Navigable Waters

While looking in the house a couple of nights ago for a book called "What is Form Criticism?" by Edgar V. McKnight (c) 1967 from a university class on early Christianity, I pulled aside a plastic bag full of books from another era - my late childhood.  A few titles stand out:

• "Programmer's Guide To The 1802 (With An Assembler For Your Machine)" by Tom Swan
• intel Component Data Catalog (c) 1978 ["Four Dollars and Ninety-Five Cents"], Radio Shack part no. 62-1379
• "Profiles In Courage" by President John F. Kennedy
• as well as several books dedicated to the ZX-81/Timex-Sinclair 1000 and hypertext programming

All while biding time until my next fishing expedition.  Today, a little more research on the fishes of Alabama, a discovery that our current view of an expanding universe may be wrong, and then off to another fishing spot.

Swallows nesting.  Hundreds of thousands of maple helicopter seed pods racing, paced, on the river's surface.

Had partially blocked a farm field path when I parked off the road this morning.  The farmer appeared out of the field with his large CASE tractor and disc plow, ready to close the gate and plow another field, so I moved the car for him.  He thanked me and drove on.

Minnows in the shallows.  Water striders jumping around.

The stripped carcass of an 18-inch sucker catfish feeding flies and filling the air with a pungent punch.

The tweet of baby birds begging from a nest in a scrub tree overlooking the water.

The river crossing of a paved country road, the bridge and its concrete piers pockmarked (shooting practice?), with dried mud floodlines up to the top of the piers and the yellow-and-black striped painted water depth markers faded and chipped.

Find a few places to cast out into the middle channel and slowly reel the plastic worm toward shore into a deep eddy.  Around noon here under the bridge's cool shadows and no fish going after the artificial lure.  Can see them darting around the river bottom uninterested.  Time for live bait next time.

Reflections of sunlight, like European discotheque after hours, dancing on the bridge's underbelly.

Midday peace.  Dragonflies.  Green bottle flies feeding on old fish bait.  The chirp of cardinals feeding along the river's edge.  A butterfly bound for nowhere in a hurry.

Swamp bamboo.  Open channel flow.  A few river rapids within view.

The "spray" of sand and gravel, into the river and onto me, from a heavy construction truck riding across the bridge, the bridge I-beam girders bending and bouncing, tiny pieces of rust released in the breeze.

Swallows come back all at once, their chitter-chattering matching their swift movements as they sweep under the bridge, stop momentarily at their nests (to feed babies?) and swoop back up into the warm blue sky for food and play.

Some sticks stuck on the shoreline - leftover handmade catfish fishing poles?  Wads of fishing line and beer containers thrown up into the underbrush.

Drink the rest of my one bottle of beer.  Contemplate lighting a cigar just as a truck pulls up.  Looks like a guy and a gal want some privacy.  Time to pack up and move on.

Back on the road, the ol' Doc McKinney Grocery, reminding me of a friend whose father's farm here in north Alabama used to have a small Cherokee village at the back.  The old Cherokees slowly died off and the village disappeared with their local way of life largely forgotten.  I am an Eagle Scout of a long-since defunct Boy Scout troop, our Scouting ways well documented but our personal trials and trails through Scouting fading with middle age.  Best to remember few will remember us long after we're gone so live for the moment and not some future we don't know we'll see.

Sends me back in time when a couple of guys used to pick up the trash in the evening at my office 12 years ago.  Neither one knew the other but they both fished the local waterways and kept trying to convince me to drop what I was doing (a lot of unpaid after-hours data analysis, at the time), pick up a pole and enjoy life as our forefathers lived, depending on the land for food and happiness.  A coworker got the clue and used to take off to fish the Elk River every chance he got.  I missed the opportunity then.

However, never too late to live the old ways, peel off the layers of civilisation and feel yourself solidly in place with the rest of the natural living things around you.  Your personality fades, conversation loses significance and the problems of the people world barely show up ... for at least one sunny day in mid-spring in the Northern Hemisphere of a small planet circling a yellow star.

Ever watched life spring up on an asteroid passing near the Sun and then fade away for a few hundred years of a cold elliptical path?  Ever watched life on a riverbank, time a measure of shadows and sunlight, every moment an irreplaceable snapshot of life on Earth?

Living waters is a phrase with many meanings - to me, the simple pleasure of sitting silently with algae, minnows, turtles, trees, snakes, grass, spiders, flowers, flies and birds.  Wondering if I'll catch a fish but not caring.  No memories.  No ledger accounts.  Life and death.  Eat, breed and be eaten.

Straw Hat, Fishing Rod and Real Life

Can a man not have a quiet afternoon casting his sinkers and lures into brambles and vines?

I'd just stepped off the cement trail down to the dirt path to find a spot to park my folding chair and tackle box when a "Hi! How ya doing?" barked out of a tree hanging over the river.

Two young men were joining their efforts to extract a rope swing trailing in slow-moving water on a hot spring day, near 85 deg F or thereabouts in north Alabama (Ali Baba, alakazam, alakazoo!).

Growing in the New Balance/Reebok/Redwing tread-stamped trail were spring beauty and starry chickweed, their blooms communicating to me their desire to feed insects in large numbers.

I nodded my John Deere woven head covering at them and found a meadowed spot hundreds of feet downstream of the fellows.

I'm no secret agent or sorcerer.  However, under my employ, men and women compete against one another to provide me resources with which my associates and I can readily exchange information.  The young swimmers up the way were a sign I was supposed to expect an unexpected report.

How old this gets.  I set out the chair, opened the tackle box, found an alluring lure for those lurking ichthyology subjects in the deep pool of water beside a fallen log hosting muck and a much-missed soccer ball, set the top of the pole between the wild grape vine and the water and cast the artificial bait downstream.

That is, I attempted to cast the bait.

Instead, I wrapped the line around the trunk of a small sycamore.

I gently pulled on the line, unwrapped the tree, recast and watched a few fish follow the lure upstream toward my location.

Then a message buzzed in my hand.  Those inventors!

My design team had rigged the fishing pole as an antenna to receive radio signals through the river water and transmit them to the organic circuitry installed in my palm.

I pointed the pole at the water and circled the bait just out of reach of the four- to six-inch shallow water swimmers while listening to a report from my associates.

All I asked for was a couple of weeks of letting the computer program run on its own set of binary digits!

And I'd get what I wanted if there was more cooperation.  Now I'm hearing that the cartels are getting a little machismo in their morning cappucino and think they can muscle in on the action that ain't theirs for the taking.

Look, fellows, I told you it's share and share alike.  You can't keep raking in all that profit and expect to keep it all to yourselves.

We're a family and when a family member disappoints me, I get angry.  I don't get revenge.  I don't get mad.  I don't get even.  I just let the family know it's all a matter of perspective as I demonstrate how business is business.  Get cocky and you sink with a South Korean ship or Russian-made airplane ... or worse.  Sorry, once it's done you can't bribe your way out of death.

I've asked my associates to take care of this business while I'm taking a few days off to fish.  If my ears buzz again, I won't be happy.  I won't laugh.  And neither will you, you understand?

I carry a pocket paper journal where I keep coded ledgers that track those of you still living in the dark ages before the invention of the abacus, batch cards and automatons.  After I received the radio message, I sat down with a beer and checked some notes in the journal.

Some of you are behind in your duties.  If I see you aren't interested in balancing things up the way they should be, then, again my associates have the authority to open a few closed doors and disclose a few so-called secrets that won't be secret anymore.

The Book of the Future is under lock and key.  You don't need to know what's going to happen next.  After all, the future's your business and nobody else's so why should I have to spell out what you're going to do in this public forum?

Take care of business, willya?  It's not like I'm asking you to solve world hunger, treat factory workers fairly or bring doubleknit polyester pantsuits back into fashion.

Now, back to my holiday.  Once again, a quick thanks to all you folks who're doing what the future said you would be doing anyway.  There's nothing in writing that says you have to do what you have to do.  You can change the future at any time, if you know who you are not and that you don't exist, of course.  A big if, but it can be done.

Look at a luna moth and ask yourself why such a big creature lives such a short time.  When you know the answer, you know the future.

See, I told you it's all simple, right there in front of your eyes.  Why you don't believe me, I can't say.  Why all this desire for proof?  You don't want a bunch of fireballs shaking the ground and scorching Earth, do you?  Well, most of you don't.

I haven't asked my scientists to run simulations of what it would take to change the ocean currents unnaturally but I think it's time to work out the details.  We've got the ability to create hundreds of millions of tonnes of nanotechnology that can reproduce itself radically and chaotically.  But why would we want to change the ocean currents?  I'll let you think about that one for a while.

What does the 15th of April mean to you?

One more post for ya afore I go on to somethin' else besides ticklin' my fingers on keys.  Tomorrow has special meaning to me and the missus.

• Her interest: Spring Plant Sale ('Members Only' Day)
• My interest: Fishing the Flint River in Alabama, North America Native Fishes Association

I've got me fishin' licence and just need some bait.  Have a great 15th, whatever and wherever you are!

A few films for those who'll be sittin' indoors:

• Fermat's Room [La habitación de Fermat] (2007)
• Gregory's Girl (1981)
• Stormy Weather (1943)

Should I buy a boat and name it Pitagoras or Pull Dubh ("Black Hole" in Irish, not far from "black pool" - i.e., linn dubh or as we call it now, Dublin; could call it Cailín Bhaile Átha Cliath ("Dublin's Girl"), instead)?

When Old News Is Good News

How long can you sit or stand and look up at trees?  The simple, guilty pleasures of living a suburban life where food grows in grocer's markets and security is provided by unseen forces.  Ahh ...

A dry spring so far on this part of the world.

Flat pencils.

A, are you ready to replace Andie in a fully-scripted, better-paced version of a Cornwell novel?  Or is it time to turn Patricia's writing into roleplaying video games?

Valerie Bertinelli - you sure make me want to spend money getting slimmer (Jason Alexander, not so much).  How long ago did we have crushes on your TV character?

So who came up with the theory about blackmailed pilots, artificial fog and electronic jamming equipment to make it look like the final approach confused IFR-rated flight crews?  When you don't know, go with the simpler explanation.  Ri-i-ght!

Same for black holes and wormholes.  Look at historical comments:

• Carl Sagan: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
• Marcello Truzi: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."
• Pierre-Simon Laplace: "The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness."

We may live in a Vedic world, a First Nations world, or a skeptical scientist's posit that worlds don't really exist but we can make sense of enough of this experience called life to establish simple rules for living.

Twenty amino acids, for instance.  Run your permutations and combinations to figure out if a two-dimensional x-y acre or hectare with an infinite z converging to Earth's core and diverging into space contains organisms with only 20 amino acids.

Diversity, not sameness.  Varying densities, not one thickness.

Time to get down to business and show where tea/coffee party piñatas can be purchased.  We're not here to threaten your sense of place.  We want to strengthen your belief in selfhood while broadening your belief in new experiences.

Save that thought for the next blog entry.  This middle-aged fool wants to take a moment to light a candle in memory of all the organisms that have died this week - famous, infamous, notorious, heroic and unknown - a simple act to honour the memories of those who no longer create their own memories and depend on us to remember them for the simple fact that they lived, no matter what they did.

Viruses/Viral

How did you first get involved in technology?  For me, it was a friend, Joe Francis, who introduced me to the RCA 1802 microprocessor, a space-hardened version of which resides in the Voyager spacecraft and later the Intel 8080/8085 CPU family.  For others, it was the Altair:

Honoring the Father of the PC

Most of us are familiar with the term "computer virus," but do you think about real viruses that could prevent the use of blood to save lives?:

Potential Risk to Blood Supply Probed 

What makes a wombat mad, a Tasmanian devil bedeviled with disease and a coal ship marooned on a barrier reef?  I couldn't find the answer in Der Spiegel, the speakeasy or Mongolian desert winds.  Maybe Nigerian radioactive dirt and water will burn the Ntera image for me.  Munster and Butler know what it's like to be "that close" to knowing, too.  Can't show favoritism in despotic nepotistic depositories.

If there's dirt and gravel in your water supply, are you looking for a sinkhole to fill in the future?  I'll ask the future mayor, AMA in HHI, to find out.

Faceless Elasticity

Friends of mine give the moments of their lives to the enjoyment and enrichment of neigbourliness via social interaction - religious school training, community singing groups, professional philosophical advice for professional military leaders - and they expect no extra payment for their giving.  They treat praise and silent appreciation equally.

One friend, Joe, looks out from a church choir to see the smiling, singing faces of a congregation looking back at him and knows there is no price for such social engagement other than a nod or a word or two of conversation in his driveway a few days later when receiving a yellowed newspaper clipping announcing his and his wife's wedding 50 years ago.  And no, he wouldn't trade his classic green 1960s Ford Mustang for the clipping.

While "modernising" my mother in-law's house interiour (new paint/door handles on kitchen cabinets, new power outlets/switches, new bathroom faucets, new ceiling lights, and other "honey-do" items) in a phase of spring renewal (what else can you do for a 92-year young woman who has all she's ever wanted or needed?), I pause and feel the pleasure of the simple pleasures of small town life ...

Meeting old friends who like to help my mother in-law fix up her house - new water heater, new walk-in shower - who find their days filled with too much work to fish idly.

Watching two planets in the evening sky, wondering at the vastness of our solar system, seeing two planets on opposite sides of the Sun, and unable to fathom what a light-year really means to tiny bipeds on a small planet in an unimaginably huge galaxy.

All the myths and legends about the photon streams we choose to call stars like our sun.

Jennifer with her cheerful smile at the local Wal-Mart.

Needing to stop at Henard's, Liberty or the local electrical supply store for solid copper wire to fix an old in-wall electric heater.

Oblivious to the major changes taking place in other parts of the world.

While individuals and nations debate the merits of freedom, we exercise the freedom to live our lives within socially-acceptable community standards that are vaguely/barely touched on by outside societies.

Happiness is a community that glosses over historical mistakes and treats those living together in the present with respect for our cordiality and desire to do right without resorting to high ideals, useless labels or petty namecalling to put space between us.

Hugs and handshakes.  Smiles and nods.  No language necessary.

In my head I carry dozens of cultures/subcultures/communities.  I do not understand why some people live the lives they choose (for instance, I couldn't imagine having protrusions embedded in my skull or go on life-threatening pilgrimages) but I understand we express individual freedom individually.

Social experimentation at the single person level.  That's where it begins.

You have the freedom to put the past behind you while learning about history at the same time.  Every moment is a new moment, completely free of the moment previous to the previous one.  Rare is the person who can completely change from one moment to another to another continuously but you can change from one moment to the next if you choose.

I've stepped out of the mainstream of consciousness for a few days to see life from the local perspective.  If I can't live in the local environment, I can't live anywhere.

I must admit I like it here.  I like the peace and quiet of local life, with local issues and local politics.

We should all see life on the local level, frequently, instead of getting caught up in large social movements that may or may not involve us at a personal level but make us feel temporarily part of something bigger than ourselves.

No matter whether you consider yourself a citizen of a corporation, a nation-state, or the globe, you live in a local community.

Keeping it real, as someone said.  That's what it's all about.

Reaching out to friends across the street and across the virtual universe.  I ask nothing more of you than that.

Working Wonders

How much do you drink?  Do you have enough?:

• Severe Drought Hits Southwest China

 How should you live?:

• Jacqueline Novogratz invests in sustainable small business solutions for world’s poor

Headache Remedy

I sit on a sofa with a notebook PC on my lap.  I wonder what thoughts to reduce down to small lines of organised letter sets.

I listen to the Great Father and the Great Mother.

The voices of the ancient ones.

My thoughts ... they are not my thoughts ... the absence of directed thinking ...

In this moment, a body with tight neck muscles, dry eyes, sore joints - signs of a body/head ache.

Stepping out of that body's immediate needs to allow the muscles, glands and cartilage to move around loosely.

What does this ecosystem we call Earth plan to accomplish?  Will it continue to expand past planetary boundaries?

Inertia.  Motion.  Resistance.  Marketing.  Design.  Desire.  Meeting one's destiny.

I am unimportant by myself, a reflection of a reflection of this mirror of the moment.

UFC figures for sale in Walgreens.  BP petrol stations in the US.  Small town Good Friday church service with potluck lunch, talking to

organist who played at our wedding about her trip to Scotland, England and Wales; retired middle school principal married to retired

middle school English teacher.

If I construct events in the moment to reconstruct events in the future, all just moments up, down and around one another, linked but not

linked, consecutive but not contiguous, then who or what is constructing me?

A knowing look from across the aisle at PetSmart.  Does she know who she is who is looking at me who doesn't know who he is looking at

her?  Knots!

The philosophy of a Chinese philosopher's wife or Rie Rasmussen's Angel-A agent.

When everyone wants something how does one meet anyone's needs?  One.

Two times two is four.  All the assumptions stored in five words.

At twenty 'til two, is it morning or night?

You know the thing about running a planet unwillingly (or unwittingly, depending on the alcohol percentage)?  Keeping ahead of the wheel

watchers.

The ancient ones crossed the Bering Sea in one family line and fell onto shore in another.  Why do they need or want?

A cathedral window pillow sham.

An arrangement of silk flowers.  A blooming Cattleya from Home Depot.

If you're an early adopter, do you produce early adopter goods, too?  The market for fresh fruit in season follows the same path - we

obey the rules set forth by rule setters set forth by the ancient ones.

If nothing is new under the sun, then how do we keep finding something new to describe the same thing all over again?

The wisdom of seeing through the veil that hides the repetition.

The audacity to put up the veil in the first place.

And the second place.

And claiming no two veils from the same cloth are the same.

Sports statistics rarely change but the names next to records rotate from season to season.  Placeholders for the next generation.

A baby is just another baby until s/he is yours.

How do you steal an idea from someone else and say it belongs to no one and now belongs to the public domain?  Plagiarism versus

attribution - you know, that line from the ["It's mine." "No, it's mine." "Then it's nobody's."] ages-old argument.

What if you gave all your ideas away for free?

What if you wandered from one idea to another just long enough to see formation but never fruition?

What if you found the true meaning in being, not doing?

What is one being?

If no one being exists, how can one be?

Some days a headache's all I've got to deal with and the rest of the nudgers nudge us along without my help.  After all, I'm a person

just like you, subject to bodily wear and tear, facing the entropic increase we call the decline of getting older.

Seven billion voices in individual songs, a few in tune with one another, styles and rhythms synching in dissonance and syncopation, many

looking for a recombiner or band leader to organise a new song's performance.  Some sing the old tunes with pride and reminiscence.

One life to live, borrowing the nearby chemicals temporarily to tell the ancient tales in new form.  Then returning to the chemical pool

for other borrowers to lend and sell.

Who will be the first person to belong to the unified group called "Living, Unlimited"?  Who will be the first true global citizen?  Not

a member of the UN, the G8/G20, or other organisation-based organisation.  Who will denounce one's citizenship(s)/membership(s) and say,

"I am alive. That's the only label I require to exist."?

Be a global citizen.  Embrace the idea of one world of differentiated people getting along.  Lead, follow or get out of the way (quietly

so (without threatening others)).

Time is on our side.  Let's make our side the winners - our species, life on this planet, sharing life with "organisms" on other planets

- while we're around to talk about time.  There are no losers, just those who are long forgotten, whose influence faded into the crests

and troughs of waves that canceled themselves out in the ooze of the chemical pool, still contributing but generically so.

You breathe dinosaur breath.  Do you want to be a dinosaur, too?

Our species will survive without any one of us.  BUT our species can thrive through the actions of any one of us.  Are you one of the

forgotten, a survivor or a thriver?  Take your pick, as long as you know our species will always have the higher draw, life takes a still

higher draw and the universe trumps them all.

A Paper April's Fool Moon

While digging through some old magazines, I found a reference to Nature, which reminded me of the old Omni magazine, Insight, and others that wound up in a refuse bin and perhaps in a landfill somewhere.  Now, we have e-mags and nearly instant cross-references, where this becomes that and we spread the news to blogs and pollywogs and frogs and pigtails.  I eat my wasabi peas listening to "Celtic" music thinking about water fleas and ant colonies moving from one potted tree in our house to another and then into the cereus pot (cereus, not serious or Sirius, not serial or cereal, either).

Redbuds blooming, Cornish Rex grooming.

On this day when a group sent me a message via an April Fool's Day joke, which they wanted to imply says what the real reason an ancient library was destroyed (to hide the prehistoric evidence of prehistoric evidence, evidently), I thumb through Harry Moore's Miocene musings called "The Bone Hunters," looking for the real clue to the next adventure our species is about to take.

Beyond automatic colour tracing...

Beyond the quad cube...

How do you demonstrate strength in weakness?

How do you turn play money into real prizes?

How does a wasp make a nest?

In this country, we don't make national heroes out of self-proclaimed martyrs - instead, we honour those who die in selfless service to society in general (police, firefighters, medical workers, military, etc.). 

However, you can't just shove that kind of social status down the throats of those in a different society. 

Figure out how to honour the dead in two opposing societies and you figure out how the living can live together, finally aligning two sets of youth training toward reaching one goal of the greater good for all, allowing dissident voices to argue about spinoff goals that might help us find even better goals one day.

A praying mantis, a spider, a hummingbird and a moth - what does a hawk want with these?  How important is the lichen, moss or mosquito to them?

If you sell chemical fertilizer, you value green lawns with few insects or weeds.  If you sell fruits and vegetables, you value the honeybee.  How do both sellers compromise and agree to a goal of the greater good for all?

Subcultures.  They're everywhere.

Will you be ready when we activate your sleeper cell for the greater good?  Can you see it might be something as simple as asking you to turn on your television set and watch a popular program that your whole family will enjoy?  Can you see it might be something as complex as accepting new job training and moving to a different part of the world where you don't speak the dominant local language?  Would you give up your chemical sales job to become a beekeeper?  Would you give up your vegetable farming to become a chemical engineer?

According to another message I received yesterday (via the arrangement of catfood cans in a pet store), some of you animal breeders will set up a communications network via read/write ID chips embedded in pedigree pets, using the pet owners' own WiFi networks to spy on them and their lifestyle habits in order to strengthen future sales of high-end pets (the strength in weakness demonstration, perhaps?).  Nothing like seeing your customer from your product's (pet's) perspective!

Time to listen to the Great Mother and the Great Father for a while.  They've been bugging me to go deeper into the meaning of life on this planet so I can see the grand vision intended for those who will first communicate with life on another celestial body.  They tell me it has little to do with intelligence as we see it and more to do with chemistry and low-power wavelength alignment.  They also tell me that we will learn to put aside superiourity and respect the sovereignty of unique lifeforms or we will never learn to survive on other worlds.  More after I meditate on what they told me and what others have thought about many times before I arrived here in my temporary cellular form.

And yes, my computer programming friends - Czech, Russian, Chinese, et al - I am looking at the data you put together for me.  Of course, the virtual world is important but it's not the only situation I'm situated in.  There are some offworld issues to assess so I can decide which countries will be toppled in years to come to align the past, present and future in this instant.  Nothing is permanent, my friends, including our valuable friendships - everything transforms.

Knowing Is Doing?

Education makes us better-informed which makes us still only thousands of years away from nomadic tribal/clan lifestyles.  How long does it take a whole population to figure out how to maintain indefinite prosperity?

Maybe this will help:

• Coastal Systems and Human Impacts 

Maybe this won't help:

• Abu Dhabi sheikh, sovereign fund head, found dead

Temperate Zone Rooftop Horticulturalism

Not, as some would hope, sclerophyllous woody vegetation habitat regeneration.

Earlier today, based on the crows circling around a hawk (dark wings, dark-banded tail and light-coloured chest), I assume the meal in the talons of a hawk would have grown into an adult crow.

Do you know the "lively red-haired man" behind the Oatmeal Creme Pie, O. D. McKee?  To him, I give thanks for Little Debbie snack cakes and a favorite after-lunch dessert of two soft oatmeal cookies sandwiched together with a fluffy creme feeling ("creme" being a word that can designate a special formula that is not exactly cream but a sweet concocted confection).  I've enjoyed the pies for 40 years.

While giving myself time to investigate the vegetation growing on the limestone hill behind my house, surveying the sedum, prickly pear and other potential rooftop crops for northern Alabama heat islands (and perhaps other areas of this temperate zone type), I saw the first flowers of late-blooming trout lilies and the first leaves of a large field of shooting stars, along with deer trails, freshly-broken snail shells, and a short-tailed lizard (perhaps a juvenile broad-headed skink).

Storms passed by last night.  Then, in clear skies, the reflection of Mars and the Moon directly overhead.

So now, while mourning the loss of a good man who died of cardiac arrest yesterday, grandfather of my niece and nephew, I think about his family's legacy and wonder what he did to teach his kids How to Be Brilliant.

Long before the last couple of generations of us arrived, our species helped usher in the dawn of a new epoch - in the past few thousand years we have demonstrated our ability to alter the landscape, exaggerating the effects of natural climate change.  Now, we have the smarts to ask ourselves, "Are we facing another silent spring?"

I met a young woman who asked me if I was more entertained by Holmes older brother or by the 8 femmes.  I asked her if a state is a state or a state and what state the state was in.  Based on her mood, she stated that recalling one's state troops from overseas missions is one state one state could state stately when pressed to recall what is the state of states on one's slate of state issues.

Exactimundo.

When pressed, a shirt starches.  Did I mean scorches or lurches?  Lunchboxes carry their own waist.  Wait, I meant weight.  Or did I mean waste?  Being mean with the mean of what one means.

That's not it, eye-thur.  Who's the author?  Who's authoritarian?  Can you be authoritarian and not a disciplinarian?

The cajones to legalise illegalities legally.  Does plastic-sealed paper money smell like money?  Where's your paperwork to paper the place with papier?  Or paper-mâché?  Or macheted spaghetti?

Noodling around again.

I cannot see the future.  I am a translator.  My power is not in me.  You are the only power I've got.  You are the future, are you not?  You are the tree rings ringing 'round the divining rod called a preshaven pencil.

We don't need the religion of global warming to make smart business decisions to reduce, reuse and recycle for higher profit margins.  You've proven that point pointedly.  We estimate our cultural industrial workplace effectiveness by the costliness of extracting metals from rock and from landfills.  When you know, you know junkpiles are money piles.

How do you pile your junk from one cycle of learning to the next determines your certitude.  Is it better to burn trash or turn it into goo?  Do you hook cows up to methane collectors?

What is manure?

Do you take away smugness if you tell the second party that the first party gets to enjoy its smugness in turn?  If we're just taking turns, where's the feeling of victory?  Ah, history.  Those who don't/can't read, don't understand, so why tell them?

Did I tell you about O. D. McKee, who drove to a salvage yard and retrieved a gear from an old washing machine to replace a hand crank at his factory, added a small motor, and "began the automation process which turned his small bakery into one of the nation's largest producers of snack cakes"? [all references to O.D. McKee taken from the back of a snack cake box purchased in 2010 - one way to think outside the box?]

Waste not, want to be knotted.

Ever watched a microwave radiation battle between two satellites orbitting Earth?  The silence of glowing things.  Space jams in space jams.

While your electronic clothes pass the electricity your body movement generates, what do you pass?  Do you pass gas?  Do you see yourself as a microwave oven?  Can you process all the waveforms passing through you?  Are you an electricity and magnetism guru, equating equations to waiting e-friends?

Are you a rooftop gardener, growing veggies and raising goats?  Do you share your chickens with the hawks, you being a ecosystem hawk yourself?  Can you extract water from the air?  Where do you store your collected carbon dioxide?  Do you sell carbon credits for batteries to store your wind generation?

If you were trapped all alone on a heat island, what would you want with you?

Sometimes you have to ask the same sets of sets of question sets to set your thought in a new subset you'd intersected more than once before.

I met a young woman who asked me a question, "What's it like to be alone?"  I told her it's not lonely if you're a lone wolf.  She's asked what it's like to be lonely.  I asked her if she was her own god.  She nodded.  I told her gods are never lonely - they have a universe of gods and servants to fill their thoughts.  She agreed.  We laughed, we gods.  Yegads!  Thankfully, we know we aren't important - two gods in the same place, one or both of them knowing a sense of importance ... you don't want that, do you?  This planet's too small.

The morning after a woodland walk I found a dead tick attached to my hip.  Damn bloodsuckers - don't they know better than to taste the power of the gods?

Time to taste time - this sluggish computer tastes funny.

Time to test the sky.  We don't own the world - we just pass the beach ball on to the next player in the next game set.  Are you ready?  Get set.  Go!

The Experiment Called Your Life

How often do you convince yourself that an external force keeps you from being you?

Well, this blog entry has nothing to do with the previous sentence.

Well, this blog entry has nothing to do with the previous sentence.

Well, this blog entry has sentences to do with the previous nothing.

Is there anything logical about the observed universe?

Is there anything universal about the observed logic?

Is anything there?

Can you observe anything?

How do you push yourself along when you're squatting like a stubborn donkey?

Are you a mule?

Are you a stool pigeon?

If the pursuit of wealth makes you happy, will you be happy when you stop pursuing and spend time simply enjoying your wealth?

Financial wizards keep upping the size of the retirement carrot in front of the donkey.  Isn't it time you figured out that standards of living are imaginary and you can live any life you choose (or don't choose), given the amount of money available to you?

Happiness is a number of atoms.  Happiness is being alive.  We never know the happiness of being alive until we get that temporary reprieve some have received in momentary deathlike states.

Find the happiness in being alive and nothing else will matter.  No need for second homes, second automobiles, secondhand automobiles, the latest disposable gadget, or even the necessities of life you thought were so essential to you yesterday.

Happiness is the image you want to look at everyday - the image of you reflected back to you.  I found that image when I was in the crib, lost it again, found it again, lost it again, found it again, and wonder why I spend time here when my happiness makes me want to sit still and listen to the sounds of the forest today.

Excellent observation, Rick.  I'm going to stop blogging for a few days and enjoy life at its simplest happiness.  I don't need complex interactions to justify my existence to you just because I actually enjoy being me in the moment.  You enjoyed your life before I came along - why don't you and I enjoy life away from this blog and other electronic devices for a while?

See what life was like before we developed language!  The happiness of a newborn baby, satisfactorily warm and full of food.

Holy Elementary!

Makes sense to me:

АМЕРИКАНСКИЕ ФИЗИКИ ПРИШЛИ К СЕНСАЦИОННОМУ ЗАКЛЮЧЕНИЮ

Now, how do we go about using this information for business/technology innovation?  Find out where these microscopic black holes are leading us?  Is dark matter involved?  Are we slipping in and out of multiple universes and somewhere deep down in our thoughts we know we are quickly evaporating and reappearing constantly?

Let's ask Steve Hsu to shed light on the matter: Backreaction, black holes and monsters

Updated my website

I updated the website, http://www.treetrunkproductions.org/.  Today is too beautiful to spend much more time in front of the computer.  The Spring Equinox is here and outside is the place to be.  See you soon!

Many important issues this weekend, including basketball scores and government legislation to consider.  Tomorrow's the day to devote writing time to them.

Exciting Times Ahead

Large Hadron Collider Triples Its Own Record

•By Alexis Madrigal, March 19, 2010, 2:54 pm
"The Large Hadron Collider set a new record for the creation of energetic particle beams this morning. The particle accelerator, which surpassed Fermilab’s Tevatron* in December as the baddest atom smasher of them all, smashed its own record, charging particles to 3.48 trillion electron volts.

* "So, while the Tevatron, the last great American particle accelerator, may be chugging along at just under a trillion electron-volts, it’s still got an outside shot at finding the Higgs-Boson particle before the LHC can find or exclude it. And that could be a fitting final act before the high-energy physics torch passes wholly from Batavia to Geneva."

News You Can Use: Inferred or Implied

Inferring Signaling Pathway Topologies from Multiple Perturbation Measurements of Specific Biochemical Species

 Abstract: The specification of biological decisions by signaling pathways is encoded by the interplay between activation dynamics and network topologies. Although we can describe complex networks, we cannot easily determine which topology the cell actually uses to transduce a specific signal. Experimental testing of all plausible topologies is infeasible because of the combinatorially large number of experiments required to explore the complete hypothesis space. Here, we demonstrate that Bayesian inference–based modeling provides an approach to explore and constrain this hypothesis space, permitting the rational ranking of pathway models. Our approach can use measurements of a limited number of biochemical species when combined with multiple perturbations. As proof of concept, we examined the activation of the extracellular signal–regulated kinase (ERK) pathway by epidermal growth factor. The predicted and experimentally validated model shows that both Raf-1 and, unexpectedly, B-Raf are needed to fully activate ERK in two different cell lines. Thus, our formal methodology rationally infers evidentially supported pathway topologies even when a limited number of biochemical and kinetic measurements are available.

Do You Care More About Your Species Or Your Country?

Good news for space enthusiasts: China Targets More Space Program Firsts

Bad news for local villagers: Hundreds killed in Nigeria attack

Where will you be on 15th April?: Obama to defend new NASA mission at April summit

What do they think over at Indian Space Research Organisation?

Today, I watched woodpeckers and insects make invisible paths between trees - spring is here in this part of the Northern Hemisphere.  Our daffodils, Lenten rose (Helleborus (orientalis or x hybridus)) and marsh marigold (Caltha palustris) finally bloom.  Woodland wildflowers are not far behind.  Fix the leaking pond liner and my wife will be happy.

Thought for the day: Never take away anyone's hope. That may be all s/he has.

Who Is Al Gore To You?

About this story: Al Gore in line for honorary doctorate from UT

I've always been of two minds on Al Gore. First, he served as a publicly-elected official representing Tennessee, he was elected into the White House as VP, and he has received international recognition - all of these point to positive contributions he has made; on the other side, he is not his father and has always projected a wooden public personality or a personality he copied from Clinton, partly, I think, because he was never a true Tennessean politician, traveling throughout his youth in his father's shadow, and thus never able to establish his own public persona (which I bet would have been more like a primary/secondary school teacher or smalltown journalist, if there had not been pressure on him to follow in his father's footsteps).

What do they say about a person never getting respect in his hometown?

I think the carbon "cap and trade" concept is sound but is hard to sell during this economic downturn because people tend to view the concept as anti-growth (or worse).

So, all the best for Al, who represents Tennessee and, despite controversy, deserves an honorary degree for what we'll understand in later centuries about the changes our species has caused to this planet's complex ecosystem. An energy consumption device provided by the Atomic Energy Museum that my father demonstrated to my schoolmates in the late 1970s taught me long ago that fuel=carbon and the megamegatons we have used/released creates longlasting effects, including the permanent heat bubbles our concrete/factory jungles create.

Sure, outer space is a big heat sink but "greenhouses gases" are good insulators. Tip the balance far enough and see what happens! Unfortunately for our species, in 10-20 years, Gore will have the last laugh on this one when the climate change (i.e., "global warming") theories he supported become reality.

Oceanic Oxygen Levelers

Which part of your future depends on dependable ocean currents?  This bit o' news portends current futures.  Place your bets now - the world's floating supply of bacteria and plankton will tell your protein supply line, soothing or soothsaying aside.

Benefits and Fringes

After making reservations for this year's An Irish Evening benefiting United Cerebral Palsy, what to do with a recent $100 gift from Amazon?  Buy some stuff to support the economy, of course:

Nothing: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions), by Frank Close
Green Roof Plants: A Resource and Planting Guide, by Edmund C. Snodgrass, Lucie L. Snodgrass
From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, by Sean Carroll
Planting Green Roofs and Living Walls, by Nigel Dunnett, Noël Kingsbury
Wasabi Peas 5 lbs. (80 oz.), Sold by: JR Mushrooms & Specialties

I'll put off purchases of Rejcha, Vranický and Dolly Freed's Possum Living until another day.

For some reason, all of this got me thinking about Karl Haas, a former host of a classical music program, "Adventures in Good Music."  I always wondered what happened to him and just discovered today that he died in 2005.  A great loss.  He often remarked that the variety of lifestyles of his listeners kept him going.  We should all be so lucky, to impact people across the spectrum of living.