Notes From A Bear's Journey

     We humans are an odd lot, and boy are there a lot of us.  Forget the billions and billions, numbers now so common with money that we just sort of walk away unimpressed.  Rather, just think of yourself at a football game or a concert, a protest or a crowded freeway.  All those people, and each of them thirsty and hungry and having to shower and poop and all the rest.  And that's just a few thousands or tens of thousands.  Now multiply that scene throughout the world.  It's rather boggling when you stop to think about it, the infrastructure that's needed to support it all...the water and the drains and the sewage pipes that need to go to each home or hotel room or whatever, the food deliveries that have to come from farm to processor to grocery shelf or restaurant, the electrical and gas lines that need to remain hidden but yet need to reach inside each home and building.  All of that operating smoothly...unless you're living somewher...

     It's not that easy being green, sang Kermit on Sesame Street.  And in today's world, hearing the words "being green" brings to mind everything from the Green New Deal to War Communism , which is not what you think (picture Kamala Harris vs. Joe Biden).  But I prefer to jump back to the words of Kermit:  It seems you blend in w ith so many other ordinary things, a nd people tend to pass you over.  When my brother and I were much younger --he single in Hawaii and us driving past an endless array of bronzed, fit, and scantily-clad bodies of all sorts in Waikiki-- I asked him how he seemed to avoid all the temptation since he was looking to settle down.  "They all use the same toilet paper, " he told me.  "You need to look for something more."  And right there, he had summed up life in a nutshell.  Take everything away --the money, the fame, the beautiful body, the youth, the muscles, the whatever else you've been led to believe ...

     Call it what you will --mountain lion, puma, cougar-- these cats are big (2nd largest in north America) elusive, fierce, and...social?  New studies recently reported in National Geographic are showing that the cats appear to share food with other possible "competitor" cats in their territories.  Said the article: “For more than 60 years of intensive research... we have said that [cougars] are solitary, robotic killing machines,” says Mark Elbroch, lead scientist for the Puma Program at Panthera, the global wild cat conservation organization.  “Instead, what we have unveiled is a secretive animal with a complex social system completely built on reciprocity.  That flies in the face of everything we ever thought about this animal...Elbroch hypothesizes, though, that removing a male from a cougar population may lead to social upheaval—potentially informing how wildlife agencies approach management of the species.  " If it is creating social...

     To be fair, I've written about the sun on several occasions , and perhaps it is because of the cold winter pecking away at different parts of the country that one is so happy when this "near" star breaks through the clouds and allows us to feel a bit of its heat (as one of my earlier posts said, in quoting theoretical physicist Christophe Gelfard:  If mankind could, one way or another, harvest all the energy the Sun radiates in one second, it would be enough to sustain the entire world's energy-needs for about half a billion years ).  Two new satellites ( one already there ) will give us deeper insights into this life-giving source of power; but another question recently emerged and that was, why is our sun so round, as in perhaps the roundest star in our solar system (our own planet Earth is more of a slightly squashed shape).  Said the LRB blog , our sun is: ... too round; a rapidly rotating gaseous body should be flattened and yet our star is the m...

     This idea of "order" began by my reading of an article on judicial law in the UK (from the London Review of Books ), a piece which spoke of the laws against assisted suicide: .. .the law continues to inhibit the entitlement of a sane individual to draw a line under a life that may well have been fulfilling and worthwhile but has now become unbearable, by threatening to prosecute and jail anyone who –regardless of motive– gives them the help they need to end it.   Not only this; if the helper –a spouse, say– would have inherited the deceased person’s estate, the law may step in to disinherit them.  Whether it actually does so depends on the applicability of forfeiture legislation, which itself defers to what it recognises as a principle of public policy –that is to say, a principle developed and applied by the courts– that denies a wrongdoer the fruits of his or her own crime ‘in certain circumstances’, as the statute reticently puts it.  What thes...

    Returning to the recent post on insects and other things that may be "bugging" you,  I neglected to mention the feature story in  National Geographic  titled "Where Have All the Insects Gone?"  The article said in part:  If humans were to suddenly disappear, biologist Edward O. Wilson has famously observed, the Earth would “regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed 10,000 years ago.”  But “if insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”   It is, therefore, shocking --and alarming-- that in most places scientists have looked recently, they’ve found that insect numbers are falling...Researchers working in a protected forest in New Hampshire found that the number of beetles there had fallen by more than 80 percent since the mid-1970s, while the bugs’ diversity --the number of different kinds-- had dropped by nearly 40 percent...A recent study of North American birds found that their numbe...