SubscribeNovember 8th, 2011
just because / attending to the small things
You know I’ve never heard Feynman saying anything silly. What a wondrous thing a mind like this is.
Post post addition:
I wondered more about the idea of Feynman saying something silly, and so I went looking for it. It wasn’t hard to find.
So what happened to the old theory that I fell in love with as a youth? Well, I would say it’s become an old lady, that has very little attractive left in her and the young today will not have their hearts pound anymore when they look at her. But, we can say the best we can for any old woman, that she has been a very good mother and she has given birth to some very good children. And, I thank the Swedish Academy of Sciences for complimenting one of them. Thank you.
Has this silliness changed my mind about Feynman’s fine mind? Not at all. Would I have wanted to know him? Depends on what he would have done when I called him an idiot for using such a mean-spirited metaphor. Everything depends on what he did with the new data that an old woman has something of value that has nothing to do with what his dick responds to. Anyone know if he was ever called on it?
November 7th, 2011
science and poetry / Adam Dickinson
One of the poets I heard read at the recent poetry conference was Adam Dickinson. After that session I went to the book table (s) and bought his Cartography and Walking and Kingdom, Phylum. The poem I am going to post here is from the second book.
But before I let Adam take over the page, I just want to say that I’ve noticed a surge of interest in poets about the scientific and an interest in finding the places where the poetic impulse and the scientific one meet.
In an interview, Dickinson has this to say in response to Rob McLennan’s question:
Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
My work is about adjacency, about standing in relation to questions of order and disorder, identity and decomposition (as opposed to assuming a discrete position in concluding such questions). I am fascinated by the prospects of using poetry as an alternative form of engagement with questions traditionally associated with the domain of scientific analysis. The reliance in scientific discourse on images and metaphors (what is the atom if not a metaphor? What is evolution if not a narrative?) is a wonderful enactment of the plurality of resources required to think through fundamental questions of materiality and temporality, and, ultimately, ethics, identity, and community. I am also increasingly interested in aleatory poetics and treated texts as a way of inviting the environment into the authorship of the poem. So much ecological poetry is written by humans. I am very intrigued by inviting the weather or other organisms into the text through the interventions of chance-based procedures. I am also an academic, so my research interests in ethics and postmodernism also figure into the poetics underlying some of my compositions.
There’s even a Centre for Poetry and Science. And an e-zine / Poetry and Science. I find I have hope that there may be some conceptual change come out of such a coupling of human selves and minds.
Upper Pleistocene In the beginning, heaven was divided from earth, night from day, sea from dry land. I watch dark birds fly south like collapsed roofs, like wide-open mouths. I watch them leave the city of split streets, the poplar branches leaning away from each other. Maybe in the beginning He saw that it was good, but it wasn't. You are born, limbs grow away from you, leave home. All the king's horses, all the king's men. Look creation says, your body has split: arms, legs, fingers. Bones of the inner ear may have evolved from the jaws of snakes that crept up to make listening out of teeth, and out of hunting, speech. This house is haunted, the pipes shake water up fro the ground. Ripped shingles must be dark birds, a rail spur, blind alleys of evolution: go back to the ocean, the birds say, go back to that place where you chose to have joints, chose choosing. It's not flight you want, but to come home, lie down, be together.
November 3rd, 2011
you know what would be soooooooo cool?
a site where you could plug in GPS coordinates and see a set of flora/fauna maps for different stretches of geologic time. You could plug in the GPS coordinates for your house and see what it would have been like at the last glacial maximum, or further back in the Cretaceous.
Someone should get on that.
Unless it’s already here? Anyone know?
November 3rd, 2011
imagining the place where you are in the past
and not just in the human past, but the far, far past when birds like this flew over head.
For example, Aiolornis incredibilis is a bird that lived up to the end of the Pleistocene. It had a wingspan of 5.0-5.5 m (and it was not the biggest of the Teratorns). It weighed something around 23kg and was a predator. Holy frakking shit man. That would have been like a SUV with wings and nasty-assed beak flying over head.
These guys live in the Americas and there were people there at the time. It’s no wonder we have stories of thunderbirds.
One of the places where fossil remains of this bird have been found is in California (the Anza-Borrego Desert). If you hunt around on the net you’ll find lots of regional sites with pictures of remaining pictographs and petroglyphs. Of course most of these far post-date the end of the Pleistocene.
During the late Pleistocene the Anza-Borrego Desert was probably very different than it is today from the point of view of the kinds of plants and animals you find there.
From: Isotopic Records From Herbivore Teeth
To compare, the mean annual precipitation in Barstow today is about 111 mm, but the place was covered in grass lands. The mean annual temperature today is 18.7 °C. Horses, camels, mammoths, lynx, bison, antelope, deer, Capromeryx, Platygonus, Nothrotheriops, Paramylodon, Smildon, oh and so many more. And were today you’ll find desert scrub, you’d find then pinyon-juniper woodlands, and where there are woodlands today, you’d find mixed-conifer and boreal communities of plants. I mean there were evergreen oaks (Quercus spp.) growing in what today is the Chihuahuan Desert. But the big plant deal, according to Connin, were the C4 plants.
A C4 plant is better adapted than a C3 plant in an environment with high daytime temperatures, intense sunlight, drought, or nitrogen or CO2 limitation. Most C4 plants have a special leaf anatomy (called Kranz anatomy) in which the vascular bundles are surrounded by bundle sheath cells. Upon fixation of CO2into a 4-carbon compound in the mesophyll cells, this compound is transported to the bundle sheath cells in which it is decarboxylated and the CO2is re-fixed via the C3 pathway. The enzyme involved in this process is PEP carboxylase. In this mechanism, the tendency of rubisco (the first enzyme in the Calvin cycle) to photorespire, or waste energy by using oxygen to break down carbon compounds to CO2, is minimized.
Examples of C4 plants include sugarcane, maize, sorghum, amaranth, etc.
It’s these plants that supported the large numbers of animal species that lived in the south west then.
The thing is that because of the placement of the ice sheet, jet streams and high and low pressure zones would have changed as well. You change one element, the others adjust. It’s one big system and what may seem like a little change to us can have big consequences. So in the south west they would have probably had more winter rain than today, more seasonal differences than today, i.e. cooler summers. One of the things this could have meant is that there was more effective moisture than today, even though there was not much difference in the amount of rain that fell over the whole year. There were, for example, great pluvial lakes throughout the Great Basin and the desert areas of the south west.
And there were huge flying predatory birds, camels, mammoths, sabre toothed cats and people. On what today is a desert. Awesome.
November 2nd, 2011
mastodons, pre-Clovis hunters and fun things to read about
I have a couple of degrees in Anthropology and although I haven’t taught in years now, I do like to fall into the literature now and again. There was a reason I took the degrees. It’s really interesting stuff.
In this case I was prompted by a news story from Science sent to me. It talked about pre-Clovis mastodon hunters.
Most significantly, the findings constitute more evidence that Paleo-Indians settled the americas before 13,000 B.P.E., the earliest date that has traditionally been assigned to the emergence of the “Clovis” cultural horizon. The “Clovis” culture is originally derived from archaeological discoveries in the late 1930′s at a site near Clovis, New Mexico, where a distinct bifacial, fluted stone projectile point artifact type (pictured left) was found and which became a common find among numerous archaeological sites throughout the American continent. Clovis marked the first presence of humans in North America and was considered ancestral to all Native Americans. Additionally, it has been suggested by some scientists that the hunting practices of the Clovis people may have played a salient role in the extinction of the mastodon, along with other large mammals that roamed North America.
But that theory, popularly known in the scientific world as “Clovis First”, has been challenged in recent years by new finds. Among the new discoveries were those of Eske Willerslev, a key lead researcher with Waters on the Manis mastodon study. He conducted Carbon-14 dating and DNA analysis on human remains found in caves in the state of Oregon and concluded that these traces of humans in North America were approximately 14,340 years old. Maintains Willerslev, “our research now shows that other hunters were present at least 1,000 years prior to the Clovis culture. Therefore, it was not a sudden war or a quick slaughtering of the mastodons by the Clovis culture, which made the species disappear. We can now conclude that the hunt for the animals stretched out over a much longer period of time. At this time, however, we do not know if it was the man-made hunt for the mastodons, mammoths and other large animals from the so-called mega-fauna, which caused them to become extinct and disappear. Maybe the reason was something complete different, for instance the climate.”
That last sentence, it had me smiling. Oh the world of in-fighting to which that alludes!
Science October 2011 issue has a number of interesting articles and reports.
Pre-Clovis Mastodon Hunting 13,800 Years Ago at the Manis Site, Washington. Michael R. Waters, et al. Science 334, 351 (2011)
Abstract: The tip of a projectile point made of mastodon bone is embedded in a rib of a single disarticulated mastodon at the Manis site in the state of Washington. Radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis show that the rib is associated with the other remains and dates to 13,800 years ago. Thus, osseous projectile points, common to the Beringian Upper Paleolithic and Clovis, were made and used during pre-Clovis times in North America. The Manis site, combined with evidence of mammoth hunting at sites in Wisconsin, provides evidence that people were hunting proboscideans at least two millennia before Clovis.
There’s a huge argument about when the ancestors of Native American people arrived on the North American continent. Here’s a nice summary of what was known as of 2008.
The Late Pleistocene Dispersal of Modern Humans in the Americas. Ted Goebel, et al. Science 319, 1497 (2008)
When did humans colonize the Americas? From where did they come and what routes did they take? These questions have gripped scientists for decades, but until recently answers have proven difficult to find. Current genetic evidence implies dispersal from a single Siberian population toward the Bering Land Bridge no earlier than about 30,000 years ago (and possibly after 22,000 years ago), then migration from Beringia to the Americas sometime after 16,500 years ago. The archaeological records of Siberia and Beringia generally support these findings, as do archaeological sites in North and South America dating to as early as 15,000 years ago. If this is the time of colonization, geological data from western Canada suggest that humans dispersed along the recently deglaciated Pacific coastline.
And my favourite (so far), a study presenting data acquired from fossilized human shit.
DNA from Pre-Clovis Human Coprolites in Oregon, North America. M. Thomas P. Gilbert, et al. Science 320, 786 (2008)
The timing of the first human migration into the Americas and its relation to the appearance of the Clovis technological complex in North America at about 11,000 to 10,800 radiocarbon years before the present (14C years B.P.) remains contentious. We establish that humans were present at Paisley 5 Mile Point Caves, in south-central Oregon, by 12,300 14C years B.P., through the recovery of human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from coprolites, directly dated by accelerator mass spectrometry. The mtDNA corresponds to Native American founding haplogroups A2 and B2. The dates of the coprolites are >1000 14C years earlier than currently accepted dates for the Clovis complex.
October 30th, 2011
more Banksy, my favourite bit
Looking through the Bansky book has been such a delight. The text is sparse and pointed, so hilarious. The art at times horrifying in its clarity and rage, but always there is a humour that deflates. The whole book is like the back matter quote from the police force (given that street art is illegal) – “There’s no way you’re going to get a quote from us to use on your book cover” Metropolitan Police spokesperson.
Banksy has this habit of going into institutions like galleries and museums and installing bits of work, unasked, and without permission. This makes them transient bits of art, but art nonetheless. This is an example. I laughed when I saw the photo. I can only imagine how delighted I would feel to come across a display like this in real time. The thing is that Banksy is right about museums and galleries being forces that decide for us what is “art” and worthy of cultural notice. I love museums but nevertheless he’s right about their power over what is considered authentic.
Putting something in a museum (a Lascaux-like carving, for example) gives it a sense of sanctioned intention, as if we know something about the creator’s notions about art, or life. It’s like the museum/gallery director is saying this person who made this was an Artist with all the social, political and psychological ramifications that the term “artist” has for us.
Those horses etc in France, we have now real idea who the individuals were that created them, nor the reasons why they were painted, nor even the feelings that were present when the paintings were made. For all we know those horses were shopping lists painted by someone who was going to get social credit if such creatures did happen to come within human range (i.e. the merchants of the day).
When faced with art created outside our own knowledge base, all we can do is feel what we feel and extrapolate back. That’s dangerous. It might be accurate, but it might be wildly wrong. The point is that by being “sanctioned” as true art, the institution guides us with respect to how we are supposed to feel in the art’s presence. It suggests to us that these objects fulfill a cultural niche known as “art objects”. When an object fills a niche we have in our world, it is necessarily imbued by the “meanings” of that niche.
Imagine for a moment that the Lascaux paintings were not listed as art, but categorized as commercial lists, or inventories. How would you respond to them then?
Street art is more democratic than institutionally approved art. And much riskier for the artist’s vision. If we don’t respond to it, we simply ignore it – the veriest nightmare for any artist. That’s in part what makes Banksy so wonderful. He puts his vision out there and we respond.
October 27th, 2011
holy molee mother mary
I was reading From Telomeres to the Origins of Life over at The New York Times and ran across this:
For instance, we’ve made progress on the question of how you make a primitive cell membrane. Others had showed how a common clay mineral, montmorillonite, might have played a role in helping to make RNA. Our lab showed how it could help membranes to form and bring the RNA into the membrane.
You try to actually make life in your lab. In essence, you’re trying to prove evolutionary theory in a petri dish. How do religious fundamentalists feel about your work?
After that work on clay was published, we got a lot of e-mail from fundamentalists: “Oh, this is so wonderful. We are so happy that you’ve shown that it’s just like it’s written in the Bible or the Koran.” In Genesis, it begins with clay.
I nearly spewed tomato sauce all over my monitor, I laughed so hard.
Here’s the abstract from the article, just in case you think Szostak is proving Genesis correct.
The clay montmorillonite is known to catalyze the polymerization of RNA from activated ribonucleotides. Here we report that montmorillonite accelerates the spontaneous conversion of fatty acid micelles into vesicles. Clay particles often become encapsulated in these vesicles, thus providing a pathway for the prebiotic encapsulation of catalytically active surfaces within membrane vesicles. In addition, RNA adsorbed to clay can be encapsulated within vesicles. Once formed, such vesicles can grow by incorporating fatty acid supplied as micelles and can divide without dilution of their contents by extrusion through small pores. These processes mediate vesicle replication through cycles of growth and division. The formation, growth, and division of the earliest cells may have occurred in response to similar interactions with mineral particles and inputs of material and energy.
Don’t you just love mental sweetpeas?
October 27th, 2011
bacteria and your sex drive, your mind, your baby
From Not Rocket Science, a very cool blog
Meanwhile, Gil Sharon found that gut bacteria can shape the sexual choices of flies. Flies that are raised on diets of starch prefer to mate with other “starch flies” while those raised on maltose prefer “maltose flies”. When Sharon dosed the flies with antibiotics, she killed both their gut bacteria and their sexual preferences. If she inoculated the sterile flies with the microbiome of their peers, their preferences reappeared instantly. It’s possible that the bacteria influence the levels of sex pheromones that affect the fly’s attractiveness.
These studies show that you can’t understand an animal’s evolution simply by considering the evolutionary pressures that act on its genome. You also have to consider the genes of the bacteria and other passengers that live inside it. We’re each like a superorganism – a unified alliance between the genes of several different species, only one of which is human.
I mean seriously? How cool!
Our microbiome is like a hidden organ, helping us to break down foodstuffs that our own cells cannot cope with. And in turn, our food affects our microbiome. Our first set is laden with genes for digesting milk proteins, allowing us to make full use of our only source of nourishment as babies. Breast milk might even have evolved to nourish the most beneficial bacteria with special sugars.
And this last bit (there are lots more, go RTFA)
Babies end up with a very different portfolio of skin and gut bacteria depending on how they are delivered. Those who are born naturally harbour a more diverse array of bacteria, which resemble those in their mother’s vagina, including several species that are important for digestion. Those who are delivered by C-section are colonised by a less diverse array of bacteria, including some like Staphylococcus that are picked up from the hospital environment.
There are soooo many jokes that could come from that last bit, but seriously, these relationships between bacteria and their larger hosts (us) are deeply interesting.
October 26th, 2011
Timothy Morton/Ecology without Nature
Here we go.
Now that I am recovered from poetry overload I have begun Morton‘s Ecology Without Nature. Hoping for the best. Today’s goal: the introduction.
October 16th, 2011
Timothy Morton/The Ecological Thought, part (last) 4b
This post is about Timothy Morton‘s The Ecological Thought, and as you can probably tell from the post’s title there are three other bits on tailfeather about the book. You can find them here.
Morton’s book is basically an argument for moving forward into animism. I hasten to say that he does not mean the kind of animism of locality, or tribal societies actually operating in our world. Rather, his animism is defined based on the scope of its application. “Ancient animisms treat beings as people, without a concept of Nature.” This is the starting place, but for Morton, the scope of such treatment is what really matters. One must include the non-living as well as the living.
All of this sounds wonderful but it is a surface thing, a thing of personal feeling, without much material experience to provide its material body, its manifestation. Morton’s construction of animism certainly doesn’t uproot basic Western assumptions that, arguably, get in the way of Morton’s postulated rather intense human change.
The feeling thing: It’s a bit like my feeling about pumpkin pie in the fridge. I do want to eat it all. I do. Convinced of such a thing, my stomach howls for it and yet I know if I don’t moderate my feeling, much of the rest of my alimentary system will react poorly, and with some acidity. Yes, it would be wonderful if we humans could think outside our own personal world, get past our desire for the “whole pie”. And of course we are individually learning to do so, but is that what is really going to change how we behave as a group, especially when faced with threats outside our body’s ability to perceive?
We were wired to react to a fast moving predator. We were not wired to handle the stressors of urban living. We’ve largely dealt with the predator issue because we could. We aren’t dealing with urban stressors at all well. Is it because we need bodily cues of the “Watch Out! Bear coming!” sort?
The assumption thing: Having lived with animists for much of my lifetime, I can tell you they are not particularly environmentally friendly, not in a way that will moderate such realities as terrible population density, family and community destruction and other such contemporary human issues all of which destroy the human capacity for compassion and caring. The lack of environmental awareness (have you ever seen the dump on a Rez?) comes not from a lack of animism, but from something else. That “something” is what will be key to shifting things should one wish to do so.
I did read the last of the pages in Morton’s book, despite my need to take a day and not think about it all. I walked instead, saved some seeds from the garden, cooked – experiential palate cleansers. I still have mixed feelings. Mostly I despair of the lack of real argument, of sense, of an accurate understanding of what it is to be human today, and of course the lack of understanding of animism and other such particular moments in the text. On the other hand I deeply admire the attempt Morton has made to think past Romanticism (which I agree is deadly), and define for himself and others a new way of attending to presence that will save our collected butts.
I do think he’s got some interesting bits in there. There are ideas worth thinking through, and I will read on to his Nature and further explore his OOO. But he hasn’t been able to banish the ghost of Romanticism and I doubt whether I’ll find he has been able to do so in these further works. The simple fact that this is a book about what we should do, how we should think, what we should let slide, that’s fundamental to Romanticism.
Romanticism is a kind of literary religion that has become, today. a culturally Green religion; it’s a form of Western religion that conflates what we want with what should be—it’s a revised Christianity, a moral faith about how to live here and now on the Earth based on the idealized (but temporally very local) notions of what could/should be. Just because it has the material earth at its core does not make it any sort of animism. Not that I am saying Morton thinks this, just that often when a person replaces God with Man, they think they have become a humanist, but they are really just theologists who think of Man as God. The same is true for those fundamentally theologically minded persons who replace God/Man with Nature (or Earth, or Goddess, or the Mesh.)
In my experience (as an animist and as a watcher of animists), animism’s true distinction is not that it treats the rest of reality as a multitude of persons (and it’s not just other life forms either Dr Morton, one can have a relationship with lightning as well as with a bear) but that most animists are pretty aware that morality is designed for human beings to get what human beings need and want, at a specific place, and at a specific time. (The head woman speaks for the band, not for the gophers, not for the deer, nor the waters, unless the gophers are her particular partner, and then she would not be speaking as a head woman but as the partner of the local gophers.)
The group will have rules of course, all human groups do, but those rules are based on history, common law, and very few of the day to day rules (like sleeping with another’s spouse, say) are ever couched in terms of “because God says not to”. If thought of at all, those rules are couched in consequential terms. For example, if I get caught I am going to get banished and cause horrible pain to my sister, but if I don’t do this I am going to remain a very very unhappy woman. Or, if we eat all the gophers, then who is going to let us know when the bison are coming from too far away for us to hear or sense?
Most animistic religions aren’t connected to the host culture’s moral system in the same way Christianity encodes morality through (say) the 10 commandments. When a spirit speaks and tells you to do something, it isn’t meant for everyone. The spirit speaks to get you what you need. It isn’t for your neighbor. That’s fundamentally different than what is intended behind the story of God speaking to Moses. When the woman above makes her decision it won’t be based on this sense of “rightness” but on what’s good to live with. That’s why the Salish words for “wilderness” really translate to “land not good for us to live on” and do not equate with the cultural lode born by the English word.
Because animistic belief and moral systems are separated, how one connects to what is and how one behaves with other humans are also based on different cultural structures; and that is fundamentally different from Romanticism. Romanticism is based on the same assumption that is fundamental to Judaism, Christianity and Islam—that how one behaves and what one believes are based on the same thing—or at least they should be. This integration of belief and behaviour (the ecological thought) is what Morton’s book tries to establish, and also why it fails to get beyond Romanticism.
The central question about “thinking forward” comes from the simple fact that the Enlightenment was essentially the development of science based on that same assumption that codes Romanticism. Can scientific thinking (which is what will allow us to know enough about the actual world outside human needs and desires to actually think about it and not some echo of us) operate in a new OS? Can we dump that moral/behavioural conflation (a key code sequence in the Enlightenment/Romantic OS) and still keep the applications (e.g. science, aesthetically based “spiritualities”) built upon it? I suspect yes, but I would really like to know what that would mean to the kinds of things we choose to think about, to desire and obsess about.