Even in absurdity, sacrament. Even in hardship, holiness. Even in doubt, faith. Even in chaos, realization. Even in paradox, blessedness
links open windows | email me at lightenin' speeds
Hey, original t-shirts for sale!
|
bird on the moon
weblog
books
all the pictures
call me moonbird
Donate: |
"Life expands or shrinks in proportion to one's courage." ~Anain Nin
Viddy Thursday: Look Around You Germs jaybird found this for you @ 20:08 in Silly People, Satire & Strange Behaviors | | permalink
Viddy Thursday: Look Around You Water jaybird found this for you @ 14:07 in Silly People, Satire & Strange Behaviors | | permalink
Viddy Thursday: Look Around You Maths jaybird found this for you @ 08:06 in Silly People, Satire & Strange Behaviors | | permalink
The Experiential Life: Sense of Time, Sense of Place It is possible though, to work with any numinous experience that one has in nature and translate it or adapt it to ones daily life. When I returned from that trip to the British Isles, the new sense I had about the landscape continued; as I hiked my local trails in the Santa Monica Mountains, I looked at every tree, boulder, and chaparral bush with new eyes. I wanted to know, what was behind what I was seeing here? Was it possible to have a similar experience such as I had on Glastonbury Tor? I’ve not experienced anything like that time in Somerset twelve years ago, but I set out on a program to hike the same canyon every week for a year in order to observe the changes over time. And there are changes, even if the freeway-laden horizon doesn’t seem to change. I noted the flowering of different trees and wildflowers, when the streams held water and when they dried up, when the grasses reached their tallest, and when the coyote pups arrived and the rattlesnakes became active. I watched the continued natural repair from a large wildfire that had burned the area a year earlier and saw migratory birds traverse the area in their seasons. I even found a place near a seasonal spring that some people have designated as a special or even sacred spot. On a tree branch near the stream was a collection of colored ribbons and torn fabric strips, some attached to shells or pieces of carved wood. The spot was lovely to sit in during a hot dry day and the water sounds were soothing, the nature spirits of the area were welcoming. So I added offerings of my own after a time and I assume that people are still doing so. jaybird found this for you @ 20:48 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
The Ecology of Magic The traditional magician, I came to discern, commonly acts as an intermediary between the human collective and the larger ecological field, ensuring that there is an appropriate flow of nourishment, not just from the landscape to the human inhabitants but from the human community back to the local Earth. By their rituals, trances, ecstasies, and 'journeys," magicians ensure that the relation between human society and the larger society of beings is balanced and reciprocal, and that the village never takes more from the living land than it returns to it-not just materially, but with prayers, propitiations, and praise. The scale ofa harvest or the size of a hunt is always negotiated between the tribal community and the natural world it inhabits. To some extent every adult in the community is engaged in this process of listening and attuning to the other presences that surround and influence daily life. But the shaman or sorcerer is the exemplary voyager in the intermediate realm between the human and the more-than-human worlds, the primary strategist and negotiator in any dealings with the Others. And it is only as a result of his ongoing engagement with the animate powers that dwell beyond the strictly human community that the traditional magician is able to alleviate many individual illnesses that arise within that community. Disease, in most such cultures, is conceptualized as a disequilibrium within the sick person, or as the intrusion of a demonic or malevolent presence into his body. There are, at times, malevolent influences within the village that disrupt the health and emotional well-being of susceptible individuals within the community. Yet such destructive influences within the human group are commonly traceable to an imbalance between the human collective and the larger field of forces in which it is embedded. Only those persons who, by their everyday practice, are involved in monitoring and modulating the relations between the human village and the larger animate environment, are able to appropriately diagnose, treat, and ultimately relieve personal ailments and illnesses arising within the village. Any healer who was not simultaneously attending to the complex relations between the human community and the larger more-than-human field will likely dispel an illness from one person only to have the same problem arise (perhaps in a new guise) somewhere else in the village. Hence, the traditional magician or "medicine person" functions primarily as an intermediary between human and nonhuman worlds, and only secondarily as a healer. Without a continually adjusted awareness of the relative balance or imbalance between the local culture and its nonhuman environment, along with the skills necessary to modulate that primary relation, any "healer" is worthless-indeed, not a healer at all. The medicine person's primary allegiance, then, is not to the human community, but to the earthly web of relations in which that community is embedded--it is from this that her or his power to alleviate human illness derives. [via mefi] jaybird found this for you @ 14:42 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Emotional devastation surfaces from Katrina A year after Hurricane Katrina scoured the Gulf Coast, the storm still rages in the minds of survivors, who now suffer twice as much severe mental illness as existed in the region before landfall, researchers reported Monday. Katrina forced 500,000 people to evacuate and carved its initials in a swath of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. The first major attempt to probe survivors' mental status found that about 15% of residents of the counties and parishes struck by the storm, or 200,000 people, have depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and other forms of mental illness, twice as many as before. About 11% now have severe mental illness, compared with 6% before the hurricane. Nearly 20% said they had mild to moderate mental illness, compared with under 10% before. jaybird found this for you @ 08:38 in News, Opinion & Politique | | permalink
Katrina: Lest We Forget *** I can't find it in me to post anything else today. Sure, life goes on, but for thousands, perhaps millions, it hasn't, and has changed for the worse. We will never forget. jaybird found this for you @ 07:12 in News, Opinion & Politique | | permalink
War Widow To Bush: "You're Here To Serve The People. And The People Are Not Being Served With This War." Hats off... I just got off the phone with Hildi Halley, a woman from Maine whose husband is a fallen soldier. Yesterday President Bush met with her privately, and news of their meeting was reported in a local Maine paper, the Kennebec Journal. The paper shared few details of the meeting, saying simply that Halley objected to Bush's policies and that she said Bush responded that there was no point in them having a "philosophical discussion about the pros and cons of the war." jaybird found this for you @ 20:37 in News, Opinion & Politique | | permalink
Jesus, people! Mixed race 12yo boy voted out of church. Why the ban? Joe is biracial, and church members didn't want the black side of his family attending with him. Y'see, this is what happens when you ask Jesus to live in your heart. All kinds of trouble. Ask Cthulhu to live in your heart, they'd hand you the keys to the church and run back to the whiskey still. Think twice about which ascended being you're willing to share coronary space with! Seriously, this is very disturbing, what with the recent school bus incident in which African Americans were asked to sit at the back. I guess we're not done yet, and it is especially upsetting that people who claim to be religious and righteous can't see the hypocrisy swinging from the end of their pearly white gleaming noses. jaybird found this for you @ 14:28 in Spirituality, Religion & Mythos | | permalink
Enzymes use quantum tunneling to speed up reactions The bizarre, unpredictable world of quantum mechanics would appear unlikely to govern everyday biological processes. However, enzymes—protein catalysts that allow chemical reactions to take place millions of times faster than their normal rate—use a phenomenon called quantum tunneling to transfer protons or electrons to or from a reactant. Until now, nobody knew just how they did it. An interdisciplinary group of UK researchers from the University of Manchester and the University of Bristol examined a single step of a reaction where an enzyme, aromatic amine dehydrogenase, extracts a proton from a substrate called tryptamine, a natural compound related to the neurotransmitter serotonin. The researchers created a computer model of the enzyme and simulated the process. They found that, contrary to what was previously believed, it is not long-range motions of the enzyme, but rather motions close to the substrate, that promote tunneling. "Our present understanding of the physical basis of enzyme catalysis is still unable to explain the many orders of magnitude by which a reaction is 'speeded up' by enzymes, nor why attempts to create artificial enzymes have so far been disappointing," said study co-author David Leys of the University of Manchester via e-mail. "Our work reveals that not only active site structure, but also motions are an essential part of the enzyme's repertoire." jaybird found this for you @ 08:21 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
Saturdays I've fallen into a bit of a routine on Saturdays. For one, as I write skirting near the 11th hours, I am about to leave the house for the first time. As sweet and tempting as the verdant August world was through the window, I was far more compelled to read books as raptors consume prey, to note the sounds of the the house when I'm the only one in it, to indulge the cats in play, and to rest, and heartily. I find it interesting that on this day of the week where I am unbound by schedule, I abide here as an anchorite and leave only under the complete hush of full-on night, where cicadas mark the passage of true time and long shadows are cast from the lamps we hope maintain civility in these hours of planetary wilderness that creep in after sunset, poke at the shutters, and rifle through the trash. It is stimulating enough to witness, from this my sanctuary, a day breeze by with its bird calls, car horns, and conversations carried by the wind from the other side of the water. I slept through one promised party, though Casey did come by and we shared wine and spoke of California, which is almost two weeks away from jarring me out of my contextual cradle. As I need to go into the city to attend to a weekly chore, I am going to attempt walking. The knee feels much more pliant today, and the rebuke of pain seems to have subsided into an annoyance of nerves. The swelling has decreased to almost give one the impression of leggy symmetricality, though I'm not certain this case can be made yet. I hope, perhaps audaciously, to mount Prospero (my trusty bicycle steed) and ride into the city's morning. We shall see. While having been a brute of a mechanism, the knee is really not a big deal, compared with the overly abundant exapmples of everyday suffering I've personally seen and held, so I'm disinclined to hobbling painfully through life when so many can barely even move forward in its muck. The cicadas are luring me, begging for an audience for their interplay between trees. I've got to get my shoes on, pack a bag, and survey the city while the final minutes of Saturday pass, and the planet edges ever closer to another arbitrary point in time, upon which we humans fixate and dote upon with such ferocity. jaybird found this for you @ 22:51 in Journaling the Infinite | | permalink
Viddy Thursday: Sigur Ros Vidrar Vel Til Loftarasa jaybird found this for you @ 20:48 in Art, Music, Theater & Film | | permalink
Viddy Thursday: Sigur Ros Hoppipola jaybird found this for you @ 14:46 in Art, Music, Theater & Film | | permalink
Viddy Thursday: Sigur Ros Glósóli jaybird found this for you @ 08:45 in Art, Music, Theater & Film | | permalink
Indians rush to temples to feed "thirsty" idols Thousands of people flocked to temples across India on Monday following reports that idols of Hindu gods were drinking milk given by devotees as sacred offerings, witnesses said. Teenagers, adults and the aged stood in long lines with garlands and bowls of milk to feed the idols of Lord Shiva, Lord Krishna and the elephant-headed Lord Ganesha, they said. Hundreds chanted hymns in the northern city of Lucknow and the eastern city of Kolkata and went into hysterics when the milk held against the idols disappeared. "It is amazing, Lord Ganesha drank milk from my hands. Now he will answer all my prayers," said Surama Dasgupta, a middle-aged woman in Kolkata. The frenzy began late on Sunday in some northern cities and soon spread across the country, including the capital New Delhi, even as rationalists and non-believers called it mass hysteria. A similar mania gripped the country in 1995 when thousands of Hindus fed milk in spoons to marble idols of Lord Ganesha. jaybird found this for you @ 20:32 in Spirituality, Religion & Mythos | | permalink
Buzz: Giant nests perplex experts
Specialists say it could be the result of a mild winter and drought conditions, or multiple queens forcing worker yellow jackets to enlarge their quarters so the queens will be in separate areas. But experts haven't determined exactly what's behind the surprisingly large nests. Auburn University entomologists, who say they've never seen the nests so large, have been fielding calls about the huge nests from property owners from Dothan up to Sylacauga and over into west-central Alabama's Black Belt. At one site in Barbour County, the nest was as large as a Volkswagen Beetle, said Andy McLean, an Orkin pesticide service manager in Dothan who helped remove it from an abandoned barn about a month ago. "It was one of the largest ones we've seen," McLean said. jaybird found this for you @ 14:27 in Environment, Ecology & Nature | | permalink
Confronting the New Misanthropy The big question today is not whether humans will survive the twenty-first century, but whether our faith in humanity will survive it. Discussions about the future increasingly tend to focus on whether humans will survive. According to green author and Gaia theorist James Lovelock, 'before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be kept in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable' (1). More and more books predict there will be an unavoidable global catastrophe; there is James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, and Eugene Linden's The Winds of Change: Weather and the Destruction of Civilisations. Kunstler's book warns that 'this is a much darker time than 1938, the eve of World War II' (2). In the media there are alarming stories about a mass 'die-off' in the near future and of cities engulfed by rising oceans as a consequence of climate change. Today we don't just have Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse but an entire cavalry regiment of doom-mongers. It is like a secular version of St John's Revelations, except it is even worse - apparently there is no future for humanity after this predicted apocalypse. Instead of being redeemed, human beings will, it seems, disappear without a trace. Anxieties about human survival are as old as human history itself. Through catastrophes such as the Deluge or Sodom and Gomorrah, the religious imagination fantasised about the end of the world. More recently, apocalyptic ideas once rooted in magic and theology have been recast as allegedly scientific statements about human destructiveness and irresponsibility. Elbowing aside the mystical St John, Lovelock poses as a prophet-scientist when he states: 'I take my profession seriously, and now I, too, have to bring bad news….' (3) Today, the future of the Earth is said to be jeopardised by human consumption, technological development or by 'man playing God'. And instead of original sin leading to the Fall of Man, we fear the degradation of Nature by an apparently malevolent human species. All of today's various doomsday scenarios - whether it's the millennium bug, oil depletion, global warming, avian flu or the destruction of biodiversity - emphasise human culpability. Their premise is that the human species is essentially destructive and morally bankrupt. 'With breathtaking insolence', warns Lovelock in his book The Revenge of Gaia, 'humans have taken the stores of carbon that Gaia buried to keep oxygen at its proper level and burnt them'. jaybird found this for you @ 08:08 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
7 Facts Making Sense of Our Iraqi Disaster With this terror triumvirate at the center of Iraqi society, we now enter the horrible era of ethnic cleansing, the logical extension of multidimensional terror. When the U.S. toppled the Hussein regime, there was little sectarian sentiment outside of Kurdistan, which had longstanding nationalist ambitions. Even today, opinion polls show that more than two-thirds of Sunnis and Shia stand opposed to the idea of any further weakening of the central government and are not in favor of federation, no less dividing Iraq into three separate nations. Nevertheless, ethnic cleansing by both Shia and Sunni has become the order of the day in many of the neighborhoods of Baghdad, replete with house burnings, physical assaults, torture, and murder, all directed against those who resist leaving their homes. These acts are aimed at creating religiously homogeneous neighborhoods. This is a terrifying development that derives from the rising tide of terrorism. Sunnis believe that they must expel their Shia neighbors to stop them from giving the Shiite death squads the names of resistance fighters and their supporters. Shia believe that they must expel their Sunni neighbors to stop them from providing information and cover for car-bombing attacks. And, as the situation matures, militants on both sides come to embrace removal -- period. As these actions escalate, feeding on each other, more and more individuals, caught in a vise of fear and bent on revenge, embrace the infernal logic of terrorism: that it is acceptable to punish everyone for the actions of a tiny minority. jaybird found this for you @ 20:48 in News, Opinion & Politique | | permalink
Iraq's Civil War: What Next? The debate is over: By any definition, Iraq is in a state of civil war. Indeed, the only thing standing between Iraq and a descent into total Bosnia-like devastation is 135,000 U.S. troops -- and even they are merely slowing the fall. The internecine conflict could easily spiral into one that threatens not only Iraq but also its neighbors throughout the oil-rich Persian Gulf region with instability, turmoil and war. The consequences of an all-out civil war in Iraq could be dire. Considering the experiences of recent such conflicts, hundreds of thousands of people may die. Refugees and displaced people could number in the millions. And with Iraqi insurgents, militias and organized crime rings wreaking havoc on Iraq's oil infrastructure, a full-scale civil war could send global oil prices soaring even higher. However, the greatest threat that the United States would face from civil war in Iraq is from the spillover -- the burdens, the instability, the copycat secession attempts and even the follow-on wars that could emerge in neighboring countries. Welcome to the new "new Middle East" -- a region where civil wars could follow one after another, like so many Cold War dominoes. And unlike communism, these dominoes may actually fall. jaybird found this for you @ 14:26 in News, Opinion & Politique | | permalink
"...[S]truggling to find a way to protect the president from public accountability." The far more difficult question is the implication of Taylor's ruling. If this court is upheld or other courts follow suit, it will leave us with a most unpleasant issue that Democrats and Republicans alike have sought to avoid. Here it is: If this program is unlawful, federal law expressly makes the ordering of surveillance under the program a federal felony. That would mean that the president could be guilty of no fewer than 30 felonies in office. Moreover, it is not only illegal for a president to order such surveillance, it is illegal for other government officials to carry out such an order. For people working in government, this opinion may lead to some collar tugging. If Taylor's decision is upheld or other courts reject the program, will the president promise to pardon those he ordered to carry out unlawful surveillance? jaybird found this for you @ 08:22 in News, Opinion & Politique | | permalink
Satan a victim of bad PR, professor says Goodness, Christianity is certainly a confusing affair, and inventive. And utterly deranged.
In his book Satan: A Biography, to be published by Cambridge University Press this month, the California university academic argues that interpretation of the Bible shows that the Devil suffered a "severe blackening of character" by the clergy, early church fathers, artists, philosophers and religious scholars. The "Devil is in the detail" - literally, he says. The reassessment of Satan comes hot on the heels of attempts to recast Judas in saintly form. Professor Kelly does not go as far as that, but he does call on theologians to consider whether the Devil is as bad as traditionally depicted. Instead of being the personification of evil, Satan is a "divine functionary" whose kingdom is the earth, he says. "My advice is, forget about evil and worry about evil deeds and the people who commit them," he said. His interpretation is accepted by many biblical scholars. The theory provides an explanation for the presence of evil and suffering, without denying the existence or omniscience of God. Professor Kelly refers to traditional texts, such as the Lord's Prayer, where the line "Deliver us from evil" is written in some prayer books as "Deliver us from the Evil One". Most Christians believe that Satan was an angel named Lucifer who rebelled against God at the beginning of Creation. After being thrown out of Heaven, he tempted Adam and Eve into sin, and since then has strived to win souls for his kingdom of Hell. But Professor Kelly argues that none of this is in the Bible, and that it represents conclusions drawn by the early church fathers and read back into the Bible. He argues from Revelation, at the end of the Christian Scriptures, that Satan remains in Heaven, as the "accuser of humankind", and will stay there until the Battle of Armageddon, when he will be imprisoned in the abyss. After a brief release, he will be imprisoned in the lake of fire for eternity. jaybird found this for you @ 20:51 in Spirituality, Religion & Mythos | | permalink
Bacteria Roll Out Carpet Of Goo That Converts Deadly Heavy Metal Into Less Threatening Nano-spheres Since the discovery a little more than a decade ago of bacteria that chemically modify and neutralize toxic metals without apparent harm to themselves, scientists have wondered how on earth these microbes do it. For Shewanella oneidensis, a microbe that modifies uranium chemistry, the pieces are coming together, and they resemble pearls that measure precisely 5 nanometers across enmeshed in a carpet of slime secreted by the bacteria. The pearl is uranium dioxide, or uraninite, which moves much less freely in soil than its soluble counterpart, a groundwater-contamination threat at nuclear waste sites. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that uranium contaminates more than 2,500 billion liters of groundwater nationwide; over the past decade, the agency has support research into the ability of naturally-occurring microbes that can halt the uranium’s underground migration to prevent it from reaching streams used by plants, animals and people. Assembling a battery of evidence, scientists have for the first time placed the bacterial enzymes responsible for converting uranium to uraninite at the scene of the slime, or “extracellular polymeric substance” (EPS), according to a study led by the DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in today’s advance online edition of PLoS Biology. “Shewanella really puts a lot of stuff outside the cell,” said PNNL chief scientist Jim Fredrickson, the study’s senior author. “It’s very tactile compared with pathogens, which go into hiding to evade detection by the immune system.” jaybird found this for you @ 14:48 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
Natural Resources are Fuelling a New Cold War ...[T]he natural resource that greases the wheels of the global economy is running out. All oil-producing states are working close to capacity and slacks or stoppages on the part of one of the major producers can't be compensated by the others. Former White House energy advisor Matthew Simmons evokes a genuinely horrific scenario: He calculates that the price of a petroleum barrel may rise as high as "$200 to $250" in the coming years -- a far cry from today's $73 and July's nominal record of $78.40. Such an extreme price increase would unhinge the entire world economy and spell ruin even for large corporations. Should the world be trembling in fear? Should everyone be afraid that gas and heating will soon no longer be affordable? Concern over such issues is certainly spreading in Germany, a country whose energy security is good compared to many others. Should we shiver with fear of anticipated bloodshed over resource allocation? The superpower China is hunting these resources especially aggressively. Should we fear the war that comes from the cold? The good news is that it's improbable, despite all the dangers and bottlenecks, that fossil fuels will become the much cited unaffordable "black gold" overnight, or that they will even no longer be available in sufficient quantities. Besides, human inventiveness has always been able to discover or invent new energy sources. The bad news is that the age of cheap oil and natural gas is definitely over. At the very latest, the next generation will be bitterly punished for our reckless overconsumption of fossil fuels. Renewable energies and energy efficiency together won't be enough to cover the shortfall, either. In the longterm, even if renewable resources like solar power, wind power and biomass -- which are urgently needed -- are added into the energy mix with oil, natural gas, coal and nuclear energy, they will still only be able to cover one-quarter of the energy needs of industrialized nations. That's the best-case scenario. Ideological trench fights over secure fuels aside, most reputable scientists agree that the historical "peak" of oil production will be reached in five to 10 years, despite improvements in drilling technology and the expansion of production to include oil shales and oil sands, which are difficult to process. From that point on, oil production will head downhill -- despite increasing worldwide demand. Earth's population consumed 83 million barrels of oil per day last year. According to calculations by the International Energy Agency (IEA), the Paris-based club of oil-importing states, the number will have climbed to above 90 million by 2010, and it will have reached about 115 million in 2030. The more fiercely fossil fuels blaze in our ovens, burn in our engines and power our generators, the faster a country can develop. US energy analyst Daniel Yergin has written that "petroleum remains the motive force of industrial society." Now, at a time when the oil age is irrevocably racing towards its conclusion, more and more people are trying to become a part of it. They are led by emerging nations like China and India -- two countries that know their growth engine will inevitably start to stutter without a constant supply of resources. Petroleum is their elixir for survival. jaybird found this for you @ 08:40 in News, Opinion & Politique | | permalink
selves within selves The light is long, as a sigh, jaybird found this for you @ 11:09 in Journaling the Infinite | | permalink
Liveblogging Matthew Fox He spoke on Thursday Aug. 17th at Jubilee Community, Asheville, NC. jaybird found this for you @ 00:22 in Spirituality, Religion & Mythos | | permalink
Viddy Thursday: Sir David Attenborough Dance of the Grebes jaybird found this for you @ 20:14 in Environment, Ecology & Nature | | permalink
Viddy Thursday: Sir David Attenborough Sounding The Alarm jaybird found this for you @ 14:09 in Environment, Ecology & Nature | | permalink
Viddy Thursday: Sir David Attenborough The Lyrebird jaybird found this for you @ 08:07 in Environment, Ecology & Nature | | permalink
A funny thing happened on the way to lunch... So, I'm gaily sauntering (as I'm prone to do) to lunch, and noticed a Eastern Tiger Swallowtail playing amongst the petunias. Then, the doubletake occured, time stopped, metaphors flew out the window, and all previous known quanities of the natural world were summoned into every neuron and pore as I noticed something unusual:  The butterfly had two different wing colorations. At first, I thought that a little insect piggy-backwas happening, or that some evil inventive child had superglued a different wing on to the poor critter. But no, this was one whole being supported through the air by two very different wings. A fantastic genetic anomaly, the audacious and upstart flutterby dazzled myself alone, as no one ventured out to investigate the little man eagerly taking pictures with a ubiquitous cellphone.  I immediately emailed the pics to Flickr, and by way of the comments, the science behind the event was revealed. What we have here is a Gynandromorph, as discerning readers of the Pharyngula Scienceblog discerned... "So, if you have a non-disjunction in an X chromosome in an XX individual during the first division of the zygote, then you will end up with an individual that appears half male (on one side) and half female (on the other side). This is called a bilateral gynandromorph. The non-disjunction can occur during later divisions, however, giving you a smaller portion of the body/wings that looks like one sex and a larger portion that looks like another. It can even happen more than once during development, so that you end up with patches of female and male scattered around on the individual, resulting in what is called a mosaic..." Note this example of a gynandromorphic swallowtail. It's exactly what I saw, with a reversal of wing fortune. I'd love to write more, much more, on this, but I'm way late for the shower and the subsequent commute to the land of abberant animals: blue fireflies, white squirrels, wayward caymen, and now Papillon sent directly from the Divine Androgyne (or a whacked chromosome). jaybird found this for you @ 12:19 in Environment, Ecology & Nature | | permalink
Study provides new insights into brain organization Scientists have provided new insights into how and why the brain is organised - knowledge which could eventually inform diagnosis of and treatments for conditions like Alzheimer’s disease and autism. A study by Newcastle University, UK, and the International University Bremen, Germany, debunked a prevailing theory that the nervous system should have mainly very short nerve fibre connections between nerve cells, or neurons, to function at its most effective. Instead the study, which carried out a sophisticated computer analysis of public databases containing detailed information of worldwide anatomical studies on primate and worm brains, found that long nerve fibre connections were just as vital to overall brain function as short ones. Much of what we know about the human brain derives from neuroscience research on primates, which are used because they have have experienced similar evolutionary stages to humans. Brain scans of Alzheimer’s patients and people with autism have shown that they are lacking certain long-distance neural interactions, although experts have yet to discover their specific purpose. The new study, published in the academic journal PLoS Computational Biology, found that long fibres are important because they can send messages quickly over a longer distance compared with if the same message was sent over the same distance via lots of short fibres. It also found that long fibres are more reliable for transmission of messages over longer distances. “You can draw parallels with a train journey from Newcastle to London,” said lead researcher, Dr Marcus Kaiser, of Newcastle University’s School of Computing Science and the University’s Institute of Neuroscience. “For example, you would get to London much more quickly and easily if you took a direct train there. However, if you had to make the journey via Durham, Leeds and Stevenage, changing trains each time, then it will take you longer to get there, and there is the possibility you would miss a connection at some point. It’s the same in the human brain.” jaybird found this for you @ 20:53 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Spock and Roll: Emotions 'fuel irrational acts' People who make irrational decisions when faced with problems are at the mercy of their emotions, a study says. Researchers traced the origin of such decisions to the brain's emotion centre, the amygdala, in a study of 20 people using a gambling game. That brain region fires up in people faced with a difficult situation but reactions to its effects vary, the University College London team found... The researchers found some people kept a cool head and managed to keep their emotions in check, while others were led by their emotional response. jaybird found this for you @ 14:45 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Death and Rebirth in World Myth and Mythic Fiction To die is to sleep, the myth seems to be saying, to be entombed among flickering dreams until we wake again. Sleep and death, birth and awakening, are fused in tales from across the world, from throughout history. There's the Chinese legend of P'an–ku, for example, a primal deity who hatches from the cosmic egg only to die, his breath, his blood, his muscles and veins, all of him, becoming the substance of the world, the wind and the clouds, the strata of rock and earth, the rivers; his death is the birth of the world. There are the metamorphoses of Greek myths — Narcissus, Hyacinth, Daphne — where death is not an end but a transformation to a new life. There are folktales or fantasy stories which take the Hindu or Buddhist concept of reincarnation as a springboard. Anna Tambour's story "Strange Incidents in Foreign Parts," in Electric Velocipede #9 for instance, has a protagonist who dies and is reborn as an eggplant. Yes, an eggplant. There's an animistic theme which informs these tales, a suggestion that death is only a dissolution of the individual back into the collective soul from which they came, from which they'll re–emerge in a new form. We tend to think of the Phoenix as the archetypal symbol of death and resurrection, to talk of rising, Phoenix–like, from the ashes. But the Phoenix which hatches from an egg incubated in fire is not the same Phoenix which builds that pyre of a nest, which dies upon that fire. That Phoenix dies so a new Phoenix can be hatched. If there is a sense of reincarnation, it is not as a restoration of the individual but as what the Buddhists would call a rebecoming. jaybird found this for you @ 07:41 in Spirituality, Religion & Mythos | | permalink
Weird Electromagnetic Things Tonight Um, yeah. A flashlight which happens to be sitting on the dining room table just flashed at me- a sustained flash of about 2 seconds. I checked it, and nothing's loose, and it wasn't on. It's got an LED bulb and I watched the beam of opaque light on my shirt. Earlier, I flicked a light switch and the flourescent bulb in there, brand new, was flickering. Not supposed to happen. Once it worked itself out it became insanely bright. And the Wifi network is a total wreck- flying one minute, toast the next. What's going on and am I a little kooky to be slightly unnerved by it? jaybird found this for you @ 22:03 in Journaling the Infinite | | permalink
Tubes: Indian village uploads itself onto Internet An Indian village has uploaded itself onto the Internet, giving the outside world a glimpse of life in rural India. Visitors to Hansdehar village's Web site (www.smartvillages.org) can see the names, jobs and other details of its 1,753 residents, browse photographs of their shops and read detailed specifications about their drainage and electricity facilities. Most of the residents can't yet surf the Hansdehar Web site as the village is not yet connected to the Internet. But the villagers hope the site -- and their imminent first Internet connection -- will put them in touch with the world beyond the flooded rice fields surrounding Hansdehar, located in a rich agricultural belt in the northern state of Haryana. "It will be a revolution," said farmer Ajaib Singh. He and other villagers hope the connection with the outside world will help speed up improvements to Hansdehar's woeful infrastructure and services such as a lack of a dispensary and unreliable electricity. The village has long been neglected by the Indian government, locals complain. "Now we can put our problems on the Web site, and then the government can't say 'we didn't know'," he said. jaybird found this for you @ 20:29 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
Greenland ice cap may be melting at triple speed The world's second largest ice cap may be melting three times faster than indicated by previous measurements, according to newly released gravity data collected by satellites. The Greenland Ice Sheet shrank at a rate of about 239 cubic kilometres per year from April 2002 to November 2005, a team from the University of Texas at Austin, US, found. In the last 18 months of the measurements, ice melting has appeared to accelerate, particularly in southeastern Greenland. "This is a good study which confirms that indeed the Greenland ice sheet is losing a large amount of mass and that the mass loss is increasing with time," says Eric Rignot, from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, US, who led a separate study that reached a similar conclusion earlier in 2006. His team used satellites to measure the velocity of glacier movement and calculate net ice loss. Yet another technique, which uses a laser to measure the altitude of the surface, determined that the ice sheet was losing about 80 cubic kilometres of ice annually between 1997 and 2003. The newer measurements suggest the ice loss is three times that. "Acceleration of ice mass loss over Greenland, if confirmed, would be consistent with proposed increased global warming in recent years, and would indicate additional polar ice sheet contributions to global sea level rise," write the University of Texas researchers in the journal Science. jaybird found this for you @ 14:16 in Environment, Ecology & Nature | | permalink
Breaking from Hersh: Bush helped to plan Levantine War In the days after Hezbollah crossed from Lebanon into Israel, on July 12th, to kidnap two soldiers, triggering an Israeli air attack on Lebanon and a full-scale war, the Bush Administration seemed strangely passive. “It’s a moment of clarification,” President George W. Bush said at the G-8 summit, in St. Petersburg, on July 16th. “It’s now become clear why we don’t have peace in the Middle East.” He described the relationship between Hezbollah and its supporters in Iran and Syria as one of the “root causes of instability,” and subsequently said that it was up to those countries to end the crisis. Two days later, despite calls from several governments for the United States to take the lead in negotiations to end the fighting, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that a ceasefire should be put off until “the conditions are conducive.” The Bush Administration, however, was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground. Israeli military and intelligence experts I spoke to emphasized that the country’s immediate security issues were reason enough to confront Hezbollah, regardless of what the Bush Administration wanted. Shabtai Shavit, a national-security adviser to the Knesset who headed the Mossad, Israel’s foreign-intelligence service, from 1989 to 1996, told me, “We do what we think is best for us, and if it happens to meet America’s requirements, that’s just part of a relationship between two friends. Hezbollah is armed to the teeth and trained in the most advanced technology of guerrilla warfare. It was just a matter of time. We had to address it.” Sy laying it all out on the TeeVee screen. jaybird found this for you @ 08:03 in News, Opinion & Politique | | permalink
A brief dispatch before scrambling eggs It is raining, and more or less has been since I went to bed, which was at midnight. I awoke a few times with the thick night just musical in rain. Just a fewminutes ago, I left a book open at chapter 3, and waddled into my bedroom to find some shorts and that it was 11. That's late for me. I've been so consumed in reverie and the bucolic morning that my own annoyingly accurate penchant for knowing the time almost to the minute was thrown far off course, breezeless at sea. If there's anything big going on in the world right now, I don't know about it. The knee seems to be making a little less nerve noise, though I am aware of it, certainly. I've not made my Saturday eggs yet, and just a few minutes ago made my tea. I'm enjoying the rain, and I know that in a few weeks the taste in the air willbe crispe |
