Publish or perish

150 years ago today, Charles Darwin gave his first public presentation of the Theory of Evolution to scientific amateurs at the Linnaean Society of London.  He had been compiling observations and consolidating his thoughts for at least 25 years, and The Origin of Species was in preparation.  But in June he received a paper by Russel Wallace, entertaining some very similar ideas.  At the encouragement of friends, he decided to go on record with his thoughts in their yet-preliminary state, so as not to be scooped.

Darwin’s presentation, loaded with factual detail, was received in sleepy silence.  The Linnean society's president Thomas Bell, writing in his review of 1858, concluded the year had not been marked by ‘any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionise the department of science’.

Article by Robin McKie from The Guardian

Take a nap

In a Nature Neuroscience article, it was shown that a ninety minute daytime nap helps speed up the process of long term memory consolidation...

A second part of the study focused on skill acquisition and consolidation.  It was found that daytime sleep can shorten the time ‘how to’ memory becomes immune to interference and forgetting.

—from a Press release by Avi Karni and Maria Korman of University of Haifa

Défense de penser

Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine —
Unweave a rainbow.

~John Keats, from Lamia 1819

To Science

Science! True daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

—Edgar Allen Poe
Music and images in Youtube video

Transforming our weaknesses

“Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought”

“Strength is born in the deep silence of long-suffering hearts; not amid joy.”

“Having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all costs of tedium and distaste.   The gain in self confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labor is immense.”

Arthur Helps, born this day in 1813, wrote books of aphorisms.  He very much wanted to be able to create larger literary constructions, but his attention span and focus made this difficult.  Perhaps if he were alive today, he would be be diagnosed with ADD.  He reworked his personal struggles as universal truths, and wrote them down to inspire others.

As he hit his stride in later life, he created a massive, 4-volume history of slavery which helped turn the world’s moral compass around. 

   “The Caladrius is a bird of which it is related that, when it is carried into the presence of a sick person, if the sick man is going to die, the bird turns away its head and never looks at him; but if the sick man is to be saved the bird never loses sight of him but is the cause of curing him of all his sickness. Like unto this is the love of virtue. It never looks at any vile or base thing, but rather clings always to pure and virtuous things and takes up its abode in a noble heart; as the birds do in green woods on flowery branches. And this Love shows itself more in adversity than in prosperity; as light does, which shines most where the place is darkest.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

“The climate...was the colorless, reductionist world of 19th century classical physics, which by that time had strongly affected the outlook of western society in general. The living world did not exist in any fundamental sense for classical physics: reality lay only in atoms, their interactions, and certain forces that acted at a distance. The living world, in all its complexity and beauty, was merely a secondary, highly derived and complicated manifestation of atomic reality and, like everything else in our direct experience, could (in principle) be completely explained (away) in terms of the ever-jostling sea of tiny atomic particles. The intuitive disparity between atomic reality and the “biological reality” inherent in direct experience became the dialectic that underlay the development of 20th century biology.”

— Carl Woese realized 40 years ago that Archaea is a biological kingdom in its own right, and was the first to propose that life on earth began in the form of  RNA, which served as both enzyme (‘ribozyme’) and repository of genetic information.  Today, Woese turns 80, and he remains an original thinker about the Big Picture in biology.

The Creed of my Heart

The rose-lit clouds of morning; the sun-kissed mountain heights;
The orient streaks and flushes; the mingling shades and lights;
The flow of the lonely river; the voice of its distant stream;
The mists that rise from the meadows, lit up by the sun’s first beam;—
They mingle and melt as I watch them; melt and mingle and die.
The land is one with the water: the earth is one with the sky.
The parts are as parts no longer: Nature is All and One:
Her life is achieved, completed: her days of waiting are done.

—Edmond Gore Alexander Holmes (1850–1906)

A century before Rosa Parks

A black woman refused to give up her seat on a bus.  She was brutally attacked and thrown off...and she took the case to court.  It was the summer of 1854, and her name was Elizabeth Jennings.

Here’s how the The New York Tribune reported the Jennings incident in a February 1855 article: “She got upon one of the Company’s cars last summer, on the Sabbath, to ride to church. The conductor undertook to get her off, first alleging the car was full; when that was shown to be false, he pretended the other passengers were displeased at her presence; but (when) she insisted on her rights, he took hold of her by force to expel her. She resisted. The conductor got her down on the platform, jammed her bonnet, soiled her dress and injured her person. Quite a crowd gathered, but she effectually resisted. Finally, after the car had gone on further, with the aid of a policeman they succeeded in removing her.”

Jennings sued the company, the driver, and the conductor. Messrs. Culver, Parker, and Arthur represented her. Arthur was Chester A. Arthur, then a novice 21-year-old lawyer and future President of the United States. This law firm was hired because it had demonstrated some talent in the area of civil rights the year before.

Elizabeth Jennings claimed $500 worth of damage. The majority of the jury wanted to give her the full amount, but, as the Tribune put it, "Some jury members had peculiar notions as to colored people's rights." They eventually agreed to give her $225, and the court added 10% plus her expenses.

Within a month of the Jennings decision, an African American named Peter Porter was barred from an Eighth Avenue rail car.  He too sued and the company settled out of court. From then on, African Americans were allowed to ride on New York rail cars on an equal basis.

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«Le véritable voyage de découverte ne consiste pas à chercher de nouveaux paysages, mais à avoir de nouveaux yeux.»

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but having new eyes”

— Marcel Proust

Laughter and irony

«C’est quelque chose, le rire : c’est le dédain et la compréhension mêlés, et en somme la plus haute manière de voir la vie.»

“Consider laughter: it can be disdain; it can be misapprehension; but at its best, it is the highest attitude toward life.”

— Gustave Flaubert

Ironie: Lassen Sie sich nicht von ihr beherrschen, besonders nicht in unschöpferischen Momenten. In schöpferischen versuchen Sie es, sich ihrer zu bedienen, als eines Mittels mehr, das Leben zu fassen. Rein gebraucht, ist sie auch rein, und man muß sich ihrer nicht schämen; und fühlen Sie sich ihr zu vertraut, fürchten Sie die wachsende Vertraulichkeit mit ihr, dann wenden Sie sich an große und ernste Gegenstände, vor denen sie klein und hilflos wird. Suchen Sie die Tiefe der Dinge: dort steigt Ironie nie hinab, — und wenn Sie 50 an den Rand des Großen führen, erproben Sie gleichzeitig, ob diese Auffassungsart einer Notwendigkeit Ihres Wesens entspringt. Denn unter dem Einfluß ernster Dinge wird sie entweder von Ihnen abfallen (wenn sie etwas Zufälliges ist), oder aber sie wird (so sie wirklich eingeboren Ihnen zugehört) erstarken zu einem ernsten Werkzeug und sich einordnen in die Reihe der Mittel, mit denen Sie Ihre Kunst werden bilden müssen.

Irony: Don’t let yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments. When you are fully creative, try to use it as one more way to take hold of life. Used purely, it too is pure, and one needn’t be ashamed of it; but if you feel yourself becoming too familiar with it, if you are afraid of this growing familiarity, then turn to great and serious objects, before which it becomes small and helpless. Search into the depths of things: there, irony never descends - and when you arrive at the edge of greatness, find out whether this way of perceiving the world arises from a necessity of your being. For under the influence of serious things it will either fall away from you (if it is something accidental), or else (if it is really innate and belongs to you) it will grow strong, and become a serious tool and take its place among the instruments with which you can form your art.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

What does it take to remind us that the familiar is not ordinary?

Humans have an uncanny ability to domesticate everything they touch.   Eventually, even the strangest things become absorbed into the routine of the daily mind with its steady geographies of endurance, anxiety and contentment.  Only seldom does the haze lift, and we glimpse for a second, the amazing plenitude of being here.  Sometimes, unfortunately, it is suffering or threat that awakens us.   It could happen that one evening, you are busy with many things, netted into your role and the phone rings.  Someone you love is suddenly in the grip of an illness that could end their life within hours.  It only takes a few seconds to receive that news.  Yet, when you put the phone down, you are already standing in a different world.  All you know has just been rendered unsure and dangerous.  You realise that the ground has turned into quicksand.  Now it seems to you that even mountains are suspended on strings.

—John O’Donohue

Improvisation for Angular Momentum

Perhaps the death mother like the birth mother
does not desert us but comes to tend
and produce us, to make room for us
and bear us tenderly, considerately,
through the gates, to see us through,
to ease our pains, quell our cries,
to hover over and nestle us, to deliver
us into the greatest, most enduring
peace, all the way past the bother of
recollection,
beyond the finework of frailty,
the mishmash house of the coming & going,
creation’s fringes,
the eddies and curlicues

~ A.R. Ammons

Start by listening...

“I’ve learned that practical solutions to extreme poverty can only come from listening to poor people themselves.”

— Paul Polak is a retired psychiatrist who has devoted himself to the problems of poverty in the third world.  He develops small, ‘obvious’ solutions and finds  ways to reproduce them sustainably. 
Interview in Smithsonian magazine. 
Video introduction

Virtually all ‘dollar-a-day’ people in rural areas own their own houses. But the walls are made of mud and wattle, usually there's a thatched roof, and the floor is a mixture of dung and clay. The house has no value. You can't sell it and, even more critically, you can't go to a bank and use it [as collateral] for a loan. But for $100 you can build a 20-square-meter house—a skeleton of eight beams and a good roof that they can add bricks or cinder blocks to. Then they can go to the bank and borrow against it.