Earth Day 2011

It was Earth Day yesterday, and a youth group organized a parade along Commercial Drive followed by an event on the Britannia HS playing fields.  This was the first of what they are talking about making an annual event.

I was a bit late and caught up with the group when they had arrived at the school grounds — and I forgot to shift my camera from b&w mode to colour.  The event was nothing if not colourful and so the following images will be impressionistic only.  First, we have the organizers — and bravo to them.

Although the named organizing group was supposedly non-partisan, this was clearly an NDP event, with the entire field marked out with NDP election lawn signs.  Quite a few folks in the crowd were also carrying NDP placards. There may have been a Green or two, but the speeches — by Libby Davis etc — and the crowd was definitely leaning to the New Democrats.  Here is NDP MLA Jenny Kwan standing with some other freaks (who were REALLY colourful, believe me!) on the left:

The opening entertainment act were “Maria In The Closet” (?) who were joined out front by some very colourful (honest!) dancers with placards.

It looks like it was a fun event, enjoyed by a few hundred folks.   ‘Tis the season for street events and I look forward to more.

Our Bi-Annual Nonsense

Tomorrow night we will turn the clocks back one hour in a continuation of an archaic, uneconomic, dangerous and energy-wasting exercise favoured by the big gas companies. How can we still be so stupid!

This is the twice a year moment when I wish I lived in Saskatchewan!

Stewart Brand and The Way Forward

Last night I attended a speech by Stewart Brand which effectively opened the Gaining Ground Conference on urban sustainability in Vancouver.   For those who don’t know, Brand founded and edited the Whole Earth Catalog back in the 1960s.  He founded a number of organizations including The WELL (precursor to all the internet communities of today), the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation.  He is a multi-volumed author and his latest book, which formed the theme of his speech last night, is called “Whole Earth Discipline: An EcoPragmatist Manifesto.”

In the book and in the speech, Brand takes what might be considered a contrarian position on issues such as cities, nuclear power and genetically-modified food — all of which he declares to be green — and on geo-engineering, which he believes will be necessary.  Brand believes that we have to work in these directions because no other set of policies can save the earth before we reach the tipping point to destruction.

With regard to cities, Brand remarked that the Renaissance was in fact the re-urbanization of Europe after the rural retreat caused by the collapse of Rome 800 years before.  It was the cities that drove progress, and he notes that city slums around the world are the breeding ground of the most interesting and progressive entrepreneurs.  These folks are poor and do not want to be poor any more; they do what is required to improve their lives and by doing, improve the cities at the same time by developing infrastructure.   He noted the development of Sausalito (where he has lived since the early 1960s) from a ramshackle locale to a gentrified space as an example of this process.

This development was described here earlier at: “What Slums Can Teach Us.”

Brand, like me, is a big pusher for nuclear energy.  I have no way of confirming his figures but he noted that one GW of power produced by nuclear energy results in 20 tons of waste. By comparison, one GW of power from coal-fired stations creates 800,000 tons of CO2. Further, he claims, there have never been any proven child defects as a result of nuclear disasters at Hiroshima, Nagasaki or Chernobyl.  Moreover, the area around Chernobyl is now one of the most successful wildlife areas — as a result of the removal of humans and human activity in the region.  He is in favour of very-deep bore holes for storage of the nuclear waste.

Stewart Brand is also a supporter of genetically-modified food primarily, it seems, because he sees it as the best way to deliver additional food and nutritional value.  Along the same lines, he believes that “garage biotech” will be the growing hobby — as programming was in the 70s and 80s.

He now believes — with reluctance, he admits — that some level of geo-engineering will be necessary as we are now not able to mitigate the effects of emissions in time.  He remarked that we would need three Mount Pinatubo-value eruptions each year to counter the rise in heat on the earth.  He has looked at atomizing seawater into the atmosphere to brighten the albedo affect from clouds which would help cool the earth.

Basically his point is that our problems are now so great that we will need to engineer ourselves out of them — ecological sentiment is simply not enough.  He hopes that the “legacy resistance” against older “new” technologies (nuclear, GM food, etc) will not stop us finding pragmatic solutions to the earth’s crisis.

The speech was the first in the new Fay & Milton Wong Theatre at the brand new SFU campus in the re-developed Woodward’s building.  It was a sold-out event at the 400-seat locale and attendees included BC Premier Gordon Campbell.

The Discovery of Asteroids

This is an extraordinary video.  It illustrates the discovery of asteroids in our solar system between 1980 and 2010.  The first time an asteroid is discovered it shown in bright white.  It then becomes green or, if it is an earth orbit-crossing asteroid it becomes red. Those asteroids that closely approach the earth are shown in yellow.  The years and the total number of asteroids are shown at the bottom left of the screen.  As the years pass, the number of asteroids discovered increases rapidly.  This is best seen at full screen.

More than 500,000 asteroids have now been found within the solar system, and thousands of them cross our orbit.  The scientists say that the rate of discovery is not slowing down.

In the video you can see the pattern of discovery follows the Earth around its orbit and most discoveries are made in the region directly opposite the Sun.  The orbital elements were created by Ted Bowell and associates at Arecibo. See this webpage for more info.

I got this video from http://www.universetoday.com

Weather In The Cold War

I am a devotee of linear history: I like to know the order in which things happened, what came first, what came next. Give me the timeline before giving me your explanation or analysis. In an earlier iteration of my blog, I tried to catalog some of these “cultural beginnings” and I have continued this here.

It will come as no surprise therefore that I just love the History of Science Timeline site.

Having been born in 1949, I decided to look at what happened in 1950 and the first thing I noticed was that in 1950 we have the first weather forecast by an electronic computer. The 24-hour forecast took 24 hours to compute. Of more interest to me was the purpose behind the work:

“As a committed opponent of Communism and a key member of the WWII-era national security establishment, [John] von Neumann hoped that weather modeling might lead to weather control, which might be used as a weapon of war. Soviet harvests, for example, might be ruined by a US-induced drought.”

Science for the greater good, eh?

Globish

That “English” has become the predominant language around the world might seem to us, lazing around on the west coast of North America, as a truism.  But Robert McCrum and other watchers of the cultural milieu have noticed something far more subtle.  The language they see as taking over is called “Globish”, a de-politicized non-Anglo Saxon version of English with a basic vocabulary of about 1,500 words.  McCrum quotes Times journalist Ben McIntyre who

waiting for a flight from Delhi, had overheard a conversation between a Spanish UN peacekeeper and an Indian soldier. “The Indian spoke no Spanish; the Spaniard spoke no Punjabi. Yet they understood one another easily. The language they spoke was a highly simplified form of English, without grammar or structure, but perfectly comprehensible, to them and to me.  Only now,” he concluded, “do I realise that they were speaking ‘Globish’, the newest and most widely spoken language in the world.”

McCrum traces the history:

British English had enjoyed global supremacy throughout the 19th century in the days of empire. Then, broadly speaking, its power and influence had passed to the Americans in the 20th century (through the agency of two world wars). After that, during the cold war, Anglo-American culture and values became as much part of global consciousness as the combustion engine. From 1945 to 1989, hardly a transaction in the modern world was innocent of English in some form – but its scope was always limited by its troubled association with British imperialism and the pax Americana. Now that seemed to be all in the past … Things had changed … English language and culture were becoming decoupled from their contentious heritage, disassociated from post-colonial trauma.

McCrum concludes that “the emergence of English as a global communications phenomenon which can celebrate a real independence from its Anglo-American roots is potentially decisive”, especially on the Internet.  Interesting stuff.

I’m Ready For My Close Up, Mr DeMille!

A technological breakthrough that may “revolutionize the way we look at viruses, bacteria, proteins, and other biological elements” hasn’t received the press I think it deserves.   IBM have developed an MRI that is one hundred million times better than today’s standard MRIs.  I can’t even count that high!

By extending MRI to such fine resolution, the scientists have created a microscope that, with further development, may ultimately be powerful enough to unravel the structure and interactions of proteins, paving the way for new advances in personalized healthcare and targeted medicine. This achievement stands to impact the study of materials from proteins to integrated circuits for which a detailed understanding of atomic structure is essential.

Wow.

In addition to its high resolution, the imaging technique has the further advantages that it is chemically specific, can “see” below surfaces and, unlike electron microscopy, is non-destructive to sensitive biological materials.

Odds & Sods #4

• David Kamp has written a fascinating detective story surrounding the legendarily prodigious eating feats of Diamond Jim Brady.  He suspects some exaggeration, but the reality is probably close enough.
• Gertrude Baines, daughter of slaves and Obama voter, takes on the most dangerous job in the world.  The previous job-holder survived just four months in the position.
• How do salmon find their way back home after years in the ocean?  The open sea part still seems a bit iffy, but once they reach the river, it’s the schnozz that leads.  Maybe Jimmy Durante is their patron saint?
• The earliest artificial eye has been discovered at an archaeological dig in Iran.

What Detroit Needs

Stop the presses!  Hold the front page!   I have found the solution to Big Auto’s problems.

I present to you — the renewable, recyclable, no-gasoline motor:

With a $25billion loan from the American taxpayer, Ford, GM and Chrysler could probably corner the global market in suitable cows.

[Thanks to Peter Greenberg for the image]

Synchronizing the Details

A century or more ago when I was in my early teens at school, I recall going caving with my class on more than one occasion.  England’s West Country is riddled with wonderful nooks and crannies if you can get over the early stages of claustrophobia.   I remember not being too impressed with stalactites and stalagmites and such like.   Luckily, others had more sense.

Via Anthropology.net, I learn of work that has been done on a stalagmite in Wanxiang Cave, China, that allows researchers to figure out the detailed climatic conditions back more than a thousand years at intervals of just 2.5 years.  In particular, they can pick out the drought of the ninth century that seems to have contributed to the collapse both of the Tang Empire in China and of the Mayans in the Americas. The researchers have also found evidence of low rainfall at the times of the end of the Yuan and Ming dynasties.

In all cases it seems, the carrying capacities of their agricultural systems couldn’t handle the pressures caused by years of low rainfall, and the civilizations crashed.

We usually look at the histories of empires, their rise and fall, as a confluence of human emotions, power, technology, military advantage, economics.  We often forget that climate is a truly global player that can cause history-changing effects simultaneously on both sides of the globe; effects that no human power has yet figured out how to tame.

I Didn’t Mean To Do It. It Is A Disease!

Charles O’Byrne is the top aide to New York Governor David A. Paterson.  He is being forced to resign because he didn’t file his income taxes between 2001 and 2005.  His defence?  According to his lawyer, Richard Kestenbaum, Mr O’Byrne suffered from “late filing syndrome“.  No, I’m serious.

They even have an “academic” tome to support them. In 1994, an article titled ” ‘Failure to File’ Syndrome: Legal and Medical Perspectives,” was published in the New York Law Journal by Eliott Silverman, a lawyer, and Dr. Stephen J. Coleman, a practicing psychiatrist.

“These people are not evading their taxes for personal gain,” the authors conclude. “Rather, they are suffering from a psychological condition that makes them unable to function normally.” In an interview, Dr. Coleman acknowledged that the affliction had not been recognized as an official syndrome, but he said he had treated 25 to 30 patients for it over the years. Most of them were lawyers, he said, including tax lawyers. “It really is a subset of obsessive compulsive disorder with people who have serious procrastination,” Dr. Coleman said. “You still see it. I think it is still quite valid today in a subset of people who are well-educated and know better, but put off dealing with their personal business.”

Money can’t buy you love, they say.  But it can sure buy you some fancy justifications.

Muons For Mayans

OK, I’m excited.  Particle physics and archaeology are coming together to investigate Mayan mounds, most of which have not been excavated.  No-one really knows what is inside these impressive structures.  But now, scientists working with muon detectors are coming to help.

The first major experiment of the Maya Muon Group will bridge the disciplines of physics and archeology. The particle detectors and related systems are designed specifically to explore ruins of a Maya pyramid in collaboration with colleagues at the UT Mesoamerican Archaeological Laboratory. The Maya Muon Group will travel to La Milpa in northwest Belize to make discoveries about “Structure 1” – a jungle-covered mound covering an unexplored Maya ruin.

Pointing out that dense materials block more muons, Patel explains that a muon detector can actually detect rooms, spaces, and caves inside what seems to be solid:  A detector next to a Maya pyramid, for example, will see fewer particles coming from the direction of the structure than from other angles: a muon “shadow.” And if a part of that pyramid is less dense than expected – containing an open space for, say, a royal burial – it will have less of a shadow. Count enough muons that have passed through the pyramid over the course of several months, and they will form an image of its internal structure, just like light makes an image on film. Then combine the images from three or four devices and a 3-D reconstruction of the pyramid’s guts will take shape.

Fascinating stuff.  The article at BLDGBLOG goes much further and is well worth the read.

Sleep Is Great

I had an interesting and busy day yesterday.  I wrote some, I painted some, I read some, I watched a lot of cricket.   My glorious wife baked some of the finest bread it is possible to eat, and we generally had good food the whole day through.  I thoroughly enjoyed all those activities — but the best thing of all was the nap I took in the afternoon.

My better half  likes to snooze on the couch, life going on around her.  And I somehow manage to snooze on the bus most mornings and evenings.  But a real nap is a serious business for me.  It is a take-off-all-your-clothes-get-into-bed-and-under-the-covers-with-the-blinds-drawn affair.  Given the right conditions, I don’t expect to be awake longer than a few seconds after my head hits the pillow, and it is hard to have a decent nap in under two hours.  Yesterday, I slept from about 2:30 until 5.  Wonderful.

It is gratifying, therefore, to find that modern scientific research is beginning to understand and appreciate the value of sleep.  It is good to know that sleep helps to strengthen memories, that the brain gets a chance to sort and file, and that sleep can help you think through problems.

Over just the past few years, a number of studies have demonstrated the sophistication of the memory processing that happens during slumber. In fact, it appears that as we sleep, the brain might even be dissecting our memories and retaining only the most salient details … During sleep, the brain reactivates patterns of neural activity that it performed during the day, thus strengthening the memories by long-term potentiation … Adding to the excitement, recent discoveries show that sleep also facilitates the active analysis of new memories, enabling the brain to solve problems and infer new information … It is now clear that sleep can consolidate memories by enhancing and stabilizing them and by finding patterns within studied material even when we do not know that patterns might be there.

But even more gratifying is to find a piece like Jenny Diski’s Diary:

[S]leeping, for all its inherent dangers and waste, is and always has been my activity of choice. Inexpert though I am in all other fields, I am a connoisseur of sleep … Sleep, while it is happening, is nothing to the sleeper. To an observer all kinds of things are happening to the sleeper while she sleeps … Watch sleeping people smile, or mutter, fidget, laugh and shriek. So the observer knows about it, watching you; you do not. Later, you can remember or feel, but the only actual experience of sleep is not-knowing. And not knowing thrills me.

Green Engines Of Change

Today, British Columbians began paying the carbon tax of about 2 1/2 cents per liter of gasoline and other fuels.  Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the Campbell Liberals have had the guts to be the first government in North America to institute such a carbon tax — a measure thoroughly approved of on the environmentalist side.  There are constant complaints, of course; many spread to feed the needs of the media for conflict rather than with any other justification.

The same media thoroughly downplay the income tax cuts that also come into effect today.  These income tax cuts, combined with the $100 “climate change” check recently sent to every man, woman and child in the Province (and who really cares if it is an election gimmick?) make the carbon tax as damn near revenue neutral as any tax could be.  Anyway, I don’t want to get political so let’s just say I am proud to live in a pioneering jurisdiction like BC.

But there is so much more that can be done.  And someone who is already doing more is Britain’s Prince Charles.  I’ve always been a supporter of Charles.  Having been forced to live a sublimely surreal life since birth, he has turned out to be a thoroughly sensible chap, unafraid to voice his strongly held opinions.  He has used the perquisites of his position wisely, to further the causes he espouses.

Case in point, he has just converted his 38-year old Aston Martin to run on a biofuel created from surplus wine.  This now joins his other cars which have already been converted to run on used cooking oil.

I like his style.

The Scythians and Global Warming

Discover has a piece on some archaeology that is fascinating on a couple of accounts.

First, it is about the Scythians, the mysterious mounted warriors from the East that early Greek historians despised (through fear) so much.   A multitude of Scythian graves have been found on the Central Asian plains, some of which have wonderful mummies and other artifacts preserved by ice over permafrost.

Second, it reveals yet another consequence of global climate change.  Scientists fear that the ice lenses preserving the remains may soon thaw, consigning the bodies to rot and decay.

Listening To Mayan And Protecting Quechua

The work of making the Mayan language, as found on their numerous buildings and monuments, available to researchers today has been one of the triumphs of linguistic and anthropological research.  Success has only come in the last couple of decades, but the output of completed and ongoing projects has been immense.

It was a thrill, therefore, to fall over the Nova site supporting their TV show’s look at the decipherment of Mayan.   If you follow the link to the Interactive Feature, you can actually hear the Mayan language of a stela dedication spoken while the English translation of each glyph is discussed in brief but fascinating detail.

It is quickly being forgotten that less than twenty years ago, we did not have the technology to make this research available to any but a limited few researchers.  We need to keep reminding ourselves about how lucky we are.

Further south, in the lands of the Inca, Demetrio Tupac Yupanqui’s new translation of “Don Quixote” into Quechua is helping to boost the once-imperial language that had fallen on hard times.

Once the lingua franca of the Inca empire, Quechua has long been in decline. But thanks to Tupac Yupanqui and others, Quechua, which remains the most widely spoken indigenous language in the Americas, is winning some new respect. Tupac Yupanqui’s elegant translation of a major portion of “Don Quixote” has been celebrated as a pioneering development for Quechua, which in many far-flung areas remains an oral language. While the Incas spoke Quechua, they had no written alphabet, leaving perplexed archaeologists to wonder how they managed to assemble and run an empire without writing.

Both Google and Microsft have versions in Quechua, and the current government in Bolivia is trying to make fluency in Quechua a condition of civil service advancement.  It might well survive.

Germs ‘R’ Us

There isn’t as much of each of us as we thought. The latest research suggests that each of us contains ten times as many bacteria as human cells — we are, in fact, just a small minority of our own bodies!

Changes in these microbial communities may be responsible for digestive disorders, skin diseases, gum disease and even obesity. Despite their vital imporance in human health and disease, these communities residing within us remain largely unstudied …

Martin Blaser of New York University has been working to identify the various bacteria that live on the human skin and help to form a protective barrier on the outside. Before he started his research it was estimated that fewer than 100 different species of bacteria lived on the skin … Blaser now estimates the number of different bacteria species living on the skin could approach 500 …

Due to their overwhelming numbers, the fact that their byproducts can be found in most human fluids, and the evidence of their potential role in health and disease, it is quite possible that mapping and understanding the human microbiome may be as important or more important to understanding human health than mapping and understanding the human genome.

So remember, wherever you are and whatever you are doing, you are never alone.

The Highest of Mountains and the Longest of Memories

Today is the 55th anniversary of the first successful climbing of Mount Everest by Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary.  News of the success arrived in England the day of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation and I remember my father, who was very excited by the news, telling me all about it.  For years thereafter Edmund Hillary was the greatest hero of my young imagination.

I have one or two memories about my brother and me that pre-date May 1953, but Hillary on Everest is the earliest I can recall anything outside the family.  I know from photographs that there were massive street parties I attended to celebrate the new Queen: I remember none of that.  But Hillary on Everest has stuck with me all these years.

The picture is of Tensing Norgay taken by Hillary.  There are no pictures of Hillary on the summit because Tensing didn’t know how to work the camera and, as Hillary said, the summit of Everest was no place to start teaching him!

Memories Are Made Of This

I was wandering along on my way to the bus this morning thinking about how quickly the year is passing; it will be June already in a week or so. That got me thinking about how time seems to speed up as we age, that the days seem more fleeting than they did when I was a kid, or even a young man. And that little reverie kick-started a theory of why the passage of time should seem different at different ages.

Let us first suppose that the neural mechanism for working out how long ago an event of a known date seems to have taken place involves flipping through a catalogue of our memories and making a calculation based somehow on the amount — or “bulkiness” — of the memory pile.

Let us next suppose that one suffers from the occasional short term memory loss — a standard condition of getting older it seems — such that a wide range of time is simply not memorialized.

Thus, when the mind flips through the memory for a particular period, the file seems less “bulky” (because of the missing memories) and the time between then and now will appear to have gone past quicker.

That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it!

The World Atlas of Language Structures

I have mentioned before that languages are an important interest of mine. Now we have an extraordinary linguistic resource online — the World Atlas of Language Structures.

The database covers more than 2,500 languages by up to 140+ structural and familial criteria. The content is displayed in text and maps serving as a rich body of data visualizations. We are lucky to have such work made available to us, and I greatly appreciate the effort.