LifeItself

Here is another short blog I started writing a year ago.  Nothing has changed. Well, over forty years, one-half of a long human life can happen for starters. Forty years ago, on July 6, 1980, my extraordinary wife, Joanna, and I were married in a small ceremony in Warsaw. Poland was a communist country, the Soviet Union controlled Eastern Europe, but a social movement, Solidarity, to which we dedicated our young lives, was burning fast through the very foundations of the powerful Eastern Block. Who would expect that 10 short years later, the Soviet Union was no more, Germany was unifying and the eastern European countries were tossed like leaves onto their paths to democratic modernity? With some adventures, we left Poland in January 1981 (me) and in April (Joanna) to settle in Minneapolis, where I was hired as a postdoc at the best Chemical Engineering department in the world, working for the top professor there. The infamous general Jaruzelski was never tried and sentenced unti...

For the record, the ambiguous title of this blog could also be read as "Shame on the US."  I could not bring myself to publish this short blog for the last 5 long months, but here it is. The dual nightmare of tRump and his Jan 6, 2021, brutal insurrection, that prompted me to start writing is gone.  But otherwise little has changed. We are still the same completely confused, mostly blind and illiterate animals that call themselves Homo Sapiens Sapiens ( Wise wise man !).  My cat has more common sense and sees nature around him more acutely than most of us. May 28, 2021. According to my friend Brian, some dudes in Nevada got curious about a bristle cone pine tree. It was really big. They cut it down. It was the oldest formerly alive tree in the world, ca. 6000 years. This tree was older than the oldest recorded dynasty in Egypt. It was older by at least 1000 years than the oldest surviving wood structure inside of an Egyptian pyramid. Eighteen years ago, that wooden s...

As I am writing this blog on May 29, 11:30 m CST, I have 20 more days of the highly erratic corona virus death data from the US, Germany and the world. Over 100,000 Americans have died of the corona virus infections in not quite three months since the early March of 2020. I do not know how to process this tragedy, other than to say that most of it could have been avoided, if we had a different administration in Washington and we had not been mining literally every resource, including humans, over the last 40 years. The merciless virus has illuminated every wrong we have committed over several decades, including that terrible murder by the police in Minneapolis this week. Coming from Poland and knowing what I know, the detached behavior of the four police officers who committed this particular crime was reminiscent of the WWII German soldiers milling about the countless execution sites for men, women and children, while being filmed by their comrades. Or taking a photo with a freshly ...

Greenland's ice is melting 5-6 times faster than recently thought and Siberia's permafrost is belching giant quantities of methane into the atmosphere, see Figure 1. Perhaps then, it is time to consider seriously how we can alleviate the crushing impacts of the uncontrollable geologic forces we have unleashed by sheer greed and lack of imagination. For fun, please read my Paris OECD dinner speech I gave twelve years ago to the distinguished EU ministers of environment and transportation. This speech was (a) ignored despite presenting the most popular paper of the conference, and (b) got me blacklisted by OECD ever since. Myopia is our middle name. From Mike Haywood, 08/21/2019. Figure 1 . The Yamal crater after belching lots of methane from melting permafrost.  It is difficult to say, but you may think of this crater as of one million cows farting methane 24/7 for one year. Oops! This aerial photo was taken by the people at the Engineering and Technical Center of ...