LifeItself

  So I am listening to the Polish internet radio, " New World ." A small group of young people there exudes such gentle happiness and unobtrusive presence that I am instantly transported to a better world of my youth. Today they discussed and read some of the poems of Wisława Szymborska, a great Polish poetess who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in literature. Today we celebrate the centennial anniversary of her birth.  A new complete collection of  Szymborska's poems and letters just came out, all 724 pages of them.    A young woman with an especially pleasant voice reflected calmly: "We must greet strangers and always reply to their greetings. I have noticed that seeing good, happy things brings more of them to my life. It is as if goodness is passing me by very fast and unless I see it instantly it vanishes. Puff!"  Then they played a short recording of another young woman, who sent her early morning greetings accompanied by the quiet cries of young an...

This is what I just wrote to my Spanish friend, Pedro P., who reacted wisely to a  piece by George Monbiot.  Just to make it crystal clear, I want to be in the Light and think pleasant, peaceful thoughts.  They are essential to my biological survival. "Well, dear Pedro, when I listen to most people, and listen carefully to what they have to say (a very rare skill nowadays, when every human bonobo tries to outshout all other bonobos with their logorrheic narcissistic performances), I see and feel the shreds of a brightly painted fabric torn into small random pieces, stirred and thrown up into the air, and falling on me silently like snowflakes.  Each fabric snowflake may make sense, but together they certainly do not. And the person who throws these flakes at me feels reassured by the sheer number of them; the more the truer.  Scientists excel at scattering around the oft-unedited products of their subconsciousness that are self-contradictory, illogical flake-by...

I meant to write on the subject of chaos for a while, because the roof is caving in on our burning global house made of cards, dead bodies, and withered land and plants. The Oxford dictionary defines chaos as Complete disorder and confusion.  The property of a complex system whose behavior is so unpredictable as to appear random, owing to great sensitivity to small changes in conditions. In my favorite  Greek mythology , the only religion that puts a smile on my face, Chaos was the origin of everything and the very first something that ever existed. It was a primordial void, from which everything was created, including the Universe and the Greek Gods. In ancient Greek, Chaos is translated as ‘the gaping void.’ The first deities that emerged from Chaos were Gaea or Gaia (Life), Tartarus (the Underworld) and Eros (Procreation). Later Erebus (Darkness) and Nyx (Night) also emerged. Gaia, the eternal Mother Goddess, emerged first from Chaos and gave birth to the Earth and the Uni...

One year ago, 42 million human lives were interrupted at 3:40 a.m. in late winter, when the genocidal Russian mafia state attacked Ukraine. I am listening right now to the Polish internet radio, Nowy Świat (New World). In addition to the usual superb music, they are providing a broad coverage of the conflict from the human and animal welfare side. Today they also aired a Ukrainian rap song "Fuck Putin."  Civilian homes are regularly destroyed by the Russians. Source: The Ukrainian Red Cross . A year ago, 10 million Ukrainians crossed the Polish border. The Polish civil society self-organized instantly, not waiting for the government and NGOs to step in. It is important to understand that at the peak this nation of 38 million people received and housed 4 million Ukrainians, while others continued west. Ordinary people had let refugees into their apartments, and gave them their second, rental or vacation homes. All on their own dime.  Thousands of Poles drove into Ukraine in...

I just attended an SPE workshop, "Oil and Gas Technology for a Net-Zero World – Defining Our Grand Challenges for the Next Decade."  Of the 60 people in the audience, I knew 1/3, some very well.  It makes sense, because I have been an SPE member for 40 years, and a Distinguished Member for 20 years.  Last year, I received an SPE EOR/IOR Pioneer Award for my work at Shell and UC Berkeley on the thermal enhanced oil recovery processes that involved foams, and their upscaling to field operations. This was nice, because Shell recognized me as one of their best reservoir engineers, and in 1985 I received an internal Shell Recognition Award for the same work. But I am not a mere oil & gas reservoir engineer.  First and foremost, I am a chemical engineer and physicist, who has thought rigorously about the sustainability of human civilization , ecology and thermodynamics of industrial agriculture and large biofuel systems, as well as about the overall gross and net prima...

 This is a guest post (first ever) by my dear friend, a brilliant physicist, Prof.  Michael Marder. When I went as a prospective graduate student to Santa Barbara the person who became my advisor told me he was studying how snowflakes grow. They build layer by layer, with small bumps emerging into fingers that sprout fingers in turn. The shape of the snowflake is comprehensible at any time in relation to its shape a moment before -- and only in relation to its shape a moment before. The environment matters too and it influences details of the shapes, which is why no two snowflakes are identical. It is an odd mixture of idiosyncrasy and inevitability. This seems to me a useful metaphor for what we call news and opinion. When I pick up the news in the morning, which I do every day and not just in the morning, it appears at first to be, well, new. Here are all the new things that just happened. And here is how to interpret them. By Alexey Kljatov - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https:/...

When I reminisce about the year 2022, I think about noise.  The loud white noise is everywhere, and it buzzes in my ears even when I am in a quiet wilderness.  For good reason.  There is no truly untouched wilderness left in this Age of Anthropocene.  Humans have invaded and damaged or destroyed every part and parcel of land and water on this beautiful Earth that is still trying to protect us from our mass extinction.  Not for much longer, unless you believe the delirious false prophets of technology who shout ever louder and are getting more aggressive by the minute.  They must shout to make their cult followers suspend sound judgement, but they have little appropriate education and no fig leaves to cover their ugly lust for social power.   The cult groupies keep on clinging to a legion of these frauds, e.g., to the  Michael Shellenberger s and  Elon Musk s ( here too ) of this world.  Draw your own conclusions after loo...