PicoBlog

Hi, We all have the ability to study the past investments of Warren Buffett. They are somewhere hidden on the internet waiting for curious investor to find them and study them. I did one write-up translation of a Western Insurance, a company Warren Buffet profiled in article “The Security I like best”. Dirtcheapstocks gives us often the great service and re-writes them for us as case studies. All great stuff. Recently I was thinking about something.

For more than a decade there’s been a relentless effort to develop and validate a continuous (or more precisely continual), non-invasive, cuff-less, accurate, blood pressure device—a holy grail in sensor technology. I’ve been testing one by Aktiia this week (my results from yesterday below), which is not yet available in the United States, and have made multiple side-by-side comparisons to an Omron standard cuff and the results have correlated well. I don’t have hypertension and by no means am I ready to say this device is ready for prime time, but it has many useful and distinctive features.

With George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga in theaters, going back to the origins of young Imperator Furiosa—a character played by Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road and as a young adult by Anya Taylor-Joy in the new film—it’s a good opportunity to go all the way back to the very beginning and look at how Miller’s Mad Max movies created and expanded on his singularly freaky, motorized, dystopic future.

This Lent, I’m offering a weekly exploration of the Paul’s letter to the church in Rome. Along the way, I’ll be posting interviews with a variety of New Testament scholars who will help us understand Paul’s major themes and the context of his letter. To get us started, here is a conversation with Beverly Roberts Gaventa, whose book When in Romans: An Invitation to Linger with the Gospel according to Paul is one of my favorite explorations of the letter.

“Abortion care is work,” writes Carmen Winant, “which is to say that it is, and looks, entirely regular.” Currently on display at the Whitney Biennial, and forthcoming as an artist’s book with SPBH/MACK, Winant’s new work The last safe abortion gathers 2,700 photographs from archives held by abortion clinics in the United States, as well as her own original photographs — of the staff, the volunteers, the answering of phones, the office birthday parties, the rallies, the front desks.

Carol Connors is the Forrest Gump of popular music in the second half of the 20th century. If you look close enough at many major events and figures, she is there. Sang on a Billboard Hot 100 number one hit? Check. Collaborated with Phil Spector? Check. Dated Elvis? Check. Co-wrote multiple hit songs, including the theme from Rocky? Check. Paved the way for contemporary female songwriters? Check. I spoke with Ms.

Emmalea Russo — a poet, astrologer and teacher — first caught my attention as a reoccurring guest on Barrett Avner’s freeform conversational podcast CONTAIN, which I listened to a lot during the summer of 2022 while I was packing to move. She and Avner discussed Simone Weil and Byung-Chul Han and modernity and mysticism. I recall being, for whatever reason, especially struck by Russo’s fixation on light, particularly cinematic light, even more specifically the use of light in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (one of my faves), which she deals with in her 2022 poetry collection Confetti.

A Conversation With returns with an in-depth, wide-ranging sit-down with UFC interpreter and black-shirted man of mystery, Fabiano Buskei. From his initial introduction to MMA and dialects to those viral moments that have elevated his profile, Fabiano and ESK cover a great deal of ground in this extended conversation between two people fascinated by words, conveying the emotions of others, and diving into their passions. Be sure to sign up for the Keyboard Kimura Substack in order to get all the content produced by this channel directly in your inbox as soon as it drops:

Thanks to Dr. Cecily Zander for taking the time to talk with me about her wonderful new book, The Army Under Fire: The Politics of Antimilitarism in the Civil War Era. Cecily teaches history at Texas Woman’s University. As I mentioned at the top of this interview, after spending years reading about the Civil War, it can often feel like new books are just filling in minor details, but once in a while a book comes along that fundamentally shifts how you think about a certain aspect of this history.