Alexa vs Alexa

[yogi]

It makes sense that food stores cater to the ethnicity of the population. That's how I know there is no specific ethnic group in O'Fallon. Although, with the name that it has, I truly was expecting more Irish than actually occurs in this city. We did have an Irish Pub that closed down during the pandemic. They never reopened and are selling the building now because they have a second Pub in St Charles which is much more profitable. St Charles also has an English Pub which is distinctly different than the Irish one that closed. I've always heard people talk about pubs but never actually been to one until I moved down here. They are not taverns nor restaurants per se. They are kind of a mixture of both. It would be akin to a sports bar back up north without the emphasis on sports. LOL

Sometimes I surprise myself when it comes to eating food. As a kid I didn't like most of the things that were "good" for me per my mother's admonitions. To say the least I was a very fussy eater. That all changed when I became the head chef of our household. I was anxious to find recipes that were simple and easy to prepare given that I was just learning how to do the cooking. The Internet was helpful but I also subscribed to Bon Appétit magazine because they not only had some fancy looking food but also articles about technique. A lot of that fancy food was not difficult to prepare, nor were the ingredients rare. For example they had a watermelon and tomato salad with a balsamic vinegar dressing. Who would have thought to combine those things? It looked interesting and was in fact delicious. So that is how I learned to sample things I've never eaten before. I now have a long list of standard meals that I prepare in rotation and rarely depart from the matrix. That really comes in handy at times like this when I'm recovering from surgery and don't care to cook anything complicated.

Fried green tomatoes are acceptable and okra is marginal. Put a little catsup on them and they go down well.

I am sorry to read about the passing of Boon. We brought our old pup down to O'Fallon and she didn't live but a few months to enjoy her new home. She was old and not all that healthy to begin with, but she picked up some horrible kennel cough at one of the groomers and I believe that is what did her in. It is always a sad time when a pet leaves us, and I understand what you might be feeling at the moment. Just know it will have a better life across that Rainbow Bridge.

[Kellemora]

I've been in a couple of French Pubs which were interesting. Can't really describe them in words though.

As my late wife turned ill, I became the chief cook, bottle washer, laundromat, and cleaning service for our household, hi hi.
I came up with a lot of interesting dishes, but they were only made from things I knew I already liked. But I made many modifications over the years so the same meals turned out a bit differently each time.

Amen on the loss of our pets. At our ages, we've seen way to many cross the Rainbow Bridge.
Although I buried the first four in the family pet cemetery.
Since my heart attacks, we have them cremated. So we have three ornate wooden boxes on the mantle with a picture of each above them. Adding the fourth when we pick-up Boon in his ornate box.

I hear stories from Debi's family, of an older great-uncle, who had his ashes divided into three urns, to be placed in three separate mausoleums he bought over the years, so he would be with each wife he outlived.
I actually thought of that myself, but decided it wasn't worth the expense, even though I own to niches, one here and one in Missouri.

[yogi]

Food and recipe modification is what cooking is all about. As far as I'm concerned it's one big chemistry lab experiment that goes on forever. LOL Having said that, trying new foods is a lot more adventurous. I knew a Mexican lady who made some fantastic tamales in both red and green sauce. Nothing I could buy in the stores compared to them, not even what I found in the Mexican groceries. She gave me a recipe for cactus one day and encouraged me to try it. She also went into a lot of detail on how to prepare it properly. It's quite a process to be honest and at one point it all can become a slimy mess if you don't do it right. Well, I don't do slime. Thus I never tried to cook cactus. However, it is apparently a popular item. I've seen it often up north in the stores and have even seen it down here in Missouri.

All the pets we did not bury personally got cremated by the vet. It was not an easy departure for any of them, but we never took back the ashes of any of our dogs. It seems kind of morbid to be honest. Then again, my wife wants to be cremated and I will certainly honor her wishes should she predecease me. I'm fairly certain that I can't refuse the inevitable urn with her ashes in it. I'll take it graciously but have no idea at this point in time what I will do with it. To me death is the end point. She won't be here nor do I believe she will have any way to sense what is going on at this level of existence. I don't think I want to be reminded of her departure each time I view the urn somewhere on display. A photograph would be appropriate enough for me in that it represents what she was more truly. Now, if she were a genie and came to me from inside said urn, I might think differently after her passing.

[Kellemora]

I used to have a whole shelf full of cook books. Some of them were collectors items so I sold them for good money too.
There is one I wish I wouldn't have sold, because about two years after the fact, that edition was fetching four times the money.
I prefer most of my foods to be neutral, not mishegaused up with other things with it, except roasts and the like. Never was big on casseroles either. Keep it plain and simple and I'm happy, hi hi.

We didn't start having them cremated until after my heart attacks and could not dig the graves anymore. I had planned on using a post hole digger to make the graves of those we had cremated, but Debi wanted to keep them on her remembrance shelves. Those shelves are starting to fill up now too, hi hi.

I bought two Niches in St. Louis for our cremated remains. Ruth is in one, the other is empty.
I bought two Niches here in Knoxville for our cremated remains. Both are currently empty.
But I have paid for the opening and closing on each one down here, something we couldn't do in St. Louis until after the fact.
This means nobody will have to pay one red cent to see us get buried when the time comes. It's all paid for, everything!

My mom kept my sisters ashes, and finally placed her container in the ground next to her and dads tombstone.
It didn't cost her anything to do that, because she did it under the cover of darkness so to speak.
She bought four pot mum's to plant around dad's headstone, and a bush to plant between the two headstones.
Naturally, a bush needs a much bigger hole, so she used a deep shooter and dug down about twice as far as she needed to for the bush. She had my sister in a small box that she wrapped in one plastic bag after another, and then wrapped that in burlap so it looked like bush she was planting. She put it down in the hole with dirt over it, and then set the bush in place.
After mom passed away, my brother would stop by the cemetery and trim the bush and plant more pot mum's around mom's side. Dad was buried in a full size coffin, but mom chose to be cremated, so the cemetery used a post hole digger to place her in the spot for her coffin. But close to the headstone, as the other half of her plot has been designated for my brother.

[yogi]

Sometime after age 65 I started to get junk snail mail in regard to planning my fortune after my body has expired. Most of it had to do with cremation, or at least that is what appeared in the name of the company sending the mail. I never read the contents to see what was being offered. I don't like the thought of not existing any more and like even less planning for my exit. You could say that is a bit selfish in that whoever survives me will be burdened with all the planning. That might be true, but the resources to do so are in place in the form of several insurance policies for just such an occasion. The beneficiaries are clearly stated therein so that there should be no problem transferring the funds to the appropriate people.

Life is sacred. A corpse, however, is just so much fertilizer in my view. It is possible, and even likely, that my survivors would not think as I do. They might want to go through the ritual of preserving my remains and perhaps keeping them on their mantel above the fireplace (which would an appropriate symbol of where I'm likely to be going - if I go anywhere at all - after I meet my maker). At this point in time I don't see the point of the entire burial ritual. I think I was hardened a little when mom passed away. She and dad, and his dad, are buried in a cemetery just a mile or two outside the Chicago city limits. The grounds are under what they call perpetual care, meaning that nothing can be placed on the grave sites so that they can come by with a mower and keep the weeds down ... forever. If I ever had thoughts of enshrining the memories of my family, the lovely rules of the Catholic cemetery prohibit it. Then, too, due to circumstance mostly beyond my control the grave sites could not be visited very often. They simply were too far from where I was living. Mom would probably swat me on the side of my head for not coming to visit, but there is no point. It won't make me feel any better about her departure nor will it benefit her in any way.

My views could be considered harsh, or realistic. Maybe I just don't like to think about dying. Period. Whatever the reasons I've not done a lot of planning for the end game. After nearly three years of caring for mom as best as I knew how, I was there to see her take her final breath. It was quite the epiphany regarding the meaning of life.

[Kellemora]

I have some insurance that gets passed on when I die, but not a whole lot to speak of.
But all of my funeral expenses are covered, even the things not normally covered.

I agree, our carcass is like a no deposit no return empty bottle.
And even though our family made their living from funeral flowers, I never much saw the point of being buried in a box inside a vault. Seems like a big waste to me.
I never went to visit after someone was gone, they aren't there, only a plot of land or a niche in the wall with ashes.

I hear ya, I'm twice a widower, and seeing them suffer at the end so much, is something I don't look forward to and I hope I die in my sleep. Not screaming like the other passengers in the car when I fell asleep at the wheel, hi hi.

There have been a million different religions and gods over the lifespan of planet earth. Even so, I still have to cling to the fact that there is something else after we move from this dimension. If not, then why life to start with?

[yogi]

It's naive to think we are at the top level of all dimensions in the universe. That would be the throne on which the supposed God sits, and I'll be honest here. I am not God. I'm not sure how much we do not know about the space we live in. We could be at the very bottom of the scale or damned near the top. I do recognize there are tiers of dimensional space all the way from subatomic particles to the edges of the visible universe. I also recognize that there likely is more than a dimensional universe out there.

You are asking the wrong question if you want an answer to what is the meaning and/or purpose of life. There is none. For those of us who are not satisfied with my short answer then I will elaborate and say our meaning and purpose is simply to exist. I read a trivial but interesting comment on Twitter one day which went a long way to explain the afterlife to me. The comment was something to the effect that a robot is a body without a spirit. A ghost is a spirit without a body. That tells me if such things a spirits exist they do not have a means to sense their environment in the same fashion as us animated humans do. In fact I'd go one step further and speculate that spirits have no sense of being at all. When your body shuts down that is the end of the road for the body. The spirit, if any, reverts back to being the universe from whence it came. That is, the entire universe, not just a portion designated by an individual identity.

Sorry, I can't help being metaphysical at my age.

[Kellemora]

That's OK. I have many takes on things, and some are considered crazy, which you already know, hi hi.

I believe there are many dimensions. I'm pretty sure we know about 5 or 7 of them from scientists.

With the new telescopes out there in space, it is amazing the new things they are discovering.
Some are even putting our knowledge of physics into question, hi hi.

[yogi]

There are absolute limits to what is possible for us to know about the universe. The most obvious limit is the speed of light. The most distant light our sophisticated telescopes can detect is 45 billion, yes BILLION, light years distant from us. That distance is incomprehensible, but we can detect it. The point I am making is that we can never know what, if anything, is beyond that 45 billion light year limit. The light of it all simply cannot reach us. The universe by definition is infinite which leaves a lot of dimensional space beyond our grasp.

Apparently the popular thinking among scientist is that there are possibly 11 dimensions in a Euclidean universe. Euclid figured it all out in mathematics, but we know there is more to existence than space and time. There is consciousness, for example, which even inanimate objects may possess. Human consciousness encompasses things such a the human spirit. None of those feelings and awareness of our surroundings lend themselves to scientific methods of measurement. They exist nonetheless. Even if those things are unique to humankind, they still are part of the whole universe.

So, the kettle of soup we are in isn't merely what we have grown up to think what it is. Logically it's more. Much more. But does it matter that such things exist if we can't comprehend it all?

[Kellemora]

Scientists think they have created a photon that can travel faster than the speed of light.
As we put stronger telescopes out in space, who knows what we may see.
Hubble is finding all kinds of things we didn't know about, and now the Webb telescope is up and running.

11 dimensions is probably right, and who knows about string theory. Some day they might figure everything out.
But this might anger the gods of the universe, hi hi.

On my wall in my downtown office, I had a huge 5 foot tall by 6 foot wide Lighted Infinity Mirror.
The actual mirror area was only like 4 foot by 5 foot because the frame was like a 6 inch wide box border around the unit.
And talk about heavy. Took four guys to get that thing mounted on the wall properly.
Now an infinity mirror is something interesting in and of itself.
But if you take another hand-held mirror that you rubbed some of the silver off the back in the center of the mirror, and looked through it at the center of the infinity mirror, it would actually make you dizzy as all get-out.
Nearly everyone I had try it, not only got dizzy, a couple of them got sick into my wastebasket, and another guy fell down and took over two minutes before his head quit swimming. He said he felt like he was sucked into the mirror, hi hi.

I used to play around with mirrors and lenses quite a bit over the years, just messing around. Then got away from it for several years until we were making the underground pine tree farm in old abandoned mine shafts, where they used the sun and mirrors to light the interior of the growing spaces. It was an amazing layout.

[yogi]

The sensors and telescopes we have these days peak out at a distance of 45 billion light years. The super high tech telescopes we have in orbit are only seeing things inside that 45 billion light year perimeter. Although that might be the limit for our technology to sense things, it may not be the absolute limit of what we can detect if we had the right stuff. But, let's say that limit is indeed 45 billion light years. We know the universe is infinite so that we can be fairly certain that there are things at 90 billion light years distance. We can never detect those things, if they exist, because their light reaching us would take longer than the lifespan of the star which we orbit. It would not matter how sensitive or how sophisticated our measuring equipment happens to be. The light takes time to get here, and there is a point beyond which we will never see the light.

The same limit is present at the minimal end of the universe. We can detect subatomic particles and in some cases we can detect their components. But, nobody is willing to say that is as far as matter goes. It could get smaller and we will miss it all because we have no instruments to measure or view the effects of anything less. I'd speculate that if the universe can be infinitely large, it can also be infinitely small.

I've not played with infinity mirrors at all, but I do understand the concept. The illusion of the lights going off into the distance is basically the result of the brain trying to make sense of it all. Everything in our life must be in order for us to comprehend it. When you view the infinity mirror through the third mirror with a hole in it the lights project out and away from you as well as in and toward you. It's like looking in opposite directions all at once. This phenomena does not occur naturally and the brain doesn't know what to do with it. Thus the effects on people viewing such a situation can literally drive them crazy. The brain does not know what to do to make sense of it all. Of course that's just my take on it. There could be other things going on that I cannot imagine.

[Kellemora]

But you would think, if a light started traveling toward us 90 billion years ago, it too would have reached here by now. That is if anything at all existed 90 billion years ago. Perhaps there was nothing that produced light before 45 million years ago.
And how do they know the light they are seeing that was started 45 million years ago, that the object even exists anymore?

I think I once said, everything we can see in space, and everything we know about, could possibly be sitting in a shoebox in somebodies closet, and they haven't been in there closet now for billions of years, hi hi.
In other words, in comparison to a speck of dust, we very well could be even smaller than that, and that speck of dust is our whole universe, hi hi.

I love all the things archaeologist find that they cannot explain how the early people had such knowledge.

My bathroom has a 3 panel mirror on the wall behind the sink, and a mirrored medicine cabinet on each side of the sink.
The purpose for this is so you can see the back of your head by looking in either mirror to your right or left.
Now if you lean forward with your head over the sink, or if you open a mirror slightly, you can create the infinity mirror affect.

I've had a few interesting mirrors over the years. One would drive you crazy looking at it. It wasn't an infinity mirror, but everything you saw in it was upside down. This had to do with how it was curved and could cause a double reflection to make you appear upside down.
I also had a couple of mirrors like you experience at carnivals. They were cheap though, basically aluminum coated plastic with a clear film over that so they didn't get scratched.
And of course for photography work I had numerous first surface mirrors, but sadly, they don't last very long before turning dull.
I did buy some coated ones once just so they wouldn't turn dull, but then there were some things you couldn't do with them due to the thickness of that thin film over them.

I had a big box of tiny mirrors that came off a mirror ball that got broken.
With a little clay to hold them up at various angles, you could do some fun things with them, using only a single pinpoint light source. That was back before laser pointers, but if we had those, we could have done some really neat stuff.

[yogi]

But you would think, if a light started traveling toward us 90 billion years ago, it too would have reached here by now

In theory that light originating 90 billion light years away from us would indeed reach our location in space. The problem with that theory is that the sun, the center of our solar system, has a life expectancy of 4.603 billion years. Our solar system, and us humans, will have come and gone about 86 billion years prior to that distant light reaching us. And, you can rest assured that nothing we know of exists for 90 billion years so that your second speculation about the object not existing any more by the time it's light reaches here is correct.

The point I was trying to make is that we can only see a limited amount of light that exists in the entirety of the universe. Whether there is matter and/or energy beyond the limits of our perception can never be proven. Logically it seems that there must be, the universe is infinite after all, but we have no way to prove it. We can't see that far.

You have mentioned the idea of us being junk stored in some super monster alien's closet down at a level even that alien cannot detect. If you are willing to accept the notion that the universe is infinitely large, then you must also agree it is infinitely small. We don't know what is going on at either end of the size scale and have no way to find out.

The things that archeologists find and cannot explain do not imply that the ancients had some mystical knowledge and powers. The lack of explanation there is exactly the same as not being able to link all the connections in the scale of evolution. There is indeed some missing knowledge which leaves gaps in understanding and also provides opportunities to misinterpret what we discover. It's fun to speculate that men in black landed in their UFO's and seeded the planet with their species. They could have come back many years later and integrated into the population along with the superior intelligence they most certainly possessed. It makes for great fiction writing, much in the same way as to speculate we are a spec of dust in some super alien's closet.

[Kellemora]

Whether we evolved or were created is not really an issue with me. But I do know evolution does take place, that's quite obvious. But how they came to be is another question, since no two species have links to other species. Mutations yes, but not distinct species. So they all evolved independently of each other, even if they took on different shapes and sizes.

But while life on this planet was evolving, life on other planets could be a billion years ahead of or behind us.
Although now we've really only had communications technology for around 100 years or so.
Radio was in its infancy and was only around 35 years old when they started looking to the stars for alien life forms.
I always thought to myself, what are the odds of another life form having radio during the short time span that we've had.
Even now, we are almost past radio waves and into using light waves for communications, and that technology is basically current technology and fairly new, when it comes to the grand scheme of things in the universe.

Planet earth is smaller than a speck of dust when viewed from hundreds of light years away, hi hi.

[yogi]

Yesterday I saw a picture sent back by a spacecraft we launched 45 years ago. The craft was leaving our solar system and took a picture in the direction of planet earth. They pointed out where we were in that picture but at most it was only one pixel in size. So, yes, you are correct to note that this entire planet is insignificant in the grand view of things.

My view of the universe in which we are a part is that it came about randomly. It had something to do with those potential quantum states I talked about elsewhere in these forums. Conditions on earth were just right for life to form at some point in time. We have always suspected that there are thousands if not millions of earth-like bodies out there in space (and have verified a few hundred to exist). The ongoing random events must certainly have produced life on other earth-like bodies as well as our own. Even your theory of multiple paths in evolution would suggest the random nature of events in the universe. And, most certainly, some of those living planets came before us and others have yet to come into being. If intelligence is the ultimate outcome of such random events, then it is almost certain that some of those distant life forms have figured out ways to communicate over great distances. We do it via modulated electromagnetic energy, but who is to say that is the only way? For all we know the aliens are among us and trying their best to communicate this very minute. Unfortunately, it's like you or I trying to talk to a gnat. Hopefully, if they do exist, those aliens won't swat us and end it all. LOL

[Kellemora]

I've always believed that there is life on other planets. They may not be anything like what we have here in our atmosphere.
Look at the deep sea creatures that live around those hot poison vents in the ocean floor, where normal life as we know it could never exist at all. Yet there is life there and doing well.

I've often wondered if the white folk on this planet actually traveled here from Mars as that planet got to hot and most of its resources used up. Let's say a billion years ago. But once here, those who came did not have the technology to duplicate what they had their. Just like here, big business and labs have created things like computer chips and mass produced them so everyone has a computer, but nobody would know how to build one starting from scratch if they were dumped on a new planet with different minerals and ores.
Heck, even physics might be considerably different there too!

I do know they use laser lights between satellites to communicate with each other.
But if we saw it, we probably could never decipher it without knowing the codes it uses.
Plus it is probably encrypted too, hi hi.
Convert the light to audio and it would probably sound like an old dial up modem, hi hi.

[yogi]

You bring up an important point when you talk about sea creatures living in an environment that would be toxic to human beings. Life is a generic term and not exclusive to humans on the surface of the earth. It's pretty obvious that living creatures adapt to their immediate environment. The process of evolution is one bit of evidence to support that theory. Adapting to the environment is also obvious on an individual scale. We can look to your own situation as an example of a person who adapted to your circumstances and functions on less than what your body was originally designed to be. On a cosmic scale this adaption process is known as entropy. The thermodynamics of the universe, so it seems, is trying to achieve a balance. That is why things fall apart and do not spontaneously evolve into something like a computer, for example. In all these cases the principle of adaptation is at the root.

Taking adaptation to be a universal dynamic, we would naturally expect the living beings on Mars to be quite different than those on earth. The environments are not the same. When you get to Venus or Jupiter where there is no similarity to earth at all, you can expect any life thereupon to be something we have not yet imagined. Humans could not have come into being on any other planet in our solar system simply because the environment was not suitable to produce that type of life. That's why I think it's a bit crazy to expect to find human-like aliens in outer space. That would only be likely on a rock that has the identical biosphere as our own planet has. Thus, we humans could not be anything else unless our surroundings change drastically. Someday after the Nuclear Winter, perhaps, when atomic radiation is as abundant as sunlight we may find life forms that at one time were human. But they would be radiation hardened. Think about that for a while. LOL

[Kellemora]

Normally, evolution takes a long long time. But I've seen pictures taken in and around Chernoble of various mutated small animals that are no longer recognizable for what they once were with any surety. I mean a frog is still a frog, but it looks like no other frog you've ever seen. The same too with what were possibly chickens. They had no feathers, and look like they were made of leather, sorta alligatorish looking, but they still acted like chickens, scratching and pecking at the ground for food.

Some animals, fish, and birds, do evolve to some extent, but they are still the same species of animal, fish, or bird.
Now that we can do extensive DNA so well, it blows Darwin's theory of evolution right out of the water. Although it was proven long ago his theory didn't hold water.
But within the same species, yes, we are evolving all the time, and sometimes not for the better either, hi hi.

But you do have to ponder, where did all the different species come from in the first place?
Archaeologists are finding 30,000 year old people, or possibly older than that, who had to live with dinosaurs or before.
I don't retain much of what I read, but I read a lot, and am always amazed at the things they keep finding.
One his all the specialized tools found in the melting glaciers, way down in the permafrost, so they can date them fairly easily as to existing before we thought man knew how to make and use such tools.

I'm sure life on other planets is very different from what we call life!

[yogi]

On more than one occasion I've found myself pondering what the definition of life might be. Being a human makes it easy to understand what I experience, but I'm just one example. At first I thought that life could be defined by a system that consumes "food" to process internally and thereby nourish and sustain it's own existence. That pretty much covers the flora and fauna we know so well, but other things I know about do something similar. For example, stars are born and eventually die out. I don't know enough to say what starts the process but there are phases of growth where cosmic material is absorbed and condensed to form a body that eventually expires. This cyclic activity is evident just about everywhere we humans have looked.

It then occurred to me that we humans are aware of our own existence, i.e., self-awareness. This phenomena is still an unsolved mystery in my mind but consciousness is what makes awareness of our being possible. In other words not only do we realize we exist, but we also interact with our surroundings and more or less determine how our future plays out by making decisions in response to random events. After some further thought the question of consciousness became more complex. Do stars have consciousness, for example? Well, if you kick a rock it will respond to it's environment and start rolling in accordance with the laws of physics. Likewise all those stars form in accordance with those same laws of physics. That tells me it is possible for inanimate things to have consciousness as part of their life cycle.

Adding to the perplexity is the question of whether all these possibly living objects also have self-awareness. In humans it's part of consciousness, but nobody has ever determined or come up with a plausible theory about exactly where that consciousness originates. Is it merely the result of chemical interactions inside our brain, or is it something external to our bodies? If it's internal, then surely rocks and stars do not have brains and thus no self-awareness. If it's external, then anything is possible. Should consciousness be external, that would suggest a dimension of being beyond human capacity to control. Consciousness existing as an external (to human life) force suggests we are all part of a greater living object. I'd call that life if I knew it really existed.

And, just as a side note, Darwin's theory of evolution was rejected in his time by the religious community in which he lived. Many people in the current century still hold those religious objections to be valid. The majority of scientists, however, tend to agree that evolution is factual. To argue the details that cannot be proven is an academic exercise that has been going on ever since Darwin announced his theory. You might as well argue the existence of a God because it falls into the same unprovable line of thought. In the end none of the arguments matter. We are here today in the form we happen to be. Regardless of the past, our only choice is to move forward.

One final thought about Chernoble. I've heard about some of the strange looking things that live there today. What amazed me more is that a few, very few, human beings still choose to live there. I don't think those humans have morphed into something different. That makes one wonder if we can actually live in an irradiated world.

[Kellemora]

Interesting thoughts there Yogi!

I just read the other day where it is thought the earth itself has an awareness and can do some things on it's own.
What they meant by that I have no idea, hi hi.

Evolution is a normal thing, we all evolve.
But Darwin's concept was we change species, something which even he himself said was not possible right before he died.

So that leaves the question. Where did the different species come from if we know it wasn't through evolution?

I think we humanoids can actually handle quite a bit of radiation. But I'm sure the levels at Chernoble can easily cause cancer or other problems.