uptime, it undergoes unavoidable structural and mechanical wear. In the tech world, older computers face physical degradation - capacitors leak, processors overheat, and data cables fray.

In the biological world, a normal aging brain experiences a natural loss in overall brain volume, a shrinking of the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, and a thinning of the protective myelin insulation surrounding its neural wires. An aging brain remains highly capable, often boasting a vastly larger cumulative database of knowledge and vocabulary than a younger system.

However, accessing those files takes longer. When an older adult struggles to recall a specific name or experiences a "tip-of-the-tongue" moment, it isn't necessarily because the data was deleted. Rather, the system is experiencing latency. The physical neural pathways - the motherboard traces - have deteriorated over time, forcing the brain to search through fragmented sectors to retrieve the file.

As the brain's processing units naturally shrink, its temporary working memory (RAM) capacity diminishes. This mechanical shift explains why multitasking becomes increasingly difficult as we age. If too many background applications are running at once - such as managing physical balance, processing environmental noise, and holding a complex conversation - the central processing unit can easily become overloaded, resulting in a temporary system freeze.

Conditions like Alzheimer's or vascular dementia act like progressive hardware failure, where bad sectors slowly spread across the hard drive, permanently corrupting core system files and wiping user memories over time.

The "Power Surge" (Acute Traumatic Events) is what we observe with a stroke or a sudden Transient Global Amnesia (TGA) event. A sudden blockage or a severe local blood-flow drop acts like a massive electrical short-circuit. It instantly halts functions mid-execution, sometimes requiring an immediate medical "hard reboot" to prevent total system failure.

Katie Couric

We recently witnessed a startling example of a sudden data wipe with veteran journalist Katie Couric, 69, who was in the news yesterday sharing her experience. While attending a panel in Colorado in June, Couric experienced an episode where several hours of her day were completely erased from her internal hard drive.

When questioned at the hospital, her operating system reverted to outdated backups: she believed the year was 2024 and that Joe Biden was still president. Doctors diagnosed her with Transient Global Amnesia (TGA), a temporary dysfunction often linked to the hippocampus. In computer terms, it was a localized RAM failure. Her brain could access old, deeply written files, but it temporarily lost the ability to write new data to the disk. Fortunately, like a rebooted server, her system restored itself within hours, though a permanent "black hole" remains in her memory log.

This is what happened to Katie. The physical architecture of her brain was undamaged - an MRI ruled out a stroke. Instead, a temporary interruption in blood flow or a microscopic spasm caused a transient software error. The machine just needed a hard reset.


Senator Mitch McConnell

Perhaps the most haunting visual anchor of a neurological system crash belongs to Senator Mitch McConnell, 84. In 2023 when standing before a bank of microphones, the world watched in real-time as McConnell's entire physical and cognitive apparatus locked up. He froze mid-sentence, staring blankly into space - a human incarnation of the "Blue Screen of Death". His cognitive processing completely halted while his external casing (body) remained upright.

While Capitol doctors initially cleared him after those 2023 public freezes, the underlying hardware vulnerabilities persisted. Following a series of physical falls, McConnell was hospitalized on June 14, 2026, following a severe medical emergency at his Washington, D.C. home where he was found unresponsive at his home. It was a stark reminder that when the physical infrastructure of a machine degrades, total system failure is often not far behind.

Not much has been said about McConnell's condition as Republicans want to hold onto a seat in the Senate. Personally, I believe he had a stroke and should retire.


Simulation Theory

Ultimately, comparing our minds to computers isn't a convenient metaphor - it's a sobering look at our own biological vulnerability. Long before modern computer scientists proposed simulation theory, the world's oldest cultures were already warning us that the physical world we touch and see is just a shadow of a much deeper underlying "code".

Indigenous peoples referred to it as a dream or illusion - references still used today. They never expected the physical world to last forever. They viewed it as a temporary training ground or a grand theater loop.

Since we live in a world of technology today, and we have AI to guide us, the best way to look at reality is as a virtual simulation in which we are experiencing for emotional value.

We go through our daily lives relying on billions of microscopic electrical impulses to dictate who we are, what we remember, and how we move. But whether it is a harmless temporary glitch in the software or a catastrophic failure of the underlying hardware, we are all just one system error away from freezing in time.

If the brain is a computer, then Simulation Theory is not just a sci-fi fantasy - it becomes a mathematical certainty that allows us to more efficiently understand why events in our reality are happening today.

Assuming I am correct that the simulation of our reality is coming to a close - that would explain the breakdown of the systems in what we call everyday life. Examples would be Trump being reelected, questioning religious systems, accelerating climate change, compromised social behavior, questioning everything, and in general life not making sense.

If we observe our universe as a massive virtual program, global events parallel a simulation that is running out of memory or heading toward a forced shutdown. This is turn parallels the human journey in linear time.

When a system is about to shut down, its code begins to fray, causing widespread chaos and malfunctions across the entire network. Hopefully as we get close to the end - concepts about why things are happening as they do - will be viewed by you through the lens of consciousness technology.




Super El Nino 2026


The El Nino weather pattern picked up strength over the past month and is highly likely to "rank among the largest" ever recorded when it peaks between October and December.

The strengthening El Nino is generating powerful, high-altitude wind shear across the Atlantic Ocean. This wind shear effectively rips developing tropical storms apart. Because of this, hurricane forecasters have significantly downgraded their expectations, predicting well below-average tropical activity for the remainder of the Atlantic hurricane season.

Severe dry spells and diminished monsoons are projected to hit India, northern Africa, Australia, and parts of South America.

Extreme downpours and flash flood risks are expected to escalate across China, the eastern Pacific, and the southern tier of the United States.

Fueled by the massive release of equatorial ocean heat combined with long-term climate change trends, meteorologists warn that the latter half of the year will see intense, compounding heatwaves. This event makes it a near "slam dunk" that global temperature records will be shattered.

Looking ahead to the end of the year, El Nino will drastically alter the winter jet stream. This typically forces freezing Arctic air to stay farther north, bringing a milder winter to the Northern U.S. and Canada.

Conversely, the Southern U.S. is facing a much stormier winter with highly elevated risks of heavy rain, snow, and coastal high-tide flooding.

A Super El Nino is coming: 5 hard-won lessons the world can learn from Africa

This year's El Nino likely to become record-breaker: Top expert

Western Europe records its hottest June as heat waves surge

The El Nino weather pattern picked up strength over the past month and is highly likely to "rank among the largest" ever recorded when it peaks between October and December




Earth's Black Box

A disused airport on Tasmania 's rugged West Coast will soon be home to an angular steel structure with a haunting purpose: to record every step humanity takes toward catastrophe   CNN - July 9, 2026
The striking monolith, known as "Earth's Black Box,' will be perched on the granite landscape of western Tasmania - an island about 150 miles off the Australian mainland - and will be up and running by the end of the year, if all goes to plan. The box will record hundreds of climate data points and pieces of contextual information. In the immediate future, the box will be talking to the world, communicating current data sets and findings. People will be able to view the data online and visitors to the site will be able to connect to the box via their cellphones. But long-term, the idea is to create a record for future civilizations if climate change wipes out humanity. It will provide an unbiased account of the events that lead to the demise of the planet, according to the project's website.





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