Butterflies flutter by... mostly

Driving home from the retreat yesterday I noticed many small objects drifting across the road-- leaves, perhaps, or flower petals. So many, just floating on the wind.

Then I realized they were butterflies.

And about every 5 seconds, one would smack against my windshield. Ping! Ping!

This changed the whole scene instantly. I was not gazing out at a tranquil scene of the lone road winding through farm country amid drifting petals. I was witnessing mass execution of a swarm of innocent butterflies at the hands of human technology. Worse, I was causing their deaths. One is reminded of Shakespeare's words: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

Being on retreat for an extended period puts one in a very open state. I began to cry. I debated pulling over in the hopes that the butterflies would soon finish crossing the road and I could go ahead without killing them. But this was some kind of enormous mass movement-- there had been a cloud of butterflies going by for a good 5 minutes and they showed no sign of declining numbers. Who knew how long it would take?

Meanwhile, I felt sick each time I heard a ping! I also noticed that they were leaving little splatters on the windshield. I was becoming splattered. It is interesting to note that one term the Buddha uses for a person with perfect morality is "unsplattered."

Then I realized that crying was not helping. Not only was I still killing butterflies, but I was making myself a less safe driver. Perhaps my foggy eyes would cause me to miss the brakelights ahead of me, or fail to notice a wandering deer.

My eyes dried. I drove on, moving steadily toward home. I fully acknowledged that taking this route using this means of travel was simply going to result in some damage. It is unavoidable; we will all take life in order to live.

And someday it will be my turn to stop living. Everything that is born will die. Those butterflies did not die in vain because they helped me see the lesson of impermanence. This is nature.

SMPY

That stands for "Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth." I was a subject in this study, and the researchers have just released their first paper:

Tracking Exceptional Human Capital Over Two Decades

It's pretty neat to see the first fruits of this long labor! And surely there is more to come.

Inner Space

There used to be a ride at Disneyland called Adventure Thru Inner Space, in which you rode in little chairs through what looked like a microscope. At first you saw cells and such, but then you got smaller and smaller, and could see cell nuclei, molecules, atoms, electrons... All of it was accompanied by an announcer's voice describing each realm of reality in that classic, booming-but-edgy voice familiar from 1960s science programs. Just as you got small enough to penetrate the nucleus of the atom, the announcer's voice changes tone: "No, we cannot go farther! It seems that we are.... getting... larger again!" The ride was created at a time when we were rather unsure about what nuclei contained :-).

Anyway, I am heading off on a 12-day meditation retreat. No posts for a while.

Speaking of inner space, I was reminded recently of a function I used to like in high school. It is the one where, when you make a solid of revolution out of it, there is finite volume but infinite surface area. (Squaring the function to put in the volume integral makes it converge, but just integrating over it in the surface integral does not converge).

The way I used to think of it was: You can fill it with paint, but you can't paint it. That extra "dx" between the inner and outer surfaces alters it from finite to infinite. Pretty interesting.

It occurred to me that a human being is the exact opposite. We have finite surface area but infinite volume. You can paint us, but never fill us with paint.

Regime change begins at home

This clever line is often stated by liberals, rephrasing Bush's quote about how "regime change" is necessary in various parts of the Middle East.

But perhaps it has a more intimate meaning. Consider this:

An old Cherokee chief is teaching his grandson about life:

"A fight is going on inside me," he said to the boy. "It is a terrible fight between two wolves."

"One is evil -- he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, self-doubt, depression, and ego.

"The other is good -- he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and confidence.

"This same fight is going on inside you -- and inside every other person, too."

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?"

The old chief simply replied, "The one you feed."

I try to ask myself, What am I feeding today? Regime change begins at home.

[This is a very old lesson, and I was recently reminded of it by C]

You don't need to know Step A

I was reading a discussion of Inconvenient Truth on WorldChanging, and was struck by what one person said about his friend's seeing the movie:

She was previously uninformed about global warming but receptive, and compelled by the movie. But she expressed this disappointment: "I did not feel I left the theater really knowing what I can do, and what I should do FIRST."

Actually, that's part of the point.

Gore is waking us up to the fact that these things are happening, and he is trying to encourage us to explore for ourselves "what we can do." If he told us "Do Step A, then Step B, etc," he would be no different from all the evangelists telling us how to find God, be free, save the world, whatever.

Our job is to take responsibility in our own lives, in our own context, with the means available to us (not to someone else). For some, that will mean cutting back on energy use. For others, it might mean joining a local effort to save some wetlands. For still others, it could mean changing careers.

The message for this person's friend is: Gore doesn't know what she should do. Only she can figure that out. And it doesn't mean she has to get it exactly right from Day 1.

Just try something! Form the intention to help, and then try to help. Evaluate how well it's going, and refine as necessary.

This is the Art of Life. We don't need people to tell us Step A in order to get started.

Klaatu barada nikto

That's from The Day the Earth Stood Still.

But it's even better on a hacked traffic sign! ROTFL!

(Thanks, J!)

Helmet mohawk

Today I saw a motorcycle rider in front of me with... a mohawk sticking out of his helmet. I kept looking and looking-- had he really cut a slot in the helmet to fit his hair???

But no. It seems that you can buy helmets with mohawk accessories. How neat! It gave me a good laugh.

Less is more

Yup, I got a crew cut. Not terribly short, but short enough to feel lighter.

I think it looks the way my hair always wanted to be.

The first thing I noticed was how tickly it is to walk in the wind. My hair ripples like the way grass ripples in a strong wind. Hee!

AmSci sweep

The July-August issue of American Scientist is chock-full of interesting articles! For instance:

• Richard Seager of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory explains how “the notion that the Gulf Stream is responsible for keeping Europe anomalously warm turns out to be a myth.” He does not question the obvious truth that England is far more temperate than New England (for instance, check the average temperatures in February). But is this the result of the famous Gulf Stream that picks up warm water around Mexico, briefly heads up the US East coast, then crosses over to western Europe, warming the atmosphere all the way? (After that, it has lost its heat and sinks, returning south halfway between the North American and European continents.)
  
  Seager began suspect something was fishy when he visited the North American northwest – Seattle and British Columbia—and noticed that they, like his native England, are far warmer during winter than their cross-ocean equivalents on the eastern edge of Asia (think about the Korean and Siberian winters). This is true despite the fact that oceanic currents in the Pacific are completely different from those in the Atlantic, and in particular there is no “Pacific Gulf Stream.”
  
  [By the way, Seager does not claim the ocean has no effect. He says the Gulf Stream is partly responsible for a warm Europe—after all, most myths contain a grain of truth—but it is not the whole story].
  
  So what are some other causes of the mild winters in Europe? Seager does climate modeling, and suggests that wind patterns play a significant role. In the North Atlantic, the mid-latitude westerlies veer south a bit, and then back north, rather than following the lines of latitude exactly. This “waviness” brings warm air from the south up to increase Europe’s temperature. And he even derives the source of this waviness: Conservation of angular momentum. This is why it applies across the Pacific as well as the Atlantic. And why it's not going away.
  
  He is not a fan of “sensationalist” journalism that suggests that a slowdown of thermohaline circulation will (soon) plunge Europe into an ice age. He states: “I would expect that any slowdown in thermohaline circulation would have a noticeable but not catastrophic effect on climate. [It] should bring on a cooling tendency of at most a few degrees across the North Atlantic – one that would most likely be overwhelmed by the warming caused by rising concentrations of greenhouse gases.”
  
  
• And then there is an article on something called constructal theory. This is a different approach to understanding macroscopic phenomena than the reductionist one often taken in traditional physics. The authors state: “Modern physics embarked on a course tailored to the principle that all things are built up from infinitesimal local effects, such as particle physics. Constructal theory is a jolt the other way, a means to rationalize macroscopic features, objectives, and behaviors…. For instance, locomotion can be considered to be a flow of mass from one location to another. Animals move on the surface of the Earth in the same way as rivers, winds, and oceanic currents. They seek and find paths and rhythms that allow them to move their mass the greatest distance per expenditure of useful energy while minimizing thermodynamic imperfections such as friction.”
  
  Wow! The article is about “constructing” locomotion in the air, on land, and in the water. At first, these can seem vastly different, but the researchers skillfully pull out the key features of such movements based on this concept of efficient flow. Suddenly a bird, a deer, and a dolphin look stunningly similar.
  
  What I find appealing about this—and here is where I take it beyond what the authors imply—is its resonance with the ideas of Taoism, qigong, and other philosophies that include a universal “flow” with which it is our job simply to connect. We don’t create the flow, we move with it—or at least that’s what we do if we want life to go smoothly. I suppose the fluffy version would be the California motto of “go with the flow,” but if you want a popular version that is perhaps less fluffy, think of the Star Wars concept of “The Force.”
  
  You don’t need physics to understand it, actually. Animals and children are much better attuned to it than adults who have been “educated” away from it. It’s that feeling of suchness that you get when you just know how to do something without any effort (or perhaps, using only effortless effort).
  
  One particularly beautiful expression of science is to observe and connect with the intrinsic flow of Nature. Constructal theory seems to reach for this beauty.
  
  
• Also interesting is an article about how sleep improves memory. The researchers showed that adequate sleep both before and after learning a task helps solidify the memory. You need to prepare your brain in advance and then let it rest and absorb the task afterward.
  
  Oh, and they checked whether caffeine is an adequate substitute – no way. So throw out the coffee, tea, and Coke. If you really want to learn that task, let it go and catch some Z’s.
  
  (And if you think you’re doing OK and this doesn’t really apply to you, they checked that too. People who are sleep-deprived tend to be much more deluded about how well they are performing. They believe they are doing fine, when in fact their performance is pretty poor. The authors note that this does not bode well for doctors, who often make key decisions on very little sleep—all the while believing they are fully competent.)
  
  
• And then there’s a whole article on the topology of soccer balls! And another one how to avoid shellfish poisoning (good for us sushi eaters).
  
  
• And this may be a science magazine, but Geoffrey Harpham – president and director of the National Humanities Center in Research Park – contributed an excellent editorial. Entitled “Science and the Theft of Humanity,” it is about how the newest branches of science, such as bioinformatics, advanced nanotechnology, and studies of consciousness, are beginning to “poach” into the traditional territory of humanists. These include the broad categories of autonomy, singularity, and creativity, epitomized by philosophy, history, and criticism of the arts.
  
  But he is not upset or threatened. Instead, he sees “the promise of dialogue and a new golden age… A rich, deep, and extended conversation between humanists and scientists on the question of the human could have implications well beyond the academy. It could result in the rejuvenation of many disciplines, and even in a reconfiguration of disciplines themselves.”
  
  Bring it on.