Beautiful Spring Day @ Max's Walden

 

Afternoon siesta's are the best!

A simple cardboard box brings heaven on earth for Fluffy and Garph

The Global Contribution Of Soil Mosses To Ecosystem Services

Max's Walden is covered with Mosses plus I have been growing them as well. They look beautiful and they help with the ecological balance. 

A new paper shows Mosses are capable to storing carbon effective to help subside climate change: 

Abstract

Soil mosses are among the most widely distributed organisms on land. Experiments and observations suggest that they contribute to terrestrial soil biodiversity and function, yet their ecological contribution to soil has never been assessed globally under natural conditions. Here we conducted the most comprehensive global standardized field study to quantify how soil mosses influence 8 ecosystem services associated with 24 soil biodiversity and functional attributes across wide environmental gradients from all continents. 

We found that soil mosses are associated with greater carbon sequestration, pool sizes for key nutrients and organic matter decomposition rates but a lower proportion of soil-borne plant pathogens than unvegetated soils. Mosses are especially important for supporting multiple ecosystem services where vascular-plant cover is low. Globally, soil mosses potentially support 6.43 Gt more carbon in the soil layer than do bare soils. The amount of soil carbon associated with mosses is up to six times the annual global carbon emissions from any altered land use globally. The largest positive contribution of mosses to soils occurs under perennial, mat and turf mosses, in less-productive ecosystems and on sandy soils. Our results highlight the contribution of mosses to soil life and functions and the need to conserve these important organisms to support healthy soils.

 

Stalin and Ideology Thro' Robert Trivers' Self Deception

I have said it many times and here I am saying it again - Self Deception theory put forth by brilliant Robert Trivers is grossly unrecognized for our own peril. 

My hope is that someday Robert Trivers' becomes as recognized (and acted upon) as Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman's works. 

Once you start looking at people's motivations and actions through the lens of self-deception (and learn to look through many lenses, not just one); we might be able to eliminate most of evil at its roots even before it starts growing. 

Richard Hanania connects the dots between Stalin's ideology with Trivers work: 

Humans are good at justifying their own self-interest and emotional needs through moral or ideological arguments. Robert Trivers famously showed how this could be evolutionary adaptive, arguing that those who need to deceive others can be most effective if they deceive themselves first. In this formulation, it is difficult to pin down exactly what it means to “truly” believe something. One way to approach the question of what drives a political leader is to ask the degree to which self-interest, in the form of the acquisition of fame, money, or power, converges with ideological justifications.

One should not rule out power-seeking or sadism as an explanation for behavior simply because a historian does not find a document in which a despot says, “I am now going to kill people because I need to stay in power and it makes me feel good.” Human nature almost precludes even the possibility of finding such evidence. In contrast, when purported ideological considerations, along with some resulting behavior traced to them, do not appear to serve one’s own interests, we are probably on stronger ground in saying that an individual is actually motivated by his ideals.

From this perspective, Stalin throughout the 1930s maximized his own power while objectively weakening the Soviet Union and the cause of international communism abroad. This should have been clearly visible given what he did to the Bolshevik party and the Soviet military and intelligence services, unless one was motivated to be blind to this fact. Convincing himself that he was acting in accordance with Marxist principles only served to assuage any guilt Stalin might otherwise have felt and make him a more ruthless and effective mass murderer.

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While I would argue that in later years Stalin came to be driven more by sadism and the lust for power, the forced collectivization of agriculture, perhaps his greatest crime, can be directly traced to communist ideology and a dream of a better world. Communism impoverished and immiserated the masses in the Soviet Union just as it has everywhere else it has been tried, even under leaders more squeamish than Stalin. What divides political leaders who do good and those who do evil is ultimately not simply a matter of intentions, as Stalin’s worst acts derived from his idealism and concern for his fellow man. While a combination of altruism and correct ideas can move the world forward, dreamers who are wrong on the facts are more dangerous than the worst cynics. We undervalue the importance of truth relative to good intentions at our peril.

 

Oxytocin, Maximus, & Me

I have written so many times that Max changed my life. 

What does that even mean? What did he change ? And How did he change?

When such questions come up; I think of Ellie Arroway's lines played by Jodie Foster in the movie Contact: 

Senator: You come to us with no evidence, no record, no artifacts. Only a story that, to put it mildly, strains credibility... Are you really going to sit there and tell us that we should just take this all on faith? 

Ellie Arroway: Is it possible that it didn't happen? Yes... As a scientist I must concede that. I must volunteer that. 

Michael Kitz: [raises voice] Then why don't you simply withdraw your testimony and admit that this journey to the center of the galaxy, IN FACT, NEVER TOOK PLACE!!?? 

Arroway: Because I can't! I had an experience... I can't prove it, I can't even explain it, but everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real! I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever... A vision of the universe that tells us, undeniably, how tiny, and insignificant and how ... rare, and precious we all are! A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater than ourselves, that we are not — that none of us — are alone! ... I wish I could share that. I wish, that everyone, if even for one moment, could feel that awe, and humility, and hope! But ... that continues to be my wish. 

One of the gifts Max gave me is the gift of observation. I saw how observant he was while I picked the wrong friends, the wrong marriage which ended in a divorce and so many wrong things because I couldn't see what was right under my nose. 

Max changed this. Our love for each other made me extremely observant. At this point in life; I can tell so much about a person without language just by observing their eyebrows move, their eyes, twitching of nose, lips and other subtle emotions without any sound.

But I couldn't even explain this gift properly. 

Until now this new research slowly unveils little details on how Max changed me:

When love is in the air, what’s happening in the brain? For many years, biologists would answer, “Oxytocin!” This small protein — just nine amino acids long — has sometimes been called “the love hormone” because it has been implicated in pair-bonding, maternal care and other positive, love-like social behaviors.

But lately, neuroscientists have been revising their thinking about oxytocin. Experiments with mice and other lab animals suggest that instead of acting as a trigger for pro-social behavior, the molecule may simply sharpen the perception of social cues, so that mice can learn to target their social behavior more accurately. “It turns out it’s not as simple and straightforward as ‘oxytocin equals love,’” says Gül Dölen, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University. If something similar is true of humans, that may, among other things, add a fresh wrinkle in attempts to treat social disorders such as autism by tinkering with the oxytocin system.

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“There’s a lot of noise in the brain,” says Larry Young, a behavioral neuroscientist at Emory University who, with coauthor Robert Froemke, explores our new understanding of oxytocin in the 2021 Annual Review of Neuroscience. “But when oxytocin is released, it turns down the static so the signal comes in much more clearly.”

That clarity is familiar to new parents, says Froemke, a neuroscientist at New York University Grossman School of Medicine and Young’s coauthor. “I’ve got two little kids,” he says. “Even two rooms away, air conditioner on, and I’m deep asleep, the baby starts crying and right away I’m awake and attending, full-pupil-dilated.” 

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Neuroscientists also note that even though oxytocin clearly plays an important role in regulating social behaviors like pair-bonding and parental care, it’s not the only actor. “Falling in love is a full brain and body experience,” says Kozorovitskiy. “It has sensory elements and cognitive elements, and memory is important. Is oxytocin one of the many modulators that is mediating all those changes? Absolutely. But can we pin it all on oxytocin? That’s definitely an oversimplification.”

Trees Through Peter Wohlleben

I never read Peter Wohlleben (nor heard of him) but I am glad I did now. 

His 2015 book The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from A Secret World and his new book The Power of Trees: How Ancient Forests Can Save Us if We Let Them. 

I ordered both. 

Review of his new book; looks like trees are much wiser than us. They raise their kids to be anti-fragile plus they are anti-coddling.  

The Hidden Life argued that trees are social and sensate. The Power of Trees shows that they can be our saviours. But it’s terribly hard to let ourselves be saved. We think we can be the authors of our salvation. We are doers by constitution. Of course, there are things we could and should be doing, but in terms of forestry practice, often what’s billed as part of the solution is part of the problem.

Anyone who has planted a tree in their garden knows that it has a profound effect – it makes your garden cooler in summer and warmer in winter. Forests do that on a grand scale. A deciduous forest in summer is often as cool as a lake. Berlin is 15C warmer than the ancient forests nearby. The coniferous monocultures so beloved of commercial foresters are not such good coolers: they’re up to 8C warmer than their deciduous counterparts.

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Crucially, trees learn from their past traumas and produce offspring programmed with those lessons. Trees that have narrowly escaped drought are more prudent in the future: they slow their growth and ration their drinking. They have two main methods for influencing their children: the first is good parenting. Mother trees regulate their children’s growth by changing the rate at which they drip-feed them with sugar solution through root networks, and children growing in the rain and light shadow of the mother won’t drink heavily or overeat. The second is epigenetic inheritance, which enables useful behavioural traits to be passed on fast to future generations.

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If we don’t learn to leave the trees alone, the trees will eventually be alone anyway – but without us.

One Of The Big Causal Factors For Idealogy

And this is also the best sentence I have read in a while: 

Commitment to abstractions leads to intolerance of reality 

You can read more here

Bingo! Such a simple but yet powerful truth. 

Hence, don't read too much subjective philosophy (consciousness for starters), subjective matter where we personally cannot find truth (is there is god there, multi-verse), sport fanatics et al., 

I have seen people my entire adult life so far happening to good people. 

No question, when I was younger, I was drawn to abstractions since it felt thrilling, human longing for certain answers to irrelevant questions, to control randomness and uncertainty in life. 

Then as I grew older, I changed my mind. 

Tarun Nayar Coaxes Melodic Music From Fungi (Mushrooms)!

Not surprisingly, they can also make some interesting music, with a little help from Canadian musician Tarun Nayar, the mastermind who makes nature-inspired electronic music under the name Modern Biology.

Many of Nayar's beautiful music pieces, which he calls "organismic music," are created by recording the bioelectric pulses from living plants and fungi, which are then overlaid with Nayar's original compositions. By using a variety of modular synthesizers and small jump cables gently hooked up to fungi, Nayar is able to coax some of the most fascinating sounds out of these organisms.

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As a musician, Nayar gives mesmerizing live performances both indoors and out, and given the nature of working with living organisms, there have been moments where unexpected things have happened, as he recounts one surprising incident:

"I was at a retreat center called Hollyhock last summer, playing mushroom music right before [renowned mycologist] Paul Stamets spoke. I was tapped into a red belted polypore mushroom, which was being rather quiet. Its bioelectricity hadn't changed in some time. I started talking about how dangerous the idea of non-human consciousness is to our notions of human exceptionalism, and the mushroom just lit up! It went nuts. The whole audience was laughing and cheering as the mushroom joined the conversation. This was actually captured on video and you can find it on the Internet. It was wild."

- More Here