It was back in March, the 8th to be precise, when I first wrote about Peter Russell. Well just over a week ago, I came across another article by Russell from the Huffington Post. It was then a moment’s work to find it on Peter Russell’s own website. (This links to various essays on the topic.)
Science has had remarkable success in explaining the structure and functioning of the material world, but when it comes to the inner world of the mind science falls curiously silent. There is nothing in physics, chemistry, biology, or any other science that can account for our having an interior world. In a strange way, scientists would be much happier if there were no such thing as consciousness.
David Chalmers, professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona, calls this the “hard problem” of consciousness. The so-called “easy problems” are those concerned with brain function and its correlation with mental phenomena: how, for example, we discriminate, categorize, and react to stimuli; how incoming sensory data are integrated with past experience; how we focus our attention; and what distinguishes wakefulness from sleep.
It would be wrong to publish anything more so if you are interested in more, then go here and pick away or better still buy the book!
If you have a quiet 30 minutes, settle down and watch these videos
Is it me or does there seem to be a shift in overall awareness of our ‘new world’?
On the 30th May, I mentioned the concept of a new Anthropocene era for the second time, based on The Economist of the 28th May having it as a lead story. (The first mention was on the 16th May.)
Then a couple of days later, friend John H. here in Payson, drops off his copy of Newsweek for June 6th. Here’s the cover page.
Newsweek, June 6, 2011
This is how the article runs, written by Sharon Begley,
Are You Ready for More?
In a world of climate change, freak storms are the new normal. Why we’re unprepared for the harrowing future.
Joplin, Mo., was prepared. The tornado warning system gave residents 24 minutes’ notice that a twister was bearing down on them. Doctors and nurses at St. John’s Regional Medical Center, who had practiced tornado drills for years, moved fast, getting patients away from windows, closing blinds, and activating emergency generators. And yet more than 130 people died in Joplin, including four people at St. John’s, where the tornado sucked up the roof and left the building in ruins, like much of the shattered city.
Then just a couple of paragraphs later, this pretty blunt summary,
From these and other extreme-weather events, one lesson is sinking in with terrifying certainty. The stable climate of the last 12,000 years is gone. Which means you haven’t seen anything yet. And we are not prepared.
Just read that again very carefully, “The stable climate of the last 12,000 years is gone.” Do take a few moments off and go here and read the full article. The last paragraph of which reads,
So what lies behind America’s resistance to action? Economist Sachs points to the lobbying power of industries that resist acknowledgment of climate change’s impact. “The country is two decades behind in taking action because both parties are in thrall to Big Oil and Big Coal,” says Sachs. “The airwaves are filled with corporate-financed climate misinformation.” But the vanguard of action isn’t waiting any longer. This week, representatives from an estimated 100 cities are meeting in Bonn, Germany, for the 2nd World Congress on Cities and Adaptation to Climate Change. The theme is “Resilient Cities.” As Joplin, Mo., learned in the most tragic way possible, against some impacts of climate change, man’s puny efforts are futile. But time is getting short, and the stakes are high. Says Daniel Sarewitz, a professor of science and society at Arizona State University: “Not to adapt is to consign millions of people to death and disruption.”
It’s a powerful article that can be read in full on the Newsweek website.
So, perhaps one might say at last, the notion that mankind’s impact on the Planet is real and capable of affecting practically all of us living on this beautiful Planet is becoming a ‘mainstream’ accepted idea.
What even a lovely boy, just one year old, can offer the world.
I’m writing this around 5pm UK time on the 8th June. A little over 4 hours ago, at 1230 give or take, I witnessed a tiny event, something that for many of us wouldn’t have been seen as anything but trivial, albeit lovely.
Here’s what happened.
I had been to an introductory meeting with Richard White of The Accidental Salesman fame. We met in Pall Mall, just by Trafalgar Square, at the offices of The Institute of Directors.
Shortly before 1230, after Richard and I had said our goodbyes, I jumped on a Bakerloo train at the London Underground station at Piccadilly Circus heading north for Baker Street.
Bakerloo line train at Piccadilly Circus station
I think it was one stop later that into my carriage entered parents with their small son. They sat down and the father, who had been carrying the young lad, was clearly beautifully bonded (not my favourite word, can’t think of a better one just now) with the small boy. The love and joy of the parents and their child just poured out into the ‘ether’ of the carriage. Result?
One man, middle-aged, sitting opposite to one side of the family beamed smiles in the direction of the young boy. You could sense that his emotional outlook had been transformed by the unencumbered joy flowing across the carriage. He really smiled more or less non-stop until I and this family got off at Baker Street station.
Another man, my guess upper middle-aged, was formally dressed in the business suit, tie and polished black shoes. He was reading a newspaper. But the boy’s joyful infectiousness touched him. He put the paper to one side and discretely looked across at the child bouncing on his father’s lap and a private smile crossed his face.
I was standing observing all of this and, of course, seeing the truth of something so core to the needs of humans. That is, the power of living beautifully in the present and how it demonstrates what my colleague Jon Lavin so often says, “The world reflects back what we think about most”.
Why do I write ‘of course’? Because what was so natural for this boy at the tender age of one is so natural for dogs throughout all their lives; wonderfully enjoying the present.
In a most un-English manner, I briefly caught up with the parents and established that the young boy’s name was Thomas.
Well done, Thomas, and may that joy in you be with you and all those around you for ever and ever.
An amazing and powerfully positive story from here in Payson, AZ
Big thanks to friends John and Janet Z. here in Payson for passing me a copy of the Payson Roundup from Tuesday, May 24th. Because I want to include much of this news story I have left it a few days so as not seen too directly as a copyright infringement.
This is how the story unfolds,
Homeless teens triumph against odds
Graduation nears for students who persevered despite chaos and carnage
In the summer after fifth-grade, Payson Herring found himself on the streets, living behind dingy car washes and eating stale food out of dumpsters. With both of his parents in jail and no one to look after him, he barely survived.
When he did show up to school, he was dirty, smelly and his attitude stunk worse than his clothes. Herring didn’t worry about high school graduation, he just wanted to make it through another night.
Yes, young Mr. Herring’s first name is Payson, presumably named after the town. The article continues,
Meanwhile, for Emerald “Emi” Stacklie, after living through three of her mother’s failed suicide attempts and two of her own, life remains chaotic as a homeless student. She continues to bounce from one friend’s couch to another, and often spends the night in her truck.
The only stability she found in life came when she met her fiancé a year ago, but like her childhood, that was also ripped away. Five months ago, her fiancé died in a car crash that left Stacklie two weeks in the hospital for her own injuries.
Both Herring and Stacklie continue to face circumstances most teens will never dream of, but despite hardships — that include incarcerated or addicted parents, homelessness, medical conditions and tragedy — both have so far beaten the odds.
From the outside, both teens look normal, with designer-laced clothing and beautiful smiles, but what they have gone through is unbelievable.
Both teens agreed to an interview, hoping other homeless teens will come forward sooner for help. Payson High School has resources, including housing for homeless teens through the Payson Assisting Displaced Students (PADS) program launched last year.
Emi Stacklie and Payson Herring are ready to graduate, after having overcome daunting obstacles.
The rest of the story may be read here. I’m going to cut straight to the closing paragraphs.
With the support of friends and his teammates, Herring has developed a new perspective.
No longer angry with his past, Herring began focusing on the future. He worked hard at football, put more effort into schoolwork and stayed away from drugs and alcohol.
Herring used his past to help shape what he was becoming.
“I am not even mad at my parents,” he said. “There is nothing they can do now about the past. What matters now is what happens in the future and what I do. I am making my future brighter.”
Herring has plans to adopt “at least three kids.” Using his own experiences, Herring said he could handle just about any child. “I want kids to grow up realizing alcohol does bad things,” he said.
Recently, Herring even reconciled with his father.
While Herring and Stacklie still struggle, both are graduating May 26 along with 163 Payson High classmates. Both have plans for their futures — Herring to serve in the military and eventually become a police officer and Stacklie will start work at a hospital as an LPN.
“I am very, very proud,” Oakland said. “We will miss them.”
Herring and Stacklie defied the odds and “bottom-line beat the system,” she added.
These are very tough young people who will see in time that combating these sorts of major hurdles will give them a self-confidence and self-pride that is beyond measure. Well done to you, Payson and Stacklie.
Travelling the 5,200 miles, give or take, between Payson (AZ) and London (UK)
Apologies for a slightly reduced service over the next 10 days but Monday 6th June finds me travelling from Phoenix to Dallas, and then Dallas to London Heathrow. This as a result of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) granting me permanent residence (the Green Card) in April and thus me being able to travel back to England to see my new grandson for the first time.
So just a few thoughts, courtesy of Terry Hershey. I subscribe to his weekly Sabbath Moment and they always contain some beautiful sayings and other gems. Take these for example, from his Sabbath Moment of the 30th May.
Anything I’ve ever done that ultimately was worthwhile. . .initially scared me to death. Betty Bender
Betty Bender
Or what about this?
To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. To not dare is to lose oneself. Soren Kierkegaard
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (b. 1813, d. 1855) was a profound and prolific writer in the Danish “golden age” of intellectual and artistic activity. His work crosses the boundaries of philosophy, theology, psychology, literary criticism, devotional literature and fiction. Kierkegaard brought this potent mixture of discourses to bear as social critique and for the purpose of renewing Christian faith within Christendom. At the same time he made many original conceptual contributions to each of the disciplines he employed. He is known as the “father of existentialism”, but at least as important are his critiques of Hegel and of the German romantics, his contributions to the development of modernism, his literary experimentation, his vivid re-presentation of biblical figures to bring out their modern relevance, his invention of key concepts which have been explored and redeployed by thinkers ever since, his interventions in contemporary Danish church politics, and his fervent attempts to analyse and revitalise Christian faith.
OK, dear readers, from somewhere over who knows where!
A good friend here in Payson, himself a former ‘lamplighter’ forwarded me an email with a link to a video taken using the Head-Up-Display (HUD) camera which also has a voice recorder.
F-16 fighter/attack aircraft
This is the email,
Here’s the F-16 dead stick into Elizabeth City, NC: A fairly short RWY for jets, (about 6000 ft long), but qualifies for an “Emergency landing field” in the grand scheme of US aviation.
You’ll probably have to watch the video several times to appreciate how intense the situation and how busy the pilot was all the way to stopping on the runway. Very apparently, the pilot was one-of-four F-16s in a flight returning to their base, (most probably from the Navy Dare bombing range south of Manteo), and the F-16 in question had already reported a “Ruff-Running Engine” to his flight leader before the start of the video.
A few comments not readily apparent are:
The whole episode, from start-to-finish only takes about 3 1/2 minutes!
The video begins as the flight is being followed on radar.
The flight leader asks for the Elizabeth City tower UHF freq which is repeated as 355.6 and the entire flight switches to that freq: Just one-more-task for the pilot to execute in the cockpit as he reports that his engine has QUIT. He has to activate the Emergency Unit to maintain electric and hydraulic power. This unit is powered by Hydrazine: (the caustic fuel that Germany created in WW II to power their V-2 Rockets and their ME-163 rocket fighters among others.) Thus, the last call about requesting fire support after the jet is safe on deck, and pilot breathing easy.
Meanwhile, back in the cockpit, the pilot is busily attempting to “Re-light” his engine: (Unsuccessfully, of course) while tending to everything else. The video is taken using the Head-Up-Display (HUD) camera which also has a voice recorder.
The HUD is a very busy instrument, but among things to notice are the ‘circle’ in the middle which represents the nose of the aircraft and where it is ‘pointed’: “The velocity Vector”.
The flight leader reports they are 7-miles out from the airport and at 9000 ft altitude. Since the weather is clear and the airport is in sight, this allows for adequate “Gliding distance” to reach a runway with the engine OFF. Rest assured, jet fighters glide sorta like a rock. They don’t enjoy the higher lift design of an airliner like that which allowed Sullenburger to land in the NY river.
Coming down 9000 ft in only 7-miles requires a helluva rate of descent, so the pilot’s nose remains well below the “Horizon” until just prior to touching down on the runway. The HUD horizon is a solid, lateral bar, and below the horizon, the horizontal lines appear as dashes. You’ll see a “10” on the second dashed line below the horizon which = 10-degrees nose low.
Radio chatter includes the flight leader calling the tower and the tower stating runway 10 with wind 070 @ 5 mph with the altimeter setting of 30.13, yet another step for the pilot to consider.
The flight leader calls for the pilot to jettison his external fuel tanks and askes another pilot in the flight to “Mark” where they dropped. The tower later tells the pilot to land on any runway he chooses.
Pilot reports “Three in the green” indicating all three gear indicate down and locked which the flight leader acknowledges.
You will hear the computer voice of “Bitchin’-Betty” calling out “Warnings”. More confusing chatter when none is welcome or even necessary. (That’s “Hi-Tech” for ya.)
The pilot has only ONE CHANCE to get this right and must also slow to an acceptable landing speed in order to stop on the short runway. You’ll see Black rubber on the rwy where “The rubber meets the road” in the touchdown area. Note that during rollout, he gets all the way to the far end which you can see by all the black skid marks where planes have landed heading in the opposite direction.
OK: That’s more than ya probably wanted to know, but you have to appreciate the fine job this guy did in calmly managing this emergency situation. He is a “USAF Reserve” pilot and those guys generally have plenty of experience. That really pays off.
Please scroll down for the link + Enjoy.
The pilot just saved about $20+m at his own risk…….Great job! Note the breathing rate on the hot mic and also the sink rate (airspeed tape on the left side of the heads up display.)
Pretty cool guy!!!
See if you can keep all of the radio transmissions straight.
Probably the coolest sounding voice in the whole mix is the pilot of the engine out aircraft.
Just a reminder an F-16 has only one engine. When it goes, you are coming down. It is just a matter of figuring out where the airplane will come to rest on terra firma.
Note: For those not familiar, the EPU (Electrical Power Unit) provides hydraulic and electrical power in event of failure of the engine, electrical or hydraulics. The EPU is powered by Hydrazine which decomposes into hot gasses as it passes across a catalyst bed or engine bleed air (if available). The hot air passes through a turbine which drives the emergency hydraulic pump and generator through a gear box.
The video is also on YouTube, as below,
Most people are aware of the value of training and experience that saved, in this case, the US taxpayer a large pile of money.
Now onto a much more tragic case, the loss of Air France Flight AF 447 that went down on 1 June 2009 after running into an intense high-altitude thunderstorm, four hours into a flight from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil to Paris. AF 447 was an Airbus A330-203 aircraft registered F-GZCP.
Many will recall that earlier on in May the second of the ‘black boxes’ or flight recorders was found. Here’s how Bloomberg reported that,
Air crash investigators retrieved the second of two black boxes from the Air France jet that plunged into the Atlantic in 2009, which may help them unlock the mysteries of the crash after two years.
“They appear to be in a good state,” said Jean-Paul Troadec, head of the BEA, the French air crash investigator that has been probing the accident that killed all 228 people aboard a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. “The first thing is to dry them, prepare them, which needs about a day.” Once the boxes arrive in BEA’s offices, in about 10 days, “the reading of information would be pretty fast,” he said.
Those who wish to read the report issued by the French Authorities may find it here. The summary from the report concludes,
NEW FINDINGS
At this stage of the investigation, as an addition to the BEA interim reports of 2 July and 17 December 2009, the following new facts have been established:
The composition of the crew was in accordance with the operator’s procedures.
At the time of the event, the weight and balance of the airplane were within the operational limits.
At the time of the event, the two co-pilots were seated in the cockpit and the Captain was resting. The latter returned to the cockpit about 1 min 30 after the disengagement of the autopilot.
There was an inconsistency between the speeds displayed on the left side and the integrated standby instrument system (ISIS). This lasted for less than one minute.
After the autopilot disengagement:
the airplane climbed to 38,000 ft,
the stall warning was triggered and the airplane stalled,
the inputs made by the PF were mainly nose-up,
the descent lasted 3 min 30, during which the airplane remained stalled. The angle of
attack increased and remained above 35 degrees,
the engines were operating and always responded to crew commands.
The last recorded values were a pitch attitude of 16.2 degrees nose-up, a roll angle of 5.3 degrees left and a vertical speed of -10,912 ft/min.
If my maths is correct a descent speed of 10,912 feet per minute is the equivalent of 124 miles per hour!
Anyway, I am advised by someone who is a very experienced Airbus captain that the odds of a stall in the cruise for a commercial airliner are extremely low, sufficiently so that it is not something that is regular covered during crew recurrent training sessions.
We really may be on the verge of a new geological period.
Just a couple of weeks ago, on the 16th May, I wrote an article called The Anthropocene period. It was based on both a BBC radio programme and a conference called “The Anthropocene: A New Epoch of Geological Time?”
So imagine my surprise when I collected this week’s copy of The Economist from my mail-box last Saturday. The cover page boldly illustrated a lead article within, as this picture shows.
US edition, May 28th
The leader is headlined, ‘Humans have changed the way the world works. Now they have to change the way they think about it, too.’ The first two paragraphs of that leader explain,
THE Earth is a big thing; if you divided it up evenly among its 7 billion inhabitants, they would get almost 1 trillion tonnes each. To think that the workings of so vast an entity could be lastingly changed by a species that has been scampering across its surface for less than 1% of 1% of its history seems, on the face of it, absurd. But it is not. Humans have become a force of nature reshaping the planet on a geological scale—but at a far-faster-than-geological speed.
A single engineering project, the Syncrude mine in the Athabasca tar sands, involves moving 30 billion tonnes of earth—twice the amount of sediment that flows down all the rivers in the world in a year. That sediment flow itself, meanwhile, is shrinking; almost 50,000 large dams have over the past half- century cut the flow by nearly a fifth. That is one reason why the Earth’s deltas, home to hundreds of millions of people, are eroding away faster than they can be replenished.
There’s also a video on The Economist website of an interview with Dr. Erle Ellis, associate professor of geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland. That video link is here.
That Economist lead article concludes,
Recycling the planet
How frightened should people be about this? It would be odd not to be worried. The planet’s history contains many less stable and clement eras than the Holocene. Who is to say that human action might not tip the planet into new instability?
Some will want simply to put the clock back. But returning to the way things were is neither realistic nor morally tenable. A planet that could soon be supporting as many as 10 billion human beings has to work differently from the one that held 1 billion people, mostly peasants, 200 years ago. The challenge of the Anthropocene is to use human ingenuity to set things up so that the planet can accomplish its 21st-century task.
Increasing the planet’s resilience will probably involve a few dramatic changes and a lot of fiddling. An example of the former could be geoengineering. Today the copious carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere is left for nature to pick up, which it cannot do fast enough. Although the technologies are still nascent, the idea that humans might help remove carbon from the skies as well as put it there is a reasonable Anthropocene expectation; it wouldn’t stop climate change any time soon, but it might shorten its lease, and reduce the changes in ocean chemistry that excess carbon brings about.
More often the answer will be fiddling—finding ways to apply human muscle with the grain of nature, rather than against it, and help it in its inbuilt tendency to recycle things. Human interference in the nitrogen cycle has made far more nitrogen available to plants and animals; it has done much less to help the planet deal with all that nitrogen when they have finished with it. Instead we suffer ever more coastal “dead zones” overrun by nitrogen-fed algal blooms. Quite small things, such as smarter farming and better sewage treatment, could help a lot.
For humans to be intimately involved in many interconnected processes at a planetary scale carries huge risks. But it is possible to add to the planet’s resilience, often through simple and piecemeal actions, if they are well thought through. And one of the messages of the Anthropocene is that piecemeal actions can quickly add up to planetary change.
We are living in interesting times!
Finally, more of Dr. Ellis may be watched on the following YouTube video.
President John F. Kennedy's May 25, 1961 Speech before a Joint Session of Congress
On the 25th May, 1961, President John Kennedy summoned a joint session of Congress and asked America to commit itself to a goal – that of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth before the decade was out.
There’s a good link on the NASA site to the speech.
MY print column this week notes that it is half a century next week since John Kennedy called for sending a man to the moon and returning him safely to Earth. The bottom line, I think:
If we can send a man to the moon, people ask, why can’t we [fill in the blank]? Lyndon Johnson tried to build a “great society”, but America is better at aeronautical engineering than social engineering. Mr Obama, pointing to competition from China, invokes a new “Sputnik moment” to justify bigger public investment in technology and infrastructure. It should not be a surprise that his appeals have gone unheeded. Putting a man on the moon was a brilliant achievement. But in some ways it was peculiarly un-American—almost, you might say, an aberration born out of the unique circumstances of the cold war. It is a reason to look back with pride, but not a pointer to the future.
Concluding article on the great Benoit Mandelbrot.
Yesterday, I wrote about Benoit Mandelbrot but wanted to save some additional information for today.
There’s a very comprehensive review of Benoit’s life on a website called NNDB. In that review, it mentions his association with the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center where he worked for 32 years. It was while working for IBM that he published the paper that established his credentials world-wide. Taken from the IBM website is this extract,
The father of fractals, Dr. Benoit Mandelbrot, passed away from pancreatic cancer on October 16, 2010. He was 85.
Benoit, IBM Fellow Emeritus, joined the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in 1958 where he worked for 32 years. His 1967 article published in Science, How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension, introduced the concept that a geometric shape can be split into pieces that are smaller copies of the whole. It wasn’t until 1975 that he defined the mathematical shapes as fractals.
Here is another website that has fractal images taken from the Mandelbrot set. An example.
Just stunningly beautiful!
Finally, if you go to this website there is a slideshow of stunning images of fractals in honour of the great man.
There is so much about the lives of humans that is astoundingly beautiful.
Before I get started on this article, a few words about the Blog in general. In recent times, the readership of Learning from Dogs has increased, frankly, to quite amazing levels. Not really sure why but grateful, nonetheless.
Readers will recognize that articles written specifically about dogs are in the minority. Even using dogs as a metaphor would still limit what could be published. But as is written elsewhere on the Blog, ‘The underlying theme of Learning from Dogs is about truth, integrity, honesty and trust in every way.’ Dogs are integrous creatures; that’s all the example required.
We are at a point in the history of man where truth, integrity, honesty and trust are critically important (they have always been important but the economic and ecological pressures bearing down on us all make these values critical to mankind’s survival). Thus the aspiration of Learning from Dogs is to offer insights on truth from as many perspectives as possible – and to make your experience as a reader sufficiently enjoyable that you will wish to return!
OK! On to the topic for today!
There are many aspects of the world in which we live that are mysterious beyond our imagination. Take the circle. Practically everyone is aware that to calculate either the area or the circumference of a circle one needs to use a mathematical constant π or ‘pi’. As a mathematician would put it, π (sometimes written pi) is a mathematical constant whose value is the ratio of any circle’s circumference to its diameter; this is the same value as the ratio of a circle’s area to the square of its radius. π is approximately equal to 3.14159.
Note the word ‘approximately’! Now read this,
(PhysOrg.com) — A computer scientist in France has broken all previous records for calculating Pi, using only a personal computer. The previous record was approximately 2.6 trillion digits, but the new record, set by Fabrice Bellard, now stands at almost 2.7 trillion decimal places.
Bellard, of Paris Telecom Tech, made and checked the calculation by running his own software algorithms for 131 days. The previous record calculation, set by Daisuke Takahashi at the University of Tsukuba in Japan in August 2009, took only 29 hours to complete, but used a super-computer costing millions of dollars, and running 2000 times faster than Bellard’s PC.
Apart from the wonderful aspect of the need of a human being to go on determining the n’th value of π there is a deeper and more beautiful aspect (well to me there is!) and that is the acknowledgement that something as simple as, say, that round coin in your hand is an expression of the infinite.
Now to Benoit Mandelbrot, who died a little over six months ago, but in his lifetime also explored the wonder and magic of the infinite.
Here’s a video of Mandelbrot recorded in February 2010 in what would be his last year of his life on earth.
If you found that video fascinating then try this series of six videos presented by the one and only Arthur C. Clarke.
Benoit Mandelbrot died on the 14th October, 2010, a little over a month before his eighty-sixth birthday (born 20th November, 1924). Here’s a nice tribute from the The New York Times.
Tomorrow, some more insights into the mysterious beauty of fractals.
Learning from Dogs 