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