Tag: YouTube

The only certainty is uncertainty.

The fascinating aspects of chaos.

I must immediately volunteer the fact that the thrust of this article is the result of a programme that we watched last Thursday night.  It was a programme originally featured on the UK BBC 4 channel in 2008.  Called High Anxieties, The Mathematics of Chaos, it is a fascinating examination into the way that mathematicians have fundamentally adjusted their views, from the certainty of Newtonian principles to the certain uncertainty offered by mathematicians such as Henri Poincare and Alexander Lyapunov.  The 60-minute documentary, directed by David Malone, is wonderfully interesting and much more relevant to the uncertainty surrounding all our lives than one might anticipate from any references to mathematicians!  It puts the collapse of Lehman Brothers, some 2 years ago, last Thursday, into an interesting perspective.

Here’s the first 9 minutes as offered on YouTube, introduced thus,

David Malone http://golemxiv-credo.blogspot.com author of The Debt Generation, directs and presents this film, It is the first part of a documentary first shown on BBC4 Television in the UK in September 2008. The film was first broadcast 2 days after the collapse of Lehman brothers at the start of the financial crisis. It looks at the discoveries in mathematics during the 20th Century which have challenged the view that the world is an essentially knowable and therefore controllable place. The film focuses on the economy and the environment and suggests that ideas about unpredictability, the butterfly effect and tipping points, stemming from mathematics, are part of what underlie some modern anxieties about the world we live in.

If this first part grabs your attention then finding the other 8 parts is easy on YouTube.  Alternatively, the complete set of videos is linked together as one film on Top Documentary Films, click  High Anxieties: The Mathematics of Chaos. where it is described as follows,

The documentary looks at the modern advances in mathematics and how they affect our understanding of physics, economics, environmental issues and human psychology.

The film looks at how developments in 20th Century mathematics have affected our view of the world, and particularly how the financial economy and earth’s environment are now seen as inherently unpredictable.

The film looks at the influence the work of Henri Poincare and Alexander Lyapunov had on later developments in mathematics. It includes interviews with David Ruelle, about chaos theory and turbulence, the economist Paul Ormerod about the unpredictability of economic systems, and James Lovelock the founder of Gaia theory about climate change and tipping points in the environment.

As we approach tipping points in both the economy and the climate, the film examines the mathematics we have been reluctant to face up to and asks if, even now, we would rather bury our heads in the sand rather than face harsh truths.

Very, very interesting and rather puts the pictures of the Petermann Glacier shown here into context.

The Tenacity of Dogs, part two.

More on how dogs adapt to challenges in their lives.

(As readers picked up from my closing comment in yesterday’s part of this story, technology has rather interfered with events.  ‘Touch wood’ things appear to be back to normal!)

Yesterday’s article (thanks to Paul Gilding for the link) was about the stray dogs in Moscow.  Before musing on the more general nature of how dogs survive as strays, there is a video on YouTube about these Muscovite dogs.  Just over 7 minutes long, it further underlines the amazing adaptability of the domesticated dog when thrust into self-survival.

As regular readers of Learning from Dogs will know, before Jean and I met, Jean had spent a large part of her life rescuing dogs in the San Carlos area of Mexico, much of that with Suzann (who was instrumental in Jean and me meeting!).  Indeed, when Jean and I moved up to Payson in February, 2010 we had with us, much to the amusement of the American border staff at the Nogales crossing, 12 dogs and 6 cats, all rescues except my German Shepherd dog, Pharaoh.

So Jean has lots of stories about how the far-too-many stray dogs in San Carlos developed strategies for staying alive.  Dhalia, see story below, shows her feral habits when we go out for a walk in the forest by constantly looking for food, despite the fact that she is a well-fed, happy and contented dog.  Jean recounts finding Dhalia,

It was in 2005, about three months after Ben died (Jean’s husband). I was driving out to the small Mexican fishing port of La Manga where there were many stray dogs.  The aim was to feed them on a regular basis and hope that they would become sufficiently comfortable with my presence so that they could be caught, so that they may be spayed or neutered and then offered for adoption.

On the way there, I drove past a couple of dogs running alongside the highway.  Dogs frequently did this looking for ‘road-kill’ that they could feed on.  I stopped the car wanting to put out some food and water.

One of the dogs was so feral that it immediately took off into the bush.  I turned around and the other dog was standing about ten feet away.  It was cadaverous and obviously suffering from mange but cautiously came up to the food, sniffed carefully and then started to eat.  That dog allowed me to pick it up and then sat quietly with me on the front seat of the car while I continued to La Manga.  It sense immediately that it was safe and from that day has remained with me.  I named her Dhalia.

Dhalia in Jean's arms, November 2008

Fast forward to today.  Dhalia is one of Pharaoh’s group of dogs and is a sweet and loving animal.

Finally, a couple of other stories to give you a feeling about these rescue dogs. One from August 2009 about a dog called Lucky Lucy.  The other about Corrie, both stories from Suzann.

Enjoy.

Spirituality and activism

A look at the film Fierce Light

For a number of reasons, both private and public, I have not been feeling as creative as normal these last 24 hours.  What I am conscious of is that events of this week, from the riots in the UK, the chaos of financial markets, right through to the death of our dog Tess have all contributed to a mental heaviness.

So I am taking a small creative short-cut, as it were, by writing about a film that we watched on Monday night; Fierce Light.

There is a trailer on YouTube.  This is how it is presented,

A Feature Documentary By Velcrow Ripper

From the Director of Scared Sacred & The Producer of The Corporation

“Fierce Light” is a feature documentary that captures the exciting movement of Spiritual Activism that is exploding around the planet, and the powerful personalities that are igniting it.

Fueled by the belief that “another world is possible,” the film portrays stories of what Martin Luther King called “Love in Action,” and Gandhi called “Soul Force”; what Ripper is calling “Fierce Light.” Acclaimed filmmaker Velcrow Ripper (Scared Sacred) takes an insightful look at change motivated by love, featuring interviews with spiritual activists Thich Nhat Hanh, Desmond Tutu, Daryl Hannah, Julia Butterfly Hill, and more.

If you would like to sink a little deeper into the film and what the motivations are behind the making of it, then do go to the web site Fierce Light.

Jean and I found the film inspiring and beautifully presented.  It came over as a film that seriously approached the topic of human consciousness and gave plenty of opportunity to reflect on some of the many forces within our societies at this present time.

Then you may like to watch this talk by the Director, Velcrow Ripper (actually born Steve Ripper in 1963), broken into two parts as follows,

The film and this talk by Mr. Ripper both date back to 2009 so, in the light of where we are in August 2011, they are proving to be extremely relevant.

Lord of the Ants

A passing visit to the American biologist, E. O. Wilson

E O Wilson

Edward Osborne Wilson was born in June 1929 thus making him, at this time of writing, just into his 82 year.  His biological specialty is myrmecology.  Got that?  Myrmecology.  And if you, like me, didn’t have a clue as to what  myrmecology is and had to look it up, it is the study of ants.  Blow me down, there is even a myrmecology blogsite!

So where is this all heading?

One of the things that we do know about dogs, especially if we go way back into the dim and distant times when they behaved more like the grey wolf, from which the species ‘dog’ genetically originates 100,000 years ago, is that their social order, their pack behaviour, was highly stable.  As an aside, when Jean was rescuing dogs in San Carlos, Mexico during the years that she lived there with her late husband she readily observed that the stray dogs, of which there were too many, had a natural propensity to group up into their historic pack formations.  (And as an aside to my aside, Jean’s close friend of many years, Dan’s sister Suzann, today carries on the splendid work of looking after stray dogs from her San Carlos house!)

OK, back to the plot!

E O Wilson’s study of ants has revealed much about social order and organisation.  The following YouTube video was from a PBS programme, aired in May, 2008, from which I quote (that is the PBS website),

Program Description

At age 78, E.O. Wilson is still going through his “little savage” phase of boyhood exploration of the natural world. In “Lord of the Ants,” NOVA profiles this soft-spoken Southerner and Harvard professor, who is an acclaimed advocate for ants, biological diversity, and the controversial extension of Darwinian ideas to human society.

Actor and environmentalist Harrison Ford narrates this engaging portrait of a ceaselessly active scientist and eloquent writer, who has accumulated two Pulitzer Prizes among his many other honors. Says fellow naturalist David Attenborough: “He will go down as the man who opened the eyes of millions ’round the world to the glories, the values, the importance of—to use his term—biodiversity.”

It’s a fascinating film, truly engaging, so do settle down for a relaxing 53 minutes and watch,

Now there’s more to this and I do want to continue with the theme of this Post tomorrow.

So for now, look in on the E O Wilson Biodiversity Foundation’s website and I’ll see you tomorrow.

Sixth sense? Of course, say dogs!

 

Science is catching up with dogs!

Those of you who have come across Rupert Sheldrake and, in particular his book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home will really not be surprised at what is coming, in terms of the rest of this Post.  Because most dog owners know, from countless observations, that dogs have an uncanny ability to see the world around them in a more deeper and intuitive manner than we can explain.

I wrote of Sheldrake’s book on the 1st June including touching on a report of Mason, a small terrier mix …

On April 27th, Mason was hiding in his garage in North Smithfield when the storm picked him up and blew him away. His owners couldn’t find him and had about given up when they came back Monday to sift through the debris, and found Mason waiting for them on the porch.

A few evenings ago, we watched a documentary from the website Top Documentary Films from the series Through The Wormhole.  This particular documentary was entitled Is There a Sixth Sense? Here’s how that film was introduced,

Sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch are the tools most of us depend on to perceive the world. But some people say they also can perceive things that are outside the range of the conventional senses, through some other channel for which there is no anatomical or neurological explanation. Scientific researchers who study such abilities call them extrasensory perception (ESP), but lay people often refer to them as the sixth sense.

Either term really is a catch-all for a variety of different purported abilities that vary from person to person. Some people claim the power of telepathy – that is, the ability to perceive others’ thoughts, without having them communicated verbally or in writing. Others claim to have the power of clairvoyance, which is the ability to perceive events and objects that are hidden from view because of barriers or distance. Still others claim to be gifted with precognition, which enables them to look into the future and glimpse what hasn’t yet occurred.

The belief in ESP or the sixth sense dates back thousands of years. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that Croesus, who ruled a kingdom in what is now Turkey in the sixth century B.C., consulted oracles – that is, groups of priests claimed to be able to predict the future — before he went to war. In ancient India, Hindu holy men were believed to possess the power to see and hear at a distance, and to communicate through telepathy.

In the late 1700s, the Viennese physician Franz Mesmer claimed that he could give people ESP powers by hypnotizing them. Just before his assassination in 1865, President Abraham Lincoln told friends that he’d dreamed of his own body lying in state in the White House. In the 20th century, Edgar Cayce and Jean Dixon attracted wide followings by claiming that they could foresee future events. During the Cold War, U.S. military and intelligence agencies, spurred by reports that the Soviets had psychics at their disposal, even tried to utilize clairvoyants who claimed remote-viewing powers for espionage purposes.

As well as watching it directly from the Top Documentary Films website, it is also available from YouTube.  Here are the four links.  It is a most fascinating review of the scientific findings in this area.  If you have a dog with you when you watch the videos, don’t be surprised if he or she fall asleep!  Nothing new for dogs in all this!

The unexplored shores of the future

A focus on Tim Bennett’s movie, What a Way To Go: Life at the end of Empire

We first came across this film, made by independent film-maker Tim Bennett, on the Top Documentary Films website, see here.  The title to this article comes from that introduction, from which is quoted,

Tim Bennett, middle-class white guy, started waking up to the global environmental nightmare in the mid-1980s. But life was so busy with raising kids and pursuing the American dream that he never got around to acting on his concerns. Until now…

Bennett journeys from complacency to consciousness in his feature-length documentary, What a Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire. He reviews his Midwestern roots, ruthlessly examines the stories he was raised with, and then details the grim realities humans now face: escalating climate change, resource shortages, degraded ecosystems, an exploding global population and teetering global economies.

Now to be honest, this is a film that is both captivating and, in parts, pretty grim.  A couple of trailers and other background material were posted on Learning from Dogs back in February.

The film also has an excellent web site What a Way To Go Movie which contains much background material including the opportunity to watch the film for free, click here.  Or a quick YouTube search will bring you to here.

My own view is that this is a ‘must see’ film.  Not because I want all of you to wallow in doom and gloom, far from it, but because, as Paul Gilding writes in his book, The Great Disruption, the quicker that mankind recognises the massive levels of denial presently in place, the quicker that mankind will commit to the scale of change that is required.  That’s where Paul Gilding’s approach differs from the movie, The End of Empire.  Gilding is optimistic that man will bring about change simply because fairly soon, in just a few years, it will be obvious at all levels in our societies that there simply is no choice!

Global climate confusion, ongoing

Herman Daly, Ph.D, makes some very powerful points at his keynote address to the AMS workshop on Federal Climate Policy, 13th November, 2007.

Note: This video is only the first 8 minutes from what is clearly a longer address.  I have struggled to find the subsequent parts of this address, although there appear to be other versions of the address on YouTube.  However, the points raised in these first few minutes are compelling,

  • Complexity stifles policy
  • The danger of overwhelming the decision of what to do now
  • Leave it until it’s perfectly clear and the likelihood is that it will be too late
Enjoy this most stimulating speech.
If you are stimulated to dig a little deeper into Hermon E. Daly here are some snippets I came across.

Herman Daly’s Ecological Economics – An Introductory Note

By John Attarian

Mainstream opinion has it that economic growth, the democratization of affluence, and ever-increasing consumption are the formula for individual and social happiness. A thoughtful and well-informed minority emphatically disagrees. Few have contributed more to this dissent than Herman E. Daly, widely regarded as the founding father of ecological economics.

Born in 1938, Daly earned his B.A. at Rice University (1960) and Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University (1967). From 1968 to 1988 he taught economics at Louisiana State University. Then he served as Senior Economist in the World Bank’s Environmental Department until 1994, when he became a professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Affairs, his current position.

As a graduate student, Daly believed that growth would solve mankind’s problems, but three experiences radically transformed his outlook. He studied under the economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1906-1994), whose book The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971) explained the decisive economic importance of the second law of thermodynamics (the entropy law) in a closed system, the availability of useful energy always declines. Georgescu-Roegen argued that the economic process transforms natural resources into waste — that is, transforms matter-energy from a state of low entropy into a state of high entropy. Georgescu-Roegen’s great contribution, Daly observes, was “reuniting economics with its biophysical foundations.” Teaching in Brazil in the late 1960s, Daly observed explosive population growth firsthand. Reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was also influential.

Wrong to publish more but if this catches your eye, then the full article is here.  Oh, perhaps I can just include the last two paragraphs of John Attarian’s fine piece ….

Daly co-founded the scholarly journal Ecological Economics in 1989 and still serves as an associate editor. His thought is slowly attracting appreciative notice, and some honors have come his way. For the Common Good won the 1991 Grawenmeyer Award for Ideas for Improving World Order, and in 1996 Daly received the Honorary Right Livelihood Award and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Heineken Prize for Environmental Science.

Integrating theology, ethics, science, and economics, Daly’s ecological economics is the kind of comprehensive vision we too seldom see, and one of the most important and promising intellectual developments of our time. Our selection of Daly’s works is a concise yet comprehensive introduction to his thought. May he find the audience he deserves.

Scamp and other dog’s incredible sense of smell

Almost beyond a human’s ability to comprehend.

On the 24th June, I wrote a piece from the Extraordinary Animals series from the UK’s Channel Five TV station.  In particular, the article focussed on Scamp’s ability to detect when people in care were dying.

Scamp is a little Schnauzer who resides at The Pine nursing home in Canton, Ohio. Like many live-in pets at nursing homes, Scamp brings companionship to the residents but he also does more than that. Scamp seems to have a gift that tells him when the end is near for one of the residents and he loyally stays with them during their final hours.

Jim & Diane Walker

The first of the three YouTube videos, some ten minutes long, examined how Scamp knew that a patient was dying and how scientists Jim and Diane Walker believed it was due to the incredible sense of smell that dogs possess.  From The Examiner of June 1st, 2009,

An amazing scientist, Dr. James Walker of the Sensory Research Institute at Florida State University, documented the power of a dog’s nose in 2002. Using n-amyl acetate (nAA), Dr. Walker documented that a dog can detect chemicals at one ten-thousandth to one hundred-thousandth the concentrations that humans can. In other words, at a minimum, dogs can smell 10,000 times better than a human.

OK, back to that YouTube video.

If you didn’t watch it on the 24th, do watch it again.  Watch it this time to pick up just what Scamp is doing.  At minute 6:30 hear how Dr. Bob Andrysco describes how the sense of smell of a dog is 100,000 times more powerful than that of a human.

Then stay with the video until minute 9:20 when Jim & Diane Walker show how a dog can detect a substance as diluted as 2 parts in a trillion.  That is so diluted as to be beyond comprehension; well to a non-scientist like me!

As the presenter describes, “That’s the equivalent of a teaspoonful of sugar in ten billion cups of tea!”  To me that is utterly mind-boggling.  Let me try and demonstrate the power of 2 parts per trillion, which is the equivalent of 1 part per half-trillion (500,000 million). Half-a-trillion fluid ounces is 522,189,675.651 ft³ – just over 522 million cubic feet.  What does that volume look like?

Here’s the picture of twelve fluid ounces – you’ll just have to imagine what one fluid ounce would look like!

Standard Coke can = 12 fluid ounces

Here’s a picture of ninety million cubic feet – you’ll just have to imagine what five hundred and twenty-two million look like!

Great Pyramid of Giza = 90 million cubic feet

OK, last one from me to allow us all to really, really appreciate the magical ability of that dog’s nose.

Two parts per trillion is the equivalent of smelling that can of Coke (12 fluid ounces) in a volume the equivalent of seventy, yes seventy, Great Pyramids (6,264,000,000 cubic feet).

Think I need to lie down in a darkened room for a while!

The BBC

A remarkably fine institution

Having now been living in Arizona for 18 months, I can say with some degree of certainty that there are few British things that I miss.  One of them is draft English beer, of course, but another one is the BBC.  Luckily modern internet technology means that quite a few of the great BBC television programmes ‘leak’ outside the UK.

The BBC Horizon science series has been one such example of a really well-produced programme.

Recently, a BBC Horizon programme about genetically modified (GM) foods aired by the BBC found its way onto YouTube and thence to the website Top Documentary Films.  Not only is it an interesting programme but it also reveals how the facts of new advances in science are often difficult to understand by us; the general public.

The link to the film on the TDF website is here but if you want to watch it directly from YouTube then here it is.

Anthropocene era gaining legs

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.