On the Cusp


Stuck inside with the rain, wind and the promise of snow means that the observations of the pond life are drive-by shots. Some of the birds are trying to make the best of it, but many are spending time on the banks negotiating with each other for early options on nest sites, none of which are binding at this stage of course. The logs have been left with solitary cormorant sentries that are sitting stoically wet as it’s no use hanging their wings out to dry in driving rain.

However, a quick look at the weather elsewhere in the world makes it clear how fortunate we are in this spot as we see floods in Australia, Europe frozen and even the south-east US getting frigid; why even the manatees in Florida are eschewing their seagrass beds for the warm outflows from a large power plant. Going hungry to spend time in a hot tub sounds a little like one of the celebrity diets that are hitting the magazines as we edge our big toe up to the cusp of the next decade. Lots of warnings against unhealthy diets abound and this seems to have been a longstanding tradition. Recent research indicates that the Neanderthalers ate their veggies cooked – I can hear it now – “You don’t get down from this rock until you eat all your veggies; do you hear me!” It seems that the old theory that they died out because they relied solely on a meat diet is no longer valid. Fanatical vegans will no longer be able to comment about my eating habits by blaming my Neanderthal lineage.

The next few days are traditionally stressful as New Year resolutions are made, broken, remade and finally abandoned. They are best summed up by this quote from Oscar Wilde: “New Year resolutions go in one year and out the other.”

Getting Ready for a New Year


‘Release Your Inner Tortoise’ is a quote that I heard today from the founder of the Slow Movement website (http://www.slowmovement.com/). This struck a strong chord as I sat watching the rain clouds gradually parting to let the sun squeeze ever so slowly through. My enthusiasm for the Release becoming the mainstay of my plan for the New Year waned a little as the idea drifted into the realms of was my Inner Sloth crying more loudly for release? However, by the time the Inner Sloth got its act together, the rain clouds had made a comeback. My expedition to check to see if the birdlife on the ponds are behaving in a manner that is seemly for a Sunday morning had to be delayed. Sloth is too slow. A Racing Tortoise is the way to go for the year ahead.

Some recent neurological research by Dr. Barrett and her colleagues at Mass. Gen. (http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.2724.html) ties the size of the amygdala to the size of a person’s social circle. A new question for next year is ‘will the size of my social circle increase?’ If it does, my amygdala might enlarge and will this be a good thing? A smaller amygdala is associated with a less worried or fearful nature, so a tortoise approach to the year is to be recommended. It will give time for my amygdala to adjust and thus regulate my optimum circle size.

Future Perfect


While armchair cruising with the Holiday Spirit and in between opportunities for overindulgence, I began to ponder on the importance of epigenetics in our lives. The subject has been active for about twenty years, although the origins go back to the 1890s. What is so fascinating is that things that we do today can affect our gene behavior, and we can pass that on down to our grandchildren without changing our basic gene make-up. The original study (turn of the nineteenth century stuff when people took meticulous notes) showed that a winter of Norwegian gluttony shortened the lifespan of the kids and grandkids. Now there’s a powerful message! The phrase ‘digging your grave with your teeth’ is probably one that those of us who are comfortably padded have heard in one form or another when cowering before the dreaded white coat at our annual medical inspection.

How does this work? Sections of our DNA can be de-activated either chemically or physically without altering its underlying structure. These aren’t mutations so the effects wear off over time, but I might not be able to wait long enough to outlast the effects of this season’s gluttony. In terms of short-term natural advantage, this ability to turn the dimmer switch up or down on parts of our gene messaging activity can help us cope with short-term changes in our environment. I should note that by ‘short-term’, I’m referring to geological time, not TV advertising time.

With the New Year about to start and the opportunity for resolutions around self-control, we should remember that the damage of those extra ten pounds of fat may last longer than the six-months of gym-time that it takes to remove them – our children born next Fall may have to live with the effects as well. That’s a scarier thought than most Christmas ghost stories.

Business As Usual


Life is back to normal on the ponds now that the survey is finished. The cormorants are back in charge of their logs, and the ducks and geese are sailing sedately around in circles, practicing for a Christmas pageant perhaps, as is appropriate for the spacious, genteel living on the Ponds. Not at all like the high-density log-life on the pond at the back of Fern Ridge Dam with eight cormorants to a log – no room to stretch a wing there.

The news media appears to be buzzing with the DNA results from the Denisovanian finger bone and wisdom tooth. Apparently the hominin trek north from Africa half a million years ago resulted in the usual macho male discussion about directions. The westward bound turned into Neanderthalers whilst those that went towards the sunrise became Denisovans. Both groups were successful and spread over large areas of the landmass. The Denisovans covered an area from Siberia to New Guinea. There is a 4.6% match of the modern New Guinea people with that from the wisdom tooth. This means that there was some canoodling going on with the modern humans who left Africa much later. Similar mixing occurred with the Neanderthals and modern humans in the west. These exciting results lead us to the idea that these mixes are to be found most strongly in the genes of the World’s politicos who are still arguing over whether East or West is best. Folk memories fade very slowly apparently.

Winter's Tale


Winter solstice and a total lunar eclipse – we’re spoilt this year. It has been 370 years since we last had this combination. But now we can huddle down for winter; as Blake said: ‘winter is the time to endure’. If Emperor penguins can do it, we can surely handle a few flakes of snow and ice.

A plant survey has interrupted the pond excitement with the waterfowl moving away to the far side of the ponds. The geese are the least fazed and now seemed to have settled into formal pairs. No disputes apparent, the season of goodwill is here.

While trawling through the outer reaches of the news machine today, I read about research on a new treatment for coughs using theobromine to calm that recalcitrant vagus nerve responsible for chronic coughs. The problem that I have with this is that the theobromine is found in chocolate, but it will be extracted so there won’t even be a flavor of chocolate left.

 I plan to reject this solution completely. When my next cold and cough strike, I will be prepared to stay at home, all wrapped up in front of the TV with a large box of chocolates. When chewed slowly, I’m sure my vagus nerve will get the benefit of the theobromine with the bonus of molten chocolate. An additional source of theobromine is black tea, so this will complete my cold cure program – warmth, lots of hot tea, chocolates and daytime TV. The TV is there to drive me back to work at the earliest opportunity, otherwise I might turn into a pneumo-viral hypochondriac. A warning note here though, chocolate has had an age-old reputation as an aphrodisiac, so warn your significant other of your plan.

Snail-s-Pace


An idle glance through world news items indicates that snails are getting a deal of attention. Todays feast of gastropodial news features the water snail,  Hinea brasiliana, and its bioluminescent behavior; see the link for details:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9287000/9287789.stm
It gives off flashes of fluorescent green light, that are amplified by its shell, when threatened by hungry denizens of the 'hood'. Now I know that many teenagers these days won’t eat anything that’s green in case it might turn out to be broccoli, but giving the green light to predators seems a little perverse. Apparently the shells don’t amplify red light so how are they going to flash out a welcome to amorous neighbors?
  
The image of the lonely polar bear on an ice float has had good use as a global warning awareness advertisement, but we need to think about the bear interface. City University of New York scientists have seen grizzly bears in polar bear habitat in northern Manitoba. The bear facts of life become interesting as one hybrid has already been shot. Both species are federally listed. Does the concern carry over to a Grolar; does it halve or does it double the federal concern? This is a question that should be sent to
    http://lawandthemultiverse.com/
for the lawyers to answer. It would seem to me to be of as much a matter of moment as whether Superman’s x-ray vision violates a person’s right to privacy when judged in the light of current modifications to airport security screening.

Weakend


Log log: the cormorants are still in full possession of their logs, and they are strengthening their defenses. The two-bird log is trying out an additional guard. Training is an issue though. As I walked past, the newbie twisted around to watch and fell off the end he was guarding. The splash was large and clearly wouldn’t go unnoticed by the higher echelons. Elsewhere in the pond, another cormorant was practicing its stealth submarine maneuvers on the ducks to great effect. It remains to be seen if they will be effective against the larger Canadian vessels, especially which are usually in flotillas of three or four.

Some sad news came in from the Masai Mara game reserve in Kenya where the vulture population is down by 60% and three species may be in danger of being lost. They have become collateral damage in the battle between some of the farmers and large predators like lions and hyenas. Carcasses of predated cattle are being laced with pesticides to poison the predator and the vultures get there first.

These days we grab for a chemical solution at the drop of a hat and without care; the collateral damage is often considerable. The weakened immune system of the honeybee leading to colony collapse disorder, is just one area that needs study. The trophy bucks strung across the hood of many deer hunter’s trucks that now need to be checked prior to butchering and excising of spinal cord material which could now be a danger due to changes that may have been induced by exposure to organophosphorous compounds. Shoot first with the spray and ask questions later, is a rather rash policy. The questions may be very large indeed. These weapons are powerful and need to be handled by wise, informed sheriffs and not bug-vigilantes.

An update on an item from December 3, the LHO box made $87k in the LA auction. The guy from the funeral home who kept it all these years said he saved it because nobody seemed to want it. But we have now moved into the e-bay generation; enough said.

Good Job, Big Job!


I heard this morning that Time Magazine has proclaimed its ‘Person of the Year’. The US’s most despised ‘Word’ has also been announced. They are Mark Zuckerberg and Whatever – whatever. Lindberg was the first ‘Person of the Year’, and remains the youngest at 25 at the time of the award. Second this year was the Tea Party Movement, which is a wonderful segway into today’s main item for discussion.

The Orca decline in the Pacific Northwest seas continues to worry some Washington scientists in spite of the Orca baby boom at the beginning of this year. As the Orcas are difficult to persuade to come in for regular health checks, other means of monitoring their health have to be utilized. A researcher called Liz has enlisted the help and support of her Labrador called Tucker. This lab. Lab. hates water, but is bravely hanging over the prow of Liz’s search boat as they scoop poop. Tucker can smell Orca poop up to 2 kilometers away, which is just as well as it only floats for 45 minutes. Liz and her colleagues have to rush forward, lining up with Tucker’s nose, scoops at the ready, hoping to strike pay dirt. Their treasures are then rushed to the University lab. where the eager graduate students have their sleeves rolled up, ready to delve into the wonders of their chosen research topic.

Followers of the item on the westward rush of the slugs to the lascivious delights of warm asphalt may already be aware of the Satsuma snails of Japan which come in right-handed and left-handed formats. They stay as distinct populations, not as rumored because of political differences, but because the couples are directionally challenged ( see:
 http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9264000/9264808.stm
for more detail). Apparently, the left-handers have a potential evolutionary advantage as the snail eating snakes have a right-handed bite and can’t get their teeth into the little critters.

Ruminations


News from the Front.
The cormorants have re-taken the log. They are standing fast as a bastion to change. Manifest destiny will have some sharp beaks to cope with if it is to triumph. The smart money is on the cormorants. The geese are looking too dilettante to be serious contenders, as they dally with each other in ephemeral groups.

Back Home.
Rain is back. The manuscript lays on the desk, looking neglected and with a silent plea for revision from every page that is without its red ink lines slashing through the purple prose, like the liposuction machine on the abdomens of the soon-to-be-beautiful. The task ahead is vast. Am I a goose or a cormorant, I wonder? Then another Rumi quote comes to the fore:

            "Start a huge, foolish project, like Noah…it makes absolutely no difference what                           people think of you."

So that’s what I’ll do. 

There has been rain for the past ten days, just another thirty to go. Ten pages a day will do it!

Questions, Questions


No rain and a warm, moist morning. Ideal for my three mile round trip to the coffee pot.
Geek info: my pedometer claims 5250 steps and as I am, unquestionably, a bog-standard, upright, ordinary person who puts his trousers on one leg at a time and walks round tall buildings rather than leaping them in a single bound, my step will be thirty six inches, neither more nor less. This means that I am twenty-one yards short of three miles unless I take in the mailbox, which will result in a three-yard bonus.

Back to the expedition: The sidewalks are wet and the mild morning has triggered a mass Westward migration of slugs. They head out to the Slug-Las Vegas of the asphalt highway. There they can revel in immersing their bodies in the sensuous warmth of the wet blacktop whilst indulging in the visceral excitement of gambling with the screaming car tires. I am now searching the Wiki-sphere to see if there is a recent branch in the evolutionary tree shared by slugs and lemmings being the origin of their common death wish – or are they all teenagers at heart?

I notice that the three-bird log has been taken over by a pair of Canada geese, showing their arrogance by standing on one leg while a brave cormorant clings to the far end. The other original settlers have been exiled to the far East of the pond to a previously unoccupied log.

Whilst watching the heron watching the fish, a quotation from Rumi, the 13th century Persian philosopher, came to mind concerning the fish contemplating the ocean. I then began to think about eels and salmon who rush from their home rivers to the big sea-world to grow up and make their way before returning to their roots and how this seemed a good analogy for so many people. But then what of the fish left at home, would they yearn for the excitement of the vast possibilities of the ocean? Another quote from Rumi moved me forward down the road to the store:
            “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.
Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment is intuition.”



Epilog: The log occupancy battle has developed. Now the single brave cormorant stands four-square in the center of the log. His head held high, he stands his ground, fearless and steadfast as the geese swim in slow formation around the log looking for any sign of weakness. Can his brother cormorants return in time to support this brave holdout or is his mission a forlorn hope?

Random Ramblings


Rain drops on the windows, and a view that shows it to be either raining or about to rain, makes today a day to study the Newspapers rather than real life.

A lot of carbon, either in the form of trees for the paper news or coal for the cyber news, is being spent on the shock/horror of Charles and Camilla when they found themselves surrounded by revolting students. However, it is not just students in the UK that are looking bad these days. Patrick Grant in his acceptance speech for the British Menswear Designer of the Year Award, said UK men, as a group, have become scruffy. Charles had a specific exclusion from this general categorization, though. There is apparently a deplorable trend gaining ground of wearing suits without ties. President Obama was mentioned as falling into this dubious dress code whilst campaigning. Oh dear, where are the bowler hats and ties that were de rigueur for the City of London gents of the last century. Casual Friday’s have spread through the week like a cold in kindergarten.

There is an Associated Press report of vandalism to the famous Glastonbury Thorn tree. The tree has been sitting stubbornly atop Glastonbury Tor for many centuries, relentlessly blooming at Christmas and Easter. Last night, someone took their saw and cut all the limbs off leaving a stump four or five feet high. The last time it was vandalized was around 1650 by Cromwell’s lads. There is hope for its recovery though, if carefully tended. We all know that the UK is taking drastic economic action, but surely Christmas trees can’t be so expensive that the good citizens have to resort to hacking away at national treasures.

For the geeks amongst us: Glastonbury and the Somerset levels are the home for the Arthurian legends with Merlin and Lancelot et al. Tintagel, as the home, is just a Cornish suggestion; and is not as well known as its ‘pastie’ – a folded pastry circle with meat and potatoes stuffed in one end and apple in the other prior to baking. Dinner-on-the-go for busy tin miners. But no self-respecting Knight of the Round Table would make do with a pastie and ale. No, roast boar and a good French wine would be required after a hard day in the lists.

Adventitious Reflections


The warm sunny morning air is filled with buzzing as I stride purposefully towards the distant coffee pot; not the friendly buzzing of insects but the continuous monotone of leaf-blower engines reminding me that the end of the year is nigh. This is a theme taken up by Time magazine and other publications who are already reviewing the year. I’m not ready for anything so grave as the death of the decade just yet. After all, I’m just getting around to thinking about getting ready for the Christmas Holidays. To review the Year rushes me headlong into New Year Resolutions. That is heavy-duty contemplation when I’m in between the overindulgences of Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The spirit of the Season is out there though. Our Heron and our Egret were in the same pond sub-division to eat breakfast in shared real estate. Even more remarkable was the presence of a goose on the three-bird log with two cormorant buddies.

Two large wire-mesh cages by the infall to the East pond strike a dissonant note. No bait or open entrance was apparent, and the only furnishing was a large bare log in each. Have these pond jail cells been set up ready for inebriated nutria or beavers who have been disturbing the peace when returning home from raves run by Parties on the Ponds?

Pond Life and Skimmers


I have pondered over this watery conundrum for the past few days: ‘why has the level on the ponds dropped by at least twelve inches when the river has risen by about eighteen?’ Some of the outer sections have become isolated, as mud banks have been uncovered. One isolated sub-pond was so isolated that it had just one mallard drake with two ducks; I wish him luck with that marital arrangement.

On a different topic, my e-mail turned up with some excitement this morning. My electronic voting form for the ALCS arrived. I hadn’t received any checks lately and so had forgotten that I was a member. Checks are a wonderful ‘aide de memoire’. Maybe this is why my short-term memory isn’t what it used to be – I think.

The Autumn ALCS News ( http://www.alcs.co.uk/news/the_shallows.html ) has an interesting preview of a Nicholas Carr book, ‘The Shallows’. I started to skim through Sanderson’s preview and had got my Kindle booting up and online to check if a Kindle edition was available, when I skimmed a section that was pointed out how even e-Readers encourage shallow reading. That stopped me. I realized that I had become a better skimmer than a pool–boy. These days I flit around the web gathering small nuggets lying in plain sight like an old time gold prospector.

Remorse took over and I went back to the start of the preview and read ‘properly’ so that, as my high school teachers used to say, ‘read, study and inwardly digest’. I’m not sure that I’d got to the ‘digesting’ stage when, although I sympathized totally with the concept that our work should be carefully and completely read, I began to think that the phenomenon of skimming started way before the Great Digital Era.

‘Speedreading’ was just for busy CEOs when I grew up, so I will ignore that as an odd gene mutation required to become a captain of industry. More pertinent, I read my first ‘Reader’s Digest Condensed Book’ too many years ago to count reliably. Even longer ago, I can remember getting condensed classics in school deemed to be suitable for 10 – 12 year-olds. Many of these, I haven’t felt the need to read in full unexpurgated form to date. I had better not mention the movies as this is inevitably skimming ‘par excellence’.

Skimming has clearly been going on for some time. But it is interesting to think of this in terms of the advice that we read in instructional tomes on the craft. I will leave you with one quote from Arthur Quiller-Couch given in Roy Clark’s ‘Writing Tools’ (Little, Brown & Co, 2008) – ‘Murder your darlings’. 

Read All About It


A very strange news day today. We now have three times as many stars in the universe as we thought we had yesterday. All red dwarfs though, so we won’t be able to see them. So as we sit outside this evening gazing heavenwards, we can feel smug at a 300% gain in our viewing quota and enjoy the Emperor's new clothes whilst we can.

Ratcheting up in strangeness is the discovery that some bacteria in California have evolved with Arsenic substituted for Phosphorus in their DNA. With larger atoms, I suppose that this makes them heavyweights amongst the microbe community. It suggests an interesting plot line for a murder mystery where the victim is poisoned with water containing these. Presumably, they can survive in normal water and, if so, the perpetrator could be well away before the deed was discovered. Great novel fodder.

Scaling the heights to the pinnacle of bizarre today brings us to a Los Angeles auction house. They are putting Lee Harvey Oswald’s original pine casket up for sale. It is apparently in a fine state of rot and missing only one handle. It is expected to go for between $60k and $100k. For you youngsters out there, the story goes back to 1981 when conspiracy theories were rife. He was dug up to check he was still there and then sent back in a fine new box for his trouble.

This is where my imagination begins to have problems. Who was hanging on to the original box and what were they doing with it? It not the sort of thing that you would want to store your ‘Work in Progress’ files in, or even those with your ‘Dead Projects’ in, now is it? 

Well, I know that those of us who have messy offices can loose papers for a while. I once lost a laptop for eighteen months in mine, through filing it in a box-file labeled ‘computing’ to avoid it being stolen when I went on vacation, and then having such a good time that I forgot where I put it. But loosing a box for twenty-nine years is an achievement way out of my league. I take my hat off to them.

Rant


When I read the news, I am usually disappointed. Today I’m angry. The feeding frenzy is at its full height since WikiLeaks casually tossed in all those juicy tidbits for the voracious and insatiable piranhas of the tabloid press, just so that we can enjoy sleaze-by-proxy with our morning toast and coffee. Some individuals in far countries may end up dead, in jail and tortured, but by using the Orwellian Newspeak of the last two decades in referring to them as collateral damage, we can sanitize any guilt at the damage done. End of rant.

Words and their etymology are a source of endlessly entertainment. I find that I’m drawn to neophiliac as I do like change, and I wonder if there is a common root to Hippocratic oath and hypocrisy but I’d better not mention this when I’m in for more Botox.