Fcuk, we are killing the bees

They set up a controlled experiment in Punjab earlier this year comparing the behaviour and productivity of bees in two hives – one fitted with two mobile telephones which were powered on for two fifteen minute sessions per day for three months. The other had dummy models installed.

After three months the researchers recorded a dramatic decline in the size of the hive fitted with the mobile phon, a significant reduction in the number of eggs laid by the queen bee. The bees also stopped producing honey.

The queen bee in the "mobile" hive produced fewer than half of those created by her counterpart in the normal hive.

They also found a dramatic decline in the number of worker bees returning to the hive after collecting pollen. Because of this the amount of nectar produced in the hive also shrank.

Oil Volcano

I had been trying to avoid the oil volcano story because it is so overwhelmingly depressing and demonstrative of human suicidal tendencies that I am deeply uncomfortable with....and then you see a news bit that makes you say, well hell we are so idiotic we deserve an extinction event.

And see this. BP has refused to let independent scientists inspect the site so that they could estimate the rate of the oil leak.

BP’s next plan is to try to seal the leak using heavy drilling fluids and then cement:

BP likely will try to shut down the well completely late this week using a technique called “top kill,” BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said at a news conference Monday.

The process involves pumping heavy drilling fluids through two 3-inch lines into the blowout preventer that sits on top of the Macondo wellhead a mile underwater. This would first restrict the flow of oil from the well, which then could be sealed permanently with cement.

Um why weren't we doing that from the beginning?

34 and counting

Another birthday passes and my mind checks its internal gauges for insight into the state of its union. Mental, physical, emotional. The goal is healthy balance. The goal is quality of life. The goal is to feel acutely and correctly the experience as it happens and to learn from what has gone before.

That has not always been the goal. Once upon a time the goal was a good story, didn't necessarily care how the yarn was crafted, just that the finished product was a compelling tapestry I would be proud of. I wanted to be 80 on the veranda chuckling to myself about how it all played out.

It is definitely interesting. Hopefully I will chuckle, but I forgot to imagine what it would feel like on the way through,so the way through feels unfamiliar far more frequently than I would like. I thought interesting meant adventure and intrigue. I wasn't smart enough to realize that you don't get to just observe life and tell it as a tale when you are older. You have to live life and life will change your parts around, alter your context and understanding and you have to convince yourself that you know who "you" are both before and after the shifting. Oh, and the shifting, the subtle persistent, pervasive shifting is far harder to grasp than the big earthquakes. You remember the earthquakes. You remember what was before and you can see what is after, but the shifting offers no such reference and no conclusion. So I realized that and I changed the goals and I try to recognize this as what life is so that it might be easier to embrace. Love is a powerful thing, but it is a powerful thing and as with all powerful things, it should be approached with respect for its power.

A widely-publicized study from 2008 in the British Medical Journal reported that happiness in social networks may spread from person to person.^[10] Researchers followed nearly 5000 individuals for 20 years in the long-standing Framingham Heart Study and found clusters of happiness and unhappiness that spread up to 3 degrees of separation on average. Happiness tended to spread through close relationships like friends, siblings, spouses, and next-door neighbors, and the researchers reported that happiness spread more consistently than unhappiness through the network. Moreover, the structure of the social network appeared to have an impact on happiness, as people who were very central (with many friends and friends of friends) were significantly more likely to be happy than those on the periphery of the network. Overall, the results suggest that happiness might spread through a population like a virus.^[11][12]

hmmm...water wars anyone?

Now, as drought-stricken California weighs whether to give private companies more control in managing its scarce water supplies, a new lawsuit claiming the Resnicks violated utilities law by making money from a vast, taxpayer-funded underground reservoir is causing a stir in the state Capitol.

"Water is a public resource, owned by the people," said Democratic Assemblyman Jared Huffman of San Rafael. "We shouldn't be giving away public funds to private sector interests, let alone choosing winners and losers in the business world."

Updates

The below is a post from October 2009. I was searching for something in my mails and blog and came upon this. I am on vacation (at home) right now attempting to find some sort of balance. I found this and realized I could at least assess my progress based on my objectives before the current exhaustion set in. So here is my score:

1. Nope

2. Indeed, I am consistently growing in my contributions to the community and feel hopeful that these efforts will lead to a more permanent commitment.

3. Success. I am currently worrying on rugs and art work in a place I found that I love with someone I love.

4. Fail, although improvements are occurring.

5. Subjective, not sure, likely fail.

Does that constitute progress?

As I come into yet another holiday season, I struggle with what I did with the last year of my life. SO..this year I am publishing an assignment list that I can either check off or give myself a fail at next year. Same time.

1. Make a list of 50 things that I want out of life. Get input on possibilities from coterie.

2. Explore opportunities for expending energy on making a concrete difference.

3. Make a home for myself. A real, permanent home.

4. Meditate consistently.

5. Improve schedule management.

Botox provides a teachable moment

They found that there was no change in the time needed to understand the happy sentences, which aligned with their hypotheses, since the Botox did not prevent the participants from smiling. But the subjects did take slightly but significantly more time to read the angry and sad sentences after Botox treatment. These data suggest that preventing the participants from frowning actually made it harder for them to interpret sadness and anger.

The scientist believe that by preventing frowns in their participants, they have blocked a feedback pathway between the brain and the face. Under normal circumstances, the brain sends the signal to frown, and in turn, once the face frowns, it sends signals back which reaffirm or enhance the brain's interpretation. Without the feedback, the brain gets a little confused or simply doesn't process the depth of the emotion as well.

I have to say that I find the implications of this to be impressive. Not only does this say that altering the faces ability to make an expression impacts your brain's ability to appropriately process the data, it strongly implies that our brain is reliant on our bodies to interpret. Sadness is not just serotonin uptake, sadness exists because the face tells the brain to uptake some serotonin. So our bodies are part and parcel of our brain. There was an author on the Daily Show, I can't remember his name, but he spoke to the blind side of neuroscience research. That analyzing and studying everything from a framework where the brain is just a processor of external stimuli fails to account for both what our brain projects into our environment and how a responding environment reacts to a projecting brain. Essentially, you can not reduce the system to its parts and gain true insight, you must try to see the whole system. We as a species seem particularly lacking in our ability to see the whole system and gain insight therein.

Not sure how I feel about this...

but it is fascinating to see it detailed out:

Human Rights begin at home. Clean up own backyard China urges U.S.

China's Information Office of the State Council published a report titled "The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2009"yesterday. The full text of China's State Council assessment of U.S. human rights violations as published in Xinhuanews follow:

There are several sections to it, but this was one was particularly disturbing.

The country's police frequently impose violence on the people. Chicago Defender reported on July 8, 2009 that a total of 315 police officers in New York were subject to internal supervision due to unrestrained use of violence during law enforcement. The figure was only 210 in 2007. Over the past two years, the number of New York police officers under review for garnering too many complaints was up 50 percent (http://www.chicagodefender.com). According to a New York Police Department firearms discharge report released on Nov. 17, 2009, the city' s police fired 588 bullets in 2007, killing 10 people, and 354 bullets in 2008, killing 13 people (http://gothamist.com, November 17, 2009). On September 3, 2009, a student of the San Jose State University was hit repeatedly by four San Jose police officers with batons and a Taser gun for more than ten times (http://www.mercurynews.com, October 27, 2009). On September 22, 2009, a Chinese student in Eugene, Oregon was beaten by a local police officer for no reason (The Oregonian, October 23, 2009, http://blog.oregonlive.com). According to the Amnesty International, in the first ten months of 2009, police officers in the U.S. killed 45 people due to unrestrained use of Taser guns. The youngest of the victims was only 15. From 2001 to October, 2009, 389 people died of Taser guns used by police officers (http://theduckshoot.com).

Oh Walmart, can you really change?

The program, which Walmart calls Heritage Agriculture, will encourage farms within a day’s drive of one of its warehouses to grow crops that now take days to arrive in trucks from states like Florida and California. In many cases the crops once flourished in the places where Walmart is encouraging their revival, but vanished because of Big Agriculture competition.

Ron McCormick, the senior director of local and sustainable sourcing for Walmart, told me that about three years ago he came upon pictures from the 1920s of thriving apple orchards in Rogers, Arkansas, eight miles from the company’s headquarters. Apples were once shipped from northwest Arkansas by railroad to St. Louis and Chicago. After Washington state and California took over the apple market, hardly any orchards remained. Cabbage, greens, and melons were also once staples of the local farming economy. But for decades, Arkansas’s cash crops have been tomatoes and grapes. A new initiative could diversify crops and give consumers fresher produce.

As with most Walmart programs, the clear impetus is to claim a share of consumer spending: first for organics, now for locally grown food. But buying local food is often harder than buying organic. The obstacles for both small farm and big store are many: how much a relatively small farmer can grow and how reliably, given short growing seasons; how to charge a competitive price when the farmer’s expenses are so much higher than those of industrial farms; and how to get produce from farm to warehouse.

Walmart knows all this, and knows that various nonprofit agricultural and university networks are trying to solve the same problems. In considering how to build on existing programs (and investments), Walmart talked with the local branch of the Environmental Defense Fund, which opened near the company’s Arkansas headquarters when Walmart started to look serious about green efforts, and with the Applied Sustainability Center at the University of Arkansas. The center (of which the Walmart Foundation is a chief funder) is part of a national partnership called Agile Agriculture, which includes universities such as Drake and the University of New Hampshire and nonprofits like the American Farmland Trust.* To get more locally grown produce into grocery stores and restaurants, the partnership is centralizing and streamlining distribution for farms with limited growing seasons, limited production, and limited transportation resources.

Walmart says it wants to revive local economies and communities that lost out when agriculture became centralized in large states. (The heirloom varieties beloved by foodies lost out at the same time, but so far they’re not a focus of Walmart’s program.) This would be something like bringing the once-flourishing silk and wool trades back to my hometown of Rockville, Connecticut. It’s not something you expect from Walmart, which is better known for destroying local economies than for rebuilding them.

Terror

I spend an inordinate amount of time on planes and an even greater time in transit. I end up being an observer of people having real lives more than I get to have a real life. The other result of this life job is having significant limbo time to read. I tend to read novels, but given the length of the flight and my general level of energy, I will also read magazines. Today on the way to Nashville, I read The New Yorker and then Harpers Magazine both liberal, elitist fare. They were interesting until I got to this.:

According to the NCIS documents, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.

I have no idea what to do with that. I keep reading it, thinking that it will change. There is no way adults put that in a report and thought it would be believable. They are better at covering shit up than this right? We don't seriously have the most expensive military industrial complex ever convened unable to come up with a more plausible story for prisoner deaths than that? It gets worse, further reporting indicates that all three of these men plus one other that died shortly after them were all victims of wrong place wrong time and were shortly to be released.

So I sit in my fugue state contemplating the fact that my government is killing people for no apparent reason and then doing an embarrassingly bad job of covering it up and wonder what in the hell are we supposed to do? I have to imagine that there are a lot of people who will read the article and feel horror (if they aren't already too cynical), and while its lovely that decent people feel horror, it hardly does a lot about it. You could try to protest, but they got plans for that as well. Writing letters to the editor of newspapers that are hardly read any more seems unlikely to generate a revolution.

So I sit and keep re-reading an account of my democratically elected but apparently deeply corrupt government committing murder and wonder what it is I am supposed to do. Because clearly it is the general silence of average people that enables this to occur. There is no viable outlet for outrage. Which of course means that you must accept that they can do it to you as well and your family and loved ones will be able to do nothing. Nothing.

hibernation

As storms pound the coast and February marches on, I feel as if my body has gone into hibernation. I read stuff that normally would have amazed me and my response is muted, quiet. I wonder if I have made the progress I meant to make, but even with that currently feel as if it will figure itself out regardless of whether or not I analyse it. I hope this is hibernation and not me giving up on things in general.

not so noble reason

you consume data you have no interest in before speaking to the crowd? The crowd's disapproval would have been swift and brutal otherwise. Excellent ROI.

On a Jet plane

Wherever you go, there you are, so they say. Where are you when on a plane reading material on the how the military industrial complex needs to consolidate its organizational management after consuming an issue of adbusters magazine and barely processing a holiday season of family, friends and their (and my) unknowably fascinating interior landscapes?

The recommendation of mindful therapists everywhere is that you need to aware of the present moment in order move forward in a conscious and conscientious manner. So do I assume a limitation of my mind's capacity that I am sitting here absorbing the data necessary to speak knowingly in front of the next crowd, without having access to an understanding of why I expound this effort other than economic autonomy? A concept which seemed elemental until I was faced with an economic crisis that confirmed my worst suspicions about the numbers on the sheet being a whole lotta bullshit and self sufficiency became an acknowledged defense mechanism against the vulnerability inherent in being part of my community.

My efforts at mindfulness awareness have shown me that my desire for an unwritten narrative were naive at best and utterly missing the point at worst. Just live your life. Mind you with this new perspective I only manage to design a new goal of being able to tell the youth I am invested in the memo I'm convinced I never got, only the more the life goes on I realize I got far better memos than most and had built in advantages that were inaccessible to me at the time. So gratitude would seem to be the appropriate response and there is gratitude, but still I swim in frustration that I cannot wholly perceive the fabric that I exist within.

So the future stands still while the present is infinite. My high school year book quote "It's all just a game, we all just wanna be loved" stands as a comforting indicator that even then, despite my cynicism, I saw a reason, a purpose for the effort required to live life well however one defines it. So in this moment I will seek comfort in the belief that I have loved well and am well loved. All I need is all I got.

Family

Last night, I met the family of the fellow I aim to have as my companion. It has nearly a decade since my last meet the family encounter and alas, I have evolved less than I had hoped....

My whole life I have read fiction, non fiction, biographies, philosophies etc in the hopes that somewhere in there I would glean the type of insight that enables a person to see clearly in the moment the tapestry that is being woven and then, instead of just observing the weaving, actually pull a few threads to enhance the overall pattern. There are people who can do this, but anecdotal observation indicates that they do it innately. It seems to odd to them that not everyone can do it. I can not do it. I can imagine it sometimes. I can see nervous chattiness or deer in headlights in the moment sort of. but never in such a way that I can grab hold of the space and allow or enable myself to occupy it in a more dignified way.

There are areas of improvement. That should be said. I do not worry about losing myself this time. I do not worry that I am glossing over inconvenient truths in order to make the picture fit. I have grown up a bit and I have improved, but of course, as life is apt to do, it all get so much more complicated now. The pressure and meaning of decisions, compromises and negotiations will feed more significantly into the meta narrative. I am no longer given the comfort of writing a little written story, which was scary but easier to improvise within, easier to see what defined progress & growth. Now I would pretend to write an interesting story within a nearly universal tale.

Now I have to believe in something in order to see it. Now I have to believe in someone in a way that puts my own well being at risk. Now I do not walk alone and its terrifying. There really had better be some fucking unicorns and rainbows or I'm going to be pissed.

It's that time of Year again

I have been keeping this blog since 2006, which seems such a long time ago. I fear that it has proven less valuable than I hoped and am sure that I have not grown significantly in my capacity to write in a way that conveys my impressions of the world. In fact, with the unending disaster that is this embarrassing attempt at health care reform, I am finding my interest in how the world runs itself waning. It seems that only the utterly corrupt and indifferent get airing and those of us who wake up everyday and get the job done, we are dispensable. There is no ROI on our lives in the eyes of those with the power and money. I will do a self check and if I really have given up I will stop posting. No reason to subject others to my cynicism.

Let it be true!

Apple's alleged Kindle-killing tablet appears to be on the runway for a spring 2010 takeoff. And in what may or may not be related news, two top-drawer US publishers are holding back ebooks of dozens of their upcoming major titles until the same time frame.

According to one analyst's "supply chain sources," mass production of Apple's long-rumored "iPad" is scheduled to ramp up in February, with release to follow in March or April. So says Yair Reiner, senior analyst for Applied Technology and Apple specialist at the Oppenheimer & Co. investment firm.

Frigging Fascinating

This makes so much sense once you think about it.

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving! I am moving this weekend and enjoying the holiday season for quite possibly the first time in my life. It's amazing.

The things that move us

I should go to bed soon. I am tired and have a long day in front of me. Still, I want to know...if you can not ever know your story till it's written, how can you know how well you are writing it? And really, if we are honest, given what we know about how memory works, even when its written, we likely still don't really know. So we live and then die barely knowing what we have done and yet desperate to have done something that will have mattered. Somehow in there, with the pain, struggle, joy and logistics should be a guaranteed quota of peace. Moments where you feel at one with the universe that you can remember in all the other convoluted moments and tell yourself you had a glimpse of the larger narrative, so you don't need to worry so much about your own. It should be a fairly large quota.

moments in time

I am having problems at work. It seems like everything I'm assigned to is blowing up in spectacular fashion. Hopefully it will pass with no significant calamities but it has made me aware of how disconcerting it still is, despite my wizened age, when the ground you are standing on shifts suddenly.

I really thought that part of getting older would be getting better at life. I am beginning to wonder if that assumption in not only flawed but fundamentally inaccurate. There are certain areas where I will get better, but fundamentally threaten my sense of security and those gains can seemingly be washed away with nary a thought. It is disheartening to think that we can only improve our ability to handle the stable moments in life, but have much less chance of improving our handling of life changing moments.

This year's assignment

As I come into yet another holiday season, I struggle with what I did with the last year of my life. SO..this year I am publishing an assignment list that I can either check off or give myself a fail at next year. Same time.

1. Make a list of 50 things that I want out of life. Get input on possibilities from coterie.

2. Explore opportunities for expending energy on making a concrete difference.

3. Make a home for myself. A real, permanent home.

4. Meditate consistently.

5. Improve schedule management.