Settle back for three minutes of very British humour.
The chances are that you may have seen this. According to the YouTube statistics, over 20 million already have.
I’m not sure how many of the double-meanings in this short sketch from Ronnie Corbett work around the world but, don’t worry, settle back and enjoy! Background information from the BBC website is here. And note that Orange is a provider of a mobile phone network in Britain.
How very precious, vulnerable and fragile is this precious place we call home.
Today’s consciousness perambulation is the fault of Mr. P., as I like to call him. I refer to Pendantry as he is on his blog, Wibble.
You see on Sunday he added a comment to my post Just a small, white dot! that included the beautiful and awe-inspiring film made by the late Carl Sagan called Pale Blue Dot.
Like millions of others, I came to admire Carl Sagan through watching the fabulous, the truly fabulous, television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.(NB. All the episodes are on YouTube, Episode One is at the end of this Post, Ed.) Here’s how WikiPedia opens their reference to Carl.
Carl Edward Sagan (November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, author, science popularizer and science communicator in astronomy and natural sciences. He spent most of his career as a professor of astronomy at Cornell University where he directed the Laboratory for Planetary Studies.
He published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books. He advocated scientifically skeptical inquiry and the scientific method, pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
Sagan is known for his popular science books and for the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which he narrated and co-wrote. The book Cosmos was published to accompany the series. Sagan wrote the novel Contact, the basis for a 1997 film of the same name.
He died far too young and was a tragic loss to humanity. The Carl Sagan web portal is here.
That 3:30 minute video Pale Blue Dot has, likewise, been seen by millions. If you or someone you know hasn’t seen it, then you must pause now …
It’s practically impossible to watch that video and not embrace the central message from Mr. Sagan. Here’s the transcript:
Our home from 6 billion kilometres. A very tiny dot against the vastness of space.
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different.
Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.
On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.
The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.
Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
Tomorrow, I will stay with the theme of our beautiful planet. Hope you can join me.
Now spoil yourself and watch Episode One of Cosmos.
My writings of the previous three days have explored the nature of man. The many ways that we struggle to understand so many issues in our lives. In particular the biggest issue of them all since we abandoned the life of the hunter-gatherer. Our very survival.
It would be so easy to beat oneself up. To stare in the mirror and despair at all the unfinished ideas that one has about being ‘sustainable’ shortly before jumping on one’s shiny new tractor, yet another symbol of our industrial civilisation. The hypocrisy, the double standards!
New tractor delivered last December.
But the mistake in any attempt at self-awareness is the assumption that you know who you are! Therein lays the problem.!
Marcus Peter Francis du Sautoy is a very smart person. This is how WikiPedia describes him.
Prof. Sautoy came to the realisation that the thoughts that make us feel as though we know ourselves are easy to experience. But where do those thoughts come from? Marcus Sautoy acknowledged that they are notoriously difficult to explain.
So, in order to find out where they come from Marcus subjects himself to a series of probing experiments. With the help of a hammer-wielding scientist, Jennifer Aniston and a general anaesthetic, Professor Marcus du Sautoy goes in search of answers to one of science’s greatest mysteries: how do we know who we are? ,
He learns at what age our self-awareness emerges and whether other species share this trait.
Next, he has his mind scrambled by a cutting-edge experiment in anaesthesia. Having survived that ordeal, Marcus is given an out-of-body experience in a bid to locate his true self. And in Hollywood, he learns how celebrities are helping scientists understand the microscopic activities of our brain.
Finally, he takes part in a mind-reading experiment that both helps explain and radically alters his understanding of who he is.
All of this is covered in a fabulously interesting episode from Horizon, the excellent and long-running BBC TV science and philosophy series. Thankfully, it made its way onto YouTube.
It is just under an hour long but I promise you it will capture you from the very first moment.
Enjoy. Even if you end up realising, as I did, what a strange person you are!
As Confucius reportedly wrote: Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.
DA14, or to give it’s full name, Asteroid 2012 DA14, is calling by Planet Earth rather soon. To quote the item on the Planetary Society’s website,
Asteroid 2012 DA14 Discovery Enabled by Planetary Society Grant
On Friday, February 15, 2013, Asteroid 2012 DA14 will travel just 17,000 miles above the Earth – closer to our planet than the orbit of the communications satellite that broadcast the Super Bowl around the world. About half the size of a football field and with more than 100 times the energy impact of the nuclear bomb that fell on Hiroshima, DA14 will miss Earth this time around, but if it had impacted, this asteroid could have taken out any major metropolitan city on our planet.
The discovery of Asteroid DA14 was made by a small team of observers at La Sagra Observatory in Southern Spain, on February 22, 2012, enabled with a grant provided by The Planetary Society. One of the observatory’s telescopes had recently been upgraded with funds donated by The Planetary Society’s NEO Shoemaker Grant program. Its new camera enabled detection of fast moving objects like 2012 DA14 – requiring very fast imaging for discovery and determination of their paths. The upgraded instrument has far outperformed the Observatory’s other telescopes.
Now, we get to point the world’s telescopes at this 2013 close flyby and learn more about this asteroid and its orbit because of the support of our Planetary Society Members all over the world.
This asteroid won’t hit Earth, at least for many, many decades. But it is a reminder we live in a cosmic shooting gallery. We need to find, track, and characterize these objects and develop the technical and political capability to deflect an asteroid. It is not a matter of whether there will be a dangerous impact, it is a matter of when.
NASA have recently released a video, see below, but a search on YouTube will find more, some of which are more engaging than the rather dry style of the NASA release.
Have questions? Bet you do! Here are some of the answers to the obvious ones. Including these:
What is the time of closest approach
Feb. 15, 2013, 19:25 UTC (11:25 PST)
What is the closest approach altitude?
Approximate altitude above the surface of the Earth will be 27,330 km, 17,000 mi (34,100 km, 21,200 mi from center of Earth). That is closer than the altitude of geosynchronous satellites, e.g., satellite TV satellites, at 35,786 km (22,236 mi) altitude.
Will it be visible with the naked eye, how bright will it be?
It will not be a naked eye object. At closest approach, its brightness will be about a magnitude of 7. It will be bright enough that it could be seen with steady binoculars or a small telescope if you are on the side of Earth it will be passing.
What parts of Earth will have a chance to observe it telescopically?
Near closest approach when it is brightest, most of Europe, Asia, and Africa. It will pass from the southern hemisphere to northern hemisphere. Though it will be much dimmer, it is observable by larger telescopes for days to weeks before and after closest approach.
Finally, well done those gents that first spotted DA14.
Miguel Hurtado, Jaime Nomen, and Jaume Andreu Winners of a Planetary Society Shoemaker NEO Grant in 2010
Note: This post was first published in August, 2010 and has remained a very popular read on Learning from Dogs since then.
So here is that post once again, albeit with a few minor changes.
oooOOOooo
More than a film, a message from dogs to mankind.
Richard Gere and Hachi
We recently watched a film about an Akita dog called Hachi, Hachikō in Japanese, that demonstrates the loyalty that dogs can offer their human companions.
It’s a very moving film. Expect to shed many tears. Even more so when one reflects that the Hollywood film is based, reasonably accurately, on a true story. The details of this story are in Wikipedia from which is quoted:
In 1924, Hidesaburō Ueno, a professor in the agriculture department at the University of Tokyo took in Hachikō as a pet. During his owner’s life Hachikō saw him out from the front door and greeted him at the end of the day at the nearby Shibuya Station. The pair continued their daily routine until May 1925, when Professor Ueno did not return on the usual train one evening. The professor had suffered from a cerebral hemorrhage at the university that day. He died and never returned to the train station where his friend was waiting. Hachikō was loyal and every day for the next nine years he waited sitting there amongst the town’s folk.
Hachikō was given away after his master’s death, but he routinely escaped, showing up again and again at his old home. Eventually, Hachikō apparently realized that Professor Ueno no longer lived at the house. So he went to look for his master at the train station where he had accompanied him so many times before. Each day, Hachikō waited for Professor Ueno to return. And each day he did not see his friend among the commuters at the station.
The permanent fixture at the train station that was Hachikō attracted the attention of other commuters. Many of the people who frequented the Shibuya train station had seen Hachikō and Professor Ueno together each day. They brought Hachikō treats and food to nourish him during his wait.
This continued for nine years with Hachikō appearing precisely when the train was due at the station
Now watch and weep.
Back to the Wikipedia entry:
That same year, another of Ueno’s faithful students (who had become something of an expert on the Akita breed) saw the dog at the station and followed him to the Kobayashi home (the home of the former gardener of Professor Ueno — Kikuzaboro Kobayashi) where he learned the history of Hachikō’s life. Shortly after this meeting, the former student published a documented census of Akitas in Japan. His research found only 30 purebred Akitas remaining, including Hachikō from Shibuya Station.
Professor Ueno’s former student returned frequently to visit the dog and over the years published several articles about Hachikō’s remarkable loyalty. In 1932 one of these articles, published in Tokyo’s largest newspaper, threw the dog into the national spotlight. Hachikō became a national sensation. His faithfulness to his master’s memory impressed the people of Japan as a spirit of family loyalty all should strive to achieve. Teachers and parents used Hachikō’s vigil as an example for children to follow. A well-known Japanese artist rendered a sculpture of the dog, and throughout the country a new awareness of the Akita breed grew.
Eventually, Hachiko’s legendary faithfulness became a national symbol of loyalty.
Hachikō died on March 8, 1935. He was found on a street in Shibuya. His heart was infected with filarial worms and 3-4 yakitori sticks were found in his stomach. His stuffed and mounted remains are kept at the National Science Museum of Japan in Ueno, Tokyo.
Hachiko
A dog offers loyalty, trust and love in exchange for being treated with integrity and compassion.
That unwritten law of the power of unintended consequences strikes again.
Before moving on to today’s post, just wanted to say that our recent move to Merlin, Oregon continues to take up huge (and enjoyable) demands on our time so the opportunity to write lengthy posts on Learning from Dogs is still some way off. Having said that with the quality of analysis that is available from others, some readers may prefer it as it currently is!
There is no better example of this than the post that follows. It is from the blog site of Peter Sinclair ‘Climate Crocks‘. As the ‘About‘ page says,
Peter Sinclair is a long time advocate of environmental awareness and energy alternatives. An award winning graphic artist, illustrator, and animator, Mr. Sinclair runs Greenman Studio from his home in Midland, MI.
Mr. Sinclair’s syndicated cartoons have appeared worldwide, and his work has been profiled in numerous publications, including the New York Times. He is the producer of the YouTube series, “Climate Denial Crock of the Week”.
A couple of days ago, Peter published a post called, ““La La La I Can’t Hear You” Comes Home to Haunt GOP, in the Election, and on Climate”. I read it with interest and asked Peter if I might republish it. In a matter of moments, I received a reply giving me such permission; here it is.
oooOOOooo
When Al Jazeera and The American Conservative are in agreement that you have a problem, you probably have a problem.
But the problem wasn’t just that conservative media gave Romney supporters bad information. The people in conservative media also seem to have been fully taken in by the idea that Romney would win and would do so in decisive fashion, and the campaign came to believe its own propaganda, too. As York notes, Romney didn’t have a prepared concession speech. It apparently never occurred to his campaign that he would lose. That’s not so remarkable by itself, but it is just one part of the overall pattern of the Romney campaign and the conservative movement’s reaction to Obama. Romney spent years running against a fantasy record and campaigning on a series of gross distortions and falsehoods, and so it shouldn’t be too surprising that his campaign and his conservative media boosters didn’t have the firmest grip on political reality.
After the election, a number of different people tweeted about a rather obvious connection – how the same people who didn’t believe the polls don’t believe global warming, either. There’s a further correlation here: On the polling side, the supposedly most liberally-biased pollsters actually came closest to hitting the mark, both in the Fordham analysis of national polls and a more sophisticated analysis of state polls by Emory political scientist Drew Linzer at his Votamatic website.
On the global warming side, a new study comparing climate models finds that those predicting the largest climate impacts by 2100 are the most accurate in modelling climate change that’s already occurred – specifically, humidity levels related to cloud formation. In short, the reality being denied in both cases is even worse than it first appears, so attempts to “compromise” or give conservatives “the benefit of the doubt” actually lead us further astray (since I first wrote this, David Roberts of Grist has written an excellent comparison of the twin delusions).
But there is more than just a correlation here. There is a common causal factor involved: Conservatives, trusting their guts, have created their own separate reality, with their own authorities, and their reasoning dominated by ideology, where certain sorts of facts simply cannot intrude. Election day was one of those rare moments in which the bubble they live inside collapsed.
In the face of model projections like Silver’s, Jonah Goldberg said that “the soul … is not so easily number-crunched.” David Brooks warnedthat “experts with fancy computer models are terrible at predicting human behavior.” Joe Scarborough said “anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue.” Peggy Noonan said that “the vibrations are right” for a Romney win. All sorts of conservative pundits were convinced the Romney campaign just felt like a winner.
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Empiricism won. It didn’t win because it’s a truer faith or a superior ideology. It won because it works. It is the best way humans have figured out to set aside their perceptual limitations and cognitive shortcomings, to get a clear view of what’s happening and what’s to come.
As it happens, there’s another issue in American politics where empiricists are forecasting the future and being ignored. Here’s what the Nate Silvers of climate science are up to:
Looking back at 10 years of atmospheric humidity data from NASA satellites, [John Fasullo and Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research] examined two dozen of the world’s most sophisticated climate simulations. They found the simulations that most closely matched actual humidity measurements were also the ones that predicted the most extreme global warming.
In other words, by using real data, the scientists picked simulation winners and losers.
“The models at the higher end of temperature predictions uniformly did a better job,” Fasullo said. The simulations that fared worse — the ones predicting smaller temperature rises — “should be outright discounted,” he added.
That means the world could be in for a devastating increase of about eight degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, resulting in drastically higher seas, disappearing coastlines and more severe droughts, floods and other destructive weather.
Just reread that last paragraph a couple of times – and make a promise to yourself, and those loved ones around you, to make a positive difference starting now. And subscribe to Peter’s blogsite!
I make no apologies for today’s post being more emotional and sentimental.
The phrase ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me‘ is well known throughout the English-speaking world and surprisingly goes back some way. A quick web search found that in the The Christian Recorder of March 1862, there was this comment:
Remember the old adage, ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never harm me’. True courage consists in doing what is right, despite the jeers and sneers of our companions.
So if in 1862 the saying was referred to as an ‘old adage’ then it clearly pre-dated 1862 by some degree.
A few days ago, Dusty M., here in Payson, AZ, sent me a short YouTube video called The Power of Words. I’m as vulnerable as the next guy to needing being reminded about what’s important in this funny old world. Then I started mulling over the tendency for all of us to be sucked into a well of doom and gloom. Take my posts on Learning from Dogs over the last couple of days, as an example.
There is no question that the world in which we all live is going through some extremely challenging times but anger and negativity is not going to be the answer. As that old reference spelt out so clearly, “True courage consists in doing what is right, despite the jeers and sneers of our companions.”
So first watch the video,
then let me close by reminding us all that courage is yet something else we can learn from dogs.
Togo the husky
In 1925, a ravaging case of diphtheria broke out in the isolated Alaskan village of Nome. No plane or ship could get the serum there, so the decision was made for multiple sled dog teams to relay the medicine across the treacherous frozen land. The dog that often gets credit for eventually saving the town is Balto, but he just happened to run the last, 55-mile leg in the race. The sled dog who did the lion’s share of the work was Togo. His journey, fraught with white-out storms, was the longest by 200 miles and included a traverse across perilous Norton Sound — where he saved his team and driver in a courageous swim through ice floes.
A lifting of the importance of integrity is the key to our survival.
Let me start by reflecting on the difference between ‘truth’ and ‘integrity’.
Here’s one of the definitions of Truth: conformity with fact or reality; verity: the truth of a statement.
Here’s one of the definitions of Integrity: adherence to moral and ethical principles; soundness of moral character; honesty.
So while in yesterday’s article, I frequently referred to the word ‘truth‘, determining the ‘fact or reality‘ of a wide range of issues associated with anthropogenic climate change is not always straightforward. Many of us probably have a strong intuition of the ’cause and effect’ of man’s footprint on this planet but a strong intuition is not the same as truth.
Then let’s turn to the notion of integrity. This is a much bigger issue, to my mind, the appalling lack of integrity! Illustrated by one simple example. How many leading politicians from any number of countries have demonstrated soundness of moral character; honesty with regard to the changing climate, even offering something as simple as “I don’t know!”
There’s a saying that pilots use, “If there’s any doubt, there’s no doubt!” Come on, politicians and leaders, at the very least there is doubt!
OK, let me move on!
If integrity is partly defined as honesty, then while it’s easy to take a pot-shot at the world’s politicians maybe we need to look closer at home; ourselves. Are we as honest with our own self as we now need to be?
Here’s an example that supports that question.
A few days ago there was a report on the website The Daily Impact about the crash of US fisheries. Let me show you how that report opens,
Report: US Fisheries Crashing
We live in a country in which every household has two TV sets, most of them receiving hundreds of channels, and two cell phones, many of them “smart.” One of every two households has a computer connected to the Internet. This country is currently in the middle of a hotly contested presidential election. And yet among the things that have almost completely escaped public attention is this: last week the US government declared fisheries disasters on four coasts.
Reflect on that paragraph. Surely it’s a reflection about the lack of integrity, of honesty, about our society?
The report ends thus,
The disaster declaration covering all these dire situations makes them eligible for Congressional aid, along with drought-stricken farmers in the Midwest and Southwest, flooded-out homeowners in New Orleans and along the Gulf, the fire-ravaged states of the far West, and the derecho-pounded Northeast. Congress will no doubt be delighted by the opportunity to help.
We eat nearly five billion pounds of seafood every year — about 16 pounds for each of us — and 85 per cent of it is imported (according to NOAA). Yet in the wake of this grim assessment of a large proportion of the domestic industry, and the questions it raises about the future sources of seafood, there is no discussion of “fisheries independence” or “peak fish” in politics or the media. Only in such outposts as this website and Mother Jones will the dire warning from the Commerce Department be reported as what it is — a dire warning.
Then there was a recent article on the Australian Permaculture news website about the US food and dairy industry. Here’s how that opened,
Americans’ right to access fresh, healthy foods of their choice is under attack. Farmageddon tells the story of small, family farms that were providing safe, healthy foods to their communities and were forced to stop, sometimes through violent action, by agents of misguided government bureaucracies, and seeks to figure out why.
Filmmaker Kristin Canty’s quest to find healthy food for her four children turned into an educational journey to discover why access to these foods was being threatened. What she found were policies that favor agribusiness and factory farms over small family-operated farms selling fresh foods to their communities. Instead of focusing on the source of food safety problems — most often the industrial food chain — policymakers and regulators implement and enforce solutions that target and often drive out of business small farms that have proven themselves more than capable of producing safe, healthy food, but buckle under the crushing weight of government regulations and excessive enforcement actions.
I’m not going to insert that YouTube video into this post but you can link to both the full article and the film here. For anyone interested in the fate of the family farm in the USA, the film is a ‘must see’! Once again, the theme of integrity, of adherence to moral and ethical principles; honesty, comes to mind!
How I do want to close this rather personal reflection on present times (some may call it an indulgent reflection!) is by including a video from this seasons TED Talks. It was brought to my attention by Christine over at her excellent blog 350 or bust. The video is about resolving conflict,
William Ury, author of “Getting to Yes,” offers an elegant, simple (but not easy) way to create agreement in even the most difficult situations — from family conflict to, perhaps, the Middle East.
The reason why this seems like a very appropriate way to close this is because the way things are going at the moment, avoiding conflict could become rather important, rather soon!
Yesterday, I published a Post that I called What it is to be human. It was inspired and based on the compelling film ‘I AM‘ by Tom Shadyac. As so often seems to happen, shortly after completing yesterday’s Post, an item from Chris Martensen’s Blog caught my eye.
Author and social critic James Howard Kunstler has been one of the earliest, most direct, and most articulate voices to warn of the consequences — economic and otherwise — of modern society’s profligate wasting of the resources that underlie its growth.
In his new book, Too Much Magic, Jim attacks the wishful thinking dominant today that with a little more growth, a little more energy, a little more technology — a little more magic — we’ll somehow sail past our current tribulations without having to change our behavior.
Such self-delusion is particularly dangerous because it is preventing us from taking intelligent, constructive action at the national level when the clock is fast ticking out of our favor. In fact, Jim claims that we are past the state where solutions are possible. Instead, we need a response plan to help us best brace for the impact of the coming consequences. And we need it fast.
James Howard Kunstler
Mr. Kunstler is the author of the very successful book The Long Emergency and his latest book, as mentioned above, Too Much Magic expands on his alarming argument that our oil-addicted, technology-dependent society is on the brink of collapse, ergo that the long emergency has already begun. His website is here.
Anyway, back to the Chris Martenson’s piece. Chris goes on to quote Mr. Kunstler, as follows:
[We now live in] this weird, peculiar period in American history when the delusional thinking has risen to astronomical levels — predictably, really — in response to the stress levels that our society feels. And it is expressing itself as sort of “waiting for Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy” to deliver a set of rescue remedies to us so that we can continue running Wal-Mart, Walt Disney World, Suburbia, the U.S. Army, and the Interstate Highway System by other means. That is the great wish out there. It is kind of understandable, because that is the stuff that we have, and people tend to defend the stuff that they have in any given society and the systems and platforms that they run on. But it is probably a form of collective behavior that is not really going to benefit us very much and really amounts to simply wasting our time, and wasting our dwindling resources, and even our spiritual resources when we could be doing things that are a lot more intelligent.
Here is something I have detected as I travel around the country: There is a clamor for “solutions.” Everywhere I go, people say “Don’t be a doomer; give us solutions.” And I discovered that the subtext to all that is they really want solutions for allowing them to keep on living exactly the way they are living now. To keep on running Wal-Mart, and keep on running Suburbia, and keep on running the highway system, and the whole kit of parts. And what that really means is that they are looking for ways to add on additional complexity to a society that is already suffering from too much complexity.
There is a podcast of the interview with James Kunstler here and also on YouTube, as below.
My own reflection on this item, as with so many other articles, essays and items available to read online, is that the power of the Web is informing and educating millions of people around the world in a way that Governments and the media have failed to so do.
That promises change and, maybe, sooner than we might expect.
