Ron P. Schwery

@RonPSchwery

Wilmington, NC

Joined November 2011

209 Following

79 Followers

830 Posts

RonPSchwery retweeted

Sama Hoole

@SamaHoole

about 2 months ago

Iceland has a breed of sheep that nobody breeds for meat, because for a thousand years it has been bred for one quality only. Judgement. They are called forystufe. Leader sheep. Taller, longer in the leg, narrower through the body, oddly marked, and always at the front, with their heads up while the rest of the flock has its head down. When they move, the flock moves. Nobody votes. A proven leader sold for two or three times the price of a good sheep. Bloodlines became famous. When a great one died, the farm kept the head. And the claim attached to them sounds like folklore until you read the records. They know the weather is coming, sometimes a full day out. If the leader will not leave the barn on a morning that looks perfectly fine, you do not move the flock. Farmers arranged their winters around the opinion of a sheep, and wrote it down as fact. Autumn round-up, 1884. A large flock is being driven across the interior when a blizzard comes down on open sand and rock. Every landmark goes. You cannot pitch a tent on that ground and turning back is worse than going on. At the front is a ram called Surtur, from Svinavatn, already known as a superior leader. The fjallkongur, the man running the round-up, makes a decision. He hands the whole thing to the sheep and tells his men to stay together. A third of the way across, Surtur stops, turns, and walks back down through the flock to find the men. His face is packed solid with ice and he cannot see. They clear it. He returns to the front and walks back into the weather. He comes back for the same service several more times that night. Nobody has to fetch him. Then he stops and will not move at all. The men feel about and find grass under their boots, which tells them they are off the desert and nothing else whatsoever. At dawn the storm eases and they work out where they are. They are standing on the exact spot the round-up stops every year after crossing the sands. Surtur had halted there since he was a lamb. Afterwards the fjallkongur told his owner that without the ram, men would have died out there as well as sheep. There are fewer than 1,500 leader sheep left, all of them descended from one district in the north east. Iceland recognised them as a breed of their own in 2017. There is a small museum out there, run by a local teacher, with the heads of the great ones on the wall and a coffee blend named after the animals. The saying on the wall is that if you wear clothes made from their wool, you will always find your way home. Genetic work has since confirmed they really are distinct from every other Icelandic sheep. The folklore was right. Folklore usually is, out where the weather kills people. No laboratory. No pedigree software. No genome. Just farmer after farmer, century after century, watching which animal was at the front when the light went, and breeding from that one. A thousand years of selecting a sheep for its judgement, and at the end of it they built it a museum. And here we are, in the country that calls them stupid.

SamaHoole's tweet photo. Iceland has a breed of sheep that nobody breeds for meat, because for a thousand years it has been bred for one quality only. Judgement.

They are called forystufe. Leader sheep. Taller, longer in the leg, narrower through the body, oddly marked, and always at the front, with their heads up while the rest of the flock has its head down. When they move, the flock moves. Nobody votes.

A proven leader sold for two or three times the price of a good sheep. Bloodlines became famous. When a great one died, the farm kept the head.

And the claim attached to them sounds like folklore until you read the records. They know the weather is coming, sometimes a full day out. If the leader will not leave the barn on a morning that looks perfectly fine, you do not move the flock. Farmers arranged their winters around the opinion of a sheep, and wrote it down as fact.

Autumn round-up, 1884. A large flock is being driven across the interior when a blizzard comes down on open sand and rock. Every landmark goes. You cannot pitch a tent on that ground and turning back is worse than going on.

At the front is a ram called Surtur, from Svinavatn, already known as a superior leader. The fjallkongur, the man running the round-up, makes a decision. He hands the whole thing to the sheep and tells his men to stay together.

A third of the way across, Surtur stops, turns, and walks back down through the flock to find the men. His face is packed solid with ice and he cannot see. They clear it. He returns to the front and walks back into the weather.

He comes back for the same service several more times that night. Nobody has to fetch him.

Then he stops and will not move at all. The men feel about and find grass under their boots, which tells them they are off the desert and nothing else whatsoever.

At dawn the storm eases and they work out where they are.

They are standing on the exact spot the round-up stops every year after crossing the sands. Surtur had halted there since he was a lamb. Afterwards the fjallkongur told his owner that without the ram, men would have died out there as well as sheep.

There are fewer than 1,500 leader sheep left, all of them descended from one district in the north east. Iceland recognised them as a breed of their own in 2017. There is a small museum out there, run by a local teacher, with the heads of the great ones on the wall and a coffee blend named after the animals. The saying on the wall is that if you wear clothes made from their wool, you will always find your way home.

Genetic work has since confirmed they really are distinct from every other Icelandic sheep. The folklore was right. Folklore usually is, out where the weather kills people.

No laboratory. No pedigree software. No genome. Just farmer after farmer, century after century, watching which animal was at the front when the light went, and breeding from that one.

A thousand years of selecting a sheep for its judgement, and at the end of it they built it a museum.

And here we are, in the country that calls them stupid.

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RonPSchwery retweeted

Sama Hoole

@SamaHoole

about 2 months ago

Nobody in America got sicker on the morning of 4 June 1998. Twenty-nine million of them went to bed a healthy weight and woke up overweight, because the NIH had moved the BMI line from 27.8 to 25 overnight. That is the whole business model. Here is the headcount. 1994: a WHO panel invents osteopenia. Bone thinner than a young woman's, nowhere near thin enough to break. Half of all postmenopausal women qualify on the spot. 1998: the overweight threshold drops to 25. Twenty-nine million new patients. Not one of them gained a pound. 2001: the cholesterol panel publishes ATP III. Americans recommended a statin go from 13 million to 36 million. Twenty-three million new customers in one afternoon. 2003: the blood pressure committee invents prehypertension. A diagnosis for people whose blood pressure is normal. Forty-five million qualify on day one. 2013: the statin guideline is rewritten. Another 12.8 million eligible, almost all over sixty, none with heart disease. Eight of the nine men who wrote it were on the payroll of statin manufacturers, disclosed only when they were forced to. 2017: hypertension moves from 140 over 90 to 130 over 80. The share of American adults labelled hypertensive jumps from 32 per cent to 46. Thirty-one million people, before lunch. 2026: the new cholesterol guideline lands in March. Another 21.5 million eligible, total now 87.5 million. The people it just added carry an average ten-year risk of 3.1 per cent. Which is to say, almost none. Not one of those was a discovery about the human body. Every one was a decision about where to draw a line on a chart, taken in a room, by a show of hands. And note the direction. Thirty years, four organ systems, and the line has never once moved back. No panel has ever sat down, reviewed the last panel's work, and handed several million people their health back. Over 140 million reclassifications in a single country. A woman of sixty-eight can sit on four of those lines at once and be four kinds of ill without a single symptom, on five tablets, for a body that is doing exactly what a sixty-eight-year-old body does. A cure is capped by the number of people who have the disease. A threshold is capped by the population.

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RonPSchwery retweeted

Peter Forister 🍁🍂🍁

@forecaster25

about 2 months ago

Had the absolute privilege of visiting the *only* living stand of mature, viable, and healthy American Chestnuts yesterday. Part of a breeding program - these trees are signs of hope in the battle against the Blight which devastated our forests. 📌 Virginia

forecaster25's tweet photo. Had the absolute privilege of visiting the *only* living stand of mature, viable, and healthy American Chestnuts yesterday.

Part of a breeding program - these trees are signs of hope in the battle against the Blight which devastated our forests.

📌 Virginia https://t.co/wDZMhw5BEV

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Ron P. Schwery @RonPSchwery

about 2 months ago

@CognitiveWarri2 ‘Asymmetry through innovation…’ This is a great story!!

The Real Mike Rowe

@mikeroweworks

about 2 months ago

Most nineteen-year-olds who drop out of college do so because they can't hack the coursework, or afford the tuition, or just prefer to play video games in their parents' basement. @ethanrthornton dropped out for a slightly different reason: he wanted to build a better missile, and MIT was slowing him down. So, Ethan left the Ivy League, took a hundred-grand from Peter Thiel, and set out to disrupt the entire military-industrial complex before he was old enough to legally buy a beer. And I think he’s on the verge of doing that very thing. Ethan grew up on a farm in Texas, working as an auto mechanic and hammering out custom kitchen knives to pay for his early engineering experiments. When he looked at the state of American manufacturing, he didn't see a lack of apps or software; he saw a nation that had forgotten how to bend metal, spark welds, and build heavy things at scale. Today, Ethan is 22, and his company, Mach Industries, is valued at nearly two billion dollars. They’re building the next generation of autonomous defense hardware, and a lot of people are paying very close attention, including those in the Pentagon. Mach’s weapons are inexpensive, (relatively) easy to mass-produce, and most of all, lethal. I heard him speak last year at an energy conference and immediately invited him on the podcast. This was the first blank square on his calendar, and I was honored that he spent a few hours chatting with me. Pay attention. This kid is going places. Our whole conversation is here. https://t.co/lI0dq5kDBI