Go Long
Back in my younger days there were times when we boys would meet in a huddle during an impromptu American football game, generally just three to a side: someone to hike the ball, someone to throw the ball, and someone to catch the ball (the person hiking would also become a possible catcher). Generally, these games progressed at a snail's pace with neither side really gaining much ground, the thrill of the tags or flags often vanishing as quickly as the daylight (as we grew older the roughness of tackling faded away, not so much because we didn't want to toss and tumble but rather because we now cared a bit about our clothes since, at least in my case, my parents couldn't afford a lot of extra clothes so we kids would try to keep even our "play" clothes as dirt free and as grass-stained free as possible since they might just prove to be the clothes we would be wearing to school the next day and well, girls were beginning to enter the picture and what girl wants to come close to a guy wearing stinky clothes, especially since none of us kids were "true" athletes in that our stinky clothes weren't the clothes worn after a varsity football game or a tough all-out basketball tournament). Anyway, when we got bored which was usually about ten minutes into the game, we would tell the receiver (the initial catcher) to "go long"* which meant that he should just run as fast as he could for as long as he could and the passer would try to get the ball to him in one desperate Hail Mary toss. As a rule, this never worked, the poor guy who was running always coming back to the huddle exhausted and the passer a bit embarrassed that his pass was so wobbly and so way off target and the one who had hiked the ball looking puzzled because he was wide open and could have easily run for a touchdown. Of course, once everyone had almost caught their breath we would try to use the "logic" of convincing each other that how the other side was tired they wouldn't really be expecting another wild toss so the call would go out once again...go long.
Such calls today seem few and far between, unless one is listening to stock analysts who seem quite worried that investors will start believing the talk of an approaching worldwide recession and begin pulling out their monies and fortunes from the market. Think long term, they say. Ride it out, these ups and downs. Shoot for the moon, or Mars, or beyond, that is, if we make it that far. Here's a small bit of perspective from theorists piecing together our Big Bang origins (the old chicken and the egg thing of which came first, the universe or the...well, what else might there be?) In the initial "explosion" of gases, there followed some 380,000 years of virtually nothing, not even matter, a period called the Cosmic Dark Ages (really) because the swirling gases had yet to coalesce and form into something as insignificantly small as particles. Oh, and how long before those gases began binding together and forming small particles and those began binding and rotating enough to become objects (such as the "rings" of Saturn and Uranus)...just another 180 million years or so, still a far cry from where the age of our universe is today at an estimated 13.8 billion years old. Add to that boggling number of years is a reminder that while a version of us primitive humans has existed for what is believed to be 200,000 years, actual human civilization is thought to have only begun around 6,000 years ago (picture it this way, industrialization didn't begin until the 1800s). So let's see where we are in all of this...6000 years (civilized humans) vs. 13,800,000,000 years (the universe). Go long...
Here's one more tidbit, there's something else that has been around for far longer than we have, even longer than either plants or animals...fungi. Remember that famous Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction period of the dinosaurs, the big asteroid and all that? The fungi not only survived that period of extinction but actually blossomed, possibly so much so that it once again became the dominant species on earth. Said a report back in 2012 by microbiologist and immunologist Dr. Arturo Casadevall of John Hopkins: Here are two indisputable facts: we are living in the age of mammals, and immunologically intact mammals are highly resistant to fungal diseases, such that most human systemic fungal are considered “opportunistic”. Could these two facts be connected? Now comes a report in WIRED that fungi are not only back (okay, they never really left) but are adapting to our warming climate. No big deal, you say? Said the head of fungal studies at the CDC (Center for Disease Control in Atlanta) the newly discovered super-yeast fungi may be "more infectious than Ebola." The article goes on to speculate on one possibility for this sudden emergence: There are possibly millions of species of fungi in the world, yet relatively few of them succeed in attacking humans. What protects us from them is our warmth: At 37 degrees Celsius (or 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit), we are hotter than what most fungi can survive. But if something encouraged fungi to tolerate higher temperatures, more of them could become a threat to us -- and the slow heating of the planet may be creating the perfect laboratory in which fungi can adapt...“It’s difficult how rapidly this has spread across the globe,” says Johanna Rhodes, an infectious diseases research fellow at Imperial College London and coauthor of a new review of the yeast’s global spread. “We definitely weren’t ready for it.”...That super-yeast has wreaked havoc in England and South Africa -- as well as here in the US, where it has spread explosively in hospitals, infecting surgical wounds, brewing whole-body bloodstream infections, and clinging to every surface that investigators have thought to check...Imagine every yeast problem that we consider unthinkably minor --skin rashes, vaginal problems, infections of the mouth and throat-- being caused instead by a potentially lethal organism that no drug can touch.
Recently I've been delving into the new series of books from Simon and Schuster which they've titled, Masters At Work. Way, way back there was Studs Terkel who interviewed and chronicled the lives of people as they worked. What was it like working in a coal mine, or making it through the Depression, or building a skyscraper? His stories caught real people doing real jobs, no college courses here; this was how it was once you were actually in the field, be it pounding nails or holding a pencil; his stories captured the spectrum from those wearing fancy suits and dresses to those working the farms and fields. So zoom forward many decades and the art of capturing real lives in real jobs returns with this series. The book on running a restaurant by Patric Kuh is eye-opening (and discouraging if you're harboring the thought), giving you percentages and markups of what you might need to just begin and to keep running (the majority of such openings fail within a year). The book on delving into private investigating proved disappointing being primarily a series of cases and people but little of the gritty start-up background, a sharp contrast to the book on becoming a marine biologist by Virginia Morrell. In it she writes about how Captain Cook sailed around the world (sailed, mind you, and in a large ship)...twice; and he took naturalists to record what he saw and thus is credited with starting the field of marine biology, even writing three volumes of his observations on the Pacific Ocean; his books caught the eye of a young Charles Darwin who had spotted an odd barnacle with holes in its shell, peeked inside with a scope and began his earnest writings on the various mollusks: ...making him the world's authority and establishing his reputation as a major figure in British zoology...Historians credit Darwin's barnacle research as being important to the development of his theory of evolution as his study of the Galapagos Island finches. But the real credit for studying marine life might go to the Phoenicians some 600 years earlier, said author Morrell; they were accompanied by another keen observer who recorded what he saw on those voyages...Aristotle. But with the invention of the steam engine, the most striking takeaway of the book for me became the almost wanton slaughtering of whales; a practice which continued on into just before this century (Japan still does whaling), she writes: ...commercial whalers slaughtered three-quarters of a million fin whales and 360,000 blue whales in the Antarctic's Southern Ocean, the world's richest whaling grounds. As the populations of these giants decreased, hunters turned to smaller humpback, sei, and sperm whales, killing hundreds of thousands of each. They also killed more than a hundred thousand minke whales, a species once considered too small to bother with. The books are rather small and easy to hold, the writings basically more like a rather lengthy article which can be quickly finished, and the subjects are quite varied, from real estate to becoming a baker. It's a form of writing I had previously not known to have been assigned a name, what the publishers describe as "written by acclaimed long-form journalists."
Reading about such findings and terms somehow brought me to something else I wasn't really aware of, that of photons,* those little-understood particles that can break free when two atoms collide and unleash the particles to their speed-of-light travel. This came when I began belatedly watching How The Universe Works (originally aired in 2014 but you can still watch the series on Hulu and other streaming services). Once at the surface of the sun, the photons shoot off into space at the speed of light, reaching us 8 minutes later; you may recognize those photons as sunlight; 93 million miles in 8 minutes (the photons continue their journey without blinking, passing right through us as they continue their journey). But at the time of their explosive formation in the sun's core, the photons face an uphill struggle to make it up to that surface; even at the speed of light it will take them anywhere from 100,000 to a million years to reach the surface of the sun due to the sun's mass, density and other forces, all of which is a good thing because if the photons did break through immediately, their initial intensity as gamma rays would kill us. So there's that and then there's the black hole that sits patiently in our own Milky Way galaxy that can swallow our sun as if it were a grain of sand. You know those black holes that now seem to be a common feature throughout our universe, gobbling up everything in its path (even entire galaxies) with such force that even light cannot escape it...except that a week ago scientists did spot light coming from a black hole. Wait, what? And here's one more thing I recently discovered...here on our planet we think of mass as being in three forms: solid (land), liquid (ocean) and gas (atmosphere). Only there's another big player out there as evidenced in our sun... plasma. And just in case you were wondering, plasma makes up 99.9% of our universe!
Supertramp wrote a song that went in part: So when the day comes to settle down, Who's to blame if you're not around? You took the long way home. Said composer and band member Roger Hodgson: We all want to find our home, find that place in us where we feel at home. Home is in the heart and that is really, when we are in touch with our heart and we're living our life from our heart, then we do feel like we found our home. It was another angle on the question that ran deep inside me, which is, 'Where's my home? Where's peace?' It felt like I was taking a long way to find it. Often mixed in with all of these boggling numbers and distances in both time and space it is easy to lose track of the long view. As the old saying goes, that becomes the long and short of it. But sometimes the most difficult and possibly the longest journey we undertake might be the one inward. Our search to find something else, even someone else (even if that person might be within ourselves) is such a daunting journey that we're hesitant to begin. But then think of the struggle of those photons fighting to free themselves and what a difference it makes when they do and now arrive to us as sunlight. Suddenly they have transformed and become life sustaining. And by adding a single letter to the word "long" we can also find that we might not need to really go long but that now we can both go and get a-long. It's a new discovery, a new way of looking at where we are in this spiral of life, where our hearts are residing and where we are in our home. One letter can give each of us a new way of looking at space and at our planet, a new way of looking at others and maybe even looking at ourselves. And it can really be just that simple.
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| Geologic Time spiral: USGS - Graham, Newman, Stacy (we humans are there somewhere at the very tip of that graph) |
Here's one more tidbit, there's something else that has been around for far longer than we have, even longer than either plants or animals...fungi. Remember that famous Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction period of the dinosaurs, the big asteroid and all that? The fungi not only survived that period of extinction but actually blossomed, possibly so much so that it once again became the dominant species on earth. Said a report back in 2012 by microbiologist and immunologist Dr. Arturo Casadevall of John Hopkins: Here are two indisputable facts: we are living in the age of mammals, and immunologically intact mammals are highly resistant to fungal diseases, such that most human systemic fungal are considered “opportunistic”. Could these two facts be connected? Now comes a report in WIRED that fungi are not only back (okay, they never really left) but are adapting to our warming climate. No big deal, you say? Said the head of fungal studies at the CDC (Center for Disease Control in Atlanta) the newly discovered super-yeast fungi may be "more infectious than Ebola." The article goes on to speculate on one possibility for this sudden emergence: There are possibly millions of species of fungi in the world, yet relatively few of them succeed in attacking humans. What protects us from them is our warmth: At 37 degrees Celsius (or 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit), we are hotter than what most fungi can survive. But if something encouraged fungi to tolerate higher temperatures, more of them could become a threat to us -- and the slow heating of the planet may be creating the perfect laboratory in which fungi can adapt...“It’s difficult how rapidly this has spread across the globe,” says Johanna Rhodes, an infectious diseases research fellow at Imperial College London and coauthor of a new review of the yeast’s global spread. “We definitely weren’t ready for it.”...That super-yeast has wreaked havoc in England and South Africa -- as well as here in the US, where it has spread explosively in hospitals, infecting surgical wounds, brewing whole-body bloodstream infections, and clinging to every surface that investigators have thought to check...Imagine every yeast problem that we consider unthinkably minor --skin rashes, vaginal problems, infections of the mouth and throat-- being caused instead by a potentially lethal organism that no drug can touch.
Recently I've been delving into the new series of books from Simon and Schuster which they've titled, Masters At Work. Way, way back there was Studs Terkel who interviewed and chronicled the lives of people as they worked. What was it like working in a coal mine, or making it through the Depression, or building a skyscraper? His stories caught real people doing real jobs, no college courses here; this was how it was once you were actually in the field, be it pounding nails or holding a pencil; his stories captured the spectrum from those wearing fancy suits and dresses to those working the farms and fields. So zoom forward many decades and the art of capturing real lives in real jobs returns with this series. The book on running a restaurant by Patric Kuh is eye-opening (and discouraging if you're harboring the thought), giving you percentages and markups of what you might need to just begin and to keep running (the majority of such openings fail within a year). The book on delving into private investigating proved disappointing being primarily a series of cases and people but little of the gritty start-up background, a sharp contrast to the book on becoming a marine biologist by Virginia Morrell. In it she writes about how Captain Cook sailed around the world (sailed, mind you, and in a large ship)...twice; and he took naturalists to record what he saw and thus is credited with starting the field of marine biology, even writing three volumes of his observations on the Pacific Ocean; his books caught the eye of a young Charles Darwin who had spotted an odd barnacle with holes in its shell, peeked inside with a scope and began his earnest writings on the various mollusks: ...making him the world's authority and establishing his reputation as a major figure in British zoology...Historians credit Darwin's barnacle research as being important to the development of his theory of evolution as his study of the Galapagos Island finches. But the real credit for studying marine life might go to the Phoenicians some 600 years earlier, said author Morrell; they were accompanied by another keen observer who recorded what he saw on those voyages...Aristotle. But with the invention of the steam engine, the most striking takeaway of the book for me became the almost wanton slaughtering of whales; a practice which continued on into just before this century (Japan still does whaling), she writes: ...commercial whalers slaughtered three-quarters of a million fin whales and 360,000 blue whales in the Antarctic's Southern Ocean, the world's richest whaling grounds. As the populations of these giants decreased, hunters turned to smaller humpback, sei, and sperm whales, killing hundreds of thousands of each. They also killed more than a hundred thousand minke whales, a species once considered too small to bother with. The books are rather small and easy to hold, the writings basically more like a rather lengthy article which can be quickly finished, and the subjects are quite varied, from real estate to becoming a baker. It's a form of writing I had previously not known to have been assigned a name, what the publishers describe as "written by acclaimed long-form journalists."
Reading about such findings and terms somehow brought me to something else I wasn't really aware of, that of photons,* those little-understood particles that can break free when two atoms collide and unleash the particles to their speed-of-light travel. This came when I began belatedly watching How The Universe Works (originally aired in 2014 but you can still watch the series on Hulu and other streaming services). Once at the surface of the sun, the photons shoot off into space at the speed of light, reaching us 8 minutes later; you may recognize those photons as sunlight; 93 million miles in 8 minutes (the photons continue their journey without blinking, passing right through us as they continue their journey). But at the time of their explosive formation in the sun's core, the photons face an uphill struggle to make it up to that surface; even at the speed of light it will take them anywhere from 100,000 to a million years to reach the surface of the sun due to the sun's mass, density and other forces, all of which is a good thing because if the photons did break through immediately, their initial intensity as gamma rays would kill us. So there's that and then there's the black hole that sits patiently in our own Milky Way galaxy that can swallow our sun as if it were a grain of sand. You know those black holes that now seem to be a common feature throughout our universe, gobbling up everything in its path (even entire galaxies) with such force that even light cannot escape it...except that a week ago scientists did spot light coming from a black hole. Wait, what? And here's one more thing I recently discovered...here on our planet we think of mass as being in three forms: solid (land), liquid (ocean) and gas (atmosphere). Only there's another big player out there as evidenced in our sun... plasma. And just in case you were wondering, plasma makes up 99.9% of our universe!
Supertramp wrote a song that went in part: So when the day comes to settle down, Who's to blame if you're not around? You took the long way home. Said composer and band member Roger Hodgson: We all want to find our home, find that place in us where we feel at home. Home is in the heart and that is really, when we are in touch with our heart and we're living our life from our heart, then we do feel like we found our home. It was another angle on the question that ran deep inside me, which is, 'Where's my home? Where's peace?' It felt like I was taking a long way to find it. Often mixed in with all of these boggling numbers and distances in both time and space it is easy to lose track of the long view. As the old saying goes, that becomes the long and short of it. But sometimes the most difficult and possibly the longest journey we undertake might be the one inward. Our search to find something else, even someone else (even if that person might be within ourselves) is such a daunting journey that we're hesitant to begin. But then think of the struggle of those photons fighting to free themselves and what a difference it makes when they do and now arrive to us as sunlight. Suddenly they have transformed and become life sustaining. And by adding a single letter to the word "long" we can also find that we might not need to really go long but that now we can both go and get a-long. It's a new discovery, a new way of looking at where we are in this spiral of life, where our hearts are residing and where we are in our home. One letter can give each of us a new way of looking at space and at our planet, a new way of looking at others and maybe even looking at ourselves. And it can really be just that simple.
*It can prove to be a lot to take in if you're not in the world of physics (I'm not) as evidenced by this opening explanation from Wikipedia: The photon is a type of elementary particle, the quantum of the electromagnetic field including electromagnetic radiation such as light and radio waves, and the force carrier for the electromagnetic force (even when static via virtual particles). The invariant mass of the photon is zero; it always moves at the speed of light within a vacuum. What??? But further into the piece a more simple version of explaining photons brought this: Photons are emitted in many natural processes. For example, when a charge is accelerated it emits synchrotron radiation. During a molecular, atomic or nuclear transition to a lower energy level, photons of various energy will be emitted, ranging from radio waves to gamma rays. Photons can also be emitted when a particle and its corresponding antiparticle are annihilated (for example, electron–positron annihilation). Got that? Me neither...it's easier to watch the Discovery series mentioned above.
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