Yesterday our book group discussed three tree-related books including Suzanne Simard’s autobiography, Finding the Mother Tree, which I read and blogged about when it was published last year. As a reminder, Simard is known for discovering, or perhaps re-discovering for modern times, that trees are linked underground via their own roots and fungal mycelium, allowing them to share nutrients, including extra support for a young or dying member; communicate information on topics such as pests and other threats; and make collective decisions, including whether to produce seed or to wait for a more optimal year. Multiple species share info and resources. Trees don’t compete for light: they share it.

This pioneering research has sprouted offspring, with many books now available on these topics for the lay reader. The power and wonder of this concept–hundreds of individuals of diverse species cooperating for the health of all–should humble every one of us, since it is something humans are apparently completely incapable of accomplishing.

I also read and blogged about Frans de Waal’s Different, about chimps and bonobos, humans’ two closest–equally close–ancestors, one patriarchal and more likely to start wars or engage in relatively violent behavior, the other matriarchal and more likely to resolve issues with social behaviors, including sex, every member being exactly bisexual. So humans could have gone either way.

But you don’t have to look at non-naked apes or even believe in evolution to find cooperative primate societies managing nature non-destructively, providing plenty of sustenance and leisure for all members. A few lucky humans have always managed to live that way, including in cities of over 100,000. Many of these are described in The Dawn of Everything by Davids Graeber and Wengrow, and golly, I think I blogged about that one as well.

Those humans are lucky until they get destroyed by guns, germs, and steel (shout out to Jared Diamond). It occurs to me that if a bunch of clothes-wearing, gun-toting, religion-obsessed Europeans with utter disrespect for savages, aka any human society not characterized by repression, destruction, and hierarchy, hadn’t managed to hijack the historical context of what turned out to be the dominant nation-states of our time, life would be much better for 99% of us.

I blame Darwin.

Although he got some things right, characterizing genetic evolution as a struggle among species, “survival of the fittest,” is not one of them. I could cite some books here….NVM. Humans, who love fiction and somehow believe anything that “makes sense” to us must be true, locked onto this nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw thing and propagated it.

In other words, there is no reason for us to be struggling for a rung on the “ladder” of prosperity except for a false paradigm, spread by force. Is there hope for a restart? I don’t see any way that isn’t horrendous, such as a much more serious pandemic. Paradigm-related myopia?

Our TMMC crew frequently goes on scouting missions to investigate sightings of creatures on the beach. These outings can be quite pleasant with beautiful views, good company, a walk by the ocean, and frequently a false alarm, as in, the animal was lounging on the beach because wild animals do what they enjoy all the time, which over-scheduled humans interpret as a sign of illness.

At least two of my crewmates work in vet offices, and yesterday one confessed to being a breedist, someone who believes some breeds of dogs are better than others, since breeding for specific traits often has undesirable genetic side effects, mostly having to do with drastically reducing genetic diversity.

Warning: Dog lovers may wish to stop reading now.

This breedist started by talking about dumb dogs, not just individuals, but breeds that have lost any claim to intelligence, then quickly moved on to physical disabilities. Large or squat dogs often have hip dysplasia. Short-snouted dogs may not breathe properly, which eventually leads to lung and perhaps heart issues. Pomeranians may pop out an eyeball when dropped or even just bounding up stairs.

Although dropping an eyeball seems like a pretty major flaw, it is actually recoverable if you grab the eyeball quickly and take it and newly-minted Cyclops Pom to the vet.

The most hated breed seems to be that tilapia of dogs, the Golden Doodle. After sufficient beer, most dog careerists from vet techs to groomers will tell you the GD has made them question their career choice.

Next most frequently mentioned are bulldogs of all types, which are found in the below-hock level of the gene pool, being IQ-challenged, short-lived, and prone to breathing, eye, and ear ailments, allergic reactions, and auto-immune disorders.

Shockingly to me, bulldogs are only one of many purebred dogs which can neither mate nor birth naturally, so are propagated by breeders using artificial insemination and Caesarian section. Our team member always uses the air quotes around the term responsible breeder. Only Stephen King perhaps can imagine what irresponsible breeders are doing.

Dogs are created by people, and just like all the other improvements we have made to nature, there are drastic unintended consequences, in this case suffering dogs with medicalized lives, vast resources spent on prolonging these lives, and the extinction of wild animals.

You may be doubting that last point. The most intelligent, successful women I have ever known once told me that a well-behaved dog on leash should be welcomed anywhere, and why not? Well, for other people, I would mention dog allergies or cynophobia. For wild animals, I would point out that dogs smell like wolves, so some animals either won’t populate areas with that smell or will suffer increased stress while doing so.

Mostly though, I would draw a bright line from the our dog-obsessed culture, in which we spent $83 billion on dogs in the US alone in 2020, to our lack of household spending on wild creatures, many under existential threat. In my experience, dogs get chiropractic treatment, supplements and pharmaceuticals, clothes, toys, holiday gifts, vacations, play dates, organic food, wellness exams and vaccines, and, if needed, extraordinary medical care ranging from joint replacements to chemotherapy. Go Fund Me campaigns to save pets are more likely to succeed than those to save humans, even children. Middle class dogs get better medical care than chronically houseless persons.

Somehow the animal part of our brain gets filled by our pets, and though we claim to love some wild animals, we will execute them without qualm if they threaten our family, lifestyle, pets, or livestock. Or even gardens. It’s a tough life for gophers.

The one-year anniversary of the US exit from Afghanistan was marked by a startling NPR report about immigration. During the elapsed year, the US has considered 8000 of the 46,000 Afghan applications for immigration, and approved 123 of those. In the same time frame, at least 66,000 Ukrainian applications have been vetted and approved.

That’s roughly a 550:1 ratio.

Is it racism? Arguably not. 76,000 Afghanis have been moved to the US since the evacuation began, although some were held in other countries for months and some are still housed on US military bases. Ukraine is of course under active attack, creating a sense of emergency.

Yet over 70,000 Afghans who worked for the US military are still trapped in their country, being hunted by the Taliban, and many of their family members are at risk as well, while food shortages may soon present an existential threat to millions. Meanwhile, more countries in the world are welcoming Ukrainians as the world coalesces against Russia’s aggression.

Sadly, Afghans pay over $500 each in processing fees, which has generated over $20 million in revenue to the US, but Ukrainians can apply for no charge. These are different government programs with different rules, with the Ukrainian one being the more recently established. Possibly each new program is created without referencing what now exists? I’m trying not to see racism, or malevolent statism, and certainly not conspiracy. I’m striving to be open-minded, to remember that even active injustice can happen unintentionally. That’s probably the most common way it does.

Mikhail Gorbachev died today. That takes me back to a joyous event for the West, the fall of the USSR, when the threat of nuclear annihilation was lifted and the world seemed ready to enact the perfect harmony of a Coke commercial. Gorbachev was bitter at the end, but his personal contribution to non-violence is unassailable. Many remembrances today are wondering if, rather than declaring cultural victory, the West had offered some reconstruction aid and recognition to peoples whose instincts lead them to choose authoritarianism over democracy, we could have avoided or at least dampened its spread today. China took the opposite lesson–concession is weak–and rode a different path to power.

Perhaps I will still be around to see the results of today’s choices thirty years from now. Is that what I wish?

My husband and I finished recording our five-movement Telemann sonata at last, and the experience made me realize the many, many ways in which I differ from not only the world-class professional musicians I avidly follow, but also the part-time professionals on whose mistakes I can hardly keep from commenting.

1. Stamina. My wrists can’t handle much more than an hour of daily practice. I suppose one might eventually master a piece at that rate, but not without
2. Focus. I can read books for hours, but after three or four months of playing the same piece just one hour daily, I was tired of it, and started pushing for us to do some
3. Recording. This wasn’t my first rodeo, and recording is just as hard as I remember, even with my talented husband doing all the heavy lifting on setup. We know how professional groups record multiple takes and then combine them. We weren’t sure whether that was kosher for us, but it didn’t matter, since even with the ‘nome we were unable to play any movement identically enough to create “drop-in” measures, due to a deficit of
4. Technique. This covers a lot of ground, including overall consistency of everything from tempo to phrasing, playing together as an (albeit small) ensemble, treatment of the performance markings, period-related style considerations, and, most obviously, just getting all the notes right. Which we did not.

We enjoyed this activity nonetheless, and will likely try another cycle starting in a month or so. This time I’m going to try to put in the time to memorize it by learning it one measure at a time, if I can achieve the required Stamina and Focus.

Meanwhile, it is what it is. If you still want to listen, follow this link.

A New Yorker article describing the Effective Altruism movement caught my eye this week, because it reminded me of a young couple my husband and I knew over a decade ago. They were high-tech workers who lived simply–no cars, small dwelling, minimal furnishings–and contributed well over half of their net earnings to less fortunate people in other countries. The idea was that well-off people can most effectively share their fortunes by making large contributions to relatively inexpensive, high-impact interventions, such as cataract removal, malaria nets, or de-worming.

Donating to the basic health of humans who are currently alive seems ethical in the purest sense, worthy of unequivocal admiration. The EA movement of today, however, has been highjacked by millionaires and billionaires, who, using the egregious reasoning of markets that seems to have driven rational thought from all westerners heads, now posit EA should seek the highest return on investment.

Saving the most people per dollar sounds ok until you hear their solution: EA is focused on saving unborn persons from the depredations of malevolent AI, a threat that will emerge, I suppose, sometime after the singularity. That hasn’t happened yet, BTW, although my phone, which often makes call, sends texts, and plays videos while resting in my pocket, and which frequently jumps to a new screen when I am actively consulting it, already seems to be asserting its independence.

Cryptocurrency moguls diverting funds from health interventions for living people to preventing AI from destroying unborn people are…overthinking? Solving the problem of insufficient aggrandizement? Mirror-gazing into the Magic Mirror until reality dissolves?

In the same issue of the magazine, a different article mentions that wildlife populations have fallen by two-thirds since 1970, and that at least a third of all nonhuman species will have become extinct by 2050. Meanwhile, my last issue of Science presented the new-to-me concept of old growth grasslands; apparently grasslands gain complexity over time just as forests do, and perform similar cleansing and healing functions for the planet, while humans have been destroying them at will, assuming they repopulate quickly.

To save something today that needed saving yesterday, maybe the EA group could disperse birth control methods to Earth’s most destructive species. What would the Lorax say?

My husband and I have been working on a Telemann sonata “for flute and piano,” though as with most Baroque music, one can play it with any instruments that approximately match its range, making adjustments as needed. Since the pianoforte was invented when Telemann was around 30, the harpsichord is a good substitute for the piano, and most of the Youtube videos of professionals playing this piece use it, as well as a Baroque flute. We not do not own one of those; the Irish flute is not the same, nor is it played in the same manner as the concert flute. As with home cooking and restaurant cooking, amateur music and professional music offer unique and distinct procedures and pleasures.

We don’t have a harpsichord either, and I have not taken even a single harpsichord lesson. As my husband pointed out, by some reckoning we do not have a piano either, since we have a Kawai CN39 digital piano, which is pretty much the best piano-like object we can both afford and fit into a beach condo. Our 800-pound 1905 Ellis full upright was just one of the items we gave up for the privilege of living a quarter mile from snow-free Monterey Bay. Definitely worth it.

The Kawai can however sound like a harpsichord, and my husband is very keen for us to record the piece in that manner. I don’t have any compunction about passing off a digital piano as a piano, but I am less sanguine about passing it off as a harpsichord. I mean, obviously I wouldn’t make a recording in which the Kawai was used for the French horn part, or even the Baroque flute for that matter.

That’s my beef with most electronic music, possibly unfairly: Is is really music if no one had to learn how to play an instrument or create a score in order to produce it? Yes, my husband says, the composing techniques are the same, and he has the education to know, so I will cede the point. Occasionally my parochial side pops up, similar in this case to those who enjoy Mozart and Bach but disdain modern classical works, folks I sometimes disdain myself, creating a circle of hypocrisy.

In any case, a real H (harpsichord, which I’m tired of typing) is played very much like a piano, and the Kawai even disables the connection between speed of key depression and volume in H mode, since a (an?) H does not have dynamics. Oddly, the damper pedal still extends the sound, but the (aha!) H also doesn’t have pedals, so perhaps the Kawai designers were thinking one playing the H would keep one’s feet on the floor. I don’t use damper pedals in classical music unless it is marked anyway, and this music doesn’t call for it, although there are plenty of dynamic markings.

We could record the piece both ways, and we might, if no other reason than to express those dynamics. But recording is a bit of a slog, and there are five movements, so we’ll do it one way first then decide how much time we want to spend on it. I like projects that have an End Date, which means we may not get all the movements up to the recommended tempo either.

As a younger person I would have thought that was a failure. As a retired person I’m trying to balance accomplishment and enjoyment. We are recording it so we will have a memento of the time we spent together, since we probably won’t be able to play it at all a year from now.

My milieu mostly exposes me to people who have a good grasp of basic science, even the ones with arts and letters degrees. For that matter, the ones with technical degrees are often well-versed in literature and history. I wouldn’t go so far as to claim membership in a Renaissance coterie, yet we manage some fairly wide-ranging conversations, and we can learn from each other.

During the last three years I’ve been working with the general public, and it occurs to me that some people aren’t like this. Last week a regular customer came into the store looking for “fermented zinc,” a product he insisted he had purchased from us before. I’m thinking, Does fermentation work on minerals? After scouring the shelves, I pointed out that we had fermented chlorella, and he said, Oh yes, that’s what I wanted, thanks! But I also need zinc, what makes it bioavailable? I showed him the chelated zinc. He’s a maven of his own health and a nice person I enjoy discussing things with, and this slight obfuscation of two terms with similar goals doesn’t make him a science zero, yet it felt odd to me. Fermentation seems biological.

A contestant on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me last weekend, playing the game in which one chooses the true story among three, chose one about an octopus that pitched baseballs at major league speeds, throwing eight strikes in a row, one from each arm. An octopus is completely soft-bodied, excepting only the beak, which is why it is such a talented escape artist. We all know it can open bottles and such, but flinging a 5-ounce item 90 feet at 80 miles per hour? Not to mention the implication that this was done on-demand and sequentially by arm. Admittedly, all the stories are outrageous; the true one was about a minor league baseball GM getting a prostate exam during the seventh inning stretch, while leading the singing over the loudspeaker. Anything for charity? Perhaps I should worry more about the appropriateness deficit than the science deficit.

One of my current coworkers is a flat-earther, which is fascinating, since I had not previously met one. He is younger than me, too–most people are, but we’re talking decades; I always pictured such believers as old fogies. He cites a lot of evidence and explanations that may sound creditable if you have roughly zero grounding in elementary school science. This person is intelligent by many measures, so I have to postulate a cause: Home-schooled by conspiracy theorists? I don’t acquiesce, nor do I argue. I simply tell him I’m very comfortable living on a roundish planet in a solar system that’s in one of billions of galaxies that are part of an expanding space-time continuum, so I have no need to follow any of the Internet sites he recommends, which show satellites dangling from hot air balloons, among other wonders.

I know science changes when humans learn new things, or re-learn things we have forgotten, but there is some axiomatic base that is clearly shared by my group, a knowledge substrate on which I rely, without which I feel life would be confusing and disturbing, and which I am grateful to have acquired.

My husband and I enjoyed a two-day jaunt to SF, which included an opera, a band concert, and of course fireworks, in fact, two simultaneous fireworks displays.

The sun set at 8:31. While waiting for nautical twilight near Fisherman’s Wharf, I sent a Snapchat of the Golden Gate Bridge encased in fog, which is to say, a Snapchat of Fog. At two miles distance, rising over 700 feet from the water, the bridge can be a striking sight from this site. When we arrived, one of the towers was still peeking through the clouds, but that eye soon winked shut.

The bridge’s roadway averages 220 feet above the water, not that we could see it, but we visit often and could picture it. I estimate the aviator’s ceiling was about 400 feet. The rockets streaked from the barges into the clouds, which were shortly filled with luminous, colorful radiance from within, reminiscent of a Degas painting, then rained pastel glow-globes gracefully into the water. The nearly identical displays took place directly ahead and to the right, in slightly differing atmospheric conditions, providing a myriad of views and effects, even from identical sources.

My first reaction was disappointment, which is a reminder that my attachment to expectations often causes me to miss a transformative moment. Certainly it wasn’t the usual brilliant, high-definition display, yet the visuals were striking, unique, almost other-worldly. My husband found the ambiguous display much more affecting, which was another bonus, a reward to him for accompanying me to a perhaps wearying series of such pyrotechnics multiple times annually over the several decades of our union.

It’s almost surprising that we haven’t experienced the fog fireworks before now.

The concomitant music and patriotic quotations blaring from the speakers were unsoftened by the weather conditions, and as a result seemed even more bombastic. What freedoms, the smudgy, pastel motes seemed to whisper, do you really have, you who don’t want to be threatened by ubiquitous firearms, to obey the strictures of religion, to ingest toxic water and air, to seek nourishment in robo-food? These choices are no longer yours to make.

Although my husband and I did see this movie, this post is not a movie review. While I had no trouble watching the movie, I wasn’t bowled over by it, and the next day I felt it did not make much of an impression, with the exception of one theme: Given the right life choices, anyone can become anything.

I mostly agree with this, if right choices includes a few other factors, like choosing one’s parents. Yet believing you could have been something else is a trap that leads to regret, and regret of one’s life choices is never productive. Regret of crimes, cruelty, and inhumanity committed during adulthood is allowed; in fact, assuming you have any of those, the rest of your life should be spent redressing them. Most of us don’t! Don’t overthink this!

Instead of lying awake at night trying to figure out why I never became a classical pianist or a research scientist, I like to think about the things that I am, based on evidence of what I do. One thing I am is a volunteer. I have been volunteering for all of my adult life, pretty much weekly, and also served several stints as a teen.

I am also a dancer, primarily folk genre. At various periods in my life I have done square, contra, Scottish, English, Balkan, Zumba, and Morris dancing regularly, in some cases as a performer, and can acquit myself well enough in swing, salsa, zydeco, and waltz as the occasion arises. Although I had occasional ballet and modern dance lessons as a child, most of my dance acumen come from hearing music and moving.

Instrumental music and singing are central, though I have trouble calling myself a musician, perhaps because I know so many professional ones, which I’ve never been unless you count getting paid some travel money for playing at a folk dance. I listen closely to music and attend performances, mostly classical these days, and sing often, sometimes with a choir. I play the piano almost every day, and dabble in the ukulele, 25-string harp, and Otamatone. I have intermittently played the Anglo concertino and a trap set, and dream of owning a hurdy-gurdy, though not strongly enough that I’m willing to sell my car to buy one.

I am a reader. I read all the time, doubtless averaging a book a week, plus magazines and (online) newspapers. I turn to books for answers, information, entertainment, advice, guidance, succor, recipes, everything. I turn to people for a lot of those things too, since occasionally my eyes need a rest focusing at 14″, which they also do when reading music or using a computer.

I am an intellectual in at least one way: I am interested in ideas. I like to imagine things and to do thought experiments. I fear that there are multiple ways of looking at anything, which is fun but also tiring and sometimes confusing.

I’m a pretty good home cook, and a bit of a nutrition nutcase.

Most people identify with their careers, and certainly being an engineer shaped me, but it was a career I chose because I was tired of being lower-middle-class, not because I was inspired by the work. I think like an engineer in that I feel problems have solutions and that I can locate and implement same. Or I used to feel that way. Current problems seem to have become messier. Being a teacher was never really a career even though I did it for 13 years, because I never bought into education theory, which made me a maverick in a very hierarchical world, which pretty much precludes advancement.

I would like to think I am a good friend, mother, and wife, but that is for others to determine. In the end, one’s effect on others may be the best assessment of a life, yet that is mostly unknowable.

I was part of a two-person crew who “rescued” an Ellie (elephant seal) pup on Tuesday. I put the term in quotes because the animal appeared to be perfectly healthy, but we had to bring it in because it was drawing a crowd of people. I’m not crazy about this policy, but I’m newbie volunteer, so I keep my mouth shut and perform as trained.

By the time we arrived on the scene, the animal was accompanied by three humans who were keeping the others at bay, an older couple and a late-middle-aged man. Disclaimer: I am terrible at estimating ages, so these people may actually be any post-pubescent age. The couple, pert and confident, had been watching the animal for at least an hour. The lone man, loquacious and emotive, was mourning the death of his wife just ten days before; her remains had been returned to the sea after alkaline hydrolysis, and he felt closer to her at water’s edge.

The couple presented as confident, long-term residents very comfortable with their knowledge of animals and quite willing to instruct other would-be viewers on the allowed approach. From the standpoint of my previously-referenced training, what they were doing was not ideal, having positioned themselves between the animal and the water. They mentioned that the animal would occasionally raise its head, make eye contact, then resume napping. They interpreted this as some sort of interspecies communication, and posited that the animal was comforted by their continued presence and protection.

Another possibility is that the animal was repeatedly checking to find out if its path to the ocean was clear.

I appreciate these folks’ concerns, and their time, and certainly worse things could have happened to this animal if it had gathered the wrong kind of crowd; recently, another crew encountered people throwing rocks at an animal. But in all likelihood this animal was just relaxing on the beach until humans stuffed it into a crate and carried it off. In addition to no signs of illness and a vigorous fight to avoid capture, it bore a grease mark that our computer tracked to a beach more than ten miles south the day before, a long swim unlikely to be made by a young animal in poor health.

All three humans stepped up their game when we asked for suggestions for the name we will use to identify the animal in our system. The widower wanted to name it after his wife, suggesting both her first name and her family name, while the couple had decided on Bruno while they were waiting. As we loaded the truck and prepared to leave, the woman pulled me aside to tell me that the widower was “creepy” because earlier he was kissing a photo of his wife. She thought the couple’s time investment had given them first dibs on naming, and wanted to submit a backup choice. I expressed the possibility that the other man was still mourning his wife, and she admitted that was the compassionate interpretation (her phrase) and “wished [she] could feel that.”

I consulted with my crew colleague after we were alone in the truck. To his credit, he said the widower seemed creepy to him also but that “that doesn’t matter,” and agreed we should submit all the names. HQ looks for a previously-unused name, so the surname won out, as we suspected it would.

Maybe I’ve been reading too much colonial history lately, but the encounter left me disgruntled. Well-educated and -heeled white people taking charge of a situation and feeling entitled to decide the fitness of others’ responses seems wrong. In case you are wondering, the widower was a person of indeterminate skin color who spoke English with an indeterminate accent. I guess I’m no better at identifying those characteristics than age.