presents a slower blog

 

Please do enjoy the following despite the inevitable flaws from sometimes rapid assembly, for it won't all be just bitching. There should emerge some balance through well-tested solutions -- some created by me, and from others distilled -- that could be both profitable and important, if they could be more widely shared. These opinions range across many topics, regularly including those pushing the limits of anyone's expertise, so the views may change with further learning; several might be seen to do so as their entries have evolved.   For potential employers, what may be apparent biases would not trespass into commissioned scientific observations, whether direct or analytical. I can, indeed, compartmentalize, despite not knowing how to stop thinking.

Not just tangent topics: Background for this Blog Military Deaths Abroad Mercury Poisoning

29 August 2011

Just ran across a common question, one that is often hidden behind trappings of fruitless searches (not least religions), with this version distilled from Virginia Woolf, "Why is life so short, why so inexplicable?" [James Wood. 2011. "Its that all there is? Secularism and its discontents." The New Yorker, 15 August, p. 87]. For the past couple of weeks some of that question has been emerging from a different direction. This muley buck, whom I believe one of the twins born on our property less than a year and a half ago, was first photographed quickly (through a less than perfectly clean window, with what I call awfulfocus) last week while I sat in front of my computer in one of my dedicated office areas, as he was sharing my view. The past week has been the hottest of the year, and he has taken advantage of a particularly cool spot by bedding down under the deck most afternoons, just outside what I call the kiva window, in a room off to the right of the image. Today, he slipped behind the bushes outside while I was listening to the radio in that room. He looked directly at me where I was sitting quietly, about four feet away on the other side of the partly open window, with his eyes gleaming luminescently green as they met mine, then turned to digging his favorite place to try to smooth it out a little further, and settled down.  The tops of his velvet-covered horns and ears continued to showed above the window edge, vibrating as he breathed or flicked away flies. Neither folk music seems to bother him not at all, nor the baseball game I watched on the flat screen TV above the sound system yesterday, the later while listening to opera or reggae. He did pop up when I sneezed, and when he heard my wife clumping around in the kitchen above, but settled back in each time. Here is a creature with some clear intelligence, of my sex and about my overall size, beautifully developed and alive, already full grown and ready to breed at less than two years of age, yet to be lucky to live even that long. His sister haunts our yard as well, but is considerably more skittish. Their mother almost surely did not survive the past winter, after we had watched her feeding and shepherding them through ongoing living strategies. We discovered what almost surely her desiccating body under a clump of bushes, while we were pulling invasive dyer’s woad on the property across the main road from us earlier this summer. Her offspring must not just forage for sustenance, making immediately plain the various vagaries of supply, fighting what is given for warmth or shade that is not too obvious to potential predators, plagued by insects without even having hands to swat them, and constantly watch for dangers that actively evolved to eat or otherwise damage them. He’s an amazing construct for the period and situation involved; so much beauty and grace to watch. And people complain about how short and dubiously meaningful their lives are! The rather minute immediate moral issue with this mixed species friendship comes when I would like to use the deck during the more pleasant hours of summer for me, as temperatures permit, which sometimes overlap with his rest periods. If I open the connecting door to the streamside deck (and to our partially detached garage), let alone walk on the boards above him, he bolts. It doesn’t seem to bother him if I sit on the far end, in my favorite place closest to the stream, as long as he didn’t see me arrive, but getting to that spot (or from that to bathroom or other indoor uses) becomes a form of understandable trespass for him. Sharing resources and property is never an easy issue. I inadvertently scared him off when he not fully settled in today, and enjoy the idea of being able to casually go out, but miss him being nearby. However, to coincidentally placate me, two spotted fawns just showed up outside, instead, sampling the shielding vegetation as they passed.

 

26 August 2011

Spent much of the afternoon upgrading my musical favorites webpage by very small increments, finally figuring out how to get 4 pixels of universal cell padding to give some breathing space to the entries amid the HTML standard boundaries that I still find to be elegant if used correctly. Then I purged a bunch of residual errors in text and content. While washing dishes, it occurred to me that my website is an electronic house, to which many more people can be (and are) invited, and where if they come, they will find little (or occasionally larger) improvements with each visit. The impact isn’t as great some approaches are supposed to make possible, or at least hasn’t been, and that analog surely isn’t new except to me, but it beat signing off key as a way to reach out. Making the changes was useful in a practical way, for looking at them on the iPad got me to listen to Linda Ronstadt’s Feels Like Home album that I hadn’t for a while, and through the headphones, which allowed hearing some details that I hadn’t found before. No big deal perhaps, but very satisfying.

 

12 August 2011

There has been a diatribe going around, whose source is forgotten, about a focus on the past leading to not caring about the future. Listening to Judy Collins 1965 Fifth Album this morning, albeit put on for “Early Morning Rain”, reminded me of the whole untruth in that statement. With rioting having been serious this past week in British streets, by her following a racially unifying rendition of “Mr. Tambourine Man” with Phil Ochs verses of “In the Heat of the Summer”, bitingly sung by Collins, what seems long gone by has everything to say to present and future, not just the past. She played the Dylan song, on a track having been laid down before the Byrds released their more famous version, as a newly hopeful, utterly memorable melody sung over a glorious instrumental duet. Her guitar brought Mozart forward, with a sound of purely played classical steel and wood ringing, in tune and on beat. Alongside that Spike’s father Bill Lee wove a free and open, complexly syncopated, yet readily accessible, jazz-derived bass line over and around. This interplay was and is the best of both worlds, working ever so well together. The satirical movie “A Mighty Wind” got after parts of the folk world that were pretentious, cynically and commercially calculated, or childishly silly, but this performance was the real core of what some of us were hearing then, which is still ever so much worth careful attention, and repeatedly. Ochs nails what is happening, with a sigh, once again, of quite reasonably disaffected youth, facing what should public funding having been ripped off by banker greed, military bloodletting draining what was left into ruining distant lands, with consistent highest-level government backing of those thieving classes, leaving the maturing, poorer children with just the debts. Less favored lives have been forgotten, uncomfortably crowded in decaying warrens, knowing of no way to reach for better, having nothing positive to focus upon, rampaging through the hostile to almost all life streets, feeling ashamed of the damage caused, yet, “we had to make somebody listen.” What has changed since 1965? Less hope, or none remaining, because there have been so many more humans born, and so much more damage done to the planet by the careless rich in the interim, leaving so much less to share, even if it could somehow be. Others are thinking along similar lines. Nina Powers on salon.com just posted, “The immediate future for Britain looks grim: increasing state repression, increased fear and suspicion of the urban poor, increased social divisions along class and racial lines, more blame and punishment and zero understanding. In other words, the very things that created the unrest in the first place.”

 

2 August 2011

Got to watch a great horned owl wake from its rest yesterday evening. I’d been sitting quietly on our deck, and the bird’s head was hidden from line of sight contact by a branch, so s/he didn’t notice me at first, though only about 20 feet away. Since it had rained so much earlier in the day, part of the process was going through the feathers first whole bodily, then one group at a time, to fluff and finish drying them. I expect that the silent flight capability means more moisture pickup from the more diffuse feather ends. The capability to spread groups in batches was fascinating, as was the follow-up grooming throughout the feathery covering with beak and feet. Yoga masters have nothing on that critter. The wakeup process took nearly an hour and a half. Throughout the process, a female hummingbird (whose sexes are easier for watchers to differentiate) who almost surely has a nest nearby was monitoring the vastly larger bird and its processing. Talk about a mismatch, but such fearlessness! She would perch nearby, then circle around in tightening loops, once coming in close enough to taste or peck at the owl, which brushed her away by raising a wing. After that brush off, she kept a lower profile, but still stayed watchfully nearby. I’d seen her go after a squirrel a couple of days ago, dive-bombing and otherwise harassing it with clear intensity until it moved away from the area that she was defending. I’ve also seen robins mobbing an owl, which was more in the open, sitting on a power pole, with the redbreasts taking turns doing strafing runs. Her behavior seemed rather more like curiosity than an attack. Once the owl moved to a slightly higher branch, and looking more around rather than just fluffing and cleaning (releasing several smaller feathers to drift away in the process), s/he noticed me and paused to glare with each pass in sweeping its head around. It was easy to understand the creature’s spooky reputation, beyond their ability to silently appear and their size. Very catlike overall, but giving an even fiercer, if possible feeling, though remembering back about being observed in the Washington zoo one day by a black jaguar, maybe about equal. The cat felt to be saying, “if it wasn’t for these bars, you’d have been lunch”, while the owl’s was rechecking to see if it had mistaken my size so that “you look awfully large and stringy, but might you, or a detachable part, still be edible?” Being considered that way resonates with the deepest of evolutionarily passed along cautions. The eyes do bore in.   Sometimes my magazine reading gets displaced in the incomplete set alongside the chair that I usually sit in. In the 25 April 2011 issue of The New Yorker is an article by Burkhard Bulger, “The Possibilian”, in which he quotes David Eagleman as saying, “Time is this rubbery thing.” The same quote is part of the lead picture caption, and the failure of the article to appreciate the boundaries that should be applied to that kind of thinking is a reflection of serious flaws in the larger population’s understanding. It is the perception of time that is rubbery, not the underlying reality, which is close enough to absolute for almost all practical purposes. In school, most laugh off Plato’s shadows, if they are ever encountered anymore. Less easily discarded is the floating of some of Einstein’s thinking, of how time compresses or changes when approaching the speed of light, and in the presence of other massive deviations from daily life experiences. That is likely true enough, with solid experimental evidence, but where it creates problems is through the common oversimplification that seems to indicate that Newtonian physics no longer applies to almost all that we have to deal with. What we wind up with is a world that indeed has perception being of shadows, not a solid underlying reality subject to precise and absolute laws, allowing assumptions that weight no longer matters to vehicle operation, that resources are infinite, or at least their use can be treated as if they were infinite, that consequences of their use can be ignored. Eagleman’s discoveries about distortions of time perception within the brain should underline the point that I am trying to make, but both miss it. Because what we seem to see has inherent electrochemical glitches does not mean that what is happening in fact before us is not more stable and more predictable than it seems to be.

 

19 July 2011

Have been deep into another musical facet opener of late. The New Yorker ran a brief review of Rob Young’s Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music, and I chose to try it as a less expensive and physical cluttering trial by using Amazon’s Kindle version via their app on the iPad. I’m about halfway through, and the book has provided gobs of wonderful trivia about a magic, if often tragic time, the folk-rock outpouring of the ‘60s and on. I know much of the topics fairly well, with a fair collection of examples for revisiting in my album (or live memory) collection, so his wanderings through and musings on it are generally delightful, especially given how much more I’ve been learning by doing of late with a guitar, and what my wife has taught me about listening to rhythms.

 

17 July 2011

Confronted another particularly destructive ATV the other day. This one turned out to be the legal landowner’s nephew. It occurred to me afterwards that he had done more damage to that land with his machine in just 10 minutes than my wife and I have done in 18 years of regular use (with permission) by walking. This morning, I realized that ties to the common penchant for not walking anyway, anytime, if they can possibly avoid it. For some reason, there seems to be an overlap between this widely held attitude and the pervasive obesity epidemic. Similarly, locals are like so many others in being childishly afraid of the dark, even though they typically draw shades against, and otherwise avoid penetration of the sun, a syndrome augmented because they so excessively artificially light their interior spaces, with quasi-daylight spectra that through an evolution that makes dark adaptation come on more slowly after exposure to it, and therefore makes darker areas seem even more so. They spend their lives trying to hurtle from door to vehicle, never seeking out what is between, or even considering the idea of the joys and health that could come by walking more often and for longer. Of course, their heavy vehicles and the infrastructure that their use requires make any walking much more dangerous and unpleasant than it could or should be, and all too often downright hostile. A truly vicious cycle, just as is their buying even more outsized machines to tow their toys, then wastefully endangering all other paved road users through a much greater exposure in time and space. Users of snowmobiles, jeeps, and ATVs consider themselves “outdoorsmen”, even while riding their mechanical toys never exposing skin, muscles, or ears to anything natural, while what consciousness they use is almost totally devoted to operating the machine, not perceiving what is around them, at least as anything more than the equivalent of wallpaper. They have no detailed idea how much more is around them when they leave the cultivated and highly poisonous biological deserts where they spend most of their time, anymore than they pay attention to the damage their activities leave behind in either of those environments. They don’t notice the noise and fumes, either, because most are diverted behind them as well, except for just enough to provide a tangent thrill. That, again, is totally unrelated to being off road, aside from when being without too many others, they can hear their own gaseous farting more clearly, and on their off-road machines they actually consider outside weather, so dress appropriately enough that they don’t have to hide within heated or air-conditioned spaces. Even then, only a very, very small fraction of what they release goes towards their own ears or lungs. The deadly misleading perversions of the concept of equality hang over all of this. Of these, I have written at length before. The core statement is that while people may be usefully considered as equal, machines can never rightfully be, nor can a person with another who is equipped with a machine (unless it simply compensates for a natural handicap). Anyway, there is surely plenty of space to use machines, if one wants to focus on them, on America’s excess of pavement. If one chooses well, there is still quite sufficient entertainment for that sort of thing to be found there. From time to time I can still find it, anyway, at far less cost for myself and to others.

 

12 July 2011

I had picked up Roseanne Cash’s 2010 Composed from the going out of business sale at the local Borders outlet a while back, and finished it last night. One of my favorite bits in it was her observation figuring that about 6% of audiences were actually paying attention at concerts; 2% on a bad night. She wrote that she plays to and for them. As per usual for someone with children, especially several and from a large family, much of the book is about them, and the satisfactions therefrom. Nothing wrong evolutionarily with that, of course, as the attitude is ever so natural. It does mean that I need to do another add-on to the introduction to my own memoir. In the half-light of 5 AM this morning, I scrawled something like, “As a child I wanted to grow up, live large, and do great things. Then, as I evolved, the wish grew instead to live more lightly and to perceive more deeply.” Without children, there is a need to leave something softer behind one.

 

6 June 2011

The folks at Bas Bleu, from whom we buy stuff occasionally, had a tantalizing blurb about a book by Denise Kiernan and Joseph D’Agnese (2009. Signing Their Lives Away: The fame and misfortune of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence. Philadelphia, Quirk Books). I was glad to find it in the nearby university library, since quite ironically (yet all too typically these days), the hardbound version of the book was printed in China. As I got into its set of vignettes of those delightfully long-haired radicals and their distaste for taxation, it increasingly occurred to me how different their situation was from the tea-baggers who are currently claiming to follow in their footsteps. In 1776, there were roughly three million fairly recent immigrant, heavy consumers of resources, routinely with families as large as possible, just beginning to penetrate a country with the world’s richest supplies available. These had long been maintained sustainably by a population of less than 50 million, who had kept their families smaller and their other impacts on the land far lighter than those who would follow. In 2011, there are more than 100 times as many heavy consumers in America as there were in 1776, with dramatically fewer resources left to share among them. The combination makes for a very different world than those anti-tax rebels lived within. Such relatively more dense human populations can be managed, but doing so successfully, as has been done in Scandinavia, is inevitably through a much more tax-dense approach, one including powerful restraints on further wastefulness or other forms of trespass, though, as those countries have shown, it can still allow more freedom of thought and behavior, as long as that does not affect others’ rights. What history classes do not teach well enough is how those newly arrived heavy consumers and their burgeoning descendents before and after 1776 so rapidly killed off both the diverse native vegetation and the animals that could have supported them for so much longer. After their prodigious initial wastage, their seemingly bountiful, but actually less productive, agricultural practices let the bulk of the rich native soils wash all too quickly away. In parallel, industrialists proceeded to dig out what had been under it, not least what were the planet’s largest iron, copper, and petroleum supplies, all too speedily turning them into widely dispersed junk and other forms of pollution. At the moment, the rapidly increasing desperateness of the situation is partially hidden by imports being paid for by mounds of IOUs, whose repayment cannot be withheld forever. The Founders surely would be appalled, in particular, by the drain on what is left that continues to be imposed by the hugely expensive post WWII standing army and its inevitably stupid international adventures. Complaints about the comparatively modest British impacts make up the bulk of the original Declaration itself, after all. Contemporary tea-baggers, of course, have never bothered to read that document, let alone understand either it or the Constitution that followed. That underlying situation is made worse because supposedly conservative government policies still strongly subsidize large families, destructive agriculture, generalized wasting of energy, and careless use of materials. These are paid for directly by taking from others less powerful, and indirectly by deferring their greater, but more hidden costs, to the future. The folks depicted in the book were indeed an interesting lot, and so were their stories. What is too bad is how little similarity remains for either the appearance of our leaders or their understanding of the very different situation that surrounds them. Total taxation is not our problem; it almost certainly should be higher. Relative burdens on whom it is being taken from, and where that money is being diverted, are the more certain problems instead.

 

21 April 2011

Interesting lyric in middle of the night listening, when the Salt Lake independent station had a program running without credits (or intrusions from their thin to begin with, and brutally over-repeated supposedly non-commercial commercials). I heard, “You’re just like all the other girls, dying from diamonds and pearls.” Of course, as I just realized, it could have been “for” instead of “from”, but is more interesting and potentially profound as I thought it was. Internet searching reveals that the word in question is “by”, which my wife says is even more ambivalent. The song is credited to Matt Hayward, Russell James Marsden, and Emma Richardson, with the Band of Skulls. Still fascinating, small bits of time that leave much thought behind. On a classical KBYU program earlier this week, DJ Mark Waite said that the Grammy Awards were cutting back on the number given, dropping among others the category “pop instrumental”. Illustrative choice, for that reflects what has gone wrong with America. The more recent program tied to an observation on the Icelandic web site that I visit regularly, where a writer described having to teach her kids how to listen to the radio during a vacation. They didn’t realize how to use their imaginations to put together the sounds without images, as those of our generation knew how. Finding that the programming early this morning was so much better than usual or otherwise available, I realized that more than half of the time it was pop instrumental, including long cuts by either Cream, Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, or more recent re-channelers of those. Even the songs with overt lyrics had extended bridges, which allow the mind to roam most freely. I don’t think it is coincidence that the greatest period of American creativity had an underpinning of instrumental music, classical and jazz, along with radio, that all required active imagining. Now its all done for one, with ever shorter attention spanning. The program got turned off when whoever put it together linked three songs in a row with cheap electronically generated beats. Just being instrumental is not enough, as the flurry into second- or third-rate strings of Musak underlined. It has to be thoughtful and well done; the Moody Blues with the London Symphony for full orchestration or Sorten Muld with electronics, for discrete examples. Listening to the latter after sunrise suggested how they artfully manage artificiality, including both its timing and spatial location, but would probably be even better if they played, rather than programmed, their underlying basis. Nevertheless, they continue to provide and example to the contemporary hordes that employing computers in music does not have to make rhythmic sounds stultifyingly empty, painful, and utterly boring.

 

11 April 2011

Another of those fascinating juxtapositions today, about which too few others are making the connection. In the newspaper this morning was the obituary of a locally respected music teacher who was about my age and had died of brain cancer. This afternoon, as I was exercising outside, a “Lawn Pride” chemical truck passed by, coming down from a thankfully somewhat distant neighbor’s home. The fellow who ordered the spray truck's immediate neighbor, who was also near my age, died two years ago of prostate cancer. Check back to my blog of 3 May 2006 (among other places) for some of the details of the connection among these, still unrecognized by those who could stop further similar deadly travesties. In the meantime, most of our trees along the road that the runoff from the poisonous neighbor comes down, and collects because of topography, have also died. Invisible trespass is no less harmful than the visible kind, instead often more so, however more difficult it is to prosecute. When I was working as a chemist indirectly for the EPA and then the National Research Council almost 30 years ago, the data seemed quite obvious that compounds structurally similar to those being commonly applied to lawns, and the chemicals inseparably associated with their manufacture, besides having directly deadly effects on non-target plants, carry eventually carcinogenic consequences for animals, not least humans. The most likely places for these to occur were the hormonally most active tissues, including the brain. Because these effects tend to be delayed, and mixed in with those from so many other corporate insults to our health, short-term testing may be inadequate for obvious proof, even when it is done at all, which for most of them, especially the by-products, it never has. Also today, in the mail, was a fund-raising request from the League of Conservation Voters focusing on the theme of stopping the demise of the EPA. It isn’t enough for the fools to keep applying subtler poisons, which the EPA has never had the funds to take on, but the most powerful corporations want to have even freer ability to destroy everyone else’s future. Crazy world, this. It continually boggles my mind that boring, close-cropped monocultures of non-native grass can absorb so much effort and noise to maintain, beyond being literally deadly if any pesticides or herbicides are applied as lazy responses to obvious problems resulting from their unnatural lack of diversity. Once more, I would rather have a meadow than a lawn, for ever so many reasons. If one feels a necessity has to have a lawn, removing dandelions or other potentially useful invaders by hand to keep neighbors happier gives the doer valuable outdoor exercise, if a time can be found without having to deal with chemical or sonic trespasses from nearby. The same applies to avoiding petroleum or electrically powered tools to shape the grass. A good push mower, if one can be found, or scythe, which is what I use, takes less total effort to employ and disturbs no one else's peace or health.

 

18 January 2011

Restating something I’ve long known, but glad to see it from another source, grist.org. I believe that if a proper study were done, it would show a definitive advantage for human vision from small (25 watt or less) incandescent bulbs, with their high red wavelength balance, more like firelight. If they are distributed where light is actually needed, and only used then and there, they can (from direct experience) provide both what is needed and do it with more satisfaction, as well as using a hell of a lot less energy than the overlit, mostly landing in spaces not being seen into (or so often actively interfering with seeing clearly) fluorescent or worse blanketing that has become the American norm.

 

14 January 2011

Paid (literally) a visit yesterday to the same physician who recognized why my unusual right leg injury five years ago had failed to heal. This time, the left hip had become the problem, particularly when I was trying to sleep, which I feared was from wear and tear, in part from compensating from bearing more than its share of the load from the only partially repaired damage to the other side. With some x-rays confirming his suspicion, and thankfully without the far more expensive MRI for this still uninsured customer, it was clear that there was good news, that the hip joint was in good shape for my age, and I could stop worrying about the threat of replacement surgery. The bad part was that a previous diagnosis was correct for a problem that had cropped up 25 years ago, when I was doing a lot of rough country fieldwork, that my left leg was shorter by a half inch, and would need a shoe lift. Back then, the prescription heel had overcompensated, being both too tilted and too high, so I gave up on it. Worse news this time, though, as the pain was revealed to have arisen because my spine has become quite distorted while my body tried to adjust to unbalanced pressures. The physician turned me over to a physical therapist to modify my exercise regime, after prescribing an initial dose of steroids to back away the inflammation, and a 7mm insert for my shoe to take up half the difference. My body has not reacted gratefully to my first try with the insert, or the steroids, at least so far. It all could be a lot worse, of course, and what has taken years to put in place will surely take a while to readjust.

 

then from the past, breaking the most prolific posting years into more digestible chunks at the solstice, entries from:

2010,
 2009,
   2008,
     late 2007,  early 2007,
        late 2006, early 2006,
           late 2005, early 2005,
             and 2004

Text, Design, and Images © 2011 by Terence Yorks

Concept originated 1 December 2004;
Page updated as of the leading entry.

Yorksite homepage / Origins / Projects / Education / Experience / Publications / Quotations / Web trolls