Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Bridge of the Gods

Kite surfing is a relatively new sport. A participant straps on a short, wide fiberglass board with boots mounted on top.  Then they lock onto a kite that looks like a small parachute. Even in a moderate wind, it's a crazy combination that translates into lots of hugely fun speed and energy.

The Columbia river gorge is the mecca of sail boarding and  kite surfing. In July,  a major kite surfing competition called the Bridge of the Gods is held in Stevenson Washington, just over an hour northeast of Portland, on the Columbia.  It's a target rich environment for a photographer.





















Monday, July 30, 2012

Fearless Felix

Felix Baumgartner is a sky diver. On July 25th, in an effort that had the look of a NASA launch, Baumgartner ascended in a helium filled balloon to 96,640 over Roswell, New Mexico. Wearing a very sophisticated pressure suit, he jumped from the ascent capsule and hurtled back to terra firma. Reaching a speed of 536 mph - mach .80 - in freefall, Baumgartner arrived back on earth about eleven minutes later. Nearly four minutes of that was in freefall, the rest under parachute.












Stuff like this fascinates me. I like the idea of pushing the envelope. In this case, the considerable resources required to mount Baumgartner's audacious freefall mission came from  corporate sponsors like Red Bull energy drink. Too bad most corporations aren't willing to step up in the same way when it comes to truly serious civilization scale challenges like global climate change.


Here is a link to Baumgartner's webpage, including some very cool animation that provides an entertaining glimpse into Baumgartner's experience. http://www.redbullstratos.com/gallery/?mediaId=media1719780923001

Here's an updated video of Felix Baumgartner's adventure... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYw4meRWGd4#t=480





Sunday, July 29, 2012

Ode to Hill and Adamson

I just stumbled across this wonderful and clever little video. Artist Maisie Broadhead  was inspired to recreate a photograph originally produced in 1844....

1844 original photo

The following text was lifted directly from the vimeo entry  describing this effort...

Artist Maisie Broadhead originally trained as a jeweller and now produces fine art photographic parodies. Her work is being featured as part of a ground-breaking exhibition at the National Gallery. As part of the exhibition Jack Cole and Maisie Broadhead directed a video to be hung next to the 1844 photographic print by Hill and Adamson that it references. It was Produced by Cap Gun Collective, Edited by James Norris at Whitehouse London and Post and VFX by Carbon FX. It recently aired on Channel 4's "Random Acts".

Broadhead's recreation


Broadhead's video of this artistic exercise is fun. The link to the video  follows...

http://vimeo.com/44374830


Saturday, July 28, 2012

Artistic Renderings #2 - Sauvie Island

Sauvie is about thirty minuites from our lome. It is very rural; farms and public lands, including a lot of space set aside for migrating birds. In the spring, the wet lands on Sauvie are teeming with Sandhill cranes, snow geese, canada geese, and several different duck species.  Bald eagles and osprey are also there and are easily spotted.

The images below were taken on Sauvie Island in the  Spring of 2012.   With these images, I applied some artistic processing in photoshop...



Sauvie at Dawn



canada geeese



snow geese



snow geese


snow geese



sandhill cranes in front of Mt. Adams


blue heron


cormorants




Friday, July 27, 2012

Careerists

Here is a piece written by Chris Hedges that resonates powerfully with me.  He writes about the bureaucrats, the faceless enablers who work in the trenches, turning corporate policy and government regulation into action or inaction that shapes our economy and our culture.  Hedges reflects on how too many of these nameless enablers remain silent or turn the other cheek, when faced with gross neglect, immorality, or malfeasance.   

Too often, such people fail when conflicted between self-interest and the greater good.  I submit that the solution is to prosecute criminal behavior. Not an easy task when so often the signals from our government suggest that bad behavior of the white collar kind will be tolerated by society.



The Careerists
by Chris Hedges


The greatest crimes of human history are made possible by the most colorless human beings. They are the careerists. The bureaucrats. The cynics. They do the little chores that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death a reality. They collect and read the personal data gathered on tens of millions of us by the security and surveillance state. They keep the accounts of ExxonMobil, BP and Goldman Sachs. They build or pilot aerial drones. They work in corporate advertising and public relations. They issue the forms. They process the papers. They deny food stamps to some and unemployment benefits or medical coverage to others. They enforce the laws and the regulations. And they do not ask questions.



illustration by Mr. Fish
Good. Evil. These words do not mean anything to them. They are beyond morality. They are there to make corporate systems function. If insurance companies abandon tens of millions of sick to suffer and die, so be it. If banks and sheriff departments toss families out of their homes, so be it. If financial firms rob citizens of their savings, so be it. If the government shuts down schools and libraries, so be it. If the military murders children in Pakistan or Afghanistan, so be it. If commodity speculators drive up the cost of rice and corn and wheat so that they are unaffordable for hundreds of millions of poor across the planet, so be it. If Congress and the courts strip citizens of basic civil liberties, so be it. If the fossil fuel industry turns the earth into a broiler of greenhouse gases that doom us, so be it. They serve the system. The god of profit and exploitation. The most dangerous force in the industrialized world does not come from those who wield radical creeds, whether Islamic radicalism or Christian fundamentalism, but from legions of faceless bureaucrats who claw their way up layered corporate and governmental machines. They serve any system that meets their pathetic quota of needs.
These systems managers believe nothing. They have no loyalty. They are rootless. They do not think beyond their tiny, insignificant roles. They are blind and deaf. They are, at least regarding the great ideas and patterns of human civilization and history, utterly illiterate. And we churn them out of universities. Lawyers. Technocrats. Business majors. Financial managers. IT specialists. Consultants. Petroleum engineers. “Positive psychologists.” Communications majors. Cadets. Sales representatives. Computer programmers. Men and women who know no history, know no ideas. They live and think in an intellectual vacuum, a world of stultifying minutia. They are T.S. Eliot’s “the hollow men,” “the stuffed men.” “Shape without form, shade without colour,” the poet wrote. “Paralysed force, gesture without motion.”
It was the careerists who made possible the genocides, from the extermination of Native Americans to the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians to the Nazi Holocaust to Stalin’s liquidations. They were the ones who kept the trains running. They filled out the forms and presided over the property confiscations. They rationed the food while children starved. They manufactured the guns. They ran the prisons. They enforced travel bans, confiscated passports, seized bank accounts and carried out segregation. They enforced the law. They did their jobs.
Political and military careerists, backed by war profiteers, have led us into useless wars, including World War I, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. And millions followed them. Duty. Honor. Country. Carnivals of death. They sacrifice us all. In the futile battles of Verdun and the Somme in World War I, 1.8 million on both sides were killed, wounded or never found. In July of 1917 British Field Marshal Douglas Haig, despite the seas of dead, doomed even more in the mud of Passchendaele. By November, when it was clear his promised breakthrough at Passchendaele had failed, he jettisoned the initial goal—as we did in Iraq when it turned out there were no weapons of mass destruction and in Afghanistan when al-Qaida left the country—and opted for a simple war of attrition. Haig “won” if more Germans than allied troops died. Death as score card. Passchendaele took 600,000 more lives on both sides of the line before it ended. It is not a new story. Generals are almost always buffoons. Soldiers followed John the Blind, who had lost his eyesight a decade earlier, to resounding defeat at the Battle of Crécy in 1337 during the Hundred Years War. We discover that leaders are mediocrities only when it is too late.
David Lloyd George, who was the British prime minister during the Passchendaele campaign, wrote in his memoirs: “[Before the battle of Passchendaele] the Tanks Corps Staff prepared maps to show how a bombardment which obliterated the drainage would inevitably lead to a series of pools, and they located the exact spots where the waters would gather. The only reply was a peremptory order that they were to ‘Send no more of these ridiculous maps.’ Maps must conform to plans and not plans to maps. Facts that interfered with plans were impertinencies.”
Here you have the explanation of why our ruling elites do nothing about climate change, refuse to respond rationally to economic meltdown and are incapable of coping with the collapse of globalization and empire. These are circumstances that interfere with the very viability and sustainability of the system. And bureaucrats know only how to serve the system. They know only the managerial skills they ingested at West Point or Harvard Business School. They cannot think on their own. They cannot challenge assumptions or structures. They cannot intellectually or emotionally recognize that the system might implode. And so they do what Napoleon warned was the worst mistake a general could make—paint an imaginary picture of a situation and accept it as real. But we blithely ignore reality along with them. The mania for a happy ending blinds us. We do not want to believe what we see. It is too depressing. So we all retreat into collective self-delusion.
In Claude Lanzmann’s monumental documentary film “Shoah,” on the Holocaust, he interviews Filip Müller, a Czech Jew who survived the liquidations in Auschwitz as a member of the “special detail.” Müller relates this story:
“One day in 1943 when I was already in Crematorium 5, a train from Bialystok arrived. A prisoner on the ‘special detail’ saw a woman in the ‘undressing room’ who was the wife of a friend of his. He came right out and told her: ‘You are going to be exterminated. In three hours you’ll be ashes.’ The woman believed him because she knew him. She ran all over and warned to the other women. ‘We’re going to be killed. We’re going to be gassed.’ Mothers carrying their children on their shoulders didn’t want to hear that. They decided the woman was crazy. They chased her away. So she went to the men. To no avail. Not that they didn’t believe her. They’d heard rumors in the Bialystok ghetto, or in Grodno, and elsewhere. But who wanted to hear that? When she saw that no one would listen, she scratched her whole face. Out of despair. In shock. And she started to scream.”
Blaise Pascal wrote in “Pensées,” “We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us from seeing it.”
Hannah Arendt, in writing “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” noted that Adolf Eichmann was primarily motivated by “an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement.” He joined the Nazi Party because it was a good career move. “The trouble with Eichmann,” she wrote, “was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”
“The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else,” Arendt wrote. “No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.”
Gitta Sereny makes the same point in her book “Into That Darkness,” about Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka. The assignment to the SS was a promotion for the Austrian policeman. Stangl was not a sadist. He was soft-spoken and polite. He loved his wife and children very much. Unlike most Nazi camp officers, he did not take Jewish women as concubines. He was efficient and highly organized. He took pride in having received an official commendation as the “best camp commander in Poland.” Prisoners were simply objects. Goods. “That was my profession,” he said. “I enjoyed it. It fulfilled me. And yes, I was ambitious about that, I won’t deny it.” When Sereny asked Stangl how as a father he could kill children, he answered that he “rarely saw them as individuals. It was always a huge mass. … [T]hey were naked, packed together, running, being driven with whips. …” He later told Sereny that when he read about lemmings it reminded him of Treblinka.
Christopher Browning’s collection of essays, “The Path to Genocide,” notes that it was the “moderate,” “normal” bureaucrats, not the zealots, who made the Holocaust possible. Germaine Tillion pointed out “the tragic easiness [during the Holocaust] with which ‘decent’ people could become the most callous executioners without seeming to notice what was happening to them.” The Russian novelist Vasily Grossman in his book “Forever Flowing” observed that “the new state did not require holy apostles, fanatic, inspired builders, faithful, devout disciples. The new state did not even require servants—just clerks.”
“The most nauseating type of S.S. were to me personally the cynics who no longer genuinely believed in their cause, but went on collecting blood guilt for its own sake,” wrote Dr. Ella Lingens-Reiner in “Prisoners of Fear,” her searing memoir of Auschwitz. “Those cynics were not always brutal to the prisoners, their behavior changed with their mood. They took nothing seriously—neither themselves nor their cause, neither us nor our situation. One of the worst among them was Dr. Mengele, the Camp Doctor I have mentioned before. When a batch of newly arrived Jews was being classified into those fit for work and those fit for death, he would whistle a melody and rhythmically jerk his thumb over his right or his left shoulder—which meant ‘gas’ or ‘work.’ He thought conditions in the camp rotten, and even did a few things to improve them, but at the same time he committed murder callously, without any qualms.”
These armies of bureaucrats serve a corporate system that will quite literally kill us. They are as cold and disconnected as Mengele. They carry out minute tasks. They are docile. Compliant. They obey. They find their self-worth in the prestige and power of the corporation, in the status of their positions and in their career promotions. They assure themselves of their own goodness through their private acts as husbands, wives, mothers and fathers. They sit on school boards. They go to Rotary. They attend church. It is moral schizophrenia. They erect walls to create an isolated consciousness. They make the lethal goals of ExxonMobil or Goldman Sachs or Raytheon or insurance companies possible. They destroy the ecosystem, the economy and the body politic and turn workingmen and -women into impoverished serfs. They feel nothing. Metaphysical naiveté always ends in murder. It fragments the world. Little acts of kindness and charity mask the monstrous evil they abet. And the system rolls forward. The polar ice caps melt. The droughts rage over cropland. The drones deliver death from the sky. The state moves inexorably forward to place us in chains. The sick die. The poor starve. The prisons fill. And the careerist, plodding forward, does his or her job.

Thursday, July 26, 2012

David Lettterman

I'm a David Letterman fan. My appreciation for him as a late night icon has grown even greater in reent years. 

Sure, some of his schtick is lame. His penchant for making fun of certain people's physical shortcomings can be annoying.  Height deprived guys like Tom Cruise and New York City mayor Bloomberg get skewered all the time in Letterman's opening monologues.  The hair lid on top of a certain egocentric rich guy is featured regularly. Okay, in the Trumpster's case, the personal ridicule is welcome. Nobody deserves it more...

The thing I love about Letterman is he's willing to book serious guests  and empathise about serious subjects.  The other day, he went off without warning about fracking - the gas industry practice of extracting natural gas by pumping seriously toxic chemicals into the ground to loosen up trapped gas deposits. Problem is, that toxic slurry ends up contaminating underground aquifers, doing incredible damage to the lives of the locals affected.   When late night comedian, David Letterman talks about fracking,  the public's awareness rises, and so, ever so slightly,  does the chances of a sensible public policy response.

About six weeks ago, Letterman had as a guest, Mohamed Nasheed, the duly elected President of the Republic of the Maldives, a cluster of resort islands off the southwest coast of India.   Nasheed was deposed by his country's military a short time before his Letterman appearance, mostly becaue he was too vocal about the precarious state of his nation due to the specter of global climate change. The Maldives are at most a few tens of feet above sea level, and sea level is rising relentlessly and inevitably becasuse of climate change.  All of the Maldive islands could be underwater in as little as fifty years from now.   Well, the corporations that own the hotels and resorts in the Maldives don't want to discourage tourism. Can't have sensible public policy stand in the way of those tourism dollars. So, the hotel guys encouraged the local military to get rid of Nasheed, who was replaced by the previous President, who is a toady for the hotel owners. The main stream media gives the story minimal coverage. Long story short, Letterman steps up, gives Nasheed, the deposed President, a bigtime, late night forum to talk about global climate change.

It takes courage for somebody in the public limelight to take on powerful interests like the natural gas industry.  It takes genuine awareness and also compassion to give a deposed President of an obscure nation  a spot in late night media.  Letterman has become a beacon.  He stands for things that matter.  For that reason alone, I'll take him over Leno any night.




Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Insect Pix

Photographing insects as they go about their business is a challenge, but not hard if you have a good camera and a quality macro lens that allows you to focus on really small stuff.  Bees are particularly fun to chase with a camera.

The easiest way, most of the time, is to set the lens to manual focus, then focus on a flower or whatever the insect is on then make fine adjustments to focus by moving your body slightly, then clicking the shutter when the critter is in focus. Shutter speed needs to be high enough to stop the insect's motion.  A two-fiftieth (1/250)  of a second usually is enough, but faster is even better if there is enough light.




















Monday, July 23, 2012

My Instrument Rating

After I became properly licensed as an FAA 'private 'pilot',  I was eager to take on the next step. I was ready to 'go under the hood' and train for an instrument rating. That's something every flier needs if they have aspirations for a career as a commercial pilot.  Basically, it's about learning to fly without normal visual reference. We're talking flying in clouds  or at night, with no visible horizon or ground in sight. If you lose visual reference, things can get ugly pretty quickly. You can get disoriented, your airplane can end up stalling or going into a spin. The easy way to avoid this kind of trouble is to be competent flying on instruments, using the horizon indicator, airspeed, altimeter, etc to maintain the aircraft in proper flight orientation. 

I took my instrument training at Berg-Branham Aviation at the Van Nuys Airport in California.  Adam Berg, who wrote seedy detective novels between logging hours in the air, was my primary instructor. 

Now, training on instruuments, was a challange for a number of reasons.  First and foremost, it wasn't fun like my earlier training had been. The training flights were intense.  Once airborne, you, the student, have to put on a hood that blocks your vision from everything except the primary flight instruments on the panel in front of you.  You fly that way for the next hour or so, with the instructor directing you through various exercises.  After you get comfortable with flying straight and level with no outside visual reference, you learn to do maneuvers,  turns, climbs, descents, etc.  Adam Berg was a good teacher. I recall that one of his things was to suddenly take control and push the airplane into an 'usual attitude'.  I had to recover from that unexpected circumstance while staying under the hood.  Eventually, I got comfortable with it, but it was nerve rattling to say the least. 

When you are flying on instruments, you are being monitored by an FAA Air Traffic Control Center at all times.  The biggest challenge was to learn to operate in controlled airpace.  In Southern California, air traffic is heavy. Flying an instrument approach and landing, especially in a busy traffic area like that, is where the wheat gets separated from thr chaff.  

Every airport has different procedures for instrument approaches. Back then, a pilot had to subscribe to the Jeppeson book, a thick volume in a loose leaf binder, that had all the instrument procedures for all the airports within one's flight region. Every week, a bunch of revised pages would come in the mail, with up to date FAA notices, changes to procedures, etc.  Every week, the Jeppeson book had to be updated; replacement pages in, the old pages out.  Just that task was a pain.  These days, pilots carry  a tablet; everything is updated automatically. 

Flying on instruments under the hood, while at the same time properly maintaining a holding pattern, or executing an approach procedure is the big casino.  At first, it's very difficult. Success comes only after a lot of failure. 

The image below shows the current instrument guide for the Van Nuys airport. For professional pilots, it's not terribly daunting,  but for a newbie like I was, getting it right was grueling.




Eventually, I did get it right often enough that I went up for my check ride with an FAA examiner. I recall the big test that day was executing a 'localizer' approach to Long Beach Airport. Fortunately, the  stars were aligned for me that day. I passed the test and became instrument rated.  

At that point, I rolled right into the training required for a commercial pilot's license. It seemed like I might even have a career as a professional pilot. Three things killed it for me: color blindness, cost, and precision maneuvers.   I am mildly color blind.  At least back then, you couldn't be color blind and fly for the airlines.  So, my prospects as a professional pilot were somewhat limited.  Then, their was the cost of continued training.  It was getting ever more expensive and the support I was getting from the GI Bill was running out.  The last straw was the requirement to train heavily to do precision maneuevers...perfectly executed turns, climbs, and descents.  I hated precision maneuvers. It wasn't fun. I stopped looking forward to going to the airport.  About halfway through the training to be a commercial pilot, it became clear that I was not cut out to be a commercial pilot, which in most instances has some serious kinship with driving a bus. I don't say that to denigrate commerical pilots or bus drivers. You have to be focused and professional in either vocation.  But, that kind of life was not for me.

Flying, any kind of flying, is something that requires a serious committment to maintain proficiency. At the time, I didn't have the money for that, so I chose to end my romance with flying.   I have piloted airplanes a couple of times since then.  The last time was while on vacation in Kalispell, Montana a couple of years ago. If I ever have the money, I will start flying again. When that happens, it might be in some kind of ultralight aircraft. They fly low and slow.  That's okay with me, because it would be entirely about having fun.



Sunday, July 22, 2012

More Gun Insanity

The other night, a homicidal nut bag went crazy in  a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.  More than 70 people shot, 12 fatally. Last year, another twisted fool shot a U.S. congresswoman, killing a bunch of people in the process. Thirty people were gunned down on a college campus before that.  It's just insanity.

In the US, a dozen guns get sold ever minute of every day. There are over 300 million guns owned by American citizens.  The gun murder rate in the US is staggering; almost 20 times the rate of the other 22 wealthiest nations put together.  Of all the people around the world killed by guns, 80 percent are American. Of all the kids killed by guns, 87 percent are American kids.

I don't own a gun.  I have no wish to own one. In principle, I'm not against responsible gun ownership. But why can't we have sensible regulation?  Why does it have to be a free-for-all? Why is it easier to get a gun than it is to get a driver's license?   Why does any private citizen need a military assault weapon or a cartridge clip that allows a pistol to fire thirty bullets before reloading? A line needs to be drawn somewhere. Right now, there is no line.

Polls suggest that the American public is evenly split on the subject of gun regulation. That gives the National Rifle Association enough clout to squelch any effort to talk sensibly about regulation. 

Only four in ten households in the US have a gun.  The vast majority of the privately owned guns in this country are in the hands of an even smaller percentage that has five, six, ten guns under one roof.  These people are aggressively vocal about their 'gun freedoms'.  

Guns are lethal weapons. A line needs to be drawn somewhere. Right now there is no line.



Puffin Cam

Puffins are seabirds.  They are also funny looking in a very endearing way.




The Audubon Society has a live webcam that you can go to that allows you to observe wild pufins on the coast of Maine.  Fun!

The link to the Audubon site is ...   http://explore.org/#!/live-cams/player/puffin-loafing-ledge-cam






Friday, July 20, 2012

The Population Bomb - 2012

Here's the one subject that remains uncomfortable for even average people to talk about.  Well, damn. Maybe it's time to bite the bullet.  There isn't a cultural or civilization scale problem on this planet that isn't at it's core about too many people chasing after too few resources.  The developed nations have largely used up their own mineral and biological wealth, so they are now  fighting over the largest stores that remain. Those stores are in the poorest countries,  which also happen to often be the same places where the human population is growing the fastest. The entire Africa continent is under seige, with China, Europe, Russia, and the U.S. jousting over who's going to control what the African nations have.

There are seven billion - that's billion with a B - humans on planet Earth. Everyone of those folks needs a minimum amount of food, water, and shelter to survive. Some of us, those of us living in the US, Canada, Europe, and some of the Asian nations are doing okay  But about two-thirds of the people living on the planet are not doing okay. They are living marginally at best.  At the same time, they aspire to what the developed nations have, and why shouldn't they? . They have every right to want what those of us who are privileged have. The problem is, there just isn't enough to go around.

The world is still adding about 75 million to the human population every year. There is no wisdom in that. It is insanity. 

We have the means to moderate our population problem.  We have the ability to manage our fertility to limit the number of births to those that are truly wanted.  It is entirely possible to eliminate unwanted pregnancies.

That's already happened in the developed nations.  It's the poorest places that keep on growing.   Until they have unfettered access to contraception; until they have reproductive choice, the Earth's human population is going to keep on growing.

It is just crazy  that we don't talk about this issue. It is the 500 lb gorilla lurking behind every conversation about global climagte change, deforestation, water scarcity; you name it.  

There are already too many humans on planet Earth.  There ought to be a way we as a human culture can talk about this thoughtfully and work together to stabilize then reduce our population numbers over the next century to a level that is sustainable over the long term.

Until we take on population, everyting we do to save water, stop deforestation, protect the oceans, etc are  only treating symptoms.  Time has long passed for us to  recognize that we are the problem. There are too many of us, and that simply must change.


Thursday, July 19, 2012

The Simian Finger

A surly reaction to an intrusive photographer?



Getting the finger is not an everyday occurance for most people, especially when the perpetrator is a gorilla.

In this instance, the image is funny, but the story behind it is not.  This primate provocateur,  who lives in a Colorado zoo, is named Kwisha.  She's 19 years old and her finger is permanently extended, due to tendon damage. It's been that way for 12 years.




Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Elephants and Rhinos in Australia

Just read a  piece in which the idea of introducing wild elephant herds and rhinoceros to Australia is getting serious consideration. 




Here are some relevant facts. Elephants are in grave danger in Africa due to the value of their ivory tusks.  It's even worse for the rhino because of their horns. Poor Africans are willing to risk their own lives to take down an elephant or rhino, as one successful hunt could make a man rich by local standards. That kind of pressure would be non-existent in the outback of Australia, where there is plenty of open land for elephants and rhinos to roam, and few people whose survival might depend on exploiting them.



According to the article, African gamba grass was imported to Australia long ago, and now has proliferated to the point that it cannot be consumed fast enough by catttle.  The fit for elephants and rhinos in Australia seems good. It's not as though the introduction of a large mammalian species hasn't happened before in Australia. The place is home to a large population of camels, many of which are now wild.  The camel is not indigenous to Australia, but as a species it has certainly found a home there.

If establishing elephant herds and rhinos in Australis saves those species from extinction, what are we waiting for?

Here is a link to the story about elephants and rhinos in Australia...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/01/elephants-rhinos-australia-wild-grass



Tuesday, July 17, 2012

The Known Universe - A Digital Tour

The known universe is enormous. Something on the order of 15 billion light years across.  If time and tangible existence began with a big bang, the result was a colossal  and by all appearnces endless expansion of known space. Billions of galaxies with billions of stars in each, all flying away from eachother as the universe expands outward.

Carter Emmart and his team of astrophysical wizards at the American Museum of Natuiral History have created an amazing digital rendering of what the living universe looks like, beginning on Earth and traveling outward to the edge of known space.

It's a remarkable six minute plus journey, and it can't help but leave one humbled by the awesome scale of it's vision.

Here is a link to Carter Emmart as he presents 'The Known Universe' to a TED audience...

http://blog.ted.com/2010/07/01/a_3d_atas_of_th/

Monday, July 16, 2012

Biocentrism

Earlier, I posted an entry about biomimicry.  This theory is different; far more broad in scope. In fact, it couldn't be more broad in scope.  Biocentrism is a compelling  alternate concept of how the universe works. It was developed by American physician/neuro-scientist, Dr. Robert Lanza.




Lanza is hardly a crackpot. His day job is focused on stem cell research.  He is one of the world's leading innovators in the bio-technology of growing new limbs, reversing paralysis, and extending lifespan.


Dr. Robert Lanza


Biocentrism provides a living context that seems to fit very nicely with what we know or believe about cosmology and the laws of physics.  All that stuff that's been discovered by blasting atoms apart in machines like CERN's large hadron collider works with Lanza's theory.

Here are the basic principles of biocentrism as illuminated by the wikipedia entry on that subject...

  1. What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness. An "external" reality, if it existed, would by definition have to exist in space. But this is meaningless, because space and time are not absolute realities but rather tools of the human and animal mind.
  2. Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be divorced from one another.
  3. The behavior of subatomic particles, indeed all particles and objects, is inextricably linked to the presence of an observer. Without the presence of a conscious observer, they at best exist in an undetermined state of probability waves.
  4. Without consciousness, "matter" dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.
  5. The structure of the universe is explainable only through biocentrism. The universe is fine-tuned for life, which makes perfect sense as life creates the universe, not the other way around. The "universe" is simply the complete spatio-temporal logic of the self.
  6. Time does not have a real existence outside of animal-sense perception. It is the process by which we perceive changes in the universe.
  7. Space, like time, is not an object or a thing. Space is another form of our animal understanding and does not have an independent reality. We carry space and time around with us like turtles with shells. Thus, there is no absolute self-existing matrix in which physical events occur independent of life.
Wow. Now, this is fun to think about.  Here is something we know.  No scientist has ever come close to understanding what consciousness is. It's far more elusive than the Higgs boson.   Lanza's biocentrism accounts for consciousness and the Higgs boson.

I wrote about Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphogenesis in a blog entry dated, 6/8/12.  There doesn't seem to be any incompatibility with biocentrism. They could be part of the same way of looking at physical reality.

Traditionalists in the academic world of  physics dismss Lanza, just as they dismss Sheldrake's ideas. But according to Wikipedia,  more than a few scientists view biocentrism as does Richard Conn Henry, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University.  Henry  points out that Lanza's theory is consistent with quantum mechanics: “What Lanza says in this book is not new. Then why does he have to say it at all? It is because we, the physicists, do NOT say it––or if we do say it, we only whisper it, and in private––furiously blushing as we mouth the words. True, yes; politically correct, hell no!"

Biocentrism seems  to consider consciousness and individuality to be something other than a physical phemomena. Because of that, Lanza raises the possibility that when a human body expires, the 'person' or node of consciousness linked to that body  may live on, perhaps reanimated in some other living form.  Isn't that a lovely thought.  That alone makes biocentrism a big idea we might want to invest in, at least a little.

Here is a link to Robert Lanza's webpage.  http://www.robertlanza.com/biocentrism-how-life-and-consciousness-are-the-keys-to-understanding-the-true-nature-of-the-universe/


Raptor Walking

When I was doing post-graduate studies at the University of Washington in Seattle,  I volunteered one day a week at the zoo. I was interested in raptors, a.k.a. predatory birds, like eagles, hawks, falcons, and owls. Mostly,  I helped the keeper clean out habitats. At that time, the enclosures were pretty primitive, mostly concrete and rusted chain link.  The raptors they had at the Woodland Park Zoo were almost all birds that had been brought in injured, and because of their condition they couldn't be released back in the wild.

Quite often, I was asked to take a bird out for a walk.  Mostly, I did this with a peregrine falcon and a prairie falcon.

Me and the Peregrine


I walked the bird around the zoo, talking to visitors sometimes, answering their questions. At that time, their was great concern that raptors were threatened by DDT, a pesticide that, when concentrated in the bird's body would cause the shells of its eggs to be too thin.  The process of incubating the eggs would often result in the eggs being crushed.   DDT is no longer used, and that's good for the birds.  Raptor populations have recovered in places where their is still habitat for them and adequate populations of their natural prey.



Their was one bird at the zoo that intimdated the hell out of me.  It was a golden eagle. This particular bird had a wingspan of about six feet and a set of industrial strength talons. They looked like they could penetrate steel.   The keeper I worked with loved to send me into that bird's enclosure with dinner,  which was mostly a nasty mix of ground up animal bits...kinda of like hamburger with feathers and bones.  Anyway, that golden eagle would focus on me like I was the meal it was really interested in.  I wish I had a photo of that eagle. It had a broken wing and could not be released, but it was in its prime.... a majestic and powerful presence even if it couldn't fly.

The biggest threat to predatory birds, indeed to all birds and animals, is the loss of habitat from human encroachment.   Yet another consequence of human overpopulation. 




Sunday, July 15, 2012

Levitation

There is a phenomenon called 'Quantum Locking' that occurs in superconductors under certain condtions. Israeli scientist Boaz Almog demonstrates this amazing discovery in the TED presentation with the following link...

 http://www.ted.com/talks/boaz_almog_levitates_a_superconductor.html



Saturday, July 14, 2012

The Wisdom of Psychopaths

This book will not be published until October, 2012. I just read about it in Scientific American.  The author, a psychologist named Kevin Dutton, suggests "there is a fine line between a brilliant surgeon who lacks empathy and a Hannibal Lecter who kills for pleasure."





Dutton says, "our society as a whole is more psychopathic than ever: Psychopaths tend to be fearless, confident, charismatic, ruthless, and focused—qualities tailor-made for success in the twenty-first century."

I would extend those characteristics to sociopaths as well.  We're talking about self-absorbed indivduals, who are indifferent to the consequences of their actions as they relate to others. The difference between a psychopath and a sociopath is measured in substile shades of gray. There are a whole lot of sociopaths in public life these days, starting with politicians, who treat 'of, by, and for the people', as a concept that applies only to those people who can buy the public policy they want.

There are a lot of famous faces that  fit Dutton's unsavory profile. Take Mitt Romney for instance, the 2012 Republican candidate for President of the United States. He may not be charismatic and he may not be fearless, but you certainly would have to call him ruthless and focused. He made hundreds of millions of dollars as a corporate raider, buying American businesses, stripping them of assets, then dumping their American workers in favor of the sweatshop wage, off-shore alternative.  Romney turned his corporate buy outs from profitable businesses into hollowed-out shells,  then walked away with tens of millions of dollars in plunder. As a Presidential candidate, Romney has proven, time and again, to be willing to say or do anything to advantage his position.  His presidential candidacy is more about unbridled ambition than anything else.

So many people in public life exhibit the characteristics of the psychopath. The 'wolf in sheep's clothing' is a metaphor for this kind of person.   We would all be well served by elevating our awareness so we recognize and are wary of people like this when they appear as public figures.  Perhaps Kevin Dutton's upcoming book,  The Wisdom of Psychopaths, will help in that regard. If so, it should be a welcome addition on our bookshelves.








Friday, July 13, 2012

Reproductive Rights are Basic Human Rights

That is the message at an International Summit on Family Planning that has just taken place in London. Sponsored by the Gates Foundation and the British government's Department of International  Development, it bought together leaders in government and in the non-profit donor community to pledge that 120 million more women and girls will have access to reproductive choice by 2020.

Here are some remarks by U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton...

Reproductive rights are basic human rights.  Women everywhere should have the right to decide when and whether to have children.  But too often, in too many places around the world, these rights are denied.  Millions of women and young people across the globe don’t have access to modern forms of contraception.

This committment will translate to 200,000 fewer maternal deaths during pregnancy, the prevention of 110 million unwanted pregnancies., 50 million fewer aboartions, and three milllion fewer babies dying in the first year of their life.

Nearly five billion dollars was pledged at this meeting to implement its goals.  Every child should be a wanted child.  Reproductive choice must become the standard, the world over.


Volocopter

A couple of smart guys is Karlsruhe, Germany have come up with a pretty substantial innovation in rotary-winged human flight.   This Volocopter flying machine can take off vertically and hover like a helicopter but, instead of one rotor, this concept relies on multiple rotors working together.





This link below is to the video of the first piloted flight test of the concept..

http://www.e-volo.com/information/first-flight-vc1

A prototype of a production two seat Volocopter is expected to be flying by 2014.   Because I was once a pilot and still love the idea of flying, the Volocopter appeals to me a lot. I hope they make it work.

The link below is to the company webpage. 

http://www.e-volo.com/






Thursday, July 12, 2012

Whale Wars

I confess, watching the cable TV show Whale Wars on Animal Planet is a guilty pleasure.   It's one round after another of chase and confrontation in the remote, southern Pacific ocean,  between Japanese whalers and ships of the Sea Shepard Conservation Society, led by Paul Watson.  As reality TV, it works because there is something precious at stake in every episode. That would be the lives of the whales being hunted by the Japanese.  It's people who want to kill whales versus people who want to protect them. The stories are told from the perspective of Watson and his whale defenders. Without question, they are the ones who occupy the high ground in this ongoing struggle. Japanese officials have refused requests from Whale Wars producers to include their perspective.

It's hard to understand why anyone is hunting whales in 2012. Whaling was banned  by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) about two decades ago.  Whaling nations are under treaty obligations to abide by the IWC ruling. The Japanese have weaseled their way around that by claiming they are hunting whales for research, not commercial purposes. Nobody is fooled by this ruse. But until a few years ago, down in rhe chilly waters close to the antarctic, the Japanese did their 'research' without challenge.

Again the question is, why are the Japanese doing it?  Surveys indicate that less than five percent of the Japanese population eats whale meat.  Even when done for 'research', Japanese whaling produces more whale meat than their people consume. Financially, it has to be a loser.  It seems, at least in part, it's a generational thing. Young Japanese are not fans of whaling, It's the older ones, especially the old guys,  who arrogantly defend their right to kill whales.

Moreover, the Japanese flauting of the IWC whaling ban has emboldened the Norweigians, Icelanders, and more recently, the South Koreans to launch their own 'research' whaling operations.  What the Japanese and their imitators never tell you is what they are researching. What do they learn that they don't already know by killing more whales?




I was in Japan, in Osaka, a few years ago to shoot a segment for a video production.  Now, I have to say, there is a lot to admire about the Japanese. Their culture is very well ordered, and their technology is second to none. I traveled on a 'shinkansen' bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka. It was a marvel. Anyway, the first evening in Osaka after hours in a hotel bar, I experienced my own confrontation about whaling. I was invited to share a drink with a big boss from the government agency relevant to the technology I was showcasing.  It started out very friendly. My hosts were much more enthusiastic 'drinkers' than me, and I was dealing with jetlag to boot. Out of the blue, the big boss goes off on me about whaling. Why don't Americans like whaling?  You have no right to challenge us about whaling, he said politely but very firmly.   I responded that I was opposed to whaling personally. But, your people in the north (he was referring to Eskimos) have been killing them for thousands of years, he said.  I said, yes, for them its about survival.  Not anymore, he said.   It was getting very uncomfortable.  It was me and about twelve Japanese, including the big boss, whom all the rest worked for.  The big boss was clearly intent on showing off for his minions by hammering me for being an anti-whaling foreigner.  I stayed calm and tried to give as good as I was getting. The whole thing got pretty intense. In the end, I extracted myself by pleading exhaustion from jetlag.

Even today, no one should underestimate the fervor behind the Japanese government's defense of whaling. But, it is not representative of the Japanese people. More than anything, its a bunch of old guys, who think they're defending the national pride.  At worst, the younger Japanese are indifferent to whaling, and in fact, more than a few, speak out against it.

But, I digress.  I was talking about the guilty pleasure of Whale Wars.



On one side, you've got the Japanese antarctic whaling fleet. with something like four fast catcher vessels. The catcher finds a pod of whales, mostly fin, minke, or sei whales, then chases after them until they are exhausted. At that point, a guy standing in the bow of the catcher vessel fires an explosve tipped harpoon into one defenseless whale after another.  Then the catcher boat drags the dead whales to a larger factory ship.  The dead animals are lauled onto the big ship's deck, where workers use pike sized flencing knives to  reduce the whale carcassses in minutes to small pieces, for sale later to Japanese consumers.   The slaughter is ugly, but deadly efficient.




For many years, the Sea Shepard Society has had a presence in the whaling regions of the southern ocean.  It didn't have much of an impact until five years ago when Discovery's Animal Planet cable TV channel  started broadcasting, Whale Wars.   The series is now seen all over the world.  The money generated from the production has been used to expand the effort. They now have several ships capable of managing the rough weather in the southern oceans. The central figure in the TV series is Paul Watson.  He is surrounded by young men and women from many nations, a lot of them novices at seafaring. All appear to be courageous and totally committed to stopping the slaughter of whales.




The campaign being waged on Whale Wars has reached a point that the Japanese government is sending out large vessels to shadow the Sea Shepard boats and prevent them from interfering with whaling operations.  Last year's most harrowing episode featured a Japanese ship ramming and sinking a much smaller Sea Shepard vessel.

Most of the time, reality TV is mindless dreck. Case in point: anything Khardasian.  But Whale Wars is reality TV with a noble purpose. At times,  it can get very intense.  Other times,  the drama seems a bit contrived.  That's okay with me.   By watching the show, I'm helping to keep it on the air and helping to maintain the revenue stream that comes from the broadcasts.   The Japanese whalers and the government agency that is underwriting them have to be losing money. How long are they going to stay in this pissing contest if there's no money in it for them?  The younger generation of Japanese don't have much appetite for their government's support of whaling.  If Paul Watson and his  band of young whale warriors are able to keep up the fight long enough, they will prevail.   That's reason enough to tune in Friday nights for the latest episode of Whale Wars.

Here is a link to a teaser for Whale Wars.

http://animal.discovery.com/tv-shows/whale-wars/videos/videos.htm