[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]
There's something about awe. I experienced it this morning watching the finches. "An Upbeat Emotion That’s Surprisingly Good for You." [Gretchen Reynolds, NY Times] Excerpt:
...Ninety-four Berkeley students were recruited to fill out questionnaires about how frequently during the past month they felt various positive and negative emotions, like hostility, enthusiasm and inspiration. The students then supplied saliva samples, which were analyzed for interleukin-6, a molecule known to promote inflammation throughout the body. Because inflammation is tied to poor health, researchers figured that low levels of IL-6 might signal good health. As anticipated, when students’ moods were checked against their IL-6 levels, those who had experienced more positive emotions generally had lower levels of IL-6 than classmates whose moods were more frequently sour....
..., the strongest correlation was with awe. The more frequently someone reported having felt awe-struck, the lower the IL-6.
“There seems to be something about awe,” says Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology and the senior author of the study, who is also the faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley. (He has studied laughter, empathy and blushing, too.) “It seems to have a pronounced impact on markers related to inflammation.”
Somewhat surprisingly, awe isn’t necessarily a rare occurrence, he adds. On average, the students in the study reported feeling the emotion three or more times a week. “How great is that?” Dr. Keltner says.
While acknowledging that awe is conceptually squishy and subjective, Dr. Keltner says that in general, a primary attribute of an awe-inspiring event is that it “will pass the goose-bumps test.” And he advises that people “seek it often.” He is just not certain what that means for everyone. “Some people feel awe listening to music,” Dr. Keltner says, “others watching a sunset or attending a political rally or seeing kids play.”
Climate change is everyone's fault – in other words, no one's. We can all feel good about deploring it....The film Chasing Ice is an incredible documentary, both for its very disturbing message and the amazing details of its production. Imagine being there recording when a glacier calves a piece of ice the size of Manhattan Island!
A book that does justice to the full tragedy and weird comedy of climate change is Reason in a Dark Time, by the philosopher Dale Jamieson. Ordinarily, I avoid books on the subject, but a friend recommended it to me last summer, and I was intrigued by its subtitle, “Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed – And What It Means for Our Future”; by the word “failed” in particular, the past tense of it. I started reading and couldn’t stop....
The reason the American political system can’t deliver action isn’t simply that fossil-fuel corporations sponsor denialists and buy elections, as many progressives suppose. Even for people who accept the fact of global warming, the problem can be framed in many different ways — a crisis in global governance, a market failure, a technological challenge, a matter of social justice, and so on—each of which argues for a different expensive solution. A problem like this (a “wicked problem” is the technical term) will frustrate almost any country, and particularly the United States, where government is designed to be both weak and responsive to its citizens. Unlike the progressives who see a democracy perverted by moneyed interests, Jamieson suggests that America’s inaction on climate change is the result of democracy. A good democracy, after all, acts in the interests of its citizens, and it’s precisely the citizens of the major carbon-emitting democracies who benefit from cheap gasoline and global trade, while the main costs of our polluting are borne by those who have no vote: poorer countries, future generations, other species. The American electorate, in other words, is rationally self-interested. According to a survey cited by Jamieson, more than sixty per cent of Americans believe that climate change will harm other species and future generations, while only thirty-two per cent believe that it will harm them personally....
Jamieson’s larger contention is that climate change is different in category from any other problem the world has ever faced. For one thing, it deeply confuses the human brain, which evolved to focus on the present, not the far future, and on readily perceivable movements, not slow and probabilistic developments. (When Jamieson notes that “against the background of a warming world, a winter that would not have been seen as anomalous in the past is viewed as unusually cold, thus as evidence that a warming is not occurring,” you don’t know whether to laugh or to cry for our brains.) The great hope of the Enlightenment – that human rationality would enable us to transcend our evolutionary limitations – has taken a beating from wars and genocides, but only now, on the problem of climate change, has it foundered altogether....
The story that is genuinely new is that we’re causing mass extinctions. Not everyone cares about wild animals, but the people who consider them an irreplaceable, non-monetizable good have a positive ethical argument to make on their behalf. It’s the same argument that Rachel Carson made in Silent Spring, the book that ignited the modern environmental movement. Carson did warn of the dangers of pollution to human beings, but the moral center of her book was implicit in its title: Are we really O.K. with eliminating birds from the world? The dangers of carbon pollution today are far greater than those of DDT, and climate change may indeed be, as the National Audubon Society says, the foremost long-term threat to birds. But I already know that we can’t prevent global warming by changing our light bulbs. I still want to do something.
In Annie Hall, when the young Alvy Singer stopped doing his homework, his mother took him to a psychiatrist. It turned out that Alvy had read that the universe is expanding, which would surely lead to its breaking apart some day, and to him this was an argument for not doing his homework: “What’s the point?” Under the shadow of vast global problems and vast global remedies, smaller-scale actions on behalf of nature can seem similarly meaningless. But Alvy’s mother was having none of it. “You’re here in Brooklyn!” she said. “Brooklyn is not expanding!” It all depends on what we mean by meaning....
From a global perspective, it can seem that the future holds not only my own death but a second, larger death of the familiar world...The animals may not be able to thank us for allowing them to live, and they certainly wouldn’t do the same thing for us if our positions were reversed. But it’s we, not they, who need life to have meaning.
The Art of Snow, domestically speaking:
Nanosecond photo. How does this body language grab you?
An Egyptian photographer who went to the Egyptian town of Al Aour two days after 13 of its residents were shown being beheaded in a video released by the Islamic State, commonly known as ISIS, was asked, "What surprised you most?"
I would expect people would feel very angry and calling for hatred and revenge and attacks, but many of them were very happy. They said their sons and brothers and husbands were martyrs now. They were the sons of Jesus. God had used them to spread knowledge of Christianity, like sacrifices. One of the mothers was laughing all the time and telling jokes.
Albert Einstein:
- Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.
- I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.
- The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.
- Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.
America has made the situation in the Middle East much, much worse by its indiscriminate bombing (and other acts) in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in that region, which have resulted in tens of thousands of civilian dead; the dead, maimed, wounded, traumatized military personnel; the energized jihadist backlash; the waste of resources better applied to education, infrastructure investment, R&D for alternative fuels to get away from environmentally destructive use of fossil fuels....
I am tired of the marketplace and its cheapening of the word. I am convinced that language is, to a certain degree, sacred and is the handmaiden of ethics, and that when language becomes a whore our ethics are robed in sleazy satins and function at the moral level of a pimp. I subscribe to the truth of the Fourth Evangelist, who began his contribution to a best seller with “In the beginning was the word.”
I learned a new term this week: Henotheism. The Wikipedia article on it defines it as
the belief in and worship of a single God while accepting the existence or possible existence of other deities that may also be worshiped. The term was originally coined by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854) to depict early stages of monotheism. Max Müller (1823–1900), a German philologist and orientalist, brought the term into wider usage. Müller made the term central to his criticism of Western theological and religious exceptionalism (relative to Eastern religions), focusing on a cultural dogma which held "monotheism" to be both fundamentally well-defined and inherently superior to differing conceptions of God.But couldn't the supposedly different "one-Gods" that people believe in all actually be the SAME God? This makes sense to me, since God would be like the elephant that appeared to a number of blind men: to one it seemed to be a long hose (the elephant's trunk), to another a tree (one of the elephant's legs), to another a smooth spear (the elephant's tusk), to another a rope (the elephant's tail)....
Did you know? Barrels of oil:
When the first oil wells were drilled they had made no provision for storing the liquid so they used water barrels. That is why, to this day, we speak of barrels of oil rather than gallons.
The Radiator
Your main goal here is not about comfort......it's just about warmth.
The most recent episode of Better Call Saul was great. I LOVED the scene where Mike shows up for a job (of serving as a guy's bodyguard for one outing) and is joined by two other guys also hired for the job. One of the guys is kind of cocky and asks Mike and the other guy (who is about 7 feet tall, 290 pounds) what they're "carrying" (meaning guns). Mike says he's carrying a pimento cheese sandwich. After Mike finally convinces the guy that he indeed is not carrying a gun, the man who's hiring them shows up and announces that he's paying each of the three men $500 ($1,500 total). The cocky guy says he can leave Mike there, he doesn't have a gun. And the man hiring them is also surprised that Mike doesn't have a gun. Why? "I don't need one, but if I do I'll take this guy's." The guy of course disputes that. He takes out one of his guns, grabs it by the barrel and pushes it toward Mike. "Show me how you're going to take this away from me." Mike says, "You don't need to make it easy." So the guy takes it by the butt and points the barrel at Mike. "Is this better?" Mike instantly has the guy's gun and the guy is writing on the pavement from a jab to his throat. Mike proceeds to check out how many guns the guy has on him. Four, all of which Mike takes over to a trash bin and dumps them in. The 7-foot guy is so spooked by Mike's ability to disarm the cocky guy, he takes off and disappears. Mike says, "Okay, looks like you have only me. But I want one thing understood: I get the whole $1,500." The man hiring him agrees and they get into his car.
Having a bad day?
The morning after the party:
10th & 11th of 18 Photos from The Smithsonian’s “Wilderness Forever” Photo Contest:
 |
| Aurora Ridge Trail, Sol Duc Valley, Washington [Image credits: Pablo McCloud] |
 |
| Aurora Borealis Over Honeymoon Rock, Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, Wisconsin [Image credits: Jeff Rennicke] |
Teachers can learn new things too:
Buying a watch in 1880. If you were in the market for a watch in 1880, would you know where to get one? You would go to a store, right? Well, of course you could do that, but if you wanted one that was cheaper and a bit better than most of the store watches, you went to the train station.
For about 500 towns across the northern United States, that's where the best watches were found. The railroad company wasn't selling the watches, not at all. The telegraph operator was.
Most of the time the telegraph operator was located in the railroad station because the telegraph lines followed the railroad tracks from town to town. It was usually the shortest distance, and the right-of-ways had already been secured for the rail line. Most of the station agents were also skilled telegraph operators and that was the primary way that they communicated with the railroad. They would know when trains left the previous station and when they were due at the next one.
And it was the telegraph operator who had the watches. As a matter of fact, they sold more of them than almost all the stores combined for a period of about nine years.
This was all arranged by Richard, who was a telegraph operator himself. He was on duty in the North Redwood, Minnesota train station one day when a load of watches arrived from the East. It was a huge crate of pocket watches. No one ever came to claim them. So Richard sent a telegram to the manufacturer and asked them what they wanted to do with the watches. The manufacturer didn't want to pay the freight back, so they wired Richard to see if he could sell them. So Richard did.
He sent a wire to every agent in the system asking them if they wanted a cheap, but good, pocket watch. He sold the entire case in less than two days and at a handsome profit. That started it all.
He ordered more watches from the watch company and encouraged the telegraph operators to set up a display case in the station offering high-quality watches for a cheap price to all the travelers.
It worked! It didn't take long for the word to spread and, before long, people other than travelers came to the train station to buy watches. Richard became so busy that he had to hire a professional watch maker to help him with the orders.
That was Alvah.
And the rest is history as they say. The business took off and soon expanded to many other lines of dry goods. Richard and Alvah left the train station and moved their company to Chicago – and it's still there. Richard was Richard Sears, and his partner Alvah was Alvah Roebuck!
Limerick of the week:
The story of the Snaggletooth Killer
is a really real whodunit thriller;
but was it cousin Ray,
the suspect women gay,
or the man doing time in the chiller?
[A "limerix" originally published on July 1, 2010]
| Copyright © 2015 by Morris Dean |
The film "Chasing Ice" was an incredible documentary, both for it's very disturbing message and the amazing details of it's production. Imagine being there recording when a glacier calved a piece of ice the size of Manhattan Island!
ReplyDeleteBob, your comment is so much better a lead-in for the fish, I've switched out the anemic one I had and inserted yours!
DeleteThanks for the correspondence! Something about awe recommends it, how climate change makes it harder to care about conservation, ice melt larger than the size of Manhattan, snow art, stumble on happiness, mind your body language, costs of war, words (including "henotheism"), Switzerland's big plus, measures of oil, warm comfort, carrot find, a "door to hell," unlikely coincidence, Mike got the job solo, a bad day, mom's day, mornings after, wilderness photos, student teachers, buying a watch 130 years ago, an old limerix....
ReplyDelete