The Coincidence Project

In February 1973, Dr. Bernard Beitman found himself hunched over a kitchen sink in an old Victorian house in San Francisco, choking uncontrollably. He wasn’t eating or drinking, so there was nothing to cough up, and yet for several minutes he couldn’t catch his breath or swallow.

The next day his brother called to tell him that 3,000 miles away, in Wilmington, Del., their father had died. He had bled into his throat, choking on his own blood at the same time as Beitman’s mysterious episode.

Overcome with awe and emotion, Beitman became fascinated with what he calls meaningful coincidences. After becoming a professor of psychiatry at the University of Missouri-Columbia, he published several papers and two books on the subject and started a nonprofit, the Coincidence Project, to encourage people to share their coincidence stories.

“What I look for as a scientist and a spiritual seeker are the patterns that lead to meaningful coincidences,” said Beitman, 80, from his home in Charlottesville, Va. “So many people are reporting this kind of experience. Understanding how it happens is part of the fun.”

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Beitman defines a coincidence as “two events coming together with apparently no causal explanation.” They can be life-changing, like his experience with his father, or comforting, such as when a loved one’s favorite song comes on the radio just when you are missing them most.

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People who describe themselves as spiritual or religious report noticing more meaningful coincidences than those who do not, and people are more likely to experience coincidences when they are in a heightened emotional state — perhaps under stress or grieving.

The most popular explanation among survey respondents for mysterious coincidences: God or fate. The second explanation: randomness. The third is that our minds are connected to one another. The fourth is that our minds are connected to the environment.

For Beitman, no single explanation suffices. “Some say God, some say universe, some say random and I say ‘Yes,’” he said. “People want things to be black and white, yes or no, but I say there is mystery.”

He’s particularly interested in what he’s dubbed simulpathity — feeling a loved one’s pain at a distance, as he believes he did with his father. Science can’t currently explain how it might occur, but in his books he offers some nontraditional ideas, such as the existence of “the psychosphere,” a kind of mental atmosphere through which information and energy can travel between two people who are emotionally close though physically distant.

In his new book published in September, “Meaningful Coincidences: How and Why Synchronicity and Serendipity Happen,” he shares the story of a young man who intended to end his life by the shore of an isolated lake. While he sat crying in his car, another car pulled up and his brother got out.

When the young man asked for an explanation, the brother said he didn’t know why he got in the car, where he was going, or what he would do when he got there. He just knew he needed to get in the car and drive.

- More Here

Mistletoes & Futility Of Models Predicting Complex Systems

Can you give an example where these changes are happening now?

My colleague, Francisco Fontúrbel, works in southern Chile. Where mistletoe is around, because it’s a reliable nectar source, the southernmost hummingbird (Sephanoides sephaniodes) becomes resident. They pollinate the mistletoes, but they also pollinate all sorts of other plants. After drought, mistletoes die, and those hummingbirds become migrants: They pack up, they follow the nectar further and further north. One study showed mistletoe deaths doubling in the dry year of 2015, and visits from hummingbirds dropped.

When the hummingbirds leave, the local plants don’t have pollinators anymore. This is predicted to trigger a community-wide cascade of extinctions, although that hasn’t been documented yet.

In Australia, large-scale research shows that mistletoe is super-important during drought as a sort of last-ditch nectar resource. But then, that same work shows that drought kills many mistletoes: In the summer of 2009, for example, there was a prolonged heat wave in Melbourne, including the hottest day ever recorded — and nearly 90 percent of a monitored set of mistletoes died. That caused a crash in bird numbers and insect-eating animals.

It’s not across the board. Some tropical systems, some temperate forest systems, are not showing those early warnings of system failure, these mistletoe deaths. But in many arid zones, and in some southern forests at higher latitudes, we’re already seeing food webs breaking down. We don’t want to ring the alarm bells and say the sky is falling, but it’s not looking good.

Are there any models yet to show where this may lead in the future?

No. There’s just so much complexity in terms of the interplay between the mistletoe plant’s natural enemies, pollinators and the host’s seed-dispersal mechanisms. We don’t have a handle on those interactions. We can do really quick-and-dirty models, but it’s just guesswork. They’re not nearly detailed enough to come up with meaningful predictions.

This seems to be a big problem I hear from many scientists: With biodiversity loss and climate change, there are so many unknowns and so many interactions, we just don’t know how badly things can go wrong, or how quickly.

Yeah, that’s right.

- Mistletoes in a warming world

How Wolf Became Dog

When modern humans arrived in Europe perhaps 45,000 years ago, they encountered the gray wolf and other types of wolves, including the megafaunal wolf, which pursued large game such as mammoths. By that time wolves had already proved themselves among the most successful and adaptable species in the canid family, having spread across Eurasia to Japan and into the Middle East and North America. They were not confined to a single habitat type but flourished in tundra, steppelands, deserts, forests, coastal regions and the high altitude of the Tibetan Plateau. And they competed with the newly arrived humans for the same prey—mammoths, deer, aurochs, woolly rhinoceroses, antelopes and horses. In spite of this competition, one type of wolf, perhaps a descendant of a megafaunal wolf, apparently began living close to people. For many years scientists concurred on the basis of small portions of the genome that this species was the modern gray wolf (Canis lupus) and that this canid alone gave rise to dogs.

But last January geneticists discovered that this long-held “fact” was wrong. Repeated interbreeding between gray wolves and dogs, which share 99.9 percent of their DNA, had produced misleading signals in the earlier studies. Such consorting between the two species continues today: wolves with black coats received the gene for that color from a dog; shepherd dogs in Georgia's Caucasus Mountains mate so often with the local wolves that hybrid ancestors are found in both species' populations, and between 2 and 3 percent of the sampled animals are first-generation hybrids. (Building on the admixture theme, in June researchers writing in Current Biology reported on the sequencing of DNA from a 35,000-year-old wolf fossil from Siberia. This species appears to have contributed DNA to high-latitude dogs such as huskies through ancient interbreeding.)

Analyzing whole genomes of living dogs and wolves, last January's study revealed that today's Fidos are not the descendants of modern gray wolves. Instead the two species are sister taxa, descended from an unknown ancestor that has since gone extinct. “It was such a long-standing view that the gray wolf we know today was around for hundreds of thousands of years and that dogs derived from them,” says Robert Wayne, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We're very surprised that they're not.” Wayne led the first genetic studies proposing the ancestor-descendant relationship between the two species and more recently was one of the 30 co-authors of the latest study, published in PLOS Genetics, that debunked that notion.

- More Here

Did Eating Only Meat Lead Neanderthals's Demise?

For the last two decades, advances in molecular biology have deepened archaeologists’ understanding of early human diets. The cool conditions in Northern Europe, such as France and Germany, help preserve collagen in fossil bone. With a technique called stable isotope analysis, we can recover minute amounts of carbon and nitrogen from the collagen in early human bones and find out where the protein they ate came from. Isotopes are groups of atoms belonging to the same element, but they have different masses. Studies of these bones’ isotopes have shown Neanderthals in Northern Europe got 80–90 percent of their protein from animals. That’s up there with the wolves and hyenas. In the arid southern parts of Europe, we’re not so lucky. Collagen in fossil bone easily disintegrates in warmer climates, taking with it the clues to southern Neanderthals’ diets.

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The zinc level in carnivores’ bones is lower than those of their prey. The difference is not affected by age, sex, or decay over time. Zinc ratios can be measured from samples as small as 1 milligram of bone. Even these tiny amounts allow an accurate assessment of an animal’s place in the food chain when they were alive.

The recent study’s analysis of zinc from the tooth enamel of a Neanderthal who lived and died around 150,000 years ago in the Spanish Pyrenees gives new insights into the diet of ancient humans. Zinc isotopes were analyzed from 43 teeth of 12 animal species living in a grassland around the Los Moros I Cave in Catalonia, Spain. These included carnivores such as wolf, hyena, and dhole (also known as mountain wolf); omnivorous cave bears; and herbivores including ibex, red deer, horse, and rabbit. The results brought to life a food web of the Pleistocene steppe, a system of interlocking food chains from plants up to the top carnivores. The zinc in the Neanderthal’s tooth had by far the lowest zinc value in the food web, revealing they were a top-level carnivore.

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Isotopes taken from sites across Europe from remains of the H. sapiens groups who inherited Pleistocene Eurasia from the Neanderthals reveal they had broader dietary range. Plants, birds, and fish were main courses for these early humans. The Pleistocene was the grassland-steppe ecosystem that dominated Siberia during the Pleistocene and disappeared 10,000 years ago. It had a remarkably unstable climate and changed from dry grasslands and wet tundra to coniferous woodlands, constantly shaking up the variety and number of large herbivores grazing there. So, an omnivorous diet would have made these people far more resilient than those who relied on big game hunting. We don’t know much about what happened to Neanderthals when big game populations collapsed. If reindeer failed to show, what could they do? But with rapid progress in biomolecular science, I doubt we will have to wait long to find out. 

More Here

Max Holiday Card 2023

Holidays cards without Max by side is a constant remainder of impermanence of life.  Living in Max's Walden without him is not complete but yet he taught me live on for life is rare and precious. 

Erwin's law states that life tends to be far less well studied when we imagine it to be. 

Together, the law of anthropocentrism and Erwin's law are hard to remember in our daily lives. 

It might require a kind of daily affirmation. 

"I am large in a world of small species. 

I am multicellular in a world of single-celled species. 

I have bones in a world of boneless species. 

I am named in a world of nameless species. 

Most of what is knowable is not yet known."

- Excerpts from the book A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us about the Destiny of the Human Species by Rob Dunn

Third Year Of Eternity

Years of reading neuroscience and other stuff had instilled in me the understanding (and fear) of limits of human memory. 

It's been three years since December 20th 2019 and my fears were rightly placed. I miss Max every second. My memories are now anchored to snippets of times Max and I spent together for 13 years. Outside of those anchor's, my memory fails with an exception of serendipitous recollections. 

My last night with Max's lifeless body, we spelt together like we did for 13 years hoping my breath will give him breath. Morning came and I was the only one breathing. Eternity had already started. 

When Max was a puppy, I almost tried to freeze his DNA. There was cryogenics service available for around $10K. 

I didn't do it. Cloning Max is not the same as Max. I wanted to preserve him as Max for the rest of my life. 

So cloning Max was out of question. 

Luckily my daytime job came to rescue. 

For the past three years, I wanted to train Max's pictures using Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) and create new synthetic pictures of Max. But I couldn't muster the courage to do so. 

This month, I got the courage. This is my first attempt and I didn't try hard. 

Maybe soon I will do better models using Diffusion models and who knows what future holds? 

These new images below look like Max. They did have Max's signature smile and it made me smile.

Avatar - The Way Of The Water

Max was around the same age as Neo is now. It was just Max and I in the midst of the best times of our lives. I saw the first part of Avatar during those times. 

James Cameron movies are chick flicks wrapped around a unique brand of education and entertainment. This time empowered with 13 years of ecological knowledge,  he sets a new benchmark for himself. 

Avatar : The Way Of The Water - Yes, the movie is long, the story is ordinary (because it reality) and VFX is beautiful. 

Behind those mundane things if one knows the science behind each scene, there will be no surprises but yet one will appreciate Cameron's innate gift to educate the people through his movies. 

1. Beauty of known and mostly unknown ocean life.

2. Beyond beauty and importance of preserving the coral reefs. 

3. Cetacean intelligence. In the past decade, there has been so much humbling understanding of intelligence of Whales and Dolphins, Cameron played an important part with his documentary Secrets of the Whales. This movie brings this knowledge to life for the masses. 

4. Of course, the villains are humans. It's true on Earth and in Pandora - a metaphor for Earth 

5. And much more on the importance of the symbiotic relationship between human animal and all other non-human animals. 

Please don't watch this movie passively. Learn from it and follow it in our everyday life. 

For starters: 

• Quit eating seafood. There are startups such as Blue Nalu, Aqua Cultured Foods and Good Catch Foods are working on Mycelium (Mushroom) based Seafood.  

• Stop using plastics. Free The Ocean has great products I have started buying since Max passed away. It's not only good for ocean but also for you - the self centered human. Read this paper - The potential effects of microplastics on human health: What is known and what is unknown

• And learn from the ocean creatures who we are. After all once upon a time we lived in the ocean before crawling into land to become the current humans. Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin and What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins by Jonathan Balcombe are great books to gain rudimentary knowledge. 

James Cameron's interview with National Geography: 

We live in a shifting baseline, where the ocean as we see it today is not what it once was. The film was also an opportunity to show us what our oceans might have looked like 300, 400, 500 years ago, before we really got busy toward an industrial civilization. If people see this film, and aside from the drama of the Sully family [the film’s protagonists] and the relationships and all these big, dramatic conflicts, if they just love the underwater experience—and they love that sense of the profusion of life and the magic and mystery—then maybe it will reconnect them with what we are presently losing here on this planet.

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They also have a symbiotic culture with an intelligent species of ocean air-breathers: big animals that we would probably take a glance at and say, Oh, that’s a whale. But, of course, it’s not a whale—it’s the Pandora version, which is called a tulkun. The tulkun are actually a very advanced society, even though their advancements are all mental. They have no technology because they have no manipulating hands as we do. They rely on the Na’vi for anything that requires that kind of physical manipulation, but they’re quite advanced mentally: They have complex language, they have mathematics, they have music, and so on.

It was an interesting journey for me to do the National Geographic limited series Secrets of the Whales because that showed that the cetaceans that live here on planet Earth—the real ones—actually have a more advanced culture than we had previously thought, in terms of passing down very structured information from generation to generation. They have complex music that’s adopted by other members of the population of that species, and it travels around the world like a kind of greatest-hits album.

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The reason that I went down the path of making a series of films in the same universe is because I thought that what I needed to say artistically—to communicate with people—I could do within that framework. Obviously, shifting from the rainforest, which was the focus of the first film, to the ocean, [there] is, between the lines, a plea for the protection and conservation and celebration of our oceans. Hopefully we can turn back from a path that is putting the oceans under stress. I don’t even like to use the term “stress”: It’s used a lot in conservation, [but] if you consider fourth-stage cancer “stress,” yeah, it’s “stress.”

The coral reefs will be a thing that exists only in films in 50 to 75 years, in most places around the planet. That’s not okay. When I was a kid, I aspired to become a diver, so I could go and see this wonder and this beauty myself. And then I spent decades exploring and enjoying that world. My kids and my grandchildren won’t be able to do that. And so, it’s kind of a cri de cœur, if you want to put it that way: to remember, to celebrate and fall in love with again, and therefore remember to protect that which we’re losing.

Wisdom Of Animals, Birds, Reptiles & Insects

Drink water from the spring where horses drink. The horse will never drink bad water.

Lay your bed where the cat sleeps. The cat loves calm.

Eat the fruit that has been touched by a worm. The worm looks for ripe in the fruit

Boldly pick the mushroom on which the insects sit.

Plant the tree where the mole digs, for that is fertile land.

Build your house where the snake sits to warm itself,  for that is the stable ground that does not collapse.

Dig your fountain where the birds hide from heat. Wherever the birds stand, the water hides.

Go to sleep and wake up at the same time with the birds – you will reap all of the day's golden grains.

Eat more green – you will have strong legs and a resistant heart, like the beings of the forest.

Swim often and you will feel on earth like the fish in the water.

Look at the sky as often as possible and your thoughts will become light and clear.

Be quiet a lot, speak little – and silence will come in your heart, and your spirit will be calm and fill with peace.

- Saint Seraphim of Sarov 1754-1833

 

The Inner Lives Of Cows, Pigs & Chickens

I think I heard about Farm Sanctuary when Max was a puppy and as each year goes by, my respect for them and their work grows. Rescuing farm animals and giving them a new life is one of the best things human beings can do. 

But even they cannot rescue every animal and I always wondered about for lack of better word - economies of scale. Now they are trying to solve that issue by doing volunteer studies on the farm animals - read the whole piece here: 

And a growing body of research suggests that farmed species are brainy beings: Chickens can anticipate the future, goats appear to solicit help from humans, and pigs may pick up on one another’s emotions.

But scientists still know far less about the minds of chickens or cows than they do about those of apes or dogs, said Christian Nawroth, a scientist studying behavior and cognition at the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology in Germany. “I’m still baffled how little we know about farm animals, given the amount or the numbers that we keep,” he said.

Farm Sanctuary, which was founded in 1986, has always held that farm animals are sentient beings, even referring to its feathered and four-legged residents as “people.”

“They have their own desires, and their own wants and preferences and needs, and their own inner lives — the same way that human people do,” said Lauri Torgerson-White, the sanctuary’s director of research.

Now, the sanctuary is trying to collect enough data to convince the general public of the humanity of animals.

“Our hope,” Ms. Torgerson-White said, “is that through utilizing really rigorous methodologies, we are able to uncover pieces of information about the inner lives of farmed animals that can be used to really change hearts and minds about how these animals are used by society.”

[---]

Farm Sanctuary began not as a home for rescued animals but with a group of young activists working to expose animal cruelty at farms, stockyards and slaughterhouses.

“We lived in a school bus on a tofu farm for a couple of years,” said Gene Baur, the president and co-founder of the organization. But in the course of its investigations, the group kept stumbling upon “living animals left for dead,” he recalled. “And so we started rescuing them.”

They ultimately opened sanctuaries in New York and California, establishing educational programs and political advocacy campaigns. (They raised money, in part, by selling veggie hot dogs at Grateful Dead concerts.)

And in 2020, the organization, which now houses about 700 animals, began assembling an internal research team. The goal was to assemble more evidence that, as Mr. Baur put it, “these animals are more than just pieces of meat. There’s emotion there. There is individual personality there. There’s somebody, not something.”

The research team worked with Lori Gruen, an animal ethicist at Wesleyan University, to develop a set of ethics guidelines. The goal, Dr. Gruen explained, was to create a framework for conducting animal research “without dominance, without control, without instrumentalization.”

Among other stipulations, the guidelines prohibit invasive procedures — forbidding even blood draws unless they are medically necessary — and state that the studies must benefit the animals. And participation? It’s voluntary.

“Residents must be recognized as persons,” the guidelines state, “and always be provided with choice and control over their participation in an experimental study.”

 

Dogs May Hold Key To Treating Cancer in Humans

I have been writing about this for years now - most of the future cancer treatments for humans will be coming from dogs. 

I wasn't just blinded by Max but it's a fact that dogs don't care about sharing data. Most humans would gladly fart in public rather than share their health data. 

60 mins had a wonderful segment on the same last Sunday: 

Dogs live in our world. They get all the same diseases we do. They eat our food. They're exposed to the same environmental pollutants. But they also have all the same genes that we do. And they have mutations in those genes that make them susceptible to everything you and I get - whether it's diabetes or cancer or neuromuscular diseases. Everything humans get, dogs get.

 

Lessons From Bono On How To Be Good

This is one the uplifting piece I have read this year - How To Do Good

It was uplifting not because of a sole hero changing the world. It's about working tirelessly - plowing through bull shit, human ego, human arrogance, money et al. Working tirelessly not for self but to do good for others. 

This is how change happens. This is the wisdom the younger generation needs to learn and avoid embracing ideologically driven worldview. Otherwise soon you will forget what you started fighting for. 

Quick summary of what we are dealing with here:

• Bono - famed U2 singer who could live a gala life but choose to help Africans. It's no surprise that he is a democrat but yet he chose to work with then (2002) Republican president Bush and his team. In the process, Bono alienated most of his liberal friends (reminds me of what happened to Christopher Hitches around the same time when he supported Iraq war)
• Condoleezza Rice - She herself black but needs someone like Bono (and much more) to convince her to help African people. So called pragmatism sprinkled with right wing tribalism blinded even Rice too. 
• President Bush - I started respecting him a couple of decades ago when I learned he had helped Africans  more than any other presidents (yeah, virtue signaling democrats). 
• The Good - What good are we talking here? Making cure for AIDS affordable to Africans since we already have a cure. Its sheer brutality to watch millions die just for the sake of money. 
• Warren Buffet - Beautiful advice from Buffet via his life long understanding of human nature. 
• Americans - Thanks to Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman's anchoring bias. It's sad the nationalism motivates every nationality, not just Americans. 
• Maximus and Me - I hate politicians and politics in democracy (other models are crap). But yet, I have the deepest respect for some politicians. I mean, one must be insane to put their body through the Cortisal roller coaster; no amount of money, fame and power is worth it except the passion for doing good. Thank you from Max and I for being a decent and good human. 

I have a confession to make. Until last week, I had never heard of FTX nor its founder. Obviously, I do know the technicalities of block chain and crypto. In a rare moment last week, I felt vindicated for focusing my awareness on things that matter more than crap such as FTX. The crazy thing is most sites I read regularly did cover FTX for years but yet the Max in me subconsciously avoided it. 

I love you Max!

Read the whole piece plus I have to read Bono's memoir Surrender. 

In his memoir, Surrender, Bono recalls a fraught conversation in 2002 with Condoleezza Rice, then National Security Adviser to President George W. Bush. The next day, the president was due to launch the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA), a $5 billion aid programme for poor countries with democratic governments. Bono had agreed to stand by his side as he did so. Now he was having second thoughts.

Bono’s charity, DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa), had been lobbying the Bush administration to do something much more ambitious: to commit to funding universal access to AIDS drugs for Africans. AIDS patients in rich countries had access to these life-saving drugs, and in the West, AIDS was on its way to becoming a minor public health problem. No such drugs were available to Africans, and an epidemic was devastating the continent. In Botswana, 38% of adults were HIV positive. In Malawi, Bono had been shown around a hospital in which each bed was shared by three or four patients. Most of them were going to die. In South Africa, Prudence Mabele, one of the first women in the country to make her HIV status public, explained to Bono that in order to meet him she was missing the funeral of a family member who had died of AIDS. “I hope you are not wasting our time, Mr Bono,” she said. “Because some of us don’t have any to waste.”

Bono and his team went to the Bush White House with a plan and some trepidation. He was used to high-level meetings - this one came a few years after he lobbied G7 leaders to Drop the Debt - but the Clinton administration was a more natural partner than the current one. First, Bono managed to get Bush’s Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill onside, despite O’Neill’s deep scepticism about all aid programs. He then persuaded Jesse Helms, a powerful senator, to support the initiative, despite the fact that Helm had called AIDS a plague from God (he repented). Over a series of meetings with Condoleezza Rice, Bono convinced her not only that America had to act, but that his program represented an effective use of funds.

The president had still not made a public commitment, however, even after meeting Bono in the Oval Office. Now, Bono worried that if he showed up at the MCA launch he would be lending his celebrity aura to Bush for nothing in return. AIDS activists and others had already accused him of giving a warmongering Republican president cover for inaction. He risked looking like a puppet of the powerful.

When Bono told Rice about his fears, she made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that if he didn’t turn up the next day, that was the end of his access to the White House. You’ll just have to trust us on AIDS, she told him. Bono swallowed his doubts, took a risk, and turned up at the press conference. The activists shook their heads. Even George Soros told him, “You have sold out for a plate of lentils”. Bono thought they might be right, but he kept going. While he waited on the White House, he toured the American Midwest with U2, building support for AIDS relief in Republican heartlands. He went on Oprah to talk about it.

Digression: to be reminded of what a talented communicator Bono is, watch his Oprah interview. It’s a masterclass. He has an amazing ability to deliver his messages in crystalline phrases which go arrowing to his audience’s heart. When Oprah asks him why he cares about Africa, he makes the question personal by talking about Ireland’s historic experience of famine. Aware that his audience includes millions of churchgoers, he recalls witnessing poverty in Ethiopia and realising that although he could give money, something bigger was required: “God is not looking for alms, he’s looking for action.” He also uses a more businesslike register, of priorities and practicality: “You can’t fix every problem, but the ones that we can, we’ve got to.” He frames the core question as a simple choice: millions of people in Africa are going to die of AIDS, we have the drugs to prevent that - so why wouldn’t we?

In Surrender, Bono recounts advice from Warren Buffett: “Don’t appeal to the conscience of America. Appeal to its greatness. That’s how to get the job done.” The Oprah appearance took place a year after 9/11. Bono talks about much he loves America and how shocking it was for Americans to learn that others hate it. If American drugs save African lives, he says, it will be harder for extremists to turn Africans against us. His best answer comes when Oprah asks the hardest question: there are millions of women watching, worrying about what to put on the table for dinner this evening - what does all this have to do with them? Bono smiles and says, “You don’t have to explain to a mother that the life of a child in Africa has the same value as her child. You might have to explain that to men, but not to women.” The audience erupts with delight (including the men).

Bono was working the problem from both ends, seducing the masses and the elites at the same time, in TV studios, on arena stages, in the Oval Office and in back-offices. His entanglement with elites represented a significant risk to his reputation. He was constantly in danger of making himself very unpopular with fellow activists and with some of the public, not to mention his own bandmates.

This risk paid off. Early in 2003, President Bush made an announcement: $15 billion for AIDS relief. Until Covid-19, it was the largest ever public health intervention against a single disease, and it went overseas. Prudence Mabele’s time had not been wasted.

[---]

Bono’s style of activism is very unfashionable. Today’s generation of activists believe that brokering deals between elites is irrelevant and corrupting, a diversion from the work of “systemic change”. It is better to make a lot of noise in the media, raising the collective consciousness, inciting enough anger that politicians have no choice but to give in and do something. Do what, though? The answer is often left vague.

 

How To Discover Aliens

This is the simplest pictorial representation I have every seen plus Lisa Kaltenegger's explanation and her passion is contagious. 

The goal at the time was to compare spectra from rocky, temperate planets to what Earth’s spectrum would look like from far away, seeking conspicuous signals like a surplus of oxygen due to widespread photosynthesis. Kaltenegger’s objection was that, for the first 2 billion years of Earth’s existence, its atmosphere had no oxygen. Then it took another billion years for oxygen to build up to high levels. And this biosignature hit its highest concentration not in Earth’s present-day spectrum, but during a short window in the late Cretaceous Period when proto-birds chased giant insects through the skies.

Without a good theoretical model for how Earth’s own spectrum has changed, Kaltenegger feared, the big planet-finding missions could easily miss a living world that didn’t match a narrow temporal template. She needed to envision Earth as an exoplanet evolving through time. To do this, she adapted one of the first global climate models, developed by the geoscientist James Kasting, which still includes references to the 1970s magnetic-tape era it originated in. Kaltenegger developed this code into a bespoke tool that can analyze not only Earth through time but also radically alien scenarios, and it remains her lab’s workhorse.

Learning From Toughest Buddhist Monks

Timeless wisdom via twitter thread  - I meditated 15 hours a day for 6 months straight with one of the toughest Buddhist monks on the planet. Here's what I learned:

1. Finding your true self is an act of love. Expressing it is an act of rebellion.

2. A sign of growth is having more tolerance for discomfort. But it’s also having less tolerance for bullshit.

3. Who you are is not your fault, but it is your responsibility.

4. Procrastination is the refusal or inability to be with difficult emotions.

5. Desires that arise in agitation are more aligned with your ego. Desires that arise in stillness are more aligned with your soul.

6. The moment before letting go is often when we grip the hardest.

7. You don’t find your ground by looking for stability. You find your ground by relaxing into instability.

8. What you hate most in others is usually what you hate most in yourself.

9. The biggest life hack is to become your own best friend. Everything is easier when you do.

10. The more comfortable you become in your own skin, the less you need to manufacture the world around you for comfort.

11. An interesting thing happens when you start to like yourself. You no longer need all the things you thought you needed to be happy.

12. If you don’t train your mind to appreciate what is good,  you’ll continue to look for something better in the future, even when things are great.

13. The belief that there is some future moment more worth our presence than the one we’re in right now is why we miss our lives.

14. There is no set of conditions that leads to lasting happiness. Lasting happiness doesn’t come from conditions; it comes from learning to flow with conditions.

15. Spend more time cultivating a mind that is not attached to material things than time spent accumulating them.

16. Sometimes we need to get out of alignment with the rest of the world to get back into alignment with ourselves. 17. Real confidence looks like humility. You no longer need to advertise your value because it comes from a place that does not require the validation of others.

18. High pain tolerance is a double-edged sword. It’s key for self-control, but can cause us to override the pain of being out of alignment. 19. Negative thoughts will not manifest a negative life. But unconscious negative thoughts will. 20. To feel more joy, open to your pain.

21. Bullying yourself into enlightenment does not work. Befriending yourself is how you transcend yourself. 22. Peak experiences are fun, but you always have to come back. Learning to appreciate ordinary moments is the key to a fulfilling life.

23. Meditation is not about feeling good. It’s about feeling what you’re feeling with good awareness. Plot twist: Eventually that makes you feel good. 24. If you are able to watch your mind think, it means who you are is bigger than your thoughts.

25. Practicing stillness is not about privileging stillness over movement. It’s about the CAPACITY to be still amidst your impulses. It’s about choice. 26. The issue is not that we get distracted. It's that we're so distracted by distractions we don't even know we're distracted.

27. There are 3 layers to a moment: Your experience, your awareness of the experience, and your story about the experience. Be mindful of the story. 28. Life is always happening in just one moment. That's all you're responsible for.

29. Your mind doesn’t wander. It moves toward what it finds most interesting. If you want to focus better, become more curious about what's in front of you. 30. Life continues whether you’re paying attention to it or not. I think that is why the passage of time is scary.

31. You cannot practice non-attachment. You can only show your mind the suffering that attachment creates. When it sees this clearly, it will let go. 32. Meditation can quickly become spiritualized suppression. Be careful not to use concentration to avoid what is uncomfortable.

33. One of the deepest forms of peace we can experience is living in integrity. You can lie to other people about who you are, but you can’t lie to your heart.

34. Be careful not to let the noise of your mind overpower the whispers of your heart.

35. Monks love to fart while they meditate. The wisdom of letting go expresses itself in many forms. 36. You can't life-hack wisdom. Do the work.

That's it. It's that simple. I learned a lot of it by not reading books or meditating (yes, I did that) but it was from Max. Just being with him and as him. 

These learnings will continue till my last breathe. 

 

Loving Laika, 65 Years Later

National Vivisection Society (NAVS) is one of the first organizations I started supporting when Max was a puppy.  If you don't know what Vivisection is then check wikipedia. 

What could be more cruel than opening up the internals of a living being when they are alive? 

But yet, many universities still do this in the name of science. 

This is so important that I have copied below the entire content of NAVS latest newsletter: 

On November 3, 1957, Sputnik 2 became the second manmade satellite to orbit earth; however, unlike its predecessor, Sputnik 2 carried a passenger: a small dog named Laika.

You may have heard of Laika. You may have even seen pictures of the little dog in books, in artwork and in popular culture. But who was Laika? And 65 years later, what can those of us who fight for the end of animal experimentation learn from her story?

Selected from a group of hardy Moscow street dogs, Laika underwent weeks of training for her space mission during which she captured the hearts of the Sputnik 2 research team. She earned many affectionate names like Kudryavka (Little Curly), Zhuchka (Little Bug), and Limonchik (Little Lemon) before being dubbed Laika (Barker) when she became very vocal during a radio broadcast. The evening before Laika’s flight, one researcher brought her home to play with his children while another went against protocol and snuck her a final meal before launch, both recounting that they had wanted to do something nice for the little dog. When they went to close the hatch, technicians took turns kissing her goodbye on the nose.

Laika was loved. Laika was sent to die.

By design, Sputnik 2 was launched with no mechanism for return. The plan was to send Laika up with enough food and oxygen to last her seven days before remotely euthanizing her. However, an extremely rushed building schedule meant that Sputnik 2 was poorly constructed, and when thermal insulation tore loose during launch, the capsule quickly overheated and Laika died just a few hours into the flight.

But death did not slow the tide of love for Laika. If anything, her adoration was magnified as she was transformed into a doggy pop culture saint: her orbit of earth branded a miracle and her death re-painted as martyrdom. In the decades following her death, Laika’s likeness began to appear on monuments, postage stamps and cigarette boxes. Today, we read our children sanitized picture books that either conveniently omit her ending or fully rewrite history to include a heroic return to earth. We get misty eyed over art depicting her floating haloed above the earth, and nod along solemnly to articles that recount her “noble sacrifice.”

There is a flaw in loving Laika this way, as surely as there was a flaw in the love shown to her by those who signed her death warrant.

The modern framing of Laika’s death paints her as a willing and necessary sacrifice in the pursuit of great knowledge. In reality, of course, Laika had no agency over her involvement in the Sputnik 2 mission, and the value of the information attained by her journey is questionable at best. Soviet researcher Oleg Gazenko recounted his involvement with the Sputnik 2 mission, saying:

“Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us. We treat them like babies who cannot speak. The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it. We shouldn’t have done it … We did not learn enough from this mission to justify the death of the dog.”

We are faced with a similar truth 65 years later, when we look at the tens of thousands of dogs who are harmed—and who go unwillingly to their deaths—in pursuit of scientific “knowledge” that is at best flawed and at worst harmful to advancing human science. Most dogs used in research today are used in pharmaceutical testing, even though upwards of 95% of drugs tested on animals fail when they move to human clinical trials. Whatever it is we “learn” from harming dogs has little or no useful application for humans.

So how should we love Laika? Not by building another statue or writing another song in her honor. Instead, we should fight to make sure that no other animal is allowed to needlessly suffer and die in the name of science like she did.

There are currently 60,000 dogs just like Laika being used in research labs in the US—not to mention uncounted millions of other animals. We may not know their names, and their stories may not be immortalized in literature, but they are just as deserving of the love we feel when we remember Laika.

I am sorry Laika. Even after 65 years your sacrifice is not properly heeded. 

A Marvel comic addict, who could spend 55 billion dollars in a heart beat to buy a toy (albeit useful in the hands of responsible people) to convert into another bullshit payment mode and could proudly pound his chest to migrate sapiens where they cannot survive even for a micro second - but yet he happily follows the centuries old protocol of torturing monkeys in the name of neuralink. 

The problem is not him but the billions who mindlessly cheer him. This is a systemic problem rooted in the DNA of Sapiens. 

I am so sorry Laika. I couldn't offer you more than the solace of this little ordinary love of Max and I. And someday soon my life.

FDA Approves UPSIDE Foods Cultivated Meat!

The dream come true news came yesterday ! 

In a major first for the food industry, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has declared that a lab-grown chicken product developed by California food-tech startup Upside Foods is safe for human consumption, setting the stage for a new food revolution in which the world’s meat is grown in bioreactors instead of on factory farms.

[---]

“This is a watershed moment in the history of food,” said Dr. Uma Valeti, CEO and Founder of UPSIDE Foods, in a statement “We started UPSIDE amid a world full of skeptics, and today, we’ve made history again as the first company to receive a ‘No Questions’ letter from the FDA for cultivated meat. This milestone marks a major step towards a new era in meat production.”

Congrats Uma Valeti for everything you did and doing for animals. You are one the handful of humans I salute and respect. 

I am happy but clearly, I am down playing my excitement. 

I have been wrong over the years when I was optimistic and I have been wrong also when I was pessimistic. 

Leave alone predicting what happens in the future in this complex system. 

My down playing comes from my past learnings of how humans have immense capacity to mess up. 

I have heard people say "yuck" to cultivated meat while happily devouring chicken living horribly and dying in their own poop. Good news: these people have a shelf life and will be gone by the end of this century or earlier. 

This is a huge moment for future animals. I will not be around to see your happy lives; the good news is neither would all the humans you treated you horribly over the centuries. 

Max and I will be celebrating your lives for the rest of time. 

This Is Reality!

 

Thermostat 6 - Animation Short Film 2018 - GOBELINS from GOBELINS pro on Vimeo.

Billionaires Who Never Grew Out Of Marvel Comics (& No Understanding Of Complex Systems)

Mark McCaughrean, senior adviser for science and exploration at the European Space Agency, admits that sometimes he refuses to watch feats of virtuoso spacefaring from the new space barons, lest he get sucked in by their superficial glamour. It is not just sour grapes about the cool things they get to do with their wealth. It’s about the scientific, social, and philosophical implications of what they are doing and how they are doing it.

[---]

Anyone who thinks that Musk’s priorities align neatly with the needs of space science should ask astronomers what they think of his 1,500 or so active Starlink satellites that are now obstructing the view of telescopes with bright streaks and raising concerns about radio-signal interference. Starlink has filed plans to launch up to 42,000 satellites in total—about five times the total number currently orbiting Earth—and competing services like Amazon’s Project Kuiper plan to add thousands more. There are already 1,600 close encounters in space (within 1 kilometer) a week from Musk’s satellites, risking collisions that could strew debris in low Earth orbit.

“There was a time when I was enthusiastic about commercial space because I saw it as a possible way we could conduct more science,” Porco says. She now concludes that this is not the way it will work. “When you put science, and the way science needs to be conducted, up against commercial interests, the two make very bad bedfellows.”

“People get so wrapped up in wish-fulfilment fantasies about living on Mars that they lose context completely, as if you can just fly away and leave all our troubles behind. It doesn’t solve any problems by going to Mars,” McCaughrean adds. For the goal of survival, we would be much smarter using our knowledge and resources to keep Earth habitable in the face of the inadvertent geoengineering we are already conducting here.

[---]

We might plausibly extend that approach to an international, crewed research base on the moon. But we don’t need space tourism and private industry to get it. This doesn’t mean that big commercial ventures should be banned. But we should be more clear-eyed about their motives and priorities and consider how much we want their already ubiquitous presence in our lives to expand into the heavens too, with barely any regulation to constrain them.

Even if you feel in your marrow that our human destiny lies in the stars, you might want to look closely at what the space billionaires have done down here. Then ask yourself whether they are the best people to take us up there.

- More Here

One of my guilty pleasures is to live long enough to read the obituary of these self proclaimed omnipotent  sapiens. 

And to state the obvious, I will never leave this beautiful planet where Max and I shared precious time together. My last breathe will be in the same place where Max took his last breathe. 

A Flicker Of Serenity In This Hurricane Of Mindless Suffering

I salute all those who worked and still working hard to bring serenity. 

Thank you. 

An Advice From Mary Gaitskill's Therapist

Mary Gaitskill's therapist must have read and followed stoicism daily!

Listen to Tyler Cowen's interview with Mary Gaitskill

Cowen: You once quoted your therapist as saying, and I’m quoting him here, “People are just horrible, and the sooner you realize that, the happier you’re going to be.” What’s your view?

Gaitsjill: I thought that was a wonderful remark. It’s important to note the tone of voice that he used. He was a Southern queer gentleman with a very lilting, soft voice. I was complaining about something or other, and he goes, “People are horrible. They’re stupid, and they’re crazy, and they’re mean, and the sooner you realize that, the better off you’ll be, the more you’re going to start enjoying life.”

I just laughed, because partly it was obvious he was being funny, and it was a very gentle way of allowing my ranting and raving and acknowledging the truth of it. Gee, I don’t know how anybody could deny that. Look at human history and some of the things that people do. It was being very spacious about it and just saying, “Look, you have to accept reality. You can’t expect people to be perfect or to be your idea of good or moral all the time. You’re probably not either. This is what it is.”

I thought that was really wisdom, actually. 

Moss Time, Touch & Johann Jakob Dillenius

In 2021, when a fifty year old house became a home called "Max's Walden", I got into "growing" moss. 

I mean there was already abundant moss but I wanted moss to encompass the home. I transplanted moss from the forest nearby, I bought moss from a nursery and stole moss from places I visited. They are already adapting to Max's Walden beautifully and those little green beauties will outlive not only me but humanity.   

A wonderful and melancholic essay on of German Botanist, Johann Jakob Dillenius:

Many minutes had gone by. It started raining again, and more water fell and seeped into the moss bed. I remembered to go about my day, which seemed a bit absurd, if not insignificant in front of a moss bed. This, then, is the first lesson that moss taught me: you can touch time. Not our human time, not even mammal time, but Earth time. Hours later, when I returned from my chores in the city, the sporophytes were still there, still holding water. Often, it can take 25 years for a moss layer to put on one inch. But moss has been around for at least 350m years, being one of the first species to make the journey from water to dry land: moss is our elder relative, as Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us in Gathering Moss. It is a species that shares our cities and apartments, a witness to human time and its catastrophic speed. If only touching moss were enough to let us experience moss time.

[---]

The idea that touching nature could bridge interspecies borders makes sense intuitively. And is there any being in the plant kingdom that embodies touch more than moss and its family, the bryophytes? Moss is touch. It doesn’t poke the skin of the being it touches. And it takes practically nothing from the host it is in contact with: moss is no parasite. Yet it softens trees, prevents soil erosion, and shelters animals too small for us to notice. It is continuously in touch with Earth and all its beings, including us. Inside a rainforest and on the city pavement, moss beckons us.

In the 900-year history of Oxford University, my current home, moss’s touch has enchanted many people. But, as the historian Mark Lawley notes, a separate study of mosses in Britain did not begin until the late 17th century. One of the key figures who recorded the diversity of mosses in Britain in painstaking detail was Johann Jakob Dillenius, a German botanist. Dillenius studied medicine, while maintaining a strong interest in botany, at the University of Giessen, where he wrote his first major work, Catalog of Plants Originating Naturally Around Giessen (1718). In it, he identified several mosses and fungi, under the heading Cryptogams, denoting plants that reproduce via spores, also known as “the lower plants”.

Perhaps only a handful of botanists at the time would have bothered spending their days with their hands touching the ground that other people walk on and animals relieve themselves on. But Dillenius did, and his work impressed William Sherard, a leading English botanist. Sherard had recently acquired a huge collection of plants from Smyrna (present-day İzmir in Turkey) and had been searching for somebody to help organise it. He offered Dillenius a job at his garden in Eltham, just outside London; and, in 1721, Dillenius migrated to Britain to work on Sherard’s plant collection, the mosses of Britain, and a pinax (an illustrated catalogue) of Britain’s plants.

For the first seven years of his time in Britain, Dillenius lived between Eltham and his own lodgings in London. In 1724, he produced his first book in Britain, the third edition of Synopsis methodica stirpium Britannicarum, originally written by the Cambridge-based botanist and naturalist John Ray in 1670. In the second edition (1696), Ray had identified 80 types of mosses, to which Dillenius added, according to George Claridge Druce’s account, 40 types of fungi, more than 150 types of mosses, and 200-plus seed plants. Dillenius divided cryptogams into “fungi” and “musci”, excluding ferns and equisetums.

For perhaps the first time, somebody had paid meticulous and singular attention to the “lower plants”. It fascinated me to imagine an 18th-century gentleman spending hours and years touching and collecting the mosses of Britain. We don’t know much about Dillenius’s inner life, but one can glean from his letters that he loved mosses and liked his life in their company. His life among English people? Not so much.

 

Bumblebees Like Playing With Toys

Only few weeks ago, I had re-posted one of my favorite essays - Animals & Play

We have more reason to celebrate all life forms amongst us and not cause suffering: 

To define the ball rolling as “play,” researchers relied on a framework that uses five criteria to fit that definition. This included that the behavior didn’t contribute to survival strategies, started during stress-free conditions, and was intrinsically rewarding.2

“Mainly, we found that bees engaged in the ball rolling activity repeatedly despite the absence of an external incentive, such as getting food/mates/shelter. Rather, the behavior was rewarding in itself, which is what play is,” Galpayage says.

They also found that the patterns of play in relation to age resembled other young mammals. Younger bees engaged with the balls more than older bees, and male bees rolled balls for longer periods than females.2

“That bees may play is an important finding for science because it provides further evidence that an insect may experience something like pleasure,” says Galpayage. “Personally, I find this behavior fascinating because it tells us that bees, like many other animals, are more than little robotic beings, but have a richer behavior and life than we would have previously thought.”

Happy Birthday Neo!

I don't give Neo enough credit for saving me from the deep abyss I might have dug myself into after Max passed away. 

Max passed away on 20th December 2019. Neo came home on 24th December 2019. 

I picked Neo, the most notorious and active puppy with 48 hours of my worst days of my life. 

Boy, I picked him right! His adamance, hardheadedness and everything that Max was not is what rescued me. He kept me in check.

For all that he did for me; I don't give him enough credit. 

Thank you for all being Neo and bringing the new light. 

Happy birthday my naughty boy :-) 

There is no beginning nor end to the story of Max and I. 

Story with Neo is not a continuation of that story. His is a new never ending story by itself. 

Words Of Wisdom

I think this might be what's meant, in Zen Buddhism, by the idea of "beginner's mind": a state of mind that doesn't pretend life can be completely stuffed into conceptual boxes, because no level of knowledge or training can ever insulate us from the openness of the very next moment. And a state of mind that approaches this fact not, mainly, as something to be scared of, but rather as a reason to show up more fully for whatever's coming next.

- Oliver Burkeman

End Of Philosophical Historiography - Hanno Sauer

One of the best papers I have ever read in my life, period. Sauer's piece now has a special place in my heart.

Ironically, serendipitously over time in my adulthood I have followed this paper at this point in my life. When Max came into my life, he shook my world and brought an eternal pleasant breeze to me. I got into serious reading to get answers for this wonderful change in my life. Inevitably, I read old philosophy but thankfully, I read new philosophy too. 

Hanno Sauer unpacks a moral argument for reading contemporary philosophy for one simple reason - they rectify all the errors in old philosophy by sheer acclamation of knowledge from the past centuries.  

This is the purpose of philosophy - the quest for understanding and knowledge and not just dwelling on thoughts of a person who lived a few millenniums ago. 

I highly recommend to read the whole paper, its enlightening: 

Physics is not taught or practiced by reading and interpreting Newton’s Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis, Geometry is not done by studying Euclid’s Elements, and so on. There may be some sort of fundamental difference between philosophy and physics or chemistry that accounts for this fact. The point is that historicists of philosophy owe us an explanation of what that difference is and why, in philosophy, things should stand so differently

To be perfectly clear: my claim is not that we should not be doing history of philosophy. There are all kinds of reasons why reading and talking about the Critique of Pure Reason or the Republic are worthwhile: studying these seminal texts is an inherently interesting intellectual pursuit; reading them is often tremendously enjoyable; and familiarity with these texts can be very valuable to intellectual historians for the insights into culture, knowledge and morality they may contain. There are thus many excellent reasons to engage with the history of philosophy. Gaining traction on the aforementioned philosophical problems, however, is not one of them. This means that I am not arguing against historians of philosophy and what they do, but against what could be called philosophical historicists, that is, those who seem to think that at least one good method of thinking about knowledge or justice is to study what historical authors have written about knowledge and justice a long time ago.

This, I argue, is a mistake.

[---]

Suppose, first, that philosophical competence is innate. In that case, we would assume that it is distributed more or less randomly, perhaps according to a natural lottery. If this were so, then the overwhelming majority of competent philosophers should be alive today. Statistically speaking, there should be ten individuals in present day Kaliningrad that are equally competent philosophers as Kant was. Let me emphasize that this is indeed what my argument entails. Likewise, Princeton or Zürich University now employ numerous physicists that are as good or better than Einstein was. This is not to say, of course, that Kant and Einstein weren’t philosophical or scientific geniuses of the highest rank that are only found very rarely in a generation, but merely that the state of the art of their disciplines, in no small part thanks to their own work, has undergone drastic improvements since their respective times. 

Now suppose that philosophical ability is acquired through training. If philosophical competence is learned, then the historically biased distribution is even more mysterious. Nowadays there are many, many more philosophers than 200 or 2000 years ago, and those philosophers encounter much, much better environments in which to hone their philosophical abilities.

What philosophical historicists are ultimately committed to is the idea that extremely small and underdeveloped societies with highly exclusive privileges of access to the relevant resources have produced much better philosophers than extremely large, globally interconnected and much more inclusive societies. This seems highly improbable. 

But if I am right, and the distribution of philosophical quality should, statistically speaking, be much more even-handed, then where are all the philosophical geniuses hiding? Where are the present day Ibn Rushds, the current Plotins and Feuerbachs, the contemporary Anselms, Brentanos and Schellings, the living, breathing Moores and Montaignes? There aren’t any, and this is probably a good thing. The existence of towering geniuses is almost always a sign that a discipline is still in the early stages of development and hasn’t reached a stage of maturity yet. Mature disciplines are characterized by a state of the art in their debates that simply cannot be overseen or dominated by any single mind. The absence of philosophical prodigies, rather than being evidence of decline, actually means that we’ve made it. 

A discipline that frequently produces singular geniuses hasn’t left its earlier phase of relative inchoateness yet. Serendipity may occasionally wrestle another Gauss or Einstein from the claws of nonexistence. But in general, modern scientific disciplines are so far developed to be beyond individual mastery. The list containing the most influential philosophers could be a simple statement of fact: Plato was de facto much more influential than any living person ever had the chance of becoming, since he had much more ample time to acquire such influence. This is indisputably true, but it doesn’t amount to a defense of philosophical historiography. If anything, it shows the opposite, namely that the attention historical authors receive today is unlikely to be due to epistemically relevant considerations, and rather due to the grace of an earlier birth. Perhaps the above list need not reflect unwarranted historicist prejudices as much as survivorship bias. 

[---]

The claim that historical philosophers have little of value to contribute to contemporary philosophy may seem disrespectful or even ungrateful to some. But I think the opposite is the case. That the historiography of philosophy – its historia rerum gestarum – is especially philosophically significant amounts to the thesis that the history of philosophy – its res gestae – was philosophically insignificant. To say that the great philosophers of the past remain relevant today is tantamount to saying that they have accomplished nothing of lasting value; that, in effect, there are no giants on whose shoulders we can stand. Physicists do not keep studying Newton’s Principia precisely because of what he has accomplished. The best way of respecting Newton is to ignore him – or, more precisely, to ignore his own writings in favor of the lasting results he produced, the substance of which can be paraphrased and taught – because the progress engendered by his work allows us to. The cure I am recommending is a healthy dose of historical amnesia to counterbalance the burden imposed by the weight of history. 

This cure was famously prescribed a long time ago by Nietzsche, one of history’s greatest philosophers, in his 1874 Untimely Meditations – which is ironic.

To be clear, Hanno Sauer is not recommending the current fad and stupidity of “cancel culture''.  This paper reminds us that we have finite time and we need to be prudent and wise not to spend too much time on outdated materials. 

There are a number of ways old books can still help us and future generations. For example:

• Even a rudimentary analysis of older texts could improve our "scale of gratitude" by proportions - how much knowledge we gained.
• It could help teach how time exposes the ludicrousness of "know-it-all" arrogance (Aristotle)
• It could help teach how time will vindicate humility and curiosity of "what do I know?" (Montaigne)

I came up with just a few of them in less than 2 mins. If we think hard, there could be a lot of good messages these old texts can bring. That would beneficial for society as a whole instead of passive nationalistic and cultural reading of old philosophers just because one's roots are from the West or Indian or Chinese.

My favorite lines from the paper have now become a great heuristic to gauge a discipline.

The existence of towering geniuses is almost always a sign that a discipline is still in the early stages of development and hasn’t reached a stage of maturity yet. Mature disciplines are characterized by a state of the art in their debates that simply cannot be overseen or dominated by any single mind. 

Reptilian Love, Loss & Mourning

Ned and Sunny stretch out together on the warm sand. He rests his head on her back, and every so often he might give her an affectionate nudge with his nose. The pair is quiet and, like many long-term couples, they seem perfectly content just to be in each other’s presence.

The couple are monogamous, which is quite rare in the animal kingdom. But Sunny and Ned are a bit scalier that your typical lifelong mates — they are shingleback lizards that live at Melbourne Museum in Australia.

In the wild, shinglebacks regularly form long-term bonds, returning to the same partner during mating season year after year. One lizard couple in a long-term study had been pairing up for 27 years and were still going strong when the study ended. In this way, the reptiles are more like some of the animal kingdom’s most famous long-term couplers, such as albatrosses, prairie voles and owl monkeys, and they confound expectations many people have about the personalities of lizards.

“There’s more socially going on with reptiles than we give them credit for,” said Sean Doody, a conservation biologist at the University of South Florida.

[---]

One of the most fascinating discoveries of reptile social behavior — long-term monogamy in shingleback lizards like Ned and Sunny — happened entirely by accident.

Michael Bull, the Australian biologist who made the discovery, was initially less focused on lizards and more interested in studying the different species of ticks that lived on them. Beginning in 1982, he would capture shinglebacks, mark them, take various measurements, then release them. After several years (and thousands of lizards), he noticed that each spring, after months apart, the same males and females would somehow manage to find each other.

Shingleback courtship is perhaps not the most romantic by human standards.

“The male will trail the female around for a number of weeks, often a few months, and defend that female from any other male that tries to encroach,” said Jane Melville, senior curator of terrestrial vertebrates at Museums Victoria Research Institute in Australia. Males have also been seen allowing their mates to eat first, she said.

Actually, this last behavior is a good move for males of a number of species. Another lizard species, the Central American whiptail, has been observed offering a potential partner a lovely dead frog to eat before mating.

But shingleback love stories don’t always have happy endings. “It’s very tragic,” said Martin Whiting, a behavioral ecologist at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. “Occasionally, they get squashed on the road and the other one will be nudging it. And then it’s very difficult for them to pair up again.”

Dr. Whiting said the lizards can remain with their dead partners for quite some time, continuing to nudge their lifeless bodies. Could this be similar to the quasi-mourning behaviors observed in primates and cetaceans?

While we can’t definitively say that these lizards grieve, Dr. Whiting said, “I would certainly say we can’t discount that certain species that have that strong pair bond might.”

- More Here

We should stop using the detrimental phrase -  "reptilian brain" (Amygdala). 

This is 101 science; life long hard work of one scientist, Michael Bull, can teach us so much and change our understanding of entire branch of species. 

Thank you, sir. 

Montagine On Leisure and Play

In Montaigne’s final essay of experience about his lifelong curiosity of how to live his life, he talks about these types of concerns. After spending some time listing the qualities of great minds that are guided him, Montaigne writes: 

The truly wise must be as intelligent and expert in the use of natural pleasures, as in all the other functions of life. So the sages live gently yielding to the laws of our human lot, relaxation and versatility, it seems, go best with a strong and noble mind and do it singular honor. There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time when he was an old man to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.

Socrates endured unfathomable hardships throughout his life. Hunger, poverty, the indocility of his children, the nails of his wife, calumny, tyranny, imprisonment, fetters in poison. And yet, he never refused to play, nor to ride the hobbyhorse with children. And it became him well, for all actions, says philosophy, equally become an equally honor a wise man.

- via Daily Stoic

Max taught me the importance of play; those lessons still continues from Fluffy, Garph and Neo. 

One of my all time favorite essay is Do Animals Have Fun?

We know at the present time that all animals, beginning with the ants, going on to the birds, and ending with the highest mammals, are fond of plays, wrestling, running after each other, trying to capture each other, teasing each other, and so on. And while many plays are, so to speak, a school for the proper behavior of the young in mature life, there are others which, apart from their utilitarian purposes, are, together with dancing and singing, mere manifestations of an excess of forces—“the joy of life,” and a desire to communicate in some way or another with other individuals of the same or of other species—in short, a manifestation of sociability proper, which is a distinctive feature of all the animal world.

To exercise one’s capacities to their fullest extent is to take pleasure in one’s own existence, and with sociable creatures, such pleasures are proportionally magnified when performed in company. From the Russian perspective, this does not need to be explained. It is simply what life is. We don’t have to explain why creatures desire to be alive. Life is an end in itself. And if what being alive actually consists of is having powers—to run, jump, fight, fly through the air—then surely the exercise of such powers as an end in itself does not have to be explained either. It’s just an extension of the same principle.

Friedrich Schiller had already argued in 1795 that it was precisely in play that we find the origins of self-consciousness, and hence freedom, and hence morality. 

“Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man,” Schiller wrote in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man, “and he is only wholly a Man when he is playing.” If so, and if Kropotkin was right, then glimmers of freedom, or even of moral life, begin to appear everywhere around us.