Two cat tales

I'm just back from a 3-day meditation retreat. One of the teachers brought her 17-year-old cat, Mickey (named for the mouse), because he is dying. His body is skeletal and lists a bit as he (very slowly) walks. He is deaf and his eyes look glazed, but he responds to touch. His caretaker told us that during his younger years he was not especially enthusiastic about people, but as he approaches the end of life, he has settled into an accepting state-- almost sweet, really. He seemed not to be in pain, but he hadn't been taking food for about 9 days.

On the first night of the retreat, the head teacher mentioned that if the cat died, we would bury it and hold a small ceremony. Usually the teacher with the cat would teach some movement meditation during the retreat, but that was put aside because Mickey was taking her attention.

But this weekend, Mickey surprised us by taking milk and chicken broth. Apparently it was not quite time. He hung around in the grass near the dining hall, where many retreatants made friends with him.

Here's the other tale: During interview time (when it's OK to talk), one retreatant told about her 17-year-old cat who had passed away a few years ago. This cat could not tolerate being indoors most of his life, but at the end, he accepted a place in the garage. They tended him there, waiting for his time to go.

One night at 2 am, the woman heard the garage door go up. She went to investigate, but found nothing obvious, so she closed the door and went back to bed. In the morning, the cat was gone, and they never saw him again. Nor has the garage door ever spontaneously opened again.

National River Clean-Up Day, the sequel

Yesterday was National River Clean-Up Day, and I participated again, like I did last year. I looked over that old post today, and found it moving to recall my observations. Indeed, they were true again this time.

The situation was a little different because heavy rains had made for high water as recently as a week ago. Much of what we were cleaning up had been underwater. The trees and reeds were swept in a downstream direction and tended to have bits of plastic and other trash stuck in them from the flow. This differed from cleaning up when the creek bed had been dry for a while, and most of the littering was trash thrown directly by humans from camping and parties. I had to learn other strategies-- like looking up! There were plastic bags stuck in branches several feet above me!

I would like to add a few more things that came to mind yesterday:

• What about the creatures who die in the clean-up process? In picking up trash from the underbrush, I swept away a few spiders and other bugs, and no doubt stepped on a zillion ants. Is is OK that they died because a human was cleaning up after the littering of other humans? And make no mistake-- I killed those insects. There is not some twisted logic trail that says the litterers are somehow responsible for their deaths. That sort of thinking causes huge problems in the world, and it does not solve any problems. It is truly useless thinking.
  
  So I killed creatures in the act of helping the creek become cleaner and more sightly. In fact, if you look carefully, you'll see that killing is unavoidable and supports life. The point is not to feel awful about this, but to be aware of it and in some way honor those who die in order that we may live (and have clean water). Such a view is more beneficial than denial, willful ignorance, moral righteousness, or self-hating guilt.
  
  
• Even in the act of performing service, the mind can slip into unhelpful states. You might think that "doing good" means automatically that you are in a good mental state, with a free and open heart. HAH. It wasn't true for me. I still had moments of impatience and annoyance, and I caught my mind wandering off on long thought-trails about events from yesterday or tomorrow, or stories about why I believed something. This is not really contributing to the act of service.
  
  In fact, I had seen this last year when I noted that I had experienced anger at humans for littering. This time around, I see the same thing in a different way: As a reminder that doing something helpful is not a guarantee of being in a helpful state of mind. --- But I will say that it sure improves the odds! This observation is not license to go do whatever you want.
  
  This points out directly the flaw in some people's logic that certain actions guarantee that certain states of mind/heart are in operation. For instance, that someone goes to church makes them a person of high moral integrity. Or even that someone is a doctor, a religious leader, or a monk ensures that they are a certain way. The outer world is not so straightforward. The same action by two people with different internal factors will carry a different moral weight. And only the performer of the action can really know his or her intention. (That's right, folks: You are the pilot).
  

Another fruitful day removing various kinds of detritus. And today, it is pouring rain again. When the water rises, however, less trash will float into the creek, keeping it cleaner and clearer.

Is the price of gas really increasing?

Well, yes, the price is increasing. It's up to $3 a gallon (or more in places like the Bay Area). But what about the real cost of driving 100 miles?

Adjusted for inflation, this number has not increased since 1979.

Here are the data. They are also discussed in this New York Times article. Basically, the cost/gallon was unusually low throughout the 1990s due to increases in fuel efficiency and a good supply of oil. Now we are seeing a "correction" back to the same cost/gallon of the late 1970s, and it feels painful by contrast.

The Power of the Sun

There is a new documentary about renewable energy. Sure, plenty of others exist already, but this one caught my eye because it's by a couple of Physics Nobel Laureates: Walter Kohn and Alan Heeger. I know these guys!!

The Power of the Sun looks promising: an actual, scientific description of how solar cells work coupled with a tale of energy usage and how we can do it more wisely based on what we know. In other words, it's not a diatribe or a horror tale or an apocalytpic warning (well, maybe the last, but phrased more gently). It's practical-- what are we already doing to work on this problem, and what else might we do to be more effective?

It's practical. In the end, that's what we need.

Disclaimer: I haven't seen it yet. But I hope to!

Dextra

No, that's not the name of a new artificial sweetener. It's the name of a new type of prosthesis!

William Craelius of Rutgers University has invented an artificial hand system that allows normal thought-directed movement of up to three fingers. Read that again: The user executes normal, volitional movement of a prosthesis.

According to this Guardian article,

By recording the movement of muscles in the remaining part of the arm as a person thinks about moving their hand, Dextra can control up to three fingers. Different patterns of muscle movement correspond to different movements and, after a few minutes of calibration, the robotic hand is ready for action.

This article also, er, touches on Dextra. It states,

Dextra consists of a standard plastic socket and silicone sensor sleeve that encases an amputee's limb below the elbow. After a brief training period, operating the fingers is biomimetic, that is, it is done by normal volitional thinking, as if the user were commanding his natural fingers. Dextra relies on the fact that much of the musculo-tendon control structures that originally operated the fingers are still present and controllable by the user and can be tapped by the proper sensors. As long as the user remembers how to activate his phantom fingers, he can mentally command the new robot fingers. Thus far, users have been able to play slow piano pieces with Dextra, as demonstrated at Epcot Center for the Discover Magazine Innovation of the Year Award ceremony.

Let's look beyond the "wow" factor. This is pretty deep stuff. If you are controlling a prosthetic finger with your own mind, is it part of your body? If not, why is your natural finger part of your body? Where does your body end and the prosthesis begin?

Suppose instead that I don't have any prosthetic fingers, but am holding a pair of scissors in my natural hand. I control the scissors by volition, although not direct nerve stimulation (there is instead an indirect link through my skin). Is this situation the same, or different? Surely we wouldn't say the scissors are part of my body. So does that mean the nerve link is required? What counts as a direct nerve link?

Surely we aren't in the process of reducing a human body philosophically to the presence of proper neuromuscular junctions between components?

Of course not. A human is an integrated, emergent object. Reductionism will get you nowhere in this case and thus should be tossed out as the wrong tool for the job.

What we can say for certain is that the body is not the self. If I lose a hand in an accident, I am still Kim. Adding prosthetic fingers, or not adding them, doesn't change my nature. This may be easy to see intellectually, but is much harder to see deeply. After all, if we are not the body, there is little reason to judge people on appearance, to be concerned when we age or become ill, or to fear death. Let me know if you have never done any of these things because I want to become your student.

Shogi

On this last trip, I flew Japan Airlines (JAL) for the first time. (Usually I fly Star Alliance, but the flight times to Singapore were way more convenient on JAL.) And so I discovered that the entertainment system offers video games! This is a great way to pass the time on a 9-hour flight.

There was a wide selection, including Disney-type games for kids, Go, and shogi. I had never played shogi (meaning "General's game" in Japanese), although I knew it was related to chess.

So I fired it up, selecting the "Easy" level of play against the computer. The hardest part at first was that the directions for the game didn't include linking the characters on the pieces to what type of piece it was. So I knew I had 2 knights, 2 lances, 1 bishop, 1 rook, etc, but I wasn't sure which piece was which.

I figured that out pretty quickly, but soon learned that this is a very difficult game! Nor only do pieces turn into other pieces by getting promoted, but when you capture an opponent's piece, you can put it back on the board and use it in your own force!

This is incredibly powerful. So for instance, each player starts with only one bishop (which hence gives them access to half the board with that piece), but if my bishop gets captured, the computer can put it back on the board and use it against me, so it has two (covering the whole board) and I have none.

No wonder fewer than 1% of shogi games end in a draw.

Actually, though, the "new" (compared to Western chess) pieces were what I found trickiest to adapt to. The gold and silver generals move only one square at a time, and are restricted in how they can move backwards. I am used to chess pieces that can range all over the board (with the exception of the pawns and king). And the knights in shogi cannot move backward! Nor can they move in an L shape that is longer than it is tall-- so they can only move one square to the side and two forward. I forgot this repeatedly.

I got my butt kicked by the computer about 15 times in a row. In that time, I learned how to handle about 2 kinds of opening attack. But the usual pattern was that things would go along for a while, and then suddenly it would all fall apart. I would realize that the computer had trapped me somehow, and I could never recover from it. Dropping pieces (ie, ones captured from the opponent) often took me by surprise, and I haven't figured out the strategies for how/when to do it.

Also, the board always seemed congested. Because so many pieces only move one square, protecting things means placing the protector right next door. (But then I might forget to notice that the bishop was sitting across the board!) Furthermore, being able to drop pieces means that the board does not clear out during the game; it continually stays almost fully loaded.

Shogi is incredibly complex! And fun to play around with, although a human opponent at the beginning would have allowed for quicker learning.

Creatures of the Night

On my last night in Singapore, I headed to the Night Safari Park. Wow! It's an amazing place.

The park is open from 7:30 pm (which is always just after nightfall-- no seasonal change in sunset at the equator) to midnight. It's a tropical forest filled with real wild animals in fairly large pens. While the visitors are there, the pens are bathed in pale light, about as strong as the moon, from lamps facing the animals so they can't see the visitors very well.

The result is that the animals that are normally asleep when you visit the zoo-- all the big cats, for example-- are active. And the Night Safari Park allows people to get much closer to them than at most animal parks.

There are two ways to see the park. There is quite a nice tram tour that takes you by lots of interesting stuff-- African wild deer, giraffes, jackals, hyenas, lions, rhinos, elephants, capibaras, etc. In fact, you have to take the tram to see everything because the walking trails (see below) don't extend that far. And the tram really gets quite close to the animals. In some cases, there is only a small stream between the animals and the road! No fence! We went right by some kind of antelope about 10 feet from the tram. In other cases, there was an actual barrier (like for the golden jackals), but it was still just some vines and a small fence; I had the impression the jackal could have leaped out if he wanted to.

They feed the animals at night, so they are often up and about getting their dinner. Apparently for the scavengers they hide the meat in a different place each night. So we saw several hyenas wandering around quite energetically, while the tram guide explained that they were "searching for their dinner."

In addition, there are walking trails -- and I mean real jungle trails like you'd go hiking on. Some visitors to the park could probably only do the tram because the trails would be too strenuous/rough. These trails go past some of the same animals as you see from the tram, as well as some different ones: leopards, various kinds of "fishing cats," etc.

When you go by a pen, it tends to come up suddenly. You round a bend in the overgrowth, and -- lo! -- the branches are cut away and you are looking at a wild deer about 20 feet away. Probably behind a small moat and a short wire fence. But it's really up-close-and-personal. There are signs everywhere saying not to yell at the animals, throw things at them, use flash photography, or otherwise disturb them.

(More than once I encountered things where I felt certain it could never work in the United States. People would do something stupid, get hurt, and sue the park out of existence. It's too bad-- we really limit ourselves this way. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to see the animals with almost no barriers between us. The park was run in an orderly way, and I could tell that the guides, although superficially friendly and helpful, were well-trained for emergencies, sort of like airplane personnel. There were plenty of park staff around the trails to help out.)

The neatest thing I saw was the Malaysian tiger. The window on his pen was reinforced glass, but that was the only barrier. Read it again-- there was only glass between us and the tiger. In fact, while I stood there, the tiger walked over and paced around in front of the glass, cocking his head as if he could see/hear/smell something nearby. Perhaps he could-- human scent. Anyway, he was quite active, sniffing in the grass, running to and fro, coming up to the glass, sitting down for a few minutes at the foot of a tree.

None of the stuff you usually see from tigers in the zoo-- pacing around a mind-numbing track in a mostly-cement pen, or sleeping behind the log so all you can see is the tail. This tiger was vibrant and clearly aware of his surroundings. He looked healthy and powerful. And he was just an inch away from me! I'm not sure how the lighting was, so I don't know if he could see us or not, but I felt like we locked eyes for a moment, and I could see his tigerness.

A wild evening to end a wild trip.

What should we do in the world?

"We must do what we conceive to be the right thing and not bother our heads or burden our souls with whether we will be successful. Because if we don't do the right thing, we will be doing the wrong thing and we will just be a part of the disease and not a part of the cure."

- E. F. Schumacher