Friday, December 31, 2021

Why It's Important To Cook Your Own Meals

Abstract

Background

Meals from full-service restaurants (FS) and fast-food restaurants (FF) are an integral part of US diets, but current levels and trends in consumption, healthfulness, and related sociodemographic disparities are not well characterized.

[---]

Conclusions

Between 2003 and 2016, FF and FS meals provided 1 in 5 calories for US adults. Modest improvements occurred in nutritional quality of FF, but not FS, meals consumed, and the average quality for both remained low with persistent or widening disparities. These findings highlight the need for strategies to improve the nutritional quality of US restaurant meals.

- Full paper here

These are obvious results and we all know it has great impact on health. But what is not obvious to most is that health also encircles the quality of ones thoughts and capacity to change mind. I rest my case. 


Thursday, December 30, 2021

Language As A Window Into Human Nature

Steven Pinker, the cognitive phycologist used to write beautiful books full of insights. One of such books was The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

We lost that Pinker to politics and "made-up" books which fits only into bullshit category. I would love to have that classic Pinker back. 

I am very mindful of language I use since most evil people do to animals is mainly because of their choice of language (PETA tried to change it - here & here). 

Our language evolved mostly based on geography and in-turn our thoughts evolved to match our language. 

So its no wonder  that the Scots language has an incredible 421 different snow-related words and expressions.

The sad fact is we are fast losing that richness of thought as the society started generalizing words and expressions. It's pity when people use acronyms these days (such as R.I.P) which doesn't begins to convey the loss of a precious life. 

Once I spoke the language of the flowers,

Once I understood each word the caterpillar said,

Once I smiled in secret at the gossip of the starlings,

And shared a conversation with the housefly

in my bed.

Once I heard and answered all the questions

of the crickets,

And joined the crying of each falling dying

flake of snow,

Once I spoke the language of the flowers. . . .

How did it go?

How did it go?"

- Forgotten Language by Shel Silverstein


Tuesday, December 28, 2021

The Trouble with Tribalism

Let’s not think small here, and just list the enemies that go against your tribal allegiances. This made some sense in the distant past, when our challenges were mostly local: local food source, and other small tribes going after them.

Things have changed a lot since. The biggest enemy we have to fight against right now is our tribal past. What served us so well for thousands of years is now an obsolete concept. It’s no more about the survival of this tribe or that one, but about Homo sapiens as a species. We must wake up to the fact that, when seen from a global planetary perspective, we are a single species living in a fragile ecosystem. And it’s not about saving the planet. Earth was fine without us for most of its 4.5-billion-year existence. It’s about saving the environmental conditions that allow for us to survive as a species.

For the first time in our collective history, we must think of ourselves as a single tribe in a single planet. Tribes exist to guarantee the survival of their members. Given the current planetary and geopolitical stressors, if we don’t begin to think of ourselves in global terms as a single species as opposed to tribes fighting tribes, we risk letting our tribal past write our dystopian future.

We are a single tribe, the tribe of humans. And, as such, not a tribe at all.

- More Here

I have yet to meet a person who doesn't consciously supports one tribe or other without any sort of awareness. 


Monday, December 27, 2021

Good Bye E.O. Wilson

This blog has a "Biophilia" label. You changed my life sir. You taught me to appreciate and embrace our natural world with wonder. 

Good bye sir. It's been a privilege and honor for me to have lived in the same time as you did. 

I don't know what to write. So I am just gonna continue to live this life and carry a little flame to pass on to the the next generation. 

Thank you for the flame and everything. 

 


If I could do it all over again, and relive my vision in the twenty-first century, I would be a microbial ecologist. Ten billion bacteria live in a gram of ordinary soil, a mere pinch held between thumb and forefinger. They represent thousands of species, almost none of which are known to science. Into that world I would go with the aid of modern microscopy and molecular analysis. I would cut my way through clonal forests sprawled across grains of sand, travel in an imagined submarine through drops of water proportionately the size of lakes, and track predators and prey in order to discover new life ways and alien food webs.



Sunday, December 26, 2021

Don't Look Up!

Complexity science does study something distinctive - namely the emergent features of systems that are composed of a lot of components that interact repeatedly in a disordered way. The reason why it has been hard to identify what is distinctive about complex systems is that there are many different kinds of emergent properties and products of complex systems, and they are not all found in all complex systems. The common features of complex systems manifest themselves differently in different kinds of systems. 

[---]

There are many important theoretical questions on which complexity science bears, the most obvious ones concerned with relationships between life and nonliving matter, and between conscious and non-conscious matter. The general implication of our analysis for these matters is that the dichotomy between atoms and molecules and advanced life forms is a very crude way of seeing the many layers of structure that are found at different scales.  The only way to understand the emergence of life is by studying the processes that occur in self-organizing physical systems not just physical structures. 

Once the complexity of nonliving systems, such as the solar system and the Earth and its climate, is grasped in detail, the difference between life and non-life seems to be less of a mysterious leap and more of a continuum. 

What is a Complex System? by James Ladyman and Karoline Wiesner (full review here)

Don't Look Up!! That's the name of the new Netflix movie. 

This is a landmark movie for Netflix not only because of so many popular stars but mainly because of its brilliant screen play. Watching the movie was like reading a new Michael Lewis book - funny, crazy sapiens, scary, greed, underdogs,  and unbelievable stupidly. 

This movie covers all the standard villains from this blog - money, greed, self centeredness, politics, technology, social media, news, talk show hosts, ivy league bullshit echo chamber education,  silicon valley saviors and obsession with space and no respect for this blue planet called home. 

And of course never knowing anything about complex systems leave alone comprehending complex systems.

Leonard DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence rock! This is now one of my all time favorite movie. 

Kate Dibiasky: We have exactly six months, ten days, two hours, 11 minutes and 41 seconds, until a comet twice the size of Chicxulub tears through our atmosphere and extincts all life on Earth.

Dr. Randall Mindy: When did you do those calculations?

Kate Dibiasky: I put the moment of impact on a diet app. So, impact is when my diet ends. Only I'm not on a diet. I'm just crying five times a day.


Saturday, December 25, 2021

Max Holiday Card 2022!

I miss the joy of the opening the holiday cards with Max by my side... we usually open the box together and see the wonderful picture of him and kiss and play together :-) 

So I still make his cards for myself and not send to anyone. 

 



We don't get or have time at all, that instead we are time. We'll never get the upper hand in our relationship with the moments of our lives because we are nothing but those moments. To "master" them first entails getting outside of them, splitting off from them. But where would we go?

Time is the substance I am made of. Time is the river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is the tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is the fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. 

There's no scrambling up to the safety of the riverbank when the river is you. And so insecurity and vulnerability are the default state - because in each of the moments that you inescapably are, anything could happen, from an urgent email that scuppers your plans for the morning to a bereavement that shakes your world to its foundations. 

- Excerpts from the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

 








Thursday, December 23, 2021

Bullshit Detector Check List Before Adapting & Paying For Any Trendy Technology

Great bullshit detector check list for new technologies. But such comprehensive list also applies to soviet style central planning systems like tradition, culture, religion, economist, silicon valley saviors et al. 

  1. What sort of person will the use of this technology make of me?
  2. What habits will the use of this technology instill?
  3. How will the use of this technology affect my experience of time?
  4. How will the use of this technology affect my experience of place?
  5. How will the use of this technology affect how I relate to other people?
  6. How will the use of this technology affect how I relate to the world around me?
  7. What practices will the use of this technology cultivate?
  8. What practices will the use of this technology displace?
  9. What will the use of this technology encourage me to notice?
  10. What will the use of this technology encourage me to ignore?
  11. What was required of other human beings so that I might be able to use this technology?
  12. What was required of other creatures so that I might be able to use this technology?
  13. What was required of the earth so that I might be able to use this technology?
  14. Does the use of this technology bring me joy? 
  15. Does the use of this technology arouse anxiety?
  16. How does this technology empower me? At whose expense?
  17. What feelings does the use of this technology generate in me toward others?
  18. Can I imagine living without this technology? Why, or why not?
  19. How does this technology encourage me to allocate my time?
  20. Could the resources used to acquire and use this technology be better deployed?
  21. Does this technology automate or outsource labor or responsibilities that are morally essential?
  22. What desires does the use of this technology generate?
  23. What desires does the use of this technology dissipate?
  24. What possibilities for action does this technology present? Is it good that these actions are now possible?
  25. What possibilities for action does this technology foreclose? Is it good that these actions are no longer possible?
  26. How does the use of this technology shape my vision of a good life?
  27. What limits does the use of this technology impose upon me?
  28. What limits does my use of this technology impose upon others?
  29. What does my use of this technology require of others who would (or must) interact with me?
  30. What assumptions about the world does the use of this technology tacitly encourage?
  31. What knowledge has the use of this technology disclosed to me about myself?
  32. What knowledge has the use of this technology disclosed to me about others? Is it good to have this knowledge?
  33. What are the potential harms to myself, others, or the world that might result from my use of this technology?
  34. Upon what systems, technical or human, does my use of this technology depend? Are these systems just?
  35. Does my use of this technology encourage me to view others as a means to an end?
  36. Does using this technology require me to think more or less?
  37. What would the world be like if everyone used this technology exactly as I use it?
  38. What risks will my use of this technology entail for others? Have they consented?
  39. Can the consequences of my use of this technology be undone? Can I live with those consequences?
  40. Does my use of this technology make it easier to live as if I had no responsibilities toward my neighbor?
  41. Can I be held responsible for the actions which this technology empowers? Would I feel better if I couldn’t?
Brilliant list but it is impossible to come up with such an exhaustive list for each of our decisions. 

Garrett Hardin in his book Filters Against Folly has a much easier way to tackle this issue by asking a simple question - "Then What?". 

He coined the phrase Ecolacy
In Filters Against Folly, Hardin outlines his approach to rational thinking through three major filters: literacy, numeracy, and “ecolacy.”

  • Literacy is easy to define: What do the words mean? Language, as Hardin points out, can be used to inhibit or enhance clear thinking. (Think about how politicians use certain words and phrases to frame issues.)  
  • Numeracy is straight-forward as well: What are the quantities involved? As Hardin saw it, the failure to invoke quantities is a major weak-point in critical analysis. Any competent analyst (not just in business, but in all human endeavor) must be in tune with quantities, numbers, and scale.  
  • Ecolacy: As for his “ecolate” filter, Hardin focuses on the first law of ecology: You can never merely do one thing. Even the most numerate and literate analyses usually forget to ask the crucial question: “And then what?” It’s a messy question; asking it leads you to a lot of dead ends. But that doesn’t mean it should be ignored. The second order of effects can often dwarf the first."
So always think of the second order effects. Always. It goes without saying there could be third and nth order effects. 

Tuesday, December 21, 2021

More On First Dogs in America

“Even if you can’t imagine anything about the life of people 10,000 years ago, you can still understand the relationship between people and their dogs” 

Early this month, there was big discovery on first domestication of dogs in Americas and now, more on the same

While this is the oldest physical evidence for domesticated dogs in the Americas, the femur fragment doesn’t necessarily belong to one of the first dogs to make it over from northeast Asia. Back in 2018, the burial sites of several dogs in Illinois were found to be around 9,910 years old. With a difference of a mere couple centuries, the title of “oldest” now just barely belongs to the Alaskan pup PP-00128. But archaeologists are more interested in the fact that we now have very similarly aged dogs in two very different parts of North America. That means that dogs were coming to America much earlier than this—but when did they first arrive?

According to recently unveiled genetic evidence, around the time when a third of North America was buried beneath ice during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) roughly 26,500 to 19,000 years ago, people had increasing encounters with gray wolves in Siberia, where comparatively temperate refuges provided prey both could hunt down and eat. These wolves gradually became domesticated dogs sometime between about 40,000 and 19,000 years ago. (Ancient wolves that played with humans likely evolved into today's friendly dogs.)

As part of a multidisciplinary research project looking into the stories of the animals, climate, and environment of the region as the ice cover invaded and retreated, scientists are unspooling the genetics of bones excavated in the region, including those kept at the University of Alaska museum. Charlotte Lindqvist, an evolutionary biologist at the University at Buffalo and co-author of the new study, was interested in what bears were up to back then. One bone, specimen PP-00128, originally excavated from the site of Lawyer’s Cave on Alaska’s Blake Channel, was thought to belong to one.

While genetic analysis proved that PP-00128 did not belong to a bear, extraction of the dog’s complete nuclear DNA profile wasn’t possible from the tiny bone fragment. But its mitochondrial DNA—a small fraction of the entire genome inherited only from the maternal line—was retrieved. The multidisciplinary team’s analysis suggested the dog belonged to a lineage that split with its Siberian canine cousins no earlier than 16,700 years ago—roughly the time humans may have been traveling into North America along the coast.

[---]

Given enough time, the vast wilderness of Alaska, through careful archaeological work, will also give up its secrets about the first arrivals of both humans and their canine companions.

“The answers to everything are sitting there just waiting,” says Perri. “There’s no animal that has the relationship with humans in the way dogs do, right?”

“The story of dogs is the story of humans,” she adds. 

 

Monday, December 20, 2021

2 Years...

The memories of December 20th 2019 are so vivid - the day Max passed away. I knew this would be last time I would able to kiss him, caress his beautiful body, feel his wet nose and cuddle with him for one last time - for one last time on this planet and my life. 

I slept next him the whole night next his body. I was a living dead animal that day and night. 

So here I am alive 2 years later without Max. Probably I am here because Max made me understand the preciousness and rarity of life. 

I guess for rest of my life, this day wouldn't have much words to speak but only tears. 

I love you Max. 





Sunday, December 19, 2021

12 Laws Of Karma

Most people think Karma is only the first one on this list but there is much more. A good consolidated list to remember forever - 12 Universal Laws of Karma According to Buddhism:

  • The Great Law: The Great Law of karma means that you receive what you put out into the world. That is you reap what you sow. If we desire honest relationships, we have to be candid and authentic ourselves first. If you long for happiness, act accordingly and share your joy with others. if it’s Financial abundance you seek then be generous without expecting anything in return.
  • The Law of Creation: Life requires, Our participation. Everything around us is the creation of someone’s intentions. Even our lives are the results of our own inner state. Although it happens unconsciously most of the time. Therefore we cannot wait for things to happen instead. We must put in action to make them happen. Finally, surround yourself with what you want. So that it is conducive to your desires.
  • The Law of Humility: Of all the laws of karma, Buddhism emphasizes the law of humility. The karmic law stresses acceptance, which is a near Universal version. That is we must accept what is before we can change.
  • The Law of Growth: Real change can only occur when we change who we are inside. As above so below and as within so without. If we want to see growth or change externally we must be committed to changing internally. The good news is that we have absolute control over ourselves in our growth beyond any circumstance.
  • The Law of Responsibility: You are the source of what happens around you and the outside world mirrors our internal state. If chaos surrounds you, then there is turbulence with it where the only way to bring peace is to find peace with yourself. The law teaches us to take ownership of the state of the world around us as only then can we change.
  • The Law of Connection: Often We give more meaning to an aspect of Our Lives over another. We might cherish the present over the past or think the future will be better unlike the here and then, however, one of the laws of karma, the law of connection emphasizes the interconnectedness of the past. Past the present and the future, neither the first nor the last are better as they were both required to accomplish the task.
  • The Law of Focus: Our minds cannot follow multiple trains of thought and be equally proficient therefore, you should focus on one goal at a time. The central goal over multitasking the karmic law of focus also teaches that you cannot focus on higher and a lower value simultaneously. We cannot Harbor negative thoughts and expect to grow spiritually, and we must direct our full attention to what we desire.
  • The Law of Giving and Hospitality: The law teaches that there will come a time when you will have to demonstrate your beliefs. It encourages one to ensure that their actions mirror their beliefs.
  • The Law of Change: Have you ever been at a point where situations keep repeating themselves and nothing seems to be changing as if life is telling you Something by repeating the same situations? Well in a sense you understand one of the laws of karma: the law of change history will repeat itself until you put positive energy to direct it elsewhere.
  • The Law of Here and Now: The karmic law of Here and Now teaches us to be entirely in the present moment. It recognizes that at any time the here and now is all we ever have, and to be engaged with and enjoy Single moments in the past leads to regret. while having Foot in the future results and anxiety over the unknowns. Come back to the moment of here And now as it is the only place you can truly live.
  • The Law of Patience and Reward: “He who Masters patients Masters everything else”. George Savile. Good things come to those who wait. You cannot replace patience, persistence, and hard work with wishful thinking, you have to be willing to do the heavy lifting to create any value.
  • The Law of Significance and Inspiration: The law teaches that no matter how insignificant we might feel, what we contribute to the whole and the universe will be different without our contribution. No matter how small it seems it is one law that you should reflect on when you need motivation. most of the law also teaches us that the value of any Venture is the result of the energy and intent directed towards following these laws of karma will ensure that you attract good karma and that your contribution as a whole is positive.

None of the above laws refer to god, magic or any superpowers. The laws are pain and simple. These are actions you can do it yourself in the present and on earth. No excuses. No magic. You need to comprehend that you matter (a lot) and do the right things always and do it over again, again and again. 


Saturday, December 18, 2021

What's Happening To German Forest's?

Brilliant and enlightening piece on how we humans cannot "plan" nature (in time, it always fails) but we  should be humble enough to embrace what nature offers us from their eternal wisdom. 

Last summer, Friederike and Jörg von Beyme stood on a bramble-covered, Sun-blasted slope outside this small town in eastern Germany. Just 4 years ago, the hillside, part of a nearly 500-hectare forest the couple bought in 2002, was green and shady, covered in tall, neatly arranged Norway spruce trees the couple planned to cut and sell.

During January 2018, however, a powerful storm felled many of the trees. Then, over the next 3 years, a record drought hit Germany and much of Central Europe, stressing the spruces that still stood. The back-to-back disasters enabled bark-boring beetles that had been munching on dead trees to jump to drought-weakened ones. Beetle populations exploded. In just 3 weeks, towering spruces that had seemed healthy were dead.

The von Beymes salvaged what they could, rushing to log and sell the dead and diseased trees. But thousands of other forest owners did the same, causing the timber market to collapse. The couple’s piles of logs were worth less than what it had cost to cut and stack them. Now, they don’t expect to earn a profit from logging spruces for 20 years. “We have a big forest now with big problems,” Jörg von Beyme says.

[---]

It's no exaggeration to say modern industrial forestry was invented in Germany. In the early 1700s, mining official Hans Carl von Carlowitz, who lived not far from where the von Beymes live today, became alarmed by devastating timber shortages caused by demand from mining and smelting. In response, he penned a 1713 treatise proposing that forests be managed sustainably. Wood harvests should be limited to what the land could produce, von Carlowitz wrote, and trees should be assiduously replanted to ensure a future supply. (Of course, Indigenous people around the world had been applying similar ideas for millennia.)

German forests started to recover as landowners adopted the approach. And Germany’s scientific approach to forestry—planting fast-growing species in neat rows, perfectly spaced for maximum timber production—became an international model. After World War II, with Germany in ruins and Allied nations demanding shipments of timber for reparations, foresters doubled down on von Carlowitz’s vision. Areas where deciduous trees such as beech and oak would have grown naturally were planted in monocultures of fast-growing evergreen spruce and pine. The trees were so essential to Germany’s economy that they became known as the brotbaums or “bread trees.”

[---]

Just a few years ago, the plot—part of a forest owned by the small town of Treuenbrietzen—was covered by Scotch pines, a common plantation species in regions with sandy soils. In the hot, dry summer of 2018, however, fires torched some 400 hectares of the pine forest, closing highways and forcing hundreds of people to flee their homes; smoke even reached Berlin. In the past, such large fires were almost unheard of in mild Central Europe.

In this plot, charred trees were removed, replaced by newly planted pines. But the drought, which continued through 2020, killed many of the puny seedlings, Blumröder pointed out as she surveyed the site. And even the survivors were struggling to keep up with fast-growing poplar saplings, some already 3 meters tall, that had sprouted on their own. The poplars’ vigor indicates that replanting is not necessary, Blumröder and Ibisch argue. “The problem is, foresters don’t wait,” Ibisch says. “They always say they think in long-term scales. But when calamity happens … they panic.”

In some other burned plots, Ibisch and Blumröder persuaded Treuenbrietzen’s forester to deviate from usual practices. On one tract, he left charred trunks standing and didn’t replant, allowing forest succession to proceed on its own—a rare practice. In others, he cleared some of the snags and planted rows of oaks—which many researchers believe could be more resilient to future climate change—instead of pines.

In preliminary results, the new approaches are producing promising outcomes. In areas where some or all burned trees were left standing, for example, Ibisch and Blumröder have found more plant, fungus, and insect species than in cleared tracts. Soil temperatures in the uncleared tracts are lower on hot days, and winds calmer, helping the soil retain moisture. Moss is beginning to cover the ground where fallen trees have started to rot, preventing erosion and stimulating the growth of underground soil fungal networks. The lesson for Germany’s foresters, Blumröder believes, is that they should “step back, let the system do [its thing] first, and then learn from it.”

- More Here

Tuesday, December 14, 2021

Words Of Wisdom (Against Trendy Tech & Too Much Cancer Screening)

You can’t test yourself to health. The things that really promote your health are not very sexy.  
Real food, regular movement, and finding purpose aren’t high-tech, but they are the true foundations of a long and healthy life.

The Hidden Problems of Early Cancer Detection


Monday, December 13, 2021

Do The Next Best Thing

Carl Jung answer's that question - "How to live?"

Your questions are unanswerable because you want to know how one ought to live. One lives as one can. There is no single, definite way for the individual which is prescribed for him or would be the proper one. If that’s what you want you had best join the Catholic Church, where they tell you what’s what. Moreover this way fits in with the average way of mankind in general. But if you want to go your individual way, it is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being of itself when you put one foot in front of the other. If you always do the next thing that needs to be done, you will go most safely and sure-footedly along the path prescribed by your unconscious. Then it is naturally no help at all to speculate about how you ought to live. And then you know, too, that you cannot know it, but quietly do the next and most necessary thing. So long as you think you don’t yet know what this is, you still have too much money to spend in useless speculation. But if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate. 

Carl Jung answer  to "What if it's too late?"

Nobody can set right a mismanaged life with a few words. But there is no pit you cannot climb out of provided you make the right effort at the right place.

When one is in a mess like you are, one has no right any more to worry about the idiocy of one’s own psychology, but must do the next thing with diligence and devotion and earn the goodwill of others. In every littlest thing you do in this way you will find yourself. Everyone has to do it the hard way, and always with the next, the littlest, and the hardest things.

- via The Marginalian (Selected Letters of C.G. Jung, 1909-1961 by C.G Jung)


Saturday, December 11, 2021

Klejn's Commandments For Archaeologist's (Applies To All!!)

1. Archaeology is not history armed with a spade, but a detective story in which the investigator has arrived at the scene a thousand years late. History is pronounced later by judges. So you must decide: to go in for one or the other.

2. Do not be similar to the historian, for whom work is already settled in two steps: collection of materials and the writing of a text. Between these two you must take the third—the research.

3. Where there is a law, there is no problem. In every set of facts do not search for laws, but for contradiction to law. Behind contradiction a problem is hidden, behind the problem a discovery.

4. State the question as a question. With nominative sentences a theme is set but not a problem. A problem is set only when it is formulated by a question. The real question begins with 'who', 'what', 'where', 'when', 'whence', 'whither', 'how', and 'why'.

5. The scholarly world is not a team of friends. What is your discovery is a loss for someone else. And this someone is usually a prominent and powerful person. Therefore having made a discovery do not expect universal delight. Be ready for tough resistance, sudden attacks and a gruelling and lingering war. A scholar needs talent second and courage first.

6. Research is a threefold struggle—with the material, with adversaries and with oneself. The last part is the hardest.

7. Every scholar has a right to make mistakes—if he makes mistakes correctly.

8. If an experiment fails once, the experiment is guilty, if it fails twice, the experimenter is guilty, if three times, the theory.

9. Do not check facts with your tongue, but with your teeth: do not search for something tasty, search for something true. Indeed what you need to recognise is not raisins but gold.

10. Argue skilfully and vigorously, but remember that one does not believe your skill or your rage but your facts.

11. Beware of assumptions. Probability is a ladder with rolling steps, an escalator. Before you know it you find yourself on the next floor. Apparent means probably, probably means possibly, possibly means maybe and maybe not. But whether it was present or absent, issue from the point that it was absent rather than present.

12. Forget the phrase 'for instance'. Examples can substantiate whatever you want. There is always a counter-example for every example. An example is permissible only when it represents a generalisation.

13. Classification is like a piano, do not try to strike a chord with one finger. You need a sufficient set of concepts and terms.

14. Weigh pros and cons on the same set of scales.

15. If the complex truth does not consist of simple truths it is not a truth.

16. The scholarly position is not a chair, but redoubt. It is only a position when it is attacked and defended. Thereafter it is no longer a position but a pose. Do not confuse a position with a pose.

17. Do not hunt for a fashionable position. In the discipline, not every word said last is the last word in the discipline. Contemporaneity is not defined by the moment of a work but by the productivity of methods, completeness of materials, and cleverness of ideas.

18. Do not hope for chance and luck. The law of gravitation was created in Newton's head and not in the apple.

19. Do not suppose anything is apparent. Collect proofs as much as possible, then people will perhaps understand that your idea did not need proving.

20. Be brief. However, firstly every one of your terms should be defined, every concept reasoned, every sentence grounded, every conclusion limited, every fact accounted for, proved and measured.

21. When you substantiate, it is important what, still more important with what but most important how.

22. The crowning proof is the one which the author has ditched and allowed the reader himself to find.

23. The 'golden middle' between two extremes is only the third extreme. It must be proved especially well.

24. Do not argue until you get a frog in the throat. You cannot out-argue your adversary, no matter how right you may be. The task of every scholarly argument is not to convince your opponent but to check yourself, to believe in yourself and to gain supporters.

25. Even if a gold coin rings on a copper coin, the ring nevertheless is golden. Inequality is not a hindrance to fruitful communication.

- A Russian Perspective on Theoretical Archaeology: The Life and Work of Leo S. Klejn by Stephen Leach (via here)



Panspermia Theory

Hitch-Hiking Life!

Friday, December 10, 2021

Oldest Ever (13,100 Years) Evidence Of Domestic Dogs In The Americas

By far the most striking of the animal remains, though, was a tooth. Using DNA analysis and radiocarbon dating, the team determined it came from a domestic dog that lived 13,100 years ago—the oldest evidence of domestic dogs ever reported in the Americas. What’s more, dogs are “a proxy for the presence of humans,” Mackie says. This find extends the length of human occupation of Haida Gwaii as recorded by archaeological evidence by 2,000 years—though Fedje expects more searching will reveal artifacts that push this back even further.

Loren Davis, an archaeologist at Oregon State University who was not involved in the study, says these findings are exciting. The dog tooth, in particular, “was a massive discovery.” Haida Gwaii and coastal British Columbia lie at the doorstep to the Americas, he says, so learning more about the early cultural and environmental record of the region has significant implications for understanding what life was like for the earliest inhabitants.

Skil Hiilans Allan Davidson, a Haida hereditary chief and archaeologist who took part in the excavations at all three caves, emphasizes that artifacts and animal remains are more than just ancient discoveries. Whether it’s a bear mandible or a fossilized human footprint, archaeological and paleontological findings have meaning for Indigenous people. Haida people have lived on and cared for Haida Gwaii for thousands of years, Davidson explains. His nation’s oral histories recount Haida people’s deep history in this region, and Western archaeology is just now starting to catch up.

- More Here


Wednesday, December 8, 2021

To Regrow US Forests - We Need Billions of Seeds & Many More 'Seed Hunters'

Like everyone one else, I just "assumed" when forest fire happens, the forest "regrows" spontaneously in time. It might sans humans but I learned they do need human help to expedite regrowth (otherwise real estate deals would be made by other humans). 

This is hard but noble work. Thank you for these noble souls and their hard work:

Grandorff’s parents taught him as a teenager how to read the forest. They were part of a niche network of cone collectors whose heyday dates back to President Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps. Trailing behind him enthusiastically now is Matthew Aghai, senior director of biological research and development at the Seattle-based reforestation company DroneSeed, along to learn traditional gathering skills.

Grandorff stops: “See, right down there.” Nestled between two big rocks on the bank of a brook is what he came for: a cache of pine cones worth $15 a bushel. These woody cones are in steep demand. Tucked inside each one are up to 10 pearly-white seeds, each no bigger than a lentil, which one day could grow to over 200 feet tall and absorb at least 48 pounds of carbon dioxide each year.

Across the western United States, the seeds are in high demand. Over the next 20 years, the U.S. aims to plant billions more trees in order to restore millions of acres of scorched forest and help offset planet-warming carbon emissions. In the West alone, some 10 million acres of recently burned land are waiting to be replanted. In the past few decades, however, the number of skilled seed collectors in the U.S. has been dwindling, though it’s not clear by how much, since the work is seasonal; it’s also gruelling, for not much pay. Fewer collectors means fewer seeds, and ultimately, trees.

[---]

Presaging that, an interim report on native seed supply commissioned by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and published in October 2020 states, “There is no agency-wide native plant restoration program … [and the] supply chain is generally inadequate to meet these large demands.”

That’s partly because of how trees reproduce.

Seeds, the embryos for future offspring, begin to form after spring pollination. As part of a species’ survival strategy, the abundance of the seeds varies by year. Seeds are energy-intensive for trees to produce, and after several low-seed years there may be a sudden oversupply. It’s impossible for animals to eat and disburse all of them, ensuring some sprout into seedlings. It’s thought that the timing of these bumper crops—known as masts—are synchronized, with the trees communicating through airborne chemical signals or via underground root networks. 

As a result, a good seed crop happens only once every three to seven years, depending on the plant species, given the irregular reproduction schedules. So 2020 was a good Douglas fir year; noble fir was big in 2016. This year across the area known as Cascadia, the tips of Ponderosa pine branches are heavy with cones.

“When there's a mast this big … it's quite unique,” says Aghai. “It would be irresponsible of us not to take advantage of it.”

These seeds are good candidates for restoring the more than 413,000 acres burned in July by the Bootleg fire in southern Oregon—the state’s third largest wildfire since 1900. To reforest that land with 150 trees per acre via seedlings sprouted in a greenhouse—enough, according to Aghai, to allow the trees to rebound quickly without overcrowding the forest—would require 18,000 pounds of Ponderosa pine seeds, he estimates. If the seeds were simply dumped from the sky by aircraft, a conventional method with a low rate of successful germination, it would take an estimated 400,000 pounds to ensure enough seeds would make it to adulthood.

Timing is everything, says Aghai; the longer it takes to reforest post-fire, the more likely that invasive weeds and shrubs take over. But it’s often difficult to find the right seed for a specific landscape—whether it’s the type, quantity, or quality. And it’s even harder when there’s a need to move quickly, such as after a natural disaster.

Saturday, December 4, 2021

Boji - Istanbul’s Traveling Dog



A street dog named Boji has become something of a celebrity in Istanbul, where he travels around the city on its ferries, trams and subway cars.

His adventures came to light a couple of months ago, and municipal officials began to track his movements. They were amazed at his resourcefulness.

"He knows where to go. He knows where to get out," said Avlin Erol, the head of customer relations at Metro Istanbul. 

Boji is estimated to travel up to 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) a day, passing through dozens of Metro stations and taking at least two ferry rides.

“He’s such a free spirit,” said Chris McGrath, a Getty Images photographer who recently spent a day following Boji around the city. “All he wants to do is ride on transportation. Every time he goes past a bus or van or any form of transport, he just wants to get on it. It’s really quite bizarre.”

McGrath first learned about Boji on Twitter, where people post their pictures and selfies with the mixed-breed dog. Now the dog even has his own Twitter and Instagram accounts with tens of thousands of followers.

“Everybody knows him now and everybody’s seen him,” McGrath said. For many, the dog has become a beloved member of the community.

“He went into one restaurant and two men sort of shooed him away, yelled at him,” McGrath said. “And then you hear someone else, another restaurant owner, yelling at those guys going: ‘It’s Boji! It’s Boji! Don’t shoo him away!’ So he’s definitely got celebrity status now.”

- More Here

This is not new. Here's 2010 post on stray dogs of Moscow.

I regret not observing street dogs in India when I grew up. I haven't visited India over 10 years now because it breaks my heart to see dogs, other animals and humans living in streets. 


Wednesday, December 1, 2021

Me & My Monkey Mind

All actions, all thoughts and all emotions of sapiens have some sort of preconceived notions.  For centuries, few wise men knew this. 

Buddha focused on the eight fold path with a prefix of "right" for each path and Immanuel Kant unleashed categorical imperative which taught us do what is right as an end in itself. In general, this wisdom meant - not to look for magic, self interest and virtue signaling.  

Of course, since Max was a puppy I have been trying to heed to these wise thoughts. But when I usually unpack those moments as and when it happens, I wasn't fully acting on those wisdom. Although, I had mostly eliminated magical thinking and virtue signaling but there had always been some sort of reminisce of preconceived notions and self interest.

I never consciously observed myself on this front when Max was alive but now, it has become self-evident that Max gave me a gift to subside this monkey mind of mine. 

Thinking of my life with Max makes me sometimes  spontaneously smile and other times spontaneously cry. There are no hidden motives or agenda and these emotions surface as an end in itself. It might sound mundane and simple but this is a powerful tool. With this gift from Max, I can think of Max at any situation when my monkey mind surfaces. This has become my own "impartial spectator" that Adam Smith wanted every human to cultivate. 

In simple terms, this gift makes me focus on gratitude and helps to curb any unnecessary arguments and  abstractions. 

So what exactly I mean by Max "taught" me? 

Did we sit together and have lessons? Of course, not. Living with Max for 13 years wasn't just living but spending most of the microseconds of those 13 years with him in and out, had an impact on my body and mind. Max became part of me and I became part of him. It's not just me who changed but Max changed too. 

The life that society preached went way and we both lived our lives in our own way. When society was busy preaching the "benefits" of 20 minutes daily meditation; we already were living a life of meditation. 

An ordinary man and an ordinary dog decided to spend the most precious thing on this planet - "time" with each other. I am eternally grateful for that decision and each one of those moments. 

Now, all these gratitude and my lucky 13 years of life with Max is done. That is past life. And to put it bluntly - all that would be useless and self-centered life if don't act on that gift for rest of life. 

Yes, its self-centered to keep talking about it and not living and acting on that gratitude for rest of my life. 
Maybe, the reason I am living without Max is exactly for that reason. 

How am I acting on that gift for the past 23 months since Max passed away? 

I will write about it soon. 


Tuesday, November 30, 2021

Insects Have Emotions & Feeling

In fact, there's mounting evidence that insects can experience a remarkable range of feelings. They can be literally buzzing with delight at pleasant surprises, or sink into depression when bad things happen that are out of their control. They can be optimistic, cynical, or frightened, and respond to pain just like any mammal would. And though no one has yet identified a nostalgic mosquito, mortified ant, or sardonic cockroach, the apparent complexity of their feelings is growing every year. 

When Scott Waddell, professor of neurobiology at the University of Oxford, first started working on emotions in fruit flies, he had a favourite running joke – "…that, you know, I wasn't intending on studying ambition", he says.

Fast-forward to today, and the concept of go-getting insects is not so outrageous as it once was. Waddell points out that some research has found that fruit flies do pay attention to what their peers are doing, and are able to learn from them. 

[---]

They're strikingly similar to other animals, and yet vividly different. Insects have many of the same organs as humans – with hearts, brains, intestines and ovaries or testicles – but lack lungs and stomachs. And instead of being hooked up to a network of blood vessels, the contents of their bodies float in a kind of soup, which delivers food and carries away waste. The whole lot is then encased in a hard shell, the exoskeleton, which is made of chitin, the same material fungi use to build their bodies.

The architecture of their brains follows a similar pattern. Insects don't have the exact same brain regions as vertebrates, but they do have areas that perform similar functions. For example, most learning and memory in insects relies on "mushroom bodies" – domed brain regions which have been compared to the cortex, the folded outer layer that's largely responsible for human intelligence, including thought and consciousness. 

(Tantalisingly, even insect larvae have mushroom bodies, and some of the neurons within them remain for their whole lives – so it's been suggested that adult insects that went through this stage might be able to remember some things that happened before they metamorphosed.)

There's mounting evidence that our parallel neural setups power a number of shared cognitive abilities, too. Bees can count up to four. Cockroaches have rich social lives, and form tribes that stick together and communicate. Ants can even pioneer new tools – they can select suitable objects from their environment and apply them to a task they're trying to complete, like using sponges to carry honey back to their nest.

[---]

In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin argues that – just like every other characteristic – the ways humans express their feelings would hardly have appeared out of nowhere in our own species. Instead, our facial expressions, actions and noises are likely to have evolved via a gradual process over millennia. Crucially, this means that there's probably some continuity among animals, in terms of the ways that we display our emotional state to others.

For example, Darwin noted that animals often make loud noises when they're excited. Among the loud chattering of storks and the threatening rattling of some snakes, he cites the "stridulations", or loud vibrations, of many insects, which they make when they're sexually aroused. Darwin also observed that bees change their hums when they're cross. This all suggests that you don't need to have a voice box to express how you're feeling.

Take the golden tortoise beetle, which looks like a miniature tortoise that's been dipped in molten gold. It's not actually covered in the element, but instead achieves its glamorous look by reflecting light off fluid-filled grooves embedded in its shell. However, pick one of these living jewels up – or stress it out in any way – and it will transform before your eyes, flushing ruby-red until it resembles a large iridescent ladybird.

[---]

The discovery of insect emotions also poses a slightly awkward dilemma for researchers – especially those who have devoted their careers to uncovering them.

Fruit flies are the archetypal research animal, studied so intensively that researchers know more about them than almost any other. At the time of writing, there are around 762,000 scientific papers that mention its Latin name, "Drosophila melanogaster", on Google scholar. Equally, studies into bees are growing in popularity, for the insights they can provide into everything from epigenetics – the study of how the environment can influence the way our genes are expressed – to learning and memory. Both have endured more than their fair share of experimentation.

"I like to watch bees and I've studied behaviour for a lot of my career, so I empathise quite a lot with them already," says Wright, who has been a vegetarian for decades. However, the numbers used in research are tiny compared to those sacrificed elsewhere, so she feels that it’s easier to justify. "It's this sort of disregard of life in general that we have [that Wright finds more problematic] – you know, people just wantonly take life and destroy it and manipulate it … from humans to mammals, insects to plants."

But while using insects for research is still largely uncontroversial, the discovery that they may think and feel raises a number of sticky conundrums for other fields.

There's already a historical precedent for banning pesticides to protect certain insects – such as the EU-wide embargo on nicotinoids for the sake of bees. Could there be scope for moving away from others? And though insects are increasingly promoted as a noble and environmentally friendly alternative to meat from vertebrates, is this actually an ethical win? After all, you'd have to kill 975,225 grasshoppers to get the same volume of meat as you would from a single cow.

Perhaps one reason we don't tend to think of insects as emotional is that it would be overwhelming.

- More Here

Monday, November 29, 2021

Grew Up Poor. How Am I Supposed to Raise My Middle-Class Kids?

Gratitude comes by constantly learning history to understand how lucky and privileged most western kids are now (by sheer luck and nothing else).

And most times, it doesn't require history but to look at other longitudes and latitudes at the present time. Gratitude shouldn't be mental but should be acted upon - for starters stop wasting food. 

Esau McCaulley has a touching piece on the same (NYT): 

I am who I am because I had to struggle and suffer. I came from the mud, and even now I remember how the dirt tastes. When my mother told me that my grandfather grew up as a tenant farmer, I could drive past cotton fields in Alabama and imagine what his life was like. The land was bursting with memory. My children and I have returned to the South and to the very neighborhood where I grew up. I once drove my two oldest kids to the home I used to live in. But the land, the dirt and the concrete don’t speak to them the way they do to me. The ghosts do not haunt them.

I don’t want to fall into the trap of treating poverty as some kind of learning experience. Black and brown people need to have paths to success that don’t involve overcoming a legacy of racism and structural injustice. We need more ordinary roads to flourishing.

And yet, I cannot help believing that my children have lost something: the determination born of suffering. I wish that I could give them that feeling. That suffering was the context within which my mother taught me about the value of education. It formed the background of my pastors’ sermons in the Black churches of my youth. The only God that I have ever known was one who cared about my Black body and my Black soul. That suffering was a unifying factor in all my deepest friendships. Those bonds are special because of what we survived.

[---]

The life I live is the complicated legacy of a survivor. I want to instill in my children the sense of Black possibility and responsibility that arises in the hearts of those who escaped the fire. It’s the fierce urgency born of a gratitude to God that we survived, coupled with the knowledge that it shouldn’t be that hard. It is a message that I needed when my belly was empty. I hope that my children listen now that their bellies are full.

At my family’s Thanksgiving, we all go around the table and name something we are grateful for. I am thankful for my wife and children. I am thankful for the life that they live. But I am also thankful for the things I suffered that made me who I am and for the ways that such suffering does not let you go. It ties you to all the other hurting people of the world. It gives your success a vocation and a purpose: to create more happy families gathering for family meals.

Saturday, November 27, 2021

What I've Been Reading

If you find yourself sliding into alcoholism, compassionate friends may try to intervene, to help you steer in the direction of a healthier life but speed (busy) addiction tends to be socially celebrated. Your friends are more likely to praise you for being "driven". 

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman.

I have been reading Oliver's Guardian pieces for close to two decades and he is one of those rare decent human beings. 

Time is short. Focus only on things that matters most and ignore rest since we will never have time for all of it. Period. 

That is the summary of this book and also, summary of my life with Max (and still continuous). I am ruthless in who, where, and how of sharing my limited time. I knew from the beginning that my time with Max was limited and I wanted to spend every microsecond possible with him - after all Max and I had way lesser than four thousand weeks (less than 700 weeks to be precise). 

Oliver is a gifted writer plus this book is also his personal story with time. Please read but more importantly embrace and act on the message.

We don’t get or have time at all, that instead we are time. We’ll never get the upper hand in our relationship with the moments of our lives because we are nothing but those moments. To “master” them first entails getting outside of them, splitting off from them. But where would we go?

Time is the substance I am made of. Time is the river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is the tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is the fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. 

There’s no scrambling up to the safety of the riverbank when the river is you. And so insecurity and vulnerability are the default state - because in each of the moments that you inescapably are, anything could happen, from an urgent email that scuppers your plans for the morning to a bereavement that shakes your world to its foundations. 




Tuesday, November 23, 2021

Lobsters & Crabs Are Sentient Beings - UK Government

Octopuses, crabs and lobsters are capable of experiencing pain or suffering, according to a review commissioned by the UK government, which has added the creatures to a list of sentient beings to be given protection under new animal welfare laws.

The report by experts at the London School of Economics looked at 300 scientific studies to evaluate evidence of sentience, and they concluded that cephalopods (such as octopuses, squid and cuttlefish) and decapods (such as crabs, lobsters and crayfish) should be treated as sentient beings.

Vertebrates, animals with a backbone, are already classified as sentient in new animal welfare legislation currently under debate in the United Kingdom.

"The Animal Welfare Sentience Bill provides a crucial assurance that animal wellbeing is rightly considered when developing new laws. The science is now clear that decapods and cephalopods can feel pain and therefore it is only right they are covered by this vital piece of legislation," said Animal Welfare Minister Lord Zac Goldsmith in a statement.

The Bill, which isn't yet law, will establish an Animal Sentience Committee, which will issue reports on how well government decisions have taken into account the welfare of sentient animals. It is part of a wider government Action Plan for Animal Welfare.

The report said lobsters and crabs shouldn't be boiled alive and included best practices for the transport, stunning and slaughter of decapods and cephalopods.

- More Here

Thank you. I hope, this is progress and opens up the eyes of other countries. Remember, UK has an animal welfare minister where as in US, there is nothing of sorts and everything is rolled up into some agriculture "department". 

Thank you for working on reducing the sufferings of our fellow sentient beings. 


Sunday, November 21, 2021

Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity

"Against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied. In fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous."

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature,” wrote Bonhoeffer in his treatise. And the nature of stupidity has its roots deep in the subconscious. It is driven by the fundamental mechanics of the human experience. As ancient philosophers noted, humans are social animals. It is this very sociability that is at the base of stupidity.

“We note further that people who have isolated themselves from others or who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals or groups of people inclined or condemned to sociability. And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem.”

Stupidity is a group phenomenon. An individual can act stupidly, but that has no effect on the greater whole. However, when a group acts stupidly, that greatly impacts the individual, compounding the entire effect. In many ways, something with initially positive ramifications, ended up stabbing humanity in the back.

- More Here

Tuesday, November 16, 2021

The Magnificent Bribe

Nearly 50 years ago, long before smartphones and social media, the social critic Lewis Mumford put a name to the way that complex technological systems offer a share in their benefits in exchange for compliance. He called it a “bribe.” With this label, Mumford sought to acknowledge the genuine plentitude that technological systems make available to many people, while emphasizing that this is not an offer of a gift but of a deal. Surrender to the power of complex technological systems — allow them to oversee, track, quantify, guide, manipulate, grade, nudge, and surveil you — and the system will offer you back an appealing share in its spoils. What is good for the growth of the technological system is presented as also being good for the individual, and as proof of this, here is something new and shiny. Sure, that shiny new thing is keeping tabs on you (and feeding all of that information back to the larger technological system), but it also lets you do things you genuinely could not do before. For a bribe to be accepted it needs to promise something truly enticing, and Mumford, in his essay “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” acknowledged that “the bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent bribe.” The danger, however, was that “once one opts for the system no further choice remains.” 

For Mumford, the bribe was not primarily about getting people into the habit of buying new gadgets and machines. Rather it was about incorporating people into a world that complex technological systems were remaking in their own image. Anticipating resistance, the bribe meets people not with the boot heel, but with the gift subscription.

[---]

Yet Mumford was not merely being sarcastic in describing the bribe as “generous” and “magnificent.” Any attempt to wrestle with the metastasizing power of the “megamachine” required recognizing that much of what it offered truly did appear impressive and beneficial. Writing in 1970, Mumford rattled off a list of some of the bribes of his time, a list that included refrigerators, private motor cars, planes, telephones, television sets, electrically driven washing machines, and the computer. Mumford emphasized that these new products should not “be arbitrarily disparaged or neglected, still less rejected out of hand.” After all, Mumford was not a reclusive ascetic hermit — he rode in cars, flew on planes, and talked with friends on the telephone. In denouncing the bribe, Mumford was not simply blasting this or that particular machine. He was questioning the ways that particular machines were used to incorporate people into a much larger technical system. What at first could seem like a “generous bargain” had a tendency to eventually feel like more of a raw deal, and once the initial excitement around a new gadget had vanished, a person all-too-often found that the new machine had not in fact solved “every human problem.”

[---]

Even as yesterday’s bribes become today’s commonalities, a steady flow of new bribes is made available to preserve our loyalty. There are smartphones with bigger screens and better cameras, virtual reality headsets, NFTs, smart glasses, self-driving cars, personal robots, a promised land of infinite apps, artificial intelligence, and the list goes on — new bribes for the new moment. As soon as it becomes incontrovertible that the last crop of technologies promising to solve “every human problem” has created many new problems, we are offered a new crop of technologies promised to really solve “every human problem,” including all of the ones created by the previous crop of technologies. Once you start looking for them, you can see technological bribes everywhere. And once you stop mulling over the potential benefits on offer, you can begin to see the risks and harms lurking just behind the shiny façade.  

Despite the ominous tones in which he often wrote, Mumford did not believe that we were doomed to become automatons. He retained a stubborn hope throughout his life that the sleepers could awaken, and that all hands could save the sinking ship. While writing extensively about technology, time and again he emphasized that what needed to be confronted was not so much the machines themselves as the ideology that builds up around them and turns them into objects of fealty and worship. As he pithily put it in Art and Technics, “If you fall in love with a machine there is something wrong with your love-life. If you worship a machine there is something wrong with your religion.” 

It is not a good thing to be accepting bribes, but it’s even worse to think of those bribes as just friendly gifts. 

- The Magnificent Bribe: Half a century ago, Lewis Mumford developed a concept that explains why we trade autonomy for convenience by Zachary Loeb


Saturday, November 13, 2021

The Dawn of Everything - New History of Humanity

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

I preordered this book few months ago and it arrived early this week. 

And I started reading it today...

I want to scream at the top of my lungs. This is a once in life time book. It's so sad that David Graeber passed away two months ago. Thank you, thank you, thank you Graeber and Wengrow for spending 10 years of your lives researching and writing this book. 

This is a rare gem; it overturns everything we were "taught" and "learned" about human history. 

And why this is important? Because, it opens up possibilities that we haven't even imagined. 

Please stop booking tickets for "space tourism" and stop respecting morons who are chasing empty spaces in space. 

Instead, spend few dollars and read this book. We can use an extra mind to bring insights on how we can make marginal improvements to the quality of life of all sentient beings on this planet. 




This is not a book. This is an intellectual feast. There is not a single chapter that does not (playfully) disrupt well seated intellectual beliefs. It is deep, effortlessly iconoclastic, factually rigorous, and pleasurable to read.

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Wednesday, November 10, 2021

Cognitive Tradeoff Theory - Tetsuro Matsuzawa

We then decided to make a direct comparison between the working memory of humans, adult chimpanzees, and young chimpanzees. The masking task was modified slightly for the purposes of this comparison. Sana Inoue, now an associate professor of Ritsumeikan University, and a postdoctoral student at that time, introduced the limited-hold task, in which the numerals were presented to the chimpanzees for only a brief duration.37 Suppose that there are five numerals—2, 3, 5, 8, and 9—displayed on the touch screen. After 650 milliseconds (ms), 430 ms, or 210 ms, all the numerals are automatically replaced by white squares. The goal is to touch the white squares in the ascending order of the now-masked numerals.

Ai’s performance in the limited-hold task was comparable to that of university students facing the same test for the first time. The performances of three young chimpanzees were much better than those of humans. We also tested the impact of overtraining among human subjects, allowing them to repeat the memory test many times over. Although their performances improved with practice, no human has ever been able to match Ayumu’s speed and accuracy in touching the nine numerals in the masking task.

One day, a chance event occurred that illustrated the retention of working memory in chimpanzees. While Ayumu was undertaking the limited-hold task for five numerals, a sudden noise occurred outside. Ayumu’s attention switched to the distraction and he lost concentration. After ten seconds, he turned his attention back to the touch screen, by which time the five numerals had already been replaced with white squares. The lapse in concentration made no difference. Ayumu was still able to touch the squares in the right order. This incident clearly shows that the chimpanzee can memorize the numerals at a glance, and that their working memory persists for at least ten seconds.

[---]

In 2013, I proposed the cognitive tradeoff theory of language and memory. Our most recent common ancestor with chimpanzees may have possessed an extraordinary chimpanzee-like working memory, but over the course of human evolution, I suggested, we have lost this capability and acquired language in return. Suppose that a creature passes in front of you in the forest. It has a brown back, black legs, and a white spot on its forehead. Chimpanzees are highly adept at quickly detecting and memorizing these features. Humans lack this capability, but we have evolved other ways to label what we have witnessed, such as mimicking the body posture and shape of the creature, mimicking the sounds it made, or vocally labeling it as, say, an antelope.

- Primate Memory, Tetsuro Matsuzawa


Monday, November 8, 2021

Cliodynamics - History As A Science

To Peter Turchin, who studies population dynamics at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, the appearance of three peaks of political instability at roughly 50-year intervals is not a coincidence. For the past 15 years, Turchin has been taking the mathematical techniques that once allowed him to track predator–prey cycles in forest ecosystems, and applying them to human history. He has analysed historical records on economic activity, demographic trends and outbursts of violence in the United States, and has come to the conclusion that a new wave of internal strife is already on its way. The peak should occur in about 2020, he says, and will probably be at least as high as the one in around 1970. “I hope it won’t be as bad as 1870,” he adds.

Turchin’s approach which he calls cliodynamics after Clio, the ancient Greek muse of history is part of a groundswell of efforts to apply scientific methods to history by identifying and modelling the broad social forces that Turchin and his colleagues say shape all human societies. It is an attempt to show that “history is not 'just one damn thing after another' ”, says Turchin, paraphrasing a saying often attributed to the late British historian Arnold Toynbee.

[---]

What is new about cliodynamics isn’t the search for patterns, Turchin explains. Historians have done valuable work correlating phenomena such as political instability with political, economic and demographic variables. What is different is the scale Turchin and his colleagues are systematically collecting historical data that span centuries or even millennia — and the mathematical analysis of how the variables interact.

In their analysis of long-term social trends, advocates of cliodynamics focus on four main variables: population numbers, social structure, state strength and political instability. Each variable is measured in several ways. Social structure, for example, relies on factors such as health inequality measured using proxies including quantitative data on life expectancies — and wealth inequality, measured by the ratio of the largest fortune to the median wage. Choosing appropriate proxies can be a challenge, because relevant data are often hard to find. No proxy is perfect, the researchers concede. But they try to minimize the problem by choosing at least two proxies for each variable.

Then, drawing on all the sources they can find historical databases, newspaper archives, ethnographic studies Turchin and his colleagues plot these proxies over time and look for trends, hoping to identify historical patterns and markers of future events. For example, it seems that indicators of corruption increase and political cooperation unravels when a period of instability or violence is imminent. Such analysis also allows the researchers to track the order in which the changes occur, so that they can tease out useful correlations that might lead to cause–effect explanations.

[---]

Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, a computer social scientist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, welcomes cliodynamics as a natural complement to his own field: doing simulations using ‘agent-based’ computer models. Cioffi-Revilla and his team are developing one such model to capture the effects of modern-day climate change on the Rift Valley region in East Africa, a populous area that is in the grip of a drought. The model starts with a series of digital agents representing households and allows them to interact, following rules such as seasonal migration patterns and ethnic alliances. The researchers have already seen labour specialization and vulnerability to drought emerge spontaneously, and they hope eventually to be able to predict flows of refugees and identify potential conflict hotspots. Cioffi-Revilla says that cliodynamics could strengthen the model by providing the agents with rules extracted from historical data.

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But Goldstone cautions that cliodynamics is useful only for looking at broad trends. “For some aspects of history, a scientific or cliodynamic approach is suitable, natural and fruitful,” he says. For example, “when we map the frequency versus magnitude of an event — deaths in various battles in a war, casualties in natural disasters, years to rebuild a state we find that there is a consistent pattern of higher frequencies at low magnitudes, and lower frequencies at high magnitudes, that follows a precise mathematical formula.” But when it comes to predicting unique events such as the Industrial Revolution, or the biography of a specific individual such as Benjamin Franklin, he says, the conventional historian’s approach of assembling a narrative based on evidence is still best.

Herbert Gintis, a retired economist who is still actively researching the evolution of social complexity at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, also doubts that cliodynamics can predict specific historical events. But he thinks that the patterns and causal connections that it reveals can teach policy-makers valuable lessons about pitfalls to avoid, and actions that might forestall trouble. He offers the analogy of aviation: “You certainly can’t predict when a plane is going to crash, but engineers recover the black box. They study it carefully, they find out why the plane crashed, and that’s why so many fewer planes crash today than used to.”

- Advocates of ‘cliodynamics’ say that they can use scientific methods to illuminate the past. But historians are not so sure.


Sunday, November 7, 2021

Becoming Cousteau

Documentary on life of Jacques-Yves Cousteau. 

For over four decades, Jacques-Yves Cousteau and his explorations under the ocean became synonymous with a love of science and the natural world. As he learned to protect the environment, he brought the whole world with him, sounding alarms more than 50 years ago about the warming seas and our planet’s vulnerability. In BECOMING COUSTEAU, from National Geographic Documentary Films, two-time Academy Award®-nominated filmmaker LIZ GARBUS takes an inside look at Cousteau and his life, his iconic films and inventions, and the experiences that made him the 20th century’s most unique and renowned environmental voice — and the man who inspired generations to protect the Earth.

Thank you for everything you did and do sir! 



Saturday, November 6, 2021

What I've Been Reading

Bertolt by Jacques Goldstyn. 

This is an illustrated children's book that portray's a beautiful friendship between a boy named Bertolt and an Oak tree. 

You can finish the book in couple of minutes but the melancholy will linger a life time. I wish there were more children books that portray such unique and precious relationships on earth. 

An entire generation of men who grew up reading Marvel comics are obsessed with empty space and "conquering emptiness" with flamboyant vehicles. At this point their brains are so over-fitted with this crap that they live and die without realizing immense beauty under their nose. These men have become role model for kids (and yeah, grown men too); such is the state of our civilization. 

We need to perpetually teach and remind kids the preciousness and rareness of everything in this blue planet. 

I grew up listening to this story of a Tamil king who gave his golden chariot so that a jasmine plant can use it as a support. History does remembers and salutes such beautiful acts and relationships. 


If I could do it all over again, and relive my vision in the twenty-first century, I would be a microbial ecologist. Ten billion bacteria live in a gram of ordinary soil, a mere pinch held between thumb and forefinger. They represent thousands of species, almost none of which are known to science. Into that world I would go with the aid of modern microscopy and molecular analysis. I would cut my way through clonal forests sprawled across grains of sand, travel in an imagined submarine through drops of water proportionately the size of lakes, and track predators and prey in order to discover new life ways and alien food webs.

E. O. Wilson: Biophilia, The Diversity of Life, Naturalist




Friday, November 5, 2021

Consequences of Whaling & Now, Talking to Whales

As usual, Ed Young has an insightful piece on the consequences of 20th century Whaling

Baleen whales are elusive, often foraging well below the ocean’s surface. They are also elastic: When a blue whale lunges at krill, its mouth can swell to engulf a volume of water larger than its own body. For these reasons, scientists have struggled to work out how much these creatures eat. In the past, researchers either examined the stomachs of beached whales or extrapolated upward from much smaller animals, such as mice and dolphins. But new technologies developed over the past decade have provided better data. Drones can photograph feeding whales, allowing researchers to size up their ballooning mouths. Echo sounders can use sonar to gauge the size of krill swarms. And suction-cup-affixed tags that come with accelerometers, GPS, and cameras can track whales deep underwater—“I think of them as whale iPhones,” Savoca said.

Using these devices, he and his colleagues calculated that baleen whales eat three times more than researchers had previously thought. They fast for two-thirds of the year, subsisting on their huge stores of blubber. But on the 100 or so days when they do eat, they are incredibly efficient about it. Every feeding day, these animals can snarf down 5 to 30 percent of their already titanic body weight. A blue whale might gulp down 16 metric tons of krill.

Surely, then, the mass slaughter of whales must have created a paradise for their prey? After industrial-era whalers killed off these giants, about 380 million metric tons of krill would have gone uneaten every year. In the 1970s, many scientists assumed that the former whaling grounds would become a krilltopia, but instead, later studies showed that krill numbers had plummeted by more than 80 percent.

The explanation for this paradox involves iron, a mineral that all living things need in small amounts. The north Atlantic Ocean gets iron from dust that blows over from the Sahara. But in the Southern Ocean, where ice cloaks the land, iron is scarcer. Much of it is locked inside the bodies of krill and other animals. Whales unlock that iron when they eat, and release it when they poop. The defecated iron then stimulates the growth of tiny phytoplankton, which in turn feed the krill, which in turn feed the whales, and so on.

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The new study, says Kelly Benoit-Bird, a marine biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, in California, is an important reminder of how “exploited species are part of a complex web, with many effects cascading from our actions.” Killing a whale leaves a hole in the ocean that’s far bigger than the creature itself.

There are more whales now than there were even a few years ago—in early 2020, scientists rejoiced when they spotted 58 blue whales in sub-Antarctic waters where mere handfuls of the animals had been seen in years prior. But that number is still depressingly low. “You can’t bring back the whales until you bring back their food,” Savoca said. And he thinks he knows how to do that.

In a rare moment for humanity - for all the massacre of whales that humans unleashed in the 20th century (wonder why Moby Dick is a classic?), now some nobles souls are working on talking to whales

It started in 2017 when an international group of scientists spent a year together at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the Radcliffe Fellowship, a program that promises “an opportunity to step away from usual routines.” One day, Shafi Goldwasser, a computer scientist and cryptography expert also from Israel, came by the office of David Gruber, a marine biologist at City University of New York. Goldwasser, who had just been named the new director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley, had heard a series of clicking sounds that reminded her of the noise a faulty electronic circuit makes—or of Morse code. That’s how sperm whales talk to each other, Gruber told her. “I said, ‘Maybe we should do a project where we are translating the whale sounds into something that we as humans can understand,’” Goldwasser recounts. “I really said it as an afterthought. I never thought he was going to take me seriously.”

But the fellowship was an opportunity to take far-out ideas seriously. At a dinner party, they presented the idea to Bronstein, who was following recent advancements in natural language processing (NLP), a branch of AI that deals with the automated analysis of written and spoken speech—so far, just human language. Bronstein was convinced that the codas, as the brief sperm whale utterances are called, have a structure that lends them to this kind of analysis. Fortunately, Gruber knew a biologist named Shane Gero who had been recording a lot of sperm whale codas in the waters around the Caribbean island of Dominica since 2005. Bronstein applied some machine-learning algorithms to the data. “They seemed to be working very well, at least with some relatively simple tasks,” he says. But this was no more than a proof of concept. For a deeper analysis, the algorithms needed more context and more data—millions of whale codas.

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The name of the CETI project evokes SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which has scanned the sky for radio signals of alien civilizations since the 1960s, so far without finding a single message. Since no sign of ET has been found, Bronstein is convinced we should try out our decoding skills on signals that we can detect here on Earth. Instead of pointing our antennas toward space, we can eavesdrop on a culture in the ocean that is at least as alien to us. “I think it is very arrogant to think that Homo sapiens is the only intelligent and sentient creature on Earth,” Bronstein says. “If we discover that there is an entire civilization basically under our nose—maybe it will result in some shift in the way that we treat our environment. And maybe it will result in more respect for the living world.”