The world is big, but it isn’t so big that we can’t hurt it

A green thought bubble
I’m binding my poetry into books. I’ve got two books so far of 300 poems. My books of the next 300 will be done soon. I’m working all day tomorrow, so it’ll have to wait until I get home. I love my velobind machine.

I had forgotten that back in 2011, when I would write a poem, I might write a one page meditation about the poem.

Reading them again is like meeting myself a second time. Some feelings are the same, some are less familiar.

One quote I found:

“The world is big, but it isn’t so big that we can’t hurt it.”

All of the shouting about climate change misses the point. We’re hurting our planet. The exact mechanism doesn’t really matter.

Animals are suffering. Plants are suffering. The oceans are suffering. The land is suffering. The air is suffering. People are suffering.

The planet is suffering and we’re to blame.

A Great War: Scorched Earth

The first phase of a great war has begun: Scorched earth.

The jungle has been filled with unfriendly foes. Our allies started the first round. Everything in sight near the base’s borders has been killed.

The round up of the enemies has taken its awful toll on the jungle closest to the base.

No one has returned (yet). It’s a race between the foes and friends to see who will seed combatants first. I may have to invest in some mercenary reinforcements and plant interlopers where death is currently holding our vain hope.

A second front of the scorched earth campaign took down vines covering the foliage unchallenged. They had been hiding horrific mines planted with the help of enemy canine patrols. They were attacked with two or three salvos. Nothing but remnants have been left behind.

The second phase of the war has already started: Decimation.

Correspondence

A green thought bubble
A friend of mine accused me of being old school today.

Lately I’ve been sending friends U.S. Mail letters.

I think that getting a piece of paper in the mail is appreciated a little more than a missive in e-mail. It’s got some substance that you can decide to save in a scrap book when it comes from someone special. I treasure the letters I got from my grandmother.

When you read the letter, you’re seeing more than merely the traces of my fingers on a keyboard tidied up by a spell checker. You can see that there is a real human that you are communicating with.

What’s more romantic? Getting an email from your date thanking you for a nice evening or a physical card expressing gratitude in a flowing cursive script?

I’m not real enamored with “internet time.” The passage of time gives some perspective. I’m less likely to go on a circuitous rant about the current political dispute if I take 10 minutes writing in ink. I’m not going to hit “send” with some half-baked whining that I’ll regret 10 seconds later.

Time has great power. I don’t take enough of it. When I write a letter, you know that it’s something from the heart.

Vulnerable

Thought bubble
In the book “Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other,” Sherry Turkle said “With some exceptions, when we make ourselves vulnerable we expect to be nurtured.” (p. 235) She’s referring Erik Erikson and the expectations coming from basic trust. That’s something that’s completely counter to the way that the Internet often works. For the most part, any time you put yourself out there, you’re at risk of being attacked or ridiculed rather than built up and comforted.

One place for this risk comes from places that encourage intimacy. It’s not always easy to trust people to begin with. Letting your guard down out there in the social media dystopia isn’t always safe. If one makes comments that might be too hard to share in person, it can still end up hurting.

One reason for this is that anonymity allows people to be more negative and exhibit the dark tetrad personality traits when, in person, they wouldn’t act out. To them, the idea that people have feelings or that they are afraid of being humiliated is alien. Often, the enemy only feels good by getting some lolz.

Sometimes you can find a community of like-minded people where you can be safe. This reflects Sherry’s comment “Communities are places where one feels safe enough to take the good and the bad.” (p. 238) I’ve found some, like deviantART, are different than most social media. One reason is that to belong there, you have to put in some work. You can’t just repost an inane meme and belong. A member of dA is a creator. A pretender just looks around and is lurking.

Every time you get in front of a computer screen and post something on Twitter or Facebook, it’s possible to misstep and be misunderstood catastrophically.

Dreaming

Lightning bolts striking To The Right Right To The Left left. Two images Layered making this 30 sec, 250 ISO – f5.6 – 90mm. (C) 2011 James Bo Insogna


Last night, I had some really realistic dreams. While thinking about dreams from the past, it seems that, depending on a person’s strengths and experiences, a dream might contain different symbols.

For example, an effect of experience: I was really successful at taking tests when I was in school. A consequence of that is that I never have dreams about an unexpected test coming up or the anxiety of getting there late.

An effect of strengths: Often my dreams include text. While I can recognize the words on the page, if I look away and look back again, the words have all changed. I can’t remember the message. Apparently my brain’s system that recognizes words and letters is closer to my core than the semantic part that understands them.

One feature of my sleep is that I often have “hypnogogic hallucinations:” I start dreaming before I’m actually asleep. Past experiences have usually been the face of a single person that appears and then vanishes. Recently, the images include two people instead of one. I wonder what that change signifies?

Last night, my dreams were hyper-realistic. Everything was really detailed and pretty mundane. Nothing was bizarre or mixed up. For example, I saw a rain shower in the distance. I could see the edges of where the rain was falling and the dark clouds that were above them. In the dream, I was picking up some papers because the approaching storm could scatter them. They looked like real pieces of papers and as I piled them together, they didn’t do something strange such as transforming into a bird or a monster.

One aspect of last night’s dream was anxiety about a tornado coming. In the past I’ve had real tornadoes coming near me. Eventually, I had one pass directly over where I was hiding and I never had a tornado dream again. I didn’t see one last night, but I was worried that one might come.

Original image: To The Right Right To The Left left. By Bo Insogna, TheLightningMan.com [Image license]

Hint of a disease prevention treatment

A green thought bubbleI was reading a science news website and found “Global research team cracks bacteria transmission codes to combat drug-resistant strains.” I did some research related to the article and found “Exploiting Quorum Sensing To Confuse Bacterial Pathogens.”

The quorum sensing paper describes a novel way to prevent bacterial disease. It reports that many bacteria grow innocuously until they reach a certain population (quorum). After there are enough, they signal each other to activate. It is only until that activation that the bacteria cause harm.

The idea is: if you could block the signal that causes the activation, you could prevent diseases.

The most clever aspect of this style of treatment is that it doesn’t kill the bacteria. It would give the bacteria no evolutionary advantage to develop resistance to the new drug.

The way resistance normally develops, as I understand it, is that a conventional antibiotic kills bacteria. If a bacteria has a mutation that makes it less likely to be killed, the mutation gives the resistant bacteria an advantage and become more common. This leads, for example, to VRSA and MRSA.

By stopping the bacteria without killing them, there’s no advantage to resist the drug.

LaSarre, B., & Federle, M. J. (2013). Exploiting Quorum Sensing To Confuse Bacterial Pathogens. Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews : MMBR, 77(1), 73-111. doi:10.1128/MMBR.00046-12

The price of gas is flat

I keep track of how much I pay for gas. As you can see from the graphic, it’s really variable. However, the past 10 – 12 months, the price has been unusually stable. The red line is a 30 sample moving average.

The numbers for this graph comes from what I’ve actually paid for gas.  Most of the purchases are in the Northeastern Indiana area.

Several online sources blame the great recession on a sharp rise in the cost of energy.   A flat cost probably has the opposite effect of stabilizing the economy. One reason would be that it allows more effective planning by businesses that are dependent on energy prices.

An analysis of the factors leading to this price stability would be interesting to study.

A graph of the prices of gasoline from 2004 to 2017

(The gap between 2009 and 2001 is due to the loss of the file containing that information. I’ve attached a PDF with the same graph.)

GasPrices-2004-2017

1913 Bible

I went to the local antique shop and found this beautiful Bible. It has an engraved wooden cover. I also appreciate it’s using photographs for some of the illustrations inside the book.

Engraved Cover

The title page says that is the Authorised Version from 1913.

The inscription in the back of the title page reads:

“In terms of the Letters Patent granted by Her late Majesty Queen Victoria to Her Printers for Scotland, and of the instructions issued by Her Majesty in Council, dated Eleventh July, Eighteen Hundred and Thirty-nine, I hereby License and Authorise William Collins, Sons and Company, Limited to Print and Publish, as by the Authority of His Majesty King George the Fifth, an Edition of the New Testament, in Brevier Antique Type, decimo-sexto size, to consist of Six Thousand Copies, as proposed in their Declaration, dated the Twentieth day of February, Nineteen Hundred and Thirteen, the terms and conditions of the said Instructions being always and to all points fully complied with and observed by the said William Collins, Sons and Company, Limited. Dated at London, the Eighth day of March, Nineteen Hundred and Thirteen. Alex. Ure.

A couple of the plates include:

“Bethlehem (Ephrath or Ephratah) is 2527 feet above the sea-level, on two hills. The modern town. Beit Lahm lies east of the main road from Jerusalem to Hebron (Ruth 1.2; 1 Sam. 16.11; Matt. 2.1, 8; Luke 2.4 etc.)”

“The supposed tomb of Lazarus (near Bethany), whom Jesus raised from the dead (John 11.3) The picture shows the opening from which the stone was removed.”

Usually in my Bible collection, I collect different translations, but this is a beautiful enough volume, that I intend to keep it as a duplicate.

Imbalanced

The universal model for depression is that it a chemical imbalance in the brain. I have serious reservations about the value of that model.

The core problem with the idea is that it is disempowering. The message is “you can’t help yourself get better.”

What thoughts that follow once a person believes that their depression is due to a chemical imbalance?

  • “I’m broken.” Since my brain is what I use for all of my thoughts and memories, I’m basically defective.
  • “There isn’t anything I can do.” Chemistry is complicated; I don’t understand it, so how can I do anything to help?
  • “It’s not going to go away on its own.” Since my brain is a bunch of microscopic neurons firing, they’re not going to fix something as severe as a chemical imbalance.
  • “It’s a medical problem.” Doctors are the ones who treat medical problems, so I need a psychiatrist and medications.

When you cut your hand, you know what is hygienic. Rinse it in water. Keep it clean and cover it with a bandage. Watch for signs of infection or use an antibiotic ointment.

A person can be suffering and depressed. Today, the person learns very few tools for recovery. There isn’t any hygiene to practice; no prevention strategies.

A treatment plan might be little more than not to get worse. The tacit meaning of “chemical imbalance” is that a depressed person needs to look to doctors. Then, people with letters after their name can help make the best of it.

Although this can be an appropriate treatment, the model for a disease needs to be useful.

“Chemical imbalance in the brain” is glib. It rolls of the tongue so easily that it doesn’t get inspection. However, it doesn’t help anyone understand depression nor take action.

Don’t shoot the message

A well-known cliche is “Don’t shoot the messenger.” When someone brings bad news, don’t blame the messengers who brought it.

A related principle is “Don’t shoot the message.” This principle notes that a good idea that comes from an bad source is still a good idea.

A thought experiment:

Some physicians and medical scientists defect to ISIS. They discover a cure for cancer that is extremely inexpensive. In addition, this cure has a 95% 10 year survival rate. The cure is simple to use and very safe. What would you, as a patient, do with a cure that was created by terrorists?

One situation to apply the principle is in religious spheres. The spiritual principles from an incompatible faith community can still deserve a fair hearing.

Perhaps the most obvious way this principle is violated today is in the political arena. If the minority party in the Senate has a good idea, the majority opponents won’t consider it for more than a minute.

If you’re making a decision, don’t shoot the message.