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In the in-between time, after Prometheus stole fire and before the great ships of oceans both close at hand and far above had flown
There was a city marked by a tower of light.

The people came from the known universe from all places and cloistered, devoted to a new god, the deity of what their hands could touch and What their eyes could see at great distance.

These bright eyed priests came and built a temple to the god of what is, Euclid of the Planes and others, they came with flattened reed-pulp
And they scribed the god of what is into being.

Great Aritosthenes, who made the earth round and whole, long before Cosmic Galileo, that reality that disappeared for millennia
Even if Ptolemeus did not match the god-like powers of Coppernicus
Who made the sun stand still.

The last of these, Hypatia the Martyr, with Her all was lost to another temple, another god vying for control and this god
Did not preside over what is, his book was of what may have been and
What might be.

The scriptures were lost, burned, destroyed by the tool Prometheus brought, for knowledge creates and destroys in it's image,
and paper chars all the same.

That continuity was broken.
We mourn the loss of our heritage and Time.

One thousand years till another temple was built,
And

1. What are quarks composed of? I know that neutrons and protons are composed of up and down quarks, among other things, but I can find no resources about the make up of quarks themselves.

2. What is energy? I mean that, when we come right down to it, we have four basic forces, and all energy is derived from those forces, but what is energy /really/? This is not a "Does 2+2 really really equal 4" question. I believe (IOW, I anticipate) that gravitational energy is the warping of space time by mass, but what is electromagnetic energy, for example? And how is that contained as a quantum field we call a photon?

I'm not really interested in untestable hypotheticals. String "theory" being one of those.

ETA: And if these are really stupid questions, please let me know. My qualifications are but a year of non majors physics in undergrad.

...to the GOP. It's undergoing evaporative cooling of group beliefs.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beliefs/

[but that's not the fucking point!]

I really like appalachian dulcimer. And I really want to have one to play. It has such a nice mellow sound, and with the drone you can play nearly any tune on a single string and have it sound good.

One of the constraints of the instrument is it's simplicity. There are three or 4 strings, usually in DAd tuning, with the high d acting as the melody string predominantly. You can get different keys, but it requires a retuning or a capo. The frets are also not chromatic, they're in the diatonic myxidian scale.

You can /buy/ chromatic dulcimers with six strings but frankly thats just a lap guitar in a different package. Part of the joy of playing an instrument is working within it's constraints. I mean, some people tune a guitar into DADGad and play all sorts of weird fingerings to get chords to play the way they would in regular EADGBe, but that's not the fucking point! I could try all sorts of wacky shit to play regular guitar chords on an ukulele too, but then it would just be a mini four string guitar. Thus defeating the very purpose of playing an ukulele.

The point of playing folk instruments is not to make everything into a makeshift guitar. The point is to work within the physical and tonal constraints to play things that both fit into the feel and history of the instrument and open ones own personal creativity beyond the realm of standard tunings and scales.

The constraints of myxidian scales, 3-4 strings in drone and required retuning to  change the key are good constraints which challenge my preconceptions of creativity in melody, harmony and tone. New neural patterns. Gut genook.

I've decided that one of the primary reasons I'm not eating well is I keep missing lunch, and the primary reason I keep missing lunch is because I don't have a good package to take my lunch to work with me. The lunches I am able to bring seldom end up being well rounded in any sense.

So I bought a nice two layer obento box, which is the japanese equivalent of a lunch box. Today I packed three slices of pork loin (from last night), leftover oatmeal barley-rice, grapes, green peppers (slices) and some bits of nappa cabbage. It was tasty and filling, despite the bento looking much smaller than the average American lunch.

Looking for suggestions now on what else to put in it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu7ZpWecIS8

ETA: He comes down pretty hard on stuff he sees as throwaway, unfortunately.

While some of you think "stupid hippies" when it comes to these things, I've been watching the video's on youtube and this one is particularly fucked.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aohGLp00MmU

Sign of the times.

...this November for ESA (Entomological Society of America),

would anyone be interested in meeting me?

You remember the story of Cain and Abel right? Cain gets pissed off that his brother is happier and gets more favor than him, so he goes off and kills Abel in selfish greed.

Cain is Humans. And Abel is the Biosphere. Except, instead of cursed to be restless wanderers, we're damnned to up to 4 million years worth of generations living in shit.

I know more about this stuff than I probably should, Roger. As a biologist, I've got strong biophilia (don't trust a biologist who doesn't), so I learn as much as I can about all life. And it's depressing the hell out of me.

I feel like what one of those stock brokers on Black Tuesday probably felt, staring out there 40th story windows, wind blowing their hair around. The biosphere has gone to shit, I can see the assets dropping so rapidly, at a daily pace, dwindling, like the monetary value of a bank account being quickly withdrawn, and I can see the species dropping like dollars, scrolling out. I'm up 40 stories and I'm just so damn depressed, Roger. The sort of world that we're moving towards, the world of dwindling life, of gray concrete and smoky towers and oil stained beaches as far as the eye can see, I don't want to live in that world, I'd rather die in this world where life is everywhere still, even if fatally injured.

It's like a grandfather with dementia, Roger. He's still there, but little by little, every day, all the things you loved about him are dissapearing, just slipping away like they were never there. Just memories. I can't remember the passenger pigeon, but I remember the Chinese river dolphin, and now it's like a key piece of grandfather's personality, not coming back, nothing but my memories. All those freshwater mussels, the native birds of Hawai'i, the bleaching corals, whole ecosystems with 10s of millions of years of continuity. Oh gods, the tunas, those beautiful fish, almost gone like the cod. I wish I wouldn't remember.

My only consolation, and hope, is that I can enjoy what's left, and that when I die I'll be nothing, so I won't have to experience the rest of it.

If the dwindling gets worse before that, I may just tell the nurse to pull my plug. Mercy on me.

Definitely not okay,

Kai

The Gulf Coast Walrus, Odobenus mexicanus.

What, it doesn't exist, you say? And neither do the other experts in BP's Gulf of Mexico Response Plan?

http://www.csmonitor.com/From-the-news-wires/2010/0609/BP-s-gulf-oil-spill-response-plan-lists-the-walrus-as-a-local-species.-Louisiana-Gov.-Bobby-Jindal-is-furious?

Professor Peter Lutz is listed in BP's 2009 response plan for a Gulf of Mexico oil spill as a national wildlife expert. He died in 2005.


Under the heading "sensitive biological resources," the plan lists marine mammals including walruses, sea otters, sea lions and seals. None lives anywhere near the Gulf.

The names and phone numbers of several Texas A&M University marine life specialists are wrong. So are the numbers for marine mammal stranding network offices in Louisiana and Florida, which are no longer in service.

Oh well. Nothing we can do about that now, might as well chalk it up to an honest mistake.

Looks like next year's meeting is going to be in Providence.

Better plan for my inevitable New England invasion. 

Written last night at 1 am in the spirit and edited this morning.

I've been recently called an overanalyzing myopic stick in the mud who can't get with the times, because I get upset when I see ML and Bayesian analysis used in systematics papers, presentations and posters. It's the point of this essay to explain why.

In systematics, we infer relationships between taxa (groups), whether those groups be species or some higher groupings, by what is variously called homology, synapomorphy, or synapotypy. These words refer to a single term, which means a specially shared character, an objective intrinsic aspect of a group of organisms that are shared by that group and not by other groups; they are hypotheses of origin. This is opposed to synplesiomorpies, or simply plesiomorphy, which are more general characters shared by a larger array of species than the group in question. These synapomorphies are the signal by which a systematist can build relationships. The guiding principle, as in all science, is parsimony. Parsimony, also known as Occam's Razor, is the best explanation is the one with the least assumptions, which reduces the variables involved and allows for a more confident test of hypotheses. In systematics this equates to reducing the number of character character changes to the least possible, rather than using wild guesses of character evolution that do not follow the simplest explanation based on the data at hand. This allows for scientific, trackable, empirical, and /reciprocally testable/ hypotheses of relationships.

So, in systematic analysis, we use the principle of parsimony to group species or higher taxa based upon their specially shared characters, in comparison and polarization with outgroup species that do not posess the specially shared characters of the group in question. These then can be visualized in nesting groupings as a branching tree like diagram, which is a hypothesis of all of the relationships between the groups in question. The test of these relationships is the consistancy of all the characters with the topography of the tree (as opposed to nonpattern) and the congruence of newly discovered characters with the ones already present. If there are small number of species, and fairly straightforward patterns of synapomorphy, all of this can be done by hand. If there are more than 12 species or taxa involved, or if there is lots of noise or nonpattern (sometimes called homoplasy) then computer algorithms can be used to swap branches of the tree together in many combinations to find the tree with the shortest length, that is, with the least number of  of changes between character states (from plesiomorphic to synapomorphic conditions or "reversing". As you can see, parsimony is not an algorhythm or a model, but simply limiting assumptions for a more reciprocally testable result.

With the onset of DNA sequencing, many people have taken to using these newly discovered characters for inference of relationships. This is great, the more characters the better, especially if there are clear homologies in the sequence; they can be analyzed in the same method as morphological characters, except they require some sequence alignment beforehand. However, a great deal of excitement on some people's part have lead to several methods used in population genetics being applied widespread to phylogenetic inference, and while they are quite good methods for the population geneticist, they are quite poor methods within the context of parsimony, synapomorphy and plesiomorphy.

Maximum Likelyhood (ML) is a method of sequence comparison and analysis that uses any of countless models of gene evolution to apply weighting to different parts of the sequence, giving that portion higher priority when it comes to signal. In population genetics of a single species, where geneology is well established, and multiple models can be tested repeatedly to determine actual modes of sequence mutation and evolution, ML can be very useful in determining gene flow, genetic drift, diversity, immigration and emigration, dispersal, and other factors within and between populations of a single species.

However, in systematics, where ML is often applied over a wide range of taxa, geneologies are completely unknown, as are the relationships between species. Models of evolution are variously imployed with no explicit reference and no reason or rational except the observation of pattern, and whether the groupings are based on synplesiomorphy or synapomorpy is completely unknown, removing the whole concept of homology which is central to our understanding of systematic relationships and our ability to test them. The whole process of analysis becomes a giant black box of assumptions where it is unknown if the resulting tree represents natural groupings or polyphyletic groupings of general characters (like if you put fleas, lobsters and lice together in a group because they lack wings; this wingless group is based on the absense of a character which is actually a plesiomorphy, or a reversal, and is not a natural group of organisms). This renders the whole of the results completely useless as a test of hypotheses, and ends up being a just so story. Even if the models of evolution are explicitly stated, this is an untested assumption with no evidence within the group in question. It becomes a luck of the draw to actually come up with a tree based on specially shared characters rather than more general characters.

Overall, ML is not suitable for systematics, due to multiple untested assumptions, often not explicit, and lack of reference to homology and hypotheses of specially shared characters. Using it in this manner is not science, and leads to unreciprocally testable conclusions.

Bayesian analysis is a clustering algorhythm often used in statistical analyses and sometimes used in population genetics. It takes data unit groups and compares them based on overall similarity, giving the amount of similarity a number. Higher similarity gives higher numbers, and those units with the highest overall similarity are clustered together. Clustering algorhythms are used in many sciences, and can actually be utilized in systematics for the delineation of species; percent difference of gene sequences can be a useful tool for uncovering cryptic species and when coupled with careful studies of morphology can be effective in resolving these species complexes. Bayesian analysis can also be used to associate adults and larvae of the same species when one or the other is of unknown determination, and gene sequences, especially of the mitochondrial gene Cytochrome Oxidase I (COI), have been used in wholesale identification and referencing projects such as International Barcode Of Life (iBOL) and Barcode Of Life Database (BOLD).

In phylogenetic inference, the data unit groups become sequences and the comparison yields overall number of basepairs shared between the groups, clustering them by overall similarity. While this lacks the untestable assumptions of ML, it has the same problems of lacking reference to homology. With bayesian analysis, sequence lengths are not analyzed individually for specially shared characters, but are simply just grouped together and given a number. There is no reference to an outgroup to establish character polarity, and it is impossible to know what portions of the sequence the quantities of overall similarity are refering to. Therefore, it is impossible to go back and check conclusions for plesiomorphy and synapomorphy. It becomes completely unknown whether the resulting tree diagram reflects the true relationships or is a spattering of unnatural groups, and it is impossible to go back and reference the characters to test these conclusions.

Using overall similarity to establish a system of classification has a history in systematics, known as phenetics. The original pheneticists believed that true phylogenetic classification was nearly impossible and therefore did not include it in their classifications. Instead, they grouped their taxa based on overall similarity, using characters known today (such as pigmentation) to often have a basis in ecological similarity but not phylogenetic history. Bayesian analysis is the final holdout of pheneticists within systematics, and it is interesting that the very methods used prior with complete disregard to inferring phylogeny are now being used TO infer phylogeny.  This method lacks any reference to homology, plesiomorphy, synapomorphy, polarization, reciprocal illumination or any other important steps in modern phylogenetics. It yields completely untestable hypotheses of relationships without reference to individual characters based on overal similarity or "distance" methods that have long been discredited. Overall, it is completely unsuitable to modern phylogenetic inference, and is in my opinion quite damaging when it is accepted as a valid technique.

So, I have explained my reasons for being upset with ML and Bayesian analysis when applied to inferring phylogenies. I understand they have some or much utility in other biological sciences, and even of important use in alpha taxonomy (species description). But due to the nature of information about relationships between species and how they are properly tested, using ML or Bayesian analysis to infer phylogenies, rather than bringing us closer to understanding evolutionary relationships, instead sets us back.

I'm at a conference now, in Santa Fe New Mexico. I'm not going to say what conference, but if you're google savvy you could probably figure it out. Has something to do with water.

Sunday evening, three speakers gave talks. Two were the presidents of the societies present, and one was the Mayor of Santa Fe. The first two weren't much to mention, lots of talk about the challenges ahead, but a quote from Tale of the Two Cities was appropriate. The mayor, on the other hand, was something else.

How often does a biologist, a natural resources trained professional, become mayor of a city? He goes way back with conservation, worked for the EPA, has a degree in something other than political science or business. Under his guiding hand the city conserves 2000 acres of water a year more than they did in 2000, the city is working to restore the Santa Fe river to a ecologically stable and diverse system. They put aside 1000 water acres every year for river flow alone, not to use, but just to let it be.

This is on top of a city known for it's arts and cultural diversity, that more and more every year reaches out to the local pueblos for collaboration, that is now commemorating not celebrating it's 400th aniversary, commemorating because the people who were here before didn't know if they could celebrate such a thing with what happened after.

This morning, a high ranking scientist from USGS came and spoke to us about the Deepwater Horizon. He said it nicer, but in summary, we're fucked and all we can do is keep close track of the before and after and shove it down the throats of BP when it comes time. He barely mentioned the impact of hurricanes, but I know, oh how I know, it was out of fear than anything else. Every day he gets up and looks at the current map. 18000 plus barrels a day. Jesus. And day by day the population levels rise and our fresh water supply grows scarcer. We don't have 5.6 earths, we don't even have ONE earth, we've fucked it in the ass without lube too many times and it's staring vacant now. Too much ecosystem rape, not just one boning from a stranger like a meteor, but a continued incestuous fuckfest by it's own ungrateful offspring. And Santa Fe just isn't enough, as much as they try.


We have nothing before us, we have everything before us. But it feels, to me, more like the season of darkness than the spring of hope.

Or

How to Increase Knowledge in Any Field.

This is both a rant and a literary/philosophical essay that I wrote while hyped on caffeine at the Dallas airport earlier today. So it goes here.

I've mentioned strong inference on several occassions, but always with reference to physical sciences. It was conceived by Plaitt in the 60s and 70s in both the Kuhnian sense of puzzle solvers and the Popperian sense of revolution. Upon reading EO Wilson's book Consilience, I am convinced that it can be applied to any field of knowledge, to the physical sciences, social sciences, and yes, even in art and humanities.

I've outlined it in parts before, but right now, sitting here in a Texan Airport, it is eating at my brain to get this on paper now, and my pen and paper are in my other bag. So be it. I type faster anyway.

1) Examine the universe for patterns. There are patterns everywhere. There are obvious patterns in science, but there are also patterns in art. The task is to look for these patterns, develop a keen eye/ear/other sense organ and seek them out. The more individuals (atoms to cultures) exibiting a pattern, the more likely it is to actually be meaningful. And by meaningful, I mean it has some sort of continuity, it's not a single isolated event.

2) Ask interesting questions. And by interesting questions, I mean ones that actually address patterns that are, or at least seem to be meaningful. It's also important to separate proximate and ultimate levels if necessary.

Proximate questions ask how, they address the mechanism, the direct reason for an event or happening, the causation. In physics, these are about the only questions you can ask.

Ultimate questions ask WHY, they address the continuity of the situation, otherwise known as the evolutionary reason for events. In physics, these questions end up in tautological answers, but in biology, social sciences and on up, these become very interesting questions.

In asking a question, one should strive to reduce and simplify it to a single statement. It might be something like "Why do bees not visit red flowers?" or "Why are serpents represented in art of many cultures?" Remember, these can be addressed at ultimate and proximate levels.

3) Develop multiple alternative hypotheses. These should address proximate and ultimate levels separatly, if needed. And like questions, they should be simple statements. The simpler the better, because a simple statement is easier to test than a complex statement, either in length or linguistics. The more alternatives, the better.

At the proximate level, the hypotheses should of course deal with mechanism. In biology, we usually work with cues, releasers, primers, etc. I'm sure you can devise mechanisms for your particular field.

At the ultimate level, hypotheses are dealing with biology on up, in an evolutionary context. As an example, in biology there are five basic reasons for everything ultimate-wise, if they are meaningful patterns.
a) Predators/parasites/pathogens
b) competition
c) fecundity
d) environment
f) nutrition

Again, the usefulness of these particular reasons may vary in different sciences. The goal is to find hypothese that address a continuity reason, a reason of, why is this pattern present instead of dissapeared? Why is this pattern around for more than a single event?

4) Devise a crutial experiment. The experiment should aim to eliminate, not support, at least one of your alternative hypotheses. By process of elimination, the hypothesis that fails to be rejected is the most robust.

Now, experiments in the physical sciences are often manipulative. You take a control and a treatment, replicate it several times and use the results to determine whether hypotheses are falsified.

Observational experiments, on the other hand, as used in the historical sciences, and in things where you can't actively control for variables, are based in congruence. Congruence is the ability of data to match other data. Higher and higher levels of congruence indicate a corroborated hypothesis. Incongruence indicates an uncorroborated hypothesis.

5) Use corroborated and unrejected hypotheses to generate further hypotheses. Return to step one to discover more patterns. Redspeat. Ad infinitum.


Now, some people may argue that you can't do this in art, in literature, and history and the rest of the humanities. I ask, are there not any patterns? Are you telling me there are no meaningful patterns in art, in literature, in philosophy? Are you saying that you can't ask questions of how and why about these patterns and determine alternative hypotheses? Are you telling me, that in the face of overwhelming congruent observational evidence for one hypothesis and incongruent evidence for other hypotheses you would not dive towards the congruent one as knowledge?

Please. Any one can use strong inference. It is a system primed and fitted for the unity of knowledge, and it will expand knowledge wherever it is applied.

Things are getting weird, Roger, and I mean weirder than normal. Not that my life is normal; I'm a goddamn bug freak, fer chrissakes.

I've gotten myself into this situation, and I'm sure I don't want out of it. You see, last week this woman on one of those online dating sites messaged me, something like "having trouble composing myself, you are lovely, message me", in a nutshell.

Next thing I know, I'm two hours from home in northern Georgia.

I'm normally not hasty about these things, Roger. But this woman is fucking smart. And I mean, REALLY smart. She blows me out of the water. And she thinks I'm a godlike being, for some reason.

Did I mention she's a porn star, a professional dominatrix, one of those proverts? That she runs her own number of websites? Oh, and here's the other thing: she has a fiancee. Except he's gay, highly attractive and walks around the house in dresses. All nestled in a matrix of suburbia. She even had me model some handcuffs (just my hands, mind you) for a video review.

This is as deep down the rabbit hole as I've ever been, Roger, and what I've said isn't the half of it. It feels like I'm headed into your territory of weirdness, relationship wise. But I'm loving every minute of it. Does that make me crazy? From Thursday evening to Sunday morning I slept less than 10 hours, ate food that's horrible for me, and felt more loved than I have in a long time. That house is a nexus of weird, and I'm lovin' it, Roger. You can't keep me away.

~Kai

Picking caddisflies from the pan,
only 1,000 more to go,
oh yeah, pickin caddisflies from the pan,
Lord, I hope theres less than 1000 to go.
The pan sure ain't getting any emptier,
so I guess I don't really know.

Theres another Cheumatopsyche,
stuff in that vial.
Oh, theres yet ANOTHAR Cheumatopsyche,
gonna stuff it deep in that vial.
Later I'll identify it,
but right now its just another file.

Well, now my eyes are getting blurry,
all the fumes are comin in.
Yeah, my nose is dry and stuffy,
all those fumes just keep on comin in.
Gonna get me a fume mask,
or this EtOH will be my end.

(guitar riff)

Another day has passed by,
and I'm still on sample one.
Yeah, another day has just gone and passed by,
and I'm still on this goddamn sample, number one.
I think I'll be workin on this sample,
till my sortin days are done.

Theres a firefly, a member of the family of beetles called Lampyridae, in the Southern Appalacians that has a very different sort of light. It's not the yellow flash patterns you see in many other fireflies, but a blue sustained glow.

Tonight, HT, another colleague and I visited a place where these emerge in large numbers. We walked back into the forest down a gravel trail, turned off our flashlights and let our eyes adjust.


As the burn out cleared, there they were, floating.
Blue glowing flames like lanterns amid the trunks of trees,
will of the wisps, coming and going, appearing and disapearing,
they were spirits of the dead, or fairies, or simply orbs of energy.

These were the males, they moved in patterns above the ground,
illuminating the leaves and dirt where the females rest, their bodies
like a hazy globe. There were so many, covering the hillside, and
we mistaked them for the stars in the sky, they were
like blue stars that had come down from heaven to play
among the trees.

So, I captured a star in my pocket, and brought it home with me.

The great Tangled Bank writhes and blooms just beyond our ordinary sight, a mass of actin and cellulose and chitin a maelstrom of energy the combined activities of individuals countless more numerous than the stars in the universe.

In the beginning there was but a single seed within the sandy shores of the Ocean. The light of Sol poured down across the grounds and waters, cracking the surface of the seed, it's germination begun. A sprout came forth, burst through the surface, emerged into this universe. Slowly at first it grew, cool winds and storms coaxing and cracking it's branches, and in the third day, the form suddenly changed it burst into bloom and spread accross the surface of the earth. The Tangled Bank, the Thorned and Flowered Bush.

The mages of old saw it as a great tree, but that is only one aspect.

It is the mangroves, and the the forests of rain and fog.
It is the oceans deep and shallow, the mountain streams and the coastal rivers.
It is the outwash of glaciers and the hot springs, and the deep ocean vents, the caves and veins shot through the strata.
It is the deserts, the grasslands and the tundra.

It is 50 million kinds of Life in tandem, the buds of a billion branches, the flowers of those that continued. Each branch is a lineage, each node a story of vicariance, of birth and separation, each dead and cut stem a deletion, only found in the bones of the earth.



Oh, such lovelyness, such unfathomable beauty, such complex majesty!



We are the readers, the diviners of this ancient wisdom the branches of the Tangled Bank, the true sooth sayers reading the cast stones of nature.

It's that time again, Roger. I took this position as part of the academic integrity committee because I thought it would be interesting, and I kept it because I wanted to make a difference.

But, OH, the monkeys that I have to deal with. Mind you, these are academics, scholars, graduate students. Otherwise known as the educated populous. And they are as much monkeys as the rest.

Take an ongoing incident, for example. We ruled previously on a case that this person, due to paying someone to take the admissions required language test for her, should be expelled and a statement be put on her transcript about violations of academic integrity. This was the ruling of the committee, and as per the written policy, plan and agreement of the university, our word was final. However, it is still not on her transcript. Why? Because the gibbering monkeys in administration are lollygagging on it, making excuses, saying it needs to be looked over again.

No. This is not what these fucking monkeys agreed to. And they are lowering our standards and by way of that MY standards. They are lowering my standards, the people who want this university to be a top twenty school.

Today, I am hearing several violations, probably to be a 5 hour affair starting at 2 pm and ending somewhere in the evening, a mixture of brazen monkeys without integrity and people who made honest mistakes, judged all the same. And it doesn't matter what I decided, because sooner or later my standards are going to be lowered. MY standards, goddammit Roger, are going to be lowered because the monkeys have no integrity.

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to mourn the departure of an old friend, an old friend we hardly knew.

The Gulf of Mexico has had a long life, 230 million years, a beautiful history from the breaking of Pangea to the present. Of course, it's not the basin that lived, but the ecosystem that made the gulf so vibrant. The basin is just a vessel, and now the vessel is empty.

These are sad things not considered polite at a funeral, but they are things that must be said. WE killed the Gulf of Mexico. We killed it, with fertilizers down the great Mississippi River, producing a festering wound the size of new jersey which comes again and again every summer. But even as it was crippled the Gulf lived on, it was a hardy area of endemism.

And now, it is gone, lost to pneumonia a rattling cough and wheezing that killed it in it's sleep, all that crude oil stopping it's arteries up, clogging it's aveoli. The Gulf had another 100 million years left on it's life, when it was killed by human negligence. It's a symptom of humanity to value only after it's lost. And though the doctors are now scrambling with artificial resuscitation, the damage is too deep.

And, though we know there will be a rebirth, we believe The Process of Sustaining goes on, how many years will it take? 100? 1000? One million? After the Great Dying at the end of the Permian, it took 4 million years for resurrection.


Let us pray that the second coming of the Gulf of Mexico will not take that long, that it will rise again like the phoenix even brighter than before.

GO!

[I suggest there have always been two kinds of original thinkers, those who upon viewing disorder try to create order, and those who upon encountering order try to protest it by creating disorder. The tension between the two is what drives learning forward.]

Taken from the end of Chapter three from Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.

And to others concerned about the growing dissolution and irrelevance of the intelligentsia, which is indeed alarming, I suggest there have always been two kinds of original thinkers, those who upon viewing disorder try to create order, and those who upon encountering order try to protest it by creating disorder. The tension between the two is what drives learning forward. It lifts us upward through a zigzagging trajectory of progress. And in the Darwinian contest of ideas, order always wins, because--simply--that is the way the real world works.

Nevertheless, here is a solute to the post-modernists. As today's celebrants of corybantic Romanticism, they enrich culture. They say to the rest of us: Maybe just maybe, you are wrong. Their ideas are like sparks from firework explosions that travel away in all directions, devoid of following energy, soon to wink out in the dimensionless dark. Yet a few will endure long enough to cast light on unexpected subjects. That is one reason to think well of post-modernism, even as it menaces rational thought. Another is the relief it affords those who have chosen not to encumber themselves with a scientific education. Another is the small industry it has created within philosophy and literary studies. Still another, the one that counts the most, is the unyielding critique of traditional scholarship it provides. We will always need post-modernists or their rebellious equivalents. For what better way to strengthen organized knowledge than continually to defend it from hostile forces? John Stewart Mill correctly noted that teacher and learner alike fall asleep at their posts when there is no enemy in the field. And if somehow, against all the evidence, against all reason, the linchpin falls out and everything is reduced to epistemological confusion, we will find the courage to admit that the post-modernists were right, and in the best spirit of the Enlightenment, we will start over again. Because, as the great mathematician David Hilbert once said, capturing so well that part of the human spirit expressed through the Enlightenment, Wir mussen wissen. Wir werden wissen. We must know, we will know.

Bolding is mine.

Wilson is in all senses a traditional scholar, a biologist, probably the greatest biologist alive today. While we can disagree on the statement that order always wins, there is a surprising amount for a Discordian in this passage. Replace "postmodernists" with "Discordians" and the meaning is the same. Both those who make order and disorder are necessary for progression of knowledge, and without this tension "teacher and learner alike fall asleep at their posts".

I'd like your thoughts on this, either what I've pointed out, or on the above overall.

Let's play a game, shall we? The name of the game is called "Imagine." The way it's played is simple: we'll envision recent happenings in the news, but then change them up a bit. Instead of envisioning white people as the main actors in the scenes we'll conjure - the ones who are driving the action - we'll envision black folks or other people of color instead. The object of the game is to imagine the public reaction to the events or incidents, if the main actors were of color, rather than white. Whoever gains the most insight into the workings of race in America, at the end of the game, wins.

So let's begin.

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn't like were enforced by the government? Would these protester — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that's what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation's capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country's political leaders if the need arose.

Imagine that white members of Congress, while walking to work, were surrounded by thousands of angry black people, one of whom proceeded to spit on one of those congressmen for not voting the way the black demonstrators desired. Would the protesters be seen as merely patriotic Americans voicing their opinions, or as an angry, potentially violent, and even insurrectionary mob? After all, this is what white Tea Party protesters did recently in Washington.

Continued here: http://ephphatha-poetry.blogspot.com/2010/04/imagine-if-tea-party-was-black-tim-wise.html

In the cathedrals of science dwell those devoted to puzzle solving, those mages who consider why why why all day and night loosing sleep in their cells working on the great Rubik cube of the Universe

This is the calling of all mages, to solve puzzles, and when a church no longer holds puzzle solvers the foundations crumble, they have dispersed to other churches that better support their primary occupation, this the revolution the godlike Sir Karl called Extraordinary Science, but the Normal Science, the magecraft of every day is puzzles, and Extraordinary Science would not exist without it.

They have glimpsed the Tangled Bank, the name-mages, they have peered deep into the magic well and that first glimpse is a satori which leaves their mouth watering. She cannot go back, the one who has seen it and every puzzle every WHY every   minute    answer is another intoxicating glimpse like a thirsty horse drawn to a pool just out of reach, these Tantalus. They have stolen ambrosia from the gods and it is a drug, a hedonism of life impassioned.

The puzzle solvers will never be satisfied, and thus the churches are built and crumble endlessly in cycles of reciprocal illumination spiraling downward to the inevitable asymptote, the Tangled Bank just out of reach, watched from afar. They are like Sisyphus, and they are happy.

Baby.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3C9CH3q9PLI

Consider this:

The average life span in the United States is around 77 years. Now, this sometimes seems like an immense amount of time, given the way the seasons seem to pass, so slowly.

However, multiply that by 365 and you get the number of days, roughly 29 thousand. Given that I've lived around 24.5 years, I've passed through around 8950 days. And I have around 20 thousand days left. Thats all.


20 thousand days....thats it? Thats all? It makes this life feel that much shorter. And every day that passes where I am depressed or uninspired is a day wasted.

FOR FUCKS SAKE, the universe has been kind or serendipitous to grant me, the emergent property of some 100 billion neurons, 50 trillion cells, and 7 octillion atoms, 8.4 kj/day, not only life but a mind to consider the present moment, the history of this present moment, and my own place in it and the future. Every day where I am not inspired, where I am not learning and growing, helping and inspiring others, enjoying the wonders of this universe and having deep pleasure in just being alive, those are days wasted.

No more wasted days. No more. Enough. I only have 20 thousand left.

Dear H.T.,

Today was a day best forgotten. You know the class in which we both currently participate, and the overwhelming project not suited to the credit we are receiving. We've discussed our mutual discomfort in excess. I spent this entire day fighting in vain to make some sort of progress, stumbling through software and analyses and frustration without bounds. And there are still no results in sight. Our professor, my advisor, has failed at professing and providing advice, experimented on students with no time or want for such experiments.

I am realizing some things. First, I am truly excellent at systematics. I have a keen eye for diagnosis, a vast memory for minutia, a great drive for understanding the nature of species and their relationships. You would agree, I think, that I could take any group of organisms and become a world expert in their study, given the time and resources.  I love life, I love my work, I love my current occupation as a Trichoptera diagnostician, I love being a student. I understand the importance of what I do, just how vital it really is. So it is not my own worth that is at fault. And, despite some unsavory people, this is a beautiful place to grow and learn, with enough good people to hold me here. Everywhere is The City, and this small area is at least one of the more pleasant sections.

However, I am still faltering...I am being held back. My advisor not only does not inspire me, but it seems he unconsciously conspires to bring me to a point of not caring. I should not be feeling disinterest in what I love! Yesterday, the visiting student told me about her advisor, a person who inspires her to do great things. When I heard this, I felt so empty, that I was missing something essential, that I was carrying extra weight on my shoulders every where I go. It seems, were it not for his library I would have found somewhere else to be.

In the enclosed stories I mean to recapture, distil and bottle the essence of that which I find so perfectly wonderful and inspiring: the majesty of life and the universe, of roots and beginnings, of science through the lens of myth, of the power of names, of the Magic Well, and the Tangled Bank. Perhaps I can hold it close and take a sip now and again to pull me through this unfortunate situation.

Sincerely Yours,

~Kai

In the Beginning there was the Universe, and there were the beings Homo sapiens sapiens in the Universe, among the still uncounted other creatures more unknown in number than the stars in the night sky. They "had no ideas except the things their hands could touch...or those their eyes could see at great distance", or did they? The Ground of Understanding was not yet broken.

Then came godlike Prometheus not yet bound for eternity, and he pressed his wide hands deep into the Ground and pulled up great clods of dirt, stones, and he set them aside. Water trickled in and he drank it and knew fire, was imprisoned for it but the flow could not be stopped and the water continued to pour in, trickle out, swell up from the Ground.

There were more after, Aristotle, Linnaeus, Darwin, von Frisch, McClintock, Wilson, and on they came to dig deep and drink, they had holy visions of born fires and glimpsed the Tangled Bank in one of Its myriad forms, a honeybee, a barnacle, a field of corn and they were deeply entranced in the vision they could not tear their eyes away drinking deeply over and over and the well grew deeper. But never once did the flow stanch, the hole dry, the water dissipate, it was always there and it seemed the more they drew the more there was to draw

The mages speak of the magic well in the Ground of Understanding to which we can always return to parch our thirst, that it is truly bottomless and will never empty, that the Tangled Bank is a vision of which we will never tire.

Yes, it's true. Though I'm cringing in admittance, I have to come out of the closet about this. It's just far too damaging to keep it in.

All people are racists, which is to say, all people discriminate based on surface differences of facial structure and pigmentation. The founder of sociobiology EO Wilson claimed it's a product of kin selection, a universal issue with a genetic root. People who are superficially different than us and our kin are more likely to be considered untrustworthy, dangerous, or simply unfriendly. People who are superficially similar to us and our kin are more likely to be considered trustworthy, benign, and friendly. This root has nothing to do with culture, although the culture factor certainly comes from and stacks upon this. Strangers are the unknown, the different and the possibly dangerous, and visual cues are very important in this determination. I may get hounded for months for posting this, but I know it's true. Some situations require split second decisions about threat or friendly, for which automatic reactions have been highly selected over evolutionary time. Kin selection based racism was initially part of that.

What I am NOT saying here is that we are all Lester Maddox. I don't think anyone here actively discriminates on the basis of race (and if you do, GTFO seriously), nor would I recommend doing so just because there is this biological basis (and if you do, also GTFO). What I am saying is we all have the capacity for superficial discrimination. This is of course not limited to race; culture adds layers of superficial differences to discriminate against. Very few people are aware of this unconscious act. I know I was shocked when I saw it in myself, when I initially shied back from people of different pigmentations or dress or facial features just because they looked different, even in completely nonthreatening situations.

This is something that requires awareness. When these ubiquitous prejudices remain just an evolutionary vestige, when they are made aware of in mind and checked they are unable to enter outward actions. It's when they are ignored, when people pretend they don't exist that they become dangerous, that we submit ourselves to monkey impulses of kin selection.

I'm a racist. But I'm recovering.

She was building a church.

The sun rose over the patch of ground just high enough to be out of range of flood, waters from the swamp and marshes below, a little hillock in otherwise forgotten land no one wants because it's so obviously good for nothing and besides, that cathedral over there is so BIG, so imposing and all the artwork....and the huge library.

She had spent years there, cloistered, reading the tomes and doing the spiritual things that all men and women of science are called to. It was just mandatory, had to be a big stone place, had to go to where all the people are going, heed the call of the foundation layers.

But that was over now. She had /ideas/ strange and weird about what was right and good to study, what creatures, what theories, what objects of the mind. Though those old mages would probably say they kicked her out, she left on her own, in the night. Not to another great temple, but someplace new.

You could see her rolling large stones up that hill for a foundation, a Sisyphus who's only companion was her thoughts and the few books she read in between the breaks in her work, and the books she wrote at night before sleep and in her dreams. Or you would have, if anyone had been around to see it. She was alone, outcast, weird, a witch no more a mage, possessing some power of mind or spirit or both that insured hatred.

And so she toils lays the foundation sets the wall posts constructs a roof. Makes a gathering place that is now small and filled only with her ideas but soon may be as big as those cathedrals. She carried with her the words, go and build a temple in the swamps and marshes, in the backwaters, away from the babels that have been constructed, separate thyself from the masses and cut new ground lay new stone.

When they rush to the cathedrals I shall build on fresh soil, in the backwaters.

In my current drunken state let me vomit some shit up for ya'all, cause I'm pretty sick of this.

Opened up the current Journal of Systematic Biology today. Back in the old days it was called Systematic Zoology, and the articles were pretty damn good, overall high quality with interesting and useful information about the world of what are species and what are their relationships. Today, the whole thing is bullshit. It's all computer programs, models, statistics, and all of it in distance-based maximum likelyhood and baetesian phenetics.

You see, back in the 80s systematists got ahold of DNA sequences, and more recently its become very easy to replicate and sequence a particular gene. This isn't a bad thing; nucleic acid base pairs are characters just like any other, they can be coded into a matrix and determined to have specially shared sequence parts. Just another tool in the tool box.

But what happened is these nearly dead pheneticists snuck into molecular phylogenetics with their overall similarity methods and called it "distance based".  These just so stories with ad hoc assumptions and a priori models that were never made explicit created trees, trees that these people claimed, "Look, this tree looks like this and the DNA said so, so it MUST be true!"

Fuck them all. Not a day goes by that I open to what I hope will be an interesting article and find a maximum likelyhood tree, or a baetesian "inference", completely useless and completely untestable, a worthless pile of junk. This is LAZY systematics, is what it is. The crap methods have caught on because WAAAAAAA, PARSIMONY TAKES TOO MUCH TIME!~

Well, suck it. If you want good testable inferences then you have to use good testable methods which take time and effort to execute. This is not a Rudyard Kipling fairytale, THIS IS SCIENCE MOTHERFUCKERS. You get out of it what you put into it, and this bullshit is not acceptable.

So, I completely refuse to give any leeway to these people anymore. They can do things right or GTFO my science.


Also, fuck you Kai.

The acolyte wanders down the long stairways. She has just left her cell, overcome with a need stemming from a whole afternoon of observation. She was watching a creature, a being, a living organism, but try as she might she could not unlock it's secrets, they were hidden to her.

As every apprentice name-mage knows, the key to unlock the secrets of every organism is two words. Sometimes one word from a set is used in another set, but never the same two as any other set (unless, of course, some mage made a mistake in the past, discovery of which requires a revision of the scripture). These two words are set in writing along with descriptive components, sometimes the langua franca, sometimes in obscure tongues. The name mage must decipher these, find the appropriate words and components, and direct the key at the lock, so to say.

Not that this is an easy process. If the spell fails, it might simply fizzle, or might explode in unknown dangers. Such is the nature of what the name-mages call "bad taxonomy". But if the spell is right, then great understanding comes, the knowledge of all other parts of the picture, ideas, past and present, the myriad writings of thousands of long dead sorcerers. All the secrets of the creature are laid bare, and more deeper secrets can be sought.

She walks quietly. This is a church, after all. It was built long ago by the shamans, by the saints, tall gothic ceilings and heavy stone needed to contain knowledge. Somehow it survived the apocalypse, when the Scala Naturae disintegrated and the whole world was in chaos. But you know what happened next, I don't really need to say it. Darwin and others planted the Tree of Life, constantly changing and growing and branches dying making it more like a bush than a tree, but still it lived, held up the Temple of Nature, stronger even than the Scala had ever. Because, how could a crystaline lattice be stronger than a living support, changing, growing, a homeostatic system which constantly readjusts to changes in the temple...but I digress.

The acolyte is looking for a metaphysical identity to place on her creature of study. I say metaphysical, but you and I both know these things have weight, they weight more in our mind and on our understanding than the Sun and the Planets weigh on Newton's (blessed be his name) elipses. Names are powerful, they CREATE the world differently to our senses. And without a name, there is no key, no way to unlock the secrets, the great seeds within the archives of Knowledge.

She pauses by a door marked (Syrphidae: Insecta), and enters into a small dark room with shelves lining the walls, crammed to the ceilings with tomes, parchment, scrolls, boxes, vials, bottles and various tools. It's been a while since another person came down here, the shelves disorganized and dirty. Most workers just shove the scriptures in back where they found them, or worse, randomly, without any sense of order. With her robes rolled up she sets to work cleaning, just to get enough order so she can find what she's looking for, a particular document....dust fills the air.

Hours pass. The Acolyte has no idea how much time has gone by, she is so intensely in her work. The shelves are almost neat, cleaner, and closer (she thinks) to mirroring The Tree. She gazes around, eyes blurry, and finds the section holding the piece of interest. The shelf is almost empty, unused for lack of workers. By her estimation, it has been at least 30 years since someone worked directly from this shelf.

And there it is. She pulls it out, blows the remaining dust from the cover, and reads

A Revision of the North American Callicera, 1980, Proc. Ent. Soc. Wash.

Having reached her goal, it is completely understandable that everything else is forgotten. Never mind what more of organizing could be done, THIS is the most important thing at the moment. She runs up the stairs, back to her cell, back to the object of study, the lock needing a key. The acolyte opens the volume, reading the spells, viewing the components drawings. This spellbook is blessfully well written. Some mages were not so kind, making a sloppy job of it, adding poor component descriptions and few or no drawings. She chuckles to herself; could it really be that easy? The name, the RIGHT name, was right there, plainly written above excellent guidelines. The author had probed deeply and dissolved so much falsehood, he had worked those shelves to the edge of his limits.


The acolyte smiled, looked at her creature one last time, and spoke the words.

The godlike Wilson wrote of his sorcery a guide to seeing the invisible hidden or simply unnoticed a practice so simple yet people never notice do they...This is the method that was passed down from the Shaman, along with the power of Naming this great power maybe even more important, it makes the invisible visible, turns the quiet alive with sound, makes the hidden obvious. The power increases with use. It has been called Law of Fives Cognitive Bias The Hunter's Mind The Thinker and The Prover, it is all of those things, the Great Power of Revealing.

The execution is simple. There are no tricks, indeed, this is a removal of tricks. The mind does not see what it doesn't think is there, so you must make it think that there is something present, the thing you are about to see.

Pick a spot of grass in a yard, a meter square of soil and plant and air. Gaze at the ground, stare intently, and will creatures to come into being. Tiny beetles, ants, springtails, aphids, WILL them into existence, imagine their presence, see them in the mind as clear in search image and unhidden as if they were 30 feet tall and 300 pounds and suddenly they appear, running, clinging, waggling antennae, alive and visible.

The mind plays tricks, they were always there, or were they? The Naturalist's, in their great wisdom, created the world of the small with their gifts, then guided others to the same visionary dream, they Named the kinds, they took the youthful peyote and now they inhabit a world much bigger than our own, a grand cosmic scale.


Now, don't tell me you wouldn't like to try it too.

Theres a field of grass, big bluestem, Euphorium, Bidens, a prairie patch, a remnant of the once great body of humus and roots and stems that was the Midwest so long lost almost gone completely like the passenger pigeon but this, this is sill here, and you are here now.

All is quiet.....or is it? Turn up the amplifier. Now the grass swishes loudly in the light breeze, leaves sawing against each other like knives against a honing stone. Now other sounds are clarified, this grinding gnashing the chewing and sucking of so many grasshoppers and plant bugs and buzzings like generators of honeybees. Turn it up even higher, the noise becomes a roar and soon even quieter rustlings are acknowledged, the movements of worms underground, the growth of apical meristem, the slow disintegration of mineral to soil to element.

Our eyes are now microscopes, peering down on a single blade of grass down into the texture of the cells to the chloroplasts streaming in circles around their nuclei, long ago drawn into this dance from solitary existence. The million billion bacteria on the leaf surface are dividing and dying and transferring genes only to be devoured by a grasshopper in the next moment, its palpi pushing the fibers inwards to the mandibles and foregut. Hold a handful of soil in hand, and gaze deeply see the thousands of mites and beetles and springtails and protozoans in that tiny pocket of air and water between the grains, that interstitial world of microscopic proportions.

And the chewing and the dividing and the swishing and the turning and circling mime the workings of our own lives except it is silent, we are unable to communicate with this creature the prairie that continues despite adversity, we are mute.

Mars? Europa? There are aliens among us, hiding in plain sight.

Names are powerful things. Those who know the names wield the power.

In the beginning the Shaman knew the names, and he kept them close, he said the names of the clouds and the stars and the plants and he had great powers of healing and foretelling the weather. The people bowed to the Shaman's expertise as he passed that knowledge of names down, that secret magic through thousands of years. And the Astrologers and Astronomers and Mathemeticians further built that power till it exceeded all previous expectation.

Today we have great mages, with knowledge passed down from Gallileo, Newton, and Linnaeus the greatest name-mage, he who was godlike Adam. This lineage is still passed on through holy scripture of the Journals of Nature, and Science, among others. The power is so strong now that it is kept in large cathedrals of stone, where the scribes and monks walk around sharing names and archiving them, those Libraries and Museums of Natural History. And there seems to be no end to this, the magic well from which we draw and reap and sow has no bottom.

Some days I know, people
want to shit all over

you. But, all that love
you've got, you shouldn't

contain it.

Life is too fucking short.


If it feels good, and
it doesn't hurt anyone,

THEN DO IT.

Now,

before you're dead and
buried.








An orgasm might just
save someone's life.

you see, this connoisseur thing. mostly its a bunch of posers, you know? Fancy pants rich people guzzling wine,

not that /I/ don't enjoy a glass of wine now and then, don't get me wrong about that

no, it's something else. Being a connoisseur isn't about snobbery sayin', so and so thing is horrid and so and so thing is "exemplar", or whatever the hell words they use

its this experience, could be with /wine/, could be with good food, or could be with a walk in the woods.

It's about 'preciation, you see? You've got this event, this thing that happens, say, okay, it's this beer I have here. I take a sip, thats the event, never had it before


then, I get some meaning, I find out its made by this local company, under so and so process, with such and such ingredients going back a thousand years to those drunk hooded bastards (praise be their names) that invented it. I get an understandin' of the identity of it, where it comes from

and then I take another sip, and there's all these sensations, of sweet, of bitter, of creamy, of smooth, of dry, and all the good bad neutral feelings comin' along behind it.

And THEN, then I inter-        intrg-     integrate that with the meanings and it all comes together in this felt. SENSE. You get that? And then I amplify it, make it the most experience possible.

An' you can do this with anything. This guy, David Pepi wrote this book about it, well, it wasn't about it, but it had this idea of qualitative natural history, like being a connoisseur of nature. But its not just about that, its about anything. Life, a connoisseur of life, qualitative natural history.....It's about APPRECIATION. You don't have to love it to appreciate it.


You want to try this beer? I swear it will be interesting.

We were created in the tropical savanna. Or we created ourselves, some say, we pulled our faces from the mud and looked skyward and suddenly there was a connection of understanding something other than simply eat sleep fuck. We sat among those trees, those large, evenly spaced wide spreading trees in the shade enjoying fruit,

we sat by the waters of the cool pond in the soft grasses near the well spaces bushes with the GOOD grubs on the roots (you know the ones)

we walked in the pastures to a high point and looked down on a valley dappled with trees and waters and grass and animals, the Eden.


Then we left, the first man and woman left and went south and north and west and east out away from the valley and it was different, the trees were different and the grasses different and....time passed.

See them now in that yard, under the wide spreading evenly spaced trees on the cool grass. They sit on a hill overlooking a lake, with bushes evenly spaced, all planted.


We remake the world to match the savanna we lost, a garden substitute for Eden, our home away from Home.

The sun revolves around the earth, you see? I mean, you would have had to see it, because it doesn't happen like this anymore. The sun rose in the east and set in the west, against the backdrop of the fixed stars the planets the moon moved in spiralling circles around the earth all in a great clockwork with occassional portents of comets the eclipsed sun and moon a sign of the Christian God. Anybody who looked up could see it.

Now it is different. You can still see the movements but they are different movements. The godlike Gallileo took to the heavens with his great eyes and made the earth move, stopped the sun in place and the planets moved round it, he said Look at what I have done, the earth moves round the sun and the planets too. And He and Kepler saw it and it was good. And Newton too took to the heavens and he made the planets move in ellipses, and he said See, I have made them move in ellipses and not spirals. And it was good.


Sometimes our eyes deceive us when we look up and out, the world still seems flat even though we know Aristarchus measured it round long ago, that god, He was followed by Columbus and Vespucci and Drake, the sons of The Wanderer who made it fully round. That is, until it was recast as an oblate spheroid.

Our gods of science make and remake the universe from those early days when the universe was made by every in their own image, they take and reform day to day, the once fixed types unfixed, the once fixed stars come loose, the once whole and uncutable pieces of matter cut. And they said it was good, and so it was.

Science is full of doers and synthesizers, both of them contributing to the pool of the mountain of the cathedral of the tower of knowledge in different ways, inducing to deducing and back again and again

and again

in a cycle the holy men Popper and Wilson call Reciprocal Illumination, a spiraling path ever closer to the truth as a moth following a pheromone trail grows straighter as he hones in on the female.

We draw closer and closer to knowing, really knowing the nature of the stuffs and the doings but we never quite have the whole picture we falter before the end because, yes, science

science is a magic well

We dig deeper and deeper drawing more water and never quite reach the bottom a permanent asymptote that keeps rising exponentially just out of grasp. Karl von Frisch knew it, he said of the honey bee that the more he draws the more there is to draw from the tangled bank of life the godlike Darwin spoke first in holy scripture. He KNEW those weeds, and yet he didn't, saw the wild movements of plants and bugs and birds and the ten thousand things of Lao-tse and he was still fooled without the mechanism.


We are seekers on journeys that will last forever because the answers, the ultimate answers, are always out of grasp and will always be out of grasp because we can never really KNOW. Everything. Socrates understood and took the hemlock anyway.

In those days when time and space were young and form was yet recent the holy and prodigal sons of Charles Darwin were plotting a revolt against the paradigm of The Organism. They were in their trenches Haldane and Crick and others armed with testubes and microscopes and they knew the path to righteousness.

With the coming of the martyred Rosaline Franklin The Organism dissolved into cells and cells into genes and genes into nucleotides and nucleotides into atoms and atoms into energy and there was no longer The Organism there was nothing but physics and the holy law was

DNA TO RNA TO PROTEIN

written above the door of the cathedral and the bells were ringing ringing.

In caves above the city the infidels resisted the shift, Wilson and Mayr and others resisted. They spat on the "exceptional young man"s and the "first-rate"s and the "brilliant discoveries" they sat by and watched as ivory bell towers grew taller and taller and they knew that babel had fallen because physics favors no one

The diciples  split over arguments and left the cathedral to dally with others they were inspired to seek connections and they found the infidels and befriended them while the remaining holy scribes locked themselves in the highest tower and the people were no longer enthralled and moved on to other pilgrimages while the tower stood crumbling.

As the tower came crashing down no one noticed, they had built themselves smaller churches.

you glorious faggots.


No, I'm not drunk, just wanted to share the love. 

Also, fuck you Kai.

These days, its pretty hard to find a job in the field of insect systematics. This is very sad for a number of reasons, the first and foremost being how incredibly important insects are on this planet. They make up more than half the number of described species (probably 90% of all species, described and not yet described) and have an economic impact valued at trillions of dollars every year (from control, from pollination, overal ecological relations, vectors of diseases, etc etc.). The second reason is that alpha taxonomy and systematics are the primary means by which we understand the diversity of these, forgive me, "bugs". And the /primary/ people working on such projects are employed by universities and especially museums.

Which brings me to why I am so motherfucking pissed off right now. This shit: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,588609,00.html

It's not enough that these people have to be political jackasses. Its not enough that they have to muddy the waters of economics and goad on creationists and fascists and all sorts of creatures I wished we had left back before WWII. Now these shitheads are intruding on MY turf. MY LIVELYHOOD! My primary occupation! Treating it as if it's of NO IMPORTANCE!

A PLAGUE ON THESE ASSHOLES! Let them have locusts and fire ants and bowl weevils and med fly and malarial mosquitoes. Let them catch crab lice and deer ticks and dog fleas. I want these assholes suffering from Dengue, Onchoceriasis, West Nile, Plague and every other insect vectored disease. I want their waterways to fall into ruin, because they can't identify the insects to determine the quality. I want their forests to be DEAD, full of emerald ash borers and wooly hemlock adelgids. May they have colorado potato beetles, and may they know why they are so fucking foolish.

Do NEVER TEST the fucking insect world. You thought the fall of Rome was bad?  You haven't seen ANYTHING yet.

Dear LMNO,

It's one of those Lazy Days today. Maybe you know the type? I'm completely unmotivated to do anything, save maybe dick around online and/or sleep. I was supposed to have a meeting with my adviser this morning, but I just sat at my desk with hands over my eyes playing with visual parallax. He wanted a rough of some parts of my thesis today, and I decided I didn't have anything for him.

So, I've locked myself in my office. The lights are out (damn unshaded ceiling flourecents; I don't know how anyone likes them), and the sunlight is coming in through the windows. I've got my coat on with the hood up; it was 30 degrees this morning, and my hair is still wet.

I haven't decided if I'm going to actually do anything yet today, if you know what I mean. I could probably get away with it easy. This lab has been dead recently, all the other students either off doing research or never come in. With the lights out and the door shut, it looks like nobody is home. There are things I can do, yes. There are samples to identify, books to read, things to write and plan, and lo, even a thesis to produce. I just have no motivation to do them, and I'm okay with that.

Perhaps this is what the Subgenii mean by "slack". A sort of comfortable laziness where you do what you want to do when you want to do it. It isn't the sort of laziness bred by consuming television, pot and doritos, just the natural sort of "I am here" comfortable lazy feeling. My mind has been working non stop recently, works non stop period. Hell, even my last weekend was spent reading and translating caddisfly literature. I never let the poor neurons have a rest!

If anyone comes in, I'll either make like the semblance of work, or I'll simply let them think whatever they want. Maybe later I'll actually do something, but right now I'm just going to sit here with my eyes half open, listening to the radiator.

~Kai

Dear Sir or Madam:

I think I finally understand what you meant about the KYFMS rule. You see, I'm pretty weird, nahh, I'm EXTREMELY weird. I'm the cream of the weird cash crop at the top of the freak pyramid.

However, either weird isn't all that weird anymore, it's boring, it's NORMAL, or it's beyond the fearful minds of non-Yeti to understand.

The key is to keep my fucking mouth shut about the weird. Actually, about everything. It's like Greene says about not revealing everything you know, or like you've said, about mad scientists not being taken seriously.

So, with that in mind, maybe I should keep my weirdness in for only the people who /deserve/ to see it, for the people who will appreciate it, and then, to use it to freak the pinks out on limited occasions, just often enough to get the thrill, but just seldom enough that they never see me coming.

It's like people who are said to have "blue" personalities, a nurturing type who are somehow able to suprise everyone, simply because they don't let their freakishness show at every moment. And when I say "freakishness", Dok, I'm not talking about this fake commercial shit. I'm talking the sort of things that you can't buy, that get you shot in the wrong locations of this Ammurica.

/That/ sort of freaky. The type to keep ones fucking mouth shut about, and only let it out for the deserving.

Also, Fuck you Kai.

We're supposed to get 2+ inches of snow here today, and a mix of rain and snow before that.

GoddAMMIT. I thought we were done with this. I had a plan to go collecting for my assistantship this friday.  So much for working late this afternoon.

I think this ends it for all time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ep6vmpcUQR8 

I just finished reading Three Cups of Tea, and I can say it is by far one of the most powerful books I have ever read. Holy shit, that man is a saint in every sense. The whole thing was wrapped up in an education of Pakistani and Afgani culture that is only topped by Cain's analyses here.

Just, if you haven't already, read it. FFS.

And if I'm just behind in all this (the book was published in 2005), well then, ignore me.

I'm a rather moody person, that is, my emotional circuit tends to go through these overly exaggerated polarized shifts on a intracircadian rhythm, a sort of hour to hour zeitgeber. I'm swinging from ecstatic to the deepest depression to unmotivated tiredness to horrible anxiety, all within the space of a morning.

After some monitoring, I've found these shifts are highly correlated with my physical status. In fact, how much sleep I've had, what and when I've eaten and the last time I've exercised and showered has more correlation to my emotional state than any other factor, including how many shitty things I've had to deal with that day. In retrospect, the former makes the latter seem meaningless in causation.

I'm finding that these physical variables /cause/ my moods. Not whoever said something mean to me on the bus, or how many deadlines I have, or whether my advisor is being helpful or not. Furthermore, if these things are taken care of the motivation and energy to do what ever I want and need to do simply arrives with ease, effortlessly.

What I'm saying is simply this: if I put all of my focus on taking care of my body, everything else in my life falls in line without any real effort to make it so on my part. When I'm eating what and when I need to eat to stay healthy, exercising and performing other maintenance tasks, and sleeping 7 hours every night, I arrive at the excitement of my work and with the needed motivation and energy to do it. All my issues and problems become solvable and as long as I'm not suddenly dropped into a warzone my mood is uplifted throughout the day. At the same time, if I'm in good physical state and I suddenly don't feel so great, I KNOW then and there is an issue that needs to be addressed, something in my life that needs to be changed.


Just some things to think about if you're unhappy.

Just wanted to note, I think it's funny that while it is an abomination for two men to hot loving sex together, it was perfectly fine for godfearing Lot's daughters to have incestuous sex with him and bear him children.

Oh, those crazy YHVH worshipers...