Baby Birds Toilet Trained June 29, 2011

 The birch tree outside my dad’s house contains a homemade birdhouse that regularly hosts three families, in sequence, per year. Right now, a sparrow family is in residence.

You might wonder, how do the parents keep the nest clean? They do go in and pick the poop out with their beaks, then throw it overboard. This I knew. But watching them now, I witnessed something that really surprised me.

These baby birds are toilet trained. (Or is that ‘nest trained’?)

Instead of a little head with a gigantic mouth, I saw one of them back up to the door. His or her tail poked out of the hole, then cleanly dropped a poop outside. Then the head reappeared, ready to accept a new tasty bug.

Isn’t that something? I’d thought the little piles of bird poop at the base of the tree were from the parents, but turns out that’s not solely true.

Good job, mom & dad!  Yet another example of how “bird brains” are far more sophisticated than we’ve generally been thinking. And how, as many parents think, toilet training is indeed for the birds.

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If you don’t believe me, here’s a YouTube video where somebody else caught a baby bird deliberately pooping outside the nest (right at the beginning – around 4 seconds in). The woman filming that seems as surprised as I.

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“Super Moon” and Earthquakes March 15, 2011

Just came upon an interesting and a bit hair-raising idea, that the lunar perigee (aka “Super Moon”, when the moon is closest to the Earth) may play a role in causing earthquakes.

AccuWeather is an astronomy site. Its commentary about the work of astrologer Richard Nolle was posted on March 1.

It includes a paragraph of commentary from a reader close to the bottom:

“Daniel Vogler adds, “The last extreme super moon occurred was on January 10th, 2005, right around the time of the 9.0 Indonesia earthquake. That extreme super moon was a new moon. So be forewarned. Something BIG could happen on or around this date. (+/- 3 Days is my guess)”.”

Guess he was right.

On March 19, the full moon will make its closest approach to Earth in 18 years. And further, this Super Moon is smack dab in the middle of a series of three (February – March – April)…

Think I’ll go outside and sing “Sister Moon” by Sting up in the orb’s general direction.  (I mean, what else can we do?  and hey, it soothes me…)

Papparazzi to the Sun February 8, 2011

NASA has just released rich images of our first technodance around the full Sun. (I say it that way because some indigenous peoples say they’ve been traveling to the Sun and Moon shamanically for a long time already.)  Beautiful giver of life here, any way you fly.

Here’s Reuters’ 30-second video newsclip showing the Sun “in 3-D” (means, going all the way around for the first time). It begins with a funny moment in which the announcer reveals the breaking news that the sun is indeed round.

Check out NASA’s image of the Sun streaming winds and flares, which affect all life on Earth in subtle ways. Seen through this extreme ultraviolet mode of photography, at a glance, she could almost be mistaken for the Earth. And notice the temporary gas triskell in the middle?

Enjoy these!

And then please take a moment to go outside and turn your face toward this beautiful, warm being.

Just imagine, if the Sun suddenly left or died, what your remaining few seconds might be like – how cold, dark, terrifying. I can easily see why earlier peoples saw the sun as a god. Even according to the currently dominant scientific story, it is partially responsible for our creation and certainly for our ongoing existence. All good things here stem from its steady munificence.

Let your skin drink in some of the vitamin D the Sun brought to this millenia-long potluck, and give thanks for your life on this day.

Birdfeeder Raider Busted! December 12, 2010

Folks at Dominican University in San Rafael, CA, where I teach as an adjunct, were baffled by a mystery. Why, no matter how often it got filled, was this bird feeder always empty?

The chief technology officer set up a sting operation to catch the culprit on camera, and figured it out.

R.I.P. Mandelbrot October 21, 2010

Benoit Mandelbrot died last week, of pancreatic cancer at the age of 85. While you may not have heard of him, you surely have not only heard of, but have taken enjoyment and even awe, from the mathematical model he invented.

“What?!” you may be thinking, “Are you off your nut? I hate math! I barely made it through high school geometry class!” But Mandelbrot coined the term “fractal” geometry, the structures of which, according to the math department at Princeton University, cannot be represented by classical geometry. And this math is accessible in a way that we all can see.

A fractal is a geometric pattern with geometrical and topographical features that are repeated in miniature on finer and finer scales. Such repetition independent of size or refinement level is called “self-similarity.”

The principle describes phenomena that we can all witness in nature.

Notice, for example, the similar inner branchings of a tree, a river valley, &  a human lung (the latter image composed entirely of fractal algorithms). The branching repeats in very similar ways, albeit at smaller and smaller levels: trunk, to roots below and large branches above, to twigs…

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Fractal patterns can also be seen to some degree in ferns, lightning, and more. Note how the fern coil repeats itself first in large size, then in each of the smaller coils. If we got closer, we’d see it repeating again in each of the tiny coils within the small coils, and the next and yet the next, down and down again.

While a research scientist at IBM, Benoit Mandelbrot began to look fluctuations in the contours of coastlines. He then branched out to look for instances of similar fluctuations in all sorts of phenomena, which to other minds might seem wholly unrelated and even tangential.

Through this interdisciplinary romp, he began to notice “self-similar” systems, and eventually came to the conclusion that such diverse occurrences as price trends of wheat in the stock market, the folds in mammalian brains as they grow, the clustering of galaxies, the structure of ferns, the shape of frost on your windows in winter, changes in barometric pressure over time, and (his original puzzle) the contours of coastlines and clouds, are related to one another.

Further, these patterns reveal an underlying force that pervade every aspect of life on earth.

It seems to me that Mandelbrot thought in terms of verbs rather than nouns; focusing on moving patterns rather than the solidified results of those patterns. Philosophically, fractals seem to echo the ancient Taoist principle of yin/yang.

Mandelbrot’s NYT obit implies that he had a rough time getting these ideas across at first: “In a seminal book, “The Fractal Geometry of Nature,” published in 1982, Dr. Mandelbrot defended mathematical objects that he said others had dismissed as “monstrous” and “pathological.”

‘Twas ever thus, eh? As Mahatma Gandhi observed, “First they ignore you; then they laugh at you; then they fight you; then you win.”

Close-up of a cauliflower

The “Mandelbrot Set” can be used to mathematically explain all sorts of crooked phenomena like those listed above. Such complex things were once considered unmeasurable, but no more. He taught us a new way to think in patterns.

Do fractals reflect some universal designing set of nature?

What if the study of fractal patterns could offer not only an understanding of repeating rhythms but also the meaning of large natural phenomena?

Such a key has long been sought. In the Middle Ages, for example, the Doctrine of Signatures (a.k.a. Law of Similarities) posited that a natural object’s shape offered clues about its medicinal use.

Hepatica leaf (photo: Frogdawn)

“And so we see in Plants and all of Nature the Word of God.  Like any Scripture, Earth’s Matter is subject to our Doubt.  But to the one who listens closely to its Cadence, it reveals the sweet hidden Truth.” – Reginald Johnson, On the Shapes of Leaves, 1697. 

So the Hepatica plant, which has leaves shaped like the human liver, was thought to contain a healing agent for liver ailments. In fact, it was given its very name due to this.

Contemplating these mysteries, amateur meteorologist Bill Felker charted the changing patterns in barometric pressure at his home over the past 25 years. He claims to now be able to use the observed trends to predict the weather on any given day of the coming year with pretty good accuracy. Believing the structure of his data is fractal in nature, Felker conjectures,

“Some analysts believe that fractals could hold the secret key to the universe, explain the causes not only of our personal decisions but also of the outside forces that influence them.  Science writer Mark Ward even conjectures that fate itself might be fractal.”

The examples of fractals usually given are visual ones like the classic fern coil. These are solid objects that we can point to, but I have a hunch that Mandelbrot’s math holds a key to understanding big patterns in motion as well. I’ve personally long been fascinated by the amazing way enormous flocks of birds can suddenly veer off in the same direction. How do they communicate? Are they watching some lead bird? If so, how? Can they do instantaneous group telepathy? Are they responding to a change in wind currents?

Maybe if we learn how to apply Mandelbrot’s principles further, we will figure out how to understand grand mysteries like that and also how to heal without violent intervention, how to make the best decisions, and how to avoid that crazy way that traffic seems to suddenly come to a stop on the freeway for no reason.

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Mandelbrot was a Lithuanian Jew whose family fled the Nazis in 1936. What a sobering reminder of how much could be lost if “ethnic cleansers” of any ilk get their way.

For those who did not suck up the toxic Barbie-doll story that attractive people must hate math, here’s how to DIY calculate a Mandelbrot set yourself.  Mandelbrot defined a fractal as “a set for which the Hausdorff Besicovitch dimension strictly exceeds the topological dimension.” Mitikoro describes how to draw one:

It’s a set of points. To draw the fractal, you must plot every point that is in the Mandelbrot set. The Mandelbrot set is defined using this formula :
z = z2 + c
|z| > 2
where z and c are complex numbers and c is the point you are testing, such as : c.real = x, c.imag = y.

If the condition is true, the point is in the set. If it isn’t true, you must iterate using the first formula. If, after a maximium number of iterations, the condition is still false, then the point isn’t in the set.

You can even model fractal patterns yourself through computers. In fact, according to the New York Times, Mandelbrot was one of the first mathematicians to use computer modeling to show mathematical principles. Witness the “Mandelbulb,” a 3-D representation based on algorithms by Daniel White and Paul Nylander.

Of course, especially for us ordinary mortals, the best way to experience these principles is to just go outside and pay attention. What Mandelbrot’s work really illustrates, in my mind, is the relationship between the large and the small; how patterns repeat at different levels and how these nested holonic relationships somehow form part of the vital matrix of life here.

Oh yes, and how, when we seek a glimpse of patterned perspective, we can see yet again how the inner workings of this planet and beyond are soul-upliftingly beautiful.

Wild Horses August 1, 2010

I was born in that most unfortunate time for birthdays in this culture, smack dab in the dead zone between Christmas and New Year’s. Nobody wants to have parties then; they are partied out and waiting only to rally one last time on New Year’s Eve. Kids born around this time of year get a single “Christmas AND birthday” present, unlike those born in times of holiday famine like August (unless you count the old pagan celebration Lughnasadh/Lammas, which no one does except me and a select few of my choicest friends.)

But I was fortunate: I grew up in northern Nevada. Yep, you heard that right. It was great. For the winter holidays, my folks and I would get into the frosty car with a thermos full of hot chocolate, and drive around the desert to see the Xmas lights that people had erected on their houses. There were competitions between entire neighborhoods to see who could put up the most spectacular light show. And the desert air is so crisp and clear that each light shone gloriously, no matter how small.

But the main reason it was cool to be in Nevada for that is that after the periphery tour, we had the downtown casino lights to go see as well – which, in my child’s mind, left all of the homemade Santa tableaux in the dust. They were spectacular! My parents thought this a ridiculous idea since these lights are up year-round, but they endured indulging my desire once or twice.

Instead of complaining about the lack of official parties, I used to pretend to myself that the light show was all in honor of my birthday. Even if it’s silly, still I think there’s some psychic benefit to be had from turning a story toward maximum joy.

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One year, when I was grown and feeling nostalgic for this ritual after my folks had moved away, I asked a friend to take me around to see the holiday lights on my birthday. He generously opened the door of his nice pickup truck, and off we went to Hidden Valley. This was the ritzy area of town where the wealthier folks really strutted their holiday stuff.

As an aside, I always wondered where people keep all the decorations during the off season – I mean really, you’d almost need a second home just to store it. There were enormous 12′ Santas complete with sleigh and the full contingent of plastic reindeer; rows and rows of huge light-up styrofoam candy canes lining their walkways; artificial trees large enough to sport beach balls as decorations; several windows full of animated dolls all lit up, running lights spelling out “Merry Christmas” and “Joyeux Noel” and “Feliz Navidad” and “Ho Ho Ho” and “He Is Risen!” but interestingly, we never saw “Happy Hanukkah” or Merrie Solstice” or “Have A Pleasant Enough Kwanzaa.” Nevada is a conservative state, after all, albeit with libertarian dreams.

But I digress.

So we’re driving around, looking at the lights, which really were spectacularly beautiful; colored gems glowing like hope in the clear crisp air. Sometimes I love American excess. And suddenly, I saw a horse in the front yard of the house we were looking at. There was no fence. “Whoa!” I said (no pun intended). “Someone’s horse got out. We should help. He could get hit.”

“That’s a wild horse,” my friend said. “They’re a nuisance out here.”

“Stop!” I urged.

He did. It was, after all, my birthday.

I got out of the truck and walked slowly toward the horses, taking a sort of edgewise path toward them so as not to startle them.

When I got closer, I could see that there were a number of them: they were a small herd. Their hooves crunched in the snow and their breath steamed in the cold air. The people in the house a few feet away remained oblivious to their night visitors, sealed in behind their closed curtains. I felt amused by the horses’ apparent enjoyment of the taste of winter lawns and hedges. This was one of the best uses I’d seen lawns put to yet.

I slowly approached the horses. The head stallion moved to check me out, keeping himself between me and his mares, ready to give the call to flee, never taking his eyes off me.

He lowered his head to catch my scent. I decided to make it easy for him. I stopped moving and deliberately breathed a slow breath out in his direction. He stopped. Then he gave a breath. He took a small step closer. I mirrored him, taking a few slow steps closer too. He backed up a step, then stopped, but stretched his neck in my direction.

For maybe five minutes, we slowly came toward each other in this dance. Bit by bit, he let me approach. Once I reached out my hand toward him, but he didn’t like that, so then I kept them at my side.

When I got within a few inches of him, I stretched out not my hand but my head. I looked him in the eye, and then I breathed into his nostrils like horses do with one another. He looked surprised. He reared up a bit, then settled back down, snorted, and breathed back into mine. It was then my turn to be surprised, as we continued to breathe into one another’s nostrils, sharing this breath.

He did not smell like a regular horse. He was also shaggier than a domesticated horse, and stockier in build than I’m used to seeing. Mustangs are descended from Iberian horses, so it’s said. He was indeed special; something different and wild. Perhaps it was his diet that gave his breath this distinct scent, or perhaps something of his mixed genetic code, or of his wild spirit – who knows?  I just know that this silent sharing of breath was one of the most lovely birthday gifts I could ever receive, and I felt that it was a very positive omen for my new year of life to come.

We stayed together for what felt like a long time, or perhaps outside of time, just breathing. He then let me gently touch his soft nose and rough burred mane with my hand.

My friend, emboldened by my fortune with this horse and the continuing nearness of the herd as they witnessed their leader’s response to me, decided to approach as well. He, too, wanted to experience communion with a wild stallion or mare. But when he came within around ten feet of us, they suddenly scattered and ran.

This was many years ago, but I’ve never forgotten it. Growing up in Nevada, the wild mustangs had always run in my imagination. Now I knew one much more intimately, as well, and felt blessed by the encounter.

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For years now, the wild horses have been captured by the government agency Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and sold off to the highest bidder who can use them as they will: love them as pets, break them for use as laborers, or, after one year of ownership, sell them as pet food. The BLM rounds them up with helicopters, deliberately causing terrorizing stampedes in which many individuals get harmed and families are destroyed. After capture, despite a real attempt to give good care, numerous horses die in the holding pens.

To me as a native Nevadan, it’s a bit heartbreaking to see the mustangs penned up out there in the desert where they used to roam free, their own sovereign nation. They are pictured on the Nevada quarter-dollar, a symbol of our own freedom. Some say they are an invasive species, which would be technically true since they were brought to this continent by the Spanish sometime around the year 1500. For this reason, they say, the horses have to be removed. Of course, most of the people who are saying these things are not exactly native to the area either. The real reason for the capture is economic: the feral horses compete with subsidized cattle for the sparse grazing available on our federal lands.

But many feel solidarity with the horses, and are working to keep them free. One such is the popular childrens’ author Terri Farley, who was also briefly my writing teacher years ago. It was she who brought my attention to the following article from the Lompoc Record, July 30, 2010:

Wild horses, elder stallion friends "Commander" and "General." (Photo by Laura Leigh)

Return to Freedom wins control of 8 wild stallions from BLM

“Eight wild stallions captured this year in a Bureau of Land Management roundup in Nevada’s Calico Mountains have been rescued by Return to Freedom’s American Wild Horse Sanctuary near Lompoc.

Return to Freedom placed the winning bids for the horses in an online BLM auction, said Neda DeMayo, founder and CEO.

“These elder stallions represent leadership and wisdom for the Calico herds,” said DeMayo. “These noble horses, once free on the range and now held captive, symbolize the tragedy of the federal wild horse program.”

Return to Freedom will try to reunite the stallions with their mares and restore, if possible, some of the family bands that were destroyed in the BLM helicopter stampede, she said.

“This rescue is a gesture of restitution for what has been taken from these horses and an affirmation of our commitment to fundamental change in the BLM wild horse program,” DeMayo said.

Between Dec. 28, 2009, and Feb. 4, BLM captured 1,922 horses from five herd management areas in the Calico Mountains Complex in northwestern Nevada. More than 140 horses died as a result of the roundup and an additional 40 heavily pregnant mares spontaneously aborted, according to DeMayo.

In April, Return to Freedom partnered with Soldier Meadows Ranch, which owns lands and grazing allotments adjacent to the Calico Complex, to offer a proposal to return many of the captured horses to the range. The proposal would provide a cost-effective model for on-the-range management of wild horses in order to avoid mass roundups and removals every few years, DeMayo said.

Although BLM did not respond promptly to the offer, the agency has recently indicated a willingness to meet, she said in press release issued Friday.”

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To learn more about the wild horses and their current situation: http://www.wildhorsepreservation.org

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Music of the Spheres July 3, 2010

You’ve undoubtedly heard the phrase “music of the spheres.” This originated for us with the Greek mathematician/philosopher Pythagoras, who proposed that proportions in the movements of celestial bodies can be interpreted as music. He viewed this “musica universalis” not as literally audible, but as a concept about harmonics, mathematics, and the divine.

In A Little Book of Coincidence, John Martineau tracks the ways in which these proportions make up gorgeous geometries. Remember “Spirograph,” that addictive drawing toy you might have had as a kid that involves toothed cogs with holes in different places to stick your pencil through in order to draw repeating geometric patterns? Turns out our universe’s movements look a lot like those patterns. No wonder we found them fascinating.

Contemporary geomancer Richard Feather Anderson claims that the entire universe is made up of only a very few geometric proportions. Feeling fascinated but skeptical, I asked him whether this was not a rather bloatedly arrogant claim, as we puny humans could not possibly know about the entire universe. I mean really, we understand only a tiny bit about the workings of our own bodies! We could speculate on what limited bits we’ve learned about our own planet, our moon, and the observable planets in our own immediate solar system, but the universe? Feather’s response was that the proportions observed by ancient philosophers have now been repeatedly noted by scientists with excellent modern telescopes and computers, and have been proven to (my memory is likely not exact here) something around 97% accuracy. Hearing this, I now had leave to go into spasms of awe.

It is not difficult to see how these proportional relationships might echo musical intervals and harmonics. Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle opined:

“All deep things are songs. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, Song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls! … See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature being everywhere music if you can only reach it.”

If we consider that life energy can be interpreted as vibration, and vibration can be interpreted via sensory organs and machines in many ways that include sound and light, it can be argued that in a way, the entire universe is continually singing.

This poetic opinion is now backed up by research scientists in solar physics at the University of Sheffield, U.K., who have for the first time managed to make recordings of the magnetic field in the sun’s outer atmosphere.

According to The Telegraph’s science correspondent Richard Grey, “They found that huge magnetic loops that have been observed coiling away from the outer layer of the sun’s atmosphere, known as coronal loops, vibrate like strings on a musical instrument. In other cases they behave more like soundwaves as they travel through a wind instrument. Using satellite images of these loops, which can be over 60,000 miles long, the scientists were able to recreate the sound by turning the visible vibrations into noises and speeding up the frequency so it is audible to the human ear.” (June 19, 2010)

The head of the research group, Robertus von Fáy-Siebenbürgen, is cited as saying, “It was strangely beautiful… It is a sort of music as it has harmonics.” As the Bard said, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

I find the Telegraph an excellent layperson’s news briefing source for scientific topics. The best thing about this particular article is that they provide actual video of the sun’s singing. I can’t figure out how to embed it in this post like you can with a YouTube video, being basically an upgraded technopeasant. But you can

click here for the video where you can listen to the Sun “sing!”

How cool is that?!

(All this longwindedness, in fact, sprang from my discovering this video and wanting to share it. Took me long enough to get to it, eh?)

The Aboriginal people of Australia believe that the world as we know it was originally sung into existence. Further, people must continue to repeat these songs if the places we live in and its beings are to continue. I find it a refreshing view to see our species as needed, instead of being a cancer to everyone else. So the people walk these “songlines” every year, literally singing the world back into being. They sing the original birth songs of their neighbors like stones and lizards. Perhaps they learned these songs from the beings themselves.

Five Dreamings. painter - Michael Nelson Jakamarra, assisted by Marjorie Napaljarri, Papunya, Central Australia.

Go outside after you see this video and sing with the Sun. Sing her back into being each year; each day, if you can. Welcome her with whatever comes to you as her own song, reminding her she is beautiful and needed and loved. And at night, don’t forget the Moon. And stars. And oh yes, anytime, all the trees and flowers and rocks and winds and…  Who cares what the human neighbors think? Their cells are all singing too, whether they know it or not.