Trees As Public Health Infrastructure

For instance, city dwellers who live in neighborhoods with more trees (and often more resources) tend to have lower dementia risk and better heart and lung health, and are less likely to die prematurely as a result. Urban forests are also associated with cooler temperatures, cleaner air and water, and greater biodiversity. Yet until recently, few studies have measured the magnitude of these benefits in “health, deaths, or dollars,” says Colorado State University environmental epidemiologist David Rojas-Rueda.

Now, as Seattle and dozens of other cities across the United States work to expand their urban canopies, Rojas-Rueda and his collaborators have quantified the health and economic gains that cities could achieve if they actually meet their lofty goals. Seattle, for instance, is shooting to reach 30 percent tree cover (from its current 28 percent) by 2037. New York City aims to jump from 23 to 30 percent by 2040. Each city’s goal is unique, based on local ecology, climate, and other factors.

Hitting such targets, the researchers found, could collectively avoid more than 67,000 premature deaths across 144 cities, along with alleviating US $539 billion in economic burden from lives lost.

- More Here

Los Angeles - World's Largest Wildlife Crossing

So, You Want To Study Mathematics?

Wow, wonderful post covering what one needs to get started in Math!

Math has a bad reputation. I believe it is the most beautiful form of human thought, but most people see it as a sterile rule system made to punish students. This disconnect is due to the way our schooling system approaches math — it focuses on the mechanics and not the why. While the basics are necessary, they can hide the deeper beauty that math contains. Luckily, it is easier than ever to get an amazing mathematics education on your own thanks to the internet.

[---]

Before I begin my subject recommendations, there are some things to keep in mind. These pieces of advice come from my own experience with 10+ years of self-studying math and working as a college math teacher. I have provided sources where relevant if you want to see why I recommend these practices.

• First, accept that this will be hard. Math is a new language that has to be mastered. It is much less flexible and more demanding than any spoken language. Expect to run into roadblocks and to have to push yourself. Some ideas will take a long time to get comfortable with; you are literally forming new connections in your brain as you study math!
• The best way to study anything is with consistency, not 3-hour marathon sessions once a month. Your brain works better on 15 solid minutes a day. My rule of thumb is to never miss two days in a row. Life gets in the way, and I can’t always make every day work, but I go out of my way to never let that happen twice.
• I remind my students about this all the time: the only way to learn math is to actually do problems. Following along with a video is an important step, but you do not understand something until you can solve the problems on your own. My recommended resources are largely based on the quality of their problems.
• Studying math can be lonely, but it doesn’t have to be. Find someone who wants to learn the same content and work together. This will help you both with accountability and increase your understanding as you talk through the content with each other. Maybe we can create an online community of people learning different topics: any interest?
• AI can be an excellent tool for self-studying math, if used correctly. There is no substitute for a good teacher, but AI can give intuitive explanations and help check your work. Resist the temptation to use it to overcome every obstacle you face, but it can be wonderful for checking your work or offering hints when there aren’t answers provided.
• Interested in one-on-one tutoring and guidance for your studies? Send me a message; maybe I can help
• Take breaks! Schools know this and have many breaks throughout a semester and even longer breaks between semesters. If an idea isn’t sticking, sometimes you need to walk away and do something else for it to click. Let your subconscious tackle it for a while. Rest is just as important as the work.
• And most importantly, have fun! You are doing this for you. Discipline can only take you so far; remember why you are self-studying math in the first place.

Part of the problem with standard college mathematics curriculum is that it heavily emphasizes calculus. I love teaching calculus, and I think the subject is really fun, but this sequence is based on outdated priorities left over from the space race. Calculus certainly has its place, but it is not the only subject to study.

Meta Value - 55

White Swans are more worrisome than Black Swans. 

Even fundamental; the mere existence of Swans should teach us a thing or two about risk.

Wisdom Of Yvon Chouinard On Living With Intent

“There is no adventure without risk,” Yvon said. “You get something important from committing to whatever you do. And if you don’t risk your neck, you haven’t made a big enough commitment. We climb for our own pleasure or to become a better person; otherwise it’s just a sport. But climbing is really a passion. And the commitment isn’t random. Every climber I know has had a fucked-up experience with their father or almost-father. Mine was an alcoholic. I was never close to him. It was a traumatic household. I spent a lot of my life just getting away from that. And I was never on the typical career path where you go to college and you learn something, then you go work at that and you know what’s expected of you. I had to find my own way of dealing with life. Climbing, for me and my friends, it saved our lives. It gave us a purpose even though it was a meaningless purpose. Every time we’d go out to do something, we gained confidence in ourselves.”

[---]

“I’ve been a student of Zen Buddhism for a lot of my life,” Chouinard said, “and it’s taught me that with business as with everything else, if you do everything the right way, profits will come. So you don’t focus on profit. You focus on intent. Climbing is the same way. So is cooking. Simplicity of intent forces creativity, and creativity is where we find pleasure. I did a little film about this eighty- year- old guy in Italy who fishes with a big old bamboo rod and makes his own horsehair lines and ties his own tiny flies by hand. He doesn’t use anything fancy, but you can’t out fish this guy.

[---]

I’ve always believed that you achieve perfection through simplicity. It’s so easy to complicate your life. It’s so much harder to simplify it. That’s why I don’t have a Yvon Chouinard computer. I don’t have a cell phone, either. I don’t have any of that shit ’cause I don’t want it. Just say no. And I’ve applied that principle in all kinds of places. Once, I had the idea to kayak the Gros Ventre River without a paddle. It was pretty serious water. My friend lost his boat, and it ended up all the way down in the Snake River. But I had learned how to roll a kayak upright with just my hands—in case I lost my paddle—and it gave me this wild idea to try the whole river that way. A paddle is a powerful thing. You can see a rock coming and just do one deep stroke to get around it. Without a paddle, you have to look much farther ahead and prepare. The boat becomes like a pair of skis that you have put on edge to turn. I found that I had to sit way down low in the boat and turn by putting the boat on edge with my hands. I had been kayaking all over South America and New Guinea and doing first descents, but that was the day I really learned to kayak.

[---]

In fact, right now, we’re trying to get Patagonia back to that initial intention. Every company needs a revolution every ten years and we’re going through a big one right now. Because a while back, I was sitting at my desk and a bunch of people came roaring in and said, ‘Guess what? We just hit a billion dollars in sales!’ And I just went, ‘Fuck.’ I was so bummed out because I knew that running a billion-dollar company was a lot different from running a little climbing hardware company and that we could easily become the bureaucracy, the behemoth, that we didn’t want to be. And in fact, it was turning out that way.

I had a CEO at the time who was opening up new accounts in general sporting goods stores and department stores. We were making a 20 percent net profit but selling out—just like The North Face did when they hired Kim Kardashian to do a skiwear line. Because they exceeded the size they should be. So we cut way back. We killed all our department store accounts. And that’s about living within our limits. And I mean, what happens when you’re free soloing and you exceed your limits? You die. That’s what we were facing. I want Patagonia to be a company that grows maybe 5 percent a year. Maximum. Just to keep up with inflation and make a decent profit and have a good culture. Keep a good lifestyle. And I don’t see any examples of anyone else who has done that. Name one company that’s purposely restricted its own growth. But that’s what Patagonia is about now. We’ve been in business fifty- four years. So what are the next fifty years going to be about? I have four thousand employees around the world. They’re all dependent on the company’s survival and yet our products are getting knocked off by everybody else.

[---]

I don’t think you can be an excellent company or make excellent products by getting bigger and bigger. You lose control. The average age of an American corporation before it goes belly- up is less than eighteen years. If we decided, at Patagonia, to start making watches and sunglasses, that would be suicide for what we wanna do. There’s a limit to everything. I don’t care what it is. Everybody dies, no exceptions. Every empire collapses, usually after 200 to 250 years.

[---]

In 2022, Yvon gave Patagonia away—the whole company, I mean. He gave it to a nonprofit foundation that he created with one goal: environmental conservation.

“I gave Patagonia away three or four years ago because I didn’t see any other way,” he said. “My kids didn’t want to inherit the company. They have simple lives like I do. I didn’t want to take Patagonia public because we’d end up killing the company’s values. I didn’t want to bring in an Yvon Chouinard investor or a partner, because those relationships always fall apart, just like most marriages. And I didn’t want to sell for the same reason—there was no way to sell and still be sure that the values endured.”

[---]

“But giving it away worked out great,” Yvon told me. “You’ve seen my lifestyle. I don’t need any money. You’ve seen my place in Jackson. I’ve been in that house for fifty years, and half the electrical wiring is burned out.”

- Excerpts from the new book Rules to Live By: How Extraordinary Lives Define What Really Matters by Jimmy Chin (profiles the founder of Patagonia Yvon Chouinard)

We Asked 100 Scientists About Unsolved Problems In Their Fields...

Epistemological Modesty, my friend. Epistemological Modesty! 

Beautiful list and stupid me, I thought we knew the answers to a few of these questions and some, I didn't even know it was a "question". 

There are so many unknown questions about animals and biology in general than physics. I am glad that many minds are working on these. 

• How did the first Indigenous people enter the Americas? - Michael Waters, geoarchaeologist, Center for the Study of the First Americans, Texas A&M University

• A million years ago, how did earlier human species colonize remote and previously uninhabited islands in Southeast Asia? - Adam Brumm, archaeologist, Griffith University, Australia

• What kind of information — about people, places and other dogs can dogs acquire through smell - Alexandra Horowitz, cognitive scientist, Dog Cognition Lab, Barnard College

• How do birds migrate with such energy efficiency? - David Lentink, engineer and biologist, University of Groningen, the Netherlands

• How many undiscovered animal species live in the deep sea, and do they matter? - Lisa Levin, marine ecologist, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego

• Which other animals dream, and how similar are their dreams to ours? - Benjamin Scott, neuroscientist, Boston University

• Why do animals that fly live longer? - Elinor Karlsson, vertebrate geneticist, UMass Chan Medical School and Broad Institute

• Why are humans the only species with a chin? - Daniel Lieberman, evolutionary biologist, Harvard University

• How did the building blocks of life, like proteins and nucleic acid, first organize into a living cell? - Steve Brusatte, paleontologist, University of Edinburgh

• When does a cell become destined to develop into cancer? - Dr. Kimryn Rathmell, physician-scientist, The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center, The Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital

• Blue whales are the biggest animals ever to exist on Earth. Where are their babies born? - Helen Scales, marine biologist

• Most cancers are not genetic, so why do they occur? - Dr. Mehra Golshan, cancer surgeon, Yale School of Medicine

• Why does the immune system in some people, and not others, control cancers and viruses? - Dr. Sharon Lewin, infectious diseases physician, the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, University of Melbourne, Australia

• Why do the viruses that cause colds and flu spread so much more easily in winter? - Linsey Marr, environmental engineer, Virginia Tech

• Can we learn what emotions animals are experiencing? - Tom Smulders, evolutionary neuroscientist, Newcastle University, England

• Are we alone in the universe? - Robert Hazen, staff scientist, Carnegie Institution for Science

Food Is Important Than Moronic AI & Dreams Of Utopia

The bigger fear is what scientists call “multiple breadbasket failures” – that is, several of the world’s great growing regions failing at once. The journalist George Monbiot tells me that globalisation has allowed us to make up for a bad harvest in one region with imports from another. This year, military activity has at times reduced Russia and Ukraine’s Black Sea grain export capacity by 97 per cent, and the Iran war has throttled Hormuz – the conduit for a third of the world’s urea, a fertiliser. El Niño is bearing down on India’s rice, Australia’s wheat and southern Africa’s maize.

India, at least, has a buffer. The monsoon season was drier than expected, but Delhi is sitting on a record strategic reserve of 59.6 million tonnes of rice, and has so far resisted repeating the 2023 export ban that pushed world rice prices up by more than a fifth. Britain? “We used to have strategic food reserves in this country,” Monbiot says. “ But we left it all to the private sector who have now moved to this just-in-time production and delivery model.” The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs estimates that the UK imports roughly 40 per cent of its food.

And what does come from our own fields is coming under increasing pressure. This summer’s drought reduced expected wheat yields by a seventh. The Met Office says El Niño is likely to lead to a wet and stormy autumn, and a colder than usual winter. During the last El Niño winter, in 2023, fields were so sodden that the following year’s wheat harvest fell by a fifth.

Monbiot’s deeper worry is that the food system now looks like the banks before the financial crash: concentrated, efficient and without flexibility. In 2008, governments rescued the banks by issuing future money. “If the food system starts to go down,” he says, “you can’t bail it out by issuing future food.” Food security and self-sufficiency, at a governmental and household level, is one of the central issues of our uncertain times.

But there are two things I can say for certain: next year is going to be hotter. And your big shop, dearer.

- More Here

Meta Values - 54

Living through something is not the same as learning from it, and learning from it is not the same as consciously extracting and communicating the wisdom it contains.

Many don't learn even from painful experiences.

Learning without experiencing firsthand and by using wisdom from past humans is absolutely free and will save one’s life. 

This is "magic" behind the long survival of organic life on this planet.

 

How Did the English Build Such Beautiful Villages?

The materials tell another part of the story, because before railways and modern transportation made standardized construction products available across the country, builders relied heavily upon whatever stone, clay, timber, flint, straw, and other materials could be obtained locally.

[---]

This created harmony almost automatically, because two cottages could be built a century apart by different craftsmen, with different windows and different proportions, while the shared material immediately connected them to one another and to the surrounding countryside.

[---]

Stone cottages, rendered façades, timber-framed buildings, walls, gates, gardens, and small shops all sit close to the road, creating a street whose shape is defined by architecture rather than by the engineering requirements of traffic.

The buildings turn corners naturally, doors face the pavement, rooflines overlap, windows remain close enough to be noticed by someone walking past, and walls continue the line of the street wherever the houses pull away from it.

Walking through Lacock therefore feels very different from moving through a settlement where buildings sit behind large setbacks and roads occupy most of the space, because here the lane remains intimate enough for architecture to stay within the pedestrian’s field of vision.

The street becomes an outdoor room formed from cottages, walls, trees, hedges, and gardens.

[---]

The English also became exceptionally good at using vegetation as architecture, with hedges forming walls, trees creating canopies, climbing plants softening cottages, and garden gates turning the transition between public lane and private home into a small architectural event.

A stone wall might continue from the side of a cottage before gradually disappearing beneath ivy, then become a hedge, then open through a wooden gate into a garden, allowing constructed and natural forms to flow into one another without a sharp boundary.

[---]

The village never needs a dramatic ending because architecture simply gives way to landscape.

[---]

William Morris, who knew and loved these places, put the deeper principle simply:

“Simplicity of life, even the barest, is not a misery, but the very foundation of refinement: a sanded floor and whitewashed walls, and the green trees, and flowery meads, and living waters outside; or a grimy palace amid the smoke with a regiment of housemaids always working to smear the dirt together so that it may be unnoticed; which, think you, is the most refined, the most fit for a gentleman of those two dwellings? … Now if the public knew anything of art, that is excellence in things made by man, they would not abide the shams of it; and if the real thing were not to be had, they would learn to do without… Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”

And this may be the simplest answer to how the English built such beautiful villages, because they built churches where people worshipped, pubs where people gathered, cottages from the materials beneath their feet, walls around gardens, bridges across streams, and lanes along routes people already traveled, then allowed generation after generation to add another layer without completely erasing the one that came before.

- More Here

Beauty Of Probabilia - A Good sceptic Has More Than Doubt & Less Than Certainty

How tightly should you hold your beliefs? You face the question several times a week without noticing. Hold them too loosely and you don’t stand for anything, hold them too tightly and you become the sort of person no argument can reach. Most of us swing between the two and have no vocabulary for the ground in between. A Roman lawyer worked one out, under pressure far worse than anything we are likely to face, and it is still the best answer available.

The time is early 45 BCE, the place a villa near Lucrine Lake, northwest of Naples, in southern Italy. One of the most fascinating and controversial figures in the entirety of Western history, Marcus Tullius Cicero, is finishing writing a book that will be known as the Academica, where he explains the nature of sceptical philosophy and why it is so crucial not just to the advancement of human knowledge, but to living a good life.

[---]

Which is why he is worth your time now. What follows is partly the story of a man, but mostly a usable method: a way of holding beliefs that is neither the performed humility of the professional doubter nor the armoured certainty of the person who has ‘done their own research’. Cicero had a name for it – probabilia – and I think you will find it very useful any time you have to assess the validity of a notion and make a decision about it.

[---]

The difference shows in practice: a genuine sceptic, confronted with compelling new evidence, updates – whereas the contrarian does not: they shift goalposts, raise new objections, or ignore what they cannot explain, all while citing studies selectively and appealing to the handful of dissenting experts cherrypicking the evidence. Their doubt is not the productive Socratic doubt that opens enquiry but a rhetorical shield that forecloses it. These self-styled sceptics are in fact dogmatists, having reached their conclusions in advance and thereafter simply engaging in rationalisations.

On the other side, a certain strand of scientism has overcorrected by demanding certainty as the price of admission for any belief worth holding, deploying ‘follow the science’ as a conversation-stopper rather than an invitation to enquiry. That is not how real science works either.

Both pathologies make the same mistake: they treat doubt and certainty as the only two options. Neither leaves room for what we actually need: calibrated confidence, the ability to say This is the best available account, I will act on it, and I remain open to being wrong. What is missing, then, is a philosophy of provisional but committed belief, a philosophy Cicero already worked out, in Latin, 2,000 years ago.

[---]

Cicero’s own formulation is plain. In the Academica, he separates his school from the dogmatists in a single sentence: others declare that certain things are settled and fixed, whereas ‘we hold many things to be probabilia, which we can easily follow but can scarcely affirm.’ Follow easily, affirm rarely. The entire method is encapsulated by that asymmetry.

The term probabilia does not mean ‘probable’ in the modern, quantitative statistical sense, but something closer to ‘worthy of approval’: a claim that has withstood scrutiny, coheres with the available evidence, and a reasonable person would assent to while remaining open to revision. It is enough to act on.

Nor is ‘probabilia’ a single, undifferentiated category, and this is the important part usually left out. Carneades graded impressions (ie, preliminary judgments) by how much scrutiny they had survived. At the first level, an impression simply strikes you as a bit more likely to be true than not. At the second level, it rises to being persuasive. At the third, it is ‘undiverted’, meaning that nothing else you believe conflicts with it. At the fourth and highest level, it is also thoroughly examined, essentially the result of scientific investigation. Trivial matters need only the first or second grade; a medical decision or a criminal verdict demands the third or fourth. What Cicero inherited and deployed, then, was not a generic mood of open-mindedness but a graded, checkable procedure.

[---]

Cicero is explicit in the Academica: the wise person acts on the best available view, not because they are certain it is true, but because suspending all judgment would make life impossible. We are not the kind of people who think nothing is true, say the Academics; we are the people who say that some falsehoods are mixed in with truths, so similar to them that we have no sure criterion for judging, so we can assess only provisionally.

Strip away the Latin and the toga, and the Academic method comes down to a handful of habits, all of which can be practised, starting today:

• Say how confident you are, not just what you think. ‘I believe X’ is nearly useless. ‘I believe X, at about 7 out of 10, and here is what is holding back the other 3’ gives your interlocutor something to work with and gives you somewhere to move in the light of new evidence or better arguments.
• Grade your beliefs by how hard they have been tested. Most of what any of us believes sits at Carneades’ second level: it merely struck us as persuasive. Reserve confident action for what has been through the third and fourth levels.
• Separate your values from your empirical beliefs. That children should not go hungry is a value and may be held firmly. That a particular school-meals programme reduces hunger is an empirical claim, to be held only as firmly as the evidence warrants. Conflating the two is what makes people defend failing policies as though their integrity depended on it.
• State in advance what would change your mind. If nothing would, you do not have a belief, you have an identity.
• Argue the other side properly. The Academy’s signature exercise was arguing in utramque partem, on both sides of a question. Carneades notoriously did it in Rome in 155 BCE, defending justice one day and demolishing it the next. The point was not cynicism but that you do not truly know what you believe until you have built the strongest case against it yourself.
• Act anyway. The sceptic who treats uncertainty as a reason to postpone action has missed the point entirely. Uncertainty is the permanent condition of humanity, deciding effectively within that is a skill we can all benefit from.
• Treat being wrong as data rather than disgrace. If you follow these sceptical rules of thumb, you will change your mind from time to time – or at least ought to. The question is whether you experience that as humiliation or as the method working.

None of this was merely theoretical for Cicero. It informed every major decision of his life, including the most contested one.

[---]

The letters he exchanged with his friend Atticus in the months before his death are the most instructive documents Cicero left. Knowing that Mark Antony wanted him dead, he debated whether to flee, whether to return to Rome, whether to trust the young Octavian (the future emperor Augustus): reasoning under uncertainty, weighing probabilities, deciding anyway. When he returned and resumed attacking Antony in the discourses known as the Philippics, he knew he might be signing his death warrant, but the probable good outweighed the probable cost. He was murdered on 7 December 43 BCE. His last words, to the legionnaire sent to kill him, were: ‘I am stopping here. Come over, soldier. There is nothing right about what you are doing, but at least make sure you cut off my head properly.’

[---]

Second, democracy requires the willingness to be persuaded. Deliberation is possible only if citizens hold their political views as probabilia rather than as dogma, and the current political crisis is partly an epistemological one.

[---]

The well-examined life is one of continuous calibration and revision: strong-enough commitments to act with integrity, loose enough to update when the evidence changes.

This is countercultural in an age that prizes authenticity in the sense of having a fixed self, and urges us to own our identity. Cicero would have found that to be self-congratulatory. He changed his mind about friends, alliances and tactical judgments, and worried about it, as his letters make plain. But developing a crystallised self that never updates is not integrity: it is rigidity dressed up as character. The Ciceronian person is recognisable by a willingness to be embarrassed by earlier certainties, and by treating that embarrassment not as failure but as evidence that enquiry is working.

[---]

The genuine sceptic is not the person who doubts everything, nor the person who demands proof before believing anything. It is the person who has learned to hold their best views with exactly the right strength of grip: firmly enough to act on them, loosely enough to let go when the evidence turns. That is what probabilia means. It is harder than dogmatism and harder than nihilistic doubt, but Cicero thought it the only honest stance available to a finite human being. He was probably right.

- More Here

Meta Values - 53

Early in life, visit all of these places (maybe schools should take kids as part of mandatory yearly trip):

• Slaughter House
• Hospital ICU 
• Hospice 
• Prison
• Cemetery and Cremation Center
• Poor neighborhoods
• Farms
• Water Processing Centers
• Aftermath of a natural disaster

Most of the above would cost zero dollars but will instill priceless wisdom and gratitude for life. 

The second and multiple order effects would be even more priceless - elimination of pain and suffering of animals, humans, food/water waste, and nature sans Anthropocene. 

 

The Mythology Of Conscious AI - Anil Seth

The importance of taking an informed ethical position despite all these uncertainties spotlights another human habit: our unfortunate track record of withholding moral status from those that deserve it, including from many non-human animals, and sometimes other humans. It is reasonable to wonder whether withholding attributions of consciousness to AI may leave us once again on the wrong side of history. The recent calls for attention to “AI welfare” are based largely on this worry.

But there are good reasons why the situation with AI is likely to be different. Our psychological biases are more likely to lead to false positives than false negatives. Compared to non-human animals, the apparent wonders of AI may be more similar to us in ways that do not matter for consciousness, like linguistic ability, and less similar in ways that do, like being alive.

[---]

Long before Descartes, the Greek concept of psychē linked the idea of a soul to breath, while on the other side of the world, the Hindu expression of soul, or Ātman, associated our innermost essence with the ground-state of all experience, unaffected by rational thought or by any other specific conscious content, a pure witnessing awareness.

The cartoon dreams of a silicon rapture, with its tropes of mind uploading, of disembodied eternal existence and of cloud-based reunions with other chosen ones, is a regression to the Cartesian soul. Computers, or more precisely computations, are, after all, immortal, and the sacrament of the algorithm promises a purist rationality, untainted by the body (despite plentiful evidence linking reason to emotion). But these are likely to be empty dreams, delivering not posthuman paradise but silicon oblivion.

What really matters is not this kind of soul. Not any disembodied human-exceptionalist undying essence of you or of me. Perhaps what makes us us harks even further back, to Ancient Greece and to the plains of India, where our innermost essence arises as an inchoate feeling of just being alive — more breath than thought and more meat than machine. The sociologist Sherry Turkle once said that technology can make us forget what we know about life. It’s about time we started to remember.

- More Here

Wise Man Amongst Moronic Neighbors In NJ!

A Mercer County homeowner’s decision to rewild their yard is sparking debate among residents who say the vegetation creates visibility concerns for pedestrians and cyclists.

The property, located in West Windsor, features a native plant garden that extends to the edge of a corner lot. A sign posted at the front of the yard states it is a certified wildlife habitat by the National Wildlife Federation.

Residents raised concerns during a Sept. 15 township council meeting, arguing that the landscaping obstructs sight lines at the intersection and could negatively affect nearby property values.

Others questioned how native gardens should be maintained and whether current township regulations are sufficient to address them.

The homeowner, Bradley King, defended the property at the council meeting, saying it provides a habitat for wildlife and pollinators.

“I am a haven for many animals on my property that we all care about deeply,” King told the council, adding that he has young children and is “equally concerned about ticks and lyme disease as anyone else,” referring to residents’ concerns about pests.

King said he is willing to discuss neighbors’ concerns and that he supports efforts to find a compromise.

“I encourage and embrace my neighbors being at liberty to do as they wish with their private property and I just wish the same consideration from my township,” King said.

Native landscaping is gaining popularity

More New Jersey residents are trading in their hard-to-maintain grass lawns for an alternative that invites migrating birds, insects and pollinators to thrive in the space.

Michele Bakacs, an associate professor and county agent with Rutgers Cooperative Extension, said the native planting movement has inspired more homeowners to support birds, pollinators and other wildlife by creating meadows of flowers and grasses on their properties.

Bakacs works with New Jersey residents interested in establishing native landscapes.

Homeowners who create nature-based landscapes should consider factors such as sight lines and visibility when planning their yards, she said.

For homeowners with corner lots, one practice involves setting the meadow back from roads and sidewalks, Bakacs said.

Jean Epiphan, an assistant professor at Rutgers University and an agriculture and natural resources agent, said communities are continuing to revisit landscaping regulations as interest in native plants grows.

“And so there’s a lot of movement, maybe a little slow in this direction, but there is movement,” Epiphan said. “And town by town, people are making changes.”

[---]

Councilwoman Andrea Mandel said she had seen the property prior to the council meeting and had observed vegetation extending into areas that may already be in violation of township regulations.

The council has not taken formal action, but officials indicated they would continue reviewing whether existing rules adequately address native landscaping while balancing safety concerns raised by residents.

- More Here

Meta Values - 52

Never-ever confuse knowledge & technological progress with progress in human morality. It never happened nor will happen in the future. 

Thank you John Gray for teaching me this during my wonder days with Max. Thank you, sir. 

First step improve my morality and make marginal progress in morality in future is to understand John Gray's wise words. 

There is no such thing as progress, that is, of things getting better: science and technology may improve, but the human animal will not; purpose does not exist independent of human construction, history and civilizations have no grand plan, no superior march towards glorious progress, nor can that purpose be a moral redemption of mankind.

[---]

If there is anything unique about the human animal it is that it has the ability to grow knowledge at an accelerating rate while being chronically incapable of learning from experience. Science and technology are cumulative, whereas ethics and politics deal with recurring dilemmas. Whatever they are called, torture and slavery are universal evils; but these evils cannot be consigned to the past like redundant theories in science. They return under different names: torture as enhanced interrogation techniques, slavery as human trafficking. Any reduction in universal evils is an advance in civilization. But, unlike scientific knowledge, the restraints of civilized life cannot be stored on a computer disc. They are habits of behaviour, which once broken are hard to mend. Civilization is natural for humans, but so is barbarism.

[---]

Science enables humans to satisfy their needs. It does nothing to change them. They are no different today from what they have always been. There is progress in knowledge, but not in ethics. This is the verdict both of science and history, and the view of every one of the world's religions.

- John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Upper Limits Of Biology

In June 1973, chestnut colt Secretariat ran the Belmont Stakes so fast that no horse has matched him since. In less than two and a half minutes, Secretariat flew along the track, finally pulling away to win by 31 lengths, nearly three quarters of a football field. The other horses were so far behind they weren’t even in the television frame. Fifty years later, billions of dollars have been poured into breeding and training, yet Secretariat’s record still stands.

This is the paradox of the thoroughbred: breeders have spent centuries trying to create a faster horse, but in doing so, they may have bred away the very genetic diversity that would allow the horse to keep improving, or even to remain robust.

[---]

As genetics has played such a large role in breeding horses, it is small wonder that horse breeders are moving with the frontiers of science. The world’s first cloned horse, called Prometea, was born in 2003. Horse cloning is now big business, despite an American Jockey Club ban, as other equine sports, including show jumping and polo, allow clones.

In 2024, the Argentinian company Kheiron announced the production of the first CRISPR-edited horses: Polo Pureza, an award-winning mare, was the foundation for five gene-edited clones with increased explosive speed. According to reports, the company modified the MSTN gene, so that the animals would develop more muscle fibers and potentially run faster as a result. Even so, the prospects for exceeding current records through gene editing are slim. Today’s racehorses are already tightly optimized for speed, balancing strength against the cost of carrying additional muscle mass. Adding more muscle is relatively low-hanging fruit, and if this were the key to unlocking greater speed, selective breeding would likely already have brought it about.

[---]

At the Belmont Stakes in 1973, Secretariat ran in a category of his own. His extraordinary performance seems to have been the result of many unlikely factors aligning. After he died, Secretariat’s heart was reportedly measured at almost 10 kilograms – twice as much as normal. This appears to have been a physiological fluke, however, as it isn’t a trait reliably passed down to offspring. Combined with his unusual stamina, exceptionally powerful legs that allowed him to cover 25 feet per stride, favorable race conditions, and a skilled jockey, this produced a race time that has still never been matched half a century later, despite advances in breeding, training, nutrition, and veterinary care.

Secretariat offers a glimpse of the upper limits of biology. But as racehorses have pushed against that limit to become faster and more powerful, their population has become more fragile as the gene pool has narrowed. Our 4,000-year pursuit of the ultimate horse may not have much further to run.

- More Here

How Not To Forget What Matters - Anti-Stultitia To Hypomnēma

The Latin word for the tendency to lose track of what matters in the cacophony of things that attract our attention is stultitia. “Stultitia,” writes Michel Foucault in “Self-writing,”

is defined by mental agitation, distraction, change of opinions and wishes, and consequently weakness in the face of all the events that may occur; it is also characterized by the fact that it turns the mind toward the future, makes it interested in novel ideas, and prevents it from providing a fixed point for itself in the possession of acquired truth.

You can’t just read a blog post about high agency, get filled with a sense of possibility, and become, from then on, an agentic person. As John Gray puts it in his monograph on J.S. Mill, our character is “a cluster of habitual willings.” For changes to our behavior to become permanent, we must become different people.

[---]

During the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, there spread a practice known as hypomnēmata, a type of notetaking system, used as a tool for meditation, in which the writer would store quotes from books they had read. Each day, often in the morning, the notetaker would open their notebook and look for a passage relevant to something they were struggling with, and then they would meditate on that—unpacking it, making the idea top of mind, ensuring it was alive in them. If they needed courage, for instance, they could meditate on an anecdote that made it real for them what it meant to act bravely. The idea was that over time, the insights they gathered by reading would be transformed into character, something deeply ingrained in their way of thinking and seeing and acting.

[---]

The most famous example of this practice is the meditations Marcus Aurelius wrote in his tent as plague swept through the camps during the military campaigns along the Danube River, but it seems to have been a fairly widespread practice among the “cultivated class.” A suggestion repeated in several popular manuals for living was that you should collect every snippet of thought that deeply inspires you to live in a more ethically true way and then, in the pre-dawn hour, look through your hypomnēmata to find passages relevant to your current situation—insightful quotes, examples, actions you had witnessed, notes from conversations you’d had, and so on—and meditate, in writing, on those that help you orient toward your current challenges, until you feel inspired to act in the proper way.

[---]

The hypomnēma was a mechanism for centering your mind on what matters, and for gradually refining your understanding of what matters. It was, to use a word from Plutarch, a tool for ethopoiesis (ethos meaning “character” and poiesis “making”), a tool for turning truth into character. By meditating daily on sentences that made it real to you how you wanted to live, you would remember to do the right thing—you would remember to practice it during the day (simply thinking about it is not going to change you). And gradually, you would become that sort of person. You wouldn’t even need to remind yourself. Your principles would have become your character. You would have developed expertise in the skill of holding yourself in a better way.

- More Here

Ocean Came To The House

What Nobody Teaches You About the Holocaust

I had heard hundreds of “Holocaust Survivor’s Stories,” but never one like this. And the reason is brutally simple: almost none of them survived. Auschwitz was a horror—no sane person disputes this—but Jews could survive Auschwitz. Thousands did. They lived to write memoirs and testify at trials and speak at Shabbat dinners and fill the halls of dozens of museums across the Western world. You have never met a survivor from Sobibor because there were practically none. You have never met a survivor who fled to the woods of Belarus because there were almost none of those either.

The story we tell ourselves about the Holocaust is the story of the survivors, which means it is the story of the camps, which means it is overwhelmingly the story of Germans killing Jews through an industrialized system of extermination. This is not false. But it is not how most Jews died. I’m not going to engage in concrete numbers because it’s definitionally impossible to come up with anything concrete, but I will roughly estimate upwards of 75% of the Jews that died in the Holocaust didn’t die in camps or ghettos.

[---]

Americans do not think about logistics or supply chains so the camps narrative feels perfectly natural to us. The Nazis rounded up the Jews, put them on trains, shipped them to camps, killed them. Simple, neat, mechanistic - very German.

Now think about this logistically and logically: there were six extermination camps: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, and Majdanek. They were all located in occupied Poland and most were not fully operational until 1943. The Final Solution was formalized in 1942.

Now consider where the Jews in Europe actually lived. The vast majority of European Jews, millions, didn’t live in Berlin or Amsterdam or even Warsaw but in the small towns and cities of eastern Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, and Ukraine. The shtetls. The Pale of Settlement and its successor communities. Many in places like Vilnius, Kaunas, Riga, Minsk, Brest, Lviv, and even more scattered in ten thousand smaller towns.

Here is a fact that is well-known to railroad historians and almost completely absent from the popular narrative: German and Russian rail gauges were different. The Russian Empire used a broader gauge—1,520 millimeters versus the European standard of 1,435 millimeters. 

[---]

The timeline makes the camps-centric narrative even more untenable for the eastern Jews. By the time Treblinka was operational in July 1942, by the time the extermination infrastructure was running at anything like capacity, the majority of Jews east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line were already dead. They were not gassed. They were not transported anywhere. They died where they lived and they were killed overwhelmingly not by Germans but by their neighbors.

[---]

As a Jew, this is a hard thing to say, and a harder thing to feel. You want your murderer to care enough to murder you. The reality is in some ways worse: the Wehrmacht rolled through these towns, sometimes confiscated supplies, occasionally issued anti-Jewish decrees or assisted the Einsatzgruppen (German mobile killing units), and then moved on to the real war. They left the Jews to the locals. And the locals were hungry.

[---]

Here is the fact that most completely demolishes the popular narrative: the majority of Holocaust victims in the East were already dead before the extermination camps were fully operational.

The Wannsee Conference took place in January 1942. Treblinka opened in July 1942. Sobibor in May 1942. Belzec in March 1942. Chelmno, the earliest, began operations in December 1941. Auschwitz-Birkenau's gas chambers became operational in early 1942 and reached full killing capacity later that year.

The mass shootings in Lithuania were substantially complete by December 1941. The Babi Yar massacre occurred in September 1941. The Romanian massacres in Bessarabia and Bukovina took place in the summer and fall of 1941. The initial sweep of killings across Ukraine and Belarus occurred between June 1941 and early 1942. So when you talk about the Holocaust, this is actually what you’re referring to more so than camps.

There is, in fact, a documented moment that captures this timeline perfectly. In Fall of 1941 reports reached Hitler that the locals in the occupied territories were killing Jews on a massive scale. His response was not to order it stopped. It was not to order it accelerated. It was something closer to a shrug. The Jews were dying, the locals were handling it, and he had a war to fight. The formalization of the Final Solution, the bureaucratic machinery, the camps, the deportation schedules, came after the spontaneous genocide in the East was already well underway. It was, in a horrible sense, an attempt to systematize and extend to Western Europe a process that had already consumed the Jews of the East.

This does not make the camps less evil. It does not make the gas chambers less horrific. It does not exonerate Germany or diminish German responsibility for creating the conditions under which the killing occurred. But it fundamentally changes the story from one of German industrial genocide carried out primarily in camps, to one of a continent-wide eruption of murderous violence carried out primarily by local populations against their own neighbors, facilitated and encouraged by a German occupation that was too busy fighting the largest war in history to do most of the killing itself.

[---]

The Holocaust is primarily a story of neighbors and ditches and bullets and fire and cold. Of neighbors turning on neighbors in an instant. It happened not in a handful of purpose-built facilities in Poland but in ten thousand towns and villages and forests and swamps across a thousand miles of Eastern Europe. A horror story carried out not mainly by Germans but by Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians, Romanians, and Croats.

- More Here

Kalendar & Wisdom Of Thoreau

I think that the man of science makes this mistake–& the mass of mankind along with him,” he wrote in his Journal in 1857, “that you should coolly give your chief attention to the phenomenon which excites you–as something independent on you–and not as it is related to you. . . . With regard to such objects I find that it is not they themselves–(with which the men of science deal) that concern me. The point of interest is somewhere between me & them (i.e. the objects)” (11/5/1857, Journal Transcript 24:610).

[---]

Thoreau’s Kalendar, in its attempts to integrate human and more-than-human timescales and to extend moments of wonder at the abundance of the natural world, exemplifies the power of a radically expanded conception of time. As an elegy to a life lived in nature, it is also a testament to the irreversibility of time’s arrow.

- More Here

Is This Artemis II Timelapse The ‘Pale Blue Dot’ For Our Times?

 

Mutualistic Partnerships Between Species Abound Across Nature

I then found many more examples of this — the maximum was five different species of ants living in one plant. So I did a wide range of experiments to understand what was going on. The first possibility was that these ant species were simply not very aggressive. To test this, I took workers from one of the species of ants and put them near workers of the other species to see whether there would be conflicts. And yes, there were. But what was interesting was that in field lab experiments, when you kept the nests apart, the ants could share a nearby sugar source without killing each other.

[---]

The ultimate test was to disrupt these compartments. When I removed the wall between two different species of ants, I found they would fight to death. After half an hour, few ants would be left alive, even though they’d been living there for years. The plant suddenly ended up without any ants at all.

[---]

They are rather unique, though species that have bacterial symbionts — humans included — do promote the growth of different bacteria in different areas of the body, which is arguably a kind of compartmentalization. Bodies also have mechanisms to prevent bacteria from entering areas where they can cause disease. When otherwise beneficial skin or gut bacteria enter our bloodstream, for example, they can become very dangerous. This shows that mutualism is always a matter of balance and control.

Many plant roots have similar protections to prevent the fungi that help them absorb nitrogen and phosphorus from growing too far inside, where they can cause damage. They also often host different strains of bacteria or fungi in different compartments, so they can selectively reward or punish them based on what they contribute.

[---]

I think this is the major pathway to evolution of obligate dependence in which species really depend on each other for survival. Both species might lose the ability to perform certain functions, say digesting certain nutrients, producing certain vitamins or defending themselves from predators, because they are provided by the partner. It’s an automatic evolutionary mechanism that makes species dependent — and vulnerable. When one species goes extinct, the other one is likely to disappear as well.

- More Here

The Examined Life Is Not the Optimised Life

That question is the old one about what makes a life worth living, and it is here that the optimising frame seizes up. We tend to imagine meaning as a reward stored behind achievement, a prize handed over once we are finally successful enough, secure enough, healed enough, lean enough. 

Yet almost none of the experiences people actually name as meaningful arrive in that fashion. Sitting up through the night with a dying parent is not pleasant and cannot be hacked, and still the people who have done it will tell you it was among the most meaningful things they ever lived through. Raising a child is the same. So is standing beside someone whose world has fallen in, telling a truth that costs you something, starting again after a loss that levelled you. 

What all of these share is that they refuse to be controlled in the way optimisation needs its objects to behave. Love shrinks into something lesser the instant you try to engineer it. Grief, rushed, sours into something false. The experiences that give a life its weight tend to be precisely the ones that happen to us, that we undergo rather than arrange, and a frame built entirely around tightening our grip will keep sliding straight off them.

This is usually the point at which an old line gets quoted, and generally a little too comfortably. Socrates, on trial for his life and offered his freedom on condition that he give up philosophising, refused, and told the court that the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being. 

We have flattened that into a fridge magnet, a mild encouragement toward a bit more reflection. He meant something a great deal less soothing. He was claiming that a life run entirely on borrowed assumptions, never once questioned, never brought up hard against the matter of what is actually good, has forfeited the very thing that would have made it a human life rather than a well-managed animal one. And the examined life he had in view is not the optimised life in a toga. 

The optimised life asks how to perform better against goals it has swallowed whole and never inspected. The examined life turns round and inspects the goals, which is a far riskier undertaking, since the inspection may well cost you the goals you have built everything on.

[---]

At the centre of nearly all these old exercises sat one discipline, the training of attention, and it is attention above all that the optimised life ruins. The Stoics had a word, prosochē, for a continuous mindfulness of what one was doing and becoming, a steady presence to the moment one was actually in. 

It is the opposite of the divided, metricised, faintly anxious attention most of us now carry through our days, one eye forever on the screen that will tell us how we are performing. 

You cannot examine a life you are not present to, and you cannot be present to a life you are perpetually trying to improve, because the improving self is always half-turned toward a future in which things will be better arranged. The harder we work at optimising our experience, the less of it we are ever actually here for.

[---]

The unexamined life, Socrates said, is not worth living. Our own age has produced a remarkable substitute for it, the optimised life, busy and measured and impressive and somehow still thin. Between the warning and the substitute lies that small and unfashionable stretch of ground where philosophy still earns its keep, not as an ornament for people with time to spare, but as the practice of asking, honestly and while it still matters, what a life is for.

- More Here

We Know Sleep, Exercise & Diet Are Vital For Health. But Why?

Suddenly, the oldest health advice begins to make much more sense. Exercise doesn’t simply boost muscle mass, it bulks up the hippocampus – a key region of the brain involved in learning and memory. It also encourages mitochondria to become more numerous and more efficient. We often imagine we’re training our bodies; we’re also strengthening the ancient energy system that allows our brains to work.

Sleep performs a different kind of maintenance. While we’re unconscious, the brain is astonishingly busy. Memories are consolidated and worn-out cellular components – including mitochondria – are repaired or replaced. So rather than thinking of sleep as simply rest, we can conceive of it, at least partly, as a mitochondrial maintenance shift, aimed at preparing the brain for another day of active learning, adapting and imagining.

Then there’s food. Mitochondria rely entirely on what we eat to perform their remarkable chemistry. The quality of that fuel matters. Diets rich in minimally processed foods provide the ingredients for efficient energy transformation, while diets that continually overwhelm the system appear to make that process less efficient over time.

Seen through this lens, sleep, exercise and diet stop looking like three separate pieces of lifestyle advice and become different ways of caring for the same biological inheritance. What fascinates me most is that this new understanding reaches far beyond physical health. Scientists are uncovering intriguing links between mitochondrial function and resilience, mood, personality traits, and even our social lives.

For centuries we’ve tended to separate mind from body, as though thoughts somehow floated free of the flesh that produced them. The reality is that thoughts emerge from living tissue that must constantly capture, transform and use energy simply to exist.

- More Here

Cultivating A State Of Mind Where New Ideas Are Born

Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

- James Baldwin

One of the easiest things to cultivate but yet most humans never do so. 

An important piece of the year: 

When expressed in aphorisms like this, you almost get the impression that creativity simply requires that you sit down in a room of your own. In practice, however, what they are referring to as solitude is rather something like “a state of mind.” They are putting themselves in a state where the opinions of others do not bother them and where they reach a heightened sensitivity for the larval ideas and vague questions that arise within them. 

[---]

One thing that sets these intensely creative individuals apart, as far as I can tell, is that when sitting with their thoughts they are uncommonly willing to linger in confusion. To be curious about that which confuses. Not too rapidly seeking the safety of knowing or the safety of a legible question, but waiting for a more powerful and subtle question to arise from loose and open attention. This patience with confusion makes them good at surfacing new questions.

[---]

There is a difference between knowing what you need to do (be independent and true to the potential in your ideas) and something else entirely to know how to embody that. Orienting in the right way to your thoughts is a skill. Like all skills, it takes practice. You also need to have a rich mental representation of how it is supposed to feel to embody the state so that you can orient toward that. This feeling is what you use to measure the relative success of whatever techniques you employ.

To slip more easily into the state, many develop strict habits around their work, rituals even.

[---]

Introducing a long delay between when you do the work and when it is shown to the world. 

Thinking of the work in religious terms, as a service to, or a search for, God.

Working with talented and open-minded collaborators, if you have the chance, can be a way to enter the zone.

Work so fast that you don’t have time to self-censor. 

[---]

The mental states where new ideas can be born are hard to open up. And they are continually collapsing. The things you have to do to keep them from caving in will make people frown upon you—your tendency for isolation, working deep in the night, breaking norms. The zone is a place at the margin of society. But strangely enough, this fragile margin is where the ideas that make our society possible come from. Almost everything that makes up our world first appeared in a solitary head—the innovations, the tools, the images, the stories, the prophecies, and religions—it did not come from the center, it came from those who ran from it.

 

We’ve Solved Many Medical Mysteries - Saloni Dattani

Happy Birthday Fluffy

Max’s little sister turned 10 today. 

Yes, I sighed after typing the above sentence… life moving so fast… what an amazing life Max and Fluffy gave me :-) 

Happy Birthday my love! I love you! 

My favorite picture of both of them together; I went to get the mail while both were waiting for me at the door.

Both of them were waiting for me outside the laundry room. Fluffy was just a year old!

Sleeping together peacefully 

Meta Values - 51

In the 21st century, the people beside you before you die are most of them you would meet for the first time a few days ago.  

That is not the weirdest thing. 

The people who made you live so long are people who you never heard of leave alone even seen them. 

If you are overfitting time, love and whatever towards your family and friends; you don’t understand gratitude. 

Having a life long awareness and gratitude for millions of living beings (not just humans) who gave you life, enabled you to experience the richness and beauty of life, and little-mudane things that made your life livable.

Darwin’s entangled web is your life. And mine and Max’s too. 

Happy B’day Garphy!

My little Buddha turned 9! 

He came home on July 30th, 2019 after I met him at Max’s vet during Max’s cancer treatment. 

On one of the worst days of my life, a beautiful gift of life, Garphy came into my life :-) 

Life is impossibly surprising - the timeless lesson Max taught me a long time ago: 

Embrace Serendipity!

Happy Birthday Garphy! 

Meta Values - 50

Wilson’s Law, which states that prioritizing the acquisition of knowledge and intelligence will ultimately lead one to financial success.

What Wilson Law doesn’t say is financial success is only a third order effect. 

The primary effect is that one develops a continuous sense of awe and wonder for all things on this planet and beyond. 

The second order effect is natural understanding the preciousness of life and gratitude for every little moment and things. 

That is a gift anyone can inherit!

Meta Values - 49

One’s culture, religion, family,  sex, ethnicity et al., inherently creates a predictable stereotype and traits. These are so easy to observe and catch in the moment as and when they show up. 

It goes without saying most of these stereotypes and traits are bad. 

The value is to understand this is real, biological,  and work towards slowly eliminating them. It takes months or even years but the good news is they can be eradicated. 

And then looking back one day, one would feel an immense sense of freedom.

  

Lichens - Our Ancient Mentor

They blow like green scarves from trees, crust rocks, frost fences, paint bark, and glow on roofs, tombstones, blue tarps — really anything that will stay still for a bit can be a swell home for a lichen.

Lichens delight, confound and inspire. A thing unto themselves on the tree of life, they have puzzled scientists for more than a century as to just what they even are. One of earth’s most adaptable forms of life, lichens live on every continent and have passed multiple tests of their ability to survive in outer space, even for months.

Beyond their persistence, lichens are productive: They bind and build soil. Work as bioindicators of air pollution and climate change. Produce nitrogen from thin air that feeds the forest floor and wildlife. Hummingbirds and bushtits gather lichens to wind into their nests. Ungulates, including caribou, elk and deer, subsist on lichens in winter, when other foods are scarce.

Lichens provide dyes, food and medicines for people, too, with their antimicrobial, antifungal and immune-support attributes deployed in traditional herbal medicines. Extracts of lichens also are used in deodorant, toothpaste, salves, extracts, teas and perfume.

Self-sufficient, lichens have no roots, no vascular tissue, make their own food and don’t need pollinators to reproduce.

[—]

Quiet and immobile as they may seem, they are actually articulate storytellers. The presence — or absence — of a lichen species, and changes in either, can indicate a shift in air quality and narrate the march of climate change.

And for all their fixedness — lichens are remarkably slow-growing — they are not passive. Some lichens wage mighty battles to define their boundaries, deploying chemical warfare, visible in a black line around their borders, to keep other lichens or their mortal enemy, moss, from encroaching, and even growing right on top of them, snuffing them out.

[—]

It was Spribille who revealed that lichens are not a twosome at all, but actually a ménage à trois, with a hitherto overlooked partner — for some 140 years.

Spribille and his collaborators shared their discovery in a 2016 scientific paper published in Science. Their genetic analysis found that lichens aren’t just the result of a single fungus and a photosynthesizing partner (be it an alga, a cyanobacteria, or both.) They found there also is a second fungus, a yeast, in the mix. Follow-up DNA analysis by Spribille and his colleagues — of 52 lichen genera from six continents — also detected the second fungus. The initial breakout from the one-lichen-one fungus paradigm was not a one-off.  

Scientists are still exploring whether the yeast is truly a symbiotic contributor, or just along for the ride. But even discovering its presence was a shocker, revealing lichens to be ecosystems unto themselves, with complexities that scientists are still trying to understand.

“We underestimated lichens for a very long time,” Spribille tells me. “It is not so much that people in the past got it wrong, as that they were missing a part of the picture, with the tools they had available to them, before the advent of genomics and modern molecular DNA sequencing.”

[—]

“Why wouldn’t they matter?” Goward says of lichens. “There are animals that feed on them, reindeer and caribou would not exist without them, they are beautiful, they color our world, they grow where other things don’t grow, they can live where nothing else can, they have the capacity to grow everywhere.”

And they are that example in nature in which one plus one equals … three. Perhaps that is why lichens have challenged science for so long.

“Science is reductionist,” Goward said. “The study of biology reduces life to its parts, the whole disappears. Lichens challenge that.”

To him, though, it goes much deeper. Lichens provide a window to see how in life things really work.

“It is still gobsmacking, the idea that lichens are a portal through which you look in one direction, and what you look at is the organism, and you turn around and what you see is the ecosystem, and they are a variation on the same thing.”

[—]

The way forward to a better future is an empathic relationship with the living world, Goward says, a future in which we recognize and honor our connections to the earth, and one another. Lichens, he continues, are our ancient mentors in this, reliable truth tellers about how the world really works.

“You can see the whole world in lichens.”

- More Here

Being Honest & Standing Up For Truth Matters

Two thousand years earlier, a North African king named Jugurtha rode out of Rome having just bribed a tribune to shut down his own corruption hearing — then arranged a murder while he was in town, for which Rome’s punishment was a polite request to leave. Looking back at the city, he delivered the greatest exit line in ancient history: “a city for sale and doomed to perish if it finds a buyer!”

That line gets quoted as an indictment of the people who sold Rome. It is worse than that. It is an indictment of the buyers.

Jugurtha wasn’t indicting the Senate for being evil. He was indicting them for being cheap. He walked into the mightiest republic in the Mediterranean, expecting resistance. He found a clearance sale.

There is a line. Cross it, and the arithmetic flips. The people gaming the system start to outnumber the people holding it up. Every honest person left standing starts to feel like a sucker. Then that person stops being honest, which moves the line again. Then the next person adjusts. Then the next.

A city can carry a certain number of crooks just as a body can carry a certain number of parasites. It gets pale. It itches. It makes bad decisions. But it lives. Stable societies accumulate these parasitic coalitions — cartels, lobbies, insiders — the way ships accumulate barnacles, each one small, each one rational, until the hull can’t move.

That is the asshole threshold.

Humans have been walking up to this line for three thousand years. Most societies that crossed it died. But a few — a strange, stubborn few — stood at the edge, looked down, and did something that shouldn’t be possible: they turned around. America itself did it once, a little over a century ago, when the country was more corrupt, more violent, and more for-sale than it is now. So what changed?

[---]

Societies don’t collapse because millions pick up weapons. They collapse because millions approve and normalize cruelty.

- More Here

The Odyssey

Since the movie inception came, I usually watch  Nolan’s movies the very first day. Last night, I watched his latest movie Odyssey. 

From the very first scene I was waiting for Argos and his bond with Odysseus. Although, the movie didn’t show too much about this dog-human bond but that scene when Argos dies did make my eyes wet. 

Max and I are a small drop in this ocean of immense bond between humans and animals. 

The movie is beautiful and conveys an important message on the vanity of war, religion, ideology, and the bottomless pit of human desires. 

Matt Damon playing Odysseus has done a fantastic job especially the final scenes and dialogue which starts with: 

"I had a lot of time to think…”

How To Thinking In Writing!

One of the best pieces I read so far this year.

Good thinking is about pushing past your current understanding and reaching the thought behind the thought. It often requires breaking old ideas. This is easier to do when the ideas are as rigid as they get on the page. In a fluid medium like thought or conversation, you can always go, “Well, I didn’t mean it like that” or rely on the fact that your short-term memory is too limited for you to notice the contradiction between what you are saying now and what you said 12 minutes ago.

When I write, I get to observe the transition from this fluid mode of thinking to the rigid. As I type, I’m often in a fluid mode—writing at the speed of thought. I feel confident about what I’m saying. But as soon as I stop, the thoughts solidify, rigid on the page, and, as I read what I’ve written, I see cracks spreading through my ideas. What seemed right in my head fell to pieces on the page.

Seeing your ideas crumble can be a frustrating experience, but it is the point if you are writing to think. You want it to break. It is in the cracks the light shines in.

When I write, I push myself to make definite positive claims. Ambiguity allows thought to remain fluid on the page, floating into a different meaning when put under pressure. This makes it harder to push your thinking deeper. By making clear and sharp claims, I reveal my understanding so that I—or the person I’m writing to—can see the state of my knowledge and direct their feedback to the point where it will help my thinking improve.

[—]

Once I stretch my understanding thin in writing, I often see holes right away. I start correcting myself and discarding ideas already while typing. I cut ideas that are obviously flawed. I rewrite what feels ambiguous to make it more precise, concrete, unhedged, and true to my understanding.

The flaws I see immediately, however, are only the more superficial flaws. The deeper patterns take a longer time to emerge—because they are further from my established thoughts and so are harder to articulate.

Often, they occur first as subtle emotional cues. As I reread a passage, I notice a slight tension across my chest or my eyes fog over. For some reason, it doesn’t feel right. There is something wrong here. 

These subtle feelings are easy to dismiss (“Eh, words are slippery, I mean something slightly different . . . there is no reason to obsess about this”). But in my experience, it is these subtler problems that tend to open a path beyond my current understanding. I learned this from my wife, Johanna, who will often sit with a draft for several hours, not writing or editing, but simply articulating why something feels off to her. Our best essays have come out of the things she surfaced during those sessions.

[---]

The emotional tone of these questions is, in my head, lovingly curious; I’m not trying to put myself down. I’m out to kill ideas. I want to help them evolve and spill forth more insight. Often this dialogue ends with me changing my mind about several premises and coming to a different conclusion, but the original idea remains the seed—no less valuable for having been proven wrong. It takes creativity and boldness to leap out and form a conclusion, and the part that criticizes must understand how dependent it is on the part that throws ideas at the wall. It is often easier to criticize than it is to synthesize a new position.

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Counterexamples are useful in two ways. Either you find a counterexample that a) proves one of the premises wrong but b) does not change your mind about the conclusion. Lakatos calls this a local (and non-global) counterexample. This means there is something wrong with your explanation. Perhaps you need to change that part of the explanation? Or perhaps you can simply drop it, making the mental model simpler and more general? Local counterexamples help you improve your explanation and get a better understanding. 

Wisdom Of Ronald Sandler

It is terrible that there are no longer enormous migrating flocks of passenger pigeons in the United States or freshwater dolphin pods in China … what is even more terrible is that this is no longer a world for them.

- What Is ‘De-Extinction’ Really For?

Underdeveloped Prefrontal Cortex = Obsession With Childhood Dreams = Mars Delusion

It’s ridiculous people hold on to their childhood dreams when their prefrontal cortex was extremely underdeveloped and neither have a mature view of common sensical reality. Alas, only if they focused on making life on earth a little better for every living being… 

Another reason for kids to give importance to Biology more and not overfit on Physics and Engineering.

Mars Delusion is part of those moronic people who refuse to shed their childhood fantasies:

Zubrin, arguably the world’s most prolific Mars evangelist, appeared on my laptop screen, sitting behind the desk at his office in Boulder, Colorado. His Mars obsession had begun as you might expect for a man in his 8th decade. He was 5 years old when the Soviets launched Sputnik. But while the adults around him seemed terrified by its implications, a young Zubrin saw only opportunity. “We were going to be on the Moon by 1970, Mars by 1980, Saturn by 1990, Alpha Centauri by the year 2000. This is what the future looked like,” he told me.

In the late 1980s, Zubrin was working as an engineer for the defense and aerospace contractor Martin Marietta when his bosses asked him to draw up a proposal for getting humans to Mars. By then, NASA had become a bloated enterprise. As part of the George H.W. Bush administration’s “Space Exploration Initiative,” its planners had come up with a Mars mission architecture so complicated that it seemed like they were “rewriting a play in order to give a part to every kid in the room,” Zubrin told me. Zubrin proposed a more streamlined plan called “Mars Direct,” in which an unmanned “Earth return vehicle” would land on Mars and automatically refine propellant to fuel a subsequent manned mission’s journey home.

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Some of this conviction, Zubrin admitted, was “a question of belief.” But as he continued to summarize his justifications, I found myself thinking back to Percival Lowell at his eyepiece, seeing only what he wanted to see. Zubrin’s framing of Martian settlement as a civilizational imperative gave him the latitude to gloss over its irreducible complexities and dangers in the service of essentially questionable abstractions: that human genius knows no bounds; that our Lebensraum is infinite; that freedom will always prevail against tyranny.

I suggested that forging new frontiers has not always been universally beneficial; the bloodstained history of colonization betrays that it has usually been the opposite. What was it about Mars, specifically, that promised to break the mold? “Is it a foolproof guarantee against folly? No,” Zubrin conceded.

 

An Ordinary Mind On An Ordinary Day

Ask about the unconscious and most neuroscientists will acknowledge its existence, grudgingly, before going on to explain that consciousness is hard enough to study as it is, without complicating the matter by bringing in something as elusive and ill-defined as unconsciousness. Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva, a Bulgarian-born psychologist at the University of British Columbia, is a notable exception, a self-described misfit in the field. “There is something inherently poetic in consciousness that’s evading scientists right now,” Christoff Hadjiilieva told me during one of our conversations. “Most scientists don’t value the free movement of the mind, because they don’t believe anything good can come of it. They want every effort of the mind to be rewarded, preferably with a publication.”

She recently coedited The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought, an anthology that includes an illuminating essay on the history of spontaneous thought. It describes the routines of several highly accomplished historical figures—including Darwin, Beethoven, Dali, and Chandler—who achieved great success despite working a relatively short day (four to five hours) followed by lots of long walks, afternoon naps, loads of unstructured time, and long vacations. It is often not until we leave our desks to wander, whether in mind or body or both, that inspiration strikes.

- Excerpts from the book A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan

The Dirt That Refused To Die

For 15 years, Sébastien Fontaine has been trying to kill dirt. The biochemist, who runs a lab at the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment, wanted to know how much carbon is released by soil — just dirt alone, completely devoid of life. His team sealed dirt into jars and blasted them with sterilizing gamma radiation. Then they waited for the carbon dioxide released by the soil — a sign of ongoing microbial respiration — to drop.

They waited, and waited, and waited some more: weeks, then months. Under a microscope, the irradiated soil showed no signs of life, but it continued to emit carbon dioxide. The soil wouldn’t stop breathing.

Fontaine’s lab repeated the experiments and produced the same results. Finally, convinced that they weren’t dealing with an artifact of the experimental setup, they set out to find the source of breath in dead soil.

Now, Fontaine and his colleagues have reported that their soil samples continued to consume oxygen and spew carbon dioxide for six years. In a 2025 paper in Science Advances, they proposed that a metabolic process that powers much of life is also possible outside living cells. Their experiments point to how it could work in dirt, absent the living proteins that would typically organize it. If they’re right, some biochemical reactions, such as those that release the energy of carbon-rich sugar molecules, may not be unique to living things. Such reactions — known as metabolism when performed by cells — could even predate life on Earth, Fontaine said.

The experiments show “what happens to biomolecules when they’re left to their own devices,” said Joseph Moran, an organic chemist at the University of Ottawa who was not involved with the research. They’re finding that the chemistry of life is not exclusive to life, he added. “It’s the chemistry of geology.”

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For Joshua Schimel, a soil ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Fontaine’s findings were not too surprising. “Glucose naturally, in the process of being oxidized, is going to form some of these Krebs-cycle intermediates,” he said.  Many soils are rich in iron oxides and aluminum oxides, which can catalyze this conversion, he added.

The idea that metals can catalyze biochemical reactions is central to a theory about the origins of life that has emerged over the last decade. Metals such as iron and zinc sit at the core of many of the most ancient enzymes found across life forms. Some researchers, including Moran, believe they might have catalyzed these reactions before life emerged. Studies, including his, suggest that the chemical reactions that break down and construct glucose derivatives, which are normally associated with life, might have existed before the enzymes and genes that enable them in living cells.

“There’s a handful of researchers like myself that think, actually, we should organize our thoughts about life in a different way — that we actually should put metabolism at the base of what life is doing, and then genes are a way of controlling that at a higher level,” Moran said.

Cell-free metabolic reactions could be more common than previously thought and don’t need special conditions to get started, said Markus Ralser, a biochemist at Charité University Hospital in Berlin, who found some of the first enzyme-free metabolic reactions.

“This fits a bit into my thinking about how metabolism started in evolution,” he said of the new work. “If it would be very hard to do, then the planet would not be full of life now.” This idea is complicated, however, by the low-oxygen conditions in which life arose.

- More Here