Category: Core thought

That little old word ‘truth’.

Truth: the true or actual state of a matter.

Well nothing complicated about the definition, is there!  If only society was equally motivated by getting to the truth of climate change.  Yes, I know I’m being naive!

Why my mini-rant?

I’m well in to James Hansen’s book Storms of my Grandchildren and it’s confirming my fears about the issues that are facing mankind now!  But more of that later.

What triggered me putting ‘pen to paper’ was a recent report from the Yale forum on climate change and the media.  Here’s how it opened,

Scientific Consensus Stronger than Scientists Thought?

Bruce Lieberman   May 2, 2012

More than two decades after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began publishing the latest scientific consensus on the globe’s changing climate, widespread doubts persist in the U.S. over whether there really is widespread agreement among scientists. It’s the primary argument of those who deny basic scientific foundations of warming.

But new and innovative survey results suggest the consensus among scientists might actually be stronger than the scientists themselves had thought.

The battles to define and debunk scientific consensus over climate change science have been fought for years. In 2004, University of California San Diego science historian Naomi Oreskes wrote about a broad consensus she found after studying 928 scientific papers published between 1993 and 2003.

But what I found deeply fascinating was that later on Bruce Lieberman, the report’s author, lists in detail the actual levels of agreement compared to the perceived levels.  To make it easier to take in, I have amended the telling differences to italic.

In sum, the newly released poll results identified surprisingly common points of agreement among climate scientists; and yet for each point, those scientists underestimated the amount of agreement among their colleagues. The results:

  • Human activity has been the primary cause of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures in the last 250 years. (About 90 percent of respondents agreed with this characterization, but those respondents estimated that less than 80 percent of their scientist colleagues held that view.)
  • If governmental policies do not change, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere will exceed 550 parts per million between 2050 and 2059. (More than 30 percent agreed, but those respondents estimated that just over 20 percent of their peers held that view.)
  • If and when atmospheric CO2 concentrations reach 550 ppm, the increase in global average surface temperature relative to the year 2000 will be 2-3 degrees Celsius, or 3.2-4.8 F. (More than 40 percent agreed, but those respondents estimated that less than 30 percent held that view.)
  • If governmental policies do not change, in the year 2050, the increase in global average surface temperature relative to the year 2000 will be 1.5-2 degrees Celsius, or 2.4-3.2 F). (More than 35 percent agreed, but those respondents estimated that just over 30 percent held that view.)
  • The likelihood that global average sea level will rise more during this century than the highest level given in the 2007 assessment of the IPCC (0.59 meters, 23.2 inches) is more than 90 percent. (More than 30 percent agreed, but those respondents estimated that less than 20 percent held that view.)
  • Since 1851, the U.S. has experienced an average of six major hurricane landfalls (> 111 mph) per decade. The total number of major hurricane landfalls in the U.S. from 2011-2020 will be seven to eight. (Nearly 60 percent agreed, but those respondents estimated that just over 30 percent held that view.)
  • The total number of major hurricane landfalls in the U.S. from 2041 to 2050 will be seven to eight. (About 35 percent agreed, but those respondents estimated that less than 30 percent held that view.)
  • Given increasing levels of human activity, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere can be kept below 550 ppm with current technology — but only with changes in government policy. (Nearly 70 percent agreed, but those respondents estimated that just over 50 percent held that view.)

Now back to Hansen’s book.  Here’s what Hansen writes starting on p.144,

Getting to the truth!

Sea level rise is one of the two climate impacts that I believe should be at the top of the list that defines what is “dangerous,” on any time scale that humanity can imagine.  Ice sheets take thousands of years to build up from snowfall.  Reasonable “adaptation” to a large sea level rise is nearly impossible, because once ice sheets begin to rapidly disintegrate, sea level would be continually changing for centuries.  Coastal cities would become impractical to maintain.

The other climate change impact at the top of my “dangerous” list is extermination of species.  Human activities already have increased the rate of species extinctions far above the natural level.  Extinctions are occurring as humans take over more and more of the habitat of animal and plant species.  We deforest large regions, replace biologically diverse grasslands and forests with monoculture crops, and introduce foreign, invasive animal and plant species that sometimes wipe out the native ones.

Hansen points out that about a billion people live at elevations less than 25 metres (81 feet).

I included a short video of James Hansen in a Learning from Dogs Post just a few days ago.  You’ll find it here – go and watch it – and think about the truth!

Photo: Winston Churchill, photographed by Cecil Beaton, at 10 Downing Street, London, in 1940.

Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.– Winston Churchill

Planet Earth is whispering to us!

Just because it’s non-verbal doesn’t mean it isn’t clear!

This is another full republication of a recent Tomgram from Tom Engelhardt.  As I have said previously, I count myself as very lucky to have had Tom give me blanket permission to reproduce his excellent essays.  This one is no exception to the others that I have presented on Learning from Dogs.

But before I go to the Tomgram that was published on Tom Dispatch last Thursday, let me gently expand on what was on my mind when I wrote the sub-heading: Just because it’s non-verbal doesn’t mean it isn’t clear!

The animals that man forms close relationships with are able to ‘read’ us in many exquisite ways.  Dogs, in particular, seem to sense the mood and temperament of humans especially well.  Indeed, I am frequently open-mouthed at the way that Pharaoh senses, almost before I am conscious of it, that I am a little mentally ‘pre-occupied’.  Most of the dogs that live around me and Jean show very clearly that they know when life isn’t running normally.

The reason I have strayed into this rather subjective place is that it doesn’t take too much to drift away and imagine that our beautiful planet is ‘speaking’ to us that she is hurting.  OK, better stop there and let Tom and Bill McKibben speak better sense!

Oh, and because this was written ahead of the global day of action last Saturday, you will need to take that into account about two-thirds of the way through.

oooOOOooo

Tomgram: Bill McKibben, The Most Important Story of Our Lives

Posted by Bill McKibben at 9:39am, May 3, 2012.

By now, it’s already deep election season, the beginning of the culmination of a cycle that commenced the day after (or even the day before) the previous presidential election. In the meantime, the endless polls appear — you can check Obama’s approval rating or the state of the presidential horserace any time, night or day — and the media goes ballistic handicapping the odds or discussing the presidential cat fight.  Each side’s handlers take out after the other’s, and increasingly, the corporate dollars pour in (another form of handicapping, or maybe just plain old knee-capping).  You know the routine.  These days, with the election a mere six months away, Romney/Obama “analysis” and prediction is already in the stratosphere and no issue, from war to a blind self-taught Chinese lawyer escaping to the American embassy in Beijing, is election-proof.

It’s all grist for the mill and who in Washington isn’t reading the polls the way a New Ager might read Tarot cards?  So when President Obama suddenly starts talking — quite voluntarily — about global warming as a campaign issue, you know something’s up.  What’s up, it turns out, is public concern over climate change after years of polling in which Americans claimed to be ever less worried about the phenomenon.

No one should be surprised, given this overheated year in North America, as Bill McKibben points out in today’s post.  In fact, in the latest climate-change polling, 63% of respondents believe “the United States should move forward to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, regardless of what other countries do.”  In another recent poll, 65% of Americans backed the idea of “imposing mandatory controls on carbon dioxide emissions/other greenhouse gases” (as 75% now support regulating carbon dioxide as a “pollutant”).

This is something new in America.  Times, like the weather, are evidently a-changin’. And the president has noticed this, especially since he’s facing an opponent who, last fall, went on the record this way: “My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet.  And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us.”

So this may be a bullish campaign season for climate change.  “I suspect,” said the president, “that over the next six months, this is going to be a debate that will become part of the campaign, and I will be very clear in voicing my belief that we’re going to have to take further steps to deal with climate change in a serious way.”  It could even help win him the election, if this summer and fall prove just as weather-freaky as our North American winter and spring have been, leaving Republican climate-change deniers and prevaricators in the dust.

If, in a far less propitious political moment, one person put climate change back on the White House agenda and made the president attend to it, that would be TomDispatch regular Bill McKibben.  The campaign of mass action he launched against the Keystone XL Pipeline and the particularly “dirty” form of energy it was slated to bring from Canada to the U.S. Gulf coast proved crucial. Let’s hope, like the cavalry, that he arrived in the nick of time. Tom

Too Hot Not to Notice?
A Planet Connected by Wild Weather 
By Bill McKibben

The Williams River was so languid and lovely last Saturday morning that it was almost impossible to imagine the violence with which it must have been running on August 28, 2011. And yet the evidence was all around: sand piled high on its banks, trees still scattered as if by a giant’s fist, and most obvious of all, a utilitarian temporary bridge where for 140 years a graceful covered bridge had spanned the water.

The YouTube video of that bridge crashing into the raging river was Vermont’s iconic image from its worst disaster in memory, the record flooding that followed Hurricane Irene’s rampage through the state in August 2011.  It claimed dozens of lives, as it cut more than a billion-dollar swath of destruction across the eastern United States.

I watched it on TV in Washington just after emerging from jail, having been arrested at the White House during mass protests of the Keystone XL pipeline.  Since Vermont’s my home, it took the theoretical — the ever more turbulent, erratic, and dangerous weather that the tar sands pipeline from Canada would help ensure — and made it all too concrete. It shook me bad.

And I’m not the only one.

New data released last month by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities show that a lot of Americans are growing far more concerned about climate change, precisely because they’re drawing the links between freaky weather, a climate kicked off-kilter by a fossil-fuel guzzling civilization, and their own lives. After a year with a record number of multi-billion dollar weather disasters, seven in ten Americans now believe that “global warming is affecting the weather.” No less striking, 35% of the respondents reported that extreme weather had affected them personally in 2011.  As Yale’s Anthony Laiserowitz told theNew York Times, “People are starting to connect the dots.”

Which is what we must do. As long as this remains one abstract problem in the long list of problems, we’ll never get to it.  There will always be something going on each day that’s more important, including, if you’re facing flood or drought, the immediate danger.

But in reality, climate change is actually the biggest thing that’s going on every single day.  If we could only see that pattern we’d have a fighting chance. It’s like one of those trompe l’oeil puzzles where you can only catch sight of the real picture by holding it a certain way. So this weekend we’ll be doing our best to hold our planet a certain way so that the most essential pattern is evident. At 350.org, we’re organizing a global day of action that’s all about dot-connecting; in fact, you can follow the action at climatedots.org.

The day will begin in the Marshall Islands of the far Pacific, where the sun first rises on our planet, and where locals will hold a daybreak underwater demonstration on their coral reef already threatened by rising seas. They’ll hold, in essence, a giant dot — and so will our friends in Bujumbura, Burundi, where March flooding destroyed 500 homes. In Dakar, Senegal, they’ll mark the tidal margins of recent storm surges.  In Adelaide, Australia, activists will host a “dry creek regatta” to highlight the spreading drought down under.

Pakistani farmers — some of the millions driven from their homes by unprecedented flooding over the last two years — will mark the day on the banks of the Indus; in Ayuthaya, Thailand, Buddhist monks will protest next to a temple destroyed by December’s epic deluges that also left the capital, Bangkok, awash.

Activists in Ulanbataar will focus on the ongoing effects of drought in Mongolia.  In Daegu, South Korea, students will gather with bags of rice and umbrellas to connect the dots between climate change, heavy rains, and the damage caused to South Korea’s rice crop in recent years. In Amman, Jordan, Friends of the Earth Middle East will be forming a climate dot on the shores of the Dead Sea to draw attention to how climate-change-induced drought has been shrinking that sea.

In Herzliya, Israel, people will form a dot on the beach to stand in solidarity with island nations and coastal communities around the world that are feeling the impact of climate change. In newly freed Libya, students will hold a teach-in.  In Oman, elders will explain how the weather along the Persian Gulf has shifted in their lifetimes. There will be actions in the cloud forests of Costa Rica, and in the highlands of Peru where drought has wrecked the lives of local farmers.  In Monterrey, Mexico, they’ll recall last year’s floods that did nearly $2 billion in damage. In Chamonix, France, climbers will put a giant red dot on the melting glaciers of the Alps.

And across North America, as the sun moves westward, activists in Halifax, Canada, will “swim for survival” across its bay to highlight rising sea levels, while high-school students in Nashville, Tennessee, will gather on a football field inundated by 2011’s historic killer floods.

In Portland, Oregon, city dwellers will hold an umbrella-decorating party to commemorate March’s record rains. In Bandelier, New Mexico, firefighters in full uniform will remember last year’s record forest fires and unveil the new solar panels on their fire station.  In Miami, Manhattan, and Maui, citizens will line streets that scientists say will eventually be underwater. In the high Sierra, on one of the glaciers steadily melting away, protesters will unveil a giant banner with just two words, a quote from that classic of western children’s literature, The Wizard of Oz. “I’m Melting” it will say, in letters three-stories high.

This is a full-on fight between information and disinformation, between the urge to witness and the urge to cover-up. The fossil-fuel industry has funded endless efforts to confuse people, to leave an impression that nothing much is going on.  But — as with the tobacco industry before them — the evidence has simply gotten too strong.

Once you saw enough people die of lung cancer, you made the connection. The situation is the same today.  Now, it’s not just the scientists and the insurance industry; it’s your neighbors. Even pleasant weather starts to seem weird.  Fifteen thousand U.S. temperature records were broken, mainly in the East and Midwest,in the month of March alone, as a completely unprecedented heat wave moved across the continent.  Most people I met enjoyed the rare experience of wearing shorts in winter, but they were still shaking their heads. Something was clearly wrong and they knew it.

The one institution in our society that isn’t likely to be much help in spreading the news is… the news. Studies show our papers and TV channels paying ever less attention to our shifting climate.  In fact, in 2011 ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox spent twice as much time discussing Donald Trump as global warming. Don’t expect representatives from Saturday’s Connect the Dots day to show up on Sunday’s talk shows.  Over the last three years, those inside-the-Beltway extravaganzas have devoted 98 minutes total to the planet’s biggest challenge. Last year, in fact, all the Sunday talk shows spent exactly nine minutes of Sunday talking time on climate change — and here’s a shock: all of it was given over to Republican politicians in the great denial sweepstakes.

So here’s a prediction: next Sunday, no matter how big and beautiful the demonstrations may be that we’re mounting across the world, “Face the Nation” and “Meet the Press” won’t be connecting the dots. They’ll be gassing along about Newt Gingrich’s retirement from the presidential race or Mitt Romney’s coming nomination, and many of the commercials will come from oil companies lying about their environmental efforts. If we’re going to tell this story — and it’s the most important story of our time — we’re going to have to tell it ourselves.  

Bill McKibben, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, is the founder of 350.org, which is coordinating Saturday’s Connect the Dots day.  You can find the event nearest you by checking climatedots.org.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and join us on Facebook.

Copyright 2012 Bill McKibben

Couple of footnotes from yours truly.

Here’s that video that Bill mentions earlier,

 

This is an email that came from Bill McKibben earlier on Sunday morning (Arizona time).

Dear Friends,

This is a thank you note, a thank you note to the whole planet.

Except for the hours when I went out to the events nearest my home in Vermont, I’ve been by the computer, transfixed by the images streaming in.

From every corner of the earth people have been doing their best to Connect the Dots on climate change. And their best has been pretty amazing — we have photos from beneath the ocean waves and from high-altitude glaciers, from the middle of big cities fighting sea level rise and remote deserts battling drought.

Here’s one of the most vivid photos of the bunch — just a taste of what it feels like to have the water rising around you, and the tip of the iceberg of the creative masterworks of the past 24 hours:

Click here to see the amazing photos from the day: www.climatedots.org

We’re going to need you soon to fight the political battles that will make use of these images, but for the next day or two just relax, and enjoy the feeling of solidarity that comes from knowing there are millions of people thinking the same way, harboring the same fears and, more importantly, the same hopes.

On we go together.

With such gratitude,

Bill McKibben

P.S. There’s still time to submit photos for our slideshow and compilation video — just send your best photo as an email attachment to photos@350.org. Make your city and country the subject line of the email, and put your story and description in the body. So many thanks in advance!

Know your brain? Possibly not.

“Exact knowledge is the enemy of vitalism.” Francis Crick.

On the face of it, I’m going to write about two totally disparate aspects of the brain.  Or are they?

I subscribe to Naked Capitalism and one of my favourite aspects of Yves’s daily email presentation are the Links.  They cover an incredibly broad range of news items.

So it was perhaps a week ago or thereabouts that one of those links was to an item in the British newspaper, The Daily Mail.  Here’s how the article started,

Power really does corrupt as scientists claim it’s as addictive as cocaine

More than a hundred years after noted historian Baron John Acton coined the phrase ‘power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ scientists claim the saying is biologically true.

The feeling of power has been found to have a similar effect on the brain to cocaine by increasing the levels of testosterone and its by-product 3-androstanediol in both men and women.

This in turn leads to raised levels of dopamine, the brain’s reward system called the nucleus accumbens, which can be very addictive.

Across in the English paper The Daily Telegraph, Dr Ian Robertson writes on this subject and says,

Unfettered power has almost identical effects, but in the light of yesterday’s Leveson Inquiry interchanges in London, there seems to be less chance of British government ministers becoming addicted to power. Why? Because, as it appears from the emails released by James Murdoch yesterday, they appeared to be submissive to the all-powerful Murdoch empire, hugely dependent on the support of this organization for their jobs and status, who could swing hundreds of thousands of votes for or against them.

Submissiveness and dominance have their effects on the same reward circuits of the brain as power and cocaine. Baboons low down in the dominance hierarchy have lower levels of dopamine in key brain areas, but if they get ‘promoted’ to a higher position, then dopamine rises accordingly. This makes them more aggressive and sexually active, and in humans similar changes happen when people are given power. What’s more, power also makes people smarter, because dopamine improves the functioning of the brain’s frontal lobes. Conversely, demotion in a hierarchy decreases dopamine levels, increases stress and reduces cognitive function.

OK, moving on.  On April 29th., there was an article on the Big Think website with the intriguing title of You Are Not Your Brain! 

What’s the Big Idea?

“Contemporary research on consciousness in neuroscience rests on unquestioned but highly questionable foundations. Human nature is no less mysterious now than it was a hundred years ago,” writes philosopher Alva Noë in his book Out of Our Heads.

It’s a bold assertion in an age when fMRI has enabled us to see images of the brain functioning in real time, and when many prominent public intellectuals (Stephen Hawking, Eric Kandel) have argued, either implicitly or vociferously, in favor of reductionism. The “brain-as-calculating machine” analogy assumes that human thought, personality, memory, and emotion are located somewhere in the gray matter protected by the skull. In other words, you — at least, the waking you who gets out of bed in the morning — are your brain.

But you’re not, says Noë. Just as love does not live inside the heart, consciousness is not contained in a finite space — it’s something that arises, something that occurs: a verb rather than a noun. And since the publication of Francis Crick’s influential The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, scientists have been looking for it in all the wrong places.

That’s enough of me republishing the article – if it grabs your interest, do go and read it in full here.

And here’s Francis Crick with an extract from his DVD on the Scientific Search for the Soul

NOTE: This is an excerpt from the two-part, 60-minute DVD.
http://www.thinkingallowed.com/2fcrick.html

A noted scientist discusses free will, consciousness, attention and memory and their relationship to the human nervous system. In a wide ranging discussion, Crick points out that the hypothesis that the brain is the seat of consciousness has not yet been proven.

Francis Crick, Ph.D., received the Nobel Prize in 1962 for the discovery of DNA’s central role in the process of genetic reproduction. He is author of Life Itself, What Mad Pursuit and The Astonishing Hypothesis.

“Chance is the only source of true novelty.” Francis Crick

More on healing.

Reflecting more than a casual interest in this fascinating topic.

Yesterday, I referred to a recent visit to my doctor and the ‘system’ not being able to address two aspects at the same time, Vestibular Migraine and possible memory issues.  Then later on, in response to a comment from Michelle of Dogkisses Blog, I owned up to having been advised that I may have early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease.

But very quickly friends responded to that ‘news’ by asking me if I had come across the information about coconut oil.  So here are my findings about the possible curative effects of coconut oil and, clearly, I wanted to draw this to the attention of as many people as I can.  Please feel free to republish this information; all I would ask is that you link back to the URL for this Post – thank you.

Let me take you to a website called Coconut Ketones and to a page on that website where there are a number of articles on the possible major healing effect of coconut oil.  The primary article, written in 2008, starts thus,

WHAT IF THERE WAS A CURE FOR ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE AND NO ONE KNEW?

A Case Study by Dr. Mary Newport

July 22, 2008

There is a growing epidemic of obesity, type II diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and predictions that 15,000,000 people in the United States alone will have Alzheimer’s Disease by the year 2050.

In 2001, Dr. Richard L. Veech of the NIH, and others, published an article entitled, “Ketone bodies, potential therapeutic uses.”1 In 2003, George F. Cahill, Jr. and Richard Veech authored, “Ketoacids? Good Medicine?”2 and in 2004, Richard Veech published a review of the therapeutic implications of ketone bodies.3 These articles are not found in journals that the average physician would read, much less the lay public. Unless you are researching the topic, it is unlikely that you would ever randomly come across this information.

My husband Steve, age 58, has had progressive dementia for at least five years. He had an MRI in May 2008 showing a diffuse involutional change of the frontal and parietal lobes and moderate left-sided and severe right-sided amygdala and hippocampal atrophy with no ischemic change, which would support a clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease. For non-medical people, this means that he has shrunken areas of the brain. Many days, often for several days in a row, he was in a fog; couldn’t find a spoon or remember how to get water out of the refrigerator. Some days were not so bad; he almost seemed like his former self, happy, with his unique sense of humor, creative, full of ideas. One day I would ask if a certain call came that I was expecting and he would say, “No.” Two days later he would remember the message from so-and-so from a couple of days earlier and what they said. Strange to have no short-term memory and yet the information was filed somewhere in his brain. My gut feeling is that diet has something to do with the fluctuation, but what. I knew that he was locked up in there somewhere, if only there was a key to open up the areas of his brain that he didn’t have access to.

The article goes on to show the amazing and positive differences that came about for Steve as a result of incorporating coconut oil and other dietary aspects.  Please go here to view and download a pdf of the full article.  But I will give you the closing paragraphs.

If you are using any type of hydrogenated vegetable oil or any oil with transfat, do not use any more and get rid of it! Extra virgin olive oil, butter and other natural, non-hydrogenated oils are okay to use along with the coconut oil. It is possible to use coconut oil in place of all other oils, however, since it contains no omega-3 fatty acids, it is very important to eat salmon twice a week or get enough omega-3 fatty acid from other rich sources such as fish oil capsules, flax meal, flax oil (not for cooking) or walnuts.

It is inconceivable that a potential dietary prevention and cure for Alzheimer’s disease, and other neurodegenerative diseases, has been out there for so many years, and yet has gone unnoticed. It is very likely that these diseases are becoming more prevalent due our current diet. The American diet has changed drastically from what it was before the 1950’s, when our parents and grandparents used lard and coconut oil to cook. Cardiovascular disease was rare at the beginning of the 20th century, and has skyrocketed, along with other devastating diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, diabetes type II, obesity, since mass produced hydrogenated vegetable oils containing trans fats were introduced into our diets and replaced these other natural fats. Sadly, the incidences of cardiovascular and other serious diseases are becoming more and more common among people in other areas of the world who have changed over from their indigenous foods to the “western” diet.

I plan to tell everyone I can and get this information to persons in positions to investigate this with the hope that Dr. Veech and other MCT oil and ketone body researchers get the funding they need. Feel free to make copies and pass this write-up on. If you have a loved one or a patient with Alzheimer’s or one of these other degenerative neurologic diseases, consider trying coconut oil. Dr. Veech suggests that, if possible, a videotape of the person before starting and at various points after starting the coconut oil would be very useful to document change. He suggests including segments of the persons face, speech and gait (walking). He also advises to have ketone bodies measured. What have you got to lose?

So in between eating spoonfulls of cold-compressed coconut oil, let me also give you some more information.

Here’s a video of Dr. Newport on CBN,

And here’s Part One of a video series all about Dr. Newport’s effective work on memory loss and Alzheimer’s with coconut oil.

Then I came across a paper delivered by  Mary G. Enig, PhD on the Weston A. Price Foundation website.  Here’s a flavour, pardon the pun, of this paper,

A New Look at Coconut Oil
Written by Mary G. Enig, PhD
January 1, 2000
Health and Nutritional Benefits from Coconut Oil: An Important Functional Food for the 21st Century

Presented at the AVOC Lauric Oils Symposium, Ho Chi Min City, Vietnam, 25 April 1996

Abstract

Coconut oil has a unique role in the diet as an important physiologically functional food. The health and nutritional benefits that can be derived from consuming coconut oil have been recognized in many parts of the world for centuries. Although the advantage of regular consumption of coconut oil has been underappreciated by the consumer and producer alike for the recent two or three decades, its unique benefits should be compelling for the health minded consumer of today. A review of the diet/heart disease literature relevant to coconut oil clearly indicates that coconut oil is at worst neutral with respect to atherogenicity of fats and oils and, in fact, is likely to be a beneficial oil for prevention and treatment of some heart disease. Additionally, coconut oil provides a source of antimicrobial lipid for individuals with compromised immune systems and is a nonpromoting fat with respect to chemical carcinogenesis.

The long and detailed document ends, thus,

Among the critical foods and nutrition “buzz words” for the 21st Century is the term “functional foods.” Clearly coconut oil fits the designation of a very important functional food.

Last October, Dr. Mary Newport released a book, entitled Alzheimer’s Disease: What If There Was a Cure? The Story of Ketones.

Dr. Newport has a Blog which, despite not being added to since December 28th last, still has much interesting information.

Finally, I came across an Organic Coconut Oil Information website that opens up with,

Organic Coconut Oil is rich in vitamins and minerals and especially rich (60%+) in important fatty acids, the medium chain triglycerides (MCTs).  It has been used by Asian and Pacific populations both as a source of dietary oil and in their traditional medical practices.  Praised for its many and various healing properties, to a Pacific Islander, Coconut Oil is believed to be the cure of all illnesses and is so highly valued they refer to the coconut palm as “The Tree of Life.”  Western modern science has only recently begun to uncover and understand the miracle healing value of the coconut.

Indeed, the website provides links to the health benefits of coconut oil for more than 17 other issues and, without lowering the tone too far, reminds me of an old joke.

Doctor, I’ve come to you about a bladder problem.

Sit down, Mr. Smith and tell me the details.

Well it’s just that I’m passing urine regularly every morning at 7am.

Mr. Smith, at your age that’s commendable having such a regular control, why would you regard that as a problem?

I’m not waking up until 8am!

Now where did I leave that last coconut!!

A healing world?

Modern medical practices raise questions about healing.

I am motivated to write today’s Post because a week ago, last Tuesday 24th April, I went to see my local doctor here in Payson.  I don’t want to rabbit on too much about that doctor’s appointment because that isn’t the thrust of this ‘essay’.  But let me just say this about that experience on the 24th, because it’s relevant to what I’m trying to convey.

A few years back, I was diagnosed with vestibular migraine but the reason for going to see the doctor was motivated by the realisation that over the last few months my memory was getting a little sporadic, for want of a more technical description!  But I felt that the vestibular migraine, that I still suffer from, was relevant to my assessment.  I should further add that the health clinic where this doctor is based have only seen me once before, for something minor.  In other words, they do not have a good understanding of me from a medical perspective.

So I enter the doctor’s room and in comes the medical assistant with her wireless-connected laptop.   Her fingers are poised to enter details.

I said, “Before we get going on my memory, can I talk about my vestibular migraine?”

The assistant replied, “Well I’m on the memory page, not the migraine page.  Which do you want to talk about?”

I sighed and indicated that she should ask me questions about my memory!

Ergo, this human that wanted to be seen as a human had to conform to the relevant medical label!

So with this still reverberating inside me, I was positively tuned to something recently published by Michele of Dogkisses Blog.  It was a very recent post called Green Healing – Horticultural Notes.  Let me ‘borrow’ a few words from that Post.

We always begin Horticulture Therapy by gathering in a circle to share plant news.  This time together is good, interesting and takes us in many directions.  We often visit our past of garden or plant memories and look to the future with hopeful or creative garden dreams and ideas.

Last week I arrived just in time to hear another participant sharing his idea for a creative planting container.  The young man was more engaged than usual and when he smiled and became excited about what plants to choose and where he would put his new container, I felt like I saw the heart of horticulture therapy.

I like to call these times Healing Happenings, which are moments in time when hope or happiness fills my heart and mind.  I’m not talking about everything being right or all problems being fixed.  I’m talking about a little piece of time when worry and stress take a back seat and the beauty of life emerges.

This got me thinking.  Is there a schism these days in modern medicine between curing and healing?  Have we created a situation where we rely on chemical and pharmaceutical technology to find a whole range of cures but, in parallel, is medicine losing sight of the need for healing?  Maybe some would argue that such a distinction is irrelevant; if one is sick then one is very needy for a cure.  But, overall, perhaps the evidence of better and better healing in our societies is pretty hard to find.    Take this that I read recently,

There is a growing epidemic of obesity, type II diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and predictions that 15,000,000 people in the United States alone will have Alzheimer’s Disease by the year 2050.

Back to Dogkisses blog,

Personally, ‘healing happenings’ include moments when I enjoy what I imagine most Mothers do, which is seeing our children, no matter what age they are, smile and be happy.  They’re also moments when I feel that my family will be okay.

There is always hope in a garden.  We hope it grows.  We hope it rains.  We hope to have a good harvest of food or lively blooming flowers that paint our world pretty.   I’m sure hope is part of why it feels good to work in a garden, whether you have a large field or a modest arrangement of containers on your porch.  Each day you have hope.

“When I’m in my garden, life’s troubles crumble away with the rich black soil between my fingers. I’m fully in my body, out of my head, my worries banished. My garden is my church, my time there sacred.”  (Garden your troubles away, by Amy Karon, PsycheScoop).

Here’s what I wrote as a comment to DK’s Post,

You using the phrase ‘green healing’ touches on the essence on what we all need to do to ‘survive’ in this crazy world. And, of course, I’m using the word ‘survive’ in a mental rather than physical sense.

It reminds me of the odd moments during the day when I hug one of the dogs and really give in to the feeling; almost as though the dog and I recognise it could be the very last hug in our lives. The emotional intimacy that flows from that private bonding across the two different (very different!) species is truly breath-taking!

So forgive my meanderings today but you may share my fear that by losing touch of the very powerful curative aspects of communing with nature, whether it be a garden, a walk in the woods, a swim in the sea or the warmth of an animal body, we may be missing real healing.  As Michele wrote, “Each day you have hope.”  Without hope there is nothing left.

The last 484 feet!

Some milestones on the age of the solar system.

Forgive me, dear readers, but something light and simple for today.  I don’t mean in the sense of the content, far from it, just easy for me to put the post together as it is from a presentation that I gave a year ago.

Here’s a picture of our solar system.

Most of us are reasonably familiar with this visual concept of our solar system, but what of it’s age?  That’s much more difficult to embrace in a way that we can relate to.

So let’s use something to represent the age of our solar system, the distance from Phoenix to Payson.

In round terms, Payson is 80 miles North-East from Phoenix.  Put another way, that’s 422,400 feet!

So if those 80 miles represented the age of our solar system, what would be the significant milestones on this metaphorical journey?

Phoenix represents the start, the ‘start’ of our solar system some 4.54 billion years ago

It was 1,075,000,000 years before Blue-green algae appeared.  That is the equivalent of travelling 18.94 miles from Phoenix North-East along Highway 87.  Or looking back, those algae appeared some 3.465 billion years ago.

But on we travel, metaphorically an unimaginable 3,459,800,000 years after the arrival of Blue-green algae until the next milestone; the earliest hominids.  In terms of our Highway that’s a further 60.97 miles.  Again, looking back that was 5,200,000 years ago.

The sharp-eyed among you will see that 18.94 miles added to 60.97 miles is 79.91 miles.  Goodness that’s awfully close to the total distance of 80 miles between Phoenix and Payson!  In fact, the 0.09 miles to run is the equivalent of 484 feet!

So let’s look at those last 484 feet.

The first 465.20 feet represents the approximately 5 million years after the earliest hominids appeared before H. sapiens arrived, some 200,000 years ago.

The appearance of Homo sapiens brings us to just 18.6 feet from Payson.

But first, we travel 9.3 feet and see the arrival of dogs, generally regarded to have separated, in DNA terms, from the Grey Wolf 100,000 years ago.

And are you 60 years old?  You were born just 0.0669 inches or 7/100ths of an inch from Payson!  If my maths is correct (someone please check!) 0.0669 inches is about 34 times the thickness of the human hair!  That’s very close to Payson!

Don’t know about you but it puts the age of our solar system into a perspective one might be able to get one’s arms around.

On the scale used above, one inch represents 895.68 years, one foot the equivalent of 10,748.11 years and a mile represents 56,750,000 years.

Anybody want to hazard a guess as to the state of our planet in one further inch?

The difference an inch makes! 895.68 years!

OK, let me stay more or less on topic and just round things off.

EarthSky website seems to have some great items, including this one.

Ten things you may not know about the solar system

9 ) Pluto is smaller than the USA
The greatest distance across the contiguous United States is nearly 2,900 miles (from Northern California to Maine). By the best current estimates, Pluto is just over 1400 miles across, less than half the width of the U.S. Certainly in size it is much smaller than any major planet, perhaps making it a bit easier to understand why a few years ago it was “demoted” from full planet status. It is now known as a “dwarf planet.”

Go here for the full list of ten items.

Finally, just how far does it all go?

How far do the stars stretch out into space? And what’s beyond them? In modern times, we built giant telescopes that have allowed us to cast our gaze deep into the universe. Astronomers have been able to look back to near the time of its birth. They’ve reconstructed the course of cosmic history in astonishing detail.

From intensive computer modeling, and myriad close observations, they’ve uncovered important clues to its ongoing evolution. Many now conclude that what we can see, the stars and galaxies that stretch out to the limits of our vision, represent only a small fraction of all there is.

Does the universe go on forever? Where do we fit within it? And how would the great thinkers have wrapped their brains around the far-out ideas on today’s cutting edge?

For those who find infinity hard to grasp, even troubling, you’re not alone. It’s a concept that has long tormented even the best minds.

Over two thousand years ago, the Greek mathematician Pythagoras and his followers saw numerical relationships as the key to understanding the world around them.

But in their investigation of geometric shapes, they discovered that some important ratios could not be expressed in simple numbers.

Take the circumference of a circle to its diameter, called Pi.

Computer scientists recently calculated Pi to 5 trillion digits, confirming what the Greeks learned: there are no repeating patterns and no ending in sight.

The discovery of the so-called irrational numbers like Pi was so disturbing, legend has it, that one member of the Pythagorian cult, Hippassus, was drowned at sea for divulging their existence.

A century later, the philosopher Zeno brought infinity into the open with a series of paradoxes: situations that are true, but strongly counter-intuitive.

In this modern update of one of Zeno’s paradoxes, say you have arrived at an intersection. But you are only allowed to cross the street in increments of half the distance to the other side. So to cross this finite distance, you must take an infinite number of steps.

In math today, it’s a given that you can subdivide any length an infinite number of times, or find an infinity of points along a line.

What made the idea of infinity so troubling to the Greeks is that it clashed with their goal of using numbers to explain the workings of the real world.

To the philosopher Aristotle, a century after Zeno, infinity evoked the formless chaos from which the world was thought to have emerged: a primordial state with no natural laws or limits, devoid of all form and content.

But if the universe is finite, what would happen if a warrior traveled to the edge and tossed a spear? Where would it go?

It would not fly off on an infinite journey, Aristotle said. Rather, it would join the motion of the stars in a crystalline sphere that encircled the Earth. To preserve the idea of a limited universe, Aristotle would craft an historic distinction.

On the one hand, Aristotle pointed to the irrational numbers such as Pi. Each new calculation results in an additional digit, but the final, final number in the string can never be specified. So Aristotle called it “potentially” infinite.

Then there’s the “actually infinite,” like the total number of points or subdivisions along a line. It’s literally uncountable. Aristotle reserved the status of “actually infinite” for the so-called “prime mover” that created the world and is beyond our capacity to understand. This became the basis for what’s called the Cosmological, or First Cause, argument for the existence of God.

Think I need to lie down now!

It’s an ill wind …

It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good!

Amazing to find that the saying was recorded as  far back as 1546 when it is first recorded in John Heywood’s A dialogue conteinyng the nomber in effect of all the prouerbes in the Englishe tongue: “An yll wynde that blowth no man to good, men say.”

The reason this comes to mind is that good friend, John H. from here in Payson, recently sent me a piece under the title of Spider’s Web.  This is how it started,

An unexpected side-effect of the flooding in parts of Pakistan has been
that millions of spiders climbed up into the trees to escape the rising flood
waters.

A quick web search came across the item in National Geographic online, from which I republish this:

Cocooned Trees, Pakistan

DECEMBER 14, 2011

Cocooned Trees, Pakistan
Photograph by Russell Watkins

This Month in Photo of the Day: 2011 National Geographic Photo Contest Images

An unexpected side effect of the 2010 flooding in parts of Sindh, Pakistan, was that millions of spiders climbed up into the trees to escape the rising flood waters; because of the scale of the flooding and the fact that the water took so long to recede, many trees became cocooned in spiderwebs. People in the area had never seen this phenomenon before, but they also reported that there were fewer mosquitoes than they would have expected, given the amount of standing water that was left. Not being bitten by mosquitoes was one small blessing for people that had lost everything in the floods.

(This photo and caption were submitted to the 2011 National Geographic Photo Contest.)

John’s email also included more images, that are reproduced below.

So it looks as though we have much to learn from spiders as well as from dogs!

Or maybe, it’s just another example of the beauty, magic and mystery of nature!

Common sense!

Some people seem to have a knack for saying it how it should be!

My sub-heading, above, applies to many people right across the world.  But the reason that this was triggered in my mind for today’s post, was a recent item on Christine’s excellent Blog, 350 or bust.  Read more about that Blog here.  I subscribe to that Blog.

A couple of days ago, there was an article with the title of Live Long And Prosper, Already.  It started thus,

Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the amazingly popular Star Trek series, was a man ahead of his time. Here is one of the things he  had to say about humanity and our problems (with one editorial comment from me!):

“I believe in humanity. We are an incredible species. We’re still just a child creature, and we’re still being nasty to each other [Stephen Harper: are you listening?].  And all children go through those phases. We’re moving into adolescence now. When we grow up, man, we’re going to be something!”

But what caught my eye were these comments to the Post.

The first one from a Mickey Haist that read,

It’s a nice goal, but would clenching our teeth and willing progress be of any effect? After all, children don’t spontaneously mature – they’re raised.

Have to say that I was left unsure by what Mr. Haist was trying to convey.  But not so Christine!  This was the first of her two replies,

No teeth clenching allowed! Robert Kennedy once said “Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he or she sends forth a tiny ripple of hope. And crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

It’s not about everyone doing everything, it’s about each of us doing what we can. Not taking action because the problem is too big is not the answer.

And her second reply,

And Mickey – if the challenge of climate change/ocean acidification/biodiversity loss that we are facing as a species (taking the rest of the natural world with us) doesn’t make us mature, then nothing will.  But I believe it will – as Paul Gilding says, humans are slow but not stupid!

Paul Gilding’s excellent website is always a great read, by the way.

But do reread those words of Robert Kennedy, they are powerfully inspiring.

Robert Kennedy

Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he or she sends forth a tiny ripple of hope. And crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

Despite the fact that these words were said in response when South Africans suffered the tyranny of apartheid, the words are, perhaps, even more relevant today.  Mankind has to combine the many ‘ripples of hope’ and build that current that will sweep away the crazy selfishness that is preventing us from living in harmony with this beautiful planet for hundreds of years ahead.

Thanks Christine.

Cleo’s progress!

Now 19 days since our young German Shepherd puppy joined us.

On the 9th April, I wrote a Post about the arrival of young Cleo who became part of our family on the 8th.  Here’s a couple of photographs from that Post.

Little bit of bonding going on!
Welcome, young lady. I'm the boss around here!

So here are a couple more taken yesterday afternoon, the 25th. Cleo was weighed last Monday and was 28 lbs, some 6 lbs gain since the 8th.

Two very loving ladies!
Pharaoh and Cleo already inseparable.

Must say that Cleo has settled in very well with her other four pack mates. Indeed, Cleo, like Sweeny, mixes easily with all the other dogs, not just Pharaoh’s group.

Dogs and the mathematics of calculus.

A remarkable story about two very clever men and an equally clever dog!

Five days ago, I received an email from a Richard Hake quite out of the blue!  This is what it said,

Dear Paul Handover,

I’m taking the liberty of cc’ing this to Tim Pennings since he may be interested in your blog “Learning from Dogs.”
As founding author of the great blog “Learning from Dogs”, I thought you might be interested in the work of Tim Pennings.
Paraphrasing from the Hope College website:

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Tim Pennings is a professor of mathematics at Hope College and owner of a famous Welsh Corgi dog, Elvis, who knows calculus. He has given over a hundred talks – including several speaking tours – based on his papers “Do Dogs Know Calculus?” [Pennings (2003)] and “Do Dogs Know Bifurcations?” [Minton & Pennings (2007)]. Articles about Elvis are easily found on Google and Youtube. For example:
1. “A Dog, a Ball, and Calculus” Ivars Peterson’s MathTrek,
2. “Calculating Dogs” Ivars Peterson’s MathTrek ,
3. “Dog Plays Fetch With Calculus” YouTube (see below)
4. “Elvis The Calculus Dog at Roanoke College” Vime0 Videos.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Regards,

Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University
Honorary Member, Curmudgeon Lodge of Deventer, The Netherlands
President, PEdants for Definitive Academic References which Recognize the Invention of the Internet (PEDARRII)

Well what fun!

Let me start with that YouTube video mentioned above:

Tim Pennings of Hope College in Madison, Wisconsin takes a look at the mathematics his dog Elvis uses to play fetch.

And here are a number of wonderful pictures of Elvis from which comes this one:

Elvis: Professor Tim Pennings' dog.

More may be learnt about Tim Pennings from here, from which I quote:

I am a professor of mathematics at Hope College. My areas of research and writing include dynamical systems (the shadowing property in particular), mathematical modeling, and the infinite. I have directed the Mathematics REU Site since 1995 and have mentored research students almost every year since 1990. A complete list of published papers, talks, and other professional activity is included in my vitae.

My interest in infinity stems from my intrigue with the rich stuff that lies in the confluence of mathematics, physics, philosophy, and theology. My paper, “Infinity and the Absolute: Insights into Our World, Our Faith, and Ourselves” is the backbone of my senior seminar course, Pondering the Big Questions. Several other math-theology papers, published in Perspectives include “A Life Lesson from Calculus” and “Haggai, Mathematical Dynamics, and the Nature of Good and Evil”.

I have a famous Welsh Corgi dog, Elvis, who knows calculus. Here are some pictures of us. We have given over a hundred talks – including several speaking tours – based on our papers “Do Dogs Know Calculus?” and “Do Dogs Know Bifurcations?” (written with Roland Minton) both published in the The College Mathematics Journal of the MAA. Articles about Elvis are easily found on Google and Youtube.

Finally, the author of the email, Richard Hake, is no slouch!  Here’s Richard’s Blog Hake’sEdStuff and information on his academic background.

Thanks, Richard, for getting in touch!