The Weird Times
Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Spaces
The Weird Times: Issue 51, May 2, 2021
Mayday Mayday Mayday
True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.—Clarence Darrow
“Death builds bridges / as long as we still hear / the living words, the song.”—Margaret Randall, “Listening”
BIRDS - SONGS - NOISE - TIME
Justin Trudeau in a flap as oil pipeline halted by hummingbirds, Charlie Mitchell, The Times UK, 4/29/21
Plagued for years by legal challenges and protests, one of Canada’s largest oil pipelines has been hit by yet another setback — hummingbirds.
Construction of the Trans Mountain pipeline was halted until the breeding season ends in August after inspectors discovered Anna’s hummingbirds nesting near Burnaby, British Columbia.
How Bermuda Is Scrambling to Save Its National Bird: The tactics used to protect the cahow are now being implemented to conserve other endangered seabirds across the globe, Helen Santoro, Slate, 4/29/21
Off the eastern coast of Bermuda in Castle Harbour sits a jagged, lush island by the name of Nonsuch. Spanning just over 16 acres, Nonsuch is one of Bermuda’s most isolated islands, and it houses several endangered and Lazarus species (those that were once thought to be extinct). Among the dense forests filled with lizards, insects, and birds, ornithologist Jeremy Madeiros spends most of his days living in a repurposed quarantine hospital, making him the island’s sole human inhabitant.
On Nonsuch, you can find “almost all of the native endangered species in Bermuda,” said Madeiros, who is the senior terrestrial conservation officer for Bermuda’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources. “For some species, this is the last place on Earth where they survive.” Over the past two decades, Madeiros has dedicated his career to conserving the Bermuda cahow—the archipelago’s national bird, which doesn’t exist anywhere else on the planet.
White noise could warn birds to avoid colliding with tall structures, Ibrahim Sawal, New Scientist, 4/28/21
Projecting white noise in the direction of oncoming birds could stop them from colliding with buildings or wind turbines.
Birds keep their heads down to streamline their bodies as they fly, says John Swaddle at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. So, visual cues may not be enough to warn them of oncoming structures. That is why billions of birds around the world, particularly those that migrate long distances, die in collisions with manufactured structures each year.
Most birds have an inner clock that prompts them to perform specific tasks at specific times of day. But in summer, Svalbard ptarmigan (Lagopus muta hyperborea) live under a midnight sun, and their activity during a 24-hour period doesn’t follow a consistent pattern.
Nevertheless, David Hazlerigg, Alexander West and their colleagues at the University of Tromsø in Norway found that key genes for establishing 24-hour rhythms are active in the brain of the ptarmigan, which uses this daily ‘circadian’ clock to time seasonal events. In birds kept constantly in the light, genes linked to reproduction became active, and the birds increased their activity in preparation for mating. The researchers’ experiments suggest that 14 hours after sunrise, the birds’ internal clocks ‘check’ whether the Sun is still up.
PRAYER TO SPRING
Open the door.
So many births!
A sun!
And the vernal equinox,
what is that but words
In an ancient tongue
changing everything
to tulips.
Open the door,
what is out there but the rain.
Let the floods come.
Let the warblers tread
home to their nests.
Let the worms glisten in love
under the covers of old leaves.
Let jack-in-the-pulpit open his
sermon with praise.
Let new words erupt:
crocus, daffodil, jonquil,
petals moving their
colorful lips.
And buds! Billions of buds!
May they burst with joy.
Let the bumblebee stumble
from her grassy cave.
And the bear with her cubs
the same.
And the spade and the plow,
let them come,
punch seed into soil,
how much good the dirt knows!
Let oak and elm unfurl
their thousand paws
to shelter with shade
the open door.
Who can stop this clapping!
This audience of everything!
—James P. Lenfesty
PANDEMICIDE
The Price of the Stuff That Makes Everything Is Surging: Global economic rebound is fueling a blistering commodities rally, Eddie Spence and Megan Durisin, Bloomberg News, 5/1/21
The prices of raw materials used to make almost everything are skyrocketing, and the upward trajectory looks set to continue as the world economy roars back to life.
From steel and copper to corn and lumber, commodities started 2021 with a bang, surging to levels not seen for years. The rally threatens to raise the cost of goods from the lunchtime sandwich to gleaming skyscrapers. It’s also lit the fuse on the massive reflation trade that’s gripped markets this year and pushed up inflation expectations.
India’s second wave of covid-19 feels nothing like its first: Holed up in Delhi, where friends are falling ill too fast to count, Dan Williams, Economist, 4/30/21
The mind’s eye is filled with pictures of desperate families scrambling after oxygen cylinders, failing more often than not. All day the early-summer heat has me picturing bodies, bagged and stacked on the pavement, waiting their turn for the pyres that burn everywhere across the city. Sometimes I switch off the screen in my home office on the second floor and step onto the roof terrace to water potted plants and scan the neighbourhood below. All is quiet and green. Smoke from the crematorium down the street has disappeared into the usual haze of the season.
The Pandemic Exposed the Severe Water Insecurity Faced by Southwestern Tribes: Lack of potable water drove high Covid-19 rates in Native American communities. That realization may help them gain better representation in upcoming negotiations about Colorado River water, Judy Fahis, Inside Climate News, 4/29/21
While the world watched in horror as refrigerator trailers collected the bodies of Covid-19 victims in New York City, the suffering of Native American people was almost invisible.
The Navajo Nation was enduring an infection rate 21 percent higher than New York during the same time period. And the White Mountain Apache tribe on the New Mexico-Arizona border was grappling with infection rates almost twice as high as the national average.
A key factor driving these staggering infection numbers, according to a new report, was the limited access to water that as many as half of the Native Americans on reservations face. As hard as people across the country found it to practice rigorous hand-washing and social distancing, it was even tougher for many members of the 30 tribes in the Colorado River Basin. Many lacked the clean water essential for sanitizing their homes and bodies to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
The new report, Universal Access to Clean Water for Tribes in the Colorado River Basin, brings attention to the challenges many Indigenous people in the region face at a time when talks are set to begin on managing drought and water shortages throughout the river basin.
2 Competing Impulses Will Drive Post-pandemic Social Life: Some people will want to go out as often as they can. Others won’t be able to forget how nice it is to sit at home on the couch, Joe Pinsker, The Atlantic, 4/23/21
The urges to go out more and to stay home more are of course in conflict, but Team Yes and Team Couch might be more alike than they appear: Both philosophies seem to stem from a desire to be more deliberate about spending time on the things that matter most to you.
This is a natural response to living through a crisis that has provided constant reminders that your life will one day end, according to Sheldon Solomon, a psychology professor at Skidmore College and a co-author of The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life. Sometimes, he told me, “existential uncertainty gives us the opportunity, as well as the psychological impetus, to step back” and revisit our priorities. This could mean resolving to spend more time alone, or it could mean resolving to spend more time with family and friends.
THINK AGAIN THINK AGAIN
Constructor Theory is a new approach to formulating fundamental laws in physics. Instead of describing the world in terms of trajectories, initial conditions and dynamical laws, in constructor theory laws are about which physical transformations are possible and which are impossible, and why. This powerful switch has the potential to bring all sorts of interesting fields, currently regarded as inherently approximative, into fundamental physics. These include the theories of information, knowledge, thermodynamics, and life, Constructortheory.org
Oxford physicist David Deutsch is a Fellow of the Royal Society who was the leading figure in the creation of the quantum theory of computation. This studies the most general information processing tasks possible in nature, superseding Turing’s theory. It has grown into the field of quantum information science, involving research groups worldwide including 120 researchers in Oxford alone. David began to investigate the prospects for a rigorous physical theory of what physical processes can, and cannot, occur in nature, producing the first paper on Constructor Theory in 2012. Chiara Marletto is a quantum physicist, who became interested in Constructor Theory in 2011, focusing initially on its applications to quantum information and theoretical biology. With support of the Templeton World Charity Foundation she has been working full time on Constructor Theory since 2013, as a postdoctoral researcher. David and Chiara’s joint work on the foundations of information theory has produced the Constructor Theory of Information. Chiara has led research on Constructory Theory of Life, Constructor Theory of Probability, and Constructor Theory of Thermodynamics. Buy the book - The Science of Can and Can’t, Chiara Marletto
Is the Labor Theory of Value useful at all? Can we salvage anything from this muddled concept? Noah Smith, Noahpinion, 5/1/21
So here’s where we might be able to see a use for the Labor Theory of Value. As a good Humean, I believe that all moral principles ultimately come from people’s moral intuitions — in other words, if people care about whether income is awarded based on actions, then it’s a thing society needs to take into account. And it might have practical usefulness as well — you can pretty easily create a social wealth fund to replace the risk-taking and liquidity-providing functions of investors, but that fund probably won’t be able to replace skilled entrepreneurs or discerning stock pickers.
Thus, even though it doesn’t describe how prices come about, the Labor Theory of Value seems to have some usefulness in thinking about the difference between active and passive income. But determining which income is active is not as easy as just looking at how hard people work. The real economy is infinitely more complex than doing the dishes.
Dutch couple move into Europe’s first fully 3D-printed house,Daniel Boffey, The Guardian, 4/30/21
Inspired by the shape of a boulder, the dimensions of which would be difficult and expensive to construct using traditional methods, the property is the first of five homes planned by the construction firm Saint-Gobain Weber Beamix for a plot of land by the Beatrix canal in the Eindhoven suburb of Bosrijk.
Species or Ecosystems: How Best to Restore the Natural World? What’s the best way to protect nature and restore what has been lost? A series of new scientific papers offer conflicting views on whether efforts should focus on individual species or ecosystems and point to the role human inhabitants can play in conserving landscapes, Fred Pearce, Yale e360, 4/27/21
The problem “is not human use per se,” says a study coauthor. “The problem is the kind of land use we see in industrialized societies.”
Scientists find way to remove polluting microplastics with bacteria: Sticky property of bacteria used to create microbe nets that can capture microplastics in water to form a recyclable blob, Sofia Quaglia, The Guardian, 4/28/21
Microbiologists have devised a sustainable way to remove polluting microplastics from the environment – and they want to use bacteria to do the job.
The Brain ‘Rotates’ Memories to Save Them From New Sensations: Some groups of neurons process sensory data and memories at the same time. New work shows how the brain pivots those representations to prevent interference, Jordana Cepelewicz, Wired, 4/25/21
A paper published recently in Nature Neuroscience may finally explain how the brain’s protective buffer works. A pair of researchers showed that, to represent current and past stimuli simultaneously without mutual interference, the brain essentially “rotates” sensory information to encode it as a memory. The two orthogonal representations can then draw from overlapping neural activity without intruding on each other. The details of this mechanism may help to resolve several long-standing debates about memory processing.
US investigating possible mysterious directed energy attack near White House, Katie Bo Williams and Jeremy Herb, CNN, 4/29/21
Federal agencies are investigating at least two possible incidents on US soil, including one near the White House in November of last year, that appear similar to mysterious, invisible attacks that have led to debilitating symptoms for dozens of US personnel abroad.
Multiple sources familiar with the matter tell CNN that while the Pentagon and other agencies probing the matter have reached no clear conclusions on what happened, the fact that such an attack might have taken place so close to the White House is particularly alarming.
UChicago scientists harness molecules into single quantum state: Discovery could open new fields in quantum chemistry and technology, University of Chicago, Eurekalert, 4/28/21
Researchers have big ideas for the potential of quantum technology, from unhackable networks to earthquake sensors. But all these things depend on a major technological feat: being able to build and control systems of quantum particles, which are among the smallest objects in the universe.
That goal is now a step closer with the publication of a new method by University of Chicago scientists.
'Forest gardens’ show how Native land stewardship can outdo nature: Patches of forest cleared and tended by Indigenous communities but lost to time still show more food bounty for humans and animals than surrounding forests, Gabriel Popkin, National Geographic, 4/23/21
For hundreds of years, Indigenous communities in what is now British Columbia cleared small patches amid dense conifer forest. They planted and tended food and medicine-bearing trees and plants—sometimes including species from hundreds of miles away—to yield a bounty of nuts, fruits, and berries. A wave of European disease devastated Indigenous communities in the late 1700s, and in the 1800s, colonizers displaced the Indigenous people and seized the land. The lush, diverse forest gardens were abandoned and forgotten.
A few years ago, Chelsey Geralda Armstrong, an ethnobotanist at Simon Fraser University, was invited by First Nation elders to investigate why hazelnut trees were growing at abandoned village sites near the coast. The plants were far from their native habitat in the dry interior and seemingly lost among towering cedars and hemlocks. Armstrong began to suspect she was studying human-created ecosystems—and they were thriving, even with no one caring for them. She brought her suspicions to community elders, who confirmed them by sharing memories of ancestors cultivating edible and medicinal plants.
RATATATAT: QUICK HITS
11 Foods That Are Already Being Impacted by the Climate Crisis, Andrea Marks, Hannah Murphy, Rolling Stone, 4/19/21
The Climate Solution Actually Adding Millions of Tons of CO2 Into the Atmosphere, Lisa Song and James Temple, Propublica, 4/29/21
Joanne Chory is using plants to save the planet, Sarah Kaplan, Washington Post, 4/28/21
Why Dead Trees Are ‘the Hottest Commodity on the Planet’ Blame climate change, wildfires, hungry beetles … and Millennial home buyers, Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic, 4/27/21
CEO of $2 Billion Startup Ousted for Taking LSD at Work: Justin Zhu, co-founder of Iterable, said he was trying microdosing as a way to boost focus, Sarah McBride, Bloomberg News, 4/27/21
Sea-level rise could submerge fiber optic cables, a key component of internet infrastructure: One foot of sea-level rise along coastlines would put more than 4,000 miles of fiber optic cables underwater at least part of the time, YCC Team, Yale Climate Connections, 4/27/21
China's government is starting to screw up: A few cracks in the facade of omnipotence, Noah Smith, Noahpinion, 4/27/21
End fracking exemptions, a threat to maternal and public health, Chelsea Clinton, Terry McGovern, Micaela Martinez, Statnews, 4/26/21
The giant accounting problem that could hamper the world’s push to cut emissions: Countries are adopting very different strategies for how they take into account carbon pulled out of the air by their forests, Chris Mooney and Brady Dennis, Washington Post, 4/26/21
What Can 26,000 Snakes Teach Us About Climate Change? Oregon State University’s massive collection is helping researchers learn how animals adapt to changing environments, Jack Tamisiea, Atlas Obscura, 4/22/21
QAnon hasn’t gone away – it’s alive and kicking in states across the country, Sophie Bjork-James, The Conversation, 4/26/21
How Nebraska farmer Russ Finch grows citrus year-round using geothermal energy: He wants to help others do the same, YCC team, Yale Climate Connections, 4/26/21
Lesley Gore, born May 2, 1946, died February 16, 2015
You don't own me
Don't try to change me in any way
You don't own me
Don't tie me down 'cause I'd never stay
I don't tell you what to say
I don't tell you what to do
So just let me be myself
That's all I ask of you
Songwriters: David White / John Madara, You Don't Own Me lyrics © Warner Chappell Music, Inc.
It’s a beautiful day and May has just begun. We’re planting vegetables, herbs and flowers. Vaccinated and yet, still worried. All eyes must be turned to India, but it is so difficult to see, to witness what is really happening. And now to worry yet again, will virus have its way with us after all?
Is this how we will live now, experiencing multiple inputs and struggling to make sense of it all?
Nonetheless, hoping for all of you to be well, to stay engaged, to experience everything with the joy of simply being alive.
Goodbye to lilacs by the door
and all I planted for the eye.
If I could hear—too much talk in the world,
too much wind washing, washing
good black dirt away.
—Lorine Niedecker, from “Well, spring overflows the land”
Rethinking Cinco de Mayo, Sudie Hoffmann, Zinn Education Project
Thanks all for your continued support and friendship. Be well.