Zark's

U.S. Crayfish Invades UK

Crayfish on River Bed
Imaged Credit: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

They look like minature lobsters, and they are indeed related as Wikipedia tells us.  They breathe through gills and live on the bottom of rivers, eating dead and live animals and plants.

Crayfish Plague explains this mold infects crayfish, killing them within a few weeks.

Endangered crayfish moved to ark for the future explains the UK is attempting to breed native crayfish and release them where they are safe from the American crayfish.  The latter is larger and more aggressive in competition for habitat and food. But worse, they are carriers for the fungus that the white clawed crayfish are susceptible. 

Native white-clawed clayfish tells they prefer the hard mineral waters of northern and central England.  They are nocturnal, and primarily breed when the water termperatures drop below 50 degrees Fahrenheit.  But it is more than competition from the American signal crayfish - the latter are also predators of the native species. 

There are six non-native species of crayfish in England and Wales explains the primary invasion occurred because seafood farmers imported the American signal crayfish during the 1970s, in a desire to diversify.  The critters escaped into the wild.  Ironically instead of diversification, the UK is battling extinction of the white clawed crayfish.

Mmm.  We need to be careful, don't we?

Haven't the Foggiest

So what will 2012 bring?  On the specifics, I haven't the foggiest idea.  I do hope that we can pull ourselves out of an asymmetrical economy.  (The 1 percent keeps doing better at the expense of the 99 percent.)  I'm fearful we have slipped into a lost decade like Japan. 

With expectations high, perhaps this will be the year that we discover cold fusion.  Perhaps as important to many of us, perhaps we will discover the perfect weight-reducing pill.  A Fountain of Youth pill, would be nice as well.

Could this be the year we make contact with extraterrestrial life?  How would that change things? 

Ready or not, here comes 2012.  May it be a good one for you!

 

Wishing You a Merry Christmas!

A toy soldier and a child stand in front of a Christmas tree.
Photo Credit: Ellen Hudson, USAG Redstone

I wish all of my readers a very merry Christmas!  The world has challenges - there are far too many people suffering for us to become complacent about helping others. 

But you know, a lot of good things happened in 2011.  We had a mild, or non-existent hurricane season, despite New Yorkers getting to experience a tropical storm.  Our troops came home from Iraq, which is something to cheer long and loud about. 

Although I'm a bit skeptical of the data, economic indicators are showing positive.  We should not stop until everyone that wants a job has a job.  But it is better than where we have been.

I wish you joy this Christmas.  Happiness is temporary, and in a pinch, will suffice, but it is not a sustaining emotion.  Joy, on the other hand, doesn't require more and more material possessions or more and more power or praise.  And joy doesn't exhibit a side-effect of happiness - selfishness or greed.  Don't settle for happiness, but reach for joy.

Merry Christmas!

How Smart Can We Get?

Soldiers participate in training
Image Credit: U.S. Army

Wikipedia reminds us that intelligence quota, or IQ, is a score that is obtained from a standardized test designed to assess intelligence.

About 95 percent of the human population have scores between 70 and 130.  An IQ test has a standard deviation of 15 points, which is actually quite large, if the average IQ is 100.  There is also controversy about whether IQ measures intelligence.  For example, the tests do not measure creativity.  One other thing - IQ seems to rising 3 points per decade.  (This is debated considerably, called the Flynn effect.)

The Massive List of Genius provides the IQs of some famous and not-so-famous people.  Physicist/Engineer Kim Ung-yong has an IQ of 210.  Author Marlyn Vos Savant has an IQ of 186.  Leonardo da Vinci is accredited with an IQ of 180, and George Washington had an IQ of 140. 

Why aren't we smarter already? Evolutionary limits on cognition reminds us there are already drugs that can increase our alertness or mental acuity, but there are unintended consequences.  For example, it is better if drivers are singly focused on the activity of driving rather than multitasking.  People that have intense, vivid, memories are not as happy as those who do not. 

The Science Daily article also notes the Ashkenazi Jews are people descended from medieval communities along the Rhine in Germany.  They have largely intermarried, which has preserved their unique gene pool from the rest of humanity. 

A debated study has four premises: a)the Ashkenazi Jews have higher IQs and an unusual cognitive profile.  b) When marrying outside their community, Ashkenazi Jews completely leave the community and rarely do outsiders enter, c) medieval laws prevented the group from trade jobs such as farming, so they switched to finance, management, and international trade, d) they suffer from higher probabilities of congenital diseases and mutations.  (Including neurological diseases.)

The Science Daily article suggests that while improvements in cognitive processing may be evolutionary possible, in the long term, it has not been advantageous.  Hence it is unlikely the future will have much smarter people than we have today.

 

 

Is Instant Replay Improving Our Lives?

Wikipedia explains that instant replay is responsible for making American football popular.  "Viewers struggled to disseminate the action from a wide shot of the field, on a small black and white television screen. However, with replay technology, 'brutal collisions became ballets, and end runs and forward passes became miracles of human coordination.' "  We simply didn't see all of this going on without instant replay.

As American readers also know, instant replay is being used in both college and professional games to review officiating decisions.  Instant replay brings scrutiny to NL officials explains that officials frequently have decisions overturned, but the humans are making decisions in real-time, at full speed, whereas instant replay shows a specific play much, much, slower, and without other distractions.  But we have become used to decisions being overturned.

All week the news channels have covering the pepper-spraying at the University of California.  A video of the police pepper-spraying demonstrators has provoked considerable criticism and comment.  Some have even demanded that the chancellor of the campus be fired.  What I'm wondering is whether the instant replay from sports as infiltrated our culture and whether that is a good thing.

There were some poignant photographs during the Vietnam War that evoked the emotions of a nation, and left deep scars.  Recall the Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of naked Phan Thi Kim Phuc running from a village mistakenly bombed with napalm.  Or the photograph of Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing Viet Cong soldier, Nguyen Van Lem.

In retrospect, those images corrected wrongs, perhaps like the pepper spraying at UC-Davis.  Suppose there had been a video running on the BP oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico when things turned horribly wrong last spring and resulted in the oil spill.  Would a public video have improved corporate responsibility and behavior?  Probably yes, right?

If we were machines without emotion, without a future, and if we were measured by similar machines without emotion, then constant video surveillance would probably yield a more efficient world.  But we are not, and images or surveillance only captures what is occurring in front of the lens, not the whole context.  Would any of us assume any risk if we knew our attempt was being captured for instant replay?

Could the founding fathers of the USA have produced the constitution if there had been instant replay? 

 

Amazon's Silk

Perhaps you can remember the days of dialup internet connection.  I can still remember the very first webpage on Roadrunner.  'Whoa!' I exclaimed.  It was fast.  Over the last two or three years, internet browsing has become slower and slower.  Part of the reason is when you browse to say, CNN, it has to make about 200 server connections for all the different ads and content.  For each one of them, my faithful Norton Internet Security Service examines each one of them at a time, making sure there is no malware hidden inside the data or conections. 

As you know, Amazon announced a new product line this week of Kindles and the new Fire.  Better than any of those, is the browser bundled with the Fire, called Silk.  Explaining Silk tells it is called silk for the strength of a single silk thread connecting two points.  The idea is that when you browse to CNN using the Silk browser, the Amazon cloud server puts the webpage together for you before transmitting it.  Your computer doesn't have 200 connections to all the different servers.  Since a lot of people browse to CNN, chances are the page doesn't have to pulled together - it is already cached and can be downloaded fast. 

If you like the idea, you can download an alternative browser to Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Chrome, called Opera.  Like the Amazon Silk, Opera does much of the web page preparation on their servers and the increased download speed is pretty amazing.  Since I use my laptop with either a Wifi or aircard connection frequently, it speeds my mobile browsing substantially. The interface is not as smooth as Firefox, (although I think Firefox took a step backward in their latest release) but it downloads much faster.

You can download Opera from their website.  Happy browsing!

Mmm.  Maybe there is something else.  I found this while researching mercy for my current writing project - Funk legend Sly Stone homeless, but hopeful.  This is a guy who had a string of hits including Dance to the Music, Everyday People, and Family Affair, among others.  His problem - drugs.  He tells of one Christmas having $2500 to spend on his son for gifts.  But he spent it all on dope before buying a single gift.  Homeless, he now lives out of his van.

It wasn't or isn't that he didn't know better.  Once hooked, some people cannot control themselves, even though they know a decision is going to spiral them downward. Recall Apostle Paul's lament, "I do not understand what I do." 

I'm not smart enough.

Former Roman Breadbasket Places Large Order for Grain

Wheat
Image Credit: Scott Bauer, USDA

Wheat probably originated with the fertile crescent which includes the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile rivers.  Archaeologists know that Egypt was a major producer of wheat in 5000 BC. 

Wikipedia tells that genetically, wheat is one of the most complex plants.  Some strains of wheat have six copies of genes.  Its 21 chromosomes have 16 billion base pairs of DNA, which is five times greater than humans.

Beginning in Syria, wheat began to evolve from wild einkorn grass into the modern varieties we know today.  The Story of Wheat explains that as the grain was domesticated, three changes occurred: a) the seeds grew larger, b) the "rachis" which binds the seeds became less brittle, improving harvesting, and c) the coverings of the grains loosened, reducing the threshing time.

In 1909, Fritz Haber discovered the process for combining nitrogen and hydrogen to form ammonia, which soon improved wheat production as a fertilizer.  100 grams of red winter wheat contains 12.6 grams of protein, 1.5 grams of fat, and 71 grams of carbohydrate.  It ranks third in production behind corn and rice.

Grain supply to the city of Rome explains that following Julius Caesar and Augustus, later caesars used free or heavily subsidized grain to feed the populous.  Hence, the phrase, "Bread and circuses" became associated with Rome.  The provinces of Sicily, North Africa, and Egypt were exploited to provide Rome with the bread necessary to appease the population.

Egypt agrees to buy 240,000 tons of Russian wheat in tender tells that the country of 80 million, with land area equivalent to combined Texas and California, has a role reversal from the days of the Roman Empire.  Today, Egypt produces about 9 million metric tons of wheat, but still needs import over 9.5 million tons.  The cost of Russian wheat?  About $262 a ton.  (Wheat weighs about 60 pounds a bushel.)

 

 

Last Space Shuttle, Last TV Soap Opera

All My Children, 23 Sept 11

'All My Children', bids a bittersweet adieu tells that Friday ended 41 years of television drama.  The final episode ended with the show's characters attending a party at the Chandler house in Pine Valley, Pennsylvania.  On Monday, viewers will be treated a cooking show instead of the soap opera.

I am reminded of the Last Picture Show, which chronicles three high schoolers trying to figure out what to with their lives in a dying Texas town.  But the moviehouse really does close, hence the name for this semi-biographical film.  Almost 20 years later, a sequel, Texasville, tells the town really didn't die - things changed.

This nation has seen many 'lasts' - East Coasters fondly remember the halcyon days of Coney Island and the Jersey Shore (before Snooki). Some of those 'lasts' are undenably good - no more smallpox, no more polio.  But 'lasts' like the soap opera still sadden me.  It is hard to articulate why, but perhaps because I understood who and what we were.  Now it is harder.

To complete the circle, All My Children first aired in January 1970.  Almost exactly 3 months later, NASA launched Apollo 13.  See what I mean about not knowing who we are anymore?

 

 

Forget the One You're With

A friend was musing today why we have such a lack of neutrality and even civility, in newscasts.  The immediate answer is because it is profitable.  Fox News became a network giant with their right-leaning interpretation of the news.  Of course, what enabled Fox News was the left-leaning interpretation of other news networks.  By catering to a niche market, today's newscasters provide exactly what their viewers want to see/hear. 

But what enabled opinionated journalism was technology.  Before cable news networks, U.S. viewers were content with the presentations by anchors such as Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, and Walter Cronkite.  Technology allows a gazillion channels on your cable set-top, and we are increasingly only surfing to the channels we agree with. 

While disconcerting, it is not opinonated journalism that endangers our culture.  It is the simultaneous isolation/connection afforded by our mobile electronic gadgets.  In the 60s, Stephen Stills alarmed the establishment with his message, "Love the One You're With".  It encouraged a generation to learn about and accept those around us. 

Today with our iPods, iPhones, (the letter, 'i', is almost Freudian), we isolate ourselves and listen to exactly what we want to hear, either from music or people.  We don't talk to the ones around us, much less love them.  We are becoming less and less open to new ideas and other people. 

The danger to society is that without trust and empathy, we construct personal defenses to protect the fragile individual cocooned in iGadgets.  This reduces the efficiency and progress of society because of the wasted energy.  The danger to ourselves is that our lives are boxed into whomever we were once upon a time.

Life is Not Always What it Appears

A Space Oddity

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, W. Keel (University of Alabama), and the Galaxy Zoo Team

The blogging world has been turned upside down at the disclosure that A Gay Girl in Damascus was not who everyone thought she was.

Amina Arraf provided details on life from Damascus and when she was reportedly arrested, activists across the planet protested at the injustice.

Gay Girl in Damascus: Second 'lesbian' blogger is a man explains that not only was the blogger falsely representing himself, but one of the owners of the site was also male, misrepresenting himself.

Back when children used to read, I'm certain you were probably taught by your mother that you could not believe everything you read.  Today, it seems that people have forgotten that lesson.