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Archive for the ‘science’ Category

The Meaning of Life … a Monday version

Posted in Health, love, Nature, Peeps, Religion, science, Sex, tagged , , , , on January 17, 2011| 7 Comments »

Dawn is cracking loud today, or maybe it’s the Pistols on the iPod shredding the infamous songwriting duo Kierkegaard & Nietzsche’s classic “Nihilism, So DaDaDandy” I’m confusing with the break of yet another week.

Yes, it’s THAT sort of morning after THAT sort of night following THAT sort of day yesterday having me think THESE sorts of thoughts.

Good morning, World … and how about that idea that we’re all nothing but a tube?

Let’s start this Monday off with the thought that we are plain and simply biological creatures born to live, then die, whose entire raison d’etre is to take in nutrients, excrete … well … excrement and reproduce, and grandiose concepts like some spiritual component, a soul, are nothing but a load of wishful hooey.

Most of science certainly points us in that direction, after all, and easily implicates bio reasons for just about anything going on in us. Everything from our fears to our joys to our passions to our annoyances can be traced to our DNA.

We love our kids because our brains grew big enough to require long childhoods for development, so we grew attached to the little buggers so we wouldn’t boot them out of the cave before they could walk … or eat them.

We dream because of electro-chemical processes. We ponder the stars and the moon because doing so paid off in longer life spans.

We create art and music out of a mandate to communicate that facilitates eating, passing along our genetic material and not being killed for our share of the mammoth.

We fall in love out of primal urges … and fall out of love for those same primal urges. (See reproduction.)

At some point our brains expanded enough to leave room for more than grubbing for grub and screwing, so started wondering about stuff. What we couldn’t explain got stories and stories became habit forming and led to religion and writing and science.

There are no few folks who subscribe wholeheartedly to this concept and appear to be comfy in the knowledge that born-live-die is all there is to it. Some tout freeing aspects in the idea that you only live once, so make the bloody most of it.

I get that. I do. But what I don’t get is the point.

Because it is dictated we must eat, we must survive, we must breed, it’s not like like it’s a party. For many it is really fucking hard and no fun at all, and if the only reason to put up with all the crap is to bring another generation in to put up with all the crap, well, seems saving them the effort wouldn’t be a bad thing.

But, see? That’s where we’re bound, trapped like a bug in amber. It’s in our DNA.

Even our fear of death is rooted in our code because without it … and with nothing else going on … we’d be topping ourselves right and left as soon as we figured out how fucking pointless it is to struggle and suffer for however many decades we’re allowed to struggle and suffer through.

Whoopie.

If we’re looking for meaning, it must come in flashes, in moments the chemicals in our brains pump out warm fuzzies and set us awash in sweet juices. These keep us going, they translate as hope … and are addictive as hell, so we plod through days and weeks and months and years and decades searching for fix after fix.

Anyone want to talk me down from this precipice?

Gawd, I hate Mondays …

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Holy Microbes! … or … Mortise meets Tenon, or not …

Posted in Nature, News, Religion, science, tagged , , , , on January 15, 2011| 4 Comments »

Dovetail tools, bless 'em ...

I have almost no idea why two particular stories in today’s news dovetail in my mind, but for reasons perhaps only the severely disturbed might grasp, they do.

First is this piece on some little dudes who’ve managed to stay alive for … get this … 34,000 years.

It wasn’t long ago that a whole new life form was discovered, and here we are again learning that the impossible is … well … not.

“It was actually a very big surprise to me,” said Brian Schubert, who discovered ancient bacteria living within tiny, fluid-filled chambers inside the salt crystals.

Salt crystals grow very quickly, imprisoning whatever happens to be floating — or living — nearby inside tiny bubbles just a few microns across, akin to naturally made, miniature snow-globes.

“It’s permanently sealed inside the salt, like little time capsules,” said Tim Lowenstein, a professor in the geology department at Binghamton University and Schubert’s advisor at the time.

Ah … the stuff we don’t know until it bites us on the ass. (Okay, until science folks dedicated to the looking find. Not the same as an ass bite, sure, but it’s not like the stuff didn’t exist before the finding, is it?)

A quick mention of the fact that both these discoveries come out of California, as do I, and I’m liking that and trying to think of a clever link, but failing.

Perhaps because I’m so far out on the linking limb already in tying that story to this one titled: Is John Paul ll Being Fast-Tracked To Sainthood?

Sure, there’s a time thing they have in common … 34,000 years alive and six years dead … but that’s a stretch, isn’t it? Maybe it’s something to do with bacteria in general?

Or maybe it’s the whole miracle-makes-saint deal …

Pope Benedict XVI has recognized a miracle attributed to Pope John Paul II, bringing the late pontiff one step from sainthood a mere six years after his death, the Vatican announced on Friday (Jan. 14).

By signing a decree accepting the miracle, Benedict completed one of most rapid beatifications in the modern history of the Catholic Church. Another miracle attributed to John Paul’s intercession will be required before he can be declared a saint.

Where am I going with this? (That’s a question to self, btw.)

Let’s try this …

Some old git kicks it back in 2005, the crowd goes wild shouting “santo subito” in that We-are-all-individuals! sort of way and sets up a chain reaction that ignores the fact the dead guy was up to some nasty shit before biting the dust yet does manage to dig up a nun who started feeling better a couple of months later. Okay.

On the other side of the planet, life goes on as it has for the last 34,000 years within some salt crystals.

Both stories make today’s news. One is no surprise at all while the other is an astonishing discovery. One adds to the body of human knowledge as the other points out how pointlessly inane people can be. One recognizes a new and unexpected push at the edge of the envelope we call life while the other bestows honors that are only awarded to dead folks.

I’m thinking 34,000-year-old bacteria actually trump anything that managed to stick around for less than 9 mere decades, so perhaps it would make some sense if the popester were to convey some sort of holyosity on the microorganisms for toughing it out.

Nah. What good would that do them?

But, then again …

What good will it do John Paul at this stage of the game? He’s more bacteria than anything else by now anyway …

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“Random chance seems to have operated in our favor” ~Spock

Posted in Expat Living, Friends, Health, Island life, science, Seychelles, tagged , , , , , , , on January 14, 2011| 6 Comments »

Not exactly an iPhone ...

On a rainy Friday in Seychelles I get a call from Mexico informing me that the Chinese calendar will be bringing me a year of good luck starting on the 3rd of February, prompting me to share that possible reprieve with friends in the US, England, Germany, Italy and South Africa.

Yep. Within about 30 minutes eight countries were buzzing about my radar, and that was without going anywhere near facebook.

It never ceases to amaze me how this world of ours has gone so tiny, yet stays so bloody big. Yeah, sure I can conference call … for free … with a half dozen people in as many countries when effectively connected, and that’s wonderful, but getting up-close and personal with anyone off this rock? That’s not so simple, is it?

It wasn’t long ago the Internet and its wonders were beyond the scope, but within a few short years it’s more common in my world that peeps have it than don’t. Not only can we now communicate globally easily and far more cheaply than in the days it took a pricy phone call to reach out and touch someone, we now have Internet ON our phones. Just take a moment to imagine how shocked we would have been had we been told ten years ago this would be at our fingertips? And with a touch screen, yet!

Yes, we’ve seen HUGE changes, but at the same time so much stays the same.

Ease of communication has leapt and bounded, but transport? Not so much.

It was 40-some years ago James T. Kirk and Co. were stepping up for getting around of the dissolve/stick-together-somewhere-else sort, but the only real change in how we’re able to move about that’s happened over all those decades is the size of the planes that cram us in, then subject us to endless hours of torture.

Oh! You can now make calls from your own phone on some airliners and connect to the Internet, but that seems just rubbing it in if you ask me.

I’ve been waiting for that Beamy-uppy thingy ever since I moved halfway around the world from my roots and shoots, but in vain.

So, what is it with all the sticking-to-the-planes deal? I admit my lack of science-y expertise may be tricking me into thinking it should be an easier row to hoe, but since I was equally clueless on the WorldWideWeb, I’m in no mood to allow any excuses.

Look at it this way …

The first telephone … the precursor to our modern communication wonders … was patented in 1876. The first car … the beginning of travel that didn’t require draught animals … came along about 200 years EARLIER, and the first gasoline engine cranked over almost in sync with the phone.

An automobile powered by his own four-stroke cycle gasoline engine was built in Mannheim, Germany by Karl Benz in 1885, and granted a patent in January of the following year under the auspices of his major company, Benz & Cie., which was founded in 1883. It was an integral design, without the adaptation of other existing components, and included several new technological elements to create a new concept. He began to sell his production vehicles in 1888.
A photograph of the original Benz Patent-Motorwagen, first built in 1885 and awarded the patent for the concept

In 1879, Benz was granted a patent for his first engine, which had been designed in 1878. Many of his other inventions made the use of the internal combustion engine feasible for powering a vehicle.

I know there’s a huge difference between the internal combustion engine and the Star Trek transporter, but so is there between the gadget you see Alex G. Bell mouthing into in the photo above and instantaneous video calls around the planet.

“I signed aboard this ship to practice medicine, not to have my atoms scattered back and forth across space by this gadget.” ~ Dr. McCoy

Yeah, yeah … it’s a bit of a scary concept, but if Bones could get over it, anyone can.

So … get on the stick, folks. I hate flying, always get a fuckin’ cold when I’ve had to freeze my ass off for 12+ hours and ingest the breath of 250 other people who are as just as uncomfortable as I am, and I don’t like the food.

But …

If 2011 actually IS my year … me being a metal rabbit and this being the year of the rabbit and all … I’m not wasting any of the luck that may come my way on R&D for rapid-er transit.

Nope.

I’ll be keeping all that for health, wealth and wisdom for me and mine, thankyouverymuch. And if that puts my ass on planes, so be it.

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Talkin’ ’bout the weather … and NOTHING else …

Posted in Island life, Nature, News, science, Seychelles, tagged , , , , , , on January 9, 2011| 8 Comments »

I’m thinking I want to talk about the weather today. It always amazes me how much dialogue can center around a topic so far out of human hands and often … especially here … so benign, but “Is it hot enough for ya?” can usual light a conversational fuse that may go on for quite a while.

I really don’t want to immerse myself in all today’s news about the horrific shootings in Arizona, although I can’t help but wonder WTF is happening in the country I called home up until 1994.

It’s not that I’m shocked by deadly violence from the business end of a gun, as that happens all the bloody time … bloody being a British expression, not an American descriptive term, although it fits that way, too … and well-armed nutjobs are a dime a dozen in the US.

No. It’s the idea that the us/them thing has inflated to the popping point without peeps seeming to care much about anything other than winning … although what it is they want to win evades my grasp.

I get that crushing universal health care is a rocks off goal and that some are pissed off about the demise of DADT and other such rights being offered to fellow humans … hence the term “human rights” … but how such issues end up on the “must do” list is beyond me, especially when “must do” translates to “must kill” to make it happen.

I don’t want to think about mass deaths of all those animals either. Not tonight.

Sure, I could dig around the info on how this sort of thing has been going on for yonks and how it’s only a wee bit odd that it’s raining dead birds and the world is awash in dead fish and dead crabs and … well, loads of dead stuff in many shapes and sizes … and there is entertainment value in considering the possibilities both conspiratorially-minded and other-worldy, but I’d really rather not be freaked out right now about the end of the world.

If I had more energy, I might actually get off on sinking my teeth into the Twitter story on how the US gov’t is strong-arming social media into bellying up and handing over info on ANYONE who might know someone who knows something somehow about Julian Assange.

The thought that they want to dig into the communications of an Icelandic official is appalling, and the fact that it’s the Obama admin doing this … Democrats, FFS … not a Bush/GOP/Tea Party mega-Nixonesque thing … is freaky and has me thinking we most likely have NO idea who is really running any show anywhere.

Quite frankly, I don’t even want to dwell on the condition of the Anse Soleil road as the Keystone Konstruction Kompany turns it into 4×4 only access, having … according to Radio Bamboo, the local version of the grapevine … pissed away Sheik Rattle&Roll’s tarmac bucks on Whoknowswhat.

Since I’ve been working all day and just now getting around to putting a blog post together … just now being 7:08 pm on a Sunday with one glass of wine down … I don’t have it in me to blather on about any of that heavy shit, thankyouverymuch.

So …

Hot/cold/windy/wet/dry enough … whatever … for ya?

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Pigs fly, birds die … we’re doomed

Posted in Nature, News, Religion, science, tagged , , , , , , , on January 6, 2011| 13 Comments »

All this bird dying, fish floating, mass crab croaking stuff is creepy, and I don’t care how many scientists trot about spouting on about how these are normal events.

Sure, I can understand how finding oneself in Beebe, Arkansas on New Year’s Eve could prompt the mutilation migration that had thousands of birds falling from the sky and nearly 100,000 fish rising to the surface in a nearby river in the days leading up to the holiday, but rural redneckitis doesn’t explain major die-offs in New Zealand, the UK and Sweden. (Although I suspect the Swedish situation may be pinned on broken condoms, but I’m not going there today.)

As some drunken Scot put it: We’re doomed, Laddy.

We’re one year away from 2012, and if predictions are to be awarded their due, apparently the road to global annihilation starts the paving process with fish and birds.

Given that one portent of doom suggests $5 a gallon gas by 2012, my world … where gas is about $7 a gallon … is already up there with the bloating snapper.

We’re also well on our way to learning all the steps to the natural disasters pas de everybody and just the global weather of the past month alone is enough to warm us up for 2012 terrors of the climate kind.

Add to it all things like the birth of a panda cow in Colorado … presaged by that wise woman Christine O’Donnel’s ManMindMouse … and the appearance and immediate shooting of a strange creature in Kentucky and there’s a whole lotta strange goin’ on.

After all, a black man is President of the US of A and it’s now okay to be gay in the army, so apparently hell has frozen over and pigs do fly, so the only horror yet to happen is THE END OF THE WHOLE FUCKING WORLD.

I could make a couple predictions myself from today’s news alone … a Momon nutjob taking over the House Armed Services Committee will result in battles of prophecy fulfillment, or not … thousands upon thousands of people will soon suddenly be unable to identify their location due to Starbucks removing their name from the logo. Yes, creepy things are coming at us.

I’m also guessing strange lights will be seen in the skies, entire nations will mysteriously place idiots in powerful positions and millions will be moved to tears by the news a perfect couple has decided to divorce. Yep … all this over the next twelve months leading to 2012.

I can’t help but wonder when the first time was humans prepared for the end of the world. For sure the predictions have been going around a while and no few religions buy into the idea of Armageddon, but did early man include a sense of total destruction as he painted bison running across cave walls? Could unexplainable events in the ancient natural world have been assumed portents of doom?

I’m guess, yep. I’m also guessing thoughts of surviving such made up a whole bunch of that old time religion that’s morphed into what we have today.

Since we can’t even figure out how to keep oil companies from wasting millions of gallons of their pricy product on useless endeavors like turning the Gulf of Mexico into sludge, much less how to travel to distant, possibly more habitable, planets, what hope could there be in trying to avoid the coming apocalypse?

The only question really then, is: What to do between now and the end of the world?

Of course, a number of options present. We can, for example:

1) Curl up in a ball and do the “Oh, woe is us” thing
2) Turn to a higher power in hopes that gives some leverage
3) Live life to the fullest every day while considering each a gift
4) Figure out a way to make a buck while riding the hysteria wave
5) Ignore all
6) Consider all an adventure and go with the flow

Okay … there are a whole lot more options and I’m willing to hear others, but that’s all the list I have time for right now since there’s no use wasting too much of that on just another bloody blog post, is there?

For my part, I’ll try my best to concentrate on ducking falling fowl, putting one foot in front of the other, having a good time when I can, writing about stuff I find interesting … or amusing … or annoying … taking care of my kids (just in case there turns out to be a world for them to inherit), hanging with my friends, laughing, loving, snorkeling and trying not to spend too much time fretting about stuff I can’t fix.

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InSantaTy: or it’s all a mythtery

Posted in History, News, Religion, science, tagged , on December 21, 2010| 18 Comments »

I wrote earlier today on the magic of belief in Santa Claus, the gift to the imagination that shiny bit of tinsel can hang on children before they reach the age when flying reindeer and fat men squeezing their bulk down chimneys to leave bikes and dolls no longer makes any sense and they face the realization that Mom and Dad are bigger benefactors than they’d figured.

We consider the progression to be in the natural order of things; hopeful frivolity gives way to information, knowledge, to familiarization with the way things really are. Also learned in time is a sense of history that serves to put traditions in context, to illuminate how one thing led to another to another and eventually to St. Nicholas morphing into Santa Claus.

Okay … so my eight-year-old is on the verge of twigging to the Santa gag, and even though I’m hoping he gets this one more year of the fantasy the writing is on the wall. He’s a smart, curious kid who loves to learn and wants to know stuff, and in the long run all that is a good thing.

I can’t help, however, but be amazed at the huge number of people who never get further than the fairy tales.

Those in this article for example:

A new Gallup poll, released Dec. 17, reveals that 40 percent of Americans still believe that humans were created by God within the last 10,000 years.

Yeah … I could have gone with the whole Holy Night tale, but although it is almost Christmas other angles came across my reindeer radar today, and the idea that only 16% of Americans buy the idea of evolution without divine guidance feels to me like a call for intervention.

Don’t get me wrong — I like Christmas music as much as the next indoctrinated American-raised harker of Harold the singing angel, and the idea of Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men (and women and children) is worth propagating. It does rather piss me off when the concept is hijacked once a year by peeps whose agenda is suspect and divisive.

When high on said agenda is keeping people stupid … well … even more reason to bah and humbug, and trotting out Eden as fact while science is swept up with the torn wrapping paper is doing exactly that.

The poll also revealed that beliefs in creationism and evolution are strongly related to levels of education attained. When results are narrowed to those with college degrees, only 37 percent of respondents maintain beliefs in creationism. Meanwhile, the belief in evolution without the aid of God rises to 21 percent.

Those numbers are still appalling, but do give some hope that education has some force against ignorance.

Lest anyone think I’m picking on Christians to put the Christ in Christmas, another story in today’s news made the same point, but in a bit more gruesome a manner. Titled “Koran Written In Saddam Hussein’s Blood Poses Problem For Iraqi Leaders”, it could be considered another candle on the holly branch …

The unique Koran’s creation took over two years:

It was etched in the blood of a dictator in a ghoulish bid for piety. Over the course of two painstaking years in the late 1990s, Saddam Hussein had sat regularly with a nurse and an Islamic calligrapher; the former drawing 27 litres of his blood and the latter using it as a macabre ink to transcribe a Qur’an. But since the fall of Baghdad, almost eight years ago, it has stayed largely out of sight – locked away behind three vaulted doors. It is the one part of the ousted tyrant’s legacy that Iraq has simply not known what to do with.

Slate notes that Saddam was never one for subtlety, and that this undertaking would serve propaganda purposes for when the dictator need to be seen as pious; he “decided to show the world that he was willing to literally sacrifice his blood for the sake of his religion.”

His blood. Nice. What a sacrifice, heh?

And to think Santa would have just left a lump of coal in his stocking and called it a day while assuming he’d made the point that genocide goes on the naughty list. Of course, if Santa was the issue, Saddam would have grown out if it by the time he was 10 or 12 … or 30.

So, why is it okay … normal, reasonable … to mature beyond the dude-in-red flying down from the North Pole, but Adam and Eve and Mohammed once ingested are to last a lifetime? Why is A Visit from St. Nicholas considered light verse, but the second chapter of Luke gospel? (Okay, bad choice of words, but you get my drift.)

But really, does this …

And Mama in her ‘kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap —
When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters, and threw up the sash.
The moon on the breast of the new fallen snow,
Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below;
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny rein-deer,
With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick.

… make any less sense than this …

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were
sore afraid.

And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

… ?

Sure, the first quote rhymes and only has a couple of songs to go with, but more importantly it wasn’t shouted from pulpits in our direction, and I can’t help thinking that’s one big diff. That and the fact that Santa has little political clout and other than marketing not much economical sway, either.

As I said in my earlier post, I don’t see Santa as a dangerous illusion fostered by parents, but a bit of magic meant to stir imagination. The other stuff could be the same, but folks don’t seem to outgrow that shit.

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Chaos: a theory

Posted in Island life, My Chinese Checkered Past, Nature, Peeps, science, Seychelles, Writers, tagged , , , on December 6, 2010| 14 Comments »

I want to speak about bodies changed into new forms. You, gods, since you are the ones who alter these, and all other things, inspire my attempt, and spin out a continuous thread of words, from the world’s first origins to my own time.

Before there was earth or sea or the sky that covers everything, Nature appeared the same throughout the whole world: what we call chaos: a raw confused mass, nothing but inert matter, badly combined discordant atoms of things, confused in the one place. There was no Titan yet, shining his light on the world, or waxing Phoebe renewing her white horns, or the earth hovering in surrounding air balanced by her own weight, or watery Amphitrite stretching out her arms along the vast shores of the world. Though there was land and sea and air, it was unstable land, unswimmable water, air needing light. Nothing retained its shape, one thing obstructed another, because in the one body, cold fought with heat, moist with dry, soft with hard, and weight with weightless things.
~ Ovid, “Metamorphoses”

No, actually I don’t want to speak about changing bodies and I’ve spewed enough of my thoughts on Earthcentric views limiting human imagination, although Ovid does have the excuse of writing long before anyone had the technology to see stars as much more than interesting pictures in the sky.

It is, however, chaos filling my brain today … okay, most days … so imagine how thrilled I was, or wasn’t, to learn the etymology of ‘chaos’ also leads one to ‘yawn’.

Greek χάος means “gap, gaping void, chasm, abyss”, from the verb χαίνω, “gape, be wide open, etc.”, from PIE *ghen-, cognate to Old English geanian, “to gape”, whence English yawn.

Well, no bloody wonder I can have a head full of swirling shit and still be bored!

During a conversation the other day with my dear friend, Brian — he of the blog Truth is Freedom and a fab poet — he mentioned an interesting critter he described as, “chaos vital to creation”, apparently a beastie that can be traced back to ancient times and blamed for just about everything.

Some of our discussion involved various methods we’ve employed in attempts to rein chaos in long enough to force it to take form, allowing us to get on with things in ways … well … less chaotic, but throwing a lasso around “a rude and undeveloped mass, that nothing made except a ponderous weight; and all discordant elements confused, were there congested in a shapeless heap” … another translation of Ovid’s words … is not only difficult, but also an effort with consequences.

The exterior manifestation of chaos ... my office.

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that grabbing free-floating ephemera and wrangling it into concepts easily shared pretty much kills off the free-floaty bit and morphs any given ephemeron into engraving, nor that grabbing hold of a “ponderous weight and all discordant elements confused” might not feel too great.

If I had a choice in the matter I might very well let chaos bubble away in a primordial stewing on a back burner instead of constantly caving to the inclination to turn it into something I can serve up.

There sure are a lot of folks that can do just that, and I sometimes find myself envious of those without curiosity, people who manage to go through days and years and lifetimes never hearing the background noise, much less wondering where it comes from.

“Ever wonder why mosquitoes exist … other than as food … or vectors … or … ”

“No … fucking things … SLAP. Got any beer?”

I find it interesting that the words “random” and “hectic” are now synonymous, amongst the young and hip with excellence, excitement and … well … missing the style boat. Of course, youth is supposed to be hectic and random, and chaos fits like a sparkly glove when your biggest worry is parents reading your Tweets.

I Googled “random thoughts” and found 6,960,000 results … and managed to resist clicking on most of them in fear of the “ooooh shiny” thing since I do have work to do today … but this did nothing to advance my chaos theory that was to be the topic of this post.

Shit.

In summation, then, I’ll simply ask, “Have you seen that story about living forever? I’m really not keen on the idea, myself, and can’t help but wonder …

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Pulling Up a Chair With Aliens

Posted in Health, Hopeful thoughts, Nature, Religion, science, tagged , , on December 5, 2010| 26 Comments »

I’ve been asked to come up with some thoughts on Alien Beings … this is what spilled out.

I am often invaded by thoughts that would to someone else feel alien; weird, formless phantoms that interrupt my work and set me to following bright, shiny objects instead of concentrating on matters at hand.

And what do I do when so annexed? I pull up a chair, pour some tea … or wine, if the hour is right … and invite my visitor to settle in for a while and share whatever it is they’ve popped into to ponder with me.

Today my alien is an alien, and although alien is the most easily accessible word for this guy, he’s not actually alien in the least …

… unless, of course, we all are.

And we are. Or, at least, I am. I don’t presume to speak for anyone else and understand many are distinctly uncomfortable with any notion suggesting they’ve ever been anything else or have even the smallest shred of anything else anywhere in their makeup.

Like the legions of folks who resent the hell out of any implication there might be shared DNA between them and … say … a chimp, others are right pissed off when handed a card reading: What you see is NOT what you are.

Sputter … gasp … choke … but, but, but …

But as I said, I’m only speaking for myself here, and this is what I am, and am not: a human woman of a certain age living on a small island in the Indian Ocean on Planet Earth.

It’s true. But not the complete truth.

I am also:

1) A result of millions of years of evolution

2) A system of biological functions

3) A transport service for a bunch of other beings that digest my food, live in my eyelashes and occasionally make me feel like shit.

4) Energy

The first three are a brief sum of what I am NOW. The fourth is what I am ALWAYS.

Given our biology and our residence, albeit very brief, on Earth, it’s an easy thing to forget the bigger neighborhood. FFS … how many people in Podunk, McMiddleAmerica forget Africa? We get all wrapped up in blankets and burritos and Manolo Blahnik and begin to assume this is what it’s all about … and all there is.

Boring. Limited. And a fucking waste of time and energy if it were the case. But it’s not, at least not in my world.

And, yes, I have a world. I’d say we all do, but that would be pushing the edges of this post’s envelope since I’m sticking to just me and my alien.

We’re one and the same, you see …

I was born Sandra, but before I was Sandra I was. (Okay … maybe not before, since time is an option, but for sake of not spinning this head off my axis and setting out after another shiny object, I’m sticking to linear for reasons of convenience.) It’s very likely I was born before, in the sense that I emerged from a human woman, grew, walked around and all the stuff I do now, only under different circumstances and geography. I have memories and experiences from stuff that happened impacts stuff that happens.

Some people and places draw me, some situations terrify me, some things give comfort and others make me extremely uncomfortable and I have no doubt reasons reach back further than my years.

Because I am, for the moment, human, it is not within my realm to assimilate experiences I had when not human, nor are those relevant. For one thing this little brain I have, all biochemical and wired for NOW, couldn’t process the data, but I do get to access it once I shuck the biological shell.

Not at all Earthcentric, I don’t assume every dance I’ve been to happened here; no, I’m sure my card has been many times filled with waltzes I couldn’t presently recognize if they stomped on my toes and called me Sweetie.

This is a big-ass hanging universe … and it’s just the one we have some idea of presently … and stuck here, as I am, on this little blue marble in my skin I have a lot to deal with through my three-score-and-ten, or whatever I end up with. I’m here for reasons I knew before I arrived, but programed to forget; a set up I like to think of as my way of making sure I don’t cheat.

I’m a blob of energy … even on those days I don’t want to drag my ass out of bed … doing the Macarena through time and space paying no attention to speed limits (I thumb my nose at 186,000 miles per second), temporarily confined to quarters. I’m a single cell in a massive organism free to move about after doing whatever it is I’m to do here and now. I’m an alien being from another world doing time on Earth. I’m a harbinger of doom, a ray of hope, dark matter, bright light.

Ah … what the fuck …

As Popeye so succinctly put it: I yam what I yam.

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News from NASA: Life comes in other flavors. No kidding …

Posted in Nature, News, science, tagged , , , on December 3, 2010| 275 Comments »

A science is any discipline in which the fool of this generation can go beyond the point reached by the genius of the last generation. ~Max Gluckman

Finally!

Yes, the discovery has now been made that has expanded our version of what life is, and it’s NASA, not an organization bent on biology, that stretched the limits of living.

Seems there are, after all, life forms that don’t conform to the accepted definition … go figure … and what an eye-opener, heh?

“The definition of life has just expanded,” said Ed Weiler, NASA’s associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s Headquarters in Washington. “As we pursue our efforts to seek signs of life in the solar system, we have to think more broadly, more diversely and consider life as we do not know it.”

I am so confused.

It is possible folks have actually been running on the assumption that all life everywhere must be made of the same stuff that came up with us? And … did it really need to take finding an example of something different here on Earth to get those folks to reconsider their perspective?

Well … if so, that’s just dumb.

NASA-supported researchers have discovered the first known microorganism on Earth able to thrive and reproduce using the toxic chemical arsenic. The microorganism, which lives in California’s Mono Lake, substitutes arsenic for phosphorus in the backbone of its DNA and other cellular components.

Okay. That’s one ‘rule’ down the drain then, isn’t it, since up until now the thought has been that it took six building blocks — carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur — to fire up the living thang in everything from amoeba to zebra; anything not having those six basics was not considered to be alive.

As the research team’s lead scientist put it: If something here on Earth can do something so unexpected, what else can life do that we haven’t seen yet?

Good question … and should be followed by: Why are we so surprised?

To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth. ~Evelyn Fox Keller

I’ve spent no little time considering what “life” is made of, and have come to the conclusion that it ain’t what we think it is. In fact, it seems to me that the part of us those six blocks stack up to may be the least of what we are.

It’s the limiting nature … biology … of the human mind that makes so illusive the far reaches of consciousness, not the other way round, and it’s the consciousness that makes everything else, including the biology. It follows, then, that we are more than our physical form. We’re like tequila … whether it be rotgut or nectar de dioses … most of our potential is wasted while in the bottle.

Who’s to say that it’s not energy … light, sound, electromagnetic waves, something else that has escaped our limited notice … that’s the bit that constitutes LIFE? Biochemists, for one, I suppose, but now they’re even having to rethink.

“The idea of alternative biochemistries for life is common in science fiction,” said Carl Pilcher, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute at the agency’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. “Until now a life form using arsenic as a building block was only theoretical, but now we know such life exists in Mono Lake.”

Now they know … and they know because they found something on this planet that can be weighed and measured, which is apparently what it takes.

A few things come to mind this morning … and, yes, I know I’m rambling, but I want to get this out before I settle into work, and rambling rants happen when there’s a lot of stuff rolling around in my head …

Which brings me to one thought …

I have a friend who’s a mulitple, so has many people living in one body, a situation that calls into question just how set-in-bone what the living part of us might be.

With a change of personalities in multiples, scars appear and disappear, burn marks do the same, as well as cysts! The multiple can change from being right-handed to being left-handed with ease and agility. Visual accuity can differ, so that some multiples have to carry two or three different pairs of glasses. One personality can be color blind and the other not. Even EYE COLOR can change!

I had a dream last night in which I was having a conversation with my son and my father, both of whom are, in present context, dead. Although I don’t recall much of it now, some of the images are clear. I know if I’d been hooked up to that whatitz thingy that checks brain activity it would have shown all sorts of stuff going on in my head. My question this morning is: Was my dream a result of a biochemical dance, or the other way around?

Could it be that we are surrounded by life forms we have no way of recognizing as such? Makes sense to me, but until a specimen is found on the bottom of Mono Lake … or energy materializes, sits down and gives a good accounting … we’ll keep running on the assumption that it’s all about being carbon-based.

There was a time a platypus was impossible, but … golly … turns out the little dudes are alive and well and happily doing the Monotremata thing down under, and even if we’ve never seen one, we don’t argue their existence. Could we someday be as accepting of a community of sentient invisible beings who might be hanging around us all right now?

I recognize I don’t have the background, knowledge or credentials that might allow me to grasp a lot of what is clearly over my head in the science, and I do understand why NASA folks are thrilled to their gills over the discovery of a “new life form”; it is a big deal and goes far to advance thinking. Good.

I do, however, sometimes tire of what smells like arrogance but is probably more closely related to a lack of imagination in presuming we are the standard by which all must be judged.

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Memo to self: It’s a day … live it!

Posted in Health, History, Loss, love, My Chinese Checkered Past, News, On getting older, science on November 18, 2010| 4 Comments »

Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness. ~James Thurber

Not that I have a lot of it spare, but I have been thinking about time quite a bit lately — the non-existance of, the travel through, the wastes of.

You reading me often and in various places must have noticed I have a monkey mind … and I’m not talking evolutionary remnants of a brow ridge but the aptly descriptive Buddhist term for one whose brain is: unsettled; restless; capricious; whimsical; fanciful; inconstant; confused; indecisive; uncontrollable. Yeah … that would be what happens under my hair most of the time, illuminated here in an article listing six steps to living in the moment.

“We’re living in a world that contributes in a major way to mental fragmentation, disintegration, distraction, decoherence,” says Buddhist scholar B. Alan Wallace. We’re always doing something, and we allow little time to practice stillness and calm.

When we’re at work, we fantasize about being on vacation; on vacation, we worry about the work piling up on our desks. We dwell on intrusive memories of the past or fret about what may or may not happen in the future. We don’t appreciate the living present because our “monkey minds,” as Buddhists call them, vault from thought to thought like monkeys swinging from tree to tree.

I’m a worrier by nature, a ponderer by profession and with a conscience that rarely has me leaving things to rest, all which have me agitating and ruminating when I should just be experiencing.

Today’s Huff Post puts me in this moment, however, so I pause to consider the ideas in an article called: How Often Are We on Mental Autopilot? You Might Be Surprised.

Although I’m not surprised a study suggests people spend 46.9% of their brain time doing a wander, nor that most don’t consider it a particularly happy path, there is some interesting science in the report.

They discovered that people have two distinct ways of interacting with the world, using two different sets of networks. One network for experiencing your experience involves what is called the “study by Kirk Brown found that people high on a mindfulness scale were more aware of their unconscious processes. Additionally these people had more cognitive control, and a greater ability to shape what they do and what they say, than people lower on the mindfulness scale. If you’re on the jetty in the breeze and you’re someone with a good level or mindfulness, you are more likely to notice that you’re missing a lovely day worrying about tonight’s dinner, and focus your attention onto the warm sun instead. When you make this change in your attention, you change the functioning of your brain, and this can have a long-term impact on how your brain works too.

Living where I do and working from my veranda, I have developed the habit of pulling myself out of my work or my ass or wherever my head might be at any given moment at intervals throughout the day to take some time to gaze upon and appreciate the beauty on offer. Right now, it’s a sapphire sea, the viridescent forest and a few puffy, white clouds navigating their way westward that fill my soul right along with my eyes. Throw in a couple of long-tailed tropic birds and the fruit bats in my jack fruit tree and I’m breathing again in that way I forget to breathe when my mind is full of whatever I’m writing, my heart is heavy with longing for what is no more and my nerves fray with concern over the illusive ‘what’s next’.

Inspired by beautiful music, I once wrote for the description of the video that went along with it:

“For me, one of the most precious gifts the universe gives is the Now, and the Now embraced is the Eternal Hug … a gift without conditions of past or future, but only the joy of the moment. And what is life but a series of moments?

The moments bringing those words are now in my past, but I can and do continue to conjure their joys.

It’s remembering to do it that’s the key:

“Mindfulness is a habit, it’s something the more one does, the more likely one is to be in that mode with less and less effort… it’s a skill that can be learned. It’s accessing something we already have. Mindfulness isn’t difficult. What’s difficult is to remember to be mindful.” I love this last statement. Mindfulness isn’t difficult: the hard part is remembering to do it.

Having studied the work of Abraham Maslow way back when, I trust his assessment of moments.

The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.

But life does do its bit to beat that out of a girl, doesn’t it?

I’m not one for wallowing in regrets, and it’s too often the future that robs me of moments; not the desire of it, but the anxiety over having some asteroid of shit fall from this clear blue sky and splatter on my life. It’s an ancestor who provides perspective and a bit of solace on this concern:

The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time. ~Abraham Lincoln

True enough, thankfully, and one day leads to another.

Yep. This moment is now the past and the next is still the future and each letter I type becomes a sentence and sentence is a pretty good description of life.

As for quantum physics and that business about the past, like the future, being indefinite and existing only as a spectrum of possibilities … well, I rather like a poet’s version today:

Forever is composed of nows.
~Emily Dickinson”

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