Future Of The Human Climate Niche

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- More here from Sante Fe Institute 

Happy Birthday Fluffy

Happy Birthday my love! Fluffy is four today. 

Max and I are one and the same; where he began and where I end is and will always be indistinguishable. 

Fluffy is quintessential Montaigne's cat that humans long to emulate in vain. No one but her teaches me every day the lessons on what is to be free, how to be playful with no desires, how to be happy and content simultaneously and how to live life inside an eternal wonder. 

Officially, she is the only gal I chased in my life and eventually won her heart :-)!

I have no words but gratitude not only to Fluffy but Montaigne to open my mind to bring Fluffy into my life.  

 

The Tragic Romance of the Nostalgic Western Liberal

 Anne Applebaum opens her new book, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, with a scene on the long winter night of Dec. 31, 1999, in a newly restored family house somewhere in the deep Polish countryside, where a big party is set to celebrate the coming of the new millennium. The closing scene is in the same house 20 years later, where the author has been spending the coronavirus lockdown.

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What Applebaum’s book makes clear is that for people like the Hungarian historian Maria Schmidt or National Review editor-at-large John O’Sullivan or the vocal Trump supporter Laura Ingraham, liberal principles were valued only because they were an effective instrument for destroying communism. When this goal was achieved, values like free media and the division of powers started to be viewed as a threat to Western civilization and traditional Christian values. The new prophets of illiberalism used all their talent to persuade their societies that the rights of others were a threat to their own rights and that the liberal system of checks and balances was not a way to preserve individuals’ freedoms but an instrument for elites to abuse the will of the people.

Applebaum is a very good writer; her style is lucid, and her arguments are bracing. This has made her one of the most powerful voices of the anti-populist resistance. But the strength of her new book is not so much in exposing the authoritarian nature of populists in power but in revealing the intellectual hollowness of the anti-communist consensus.

In his review of Jacob Heilbrunn’s history of neoconservatism They Knew They Were Right, the author and journalist Timothy Noah sharply observed: “To be neoconservative is to bear almost daily witness to the resurrection of Adolf Hitler.” In Applebaum’s much more liberal and optimistic version, to be neoconservative is to bear almost daily witness to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Applebaum’s political identity was made by her admiration for the moral courage of East European dissidents and her belief in the potential of the United States to make the world a better place.

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But the book’s subtitle “The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism” is rather misleading. Unlike communism, authoritarianism is not an ideology. Populists, unlike communists or fascists, do not dream about a “new man” who will be born of their revolution. What drives intellectual supporters of Trump and Hungary’s Viktor Orban is not some new vision of society but pathological hate toward liberalism. The central and most bitter insight of the book is that Applebaum’s ex-friends are not sorry for the breakup of their relationship with her. The central and most bitter insight of the book is that Applebaum’s ex-friends are not sorry for the breakup of their relationship with her—in fact, they feel liberated from partying with people like her in the first place. For the nationalist-populist, 1989 stands for a victory that was subsequently lost—and they blame people like Applebaum, and her liberal peers, for turning the victory into a defeat.

Populists’ rejection of the post-Cold War world has its distinctive Polish, British, and American versions, but what is common for the new anti-liberals is the idea of a stolen victory. In Poland, supporters of the Law and Justice party found it unbearable that ex-communists turned out to be among the winners of the fall of communism. In the United Kingdom, the West’s victory in the Cold War revealed the decline of Britain’s influence. In the United States, Trump’s supporters are convinced that not the West but communist China is the real winner of the Cold War. Intellectuals who support anti-liberal counterrevolution feel deeply betrayed by history. They swim in pessimism and despair even when they win elections.

- More Here

What Made Richard Feynman One of the Most Admired Educators in the World

Gates points to Feynman's lecture series "The Character of Physical Law, a great example of how he could explain things in a fun and interesting way to everyone. And he was very funny."

That sense of humor complemented a sense of rigor: "Dr. Feynman used a tough process on himself, where if he didn't really understand something, he would push himself," asking questions like "Do I understand this boundary case?" and "Do I understand why we don't do it this other way?" Such an effort to find the gaps in and failures of one's own understanding may sound familiar, fundamental as it is to Feynman's "notebook" technique of learning.

You only know how well you understand something when you explain it to someone else; many of us realize this, but Feynman lived it. The depth of his own understanding allowed him never to be boring: "Feynman made science so fascinating," Gates says, "He reminded us how much fun it is," and in so doing emphasized that "everybody can have a pretty full understanding. He's such a joyful example of how we'd all like to learn and think about things." Though the term "science communicator" wasn't in wide use during Feynman's lifetime, he played the role to near-perfection. 

- More Here

Happy Birthday Garph!

Graph is 3 years old today. He came home on 07/20/2019 when he almost 2 years old.

Although he spent only a few months with Max, he always used to sit next to him during his weakest times.

              Garph sitting next to Max

I call him the little Buddha.. he has gone through so much pain in his tender age but his calmness, tenderness, and other emotions that I cannot even comprehend have already taught me so much than any book has ever. The crazy thing is he looks so ferocious and badass but he acts completely opposite of his looks. Talk about stupid human perception.

Happy Birthday my love. Thank you for coming into my life.

Good!

and Jacko has the best narration of Kipling's poem If:

If you can keep your head when all about you   

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   

    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;   

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

    And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   

    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

    If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes to Die - Ed Yong

There’s a joke about immunology, which Jessica Metcalf of Princeton recently told me. An immunologist and a cardiologist are kidnapped. The kidnappers threaten to shoot one of them, but promise to spare whoever has made the greater contribution to humanity. The cardiologist says, “Well, I’ve identified drugs that have saved the lives of millions of people.” Impressed, the kidnappers turn to the immunologist. “What have you done?” they ask. The immunologist says, “The thing is, the immune system is very complicated …” And the cardiologist says, “Just shoot me now.”

The thing is, the immune system is very complicated. Arguably the most complex part of the human body outside the brain, it’s an absurdly intricate network of cells and molecules that protect us from dangerous viruses and other microbes. These components summon, amplify, rile, calm, and transform one another: Picture a thousand Rube Goldberg machines, some of which are aggressively smashing things to pieces. Now imagine that their components are labeled with what looks like a string of highly secure passwords: CD8+, IL-1β, IFN-γ. Immunology confuses even biology professors who aren’t immunologists—hence Metcalf’s joke.

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There are also preliminary hints that some people might have a degree of preexisting immunity against the new coronavirus. Four independent groups of scientists—based in the U.S., Germany, the Netherlands, and Singapore—have now found that 20 to 50 percent of people who were never exposed to SARS-CoV-2 nonetheless have significant numbers of T-cells that can recognize it. These “cross-reactive” cells likely emerged when their owners were infected by other, related coronaviruses, including the four mild ones that cause a third of common colds, and the many that infect other animals.

But Farber cautions that having these cross-reactive T-cells “tells you absolutely nothing about protection.” It’s intuitive to think they would be protective, but immunology is where intuition goes to die. The T-cells might do nothing. There’s an outside chance that they could predispose people to more severe disease. We can’t know for sure without recruiting lots of volunteers, checking their T-cell levels, and following them over a long period of time to see who gets infected—and how badly.

Even if the cross-reactive cells are beneficial, remember that T-cells act by blowing up infected cells. As such, they’re unlikely to stop people from getting infected in the first place, but might reduce the severity of those infections. Could this help to explain why, politics aside, some countries had an easier time with COVID-19 than others? Could it explain why some people incur only mild symptoms? “You can go pretty crazy pretty quickly with the speculations,” says Crotty, who co-led one of the studies that identified these cross-reactive cells. “A lot of people have latched onto this and said it could explain everything. Yes, it could! Or it could explain nothing. It’s a really frustrating situation to be in.”

“I wish it wasn’t,” he adds, “but the immune system is really complicated.”

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Taia Wang of Stanford is a little less sanguine. She tells me several studies, including upcoming ones, consistently show that many people seem to lose their neutralizing antibodies after a couple of months. “If you asked me to guess six months ago, I would have thought that they would last longer,” she says. “The durability is not what we’d like.”

But “the fact that you don’t have measurable antibodies doesn’t mean that you aren’t immune,” Iwasaki says. T-cells could continue to provide adaptive immunity even if the antibodies tap out. Memory B-cells, if they persist, could quickly replenish antibody levels even if the current stocks are low. And, crucially, we still don’t know how many neutralizing antibodies you need to be protected against COVID-19.

Wang agrees: “There’s a common notion that antibody quantity is all that matters, but it’s more complicated than that,” she says. “The quality of the antibody is as important.” Quality might be defined by which part of the virus the antibodies stick to, or how well they stick. Indeed, many people who recover from COVID-19 have low levels of neutralizing antibodies overall, but some of them neutralize very well.  “Quantity is easier to measure,” Wang adds. “There are more ways to characterize quality and we don’t know which ones are relevant.” (This problem is even worse for T-cells, which are much harder than antibodies to isolate and analyze.) 

- More here from Ed Yong; if you are confused with immunology then you are on the right track! You now understand what complex systems are all about.

Like Humans, Dogs Process Intonation & Word Meaning In Separate Brain Regions

"Our findings suggest that dogs, similarly to humans, process emotional prosodic cues in spoken words at lower levels (subcortical and near-primary cortical regions, reflected in both short-term and long-term adaptation effects) and lexical information at higher levels (near-primary and secondary auditory cortical regions, reflected in long-term adaptation effects) of the auditory processing hierarchy. Prosody processing was thus subcortically independent of lexical cues, prosody influenced lexical processing in a near-primary cortical region and, finally, lexical processing was independent of prosodic cues in a secondary auditory cortical region."

- More here and full paper here

Dinosaur's Cancerous Bone From 77 Million Years Ago

A collaboration led by the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and McMaster University has led to the discovery and diagnosis of an aggressive malignant bone cancer — an osteosarcoma — for the first time ever in a dinosaur. No malignant cancers (tumors that can spread throughout the body and have severe health implications) have ever been documented in dinosaurs previously. The paper was published on August 3rd in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet Oncology.

The cancerous bone in question is the fibula (lower leg bone) from Centrosaurus apertus, a horned dinosaur that lived 76 to 77 million years ago. Originally discovered in Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta in 1989, the badly malformed end of the fossil was originally thought to represent a healing fracture. Noting the unusual properties of the bone on a trip to the Royal Tyrrell Museum in 2017, Dr. David Evans, James and Louise Temerty Endowed Chair of Vertebrate Palaeontology from the ROM, and Drs. Mark Crowther, Professor of Pathology and Molecular Medicine, and Snezana Popovic, an histopathologist, both at McMaster University, decided to investigate it further using modern medical techniques. They assembled a team of multidisciplinary specialists and medical professionals from fields including pathology, radiology, orthopedic surgery, and palaeopathology. The team re-evaluated the bone and approached the diagnosis similarly to how it would be approached for the diagnosis of an unknown tumor in a human patient.

“Diagnosis of aggressive cancer like this in dinosaurs has been elusive and requires medical expertise and multiple levels of analysis to properly identify,” says Crowther, who is also a Royal Patrons Circle donor and volunteer at the ROM. “Here, we show the unmistakable signature of advanced bone cancer in 76-million-year-old horned dinosaur — the first of its kind. It’s very exciting.”

- More Here

Jeremy Adelman Revisits Albert O. Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty On The Occasion Of The Book’s 50th Anniversary

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty was influenced by all of these inputs: Hirschman’s misjudgment in Nigeria; Moscovici’s analysis of the power of small groups that speak loudly; and Nader and the consumer movement. The book is like a road map through the intricacies of disappointment. What to do when your government stops listening, your car dealer sells you lemons, or the local public school cuts after-school music to save some money? For Hirschman, there were three options. One was exit. You could leave your country. (Hirschman was familiar with this option. He had fled tyranny, war, and intolerance on many occasions, starting in the spring of 1933, when he fled the Nazi takeover in Germany at age 17.) You could give up on Chevy and buy a Ford. You could withdraw from the public school and opt for a private one. In our day, examples of exit include General Mattis’s resignation from Trump’s cabinet, the decision by the majority of Britons to part ways with the European Union, and the flight of 70 million refugees worldwide from persecution and obscene neglect.

Another option was voice: expressing anger in a letter to the editor or making a complaint to the sales rep or, as many of the students at Stanford were doing the year Hirschman was in residence, protesting the Vietnam War. When demonstrators clashed in the streets of Paris and outside the Democratic Party convention in Chicago in 1968, or marched on Washington in the summer of 1963 to push for equal rights for African Americans, they exercised what Hirschman called voice: proclaiming one’s discontent loudly and publicly, in the hope that rulers got the message and changed their ways. In our day, we see voice when citizens hang a banner over a police station in Seattle declaring, “This Space Is Now Property of the Seattle People,” or pressure the governor of New York to make public the records of abusive police officers, or take to the streets of Beirut to denounce a corrupt and kleptocratic regime.

There was a third option: stay loyal. Hirschman didn’t think too much about loyalty. It wasn’t really an active option, more like a default setting. To this day, it remains the weakest conceptual leg of his famous tripod.

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Hirschman also noted that deaf and overgrown institutions were vulnerable to “laziness, flabbiness, and decay.” He contended that small and medium-size countries were more inclined to adapt and reform to keep exit-tempted citizens at home. The Dutch Republic had to pay attention to its citizens in early modern Europe or risk losing its painters and patricians. Bigger powers with more resources could afford to tune out for longer, but the consequences were never too far behind. Just look to France, where pent-up grievances eventually exploded in revolution.

People with choices can wield stronger voices. What prevents institutions from going the French route is their ability to listen, their tolerance or support for voice, and, ultimately, the fact that they cannot close off the exits. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty can be read as a case against monopoly, with the goal of not only protecting consumers—as Nader proclaimed—but keeping ruling institutions responsive.

- More Here. Hirschman is one of my favorite people and his book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States has timeless insights.

Interview with Jane Goodall

Phillips: And yet the world is eating more and more meat.

Goodall: Well, we have to change attitudes. Yes, we’re eating more meat, but at the same time the number of people who are becoming vegetarian and vegan is increasing.

Phillips: It reminds me of one of your early discoveries of chimpanzees eating meat. Do you think that had an implication or any bearing on the human diet?

Goodall: Humans are not carnivorous, we are omnivorous. And there is a big difference. Our gut is not like a carnivore’s guts, which is short to get rid of the meat before it goes bad and inside your gut. We have a vegetarian gut, an omnivore’s diet. This means our gut is much longer to get all the goodness out of leaves and all the other things we eat.

So when you think of chimps — yes, they hunt, and they seem to love hunting. But it’s been estimated that meat occupies only about 2% of their diets. That’s just for some individuals. Others hardly ever eat meat at all.

Phillips: How can we best get the message across that a vegetarian diet is the most sustainable for the planet, and good for animal welfare?

Goodall: We’re working with young people from kindergarten through university, now in more than 50 countries, growing all the time. It involves young people of all ages choosing projects to make the world better for people, animals and the environment.

They are changing the way their parents think, and the vegetarian ethic is very strong in many of them. So I say you’ve got to change the mindset and children help to change the behaviour of their parents.

Phillips: That’s a tremendous piece of advocacy, given the huge concerns there are about animals’ contribution to climate change and other dangers they pose to our water supplies and the quality of our land.

Do you think there should be any legal control of the use of animals for intensive animal production?

Goodall: Yes, I do. I think it should be banned. A) for the tremendous suffering caused to the animals; B) for the harm to the environment; and C) for the harm to human health. There should be legislation that limits or bans these intensive farms.

- More Here

Resilience Requires Just Ordinary Magic

The three word summary of the research on resilience = "Other People Matter"!