Slimy Things With Legs

All the contact information in my address book is completely outdated. Really, really outdated. Some of it seems to date back to maybe 2003.

Would anybody like to help me remedy this situation?

You certainly don't have to post things here; you can get information to me through the usual channels.

Here's a note to myself that I found a minute ago:

"The dead have come back to life, but they mostly want shoes."

UPDATE:

I have also found "selling counterfeit bees".

(The subject line is hyperbolic, but I can never resist the opportunity to quote Taito video games. This line is from the game Metal Black. And yes, the final boss in the video is the Cambrian organism Opabinia regalis.)

(This post is kind of incoherent; perhaps I'll post a revised version later.)

Some time ago, I ran into this, by James Hansen.

Our conclusion is that, if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, CO2 must be reduced from its present 385 ppm (parts per million) to, at most, 350 ppm. We find that peak CO2 can be kept to about 425 ppm, with large estimates for oil and gas reserves, if coal use is phased out by 2030 (except where CO2 is captured and sequestered) and unconventional fossil fuels are not tapped substantially. Peak CO2 can be kept close to 400 ppm, if actual reserves are closer to those estimated by “peakists,” who believe that the globe is already at peak global oil production, having extracted about half of readily extractable oil resources.

This lower 400 ppm peak can be ensured, assuming phase-out of coal emissions by 2030, if a practical limit on reserves is achieved by means of actions that prevent fossil-fuel extraction from public lands, off-shore regions under government control, environmentally pristine regions and extreme environments. The concerned public can influence this matter, but time is short, the industry voice is strong and climate effects have not yet become so obvious to the public as to overwhelm the disinformation from industry moguls.

These conclusions are drawn from a recent paper by Hansen, which can be found here. (I have not read it yet.) These sorts of things seem to be popping up all over now, partly because I have partially restarted my earlier news-collecting strategies.

In this context, I think it is worthwhile to mention that wild populations appear to be declining rapidly. This (rather obviously) cannot be ascribed to global warming alone. Halting the general ongoing decline in biodiversity will require much more far-reaching changes, particularly with regard to human patterns of land use.

I think it is clear that we are not doing enough. This is not a new trend:

North Atlantic fish stocks have been in decline for well over a century. Callum Roberts points out in his recent book The Unnatural History of the Sea that it was obvious from the 1880s that fish stocks were in decline. Fish catch records from the 1920s onwards show that, despite the enormous improvements in boat design and trawling technology and better refrigeration, catches of the great Atlantic species, such as haddock, cod, hake and turbot, remained constant or slowly declined. As they have ever since.

Unlike global warming, the science of fish stock collapse is old and its practitioners have been pretty much in agreement since the 1950s. Yet Roberts can think of only one international agreement that has actually worked and preserved stocks of an exploited marine animal - a deal in the Arctic in 1911 to regulate the hunting of fur seals on the Pribilof Islands. So why has the international community failed so badly in its attempts to stop the long-heralded disaster with our fish?

'Quite simply,' Roberts says, 'agreements and deals brokered by politicians will never be satisfactory. They always look for the short-term fix.' He and his team at York University did a survey of the last 20 years of EU ministerial decisions on fish catches and found that, on average, they set quotas for fishing fleets 15 to 30 per cent higher than those recommended as safe by scientists.

'What that figure doesn't tell you is that often, for less threatened species like mackerel or whiting, they have set quotas 100 per cent higher than the science recommended. So, in their efforts to pacify the industry, they are bringing populations that could be sustainably fished into the risk zone,' he said.

The fishing industry, Roberts feels, has exerted excessive influence on politicians in Europe's Atlantic nations since the 18th century - when it was necessary to keep the fleets well manned, as a source of seamen for their navies when war broke out.

Admittedly, existing issues with fisheries represent one of the most dire environmental problems in the world today. Citing the above article may not represent any accurate picture of our present efforts to stem the destruction of the world's biodiversity.

But I am not very optimistic. My suspicion is that this sort of thing, as excerpted from the Center for Biological Diversity newsletter that I subscribe to, seems to be more indicative of our present actions:

As I wrote you last week, Bush's May 14th decision to list the polar bear as a threatened species contained a cynical "special rule" designed to prevent the listing from having any impact on global warming.

The administration admitted that the polar bear is spiraling toward extinction due to global warming, but brazenly refused to do anything about it. It even admitted that its goal was to keep the oil wells flowing and the power plants polluting.

Simple things will not save the Earth. Institutional efforts are needed to tackle these problems. The power of personal efforts does not appear to be very great:

While Gates's [the article is referring to Bill Gates] consumption was estimated from published reports, the students interviewed a local Buddhist monk. He lived off savings earned in the tech industry, and spent half the year sharing a friend's apartment and the other half, he claimed, living in a forest. His footprint: about 10.5 tonnes.

The homeless person, who used soup kitchens and slept in a city shelter, used about 8.5 tonnes, the "floor" for energy consumption in the U.S. In working out a formula to measure carbon footprint, Gutowski and his students took into account the services available to all Americans, including use of roads, police services, banks, schools, libraries and the judicial system.

"Goods and services are provided to all citizens, and certain amounts of energy are required and carbon is emitted for those services. At what point do you say you've got to fix the system?"

Again, I am not so sure about the study&mdash the press often mangles scientific results quite thoroughly. But the primary literature related to these questions is far too vast, and too specialized, for me to tackle. I am forced to rely on other sources.

Bizarrely enough, something completely different summarized my feelings about this. In considering the nature of environmental news, I was struck by this passage from Amusing Ourselves to Death:

As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant. The abundant flow of information had very little or nothing to do with those to whom it was addressed; that is, with any social or intellectual context in which their lives were embedded. Coleridge's famous line about water everywhere without a drop to drink may serve as a metaphor of a decontextualized information environment: in a sea of information, there was very little of it to use. A man in Maine and a man in Texas could converse, but not about anything either of them knew or cared very much about. The telegraph may have made the country into "one neighbourhood", but it was a peculiar one, populated by strangers who knew nothing but the most superficial facts about each other.

Since we live today in just such a neighborhood (now sometimes called a "global village"), you may get a sense of what is meant by context-free information by asking yourself the following question: How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve? For most of us, news of the weather will sometimes have such consequences; for investors, news of the stock market; perhaps an occasional story about a crime will do it, if by chance the crime occurred near where you live or involved someone you know. But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action. This fact is the principal legacy of the telegraph: by generating an abundance of irrelevant information, it dramatically altered what may be called the "information-action ratio".

In both oral and typographic cultures, information derives its importance from the possibilities of action. Of course, in any communication environment, input (what one is informed about) always exceeds output (the possibilities of action based on information). But the situation created by telegraphy, and hen exacerbated by later technologies, made the relationship between information and action both abstract and remote. For the first time in history, people were faced with the problem of information glut, which means that simultaneously they were faced with the problem of a diminished social and political potency.

You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself another series of questions: What steps do you plan to take reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rate of inflation, crime, and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha'is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: you plan to do nothing about them. You may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some plans, as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once every two or four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a satisfying means of expressing the broad range of opinions you hold. Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and will then submerge it in a Niagra of similar opinions, and convert them into&mdash what else?&mdash another piece of news. Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: the news elicits from you a variety of opinion about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.

It's hard to escape the feeling that something's got to give.

(I suppose I should note that I have a lot of criticisms to make regarding Amusing Ourselves to Death. I will post them later.)

I would just like to note that one of my favorite films, La Planète sauvage (known in English as Fantastic Planet), has been put up on YouTube in its entirety. I saw this movie when I was quite young, and it had a very powerful effect on me.

It's all very weird, though. If you're the kind of person who'd enjoy the Codex Seraphinianus, then you'd probably like it; otherwise, you might find it too odd to be worthwhile.

"In fact, it may be more adequate to view the life cycle itself as the unit of selection rather than the parasite." (From Evolutionary Ecology of Parasites: From Individuals to Communities, by Robert Poulin.)



Bonus thought: I have no friggin' clue how endospores evolved.

From my parasitology textbook (Parasitism, by Bush et al.):

"Dictophyme renale normally infect the right kidney (the reason for the predilection for the right kidney is unknown) of mink (Mustela vison) and effectively turns the kidney into an empty capsule."

Right.

At times like this, I think of the Pkunk: "Ah, the mysteries of the Universe. Try to understand 'em, but can you? Nope, they're mysteries!"

You know how pigeons will walk awkwardly away from you if you get too close, and then fly a little ways away if you chase them? My favorite thing to do with pigeons is to walk behind them slowly, just fast enough for them to try to walk away, in their sort of pigeon-speedwalk, but not fast enough for them to bother flying. If you keep it up for thirty seconds or so, you get one seriously freaked out pigeon. Eventually they decide that it's worth their while to fly away from you after all, and when they do, they want to be way the hell away from the crazy pigeon-stalker that's following them.






I've gone into biology because I love animals. You can tell, can't you?

Stephanos of Alexandria:

"For when it shall spurn the blackness of the wrinkled crust, it is transformed to whiteness; then the moon of shining light shall send forth the rays; then to the later whitening, when you shall see the white compound. For when the full of the moon appears, then the full moon discloses its light. Then solid is the yellowing. What is this? Say. The whiteness perceived. And how do you render the white yellow? Ye wisest of men, over-pass the reasoning, this answer is a secret, a mystic speech and consideration. I will tell you the hidden mystery, whence it is proclaimed above you. 'After the cleaning of the copper and its later attenuation and the blackening for the later whitening, then it is the solid yellowing.' When you see the whitening taking place within it, recognize the concealed yellowing, then know the whitening as being yellow, then also being white, it becomes yellow by its hidden yellowness, by possessing the depths of its heart, by having the corporeal possession of the whiteness of the silver and, unutterably, the pervading whiteness in it. 'This is the solid yellowing.' What is this? That which has become white, it is the yellow. For the same white appears in the colour, but the yellow nature overrules it."

I am very grateful that my organic chemistry textbook was not written in this fashion.

Tags: alchemy

"I used to dream of the day when my computer would be as easy to use as my phone. It has happened. I no longer know how to use my phone." &mdash Bjorn Stroustrup

I seem to own a ton of consumer electronics now. I didn't really ask for them; I've acquired everything as a series of gifts. I feel guilty of excessive consumerism, and thinking about the amount of nitric acid that must have been needed to produce these items makes me cry. I have to admit that they are nice toys, though, and they're expensive enough to make me quite reluctant to return them, on account of the feelings of the gift-givers. Anyway, I thought I'd write a little bit about the most recent items I've acquired:

( Pandigital 11 Inch Digital Picture FrameCollapse )

( Tom-Tom One XL GPS UnitCollapse )

( Olympus Stylus 770SW Digital CameraCollapse )