Notes From A Bear's Journey

  Today was trash day, a term used here in the U.S. to indicate the day that those big 9-miles-per-gallon hydraulic-loaded trucks come and haul away the contents of your rubbish bins, big 50-gallon bins that for us somehow keep filling up each week despite our best efforts at recycling (our recycling bins are rather full as well).  Of course everything is packaged here in the U.S., from the frozen peas to the replacement wiper blades for the car which come complete with every possible bracket and adapter for the various years and models of vehicles.  Off it all goes into either the trash bin or the recycling bin, a dilemma made no easier at the recycling facility which is now fond of the term, "aspirational recycling," a term used to describe how we consumers throw in everything that we think can be recycled but aren't really sure so let the recycling facility sort it out (here's a hint, most of what we throw in with that mindset can NOT be recycled); and off it goes ...

  There's that word, one which means to fill in the blanks, to conclude beforehand, to --as the mnemonic goes if the word is taken apart-- to make an "ass" of "u" and "me."  It's easy to do, of course, to make an assumption of someone or something, to stereotype or lump entire segments of peoples into small groups.  Think of these trigger words: homeless, immigrant, conservative/liberal, hippie, Muslim/Jew/Korean/Chinese/Saudi.  Think of your own impression when you meet someone for the first time and he or she lights up a cigarette or pours a glass of whiskey; does it repel you or draw you closer (perhaps because you do the same?), or maybe it causes you to have no judgement at all; and what if that person were pretty or handsome, or rich or poor.  There are many assumptions we tend to make, sometimes even lumping entire populations together such as "oh, those Americans;" perhaps some of this is because of the instant availability of soc...

  The temperatures have been quite chilly recently, often hovering around -5°C in the mornings.  And yet many of the maple trees have still not fully dropped their leaves.  It's been an almost daily chore for me for awhile, that of me raking the leaves into piles and then mulching them back into the lawn; and while walking the dogs the other morning I noticed one tree dropping a steady cascade of leaves, dropping them as steadily as a waterfall, constant and floating, its golden cargo releasing at different times to produce a moving picture of leaves as I watched and filmed.  But seeing that happen did get me thinking.  Did I never witness this before, me just awakening to see leaves covering the grass as if somehow during the night the trees had colluded to unload all at once?  Certainly you could often see the wind hastening the fall of many leaves but I had never before seen such a waterfall of leaves.  But why not?  With each tree having so ma...

  There is a quote from Francis Bacon: The human mind is often so awkward and ill-regulated in the career of invention, that it is at first diffident, and then despises itself.  For it appears at first incredible that any such discovery should be made, and when it has been made, it appears incredible that it should so long have escaped men's research.  So with that now on your mind, I'm giving you advance notice that i'm splitting this idea in two, that 1) we can see the joy and surprise in new products and inventions that we're amazed at humanity's progress; and 2) we can see and choose to ignore it.  There are lots of examples of the former, which I'll get to later because it's always nice to end on an upbeat note; and there are lots of examples of the latter...genocide, extinctions, histories altered or omitted, and of course, climate change.  This comes up primarily because of the recent report just last month from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate...

  To begin, I am not nor have ever been a cigarette smoker, fate perhaps stepping in when I was just a lad of eleven or so and having my friend and I discover a discarded half-used cigarette in a back alley somewhere.   As kids are wont to do we felt that we had found an illicit treasure as enticing as if we had snuck into a peep show, because there was something to this smoking thing that we as kids didn't understand.  After all, sample packs of cigarettes were being given away everywhere...at the movies, at shopping centers, even at the fairs; and all the movie stars and adults we saw seemed to smoke, and smoked everywhere be it at work or when jetting around the world (luckily, my parents never did smoke cigarettes although my step-father was the tried and true MacArthur image of a pipe-smoker).  So, the half-used prized possession in hand, we somehow cornered a book of matches and excitedly lit the darn thing, that cigarette, taking a big drag as we'd seen i...

   To continue the last post , we humans keep asking where did we come from, what are we doing here, and what's next?  Okay, there was a bit of flack over my mentioning how we humans are just not the most complex beings on this planet, and particularly of issue was my mentioning of wheat.  But as The Atlantic pointed out: For a start, wheat’s genome is monstrously big.  While the genome of Arabidopsis --the first plant to be sequenced-- contains 135 million DNA letters, and the human genome contains 3 billion, bread wheat has 16 billion.  Just one of wheat’s chromosomes --3B-- is bigger than the entire soybean genome.  To make things worse, the bread-wheat genome is really three genomes in one.  About 500,000 years ago, before humans even existed, two species of wild grass hybridized with each other to create what we now know as emmer wheat.  After humans domesticated this plant and planted it in their fields, a third grass species inadverte...

   Not long ago a friend had me read the recent book by Dan Brown (you'd know him as the author of The Davinci Code and other popular fiction thrillers); in the book the theme kept asking two questions about human: Where did we come from, and Where are we going?  As to the ending I'll will simply direct you back to the last post for the answer (it's there, if you look).  One of the things that rings a bit more true for me about who we are or why are we here is that despite our brawn and our bold egos, we might merely be a host species for DNA (the idea behind the movie Prometheus ) the premise being that DNA more or less seeks whatever carrier it can find to continue preserving its life, whether that host is human, animal, plant or who knows what out there in space.  But then came that digging and those bugs.    The digging part is from an interesting series of lectures by archeologist, Dr. Eric H. Cline .  Listening to his talks one can...