Grace takes the form of methane

Warnings that we humans are hogging more than our share of the earth’s resources and collectively making the place less livable have been in our face for decades, if not centuries.  The need for collective global action has been obvious, while we as a species have equivocated, temporized and denied.

Now comes reprieve we have not earned in the form of a little more time to get our act together.  The Marcellus Shale runs through Appalachia, from Eastern Tennessee up through mid New York State, and was surveyed last year to contain perhaps 50 trillion cu ft of recoverable natural gas, clean energy with much less CO₂ per joule than coal.

Let’s use this reprieve wisely.

Harvest moon

The Hindoos compare the moon to a saintly being who has reached the last stage of bodily existence. Great restorer of antiquity, great enchanter! In a mild night when the harvest or hunter’s moon shines unobstructedly, the houses in our village, whatever architect they may have had by day, acknowledge only a master. The village street is then as wild as the forest. New and old things are confounded. I know not whether I am sitting on the ruins of a wall, or on the material which is to compose a new one. Nature is an instructed and impartial teacher, spreading no crude opinions, and flattering none; she will be neither radical nor conservative. Consider the moonlight, so civil, yet so savage! 

— Henry David Thoreau

Whatever it takes

In psychological experiments conducted at UC Santa Barbara, Travis Proulx has found that reading Kafka enhances the mind’s ability to perceive new patterns, even when those patterns are unconsciously appreciated, and not articulated.  

It’s an interesting result, and convention dictates that Proulx gets first crack at telling us what it means.  Is this, as the author claims, a benefit of confronting the absurd, forcing the mind into a mode where it casts a wider net in search of reason and order?

Drawing us into paradox is a mark of great art.  We all recognize the utility of keeping our minds fresh, avoiding the dismissive response, renewing our capacity for creativity.  My take on this is that there is no formula for stimulating our creativity.  It is exciting that some correlates of creativity can be measured, but the ability to enhance creativity defies quantification and is, in fact, a mark of high art.

— Article in Science Times

Animal talk

Perhaps it’s a conceit to imagine that language belongs exclusively to humans.  So far, we have decoded only a few of their ‘words’.  We presume that the language is limited to a few warning calls, but we really don’t know how extensive or how nuanced it is.  A few years ago, we would have said there is no language at all.  Best studied are warning cries, because we can see the behaviors that they elicit.  There is a powerful selective incentive to develop recognition of warning cries, so we shouldn’t be surprised if these are the first language that animals exhibit.  But is there more?  Are there dozens or hundreds of unique sounds in their vocabularies?  Is there a grammar that expands the range of meaning with context?

Apes and monkeys are close enough to humans that we can easily imagine a complex sociality.  But birds with their tiny brains seem, if anything, more adapted for verbalization.  And dolphins’ language is known to be rich and varied, but thus far un-decoded by man.

Olivia Judson, blogging in the NYTimes this week, tells us about animal cries.  Jungle animals are polyglots, and can understand the cries of other species:

Diana monkeys, for example, don’t use the same sounds for “eagle!” or “leopard!” as Campbell’s monkeys do. But they respond to recordings of a Campbell’s monkey shouting “eagle!” or “leopard!” just as they would to a shout from one of their own, or a sighting of the predator itself.

Judson describes the little that is known about how animal groups teach their young to talk:

Young vervet monkeys, for example, appear to have an innate tendency to shout “eagle!” — but they do it at anything that’s in the air, be it an eagle, a vulture or a falling leaf. They shout “snake!” at long, thin things on the ground — like twigs. As they get older they learn to refine their calls. This seems to be through positive reinforcement — when they make the right call, adults join in and do it too. (It’s tempting to think there may be negative reinforcement as well. One researcher reported seeing a mother run up a tree after her infant gave a “leopard!” alarm. But there was no leopard — only a harmless mongoose — and when the mother caught up with the infant, she gave it a smack.)

Link to Judson’s column

Shhh!

Every word is an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.

— Sameul Beckett

I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.

The Physics of Fate

The Large Hadron Collider failed because the Higgs Boson doesn’t wish to be discovered.

Surely this is the kind of thinking that primitive philosophers invoked in ancient times.  Banished by the Enlightenment, teleological thinking has long ago been routed out of the halls of Science.

Think again.  The phenomena of physics have led us to such a strange place that brilliant and straight-faced mainstream scientists talk about Fate.

“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” says Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen.

article in Science Times today

Compassion and the Dismal Science

“We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith was born 101 years ago today

“Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”

Man’s Place in the Universe

Over billions of years, life has transformed the chemical face of the Earth.  Over thousands of years (but accelerating in the last 100), human life has transformed both the Earth and the biosphere.  As genetic engineering continues to advance, it seems likely that man will also transform his own biology.

Will the successors of humankind go on to transform our Galaxy for their own habitation? The Universe is far larger than the Earth, but the available time is also far longer than the few decades in which technology has developed.

This slide show offers some perspective on the future of the Universe, starting with our small corner.  The premise (if I may give away the punch line in the last slide) is that our legacy may be destined to become an organized intergalactic community that takes control of the evolution of the cosmos, and that we could shoot all that to hell if we as a species don’t manage to survive the next century.

I actually find the premise that life’s progeny will someday take control of the motions of stars and galaxies more plausible than the idea that the next century on Earth is crucial.  We don’t know if intelligent life is evolving or has evolved elsewhere, and we don’t know if intelligent civilizations would evolve a second or third or hundredth time on Earth should the first few attempts prove too violent or insufficiently communal to manage an ecosystem that can support us.

Slide show: http://thefutureofourworld.ytmnd.com/

Among the rocks

Oh, good gigantic smile o’ the brown old earth,
   This autumn morning! How he sets his bones
To bask i’ the sun, and thrusts out knees and feet
For the ripple to run over in its mirth;
   Listening the while, where on the heap of stones
The white breast of the sea-lark twitters sweet.

That is the doctrine, simple, ancient, true;
   Such is life’s trial, as old earth smiles and knows.
If you loved only what were worth your love,
Love were clear gain, and wholly well for you:
   Make the low nature better by your throes!
Give earth yourself, go up for gain above!

— Robert Browning

Does biology exploit quantum duality?  Do our brains?

Quantum duality is part of the weirdness of quantum mechanics.  There is more information in every packet of energy than is available when that packet is absorbed or detected.  The extra information is in the form of ‘wave phase’, which can’t be measured directly, but it determines the way a quantum interacts with other quanta.

Quantum computers use this principle to process information in parallel, which can, in theory achieve efficiencies vastly greater than any classical computer could attain.

One of the great questions of philosophy of mind, in my opinion, is whether our brains are quantum computers.  If so, this could certainly explain intuition and the ability to arrive at answers without knowing where they came from.  It might even explain telepathy and precognition.  But the idea that the brain uses QM has been deeply controversial.  Roger Penrose, one of the smartest people in the universe, has argued powerfully for ‘yes’, based on detailed arguments from the structure of neurons.  Max Tegmark, a younger physics genius who may well be in Penrose’s league, argues just as forcefully for ‘no’.

Now Scientific American reports on the work of Gregory Engel (at UChicago) to the effect that green plants use quantum mechanics in absorbing light, deciding how best to use each photon before committing to how the photon will be routed and where it will be absorbed.  This makes plausible then general idea that natural selection has been smart enough to exploit QM where it can gain an advantage that way.

Scientific American article on quantum data processing in plants
Wikipedia article on Quantum Mind 

Brother Sun and all God’s creatures

“I am a religious Russian Orthodox person and I understand ‘religion’ in the literal meaning of the word, as ‘re-ligio’, that is to say the restoration of connections, the restoration of the ‘legato’ of life. There is no more serious task for music than this.”

Sofia Gubaidulina, 78 years old today, continues to conceive some of the most interesting sounds in music.

The Canticle of the Sun, also known as the Laudes Creaturarum (‘Praise of the Creatures’), is a religious song composed by Saint Francis of Assisi. It was written in the Umbrian dialect of Italian but has since been translated into many languages. It is believed to be among the first works of literature, if not the first, written in the Italian language.

Gubaidulina created a setting of the Canticle for cello, choir, and percussion, as a birthday present for Mstislav Rostropovich in 1997.

Listen with headphones, undistracted to the closing movement of the Canticle, performed by Rostropovich and friends.

How life began

In one of the best science articles I’ve seen in many a year, Nick Lane pulls together several strands of evidence to propose some new twists in the story of the origin of life.

The major new clue is about energy metabolism.  The life with which we are familiar today depends (ultimately) on sunlight for energy; but photosynthesis is complicated, and it is clear that it developed much later in life’s history.  Lane takes a clue from the unexpected way that life stores energy, using not chemical bonds but electrochemistry.  Pumping hydrogen ions across a membrane is a process common  to all of life, from bacteria to archaea to eukaryotes (that’s us). 

Perhaps life began in a place where electrochemical energy was free and plentiful, where acid welled up from vents deep in the ocean, and where rocks were perforated with tiny pores, providing catalysis, protection and a basis for competition, before cell membranes were ‘invented’. 

Read the whole story in New Scientist magazine
Buy Nick Lane’s book on 10 greatest inventions of evolution

You can’t have one without the other

“It was out of the rind of one apple tasted that good and evil leapt forth into the world, like two twins cleaving together.”

– Paul Auster, in a fictional quote from Milton’s Paradise Lost

In my meditation this morning, I realized for the first time that I like exhaling better than inhaling.
– JJM

Ode on a Grecian Urn

I
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

V
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

— John Keats, born 1795 on All Hallows Eve, lived just 25 years
entire poem