The Important news

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It is certainly true and defensible that the first concern of any species is its own survival and Homo sapiens is an excellent example on a grand scale. But there is comfort to be found in that the rest of existence is in good shape and carrying on. The planet and its kin are doing fine. For example, reported in Scientific American:

The Helmetshrike

In the Sabi Sand Nature Reserve in South Africa, U.K. photographer Gary Collyer and his safari group heard noises above them and turned on a lamp. The result was Helmetshrikes preparing to sleep. They huddle together for warmth and balance. No concern about Homo’s trials and tribulations here.

The Bison: from 30 million to 325 (1884) to 500,000 today.

One of the great tragedies caused by Homo was the elimination of the American Bison by white Americans. It was a tragedy to bison and Native Americans, both of which were slaughtered and dismembered without pause or recrimination. The important news is that Homo has managed to halt the elimination of a species – a rare event. The North American Indian still survives but without what one might call restoration to the norm.

Celebration of Community

The American broadcast industry is addicted to reporting troubling information, gossip and promoting news based on commercial value. The important news is that local communities still try their best to celebrate normalcy and unity. Togetherness is the mood of the occasion and fun is had by all. Perhaps there is a good element at the base of Homo behavior.

Legal migrants receive community assistance

Trashing immigrants is not the important news. What is important news is that destitute families are assisted by small communities and neighborhoods as the family makes its way to a new beginning – which any of us would do if we were in the same situation.

Will sanity return to Homo sapiens via its tribal/community societies? The plant kingdom understands this principal – it doesn’t start with the flower, it starts with the root.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

A pleasant visit to the 17th century

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Mariner and his wife often schedule small day trips to places never visited or not visited in a long time. The destinations almost always are within fifty miles round trip. They have visited small parks, historical sites, certain stores or restaurants, fairs and other social events. Unbeknownst to them until they arrived, they even visited a town that wasn’t there anymore.

A day or two ago they traveled a whopping 27 miles west to visit a store they had not visited in many years. This was a special store for two reasons: first, it was an old store established in 1985 in a small town in the middle of nowhere that is run farm-to-store-shelf by members of the Pennsylvania Dutch denomination (one of many Anabaptist sects), second, the ‘Dutchman’s Store’ had a grand reopening at a new location last week. It is the only store of its kind that mariner and his wife know aside from smaller stores in the Lancaster area of Pennsylvania. When measuring this new store, think of Walmart.

Dutchman’s is entirely stocked for Anabaptist folks from kitchenware (does your store sell a flour mill to make your own flour or three versions of ice cream makers?) to clothing just for the Anabaptists (mariner was sorely tempted to buy a traditional brimmed straw hat that he would wear to scare his family when they visited) to special slaughtering bullets, to ancient used books for sale (slightly aligned with Anabaptist teachings), to an astounding produce market fresh from the farm and large cuts of meat from every kind of farm animal, goats too. His wife surprised him by buying two large lamb steaks, a meat seldom if ever seen in supermarkets – at least in Iowa.

But get this – mariner has lived in Iowa for 31 years. He has berated the ‘pork’ state for not having, nor even knowing about ‘scrapple’. It is one of his childhood memories and has disappeared from grocery markets, even in Iowa. Back in the 60’s when mariner lived in the town he lives in now, only one older woman knew what scrapple was. She made a batch for him.  On this trip, his wife surprised him by buying a pack of scrapple from the Dutchman’s store. Wow! Then he read the small print: manufactured in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Iowa just doesn’t understand fine cuisine.

99% of the staff are dressed Dutchman style with beards and Anabaptist clothing and the women all wearing the same white bonnet. When mariner checked out, he asked the attractive young lady wearing the bonnet what the significance was of the hat since every woman was wearing one.

She said, “We regard the head covering as a mystical cloth that carries protective powers of angels for our women” (using 1Cor. 11:10—and yet the word protection is never used in this verse) “and empowers us to somehow live a more righteous life than those who do not wear it.”

Mariner asked if the bonnet was sort of like a halo? She grinned widely and said, “Yes.” Mariner responded that he was quite pleased to have met an angel ….. Only at Dutchman’s.

Ancient Mariner

 

Short perspective on Middle East

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The circumstances in the Middle East have been longstanding. Other geographical nation groups have transitioned, in the words of Wikipedia, “The period between 500BCE and 1500CE was marked by economic and territorial expansion, demographic and urban growth, the emergence of national identity, and the restructuring of secular and ecclesiastical institutions.” – except for the Middle East.

Early on, the Middle East was a playground for large dynastic wars and an area one had to pass through to get from eastern dynasties to western dynasties. Sometime around 2500BCE to 2000BCE, the region suffered from a permanent weather shift that moved agricultural weather down to Africa, hence the Sahara Desert and the Middle Eastern region slowly lost economic stability. The consequence was that while other nations had enough wealth to experiment with changes in national ethos, the Middle East was scrambling to survive; archaic secular and ecclesiastical institutions did not change.

Since the era of the Roman Empire, the western nations, Russia and China have dominated the Middle East as a resource rather than a culture. Colonialism in the region wasn’t dismembered until World War I and II. Again, there was little opportunity for the region to develop independent national identities.

Then the importance of oil blocked cultural development. If you were a nation with oil, who needed to change with all that money floating around?

The result today is an outdated religious reality that ignores the impact of centuries of modification elsewhere in the world, a presence of continuous ‘archaic secular and ecclesiastical’ conflict that limits unification, e.g., European Union, and has become a serious conflict between the Middle East (Islamic) and western (Christian) nations.

The impending war should have occurred centuries ago but now the region has capabilities money can buy like modern weaponry, technology and political influence without a modern sense of national ethos, rather, remaining 17th century theocracies.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

 

 

 

Listen to the rhythm of the falling rain

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Remember that old song from the sixties? It came to mind as mariner sat by the window the other day watching it rain. The song spoke of romantic issues but what came to mind was the orderliness of rain. What humans know as rain, which has been around since the Precambrian age, is a simple thing. Chemically, it is just water and will freeze when it is cold enough. Humidity (melted water) is evaporated into the warm layers of a weather system and returns to a solid form (water or ice) when it is cool enough, falling rhythmically to the ground. No warm-bodied cells manage it, no creature commands it, no mountain owns it. It just falls – listen to the rhythm of the falling rain . . . even windblown storms can’t disrupt that rhythm.

Humans often think of rain as an interference to the otherwise motivated ‘orderliness’ of human activity. Mariner sat by the window long enough to forget his orderly life and to be comforted by something that was 100% natural. No man made technology, no economic motivations, no political or sociological influence. Just rain, with that soft beat as it hits the solid ground.

Rain continues to do its simple thing, regardless of humans messing with the atmosphere; the rain may ride different weather patterns caused by human intervention, but that rhythm prevails.

The next time it rains, stop everything and listen to the rhythm of the falling rain. There is peace to be taken from its simplicity, honesty, and that the planet still controls the behavior of rain.

Ancient Mariner

 

November 5 2024

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That is the date of the upcoming election between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Trump has made it crystal clear that there will be an honest election only if he wins.  He promises chaos if he doesn’t win. Citizens of the US must take note – this isn’t just inflammatory banter. Citizen groups already are developing plans for combat if Trump loses.

Nevertheless, every citizen must exercise their right to vote.

* * * * *

Mariner has written 1,835 posts. Many topics were covered in every field of interest from nonsense to serious essays. With certainty he knows often he has been redundant, skeptical and overly critical on many political and societal occasions.

In recent posts he has expressed a fatalistic prognosis for the future of Homo sapiens and many fellow creatures. Even these comments have become redundant. He sat down with Guru to have a last effort at defining order in the humanly perceived universe and the cacophony of noise that clouds that order.

Guru made it clear that mariner must describe the structure of authority as it relates to the Homo universe:

Planet Earth is 4.5 Billion years old. It abides by the rules imposed upon it as a member of a vast, disciplined Universe. Accordingly, Earth has seasons, is accountable to the influence of a moon, and must accommodate the behavior of a close star, the Sun. Given these influences, the Earth is in charge of all that occurs on, in, and above its sphere. This includes non-living material and all, all living creatures.

Egocentric Homo thinks it has the ability to ignore Earth’s management of the planet’s existence. This is the largest source of cacophony since Hominidae Ardipithecus came on the scene 5.3 million years ago. A large amount of today’s noise would not have occurred if Homo had acknowledged Earth’s authority. Consequently, Homo finds itself in the following circumstances:

Stealing oil, forests, several chemicals and gases and a disregard for social disciplines required by evolution, Earth has been thrown off balance and has no choice but to adjust. The planet’s adjustment has paid for the thievery of Homo by sending tens of thousands of species to extinction and re-balancing the global ecosystem, AKA climate change.

Using various methods of chemistry and artificial environment, Homo has doubled the lifespan of a largely unchanged genome. The result is a much larger population of Homo than Earth had planned for. As the twenty-first century begins, natural resources are short which leads to an unsettled fear for the future which leads to stress in Homo economic practices.

Finally, Homo has discovered an artificial way to create life forms. Recently, computer applications have become capable of reproducing chromosomes, AKA remaking electrically controlled genomes. It is too early to predict the ramifications but the movie “Matrix” can’t be too far off.

What lies beneath the cacophony and conflict? The original Homo. For the time being (perhaps another 100+ years), the only safe ground is to behave like a normal Homo sapiens. Individuals must place social interaction and tribal sympathy foremost in their daily lives. Although it may be too late, Homo should pay retribution to Earth’s ways by showing respect and following nature’s rules.

Ancient Mariner

Beware the Eye of Sauron

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An icon from J.R. R. Tolkien’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’, The Eye is constantly watching for an opportunity to strike evil in the world. Tolkien references Sauron as the most complete evil. Throughout many of Tolkien’s stories, Sauron, by many names, is the evil power that wishes to control all of Middle Earth.

The manner by which Sauron attempts to intercede in Middle Earth society is surreptitious. Sauron seeks to undermine truth with malicious myths; he seeks to disrupt achievement with abusive intent; he provokes war and conflict by any means. Eventually, if his tactics prevail, he will reign as the evil dictator of all Middle Earth.

Who has the power to make today’s reality exist according to the plot of The Lord of the Rings? Is it Sauron himself? Is he, in fact, real? There are surreptitious examples:

AI displacing human behavior.

MAGA, a movement driven by myth.

Plutocracy, an economic ploy to suck the life out of human equality.

Twenty active wars around the globe with some very large wars waiting in the wings.

A myriad of destructive prejudices preventing humanity from a smooth, collaborative world.

COVID

Unsustainable relationship between humans and sufficient food in the biosphere.

Increasingly rapid extinction of tens of thousands of creatures in the environment.

Sauron is good at what he does. Mariner is thinking about moving back to Chicken Little’s henhouse.

Ancient Mariner

 

Homo sapiens is a lot like crabgrass

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Instead of writing about these things, mariner will drop the lead-ins and sources so the reader can check out the ones of interest.

֎ Scientists Make ‘Cyborg Worms’ with a Brain Guided by AI — AI and tiny worms team up to get to treats. In the study, published in Nature Machine Intelligence, researchers trained an AI agent to direct one-millimeter-long Caenorhabditis elegans worms toward tasty patches of Escherichia coli in a four-centimeter dish.

Want to know where the best place to buy a house is? Just ask AI, they’ll make you go there. BTW, got lots of money?

֎  https://www.politico.com/newsletters/digital-future-daily:  California lawmakers sent a nationally consequential AI bill to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk last week — America’s most high-profile effort to date to put fresh legal guardrails around AI safety.

State Bill 1047 would hold companies liable for harms caused by their software, establish protection for AI whistleblowers, and put safety restrictions and requirements on AI models that reach a certain level of computational power, the closest any new American law has come to the European Union’s sweeping AI Act.

All we need now is a functioning Federal Government.

֎ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-surveillance-pricing-practices-under-federal-probe/   AI ‘Surveillance Pricing’ Could Use Personal Data to Make People Pay More. The agency’s ongoing investigation was sparked by a growing awareness that companies are using AI and machine learning to track certain categories of user data—such as age, location, credit score or browsing history—which many people probably wouldn’t deliberately share.

Consumer surveillance extends beyond online shopping. “Companies are investing in infrastructure to monitor customers in real time in brick-and-mortar stores,” she says. Some price tags, for example, have become digitized, designed to be updated automatically in response to factors such as expiration dates and customer demand. Retail giant Walmart—which is not being probed by the FTC—says its new digital price tags can be remotely updated within minutes.

Use storefronts and pay cash as much as you can! Google won’t know you were there (if you leave your phone in the car).

֎ There are several stories in online news about the useless effort to make the oil industry take responsibility to reduce global warming.

Goodbye, Florida and New York City.

Ancient Mariner

 

The education experience

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In the last post, mariner wrote about habits stored in the brain which were hard to dislodge. It occurred to him that the manner in which education is applied to students also is suffering from old habits that are hard to dislodge.

It is true that the scope of intended subjects has changed over the centuries. It is ‘how’ a student is instructed that is under the microscope today. We can assume the early Homo folks simply did a show-and-tell, demonstrating the actual procedures to be learned. As conceptualization crept into the culture, it had to be captured in documents and eventually into special books called textbooks. Even with books, an instructor was required to translate information and give the information a human perspective. And so it has been for eons.

Today, it has suddenly occurred, “why keep human instructors in the classroom if a computer can provide a simulated teacher any time day or night?” Mariner admits that he often takes advantage of the wide, free-roaming learning opportunities available on the Internet; he has a master’s degree in gardening from Junk University (YouTube). The mistake in the question above is that for all its intelligence, computer tablets don’t have physiological souls, that is, computers don’t have to change behavioral habits hidden in their subconscious. A human instructor still is needed; it’s the instructor’s focus in the classroom that needs an upgrade.

Sadly, the idea of displacing employees as a beneficial act affects other professions as well from truck drivers to office workers to nurses. Even delivery workers may be displaced by little automated delivery boxes and drones – it occurs to mariner these boxes offer a good opportunity to practice hunting; will geese and deer be irritated if they are replaced by automated drones and robots?

Back to education.

Education, as everyone has learned during the Covid pandemic, is not just about books and visual presentations. He has heard from friends who are teachers that students, especially the younger ones, are unruly, unmannerly and disrespectful of the teacher’s role in the classroom. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that 32% of K-12 students are behind grade level. Why are schools still dealing with the long-term effects of remote schooling and other pandemic-era learning disruptions?  Something other than book learning and concepts disappeared during the pandemic.

Given a moment, one realizes that a great deal of socialization occurs in the classroom from pre-school to college. The most important learning may be tuning the student’s subconscious to be a collaborator with society. AI is trying hard to emulate this interactive experience as well but despite the canned responses of social robots, children need children – and someone who can adjust response and guidance to fit many subconscious minds in an integrated fashion. That takes another subconscious mind – a human instructor.

Along this line of thought, mariner has written posts that question the use of individual grading. He suggests that society today, with all its automated advantages, is more interested in individuals who can fit in and be fellow collaborators. To that end, grading should be applied to small teams in the classroom rather than to individuals since the Internet is so handy with factual information. What becomes important is human behavior in a learning atmosphere, not what a student knows about page 130 in a textbook. Having teams of students compete with other teams forces collaborative behavior. The computer tablet is the new textbook.

All these conditions affect the standard approach of instruction and require adjustment to long ingrained teaching habits. The growth of community colleges and new student demands that colleges guarantee employment at graduation are two of many indicators which suggest revamping the grading, textbook and syllabus methodology that has been around long before the United States existed.

An afterthought, smartphones are the new version of talking in class. Any psychologist or therapist or teacher would want to control thought processes. Think how successful a hypnotist would be if the person being hypnotized was busy using a smartphone.

Ancient Mariner

It’s different today

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In the last post, mariner cited a man who had lost his brain functions but could still make breakfast. The article citing him was about habit and how much of our behavior is managed by a special part of the brain that stores habits. Habits are frozen procedures that require no thought in order to take action.

For normal folks who still have brain function, much of our personality and our capability is under the control of habit storage – no thought or judgment required, A simple example is getting ready to go out the door. Typically, the car keys are always in the same place, ready to grab without thinking. If the keys aren’t in place (often in a purse or pocket), a person may get to the car door before realizing the keys are not at hand.

Mariner is aware that he and the gentleman with brain damage have similar habits. With mariner, it’s making the morning coffee pot. He is aware that he doesn’t need to process the routine – just do it!

Our reasoning skills are supported by many habit files. For example, one may have a firm prejudice about which route to take to a destination; why? “Oh, it just seems the easiest way to go” [even if it isn’t]. Prejudice, no matter the subject or behavior, has strong support from habit files.

In politics, a good example is staying with a political decision that isn’t relevant anymore. That person has a habit for their position on the matter and uses that memorized (habitual) position rather than apply new reasoning to a changed reality.

It requires way too much wordage to indulge in examples of a person’s personality. Suffice it to say there are tons of habit files; one doesn’t have to reconstruct who they are every moment of the day.

The comfort of habit is that one can do many procedural (and physiological) things and not have to think about them. How about when you change jobs and you realize you can’t do something the way you’ve always done it – something as simple as pulling out of the driveway in the right direction to go to work?

As we move through those periods of life where we have to figure out a new us, especially at retirement time, it often is a difficult time. Or it is a tough time when a family member dies. Or perhaps one’s role in past life disappears completely at retirement. What makes these transitions difficult is that we must toss out a lot of internalized habits about who we are and how we behave in a new situation. We have to invent new habits! The brain, of course, is hesitant to participate because these were supposed to be habits so the brain didn’t have to deal with them.

As the brain dwindles in old age, habits become important whether they are relevant or not. Perhaps this is why it’s so hard to be a new ‘you’ in one’s eighties and nineties.

Ancient Mariner

Know a song?

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I’m gonna buy a paper doll that I can call my own
A doll that other fellows cannot steal
And then, the flirty, flirty guys with their flirty, flirty eyes
Will have to flirt with dollies that are real

When I come home at night, she will be waiting
She’ll be the truest doll in all this world
I’d rather have a paper doll to call my own
Than have a fickle-minded real live girl

I guess I had a million dolls or more
I guess I’ve played the doll game over and over
I just quarreled with Sue, that’s why I’m blue
She’s gone away, and left me, just like all dolls do

I’ll tell you, boys, it’s tough to be alone
And it’s tough to love a doll that’s not your own
I’m through with all of them, I’ll never fall again
Say boy, what you gonna do?

I’m gonna buy a paper doll that I can call my own
A doll that other fellows cannot steal
And then, the flirty, flirty guys with their flirty, flirty eyes
Will have to flirt with dollies that are real

When I come home at night, she will be waiting
She’ll be the truest doll in all this world
I’d rather have a paper doll to call my own
Than have a fickle-minded real live girl

Know what? Mariner just sang that entire song from memory. It is by the Mills Brothers and released in 1944! In fact, He knows several of their songs by heart. Yet, today he can’t remember what happened yesterday!

How does the brain play games like this? On the one hand, there’s Marilu Henner (Taxi), who has instant recall of every single day in her life versus the man who suffered total brain loss but could still make bacon and eggs for breakfast.

There are 100 billion neurons (brain cells) in the human brain. One would think that once learned or experienced, that moment would always be at hand. The brain, however, is a lot like a computer: it has a delete key and an escape key. And like most folk’s computers, the brain has a truly garbled filing system. Also like a computer, the brain has a restrictive operating system that will keep some information at hand for frequent use (virtually all these programs don’t care about the Mills Brothers, it’s more about body chemistry, aches and pains and making sure all the body cells understand what to do).

Has the reader ever searched for a file they knew was somewhere but after great effort never found it? The brain does that, too. Has the reader ever accidentally deleted a four page document they were working on and it is irretrievable? The brain does that, too. The brain’s delete key is used for these situations and also  when junk gets into the files – usually from illness, injury or drugs. Often, the delete key is used when brain processing hits a neuron to process but it’s not there. That’s called amyloid clusters.

Big city folks may never have experienced this, but out in the boonies, the internet signal isn’t always steady. The computer or TV screen goes dark for a moment or more and that little spinning curlicue shows up. The blocked signal is exactly what amyloid clusters do – they block the signal. The more amyloid clusters are mixed in between neurons, the more the brain shows signs of dementia. Fortunately, scientists are tinkering with ways to remove amyloid clusters.

So if it’s important to remember something, put it in a song and memorize it.

Ancient Mariner