Notes From A Bear's Journey

   The film Anon with Clive Owen shows a perhaps not-so futuristic world, one where everyone's data and whereabouts is able to be viewed.  The plot centers around the main character being puzzled when a person he passes has no data showing; how is that possible?  Indeed, as Jack Shafer of Politco wrote:  Your “bloat-laden smartphone” harvests and sells personal information, including real-time location, to third parties.  Your internet service provider does the same with your online habits.  Gizmodo readers know all about how home devices --toothbrushes, smart TVs, Amazon Echos, sleep monitors, coffee makers, thermostats, smart lights, bathroom scales, et al.-- spy on them via the internet.  Meanwhile, car companies have joined the queue to sell your driver data.  We’re living in a Philip K. Dick novel!   And they want more...Facebook* and the others have realized that their audience is just beginning, even as those under 25 begin to look to new horizons.  Said James Temperton in

   You've likely read about the trails and travails of Facebook, how its (and your) data and privacy are collected and sold and used.  Word is that Amazon, still unprofitable in its shipping and products, makes most of its money from its data, which pretty much means...you; add Google to the mix and you're almost there.  Microsoft and Apple round out the picture, making the news in everything from the New York Review of Books (in a review of Alexander Klimberg's book, The Darkening Web ) to Rolling Stone .  The term itself --the Big Five-- has been used to describe our fears in oil companies and corporate dominance (it was commonly used in Hawaii to describe the controlling sugar interests there)...even our psychological path to success .  But trying to tackle the subjects of such massive companies as Google (which runs the platform on which this blog is appearing) or Facebook or Apple would be an exercise in futility.  So let's just jump to the data collection.   

   Funny thing, our vision.  Remember reading about those cortical nerves and a third being dedicated just to our eyes?  Turns out that our brains devote a lot more space to our eyes as well, or maybe it's the other way around (estimates are that between 30-50% of our neocortex is devoted to our vision).  For one thing, our vision arrives upside down on our retinas, complete with a blind spot for each eye (an actual missing piece).  And the eye is constantly vibrating, anywhere from 120 to 200 times per second; and you might ask, just how do they know this?  When a drug is administered that stops this movement, the patient loses vision (which returns when the drug wears off and the eyes are allowed to resume their motion; in other words, without the vibrating we would not be able to see).  The brain is left to sort all of this out, from "filling in" the blind spot to making sense of the moving images (think Steadycam).  Sounds easy enough but the images pretty much arrive

   This recent for-sale ad caught my eye for some reason; it read: Sale of second-hand stock of philosophy books and related subjects, ca. 18,500 books.  The stock is on offer as one lot, inclusive of shelving (optional).   So I read that and thought who on earth collects (and attempts to sell) so many books?  As it turns out, quite a number of folks.  Then came this: Fast-forward to the fourteenth century and the Catholic church was again in trouble.  Between 1378 and 1417, first two and then three concurrent popes claimed authority over western Christendom.  Each contender maintained his own Sacred College of Cardinals, and his own administrators and offices.  The causes of the split were political rather than theological.  The followers of the rival popes were divided, in large part, along geographical lines...in 1414 a general council of the church convened in Constance with a view to mending the schism.  The council was a logisitical exercise with few precedents.  Apart from 30,

   For much of the world, one of the rituals of waking up is having a cup or two of coffee (in the U.S., 90% of adults consume some form of caffeine daily).  This can now come in many forms well beyond the dark espressos and American versions (a friend of mine called coffee here in the U.S. little more than water filtered through old socks).  Another friend roasts his own beans and disdains my taste for dark roasts saying that they taste "burnt" and bitter to him.  Ah the varieties of taste.  Among this of course, I've left out the flavored creamers and fancier (pricier) versions of macchiatos and affogatos or the more popular cappuccinos, not to mention the cold brews and iced coffees, each giving their blast of sugars and milks to add to the caffeine.  Worldwide, 52 million pounds of coffee beans are consumed daily.  Myself, a couple of hearty cups of black in the morning and I'm held over for the day.  But as with so much of the world, there was much more the disc

Typical construction of mason bee house    Much has happened in the past few days, much of it the usual transitioning of spring to summer, the mowing of lawns and dealing with sprinklers (changing out solenoids and diaphrams), scheduling overdue appointments and discovering that Costco is already starting to close out some of its summer items as it prepares for the coming fall (what??...we just started June).  So one of the items already out online but with a few left in the warehouses were Swiss bee houses, not for Swiss bees but rather made in Switzerland.  Filled with little tubes, this sort of "home" is meant to house wild mason bees...and then came the article in Scientific American .  Said the piece (as is also noted on the bee house):   BOBs (blue orchard bee) are nothing like honeybees...honeybees are social.  One queen and thousands of female workers live together in colonies that can last for years.  Multiple generations of workers divvy up the jobs that keep