Max’s little sister turned 10 today.
Yes, I sighed after typing the above sentence… life moving so fast… what an amazing life Max and Fluffy gave me :-)
Happy Birthday my love! I love you!
In the 21st century, the people beside you before you die are most of them you would meet for the first time a few days ago.
That is not the weirdest thing.
The people who made you live so long are people who you never heard of leave alone even seen them.
If you are overfitting time, love and whatever towards your family and friends; you don’t understand gratitude.
Having a life long awareness and gratitude for millions of living beings (not just humans) who gave you life, enabled you to experience the richness and beauty of life, and little-mudane things that made your life livable.
Darwin’s entangled web is your life. And mine and Max’s too.
My little Buddha turned 9!
He came home on July 30th, 2019 after I met him at Max’s vet during Max’s cancer treatment.
On one of the worst days of my life, a beautiful gift of life, Garphy came into my life :-)
Life is impossibly surprising - the timeless lesson Max taught me a long time ago:
Embrace Serendipity!
Happy Birthday Garphy!
Wilson’s Law, which states that prioritizing the acquisition of knowledge and intelligence will ultimately lead one to financial success.
What Wilson Law doesn’t say is financial success is only a third order effect.
The primary effect is that one develops a continuous sense of awe and wonder for all things on this planet and beyond.
The second order effect is natural understanding the preciousness of life and gratitude for every little moment and things.
That is a gift anyone can inherit!
One’s culture, religion, family, sex, ethnicity et al., inherently creates a predictable stereotype and traits. These are so easy to observe and catch in the moment as and when they show up.
It goes without saying most of these stereotypes and traits are bad.
The value is to understand this is real, biological, and work towards slowly eliminating them. It takes months or even years but the good news is they can be eradicated.
And then looking back one day, one would feel an immense sense of freedom.
They blow like green scarves from trees, crust rocks, frost fences, paint bark, and glow on roofs, tombstones, blue tarps — really anything that will stay still for a bit can be a swell home for a lichen.
Lichens delight, confound and inspire. A thing unto themselves on the tree of life, they have puzzled scientists for more than a century as to just what they even are. One of earth’s most adaptable forms of life, lichens live on every continent and have passed multiple tests of their ability to survive in outer space, even for months.
Beyond their persistence, lichens are productive: They bind and build soil. Work as bioindicators of air pollution and climate change. Produce nitrogen from thin air that feeds the forest floor and wildlife. Hummingbirds and bushtits gather lichens to wind into their nests. Ungulates, including caribou, elk and deer, subsist on lichens in winter, when other foods are scarce.
Lichens provide dyes, food and medicines for people, too, with their antimicrobial, antifungal and immune-support attributes deployed in traditional herbal medicines. Extracts of lichens also are used in deodorant, toothpaste, salves, extracts, teas and perfume.
Self-sufficient, lichens have no roots, no vascular tissue, make their own food and don’t need pollinators to reproduce.
[—]
Quiet and immobile as they may seem, they are actually articulate storytellers. The presence — or absence — of a lichen species, and changes in either, can indicate a shift in air quality and narrate the march of climate change.
And for all their fixedness — lichens are remarkably slow-growing — they are not passive. Some lichens wage mighty battles to define their boundaries, deploying chemical warfare, visible in a black line around their borders, to keep other lichens or their mortal enemy, moss, from encroaching, and even growing right on top of them, snuffing them out.
[—]
It was Spribille who revealed that lichens are not a twosome at all, but actually a ménage à trois, with a hitherto overlooked partner — for some 140 years.
Spribille and his collaborators shared their discovery in a 2016 scientific paper published in Science. Their genetic analysis found that lichens aren’t just the result of a single fungus and a photosynthesizing partner (be it an alga, a cyanobacteria, or both.) They found there also is a second fungus, a yeast, in the mix. Follow-up DNA analysis by Spribille and his colleagues — of 52 lichen genera from six continents — also detected the second fungus. The initial breakout from the one-lichen-one fungus paradigm was not a one-off.
Scientists are still exploring whether the yeast is truly a symbiotic contributor, or just along for the ride. But even discovering its presence was a shocker, revealing lichens to be ecosystems unto themselves, with complexities that scientists are still trying to understand.
“We underestimated lichens for a very long time,” Spribille tells me. “It is not so much that people in the past got it wrong, as that they were missing a part of the picture, with the tools they had available to them, before the advent of genomics and modern molecular DNA sequencing.”
[—]
“Why wouldn’t they matter?” Goward says of lichens. “There are animals that feed on them, reindeer and caribou would not exist without them, they are beautiful, they color our world, they grow where other things don’t grow, they can live where nothing else can, they have the capacity to grow everywhere.”
And they are that example in nature in which one plus one equals … three. Perhaps that is why lichens have challenged science for so long.
“Science is reductionist,” Goward said. “The study of biology reduces life to its parts, the whole disappears. Lichens challenge that.”
To him, though, it goes much deeper. Lichens provide a window to see how in life things really work.
“It is still gobsmacking, the idea that lichens are a portal through which you look in one direction, and what you look at is the organism, and you turn around and what you see is the ecosystem, and they are a variation on the same thing.”
[—]
The way forward to a better future is an empathic relationship with the living world, Goward says, a future in which we recognize and honor our connections to the earth, and one another. Lichens, he continues, are our ancient mentors in this, reliable truth tellers about how the world really works.
“You can see the whole world in lichens.”
- More Here
Two thousand years earlier, a North African king named Jugurtha rode out of Rome having just bribed a tribune to shut down his own corruption hearing — then arranged a murder while he was in town, for which Rome’s punishment was a polite request to leave. Looking back at the city, he delivered the greatest exit line in ancient history: “a city for sale and doomed to perish if it finds a buyer!”
That line gets quoted as an indictment of the people who sold Rome. It is worse than that. It is an indictment of the buyers.
Jugurtha wasn’t indicting the Senate for being evil. He was indicting them for being cheap. He walked into the mightiest republic in the Mediterranean, expecting resistance. He found a clearance sale.
There is a line. Cross it, and the arithmetic flips. The people gaming the system start to outnumber the people holding it up. Every honest person left standing starts to feel like a sucker. Then that person stops being honest, which moves the line again. Then the next person adjusts. Then the next.
A city can carry a certain number of crooks just as a body can carry a certain number of parasites. It gets pale. It itches. It makes bad decisions. But it lives. Stable societies accumulate these parasitic coalitions — cartels, lobbies, insiders — the way ships accumulate barnacles, each one small, each one rational, until the hull can’t move.
That is the asshole threshold.
Humans have been walking up to this line for three thousand years. Most societies that crossed it died. But a few — a strange, stubborn few — stood at the edge, looked down, and did something that shouldn’t be possible: they turned around. America itself did it once, a little over a century ago, when the country was more corrupt, more violent, and more for-sale than it is now. So what changed?
[---]
Societies don’t collapse because millions pick up weapons. They collapse because millions approve and normalize cruelty.
- More Here
Since the movie inception came, I usually watch Nolan’s movies the very first day. Last night, I watched his latest movie Odyssey.
From the very first scene I was waiting for Argos and his bond with Odysseus. Although, the movie didn’t show too much about this dog-human bond but that scene when Argos dies did make my eyes wet.
Max and I are a small drop in this ocean of immense bond between humans and animals.
The movie is beautiful and conveys an important message on the vanity of war, religion, ideology, and the bottomless pit of human desires.
Matt Damon playing Odysseus has done a fantastic job especially the final scenes and dialogue which starts with:
"I had a lot of time to think…”
One of the best pieces I read so far this year.
Good thinking is about pushing past your current understanding and reaching the thought behind the thought. It often requires breaking old ideas. This is easier to do when the ideas are as rigid as they get on the page. In a fluid medium like thought or conversation, you can always go, “Well, I didn’t mean it like that” or rely on the fact that your short-term memory is too limited for you to notice the contradiction between what you are saying now and what you said 12 minutes ago.
When I write, I get to observe the transition from this fluid mode of thinking to the rigid. As I type, I’m often in a fluid mode—writing at the speed of thought. I feel confident about what I’m saying. But as soon as I stop, the thoughts solidify, rigid on the page, and, as I read what I’ve written, I see cracks spreading through my ideas. What seemed right in my head fell to pieces on the page.
Seeing your ideas crumble can be a frustrating experience, but it is the point if you are writing to think. You want it to break. It is in the cracks the light shines in.
When I write, I push myself to make definite positive claims. Ambiguity allows thought to remain fluid on the page, floating into a different meaning when put under pressure. This makes it harder to push your thinking deeper. By making clear and sharp claims, I reveal my understanding so that I—or the person I’m writing to—can see the state of my knowledge and direct their feedback to the point where it will help my thinking improve.
[—]
Once I stretch my understanding thin in writing, I often see holes right away. I start correcting myself and discarding ideas already while typing. I cut ideas that are obviously flawed. I rewrite what feels ambiguous to make it more precise, concrete, unhedged, and true to my understanding.
The flaws I see immediately, however, are only the more superficial flaws. The deeper patterns take a longer time to emerge—because they are further from my established thoughts and so are harder to articulate.
Often, they occur first as subtle emotional cues. As I reread a passage, I notice a slight tension across my chest or my eyes fog over. For some reason, it doesn’t feel right. There is something wrong here.
These subtle feelings are easy to dismiss (“Eh, words are slippery, I mean something slightly different . . . there is no reason to obsess about this”). But in my experience, it is these subtler problems that tend to open a path beyond my current understanding. I learned this from my wife, Johanna, who will often sit with a draft for several hours, not writing or editing, but simply articulating why something feels off to her. Our best essays have come out of the things she surfaced during those sessions.
[---]
The emotional tone of these questions is, in my head, lovingly curious; I’m not trying to put myself down. I’m out to kill ideas. I want to help them evolve and spill forth more insight. Often this dialogue ends with me changing my mind about several premises and coming to a different conclusion, but the original idea remains the seed—no less valuable for having been proven wrong. It takes creativity and boldness to leap out and form a conclusion, and the part that criticizes must understand how dependent it is on the part that throws ideas at the wall. It is often easier to criticize than it is to synthesize a new position.
[---]
Counterexamples are useful in two ways. Either you find a counterexample that a) proves one of the premises wrong but b) does not change your mind about the conclusion. Lakatos calls this a local (and non-global) counterexample. This means there is something wrong with your explanation. Perhaps you need to change that part of the explanation? Or perhaps you can simply drop it, making the mental model simpler and more general? Local counterexamples help you improve your explanation and get a better understanding.
It is terrible that there are no longer enormous migrating flocks of passenger pigeons in the United States or freshwater dolphin pods in China … what is even more terrible is that this is no longer a world for them.
- What Is ‘De-Extinction’ Really For?
