Author: Paul Handover

Real healing power

Ricochet – just another healing dog!

Ricochet

This story has spread far and wide but, nonetheless, deserves a Post on Learning from Dogs because it is the essence of what dogs offer the world – unconditional love.

To gain the trust of a dog and enter the special relationship that humans have with dogs is to understand the significance of taking people at their face value and expect nothing in return, as dogs do.

Ricochet was born as a service dog and entered into the appropriate training.  But there was a hic-cup in her learning, fortuitous as it happened and …. no, that’s enough from me.  Watch it yourself ….

Now take a few minutes and understand what Ricochet and Ian McFarland demonstrated to the world.

and here’s Ricochet website.

and, well … just think what the world would be like if we all understood the power of love!

Love is the only answer

By Paul Handover

So I said to this dolphin …

Fascinating research on how dolphins develop ‘speech’

Once again, I am indebted to Yves Smith for posting a link in the edition of Naked Capitalism published on the 1st October that really caught my eye.  This follows nicely after my piece a couple of days ago about how the stray dogs in Moscow are learning new ways to survive.

It was a piece on the BBC Earth website about how dolphins attempt to learn the language of other dolphin groups.

The BBC article starts thus:

Just magnificent

When two dolphin species come together, they attempt to find a common language, preliminary research suggests.

Bottlenose and Guyana dolphins, two distantly related species, often come together to socialise in waters off the coast of Costa Rica.

Both species make unique sounds, but when they gather, they change the way they communicate, and begin using an intermediate language.

That raises the possibility the two species are communicating in some way.

Biologist Dr Laura May-Collado of the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan made the discovery studying dolphins swimming in the Gandoca-Manzanillo Wildlife Refuge of the southern Caribbean coast of Costa Rica.

Later the article says:

As yet, Dr May-Collado cannot be sure if both species are changing the way they communicate, or whether it is one species attempting to call more like the other.

That is because her sound equipment could only record the total calls produced by mixed species groups of dolphins, and could not separate out sounds made by individuals.

“This limits how much I can say about how much they are communicating,” says Dr May-Collado.

However, dolphins are known to have an extraordinary ability to change their calls when ‘talking’ to other individuals, or to ensure they are heard over the din of background noise pollution.

So “I wouldn’t be surprised that they can modify their signals to mimic, and even possibly communicate with other species. Particularly when their home ranges force them to interact on a daily basis, which is the case of this study,” she says.

Read the full piece here or access details of the publication here.

And, finally, enjoy this:

By Paul Handover

The True Test

An interesting poem by Peter Kahn

During my sorting out of old belongings stored at my mother’s house in London, I came across this.

The True Test

I’m a teacher, not a preacher

but I will preach a little to teach a little

won’t extol the power of God, but the power of words.

I’ll attempt to amplify and magnify the God-given talent

that I suspect some of you may neglect or under-utilize

because its value has been minimized

in the movement to standardize and over-analyze

how well we perform on tests.

–

I intend to underscore how you’re blessed

academically

beyond those test

scores

that supposedly solely

attest to the level

of your intellect

but in effect

tell you what you can’t do.

–

I’m not a preacher, but I’ll testify that

I suspect these tests

neglect to detect

creativity, “can-do-it-y”

the fluidity of your ingenuity

the things that reflect true potential

hardly inconsequential

that are immeasurable

un-testable

by standard means

You know what this means

It’s about bringing what you’ve got to the table

to enable them

to envision you

as a mover and a shaker

who will take him or her

by the heart and start

a new vision for everyone to see

unimpaired by the SAT and GCSE

You see, we’re about to utilize poetry

to show ’em what you got

is not just what they think they see.

–

Are you with me?

are you ready to unleash your abilities?

are you ready to impress?

like the Rock’s biceps?

like Janet Jackson’s dance steps?

like the poetic lyrics of Mos Def?

and the Haitian syncopations of Wyclef?

–

Are you willing to try your absolute best?

Now that’s the TRUE test.

Chilean miners – further update

Two months today

Nice to see the BBC maintaining a news stream on the Chilean miners who were trapped underground two months ago – the 5th August.

Here’s the page on the BBC website that has a very good summary of progress to date.

Workers pump water through a tube to miners trapped at the San Jose mine in Copiapo, Chile. AP photo.

By Paul Handover

Smart dogs in Russia

Dogs never stop learning

(With thanks to Dan Gomez for forwarding the email from Bill Wells)

A quick Google search will find lots of links to stories about how stray dogs in Moscow are learning new ways of looking after themselves.  My quotes and pictures have been taken from the English-Russia web site.

Russian scientists say that Moscow stray dogs became much smarter. The four legged oldest human’s friends demonstrate real smartness such as riding the Moscow metro every morning to get from their suburban places of living to the fat regions of Moscow center. Once they arrive to the downtown they demonstrate different new, previously unseen for the dog skills. Those skills can include “the hunt for shawarma” for example, the popular among Muscovites eastern cuisine dish. This hunt scene can be seen as this:

Regular Moscow busy street with some small food kiosks. A middle-aged man buys himself a piece of hot fast food and walks aside chewing it without a rush. Then just in a second he jumps up frightened – some doggy has sneaked up on him and barked out loudly. His tasty snack falls out from his hands down to the ground and the dog gets it. Just ten minutes later, on the same place, the teen youngster loses his dinner in exactly the same manner. The modern Russian dogs are on their urban hunt.

“This method of ambushing people from their back is widely exercised by Moscow dogs”, saying A. Poiarkov, working in Ecology and Evolution Institute of Moscow. “The main point here is to define who would drop the food scared and who won’t, but the dogs are great psychologists they can do it better than us”.

Cheap travelling!

Moscow ecologists think that dogs started acquiring this habits in 1990s, when the Soviet union collapsed and Moscow has fell into the hands of new class of Russian capitalists. They understood the true value of the downtown realty underestimated by previous Communist owners and became removing all the industrial complexes Moscow had in its centre to its outskirts. Those places were used by homeless dogs as a shelter often, so the dogs had to move together with their houses, so they had to learn how to travel Moscow subway – first to get to the centre in the morning then back home in the evening, just as us people.

The commercial revolution of Moscow made their usual feeding places like trash bins out of direct reach, so they had to get to know new ways of getting their piece of food. That’s how appeared those “Shawarma hunts”. Sometimes though they use more gentle methods. Young girl sits on the bench to eat her hot dog – a big cute looking dog appears from the surrounding bushes and puts her head on her knees. The girl can’t help herself sharing the hotdog with a dog.

Among some more amazing skill those Moscow dogs are the ability not to miss their stop while going on the subway train. Biologists say dogs have very nice sense of time which helps them not to miss their destination. Another skill they have is to cross the road on the green traffic light. “They don’t react on color, but on the picture they see on the traffic light”, Moscow scientist tells. Also they choose often the last or the first metro car – those are less crowded usually.

It’s funny but the ecologists studying Moscow stray dogs also tell the dogs don’t miss a chance to get some play while on their travel in the subway. They are fond of jumping in the train just seconds before the doors shut closed risking their tails be jammed. “They do it for fun, just they have enough food”, they conclude.

"Wake me up at the next stop, please!"

Here’s a video from YouTube courtesy of the Wall Street Journal – wet eye warning!

Jeannie and I would be helpless in Moscow!  Reason?  We have 12 ex-stray Mexican dogs living with us in Payson plus my beautiful German Shepherd dog, Pharaoh, that came with me when I left the UK in 2008.  We can’t resist helping these wonderful creatures.

Pharaoh with little Poppy, a stray found on a Mexican building site

See more pictures from that English-Russia web site here.

By Paul Handover

In my lifetime?

Possibly the greatest discovery of all time.

What would that be?  Finding evidence that there is intelligent life on another planet.

With the assumption, of course, that there is intelligent life on Planet Earth 😉

So what prompted this article?

Simply that the British Magazine The New Scientist on its website has a recent article with the intriguing heading of Found: first rocky exoplanet that could host life.

Here are some extracts:

Astronomers have found the first alien world that could support life on its surface. It is both at the right distance from its star to potentially harbour liquid water and probably has a rocky composition like Earth.

“That’s the most exciting exoplanet I’ve seen yet,” says James Kasting of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, who was not involved in the discovery.

The planet orbits a dim red dwarf star 20 light years from Earth called Gliese 581. Four planets were already known around the star, with two lying near the inner and outer edges of the habitable zone, where liquid water – and therefore potentially life – could exist on its surface.

A rocky world has been found squarely in the middle of the star Gliese 581's habitable zone (Image: Lynette Cook)

The article continues:

The discovery suggests habitable planets must be common, with 10 to 20 per cent of red dwarfs and sun-like stars boasting them, the team says. That’s because Gliese 581 is one of just nine stars out to its distance that have been searched with high enough precision to reveal a planet in the habitable zone.

“If you take the number of stars in our galaxy – a few hundred billion – and multiply them by 10 or 20 per cent, you end up with 20 or 40 billion potentially habitable planets out there,” says Vogt. “It’s a very large number.”

For more years than I can imagine, I have always thought that the most amazing scientific find of my lifetime would be the discovery of life on another planet.

I’m 65 at present – wonder what the odds are? But surely this announcement by The New Scientist does increase them?

Cat lovers – this is for you

A man absolutely hated his wifes cat and decided to get rid of him one day …

… by driving him 20 blocks from his home and leaving him at the park.

As he was getting home, the cat was walking up the driveway.

The next day he decided to drive the cat 40 blocks away. He put the beast out and headed home.

[]

He kept taking the cat further and further and the cat would always beat him home. At last he decided to drive a few miles away, turn right, then left, past the bridge, then right again and another right until he reached what he thought was a safe distance from his home and left the cat there.

Hours later the man calls home to his wife: “Jen, is the cat there?”

“Yes“, the wife answers, “why do you ask?”

Frustrated, the man answered, “Put that cat on the phone, I’m lost and need directions!”

[With thanks to Magsx2’s Blog where I first saw this.]

By Paul Handover

Onwards and upwards

Some remarkable recent achievements in aeronautics

Just happened that a few items crossed my inbox more or less in the same time-frame that made me reflect on the ingenuity and persistence of inventors and explorers.

Here’s the first item that I came across in The Register.

Canadian enthusiasts have finally achieved a feat that has eluded humanity’s finest engineers since the time of Leonardo da Vinci – to build a machine, powered by a human pilot’s muscles, which flies by flapping its wings: an ornithopter.

Here it is on YouTube.

Read the rest of the report here.

Then Klaus Ohlmann is recorded on the FAI website as submitting a world record claim for flying a solar powered glider a total of 375.7 km (233.4 miles) around three turning points.  Oh, and not forgetting a claim by Jan BÈM and Olga ZALUSKÁ  from the Czech Republic for a world record altitude by a weight-shift microlight – 8,188 metres no less (26,864 feet!) – or the claim by Richard Young of the USA for a world record of flying an aircraft between 300 to 500 kg around a closed circuit of 100 km at a speed of 390 km/h (242 mph).  What is it with these guys – have they not got proper jobs to go to? 😉

Anyway, here’s Klaus on a nice video.

Finally, my dear friend of many years, Dan Gomez, reminded me in a recent email of this very brave pushing back of the boundaries.

More from here.

Swiss pilot Yves Rossy

By Paul Handover

CASSE

The Center for the Advancement of Steady State Economy

My post published a short while ago contained a contribution from Carla.  This, in part, is what she said:

We have to try to work constructively for change. I keep urging people to check out the potential for an economy based not on constant growth, which is impossible on a finite planet, but on some sane principles of equity and sustainability.

If you go to http://www.steadystate.org and look at their position statement, you can see that people from all over the world are signing on–yes, just three or four people a day–but they are from every continent and just about every country.

Now, can you help this “go viral”?

I spent sufficiently long at the CASSE website to be comfortable that it is well worth supporting.  Here are the members of the Executive Board.  Here are the staff and here are their advisors.  Here’s their Mission:

The mission of CASSE is to advance the steady state economy, with stabilized population and consumption, as a policy goal with widespread public support. We pursue this mission by:

  • educating citizens, organizations, and policy makers on the conflict between economic growth and (1) environmental protection, (2) ecological and economic sustainability, and (3) national security and international stability;
  • promoting the steady state economy as a desirable alternative to economic growth;
  • studying the means to establish a steady state economy.

Even if you don’t want to make a financial subscription to CASSE you can still register your support.  Here is their Position Statement:

The CASSE position sets the record straight on the conflict between economic growth and environmental protection. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution are just three powerful examples. And how will the next generation find jobs when the planet can’t support our overgrown economy? The CASSE position calls for a desirable solution – a steady state economy with stabilized population and consumption – beginning in the wealthiest nations and not with extremist tactics. Join the likes of E. O. Wilson, Jane Goodall, and David Suzuki; fill in the information below to sign the position and support a healthy, sustainable economy.

Go for it. After all, one of the definitions of madness is to continue doing the same thing and expect a different result.

By Paul Handover

No, it’s not only me!

The power of human networking.

My article published yesterday referred to a post on Baseline Scenario entitled After The Recession: What Next For The Fed? Do go across and read it.

I had been in a bit of a rant mood and contributed a comment to that Post.  I wrote:

I don’t have the knowledge to respond to Simon’s excellent Post in detail but his comments reinforce what feels like a constant throbbing in my mind – how can the citizens of so many countries have abdicated so much interest and concern in how they/we are governed. Wish I had even a clue as to the answer to that question.

Significant social unrest would be very scary – the ‘law’ of unintended consequences and all that – but there are times when I wonder if this, in the end, might be the only form of real progress for the hard-working, tax-paying majority.

End of rant! 😉

Interestingly, that stimulated some replies which were, in my opinion, worth sharing with you; kind reader of Learning from Dogs that you are!

Sir, you raise a sad but true point when you ask how a majority of us citizens, on a worldwide basis, could have lost true “by the people” control of our own governments.

For most of us the loss of healthy economic functioning has been the main consequence of this, something that has been very painful. But I also find myself reflecting on the unspeakable genocides in our collective human history. One gets an awful sense of how such things were permitted to arise…ZeroInMyOnes

And

Well spoken Paul Handover. The system cannot and will not be changed politically or judicially because the malevolent forces who conjured the system own and control both the political and judicial operations and operators. Those operators work to advance the interests of the predatorclass whose operations, operators, and structures are malevolent.

The people are the abused victims of predatorclass criminal enterprises bent on total control of the earths wealth and resources, and the enslavement or eradication of the rest of the population.

The peoples only hope for implementing the changes necessary to form a more perfect union is best described here:

(“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”) TonyForesta

And

Paul Handover, that was not a rant. You are simply talking common sense.

Scary is right. And it’s scarier by the day.

We have to try to work constructively for change. I keep urging people to check out the potential for an economy based not on constant growth, which is impossible on a finite planet, but on some sane principles of equity and sustainability.

If you go to http://www.steadystate.org and look at their position statement, you can see that people from all over the world are signing on–yes, just three or four people a day–but they are from every continent and just about every country.

Now, can you help this “go viral”? Carla

These are strong, powerful views.  I have joined Casse, the organisation referred to in Carla’s comment – see second Post from me today – and Tony’s comment motivated me to look up the history of the United States Declaration of Independence, the subject of a separate article on this Blog.

Powerful stuff!

By Paul Handover