Costa Rican Dry and Wet Rain Forest

Rosemont mine proposal in the scenic Santa Rita mountains

Usually I have no quarrel with how private individuals conduct their business, but when their business affects my health and well-being I must speak up. Even the most casual freeway observer cannot help but note the monumental destruction wrought by mining in Southern Arizona. For those who live here, that scenic desecration is compounded by polluted water and air. Arsenic groundwater contamination has ruined much of our already scarce aquifers. Every time the wind blows I can see billowing clouds coming off the Sierita Mountain mines and I can feel it in my lungs and eyes.

I don't usually object to other people's business, but when that business gums up my vision and chokes my breath, I must speak up. The owners of the proposed Rosemont mine promise that their business will be different, that it will not have such ill effects, but the evidence of history speaks otherwise. Let's see the mining companies fix the mess they've already made before we even consider letting them make another one.

Fate of the Borderlands in the Global Economy

Just back from Mexico, an exotic frontier somewhere near these borderlands. All the maps are jumbled (and all the people ask, "what, really, is a border?") and (I don't know if you've heard of this) even the GPS systems are confused here, the systems based on NAD 1927 are off by a couple hundred meters from the revised 1983 version, the earth's bulge having migrated in that time, or the poles shifting, a gentle shrugging action that stretches the wasteline/equator and dragged mountains hiccuping across the corpulence. But things stick and the motion is not always fluid, so you get what we have here, impossibly arbitrary borders that people will die to (double?) cross. Constant movement without change.

I don't know how much it is in the Mass (catholic?) mediums, but southern Arizona is in a state of simmering chaos. Some accounts have the drug lords outpacing total Mexican federal spending. They reutinely kidnap Mexican police officers, and there have been firefights between the U.S. border patrol and defiant thugs. They retaliate with terrorism; recently, all of the police officers from a border village were killed (about 30), and the Mexican army was only able to regain apparent control at the expense of heavy casualties on both sides. Because law here is based here totally on force, with no shred of social contract, this can be a very lawless place, with only the sheen of daytime normality, the bright truth of the desert sun, to obscure the midnight drama. In places along the border there are so many abandonded backpacks that you cannot walk without stepping on them...every one of these backpacks is a new American. The border patrol is fighting a hit-and-run game of interdiction, but are, if anything, in retreat, having mainly fallen back behind the 32nd parallel.

Much of the action of Hemingway's "A farewell to arms" derives from his character's intimate knowledge of italian geography, as e.g. he floats down a river after mutineering. To know a landscape well enough to navigate totally 'blind' (without the aid of cars and roads, technology, internet information) is my goal here. Like the back of my own hand, like a lover. This is a years-long courtship, She is so Vast; not that a one-night stand would be insulting, but I always want more, to see the next curve around a canyon, the way her leaves change in different places, at different times. The native fish swimming in moist places, the howls and stars at night.

Globalization has always existed, but now it is so fast -- before anything can exist for itself it is pasted in front of a million backgrounds, nothing connected by anything but convenience, constantly swirling connections, getting nowhere. The nightmare of too-drunk total vertiginous movement while lying afraid to move on a bed of surround-sound. But according to economists, the speed of dollar turnaround, the mobility of capital, is what creates wealth. The faster we spend it the more we have, and nobody can devalue the American dollar if we keep consuming, which we couldn't do if they stopped buying imaginary dollars. They believe in the imaginary dollars because we look wealthy because we spend them so fast: constant movement without change.

Meanwhile, I've been learning the art and science of tracking at a Mexican ranch. Now the dirt speaks and I cannot help listening, and we following where it leads...Jaguars live here. What strange power these dark creatures hold over us, that even in the caccoonish confines of our surround-sound media center we are moved by their perfect power?! They also want to cross the border into america, the wonderful wilderness santuaries we have built of their historical (100, 150 years ago) habitat, but the Wall might be more of a problem for them than for "coyotes". When the bright-eyed beast circles in Your dreams, embrace it, it will make you stronger.

What we love we shall grow to resemble. -Bernard of Clairvaux.
-with apologies to Nona, who will Understand.

Autumnal Bucolic Zephyr

November-hot Tucson sun
oasis in the desert
date palms and pomegranates
laundry detergent and fried food
stars, lapping waves of high cirrus clouds

It was a good time of year and I came down out of the hills and lived in the city, going for walks along concrete roads, drinking beer, in the pool, fruit juice at my writing desk, watching. Friday night at the edge of the universe...front row seats.

Planning my next voyage -- through the mountain passes South of the Whetstones and Dragoons, North along the Chiricahua towards Wilcox and their fresh fruit stands. Then West to the secret Nature Conservancy hotsprings on the south of the Galiuro mountains. Then...back to Tucson? Its almost too warm in the city; I ride in shirtsleeves, warm, through the night. I confuse this place with Jerusalem, within this light I go about my daily business, smoking, turning wide circles. Diving in aquamarine waters; the gym, sunbathing, wine and cheese and fresh fruit in this desert city, white like icecream.

Wide Arizona beckons.

Wildlife Tracking Workshop at El Aribabi, Sonora, Mexico

Sky Island Alliance leverages a small but dedicated staff with a tiny budget to marshal a large network of grassroots volunteers who influence a wide range of public policy decisions. For example, their Wildlife Linkages program trains citizen scientists to track keystone mammalian predators in the Southwest. The GPS data are used to assemble up-to-date maps of existing wildlife linkage corridors and influence decisions ranging from urban planning of new subdivisions to the construction of wildlife access tunnels under interstate highways.

The training took place at the El Aribabi wildlife ranch in Sonora, Mexico. The instructors were professional scientists and wildlife trackers specializing in wolves, mountain lion, jaguar, coyote, and bobcat, and coati. This is a great program and more people should take advantage of this opportunity to "get to know the neighbors"; it should be expanded so that everyone has the opportunity to feel at home in the wilderness. It should be a key component of the Leave No Child Inside movement. For more information about citizen science wildlife tracking programs
see keepingtrack.org.


See: Winter Wildlife Tracking

Tucson Pride

On the right is an energy bar made locally in Tucson. On the left is a leading-brand energy bar from anywhere else....

Label:

Endangered: Pima Pineapple Cactus

This expedition, led by Patrick Dockens of EcoPlan Associates, traveled beyond the mine tailings of Green Valley and skirted the variegated edge of the beautiful Sonoran Desert to map the homeland of the rare & Endangered Pima Pineapple Cactus (PPAC). The PPAC is named for its shape, not its taste, and is primarily threatened by the voracious appetite of development & accompanying habitat destruction.

This quite large mother is shown carrying a single "pup" (at bottom of photo), a vegetatively propagating bud. The really cool thing about these surveys is that they provide an excuse to thrash around in the prickly heart of the Sonoran desert. Unless science mandates straight-line transects for statistical rigor, few would dare to brave the physical rigors of the desert for days and weeks on end. This labor bore the fruit of knowledge: we located several isolated populations of the Pineapple, and since we had also observed many places without populations of the cactus we began to form an idea of the microclimate and plant associations that the Pima Pineapple Cactus favors. Although it is only a hunch or an intuition, I believe that the members of this field crew are probably now better able to find this cactus than are any other people on Earth.

I wonder if this intuition could be quantified....here is an effort to use non-hypothesis-based factor analysis to do just that in the Colorado Rockies.

Mathematics and Mileages to my House

The trail to my house, as all trails in the Southwest, is a wash (or vise versa). You go along down the dirt road where the BLM rangers lost my tracks. When the tire ruts have begun to meander individually, separate from one another, you have come to the right spot. Now they split and go around trees that are 50 years old.

They tracks have become trails.


But these trails are no longer monotonic, (one-to-one) i.e. for a given distance from the trailhead there are different, yet equivalent, positions on the trail. In other words there are many trails masquerading as one another.

Suddenly, you are at my camp.

"Four hikers go into the canyon with shovels. Three come out..."

Aravaipa is one of the most scenic of Arizona's many beautiful scenic canyons. Unfortunately, like many riparian areas in the southwest it's beauty and ecology are threatened by the invasive species Russian Olive, or tamarisk.

"Tamarisk SHOULD NOT BE in Aravaipa canyon.

We're getting it done, beating the monsters back, yanking them from their dirty little nests - taproots and all - and hanging up on the rocks to die. This is the best way to stop them from re-rooting themselves - but it's also the 21st-century equivalent of nailing owl-skins to the barn wall to ward off witches: begone, ye cursed tamarisks!

We worked the area from just below the Narrows almost to Virgus canyon. In the spring we pulled thousands of seedlings out of this stretch of canyon. The ones we missed grew a lot over the summer, especially their root systems, and these had to be dug and picked and pulled with the extra leverage of a weed-wrench. We estimate that we pulled out 100-150 plants. One was even flowering (the hussy!)."

[this quote is excerpted personal communication, Diana Turner, volunteer leader]

Las Cienegas Grassland Monitoring

Las Cienegas BLM National Conservation Area (NCA) is situated just north of Arizona's "Wine Country" in Elgin. The NCA encompasses most of the valley between the Santa Rita and the Whetstone "Sky Island" mountain ranges. Its verdant, rolling grass hills are a welcome surprise after the stark rock and Saguaro spires of the Sonoran Desert. When travelers see it they invariably exclaim, "Oh, I didn't know Arizona could be like this!". [map]

We identified annual and perennial grasses to evaluate ecosystem recovery after several years with no livestock grazing (there are native Pronghorn antelope). The transects revealed a marked increase in overall ground cover and a succession over the years from annuals to perennials. There were a few invasives, of course, such as Lovegrass, but also many beautiful natives like Sideoats Grama.

Grasses can be quite beautiful: while they lack the showy colors and fragrances of flowers because they are wind pollinated (and hence don't need to attract pollinators), their varying solutions to the architectural problem of arranging the seed head are quite wondrous, especially under magnification.

Source: Vplants.org

The Wildlands Project

"We are ambitious. We live for the day when grizzlies in Chihuaha have an unbroken connection to grizzlies in Alaska, when wolf populations are restored from Mexico to the Yukon to Maine; when vast forests and flowing prairies again thrive and support their full range of native plants and animals; when humans dwell on the land with respect, humility, and affection."

Contrasted with some environmental groups that fight to save "the last great places", the Wildlands Project (TWP) advance a positive vision: Rewilding.

Rewilding means "safeguard biodiversity where it is intact and restore the integrity of wild Nature where it has been compromised." For example, "as a first step toward protecting the extraordinary biological richness of Mexico's northern Sierra Madre Occidental mountains and the adjacent prairies, our Mexican staff identified ecologically significant areas, including critical habitat for jaguars, thick-billed parrots, and black-tailed praire dogs...We intend that Arizona and New Mexico will once again have jaguars in the arroyos and thick-billed parrots feeding on pine cones. But such intentions are only fantasies unless we first protect these animals' habitats in northwestern Mexico."

Note: Even with a positive vision, the best conservation plan needs be defensive in this time of explosive development of mineral resources and degraded agricultural land. Why do they capitalize "Nature"? Restore, rewild, revitalize, renew, rebalance, replenish, regenerate, reconnect.

Sky Island Alliance

"To my mind these live oak-dotted hills fat with side oats grama, these pine-clad mesas spangled with flowers, these lazy trout streams burbling along under great sycamores and cottonwoods, come near to being the cream of creation." Aldo Leopold (1937)


"This landscape that so enthralled Leopold was where the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Madre kiss, where the plants and animals of the Neotropics mingle with those of the Nearctic, where jaguar and grizzly hunted the same ridges, where elk and javelina browsed and rooted cheek to jowl, where northern goshawks took thick-billed parrots on the wing. Arizona, New Mexico, Chihuahua, and Sonora are landscapes of wonder, beauty, and wildness--and of mind-boggling biological diversity. Aldo Leopold saw this landscape as a single ecological region, as do we today. Sky Island Alliance (SIA) hopes to protect it and restore it to ecological health."
[paraphrased, Wild Earth Journal, 2000: The Wildlands Project.]

Sky Island Photos


---
Earth Verse

Wide enough to keep you looking
Open enough to keep you moving
Dry enough to keep you honest
Prickly enough to make you tough
Green enough to go on living
Old enough to give you dreams
Gary Snyder

Tea-Time on the Mountain-Top

You are CORDIALLY INVITED to a TEA PARTY on the SUMMIT of Mt. Wrightson, (Santa Rita Mountains, Sky Islands) this SATURDAY and SUNDAY from noon till 4 in OBSERVANCE of the planet MERCURY's greatest visibility on the 29th. Refreshments will be served. Dress will be smart-casual and please be on time. An after-party camp will observe Mercury's peregrinations.
Cheers,
CONOR

--

Postscript:
The glare up here is Tremendous, serving tea and talking about imaginary things. I can see smoky haze rolling off the open pit mines. Mines and telescopes, the only things visible of the earth from up here by moonlight. The crickets lie still on the asphalt as autumn starts. I am fatterning up for the Winter;mosquitoes cannot bite me and river rocks are Shiatsu on my back. I'm spending the weekends tracking Jaguars (either melanous or spotted) in the Borderlands. This is where Coronado sought the seven cities of gold. There is only one place in the world with more mammal diversity: the Costa Rican rainforest.

Ranch Life

We keep a loaded rifle at all times. Always know where the animals are. Always know where the nearest exit gate is. Bison are a herd animal, and when they stampede, as is their wont, they are almost impossible to stop; it is a classic example of a self-perpetuating system. The ones in the middle have to keep running to keep ahead of the ones behind, so even though they can't see what's in front of them they'll keep pushing the ones in front, through anything: fences, streams, people. They'll trample the individual who stops to smell the flowers.

The tractor blows smokes rings into the whimsically blue sky, while 50 miles away, across the valley, thunderstorms perch like gargoyles on the mountains. But the only thunder comes from the lumbering bison as they re-enact the stampedes of their racial memory. When the daughter of the rancher talks about how "they mainly wander around in the north slope, but once one starts heading down this way they'll all follow..." I think she is talking about clouds before I realize she is talking about buffalo.

--

Crouched in the tall grass, sweating, I remember where I came from. The cavernous darkness of the barn, a shaft of sunlight from the open door, sparks flying from my slowly sharpened weapon. The sweat takes me back to Tucson, a place far away but with similar summer weather (monsoonal) and similar annual rainfall (about 10 inches). But here, on the West Slope of the Colorado Rockies, the streams gorged with snowmelt and mountain rain are only 13 miles away, not 1300, and their misty breath, siphoned through itenerant sprinklers, grows grass up to my chest. There are a hundred species in this artifical meadow (many grasses and forbs:great burdock, knapweed, red and white clover, alfalfa (purple, blue, and light blue), mullein, morning glory, milkweed, gumweed, western dock, chicory...) but one does not belong. Suddenly I lunge and my shovel strikes the root of the musk thistle. I move on while it lies there dying. I wander long and aimless...

I live for the woods

Bush alder and pentaphylooides floribunda graced the south bank, while grasses and sedges and --what's that? a decaying old mushroom --with a fringed ring -- psychedellic! Definately a Psilocybe. I took a deep whiff and the on-beyond-earthy smell, as usual, constricted my bowels and while my heart raced to keep up. I gasped and staggered back, but soon I overcame these time-tested instincts and so, with a cry of "no time, no time!" plunge-stepped off into the wilderness.

My explorations take me gradually upstream. It seemed as if the days were flowing by, and I spent whole lifetimes at each bend in the babbling brook. Do not the fish also cause erosion? The elk with their thrashing?

In a clearing where the buck elk stood
squared their hips and bellowed their mating cry
thrashed their still-tender antlers against the sticky-hard
and brittle-soft
bark and branches of the aspen,
Quaking.


On this mountain I am climbing to meet you. I stop under a Ponderosa while the rain passes, and eat of the clear pine sap, and browse oregon grapes packed thick about, gently brushing my ankles, and dream:

It is not possible to tread on the Magic Island, the plants grow so thick. Instead one must swing from limb to limb! Or from stalk to stalk. Let nature show herself as she will. Often a juicy stalk of food will appear in the morning. Trash is simply dropped, whereupon is promptly vanishes into the udnergrowth (Sometimes you can smell where a lot of people or animals have recently been). But to what purpose the song of the birds? The angry chatter of a chipmunk? The ecology of sound? A mossy world where nothing has any weight. The long rise and slow intermittant relapse. The sound of bubbles popping underwater. Quicksand in the river deltas; even the larger boulders rock gently as if they were floating. A caterpillar living on a bed of moss.

I speak for the woods
I live in the woods
I speak in the woods
I live for the woods

Lime Night Life Light

Ah, back to the hammock

cold paws, correct breathing

shoulders relaxed
writing in bed, flowers
scattered around
my dark shape
amid
innumerable dark shapes
under an empty sky
full of fluttering
moths
whose white noise fills up the valley
called to my reading
my lime night life light
a babbling brook of half-heard ideas
while
I roam, hourless,
over the mornings and afternoons
of possible lives not lived
and possible patterns
of impossible sciences

South Park, Colorado

Its best to be protected the first day out in the wilderness. Racing clouds and sun meant sunglasses useless. Plunging through underbrush - stop at the edge of a copse of woods. So unfortunately that meant boots. There was evidence of Plenty - the squirrels had more pine cones than they knew what to do with; many lay unchewed in the relative clearing under the canopy of Engelmann spruce boughs.
The edge of the woods, where the aspen grow shorter, scarred by the testosterone-fuled frenzy of male Elk. There were battles here, symbolic and real; the snorting cry of chivalry and desire. Scattered bones stand silent testament to those too old to be fleet of foot.

Steep Gulch outside Leadville, CO

I started down from Hope Mountain in a light rain -- so light I could still look about normally. The Gentians were closed against the storm, though. The face of a deer caught the corner of my eye, and the recognition became an involuntary turn of the head, in time to see her do the same.

Down, down through the mats and then thickets and then forests of Engelmann spruce, as if dull silver-evergreen tips remember dry copper-containing ore. Where the spruce grow tall they let the mat juniper have the understory. And now mats of strawberries...I noticed a tiny wild strawberry sitting on the lip of the mountain squirrel's burrow; ripening in the sun or dropped from his paws when my oversize shadow darkened his door? Without hesitation I picked it up and ate it in two heavenly bites. No regret.

Two butterflies were fluttering over and on one another, surely engendering piles of caterpillars in the underbrush.

Contingency and Control in the Laboratory

The Comparative Psychology of Learning: the Selective Association Principle and Some Problems with "General" Laws of Learning. Bolles (ed) 1973.

"A rat on a treadmill learns i f it runs when it hears a beep it can avoid an electric shock. The rat can also learn to turn to avoid a shock. But rats cannot learn to rear up on their hind legs to avoid being shocked. The rat's brain cannot learn to avoid danger using a naturally exploratory behavior."

In the same vein, you also can't train animals to get a reward by moving away from a stimulus that predicts reward. Pavlovian conditioning trumps Skinnerian. (personal communication, Dr. Insel) Accepting the full import of this work entails abandoning general intelligence. Without general learning, we can question the adaptability of man to the modern social-technological milieu. It appears we can learn some things, but for others we will continue to make the same mistake over and over again.

...which reminds me of my current philosophy of science, expressed by E.O Wilson:

"Nature first, then theory. Or, better, Nature and theory closely intertwined while you throw all your intellectual capital at the subject. Love the organisms for themselves first, then strain for general explanations, and, with good fortune, discoveries will follow. If they don't the love and pleasure will have been enough."

The idiosyncrasies of evolutionary contingency make controlled experiments difficult to interpret, in the sense that it may be hard to extrapolate "logically" from one model (animal) or trait to another system. The general laws we attempt to find by working in simplified laboratory settings may not even exist, but if we don't "love the organism for itself" we may never know it. This is part of the reason I'm leaving laboratory science. Under this interpretation, contrary to current fashion (and dogma), the profligate wonders of Natural History become the supreme biological science.

Zeitgeist: nobody believes this story

w90a8TYT8)(*#)%(its like somekind of voodoo science fiction

horror story - Weird Circumstances and Religious Visions

too...evolving...raw,fresh,feral, the long drawn out death of

a mountain lion, the dry hills, Backbone of a continent,

pinyon, piece-meal, shattered. Here, too, squat in stone

towers (albeit 1000 A.D.), blasted sinfilled cities, share in

the earthern pizza oven with all the rainbows of biodynamic

generalities. DOING GOOD WORK< SURROUNDED BY DUST up to our

eyebrows, machettes and slingshot, spear, and motorcycle;

running on high-octane raw milk and butter, bjorkian

wonderlusting up the Backbone through the second Eden of

permaculture Santa Fe, Taos, Durango, Montrose, Hotchkiss skip

and jump to Rocky Mountain Nat'l Park.

in the bathrooms the scientists all clasp their hands before

the mirror
in prayer that the autofaucets will turn on
in the cubicicle the woman next to me is selling her

breastmilk
a machine is suckling now

so i quit the frankenstein
Department of Defense
and return to the land:
I'm sleeping in a hammock
the earth owns
a small strawbale casita, in the big pantano cuerca, canelo,

rillito

watermelon pineapple & soy sauce
Hawaiin-brought macadamia nuts
heavy odor of centronella
i kneel and pass fingers through dirt
fingers through dirt
everything made of dirt
made of dirt
I pass fingers through the world

to worship technology but still doubt
understand the mistake in what's
given

i eat these cumquat preserves w/
(local) (raw) honey and butter
i combat global warming
i grow fat while it grows thin

fuck man its total war
HELICOPTERS everywhere, every 5 minutes
La Frontera, The Border
they're strafing villages 100 kilometers from here

awww man we're totally fucked
its so hot here you want to fuck yourself
the 9-to-5ers must be unhappy everywhere
none of them ever stops trying
finding work - playing hot potato

I'm playing bongos on the street
I've cured global warming
the green spreads out from my
huts and tents
the whirlwind
a moon-burn
making good choices
and opening lucky meetings

Breath. Deep. Ecology.

The lights of Tucson turn black sky blue on the horizon,

obliterating the stars there and I think of the numberless salmon who, in their ardor, turned the waters pink,

so thick you could walk across, from bank to bank, on their backs (source: probably apocryphal story believed by Lewis and Clark).

But we embraced progress and prosperity
and built the dams that killed the illimitable salmon,
numberless as the stars.

In my career I see reflected
this history of society embracing technology,
perhaps to prove to ourselves that we can.
I've done genetic engineering and brain surgery,
great endeavors that now seem hollow.

In their stead, I would
Embrace the wild uncertainty of nature....

Is this Permaculture?

Walls, moats, barracades, embedded tiles, ocotillo branches, chicken wire, hog wire, blade-wire, possibly even barbed wire somewhere in there all thrown together ... still doesn't keep the rabbits out. What to do?

the desert speaks I

the desert speaks &
the heat swallows you

there are mountains surrounding
to the northeast the rocks are black: "tucson"
as if balloons were inflated and popped
in a pool of molten lava
at the confluence of two dry rivers

we camp on the surface in billowing white tents
the ground crackles and pops
we spit watermellon seeds
cicadas lost in the pads of a prickly pear

"love and rely on the desert"

we camp amid the stranded fortresses of blasted, bygone greatness
mine tailings
mixed with broken
clay tablets, pueblos

a shared hallucination:
sun cuts through sparse leaves
many thin things, split apart
a few scattered hermitages and
six emaciated deer in a dry stream
too tired to run away
ghost paths over empty ground
waiting for the monsoon

it is hard to swallow here
the wind and
El sol y sombra,
Sonora

I woke at 4 am

I woke at 4am today after dreaming about the design of the hanging mobiles hanging outside my door. They are wine bottles spiral-wrapped in wire, hanging above an adobe wall. The cactus all around are Sonoran, but working with mud (adobe) I can finally make snowmen like Calvin and Hobbes. I made use of the cedar sawdust composting toilet and fed the bitch-chickens, who just want me to chase them so they can squwak. Imagine how much estrogen you'd need to lay an egg every single day. These are not happy birds. Luckily I am an enlightened creature, with 7 chakras and the names of 12 zodiac constellations tucked under my belt. Saw the sun rise and went for a jog with my spear -- no game today, limped back to the casita and downed a liter of coconut juice. Dehydration's a killer that stalks by night. Then I went to inspect the latest bathtub full of clay mud. Earthy bentonite, straw, and (if in Afro-India a hefty dab of manure) combines to make a swell concrete. I'd like to try digging a nice badger-burrow like all the other animals in the desert, but don't know how they keep the floods out. I'd like to try planting a bamboo forest and coming back 5 years later to weave a giant basket/yurt/tepee house, replete with multicolored hammocks and a dozen kites or hot air balloons to mark the spot when I'm out on forages. More and more feral every day. Wearing a bear-tooth necklass. ...Then i got on my motorcycle and rode up over the mountains to my neuroscience job, where frankenstein-esque shit goes down. Brain surgery, computer-brain interfaces, weird stutter-start blown fuse littered benchtop CYBORGS, and the latinas all mutter under their breath "!dios mio!". Escape is only 6 hours and a couple months away. Then I'm taking the high road right up the backbone of the continent to get a brrreath of fresh air. Crazy. Colorado. Cool? Shout the ancestors, speak the many tongued forks in your road, swirl with the gastrointestinal juices that wash the fruit of four continents in your local deli. Raw milk is heavenly. I feel Kalahari. And having way to much fun with this. Got to go cut up some insects.

How to Build with Cob (Adobe)

First, sift some dirt. High clay content and low organic matter is best; Tucson dirt is just about right.

Then add lots of water and straw and knead it like dough. With your feet.

In a bathtub.

You will get very dirty.

Lather it on a framework such as straw bales or reed mats.

What's your favorite country?

More info.

Ron Paul for President in '08

I think the key issue for 2008 is reducing the power of the executive. As some have pointed out, as the US increasingly centralizes power in one branch of government, our checks and balances are overturned in a way reminiscent of fascist coups. It doesn't matter who is president in 2008 or 2012, what matters is the fundamental process of democracy.

"With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise."

Ron Paul is a republican who seems to actually believe in Less Government. As such, I support his presidential bid. I am a one-issue voter, because that's the way the system is. And my one issue is less government.

EF Schumacher on "Progress"

"He called his talk 'The Insufficiency of Liberalism' and it was an exposition of what he termed the “three stages of development”. The first great leap, he said, was made when man moved from stage one of primitive religion to stage two of scientific realism. This was the stage modern man tended to be at. A few move to the third stage in which one can find in the lapses and deficiencies in science and realism, and that there is something beyond fact and science. He called this stage three. The problem, he explained, was that stage one and stage three appear to be exactly the same to people stuck in stage two. Consequently, those in stage three are seen as having had some sort of a relapse into childish nonsense. Only those in stage three, can understand the differences between stage one and stage three."

find a Permaculture-Social-Environmental-Justice grassroots movement near you

The Orion Society is the nexus.

Diagram of Cloud Mechanisms

Letter of the Week: 1872 Mining Law

Dear Senator,

The 1872 Mining Law needs to be changed. It consistently favors the interests of large, often foreign companies over the interests of local Arizona landowners. It subsidizes the give-away of over $1 billion in publicly-owned minerals every year.

My family and I are directly affected by dust blowing off the numerous open-pit mines in Pima county, and what really irks me is the thought that my tax dollars are funding this irresponsible exploitation of our God-given natural heritage.

This land is held in trust by our government so that everyone can use it, but when these companies come in with their mines they just use it up. Although we often hear that these mines are creating jobs in our local communities, the reality is that these corporations will leave us high and dry when the minerals run out.

We need an updated mining law that considers the valid interests of local landowners as well as the interests of economic development. I plan to watch your action on this issue as a kind of litmus test for who you really support; is it the local landowners trying to make a living in Arizona or is it the big corporate interests at their government-sponsored pig trough?

Homeopathy

"The underpinning of the editorial content of the Lancet as it relates to homeopathy relies on a quaint old idea from the nineteenth century that the ONLY way that the property of water can be affected or changed is by incorporating foreign molecules. This is the Avogadro-limit high-school level chemistry argument. To a materials scientist this notion is absurd, since the fundamental paradigm of materials-science is that the structure-property relationship is the basic determinant of everything. It is a fact that the structure of water and therefore the informational content of water can be altered in infinite ways".

Dr. Rustum Roy

An Island to Oneself

"The coral waxes, the palm grows, but man departs."
Suvarov, Cook Islands, South Pacific

"Transition"

Transition
Let us now turn to psychological facts. At night all leaping fountains speak with a louder tone; my soul, too is a leaping fountain says Zarathustra. Into the night life seems to be exiled --these are the famous words from Freud's Interpretation of Dreams--into the night life seems to be exiled what once ruled during the day. This sentence contains the entire modern psychology. Its great idea is the stratification of the psyche, the geological principle. The soul has its origin and is built in strata, and what we learned before in the organic field apropos of the construction of the big brain from the anatomic-evolutionary standpoint of banished aeons, is revealed by psychosis as a still-existing reality. We carry the ancient peoples in our souls and when the later acquired reason is relaxed, as in the dream or in drunkenness, they emerge with their rites, their prelogical mentality, and grant us an hour of mystic participation.

When the logical superstructure is loosened, when the scalp, tired of the onslaught of the prelunar states, opens the frontiers of consciousness about which there is always a struggle, then there appears the old, the unconscious, in the magical transmutation and identification of the "I" in the early experience of the everywhere and the eternal. The hereditary partimony of the middle brain lies still deeper and is eager for expression: if the covering is destroyed in the psychosis there emerges, driven upward by the primal instincts, from out the primitive-schizoid substructure, the gigantic archaic instinctive "I" unfolding itself limitlessly through the tattered psychological subject.


Quoted in "Plexus" the 2nd volume of the Rosy Crucifixion by Henry Miller

Henry Miller's Gourmet

At a Jewish delicatessen. Plenty of sour cream, radishes, onions, strudels, pastrami, smoked fish, all kinds of dark bread, creamy sweet butter, Russian tea, caviar, egg noodles--and Seltzer water.

In addition to fried onions and mashed potatoes we had succotash, beets and Brussels sprouts, with celery, stuffed olives and radishes on the side. We washed this down with red and white wine, the best obtainable. There were three kinds of cheese, followed by strawberries and rich cream. For a change we had some excellent coffee, which I prepared myself. Good, strong coffee with a bit of chicory in it. All that lacked was a good liqueur and Havana cigars.

Delicious breakfast, ...always fresh fruit and berries smothered in cream, muffins fresh from the oven, thick strips of bacon, marmalade, steaming coffee with whipped cream. I felt like a pasha.

A "snack" consisted of cold cuts, salami, headcheese, olives, pickles, sardines, radishes, potato salad, caviar, Swiss cheese, coffee, a German cheesecake or apple strudel, with kummel, port or Malaga to top it off.

What better than a caviar sandwich on black bread smeared with sweet butter--at 2:00 A.M.? With a glass of Chablis or Riesling to wash it down, certes. And to round it off, perhaps a dish of strawberries floating in sour cream, or if not strawberries then blackberries or huckleberries or blueberries or raspberries. I see halvah and baklava too. Goody goody!

Farm Bill Letter

Senator,

I am very concerned about the upcoming vote on the Farm Bill. I consider the existing farm bill a prime example of government "pork". The basic issue is whether we, the American consumers, should be allowed to choose which food and which farmers to support.

This is a very important issue, one that we are confronted with every week at the supermarket. Government subsidies have made it cheaper to buy Coca-cola than local apple juice. Why the government would want to promote corn syrup while we are in the midst of a diabetes crisis boggles my mind.

Please stay out of my dinner. Let the market decide which foods are produced (that's what capitalism is good at). By all means provide funding to retrain farmers who were dependent on subsidies, and put tariffs on imports from countries that lack our environmental and labor standards. But let us, the American people, choose how to spend our own money.

Thank you.

Conor Flynn

I Vote Every Week

Most Senators and Congressmen have email forms that can be used to contact them. Although they probably don't read 99.9% of the letters they receive, you might get lucky. Plus, there is usually a place to input the subject of an email, and I'm willing to bet that they do keep track of how many letters they get about bills they vote on.

Here are my Senators and Representatives
Senator Jon Kyl
Senator John McCain
Representative Gabrielle Giffords (85719-2857 )
Representative Raúl M. Grijalva (85735-8803)

On the Current State of What Paleontology Knows -- Not Much.

They don't even know what the land looked like. They know next to nothing about the major rituals or holidays, let alone what beliefs may have motivated them. They don't even know what their society did. We do know they built roads. But was the land farmed? Did they plant trees? They don't know when they lived in particular places, how much rain they had to work with, what the landscape was like. How the land changed as they abandonded it (or did it change first and they had to abandon it afterward). Cause and effect?

Seminar:
Alluvial geoarchaeology of fire history and culturally modified environments along the Eastern Mogollon Rim, Arizona. Chris Roos
Affiliation: Anthropology, University of Arizona

Choose Life

"Two paths lie before us. One leads to death, the other to life.

If we choose the first path—then we in effect become the allies of death, and in everything we do our attachment to life will weaken: our vision, blinded to the abyss that has opened at our feet, will dim and grow confused; our will, discouraged by the thought of trying to build on such a precarious foundation, will slacken; and we will sink into stupefaction, as though we were gradually weaning ourselves from life in preparation for the end.

On the other hand, if we reject our doom, and bend our efforts toward survival-then the anesthetic fog will lift: our vision, no longer straining not to see the obvious, will sharpen; our will, finding secure ground to build on, will be restored; and we will take full and clear possession of life again. "


Schell, Jonathan. Fate of the Earth.

A gigantic experiment with all living things...

I have become increasingly skeptical of the safety of common chemicals. It is not that they are untested, but that they may be fundamentally untestable. Results showing changes in the grandchildren of exposed rats and hormone mimics having effects at doses almost too low to measure persuade me that the Precautionary Principle should be applied. At present, "we are running a gigantic experiment with humans and all other living things as the subject."

I talked to a Nalgene sales representative who swore there was no danger from Bisphenol A. Turns out there's quite a body of literature to the contrary, Canada's environmental agency is reviewing its grandfathered status and San Francisco has already banned it. Here's the letter I wrote after doing my research:

Mr. _____,
We spoke at the University of Arizona vendor fair on Tuesday the 24th of April briefly about BPA in Nalgene products. As I indicated, our lab is very concerned about any and all hormone mimics. We recently had an incident, unrelated to BPA, involving possibly paper products or wheat that may have been contaminated with some sort of juvenile growth hormone, leading to the virtual eradication of our colony animals (Manduca sexta) and a slow down over several months in our ability to conduct research.

As you can see, we are very concerned about possible extraneous factors affecting our research. Despite your assurances to the contrary, I do not find the peer-reviewed research on BPA to show it to be conclusively safe for use in our lab. (CF. Murray TJ (2007). "Induction of mammary gland ductal hyperplasias and carcinoma in situ following fetal bisphenol A exposure." and Frederick S. vom Saal (2006). "Large effects from small exposures. II. The importance of positive controls in low-dose research on bisphenol A.") Therefore, we will continue to seek out alternatives to Nalgene plastic containers in our purchasing.

If you are aware of any new research showing the safety of Nalgene products I would be happy to hear about it. In the meantime, this letter is simply to express my concerns and my conclusions based on the information you gave me and the information I have available to me.

Thank you.


Related Articles:
Man-made Chemicals Detected In Newborns

England Tourism

Good old food in London

Sculpture Park on the Isle of Portland

50 and 100 miles from home

This is an old AAA map of Arizona, with modifications. Since my van can be towed 100 miles for free, it seemed prudent to determine the extent of my get-home-free zone. This is where I feel comfortable; anything beyond that starts to stretch my luck and my umbilical. This zone, my home, includes most of Arizona's sky island mountain ranges.

Opportunities

www.caretaker.org
www.coolworks.com
www.housesitter.com
www.organicvolunteers.com

Learning the Shape of Clouds

"learning the shape
of clouds" not
that every moment
has to be extra
ordinary. Kick
some leaves.
The underside
of some rocks
pinecones and
pale
leaflitter on
the dark earth
but some days
there is just a single
dark cricket under
the rock and the
leaves make an empty
rustling.

I'm moving in the
right direction. Except
the fire in my
lower stomach and
the surge at the back
of the brain
and the eyelids
when breathing.
Your own footsteps
on the way back.
Tire tracks gradually
you hear only
the swish
of pants
inside the muffle
of hat and jacket

Thank-you for Your Help

because of you I walked out one last time
into the Baja sun and bright concrete surround
I said goodbye to nobody and thanked no one for their help
silently without moving my lips
no vibration on take-off
blink and then the clouds opened over Dallas
the grid-plan
welcome to the American machine
consumed and then the west Texas farmfields,
Guadalupe mountains, White Sands Nat'l Monument,
the rocky backbone of the continental divide,
islands perched in the sky,
home: a rusted plane by the runway
two beautiful women with perfect posture
walking away from me into the setting Tucson sun

Why Did You Do That?

Why do other people act the way they do? Actions that you can't explain through values or ideology, like good environmentalists watching TV instead of the sunset. I think everyone has a list of weird inexplicable actions that other people do. For what reason? Personally, and I realize this is a personal failing and I'm working on it, I've always chalked up inexplicable actions to stupidity. The reason the ex-hippies paved over our vegetable garden was because they didn't realize how important it was or how much they'd miss it, nor how easy an alternative solution might have been. They didn't realize because they didn't really want to think about it, or they couldn't.

Since realizing my own explanation I've stopped believing it as much and have become more interested in other people's explanations. There is usually a dominant one, a recurring cognitive theme. For example, R, either through projection or the basic goodness of his nature, thinks that the reason people do bad things like cut you off in traffic is because although they know better, they just don't care. This lack of care is, for him, the ultimate indicator of all wrong actions. R has always been of the Old School of medieval honor and loyalty. For him, Good and Evil are daily battles.

I was recently rereading Catcher in the Rye, and over and over again Holden Caulfield, the dropout kid, explains people's behavior by calling them "phonies". I like that. In their hearts they know better and maybe actually are good people, but they end up doing the exact opposite because of society or because of something mysterious called "growing up". Getting used to being phony. Hunter S. Thompson famously described the Problem with Americans as "Fear and Loathing". Ever the wordsmith, he chose one of the most evocative and perspicacious phrases to describe other's failings. People live in suburbia because they're afraid of the city, afraid of others. And how much of that behavior transitions from fear to a kind of sublimating hatred; no better word exists than "loathing". In contrast, Steinbeck writes about "ignorance of the self" being the root of all evil.

I think he might be on to something with the whole Socrates "self-knowledge" angle, but why stop there? I'm an ecosystem Buddhist, a way of thinking I learned from the Zen/Beat poet Gary Snyder. According to him, we shouldn't judge others because everyone has a part to play in the drama-dream of life. We shouldn't judge warmongers for warmongering anymore than we should judge the hawk for killing rabbits. That is their (ecological) role in this life, a role we can vehemently fight, but not one that we should stoop to judging personally. I'll do my thing, tend to my business, and you do yours. Can any one explanation be more than a crutch? I and those around me deserve better.

Molecular Biology is either ahead of its time...

...or full of BS.

I just quit my graduate "genetics" course because it was just shape-filling protein models with a prof waving his hands at a Plato's Cave Powerpoint screen. He's a genetics guy but genetics isn't pretty enough for Powerpoint so he spent the whole semester talking about molecular genetics, which either a) he doesn't understand or b) nobody understands. Probably both, and they definitely don't know that they don't understand it. I have better things to do with my time than listen to Just So Stories (and then Regurgitate them on the midterms). I want to go on record pointing this out, so that when the Revolution comes I'll have bragging rights.

things i found on a summer hike at a ski resort in the lower sierras

eye drops and a single dime and...

the drone of flies

economies of organisms, leaves, sticks and color

mountains

so white?

i thought there were clouds over on the horizon

will you write after their end?

record birds, heartbeats, melting snow

icecubes on the face, keep me awake

the hours field mice spend gnawing on nuts

dreams speeded up to cartoonishness

the way a bicycle amplifies someone running

white charcoal on the black foundations

a house gutted by red fire as tall as the green pine

arrows anchor the earth where the man, his wife, and their children stood

and what is money?

and can you add inside a black hole?

and

...a keychain thermometer, a tree covered in lady bugs,...

Peak Trash: the End of Cheap Garbage

>>>>State of the Union Speech, USA, 2025.
My fellow Americans, as we all know, during most of the Century of Oil, discovery of new deposits increased to keep pace with demand. But since oil was a finite nonrenewable resource, this could not last forever. What is now known as "Peak Oil" occurred when the available deposits began to decrease, even as demand continued to increase. During the ensuing years the end of cheap oil brought an end to everything that was made from cheap oil: plastic, fertilizer (agriculture), transportation, energy, and, basically, the entire pre-Peak Oil economy.

However, that crisis was not as bad as some alarmists had predicted. Americans are a hardy, industrious folk, and a Solution was found to the problems of post-Peak Oil times. Due to the astounding foresight of our ancestors, it appears that huge deposits of useful plastic were safely stored away in "Landfills" in case of just such an eventuality as Peak Oil.

Our economy now relies almost exclusively on trash harvesting and services related to the scrounging of this precious resource. Thanks to the generosity of our forefathers, their used styrofoam cups and plastic milk jugs saved our country from Peak Oil and helped make America one of the richest countries in the post-Peak Oil world. Yet, a new crisis awaits us. Today, I bring you news from our leading scientists that we may be headed toward an end to our supply of cheap garbage. Unfortunately, it appears that garbage, like oil, is a finite non-renewable resource. Even as our demand for trash continues to grow, there are fewer and fewer Landfills to supply that demand.

We believe that this is the beginning of a new era, an era that will challenge each and every one of us; the era of Peak Trash. Without major new deposits of plastic plates, spoons, forks, and knives, some Americans may be forced to do without when they eat their dinners of fermented compost. What will the children of tomorrow use to carry water from the sewer ditch when all the milk jugs and styrofoam cups are gone? When all the rusted car frames are occupied, where will we find shelter? Without plastic bags, what will we wear to church on Sundays? We can only hope that, just as we were saved from Peak Oil by the miraculous foresight of our ancestors, we will likewise be saved from the ravages of Peak Trash by some other miraculous intervention. Thank you. [applause]
>>>>>>>>

Cognitive dissonance...in a fly?

[diagram from Kravitz lab "boxing flies" work]

A couple hours phenology
on top of the mountain
cumquat in a plastic bag
white butterfly
after half an hour
some bees two? three?
above the valley
two eagles circled and cried
spit out cumquat seed
phenology? or phenomenology
threw the banana peel and i could almost see it
the I almost disappears --> goal

then a pair of big flies, then a pair of small flies
17 chia seeds drying on a pair of trousers
the gel does its job; hardens stuck to the cloth
cotton cloth is also gel
tug-of-war between them (like heat, electricity)
the actual neural decision-making logic of a fly -- scratch scratch it goes
strobe light-like
to investigate the cumquat seed
then shies away behind the bush

nothing here is human-sized
I won't be Ostrich-sized.
A spent caccoon hangs from a dead branch on a live bush
inches above the rocks
ALL life uses DNA. ALL countries trade with dollars.

should i follow the white butterfly? write her down?
if cities are a good thing than free trade is a good thing.
as i leave in the mid afternoon
two butterflies fight or dance
above

Teaching lesson plans

teaching lesson plans
1) find the center of the triangle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incircle



2) alphabet on beyond zebra cyrillic arabic etc

Apes

"The family Hominidae consisting of gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and humans collectively known as the "great apes".

APES; fellow travelers, uncles, caricatures, demons. They look out of the same eyes, see each otther as we see each other. Of all animals, the creatures we have perhaps the best chance of understanding. Closest. Kissing cousins. But Different, their faces twisted, their bodies warped, like us, but reflected imperfectly. All of these words for Different mean, somehow, Inferior. And, like the mentally retarded, it takes more cognitive machinery than most humans posses to understand them, irremediably separate, but Equal. Fellow voyagers clutching at one another's limbs on the edge of the cliff gazing out over the inexplicable universe. Can you name the four living species of ape (five, counting homo sapiens)?

Q: What is the point of Education?

Q: What is the point of Education?
A: To teach obedience and limit learning.

"The whole system was built on the premise that isolation from first-hand information and fragmentation of the abstract information presented by teachers would result in obedient and subordinate graduates, properly respectful of arbitrary orders."
-John Taylor Gatto, describing the adoption of Prussian-style education in 19th Century America.

CF. essays by Milton Friedman, David Henderson, others

notes
http://www.gracellewellyn.com
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com

good essay
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/hp/frames.htm

http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich.html
www.infed.org


Many people complain about government waste, but I welcome it…efficiency is not a desirable thing if somebody is doing a bad thing.…Government is doing things that we don’t want it to do; so the more money it wastes, the better.

Nobel laureate Milton Friedman,
http://www.reason.com/news/show/118175.html

Guest post from Henry

Not that long ago there was a bad Evil Man, a sorcerer so powerful the seas themselves bent to his command. One day from atop his throne of bare hard rock his saw a princess collecting pebbles from the water's edge. At once enthralled by her beauty and furious that she would take his property, he cast a spell to fence her in. The sun had shown brightly at the hour of her birth, and his magic was little against her: moments after the spell was cast it broke, leaving her free to leave. So the sorcerer recast the spell, and again it broke, and again he cast it, again and over again. And so his cruelty imprisoned the both of them. It is said that they both are still there, trapped... but beware if you find that hidden beach: the Evil Man's craaazy eyes may spot you too. (holla!)

Photojournalism is "objective".

Photojournalism is "objective". Instead of telling "stories", photos are chosen for holistic interest, a slice that is judged significant through an event that may or may not be judged significant. Because visual interest is often associated with traumatic experiences, a fair number of the major events of the day are reported, but also a cross-section of interesting minor events that, taken as a more-random sample, yield a more objective overall world-wide "picture".

What would constitute a truly "random" sampling of photographs? What does God see?

And yes, I realize that I'm confusing "objective"'s two meanings, both the metaphorical and the photographic. This is intentional, as are the potential dual meanings of "picture" and other terms that seem to have parallel or harmonious meanings in both the realm of images (CF. Wittgenstein's aphorisms) and our notion of truth. Despite what they say about Photoshop, seeing is still [closer than reading to] believing.

Friday CogSci: Conditioning on perceptual cues.

Ben Backus from Penn

Dr. Backus asked the question, which pairing of perceptual stimuli can be classically conditioned? Not just learning greater acuity, but actually learning perceptual experience; "the way the world looks". Can stimuli from different modalities influence each other? See for example the illusion of simultaneiety when someone claps their hands together a fair distance away. How does perceptual learning compare with other forms (appetetive, aversive) conditioning?

Interesting that, given these illusions, Dr. Backus assumes that visual perception is "optimal" e.g. uses all sources of information. What does it mean to argue that a structured representation is "correct"?

So, is the cue arbitrary? No, some cues (unconditioned stimulus) work better than others when paired with a given conditioned stimulus. For example, sound doesn't work to flip a Necker Cube illusion, but it does work on the bouncing/ghost ball illusion. There was a lively discussion afterward and during lunch about what makes a good model species, whether evolutionary justifications can explain (not just post hoc) what cues will work and which won't.

Is learning incremental or abrupt (i.e. paradigm shift)? Incremental, although perception is abrupt ("all or nothing").

Is there a "learning to learn" effect? No.

Local NGO Links

New Mexico Wilderness Alliance
Upper Gila Watershed Alliance
Sky Island Alliance
Friends of the San Pedro River
Tucson Audubon Society
SaveThePeak
Center for Biological Diversity
Friends of the Santa Cruz River
Sustainable Tucson
Friends of Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge
Coalition for Sonoran Desert Protection

Consciousness and YES/NO Psych Questionnaires

The questions were of the form "does x feel happy/sad/pride" where x were specific examples of mammals, insects, plants, machines, and natural objects. For example, "do ants feel sad?" and my task for one hour was to answer "yes" or "no" as quickly as possible; there were literally thousands of examples, presented every 2 seconds nonstop for 45 minutes. This was supposed to tell them about my "attributions of consciousness". What?

[Idea: Why didn't they test just ten examples from each of the categories?? 1) That wouldn't take an hour, and an hour is the canonical amount of time students are willing to . 2) To increase statistical power. Another, more efficient, question structure could be based on adaptive learning, where the computer generates each question based on the previous answers, so that it moves from general to specific, eventually oscillating around my indecision point (assuming a scale of consciousness graded from most similar to humans to least...this is assuming that people aren't more likely to say that a motorcycle can feel happy than a worm)]

IS this what science has come to? Who cares? These guys get public funding for this? What's worst is how insulting this is to me; that my nuanced feelings, opinions, hopes and fears about the realm of consciousness could be reduced to yes or no. No possibility for discussion / completely dehumanized: do they really think they're plumbing the depths of my soul in this artificial setting? Or, by "controlling all extraneous variables" will they only find only what they're looking for? I'll never believe another psych study based on bored college students pressing yes or no as rapidly as possible. College students are some of the most dumb and desperate people in society. Most of those guys were frat boy dropouts, hung over and world-weary; the quiet desperation of years of unreflective failure necessary to motivate young men to throw away their hours of youth for pocket change.

My strategy was twofold: first, panic and prepare to leave, but then rationalize myself into staying. I already sit inside staring at a screen all day anyway. Just relax, learn to accept things as they are. You are in a comfortable chair in a room of meticulously immaculate and barren cubicles. Is this hell? Purgatory? The ultimate aspiration of hegemonic standardization, the real essence of school and work and society? You've already started, already committed. Don't change horses in midstream. Impossible to rebel anyway; resistance is futile. If you leave now, shouldn't logically you also leave your job, turn off and drop out of civilization entirely? No, remain calm. I took my shoes off, relaxed my face into its most natural wide-relaxed expression, and drifted off while letting my fingers do the walking over the amazingly banal cavalcade of animals, plants, and machines. Such cacophony in the world, and to think that this is only a fraction of the things we have put words to: boulder, giraffe, falcon, daffodil, desert, taxi cab.

In the end I took my $10 but couldn't look the experimenter in the eye. And maybe I'm just paranoid, but I couldn't help thinking that that was the point of the study, that the real test was what it always is: will you take the money and shut up, or cause a riot? I've always been a reasonable fellow. But I don't believe anyone in that room was conscious.

Econ. Questions

Is gov't the only way to control externalities, or will the market correct its own inefficiencies? One solution would be MORE private ownership, so that the owner of the wild geese would have a vested interest in making sure pollution from the local coal plant didn't mutate their ugly ducklings, or whatever.

Do copyrights and patents prove that the free market system is irrevocably flawed? How does biology deal with the costs of mimicry? There is ample evidence that innovation is not greater in countries with better intellectual property rights. Does this show that these incentives aren't significant, and hence necessary? "The intellectual property issues, when it comes to copying drugs, involve an irreconciliable clash between rule and act utilitarianism."[Marginal Revolution]

What does GDP or even utility/happiness/welfare have to do with what we really want to maximize?

Are defense and health both public goods that shouldn't be relegated to the private sector. CF. The voluntary city.

Good Econ Reads:
Marginal Revolution Blog
Reason Magazine
Freakonomics Blog
Overcoming Bias Blog

Doctoring is a Doomed Profession

Although medical doctors have quite a large amount of power in our economy, I believe that their bargaining power is being diminished by technological innovations and managerial restructuring. Robin Hanson's idea of negative health care would significantly raise the prestige of massage and personal training at the cost of doctors.

Jason I. Altman predicts: "By 2030 all surgical anesthesia will be administered and monitored by computers, with no need for professional medical supervision beyond the surgeon." Even sooner than that we are likely to see outsourcing of surgery, as robots controlled from the next room are replaced by robots controlled from India.

Its only a matter of time until large, centrally-controlled and ineffecient hospitals are replaced by "the Trader Joes of healthcare", a business model that goes straight from the drug companies to the client, and "cuts out the middleman" who in this case is none other than the good Doctor.

DNA screening is the wave of the future. Ever seen GATTACA? You can currently buy limited DNA tests that will soon be cheaper than a doctor's visit to tell you everything from whether your kids are likely to have Crutzfield-Jacobson disease to what your life expectancy is based on genetic markers for cardiac disease.