Science
- Written by: Bent Lorentzen
- Category: Science
Have had a crush on this amazing Canadian scientist for the 15 years that I've followed her work. If you spend a little time with her in this Ted Talk, you'll see why.
You can also just read the transcript to her presentation, but then you miss out on the graphics, images and her personality.
- Written by: Bonnie Armstrong
- Category: Science
My wife decided to have our DNA tested. She didn’t do it to search for genetically based diseases or even for a DNA identification in case I get lost again.
I am a person who gets lost a lot. I get lost in large buildings. I get lost in parking lots. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve been somewhere, I will still lose my way the next time I go there. There is a parking lot in San Diego’s Horton Plaza Shopping Center in which I am guaranteed to get lost. The structure is built so that I can see my car but I cannot get to my car. If the car is a floor beneath me, I will try to walk to that floor. I will walk to the floor below, and the car will then appear to be on the floor above me. It is the New England idiom “You can’t get there from here” made real. No matter where your car is, you can’t get there from where you are.
- Written by: Bent Lorentzen
- Category: Science
A sinewing fog, through ancient browns and green
Dewy leaves, dripping beneath
Misty whispering, through lush green fern
Rain rain, falling falling
Trickling onto, moldy leaves
Flowing through, gnarly roots
Backswimmers delighting, in gathering pools
Woodthrush warily sipping
Shimmering little pools, coming and going
Gathering and rushing, noisily against, mossy rounded stone
Converging and rushing, toward some far off place
Submerging cavernously, reemerging
Flowing powerfully, against mountains old
Carving verdant valleys, into lakes and ponds
Moose braving, seeming surfaces
Beavers laboring, beneath
Fish breathing
WoMen gathering, green power
On and on, flowing toward some far off point
Emptying into, the endless seas
Whales singing, leviathan yearning
Shrimp frolicking, in warm ocean currents
Emptying into, glacial depths
Emerging again, a world away
Bearing the dust, of centuries past
Rising from, a burning sun
Like salmon returning, to streams of birth
Clouds gathering, on winds destined, for mountains scraping sky
Kissing again, places left high and dry
In the cold of winter, the elk stands tall, white vapor, with air dancing
Water thrusting, from a hose, cooling hungry fires
Steam rising, into the city night
Thirsty old man, sweat pouring from his brow
A child gushing, out of swollen womb
The body of water, Amen to life
Bullet through a heart, gushing steaming human blood
Sun above, the earth below; one powers, the other transforms
Ravaging cyclones, dancing with El Ninos
In that balance, above and below, the river flows on and on
Toward some far off place
Scrubbing earth and sky, all at once
And Voyager takes, a snapshot
And Sagan sees... a pale... blue... dot
- Written by: Bent Lorentzen
- Category: Science
In a ”which came first, the chicken or egg” sort of way, have you ever speculated, as you think with words, about what your conscious sense of self would be like in the utter absence of words? In other words, is consciousness dependent on language, or is language dependent on consciousness? This question has long been of special interest to me, mostly due to my work with intelligent birds, such as crows. But more importantly, how do we problem solve a set of civilization-threatening anthropogenic issues that include a mass extinction crisis? It requires that enough people can be on the same page to even be willing to define the problem. Can we understand how others think based on how we think? And we think that we think with words, don’t we? It can creatively take us deep into abstractions, and wondrously into the most complex maths and sciences that demystify the cosmos for our children's children voyages. And it can generate unimaginable hells.
Shakespeare and Descartes speculated about it. As did socialist Helen Keller, deaf and blind, who had no real language until she began inventing one, first through gesticulations, called “home signs,” with a childhood friend her own age. Helen mastered Braille with her lifelong companion and teacher, Anne Sullivan (Johanna Macy), who also taught her to speak well enough to get a college education and hold lectures, with help from the likes of Alexander Graham Bell.
- Written by: Curtis W. Long
- Category: Science
Hey, you idiots over there on the third planet!
When are you going to wake up?
Don’t you dare tell me to, “Can it;”
I’ve been here since Sirius was a pup.
You’d better use me while I’m still around.
I’ve only got five, “Bills” more to go.
That’s just a bit more than I’ve been crowned.
Yeah – 4.5, 3.7 – I know…
- Written by: Bent Lorentzen
- Category: Science
If a large passenger plane crashed every day, would you risk taking a flight? It's estimated that's how many people on average die every day from contracting an antibiotic resistant infection, a superbug, from a hospital stay.
According to the archeological evidence to date, the first peoples to have entered the Copper Age, otherwise known as the Chalcolithic, lived nearly 8,000 years ago on Rudnik mountain in Serbia. Among dozens of later worldwide sites, Egypt stands out, as does precolumbian Mesoamerican civilizations, where tin was soon added to the copper to produce bronze. And based purely on the most intelligent guesses from anthropological evidence, it was likely always a woman who accidentally discovered how to smelt copper, since women had responsibility for the hearth in most of those cultures. If she put a crystalline green rock, malachite, in or around the campfire, especially if it were to make pottery, it would produce a really cool-looking green flame to everyone's amazement, and in the morning she would find a hard black substance remaining, copper-oxide. If later on, that blackish material were to be cooked in the hotter charcoal remains of a campfire, the carbon would bind with the oxygen in the ore and escape into the atmosphere as CO2, leaving behind pure copper. And all this because of the fusion that occurred within a neutron star explosion billions of years before the formation of our solar system.
- Written by: Curtis W. Long
- Category: Science
The great deserts of the world – Gobi, Sahara –
Just sit there, wondering why…
For eons, they sit there in the sun,
Absorbing the light from its ray-gun.
For eons, they sit, listless,
Their sands glowing, blowing,
Ever inert and blissless.
Now, they speak:
- Written by: Bent Lorentzen
- Category: Science
On Dec. 24,
2017, an influential nationalistic member of the Danish parliament, Søren Espersen, said, "Wolves attack small
children and old people. It's nuts to have them in Denmark...[translated
from the Danish]." Espersen is a
member if the Danish People’s Party (DF). In May, 2017, former Danish Minister
of Finance (Secretary of the Treasury) and center-right conservative party member, Henning Dyremose, compared the policies of the DF to
the Ku Klux Klan. Dyremose later explained that he made the remark based on his childhood experiences while living in America.
Søren Espersen wants an
open season on Danish wolves, as does a coalition of European nationalistic
parties, on behalf of sports hunting, sheep and other livestock farmers, and to
undermine the science of the European Union. For the sake of ecosystems stability and
species conservation, the EU Habitats Directive gives wolves maximum protections,
and at first only allowed the destruction of wolves verified to be a direct threat
to humans. And it offers incentives for member states to pay compensation for
livestock loss. This occurred as a result of the 1979 Berne Convention on the Conservation of European
Wildlife and Natural Habitats, which went into effect in 1982. European
countries that are not a member of the EU, such as Norway, do allow limited
hunting of wolves, and there are efforts now to intensely expand culling wolves. This Nordic fear of wolves makes no sense to senior science advisor, Susanne Hanssen, of the Norwegian Environment Agency. Only one case of a fatal wolf attack is recorded in its entire 1200 year history. Sweden has
occasionally flouted the directive, with special hunting permits, with the EU responding with warnings. The EU has
also allowed a culling of 40 wolves in France, which polarized many.
- Written by: Curtis W. Long
- Category: Science
Fire, wind and water,
Though useful
sometimes they be,
Read more: FLAMA, VENTIS, AQUA: NATURE’S VOLATILE, “PAS de TROIS”
- Written by: Curtis W. Long
- Category: Science
My line of sight is shorter than the long, white cane with the sensitive tip that telegraphs the lay of land before me. Now, picture me, alone, at the huge, San Diego Fashion Valley shopping mall – less than a week before Christmas! That was when Fashion Valley became, “Blind Alley.” Although I am hypersensitive to everyone and everything around me, it becomes obvious that, for all practical purposes, I am invisible – especially to the people who almost stumble over my white cane. (This probably is the only ploy that has not, as yet, occurred to the terrorists – oops!)
