rawjeev's randoms

A blog of random things that catch my eye as I roll on with life.

[lamignonette]

[mmoonsilverr]

roving bridge

[free-my-mindd]

[free-my-mindd]

[apocryphics]

oh ok

[gorps]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

* * * * *

“The living can’t quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can’t because they don’t. The light that shines into darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones.”

~ Wendell Berry (from Hannah Coulter)

[alive on all channels]

[rawjeev]

“Loneliness is the poverty of self. Solitude is the richness of self.”

—Mary Sarton

[littlewildmother]

Studies show that engaging in ritualized behavior significantly improves outcomes on measures of grief and feelings of control, even when the person participating in the ritual has little or no belief in the ritual’s power. Just a reminder for no one in particular.

[littlewildmother]

Research has revealed that, while rituals are universal across human cultures, the content and actions of those rituals vary widely even when they have the same intended purpose. This suggests that it is not the actions that matter, but that you are taking any action at all and naming it ritual. It can be an elaborate ritual with dozens of moving parts and participants, or it can be as simple as lighting a candle alone with the intent to remember someone.

The healing is in the doing.

[rawjeev]

“May I always have less that I need and more to give.”

— rawjeev

[rawjeev]

An ant mimicking cricket nymph. Macroxiphus species.

I have seen ant mimicking jumping spiders many times. When I saw this guy jump (at the beginning of the video clip) it was obvious to me that it was not an ant. Looking closer, I noticed the long whiskers and the hindlegs that told me it was not a spider. I learnt later that it was a cricket. Amazing life.

Seen at ArtGarage, HMT area, Bengaluru.

[rawjeev]

Odontomantis planiceps, Asian ant mantis

This mantis mimics black ants in its initial stages.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

“To keep our hearts open is probably the most urgent responsibility you have as you get older”

~Leonard Cohen

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

How a radical new view of life could reveal its origin – and aliens

We've been looking at nature the wrong way, argues Rowan Hooper. If we stop focusing on the individual, we get a whole new picture of how li

Rebecca Solnit 

In my last book, I argue that the transformation of ideas, beliefs, and values is so profound it amounts to the dismantling of a civilization and its replacement (by one that I like much better and that scares the socks off those who want to perpetuate straight white Christian male hegemony and find that to do that they have to get more and more extreme including in how they distort the facts around science and nature and reality themselves). Here's three essays I've just come across demonstrating that we are rethinking nature itself -- and since nature has been for centuries a touchstone for what is legitimate, normal, meant to be, etc. the definition of nature is crucial for everything, from how we understand sex and gender to how we think about economics and society. Huzzah! Links in captions to screenshots.

Willow Schenwar writes, "Excluding insects, 33 percent of all animal species are predominately hermaphroditic. Some of these animals start out as one sex and change to another. Clownfish are an iconic example: They begin their lives as male and have the ability to transform their bodies to become female when the alpha female of their social group leaves or dies. Other fish, such as wrasses, exhibit this same sequential hermaphrodism, but in the other direction. Many invertebrates—such as worms and snails—possess the reproductive structures of both sexes at the same time. Some species have more than two sexes; splitgill mushrooms have over 23,000 different sexes, or mating types."

Rowan Hooper writes about his excellent new book, "In my new book Togetherness, I make the case that symbiosis – which means “living together” – has been neglected in our explanation of biology and ecology. It’s not just that I think it’s a shame that its significance has been unappreciated; it’s that recognising symbiosis is vital to help us understand who we are and how we came to be. Complex life – all those things you see around you – exists only because of a deep form of cellular symbiosis, and all plants rely on symbiosis to grow and to produce all the food we eat. But this isn’t widely recognised. Since before Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution, and even more so afterwards, we have emphasised the role of competition in the evolution of life, fuelled by the idea of nature being “red in tooth and claw”. What I didn’t expect to find when researching my book is that the growing understanding of this togetherness, and the way it forces us to look at the world anew, is helping to demystify one of the greatest and oldest questions in science: how did life begin? The picture that is coming into view is set to reshape our definition of what life is – and inform the search for alien life."

Capitalism has warped our understanding of ecology and life’s origins

The ideas of survival of the fittest and winning at all costs are closely entwinned with Darwinism, but they shouldn’t be. A rethink from a

Fascists Try to Write Trans People Out of the “Natural Order.” The Earth Disagrees.

The vast majority of life on earth exists outside of sex and gender binaries—despite what the right likes to claim.

[protoslacker]

The UN has voted 141-8 to adopt a resolution backing a world court opinion that countries have a legal obligation to address climate change, with the US – which is the world’s biggest historical emitter – among the small group opposing it.

The Guardian. UN backs historic climate crisis ruling, despite US attempts to stop resolution

The US, Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia – some of the highest oil-producing nations and major greenhouse gas emitters – opposed the measure

The indispensable Rebecca Solnit: "This May Well Be the Most Consequential Case in the History of Humanity"

[rawjeev]

“Spiritual practice is certainly a 'private' matter, not because it must be done alone, but because no one can do it for us.”

— Samuel Alexander, Entropia

[wayti-blog]

“Let the waters settle and you will see the moon and the stars mirrored in your own being.”

― Rumi

[protoslacker]

The AI industry is telling a story about the future of work that goes roughly like this: automate what can be automated, augment what remains, and trust that the productivity gains will compound into a wealthier, more efficient world. The Social Edge Framework tells a different story. It says: the intelligence we are automating was never ours alone. It was forged in conversation, argument, institutional friction, and collaborative struggle. It lives in the spaces between people, and it shows up in AI capabilities only because those spaces were rich enough to leave linguistic traces worth learning from.

Bright Simons in The Ideas Letter. The Social Edge of Intelligence

AI doesn’t really “think.” Rather, it remembers how we thought together. And we’re about to stop giving it anything worth remembering.

Via Kottke Dot Org

Bright Simons

[astound]

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