Thoughts on decapitation

Some thirty years ago there was a popular list of the twenty most significant stresses in life.  They included the obvious things like divorce – which I think might have been number one – and moving house which I recall was number two.  The death of a family member, a diagnosis of cancer, and giving up smoking or alcohol were probably also there.

Not on the list was what I think is a uniquely modern stress:  having one’s computer go bust.  It wasn’t on the list thirty years ago because in those days computers didn’t give you high speed access to your bank accounts and investments, to email, to television, to Twitter, to sports, to contact information to all your family and friends, or games any more challenging than Solitaire or Hearts.

A friend just wrote saying that her computer has been down for two days, and that the esperience was less like an amputation than a decapitation.   I know what she means.The potential for stress is there as soon as you get a computer, and the more you learn to use it, the bigger the potential stress becomes.

We got our first computer in 1980.  Within six weeks, my husband and I realized that we were a two-computer couple.  Our relationship might survive a single bed, and if required a single bathroom or a single car, but it was not going to survive a single computer.  I quite soon realized that I would trade off my refrigerator, clothes dryer, and television in a single throw rather than face the upheaval of computer loss.

Of course, it’s happened.  More than once.  The worst was probably in Spain when DOS and all the rest of the software was in Spanish with words that weren’t yet in any published dictionary.  Today the sources of the problem are more varied – sometimes it’s a virus, a software glitch, the telephone connection, or the weather.

Whatever the cause, faced with a computer black-out, I’m still inclined to shout from the battlefield with Richard III –  ”My kingdom for my horse -for my computer!”

Climate change #5

In an attempt to estimate the size of the world’s energy needs in fifty years or so, I’ve been trying to find out how the current energy usage in the developed world compares to that of emerging economies.   Here are a few figures – without accompanying adjectives:

• The developed world has about 20% of the the world’s population;
• it uses 6 times as much energy as emerging economies;
• Within the next 20 years, world energy consumption is expected to rise by about 44%.
• Within 40 years, global population is expected to have increased by 30%.

It looks to me as if the only way to look at these figures and avoid the conclusion that we have a mega-challenge in relation to our energy consumption is to revert to pre-scientific, if not irrational, reasoning.

I’m not without hope.  In a way, I think it’s a terribly exciting time to be alive.  Maybe even to be young.  But solving this problem is going to require something more than turning off lights we’re not using.

I’m not sure a blog is the best way for me to tackle an issue as huge and complex as climate change.  I do think there is an urgent need for the problems and solutions to be presented in a way that makes them comprehensible to people who don’t have time to take an entire course, but whose involvement is going to be critical.

So at some point I may give up the blogging format and write a book like The Big Bang to Now which I wrote to make all of time comprehensible to people like me who don’t routinely deal with numbers much bigger than 10,000.   It’s not that the market necessarily needs yet another book on climate change.  I just may need to write it.

Living almost forever

A Cambridge geneticist recently announced his assessment that people alive today might live to be a thousand years old.  We  have learned so much about how to repair the cellular and molecular damage that is the ultimate cause of death, he says, that quite soon the average age at which people die might be several thousand years.

Oh God save us!

I like living very much.  I’m not looking forward to dying anytime soon.  But I do not,  do not want to live to be a thousand.

Apart from my personal preferences in the matter, can you imagine a world in which people live 20-30 times longer than we do now?  I’m almost aghast as I contemplate the possibility.

China already has a one-child policy.  Obviously, unless we find another planet on which to live, we would have to stop having children on a far more drastic scale than that.  Alternatively, the murder rate might increase dramatically as we fight for food and water.  Possibly even space to lie down.

And of course, the retirement age would have to be delayed somewhat.

No, it’s a terrible idea.  I’ve just read an article about the implications of the speed at which the global population is aging.   It’s enough already.

The end of my natural life will come sooner rather than later.  I might not greet death with delight.

But the alternative would be much much worse.

Familiar unrest

Uighur protests in a remote Chinese province were in the news again tonight.  The Uighurs are worth a Google search.  They are Turkic Muslims rather than ethnic Chinese, and have had a distinct identity since 300 BC.

Tension between the Uighurs and Han Chinese has been evident for years.  But as in so many other places, the world’s economic downturn has probably made it worse.  When people have jobs and security, domestic violence, burglaries, ethnic strife, and demagoguery all drop.  When jobs, enough food and water, or ones community are threatened, they rise.

Since the financial crisis began, twenty million migrant workers have lost their jobs in China, and over 60,000 factories have closed.  The current strife probably began in China’s manufacturing area among the unemployed.  A Uighur was accused of rape – apparently without justification according to the BBC report.  But several Uighurs were lynched.

That’s when the Uighurs began to protest against the Han in the north.

I participated in peace marches against the Vietnam war, and then read news reports about what was supposed to have happened.  Since then I have been sceptical about the accuracy, if not the downright truth, of about 90% of what is reported.

I don’t know whether it was the Uighurs who first attacked the Han or the security forces who first attacked the Uighurs.  The Chinese media say it was the Uighurs who started it.

Humbled to near speachlessness

I set out a little over a month ago on a project to learn about the scope, the dangers, and the possible solutions to global warming and climate change.

I have been reduced to near silence by an issue complex, vast, and significant beyond my most wild imaginings.  I’ve been torn between the extremes of hope and despair and back again beyond counting.  The ingenuity, the creativity, the possibilities seem so hopeful.  And then I run smack up against the size of the problem.

The size of the problem:  80% of the world’s total population of 6.9 billion people live in Asia, Latin America, or Africa.  25% of them subsist on an average of $1.25 a day.  That’s more than 20% of all the people in the world.  They are not currently contributing to greenhouse gases by driving cars or turning on refrigerators, TVs or central heating.  And the great majority of people are not consuming energy at the rate of the currently developed world.

It gets worse:  By 2050, the world’s population is expected to increase to 9 billion.  That’s an increase of 30%.

So what we have is a developing world seeking to improve living standards, which, as countries like India and China illustrate, means that their energy consumption will increase dramatically.

In less than half a century, not only will the world’s population have increase by 30%, but energy consumption per person will also have increased.

Assuming that the world did not run out of sources of affordable fossil fuels, the pressure such a vast increase in consumption would put on Earth’s environment is immense.  That probably won’t happen, though, because experts say that fossil fuels are getting harder and more expensive to get at.

Except perhaps coal, which is far and away the filthiest of the lot.

Is the problem solvable?  I don’t know.  I am sure that it is within our power to influence the size of the problem posed by fossil fuels.

More later about some of the avenues that might lead us out of this cloud and smoke which we have created for ourselves.

From a young age

In the Cambridge Botanical Gardens this morning, I saw a girl probably about six years old walking with her parents.  She was wearing an academic gown.  It was a miniature version (or was made for a very short professor) but she wore it with the casual aplomb of an experienced member of faculty.

It reminded me, when I was just about her age, that I used to go to my bedroom and dress up in my self-designed nun’s habit.  As I recall, I wasn’t concerned about becoming a a holy person.  I spent too much time looking in the mirror reaching the conclusion that I might make quite a fetching nun.

Unfortunately, the first time I put on the authentic nun’s habit as a Maryknoll novice, my priorities had not altered much.  I remember heading for the nearest mirror and evaluating my image.  I thought then, too, that I looked quite attractive, seeing as I had to do without any make up.

At least I eventually decided that I did not belong in the convent.  Though it was not with a great deal of self-knowledge even then.  I left saying that I could not live the life I’d entered Maryknoll to live.  That may have been true, but my deeper motives at that point were still pretty well buried.

Yet, it is often possible in retrospect to see in children the directions that their lives will take.

I wonder about the girl in the garden today.  Will she become an academic?  or merely a clothes horse with a great sense of style?

A friend for Independence Day

I first met Richard on the day that we were moving into our penthouse apartment in the English Lake District.  Moving house is listed as one of the five most stressful events in most people’s lives, and our move from Spain was an example of why it tends to hit the stratosphere.

Finding an irascible man at our door was not a favourable introduction. Richard didn’t say “welcome” or introduce himself and invite us for drinks one evening.  He said that the moving men were risking breaking the elevator by overloading it and we’d better stop them and unceremoniously left.  Sometime later his wife Margaret came up to welcome us and asked if there was anything she could do to help.  She said they lived in apartment #2, and if we needed anything at anytime (I remember her saying “eggs or anything”) to come down.

But I was unmollified after Richard’s presentation and I thought it unlikely that we would have much to say to each other.

I was wrong.

With time we came to be immensely fond of Richard and Margaret.  Richard said what he thought without embroidery, a Yorkshire characteristic I found totally refreshing.  He was completely without pretension, and without ceremony one of the most generous people I’ve ever met.

He was also an iconoclast with a sense of humour.  What I remember most often was the inevitable phone call I would get on July 3rd urging me to hang an American flag outside our tower window to celebrate American Independence Day.

I never did it, because actually, I never had a flag.  But in retrospect, I dearly wish I had.

Richard died unexpectedly very shortly after we moved from the Lake District to Cambridge, and we miss him more often than he would have guessed.

Especially on July 4th.   Independence Day suited him.

Will you still love me when…

I remember once saying in about mid-November that I was getting through winter very well.  My brother Bob who lives just south of the Canadian border, laughed.

To say that I’m enjoying my old age is probably comparable.  Being a few months short of seventy is unlikely to qualify me as highly experienced in aging.  Nonetheless, it never occurred to me that I might be in for some big surprises if I live long enough.  And not all of them negative.

What do you think you will be doing if you live to be 90?  I have to admit that I was startled to read that a woman here in England has just published her first novel at the age of 93.

Lorna Page says it has transformed her life and is planning to use the royalties to buy a large house for friends currently in a nursing home.

Her book, A Dangerous Weakness, is available on Amazon.  I haven’t read it yet, so I don’t have an opinion about the end product.  But I’m in delight and awe at the process.  If I live to be 93, I wonder if I’ll be still even be writing this blog.

It’s worth a try.

Naturally -

The high court in India today struck down a 19th century law put into place by Britain which outlawed homosexuality.  Gays believe it is important because it removes a legal barrier for them even if societal attitudes are often still hostile.  Striking down the law will also make it easier to increase the effectiveness of campaigns to reduce AIDS, since gays will not be vulnerable to prosecution if they openly declare their sexual orientation.

So much for the news.  I was reflecting on my own changed attitude toward homosexuality.  As a Catholic, I was taught that homosexuality was a sin because it was unnatural.  Not being homosexual myself, I didn’t get greatly exercised by this teaching until I became a psychologist.

By then, I had long abandoned the idea that to be gay was to be a sin, but the profession still believed that homosexuality was psychologically deviant and included it as a category of mental illness.   I worked and lived in New York City and gays were often among my friends and colleagues.  Their homosexuality didn’t impress me as pathological.

But I, like many of them, especially among my students, wondered why they were gay rather than straight.  Gradually research has changed attitudes:

• there is almost certainly a genetic component that influences our sexual orientation
• same-sex activity occurs not only among humans but in many other animals, including primates
• in all primate groups, including us, homosexuality often seems to promote bonding.  Ancient Greeks encourage homosexuality among its elite to strengthen their commitment to each other and to raise their chance of survival in war
• lesbianism in species as diverse as primates and birds often mean that that both participate in parenting, giving offspring greater protection and learning opportunities

By and large then, homosexuality doesn’t lead directly to the production of offspring, but it does make a significant contribution to the good of the whole group.

Which impresses me as an outcome to be supported.

Naturally.

Reverse Chaos Theory

According to Chaos Theory, some small event - like the flapping wings of a butterfly – can ultimately lead to some very significant event — like a hurricane that is first felt thousands of miles away.

Given its name, I suppose it’s not surprising that the theory is used most often to explain catastrophic events caused by some minor seemingly-unrelated and distant disruption.

But I would like to propose a twin theory which I have called Reverse Chaos Theory.  This brilliant idea is the result of a few moments I spent this morning in the parking lot of our local DIY store.  We were lifting some sharp-edged lawn equipment into the car when it slipped.   In the process of trying to catch it, I put the can of oil I was also carrying on the roof of the car.  After arranging our purchases in the trunk, I put slammed down the door and started to get into the passenger seat.

A stranger passing by called over that I’d left something on the roof.  It was the can of oil.  I expressed my gratitude effusively.

My gratitude was effusive because, along with the can of oil, my wallet – containing my credit cards, Peter’s credit cards, store and loyalty cards, my driver’s license and insurance, and about $50 – was also on the roof.

I was shaking as I got back in the car.  The oil was nothing.  But the upheaval of losing my wallet somewhere on the road between Cambridge and home still elevates my heart rate.

I doubt very much that stranger is sitting at home tonight thinking she did a good deed.  But I know she did.  And if she’d just passed by deciding that can of oil was none of her business – or if she’d passed by sixty seconds sooner or later – my life right now would be in chaos.

So I’m dedicating this theory to her.  I don’t know her name, so I’ll just have to call her Reverse Chaos.