Dogs are animals of integrity. We have much to learn from them.
Year: 2024
A beautiful shot from Southern California.
This photograph was forwarded to me from Dan Gomez, who took it on the morning of last Tuesday.
It was taken in the Coachella Valley and was a morning shot of the sun through the haze caused by the Lion Fire.
Fabulous!
How The Dodo spoke of a dog and a wild shark bonding.
I do not know much about this story apart from the fact that it appeared in The Dodo recently and I took to it.
So please enjoy! (And that assumes you have not already seen the article!)
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Published on Aug 16, 2024
For most dogs, their friend groups usually consist of a mix of humans and other dogs. But Lili, a 3-year-old dog who lives on a French Polynesian atoll called Fakarava, isn’t like most other dogs. She prefers friends who have gills and fins. In fact, her very best friend is a shark.
Ever since Lili’s mom, Emmanuelle Larchet, adopted Lili, she’s known that her dog has an affinity for all things aquatic. She started swimming in the lagoon near Larchet’s house when she was only a month old.
“She’s really a water dog,” Larchet told The Dodo.
There are around 100 sharks who live in this lagoon near Larchet’s house. So when Lili swims in the water there, she’s surrounded by them. While many dog parents would be terrified to see their dog swimming amongst sharks, Larchet knows that the sharks Lili swims with are nurse sharks, who are actually very docile creatures.
“We call them sea puppies because [they’re] like dogs, actually … They are very nice,” Larchet said.
Larchet likes to joke that when Lili swims around with her shark friends, it’s sea puppies meeting earth puppies.
Over the years Lili has been swimming in the lagoon, there’s one shark in particular she’s grown especially close with. His name is Sharky, and he and Lili visit each other almost every day. Larchet and Lili are able to recognize Sharky because he has a special marking on one of his fins.
Lili and Sharky like to explore their lagoon together. They enjoy splashing around in the warm, clear water.
“He comes to say hello every time she sees him,” Larchet said.
Even though Lili and Larchet are best friends themselves, Larchet is more than happy to share her Lili with Sharky. And even though Larchet watches Lili hang out with her shark friends all the time, it never gets old seeing them spend time together.
“[When] I see her swimming with Sharky, [I’m] so happy,” Larchet said.
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It is a lovely story!
We are speaking of the universe.
I follow Patrice Ayme and have done for many years. Some of his posts are super-intellectual and those I struggle to understand.
But a post published on September 8th, 2024 was very easy for me, and countless others no doubt, to understand and I have pleasure in republishing it on Learning from Dogs today.
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September 8, 2024
I doubt that there are civilizations around. We are facing a galaxy devoid of intelligent aliens: little green mats out there, not little green men.
First, we don’t see them. With foreseeable technology (hibernation, nuclear propulsion, compact thermonuclear reactors, bioengineering, AI, quantum computers) we should be able to send very large interstellar spaceships at 1,000 kilometers per second… Thus it would take a millennium to colonize the Centaur tri-star system…. 25,000 years to colonize a 200 light years across ball… And the entire galaxy in ten million years… Wars would only accelerate the expansion. So if there was a galactic civilization, within ten million years it would have spanned the entire galaxy and its presence should be in sight.
Second, life took nearly four billion years to evolve animals. Bacterial life could have been nearly extinguished on Earth many times…. Be it only during the Snowball Earths episodes. A star whizzing by could have launched a thousand large comets. The large planets could have fallen inward.
Third, ultra intelligent life may not be able to have hands or tentacles and thus develop industry. Once intelligent life forms have evolved, say sea lions or parrots, let alone wolves, they may just be sitting ducks for the next disaster which would revert life to the bacterial level, erasing billions of years of evolution.
Fourth, when civilization is launched, it can fail… And not get a second chance (from lack of availability of mines after easy picking during the initial civilization).
Fifth, nuclear powered Earth is special. Earth has plate tectonics, probably from a nuclear reactor at the core, keeps the CO2 just so for a temperate temperature… Water, but not too much. Her large Moon stabilizes her. Earth doesn’t have a weird rotation like Venus (retrograde and slow) or Mars (spectacularly tilting axis). Ian Miller has aluminosilicates considerations on top of that.
So I don’t expect little green men… Besides those sent by the perverse Putin…
Just when we thought we knew of all the stress, here is another one: if we go extinct, the universe loses its soul! We have thus found a new Superior Moral Directive: SUS, Save Unique Soul!
Expect little green mats, not little green men.
Patrice Ayme
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A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk to our local Freethinkers group and called it The Next Ten Years. It began, thus:
This presentation is about the world of the future; of the near future. And the biggest issue, most agree, is the change in the climate.
The Global Temperature anomaly, as of last year, 2023, is 1.17 Centigrade, 2.11 Fahrenheit, above the long-term average from 1951 to 1980. The 10 most recent years are the warmest years on record.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is quoted as saying that ‘a goal without a plan is just a wish.’ So my plan is to show you how we can change, no let me put that more strongly, how we must change in the next ten years. Because our present habits are ruining the world.
Learning from Dogs 