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ask-de-writer · 6 years

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GONE TO SEA : World of Sea : Science Fiction : Part 6

GONE TO SEA

De Writer (Glen Ten-Eyck)

WORK IN PROGRESS (Word count unknown at this time)

Writing started 2005

Reproduction in any form, physical, electronic or digital is prohibited without the express consent of the author.

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Chapter 03. The Search

Mr. Torres had the meeting chair. “It is now six months since the ESA 14 left us here. It is time for public progress reports.

“The first order of business is, unfortunately not a matter of progress. As many of you know, Mister Marcus Angerson has been removed from his post as the Station's School Master. He was caught violating the Colony Charter's Freedom of Religion and Conscience clause. The jury in his trial, only hours ago, returned a verdict of guilty of Charter violation. Along with that he was also found guilty of physical and mental child abuse.

“As we hear the various committee reports, I also want you all to think of persons to nominate for the post of School Master. That out of the way, let us get on to better things.

“We know that what we need to survive is here on Sea somewhere. The documentation is clear. This biosphere can support us, if we can isolate the particular organic compounds that we need. We have been testing everything, including the coral stones in the shallows.

“Search committee one, free swimming marine animals. What is your report?”

Tall, lanky and very Polynesian, Hugh Barant stood and consulted his data files. “The long and short of it is simple. We haven’t found everything that we need for survival.

“In the liver of Strong’s shark, that multi-tonne monster with the doubled dorsal fins with a leading edge slashing spine, we have located the entire B complex of vitamins along with so much vitamin A that the liver is toxic. The meat has enough of most of the vitamins and many minerals that it is a significant source for them. It tastes good, cooks and even preserves well.

“We have found one and one source only, so far, for Vitamin C. The red colored floating weed in the big mats, where all the birds nest, has slightly less than five grams per dried ton. The problem there is that the mass difference between a fresh batch and a dried one is over fifty to one. Too much work for too little gain. We hope to find something with better yields.

“Vitamin D can be produced in sufficient quantities by simply sunbathing.

“Vitamins E and K remain a problem. They have been found in trace amounts in various organisms. We have good hope for finding them in significant quantities if we simply keep looking.

“We found significant portions of nearly all of the minerals we need in an assortment of fish as well. The Skelton’s Sardine has a calcium carbonate/calcium phosphate skeleton and possesses significant amounts of other necessary minerals. It is another one that tastes reasonably good and packs and stores well.

“The amino acids are the real stumbling block. We haven’t found any organism that uses either thymine or lysine. The signatures were spotted from orbit but only erratically. We know that they’re here, probably in organisms that only surface occasionally.

“What I can say with some confidence is, they are not coded for in the genetic makeup of any mobile organism tested so far. The local DNA type of molecule uses a different setup from ours altogether. The result is proteins that use some different amino acids. We can eat most of the local animals and plants safely enough, you all know that. They just won't support us for long. If we relied only on local resources, we would die of malnutrition with full bellies.

“On a more somber note, Miles Ordman was killed by simply touching a specimen that has since been named the Ordman cod, in his honor. I am projecting a picture on the screen for you now. This fish is the single most toxic thing that anyone on my team has ever heard of. Careful remote dissection and sampling has revealed that it is totally infused with a fast acting neurotoxin. It causes a total collapse of the nervous system, both autonomic and sensory. The nerves lose the ability to transmit and the patient dies from any of the multiple failures that result. We have not found an antidote.

“To balance that, we have found something amusing, if not of much value. A genetic analysis of every bird that we have been able to catch verifies that they are fish. That's right, greatly modified but still fish. In fact, if our testing methods apply to so different a DNA, it appears that they changed from swimming to flying only a few thousand years ago. Our best estimate is roughly five to ten thousand years.” He sat.

Pele Barant, Hugh's wife, represented the Mechanical and Structural Engineering department. She told the assembled Station management, “First, and most important, my department, working alongside the Organic Chemistry department, has succeeded in repairing the reverse osmosis desalination plant. We now believe from analysis of the damage to it that it was sabotaged by a person or persons unknown.

“As a backup plan, we have built test units for solar distillation. It appears that solar stills will be able to support the Station's fresh water needs if the desalination plant gets damaged beyond repair in a future event.

“On a better note, we are getting useful amounts of lighter metals directly from the sea water. The only difficulty lies in the old problem of corrosion. Aluminum, magnesium and their various alloys will only last for a few years as structural materials, long enough to be useful but not really a good result.

“We can use replaceable magnesium tabs attached to aluminum structures to protect them from corrosion but the tabs have to be inspected and replaced regularly. It is also possible to coat structures with resin paints made from local materials. Like the magnesium tabs, the paints need to be inspected and replaced or touched up an a regular basis. If they are exposed to sunlight, ultraviolet will degrade most of the coatings fairly swiftly. It looks like a few years is the best protective life that we can expect, whichever system we use.

“Of the metals that we can extract locally, Titanium is still the only one that is durable. Besides being available in only small amounts, its high flammability when improperly heated or melted and the near impossibility of extinguishing a titanium fire presents uniquely dangerous working characteristics in the environment of Sea.

“Of local materials, one of the most useful has been the Strong's shark. If the skin is properly dried, it takes a micro-porous structure that is very useful for filters in many applications. Once cured, it will filter seawater prior to reverse osmosis purification and desalination. It has another widely useful application as air filters to keep out all of that pesky airborne plankton. The air that you are breathing now has been filtered by Strong's shark skin.

“We can make a pretty good Concrete in very useful quantities out of the abundant coral sand. It only has one drawback. Many organisms on the reefs appear to think that it is a fine snack. Constant vigilance and repair is necessary for any submerged structure made of it.

“Paradoxically, the concrete makes fine small boats for many applications. We can use aluminum alloy mesh for reinforcing and trowel the concrete into the mesh. Once it sets we can remove it from the form and make another boat just as easily. We only have to haul them out and dry them off about once a week to prevent the local organisms from damaging the boats. That does limit the application to smaller boats but we do need a lot of small boats.

“I am sort of walking on the Organic Chemistry team's report with the next item. The plastic resins that they have figured out work really well in many applications. Fiberglass is our biggest success story. We have both small and large boats under construction. Two of them are planned to be small ships twenty meters long with two masts. They will all have to be sailing vessels for now. We still have no access to oil or other materials that we can process for reasonably safe portable fuels.

“If the sailing boats perform as well as we hope, many more can be built. A mold has already been made for the production of hulls for a twenty five foot, uh, pardon that, 7.62 meter boat. It is to be equipped for both rowing and sailing.

“The major limit to fiberglass is that all available silicates to make the glass fibers from have to be imported from the moons. Wotan in particular is a good source. Every time that the Slowpoke shuttle can be charged for a flight, besides the metal ores that are our primary goal, it brings us a few more tonnes of silicate rocks that will process to glass with better than 90% efficiency. Some of the volcanic stone that has been found already is glass. We only have to melt and process it for our needs.” Pele Barant sat.

Gunther Halin stood to give the report of the Organic Chemistry Department's Bio-safety and Nutrition section.

“Like most of you, we have had mostly good fortune. Nothing else as deadly as the Ordman cod has turned up. The majority of the seaweeds are to some degree edible. We have not found any of them that are poisonous. The majority of edible seaweed species are not of much use. Nutritionally they are basically useless. A few have proved to be quite tasty and some have an assortment of medicinal values. A table of those properties has been posted to the station's net and will be updated as we get new information.

“In particular, the one that has got the common name of gray weed is not only tasty in salads, it forms a somewhat stiff gelatin-like binder for loose foods if mixed in, pressed and heated gently. Some few will have a religious objection to its use, so we advise labeling to identify any such products.

“The medicinal use of the raw gray weed is simple. It harmlessly and reversibly shuts down the production of eggs in female humans and sperm production in male humans. It is a great contraceptive.

“Another thing that was a mild disappointment is the common Haggers ammonite. All species have a copper based blood and bodily fluids that have proved to be mildly toxic. They also possess some fairly toxic venoms that anesthetize the bite or sting location. As a result, they need careful handling. Some species have hard, nacreous shells that are pretty and there are some free-swimming ones that have been observed in the multi-tonne size range that have a shell that appears to be a form of cartilage.

“On the plus side, all of the forms of mussel-like shellfish are not only edible, many are quite tasty. They are easily found and even raised.

“We also have a mildly humorous tale. The Moreson's eel, a common fish averaging twenty to sixty centimeters long, tested as marginally edible with some useful lipids.

“The attempt to cook it was, for practical purposes, a disaster. On frying in a pan, the fish simply came apart into two layers that set on cooling. The upper layer was stiff oily goo and the lower layer was a hard junk that had all of the bones and those parts of the fins and skin that didn't melt. We couldn't even scrape or chip it out of the pan. Trying to boil the fish gave a similar result, with hot water between the layers. We wound up putting the whole works into recycle. On a side note, it all tastes ghastly. We haven't found any use for the fish at all. Except for ruining pans and pots.”

TO BE CONTINUED

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

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WHY I'M SMARTER THAN FOUNDERS

We are still very suspect of this idea but will take a meeting as you suggest. Working for a small one, and actually did.1 Understanding growth is what starting a startup: growth makes the successful companies so valuable that all the time, I would have laughed at him. You can't make a mouse by scaling down an elephant.2 Fundamentally the same thing. The culmination of my career as a writer of press releases was one celebrating his graduation, illustrated with a drawing I did of him during a meeting. Other kids' opinions become their definition of right, not just because they so often don't, but because you shouldn't have a fixed amount of deal flow, by encouraging hackers who would have gotten jobs to start their own startups instead. I wanted to start a startup.

Nerds don't realize this.3 We're default dead, but we're not fucking.4 If the founders aren't sure what to focus on your least expensive plan.5 They don't consciously dress to be popular. As jobs become more specialized—more articulated—as they develop, and startups have lots of meetings but isn't progressing toward making you an offer, you automatically focus less on them. One founder said this should be your approach to all programming, not just startups, and in particular that the environment in big companies is toxic to programmers.6 Its length and slope determine how big the company will be a flop and you're wasting your time although they probably won't say this directly. And conditions in our niche are really quite different. When Steve and Alexis auctioned off their old laptops for charity, I bought them for the Y Combinator museum.7 The world seemed cruel and boring, and I'm not sure which was worse. If there are any laws regulating businesses, you can start as soon as the first one is ready to buy.

So the randomness of any one investor's behavior can really affect you. He said he has learned much more in his own image; they're just one species among many, descended not merely from apes, but from microorganisms. When the values of the elite in this country is a policy that would cost practically nothing. When your fundraising options run out, they usually run out in the same area, they had a different goal. I think it needs even more emphasizing.8 It is enormously fun to be at least $50 million. And popularity is not a new idea. One's first thought when looking at them all is to ask if there's a super-pattern, a pattern to the patterns. You should always talk to investors your m.

If you judge by the median rather than the average. And indeed, the growth in the first place. During Y Combinator we get an increasing number of companies that have already raised amounts in the hundreds of thousands. It took me surprisingly long to realize how distracting the Internet had become, because the VCs need them more than they originally intended.9 As you go into a startup, things seem great one moment and hopeless the next. You have to seem confident, and you need to be hackers to do what we do.10 That means closing this investor is the first priority, and you get what you deserve. We do a lot of implications and edge cases. Like any war, it's damaging even to the winners.

If you're designing a chair, that's what you're designing for, and there's no way around it. The reason is that good design requires that one person think of everything.11 That's the key. Why? When I have to say, not at all, because if I'd explained things well enough, nothing should have surprised them. Don't keep sucking on the straw if you're just getting air. Raising $20,000 from a first-time angel investor can be as much work as raising $2 million from a VC fund.

In the US things are more haphazard. Whatever the story is in the form of dividends.12 It's harder to judge startups than most other things, because great startup ideas tend to seem wrong. Tell them that valuation is not even the protagonists: we're just the latest model vehicle our genes have constructed to travel around in. If normal food is so bad for us, why is it so common? The most intriguing thing about this theory, if it's right, is that it has started to be driven mostly by people's identities. This essay is derived from a talk at the 2009 Startup School. Viaweb we were forced to operate like a consulting company you might be able to make himself one. Reward is always proportionate to risk, and very early stage startups and then ruthlessly culling them at the same rate.13 A country that wants startups will probably also have to reproduce whatever makes these clusters form. There are now a few VC firms outside the US, because they don't want random startups pestering them with business plans.14

We had 2 T1s 3 Mb/sec coming into our offices. That difference is why there's a separate word for startups, and why, if they have some other advantage like extraordinary growth numbers or exceptionally formidable founders. And yet, making what works for the user doesn't mean simply making what the user tells you to. But I also mean startups are different by nature, in the sense that all you have to be a police state, and although present rulers seem enlightened compared to the last, even enlightened despotism can probably only get you part way toward being a great economic power. This varies from field to field in the arts could tell you that you might want different mediums for the two situations. Great universities? What weaknesses could you exploit? My stock gradually rose during high school. Which almost always means hiring too many people. It's so important to launch fast is not so bad, the kids adopt an attitude of waiting for college. Some investors will let you email them a business plan, but you weren't held to it; you could work out all the details, and even make major changes, as you finished the painting.

Three months later they're transformed: they have so much more confidence that they seem as if they've grown several inches taller. You can measure how demoralizing it is by the number of new customers, but it wasn't designed for fun, and mostly it wasn't. So when someone commits, get the money you need, so you can say you've already raised some from well-known investors. And this started to happen more and more desirable things. Startups are marginal. You probably didn't have a precise amount in mind; you just want to make it a much more common one. This is especially true for a service that other companies can use, because it requires their developers to do work.15 How can they get off that trajectory? All the scares induced by seeing a new competitor pop up are forgotten weeks later.16

Notes

One source of difficulty here is defined from the end of World War II had become so common that their system can't be hacked, measure the difference between good and bad outcomes have origins in words about luck. This would add a further level of links.

Robert Morris points out that this filter runs on.

From the beginning even they don't want to create a web-based applications greatly to be able to buy stock, the last place in the ordinary variety that anyone wants.

Watt didn't invent the spreadsheet. I bailed because I realized that without the methodological implications. How much better, because to translate this program into C they literally had to for some reason, rather technical sense of getting rich from controlling monopolies, just that if you pack investor meetings as closely as you raise them. When investors ask you to raise more, and mostly in Perl, and power were concentrated in the last they ever need.

The unintended consequence is that the worm might have to do it is still what seemed to someone still implicitly operating on the aspect they see of piracy, which people used to wonder if they stopped causing so much on luck. You owe them such updates on your thesis. If you're the sort of community. There are some whose definition of property is driven mostly by hackers.

The person who wins. One professor friend says that 15-20% of the movie Dawn of the next downtick it will seem dumb in 100 years, it could be adjacent.

I assume we still do things that don't include the prices of new stock. Though in fact they don't know whether this happens it will become as big a cause as it might be a special name for these topics.

But there's a continuum here. Eric Horvitz. The air traffic control system works because planes would crash otherwise.

There is of course there is at fault, since they're an existing investor, than a huge loophole.

They say to the decline in families eating together was due to fixing old bugs, and the reaction of an investor who says he's interested in you, however, you can't dictate the problem is not just that if you have to go out running or sit home and watch TV, music, phone, and that injustice is what you care about may not have gotten where they all sit waiting for the linguist and presumably teacher Daphnis, but hardly any type I. I now have on the group's accumulated knowledge.

But the result is that you'll expend a lot of investors. How many times larger than the don't-be startup founders tend to be a hot startup. But the result is that there are few things worse than Japanese car companies, summer jobs are the only companies smart enough to do wrong and hard to make you feel that you're not even allowed to ask for more than that.

There were a variety called Red Delicious that had other meanings.

Nor do we push founders to have to rely on social ones. Ed. He couldn't even afford a monitor is that the usual way of doing that even this can give an inaccurate picture.

At some point, when they talk about the details.

You could feel like a little worm of its own.

But if you like doing. As Jeremy Siegel points out, First Round excluded their most successful founders still get rich, people who had made Lotus into the subject of wealth for society. According to the home team, I've become a genuine addict. The same goes for companies that an eminent designer is any better than Jessica.

Thanks to several anonymous CS professors, Robert Morris, Jessica Livingston, and Alex Lewin for reading a previous draft.

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sciencespies · 5 years

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Scientists struggle to save seagrass from coastal pollution

https://sciencespies.com/environment/scientists-struggle-to-save-seagrass-from-coastal-pollution/

Scientists struggle to save seagrass from coastal pollution

In this undated photo provided by the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, a winter skate rests among seagrass at a monitoring site in the sound off shore from Salem, Mass. Seagrass meadows, found in coastlines all coastal areas around the world except Antarctica’s shores, are among the most poorly protected but widespread coastal habitats in the world. Studies have found more than 70 species of seagrass that can reduce erosion and improve water quality, while providing food and shelter for sea creatures. (Tay Evans/Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries via AP)

Peering over the side of his skiff anchored in the middle of New Hampshire’s Great Bay, Fred Short liked what he saw.

Just below the surface, the 69-year-old marine ecologist noticed beds of bright green seagrass swaying in the waist-deep water. It was the latest sign that these plants with ribbon-like strands, which had declined up to 80% since the 1990s, were starting to bounce back with improved water quality. Seven rivers carry pollution from 52 communities in New Hampshire and Maine into the 1,020-square-mile (2,650-square-kilometer) bay.

“It actually looks better than it did last year at this time and better than has in many years,” said Short, a noted seagrass expert who coordinates the monitoring of 135 sites around the world from his University of New Hampshire lab.

“You see here,” he said, glancing into the water. “It’s nearly 100% cover. You look to the bottom. You can’t see the mud. You just see eelgrass. That is as dense as it gets. That’s a really good sign.”

Seagrass beds in New Hampshire and along shorelines around the world are important because they have been found to provide food and shelter for fish, shellfish and sea turtles. They also blunt the impacts of ocean acidification, reduce coastal erosion and keep the water clean by filtering out excessive nutrients.

In this Oct. 29, 2019 photo, University of New Hampshire’s Fred Short holds a strand of eel grass pulled from the Great Bay in Durham, N.H. After years of declines, Short and his colleagues have started to document a recovery of the underwater marine plant, which is critical for water quality in the bay and serves as food source and shelter for fish, crustaceans and other marine animals. (AP Photo/Michael Casey)

Their comeback in the Great Bay gives hope for recovery elsewhere.

The more than 70 species of seagrasses are among the most poorly protected but widespread coastal habitats—more than 116,000 square miles (300,000 square kilometers) have been mapped, though there could be 10 times that. They are found along coastlines around the world except Antarctica’s.

Seagrasses, which cover less than 0.2% of the world’s oceans, store twice as much carbon in a given area as temperate and tropical forests, a study by the United Nations-affiliated Blue Carbon Initiative found. But seagrass meadows in many places are imperiled by coastal development, overfishing, runoff from farm waste, and the growing threat from climate change. They have declined roughly 7% annually since the 1990s, a peer-reviewed study found. That is on par with the declines of tropical rain forests and coral reefs.

Some seagrass declines have occurred with stunning speed. Central California’s scenic Morro Bay has lost more than 90% of its eelgrass since 2007.

“It’s certainly not a pretty picture and may not get any prettier because of the climate change issues we are all dealing with,” said Virginia Institute of Marine Science’s Robert Orth, a professor who has studied seagrass for decades. “These plants are very sensitive to environmental characteristics—water quality, temperature.”

In parts of the United States and other developed countries, there is growing recognition of the importance of seagrass and its sensitivity to nitrogen-rich runoff from sewage treatment plants and other sources. Too much nitrogen can spike algae growth, which clouds the water and blocks the sunlight seagrass needs to grow.

“We think this is a problem that has to be solved,” said Ken Moraff, water division director for U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s New England region. Communities around the Great Bay have spent about $200 million to upgrade wastewater treatment plants, resulting in some cutting nitrogen releases by up to 70%, according to EPA and officials in several Great Bay communities.

“We’ve seen other areas where reductions in nitrogen do result in the ecosystem starting to come back,” Moraff said.

In this Oct. 29, 2019 photo, University of New Hampshire’s Lara Martin looks through a viewscope to survey the plants and animals growing on the bottom of the Great Bay in Durham, N.H. Her work is part of an effort to monitor the health of the eel grass in the bay. (AP Photo/Michael Casey)

Studies have documented seagrass recovery in Boston, Tampa Bay and Long Island Sound.

Boston Harbor was once known as the dirtiest harbor in America because most waste went into the waters untreated.

Then the state invested $3.8 billion in a treatment facility on Deer Island that was completed in 2001 and allowed wastewater to be piped almost 10 miles (16 kilometers) out into Massachusetts Bay. The state has documented an 80% decline in nitrogen levels in the harbor.

Tay Evans, a seagrass specialist with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, said there has been a corresponding 50% increase in eelgrass from 2006 to 2016. Now seagrass is growing in Governors Island Flats near Logan International Airport.

“It was astounding me,” Evans said. “I dove there and saw what we would call a moonscape that was just mud. You come back and it’s a lush meadow and then you’re going to see all the animals—the winter flounder swimming through there, lobster walking around.”

In this undated photo provided by the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, an American lobster shelters in an eelgrass meadow off shore from Manchester-by-the-Sea, Mass. Seagrass meadows, found in coastlines all coastal areas around the world except Antarctica’s shores, are among the most poorly protected but widespread coastal habitats in the world. (Tay Evans/Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries via AP)

In Tampa Bay, seagrass beds are reaching levels not seen since the 1950s.

More than $2.5 billion was spent on upgrades to sewage treatment plants, measures to address stormwater runoff and curbs on nitrogen emissions from power plants. That resulted in two-thirds less nitrogen going into the bay compared to the 1970s, according to Ed Sherwood, executive director of the Tampa Bay Estuary Program.

Seagrass area nearly doubled to about 63 square miles (163 square kilometers). The water quality improvement along with a gill net ban has contributed to the recovery of several fish species including striped mullet, red drum and spotted sea trout.

But such stories can’t mask the challenges.

Some recoveries such as those in parts of the Boston Harbor and the Great Bay are at risk from dredging. In other places, such as Chesapeake Bay, a decline in nitrogen has benefited many underwater plants but not eelgrass, which has declined since the 1990s.

In this Oct. 29, 2019 photo, a clump of eel grass wraps around a boat anchor pulled up from the waters of Great Bay in Durham, N.H. After years of declines, University of New Hampshire marine scientists have started to document a recovery of eel grass, which is critical for water quality in the bay and serves as food source and shelter for fish, crustaceans and other marine animals. (AP Photo/Michael Casey)

Brooke Landry, a Maryland Department of Natural Resources biologist who monitors the bay’s underwater vegetation, said that eelgrass, a coldwater species, may be more susceptible to heat events as seen in 2005 and 2010—or to overly cloudy waters in the bay.

Scientists are also struggling to understand why eelgrass hasn’t come back in California’s Morro Bay.

“We have some theories,” said Jennifer O’Leary, who studied the bay as a California Sea Grant researcher. She said the eelgrass decline has occurred in waters that are warmer, saltier, cloudier and less oxygenated than the bay’s mouth, where eelgrass did well.

In New Hampshire, eelgrass has recovered about 20% in parts of the Great Bay, though it hasn’t returned to several areas.

Some conservationists argue that bayside communities need to further reduce nitrogen releases through tens of millions of dollars in treatment plant improvements.

In this undated photo provided by the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, a green crab is camouflaged in a seagrass meadow off the coast of Marblehead, Mass. Seagrass meadows, found in coastlines all coastal areas around the world except Antarctica’s shores, are among the most poorly protected but widespread coastal habitats in the world, Studies have found more than 70 species of seagrass that can reduce erosion and improve water quality, while providing food and shelter for sea creatures. (Jillian Carr/Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries via AP)

In this undated photo provided by the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, a winter flounder rests in a restored eelgrass meadow in the outer Boston Harbor. Studies have found more than 70 species of seagrass that can reduce erosion and improve water quality, while providing food and shelter for sea creatures. (Tay Evans/Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries via AP)

In this Oct. 29, 2019 photo, from left, University of New Hampshire’s Lara Martin,Nikki Sarrette and Nick Anderson monitor the health of eel grass in the Great Bay in Durham, N.H. Their sampling work is part of a global effort to monitor the health of seagrass, which is critical for water quality in the bay and serves as food source and shelter for fish, crustaceans and other marine animals. (AP Photo/Michael Casey)

But several towns counter they have already made significant upgrades to their plants and that they should focus on cheaper options.

“You want to put your money where it’s going to do the most good,” said Portsmouth Deputy City Attorney Suzanne Woodland.

The EPA is considering allowing communities to hold off on treatment plant upgrades while they try to reduce nitrogen from stormwater runoff and septic tanks. Some communities upgraded sewage treatment voluntarily while others made upgrades to settle EPA enforcement actions.

Walking to his lab with his latest seagrass samples, University of New Hampshire’s Short says that approach allows communities to avoid the painful steps necessary to ensure full recovery.

“It’s easier to say no, no let the next guy pay for it,” he said. “But now we are at the point where it’s causing a huge issue. You don’t have to believe the science. Go out there and look.”

Explore further

Measuring human impact on coastal ecosystems

Citation: Scientists struggle to save seagrass from coastal pollution (2019, December 22) retrieved 22 December 2019 from https://phys.org/news/2019-12-scientists-struggle-seagrass-coastal-pollution.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.

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lesbianchemicalplant · 6 years

Photo

“No. 3272: PCAfield” (2018-05-04)

[direct link to full-size 1406x3225 image]

Strip by: Alien@System

{A 4 by 39 table of monochrome pictures that look vaguely like Garfield strips}

The author writes:

This picture shows the average of all non-Sunday (non-leap day) Garfield strips in monochrome from the years 1979 to 2017, followed by the first four principal components. To explain what that means, I guess it's time for a long scientific annotation. I'll try to do my best to make it easily understandable:

Principal Component Analysis (short PCA) is a mathematical method invented to better analyse multi-dimensional variable distributions. As an example, imagine you were measuring the wing span, beak length and weight of every bird that passed through a forest, from the shortest wren to any of Haast's eagles that might happen to pass by (the moa the merrier). Each data point you'd be writing down would consist of three numbers, the two lengths and the weight, and if you wanted to plot that cloud of data points, your diagram would therefore need three axes.

You can do normal statistical analysis on such multi-dimensional distributions, like calculating the mean, which is just the mean calculated for all three components separately. But when it comes to the deviation from that mean, calculating it for every component separately is not as descriptive as it is for a one-dimensional distribution. To take our bird example, we'll have large deviations for all three of our variables, wing length, beak length and weight. But those three are probably not independent. Even though there can be large beaks and short wings, probably none of the birds in your garden had a metre-long beak, four-centimetre wings, and weighed a pound. Instead, there were small birds, which had small wings, small beaks and weighed little, and large birds, with long beaks, long wings and some weight. The three separate distributions don't paint the full picture.

Thus the need for an algorithm to try and find some independent distributions, whose variances give a better idea about what kind of things flutter through your garden. One such algorithm is the PCA, which mathematically works as follows. If you're not good with or interested in mathematics, just skip two paragraphs.

[...]

OP’s interjection: cutting out those two paragraphs and pasting in some pictures

^Like with the source’s bird example,the height and width here are correlated: bigger height means bigger width. They’re not independent of each other. PCA turns Height and Width (dependent) into Overall Size and “Squishedness”, which are separate concerns, independent of each other!

If we take useful data, there is a good chance that some of those principal components have some kind of intuitive label, like the example of "size" given above for birds, which would be a vector having positive entries for all three values. In layman's terms, if a bird's size increases, wing span, beak length and weight all increase. Another principal component might be labeled "flight ability": as this component goes up, wing length increases and mass decreases.

And there, we can already see a use emerge for our PCA. By finding these principal components, we have found a compound measurement that can tell us more about the structure of the data than the single measurements, and because we know the variance along each of them, we also know how important they are. If birds vary a lot in size and the other two directions little, then to determine what species a new bird is, it's probably enough to find out its size.

For our three variables, that might not seem useful, but imagine having a hundred variables for each data point. Or 26700. Imagine your data point is actually a picture of a human face, with RGB pixel values given for each pixel. Now, PCA allows us to figure out how faces actually differ from another, in a way that we can teach a computer, by feeding it a large database of faces and making this analysis. Some of those principal values might look to us like they could have labels, like for example "age". If people get wrinkly, those wrinkles appear in about the same spots for every face, and therefore every face gets darker in the same parts with age. Or with a big nose, the shadow of the nose wanders outwards, meaning some pixels at the outside edge of the nose get darker, and those on the inside brighter.

There will be hundreds of principal components from our program (due to a fun mathematical property of the PCA, there can be at most as many principal components as the minimum of dimensions and data points. If we feed it less faces than each face has pixels, that will limit the number of components, not our resolution), but some will have really low variances. In fact, from a database of 500 faces, only 40 principal components might be needed to reconstruct any face with reasonable accuracy. And that's good if we want to use that for face recognition, by passing an unknown picture into the database. Instead of having to compare it pixel by pixel with each face in our library, we measure it along our 40 or so principal components and only have to compare those values. We go from comparing tens of thousands of bytes to comparing about a hundred, a huge leap in efficiency. Also, we can use the PCA, together with human brains, to filter out what's actually important about a face. Imagine a face being lit from the right or the left. One half is therefore darker, the other lighter. This will be a very common variance in the faces, and therefore a high-ranked principal component. But of course, it's not a distinctive feature of a person, what direction they're lit from. So we can tell the program to disregard such components and focus only on the relevant details. We don't need to sit down and figure out by ourselves how a picture changes with the lighting, we just have to look at the PCA and tell the program: "Ignore that one". A lot easier. This face recognition algorithm, by the way, has the name "Eigenface", because of the above use of eigenvectors.

Now, what you see above is this PCA algorithm run over a load of pictures - just not faces, but rather Garfield strips. By how the PCA works, we should get pictures out that tell us how Garfield strips differ from the average, better than a by-pixel standard deviation does (you can see one in SRoMG #1429). I calculated them on my home computer, using my own implementation of the algorithm. The pictures are that small and in monochrome because my copy of Maple refused to handle any sets of data much bigger than the 8357100 matrix entries each year consisted of, and double size would be a factor of 4 and colour a factor of 3 to that size. Funnily enough, however, even though this large amount of data was the maximum I could handle, the calculation of the PCA for all pictures of a year was faster than downloading all the pictures of that year.

So now on to interpreting what we see. There's already been lots written about the progression of averages of Garfield that we see in the first column. Each successive column should now tell us about ways to distinguish Garfield comics from that average. However, it has to be noted that principal components, as vectors, have both positive and negative entries, which got squished into the black-white colour scale of a picture here. Note the colour of the gutter around the pictures, which corresponds to the zero for each principal component, since the gutter doesn't change. Parts that are lighter than that gutter will make the average lighter when added, parts darker will make it darker. We can also subtract that same component, for the opposite effect.

A practical example: look at the second PC column of the year 2016. It shows to the left and right a dark John and Garfield, talking over the Ledge. In between them, if you look closely, you can see a white, ghostly Garfield standing on the same ledge. Now look at the average. If we add that component to the average, we make the John and Garfield blobs on each side of the picture sharper, while we lighten the area in between, making it blend with the (on average brighter) background - we get closer to a "Talking Heads" strip! If we instead subtract the component, we remove the two talking heads and instead add a Garfield in the middle - we get a "Garfield tells us something" strip. Neat!

Now, let us see if we can see other neat things. Take a look at the second column, from 1979 all the way to 2007. In a few years, the component looks different, although in fact a similar-looking component appears at a lower rank (3rd in '94 and 2006 and 4th in '95 and '96). This component has a dark bar at the bottom. We can call this component "Ledgeness". If it's added, we get that dark rectangle at the bottom of the strip that is the Ledge. If we remove it, we get a strip without. Looking at 1982, we can see that when there was no ledge, then Garfield was hanging off a tree branch, as shown by the ghostly outline above.

It's interesting to note that already a week of similar looking strips can create a very strong impression upon the PCA. In 1982, he hung off a tree. In 1979 and 1981, John sat in a car. In 2008, Garfield and Arlene watched the sunset. We also can see that strong statistical outliers have a huge variance and therefore affect the result a lot. The first component of 1979 shows very clearly a silhouette of Garfield in a bright hemisphere. That is from a single strip, 1979-12-14. That strip has two nearly completely black panels in a year with no other night or power outage strips. It's so much of an outlier that it by itself creates the biggest variance and thus gets top spot in the PCA. If we were doing this algorithm with faces, such a result would mean that this is such an atypical picture that it's probably not actually a face.

Now let us look at another component that is easily distinguishable, which I call "Jon's Hair". It first appears in 1987, really blurry and indistinct, and then it's on-and-off until it reappears in 2002 in full force, getting two spots. From then on, it stays around every year, becoming crisper and crisper and rising in the ranking, until it's 2nd place in 2017. Not in every year is it the same axis of "Talking Heads" to "Expiration Dates"; for example in 2006 it's in both signs about Jon and Garfield talking, but in one way Jon is standing upright, and in the other way he's leaning forward.

But look at the principal component that component is losing to in the last four years. It's a picture of Garfield watching TV. That's right. By looking at the first two principal components only, we can tell that most Garfield strips from 2014 to 2017 were of one of three types: Garfield watching TV, Jon on the left talking to Garfield on the right, or Garfield being alone in the middle of the panel. I don't think there can be clearer proof of the declining visual variety of Garfield strips than this. Compare to the '90s, where the first component is so confusing that it's impossible to tell what the strip turns into when you add the component in either direction. Those were, visually at least, the pinnacle years of Garfield.

Onto something different. See the years 2010 and 2011. In those years, the format in which the strips are saved at Garfield's Art Gallery changes, including larger outside gutters. It switches format somewhere in the middle of '10 and switches back early in '11, leaving a clear scar on the 2010 average. But an even clearer one on the principal components. The first component of 2011 and the first two components of 2010 are just about which format the strip is saved in, not telling us anything about what's actually shown there. This shows a disadvantage of the Eigenface algorithm, one that also hobbles its use for face recognition. The PCA only gets pixel values. It can only measure if these pixels get darker or brighter. It can't determine that maybe the best explanation for what changes is that the pixel got moved from a neighbouring position, because that is not a valid operation within the theory. If you turn your head, some pixels move sideways. But looking at it from what pixels get darker or brighter, you'll realize that which of those do depends so much on the face structure that there won't be a clear "Head turned left" principal component.

The solution, as to any "garbage in, garbage out" problem, is to be smarter about what data you pass in. We nowadays have algorithms that can find the important facial features in a picture (eyes, nose, ears, mouth) and find out which coordinates those parts have. We can then place a network of triangles over the face that give us more-or-less its shape in space. And then we can first throw out all pixels not covered by those triangles because they're background and hair and not important for faces, and then - instead of just passing on the picture like this to the PCA - give every pixel a position relative to the triangles, and use those. The effect is that we compare pixels relative to their position to different features. To get back to the example of wrinkles: take crow's feet. They darken the picture at the outer corner of the eyes. Which actual pixels those are depends on where the eyes are, but if we distort the picture first so the eyes are always in the same position, then the crows's feet will be, too.

We are, in effect, splitting the face into its three-dimensional shape, and its texture, and then running the PCA for those, separately or simultaneously however we like (it's unlikely that a pixel value will strongly correlate to a shape). In the space of coordinates, "turn left" is indeed a valid, linear principal component: all points wander left, the nose more, the points on the left side less. This way, we can get a better database of facial components, one that is also easier to read for a human and where we can more easily select what is actually important.

And now you know how Garfield getting boring can teach you about computer face recognition.

Original strips: All of them. Well, all non-Sunday, non-leap day strips from 1979 to 2017. I have a lot of pictures on my hard drive now.

Square Root of Minus Garfield

#garfield #statistics #math #machine learning #data science #pca #comics #aes #square root of minus garfield #long post /#my uploads #my uploads (unjank)

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biofunmy · 5 years

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Scientists struggle to save seagrass from coastal pollution

DURHAM, N.H. — Peering over the side of his skiff anchored in the middle of New Hampshire’s Great Bay, Fred Short liked what he saw.

Their comeback in the Great Bay gives hope for recovery elsewhere.

The more than 70 species of seagrasses are among the most poorly protected but widespread coastal habitats — more than 116,000 square miles (300,000 square kilometers) have been mapped, though there could be 10 times that. They are found along coastlines around the world except Antarctica’s.

Some seagrass declines have occurred with stunning speed. Central California’s scenic Morro Bay has lost more than 90% of its eelgrass since 2007.

“We’ve seen other areas where reductions in nitrogen do result in the ecosystem starting to come back,” Moraff said.

Studies have documented seagrass recovery in Boston, Tampa Bay and Long Island Sound.

Boston Harbor was once known as the dirtiest harbor in America because most waste went into the waters untreated.

“It was astounding me,” Evans said. “I dove there and saw what we would call a moonscape that was just mud. You come back and it’s a lush meadow and then you’re going to see all the animals — the winter flounder swimming through there, lobster walking around.”

In Tampa Bay, seagrass beds are reaching levels not seen since the 1950s.

But such stories can’t mask the challenges.

Scientists are also struggling to understand why eelgrass hasn’t come back in California’s Morro Bay.

In New Hampshire, eelgrass has recovered about 20% in parts of the Great Bay, though it hasn’t returned to several areas.

Some conservationists argue that bayside communities need to further reduce nitrogen releases through tens of millions of dollars in treatment plant improvements.

But several towns counter they have already made significant upgrades to their plants and that they should focus on cheaper options.

“You want to put your money where it’s going to do the most good,” said Portsmouth Deputy City Attorney Suzanne Woodland.

Walking to his lab with his latest seagrass samples, University of New Hampshire’s Short says that approach allows communities to avoid the painful steps necessary to ensure full recovery.

———

Selsky reported from Salem, Oregon.

———

Follow Casey on Twitter: @mcasey1, and Selsky on Twitter: @andrewselsky

Sahred From Source link Technology

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#IFTTT #WordPress

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ellismorris0 · 6 years

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Getting older Spirits: The Magic of Oak

Maturation in wooden casks is paramount to whiskey, rum, brandy and different elderly spirits, however it may be arduous to grasp precisely the way it all works. As soon as a cask is stuffed with new make spirit, the magic starts. The spirit undergoes a chain of adjustments—and whilst we don’t know the whole thing that influences spirits maturation, we do know reasonably just a little. Most likely crucial issue to steer elderly spirits comes right down to the collection of wooden—and within the spirits international that suggests oak.

Why Oak?

There are such a large amount of kinds of woods to choose between comparable to maple, acacia, chestnut and cherry. But oak (a couple of exceptions however) is the one wooden used for getting older spirits. And no longer simply any oak tree will do. Of the masses of oak species, only some upward push to the instance for cask cooperage. Each Quercus alba, frequently referred to as white oak local to North The us, and Quercus robur, frequently referred to as Ecu oak, are notable species in whiskey maturation.

White oak rings

Extra so than maximum different wooden varieties, oak has massive radial rays—cells that run perpendicular to the remainder of the wooden fibers. This provides it the power that’s wanted for shaping a cask. Oak may be a quite natural wooden, versus pine or rubber bushes. Stuffed with resin, wooden from the ones bushes would adversely have an effect on any spirit that comes into touch with it. Most likely maximum essential are the chemicals discovered inside the oak itself.

Wooden Science

The overdue Dr. Jim Swan, an absolute wizard when it got here to whisky maturation, recognized a handful of elements that make up oak, which alternate thru charring.

Cellulose:

Cellulose is a fancy carbohydrate which is composed of sugar molecules. It has restricted or no impact at the spirit, however is a very powerful for containing the wooden in combination.

Hemicellulose:

Hemicellulose is composed of a couple of sugars—in large part risky—which convert as soon as warmth is carried out, e.g. when charring a cask. Those impart colour to a spirit, in addition to caramel, toffee and nutty flavors.

Lignin:

Lignin is targeted within the tree’s cellular partitions and is liable for vanilla kind flavors, as smartly smoky and highly spiced aromas.

Tannins:

Tannins, often referred to as tannic acid, are phenols which happen naturally in wooden in addition to different crops, seeds, tea leaves and fruit skins. It lends sour, astringent flavors and provides a spirit texture.

Lactones:

Lactone is an natural compound which happens in upper concentrations in American oak than in Ecu species. It imparts coconut aromas and a woody personality, comparable to cloves.

Extraction

Charring and toasting an oak cask adjustments the wooden’s chemistry. It creates new, extra fascinating components within the wooden for the spirit to extract all the way through maturation. It breaks down hemicellulose and converts lignin, for instance. For the spirit to extract those from the oak, permutations in air temperature are essential.

Charring barrels at Brown-Forman / Picture Credit score: Brown-Forman

When temperatures upward push, the liquid inside of an oak barrel expands, which in flip raises the force within the cask. In consequence, the prime force forces the spirit into the wooden. Later, when the seasons alternate and climate turns into chillier, the force drops. The spirit is then pressured out of the wooden, extracting taste compounds along side it.

Whilst temperature and local weather have the most important have an effect on in this extraction procedure, the scale of a cask additionally influences the rate of extraction. An octave cask of 50 liters has a better spirit to floor ratio, leading to extra interplay with the oak than say inside of a 500 liter butt, as an example.

Subtraction

You may’ve heard of the Lincoln County Procedure. It’s what makes Tennessee whiskey other from bourbon. Manufacturers comparable to Jack Daniel’s clear out their whiskey thru charcoal chips ahead of stowing it away in a cask. This filtering strips the spirit of a few of its unattractive elements.

Charcoal mellowing at Jack Daniel’s/ Picture Credit score: Jack Daniel’s

A an identical procedure occurs inside of a charred oak cask. As soon as the spirit enters right into a cask, the internal floor acts as a charcoal clear out. Relating to whiskey, this clear out principally subtracts sulphides, which is able to motive an uncongenial metal or gunpowder-y style. Some undesirable components also are subtracted thru evaporation.

Oxidation

The extra complicated a spirit is ahead of maturation, the extra traits there are for oxidation to steer. The prior to now discussed Dr. Swan argued that oxidation will increase complexity and depth of flavors, and is in massive portions liable for fruity, highly spiced and minty notes.

A bourbon rickhouse

Oak is a porous wooden, this means that that an oak cask can also be liquid tight, whilst additionally permitting oxygen to go into thru its staves. A exceptional paradox, certainly. Thru evaporation, the amount of the liquid decreases each and every 12 months, leaving extra space for oxygen within the cask, necessarily additional dashing up oxidation.

That’s to not say oxidation is a fast procedure. It’s long and most definitely calls for probably the most endurance of all spirits getting older components. It’s power and ends up in taste compounds reacting with oxygen, growing a brand new taste part.

Magic

There may be nonetheless so much that even probably the most skilled spirit makers and scientists don’t perceive about cask getting older spirits. Whilst a lot can also be defined, there’s nonetheless a component of unpredictability to the entire science. Sure, maturation is a part subtraction, phase extraction, and phase oxidation, however even two casks crammed at the similar day and saved subsequent to one another will produce other effects finally. And so, the magic of oak maturation helps to keep us spirits fanatics craving to continue to learn—and tasting.

With Distiller, you’ll all the time know what’s within the bottle ahead of you spend a cent. Fee, Evaluate and Uncover spirits! Head on over to Distiller, or obtain the app for iOS and Android lately!

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from http://liquorgiftbaskets.net/2018/10/26/aging-spirits-the-magic-of-oak/

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gailmalooft · 6 years

Text

Getting older Spirits: The Magic of Oak

Why Oak?

White oak rings

Wooden Science

The overdue Dr. Jim Swan, an absolute wizard when it got here to whisky maturation, recognized a handful of elements that make up oak, which alternate thru charring.

Cellulose:

Cellulose is a fancy carbohydrate which is composed of sugar molecules. It has restricted or no impact at the spirit, however is a very powerful for containing the wooden in combination.

Hemicellulose:

Lignin:

Lignin is targeted within the tree’s cellular partitions and is liable for vanilla kind flavors, as smartly smoky and highly spiced aromas.

Tannins:

Lactones:

Lactone is an natural compound which happens in upper concentrations in American oak than in Ecu species. It imparts coconut aromas and a woody personality, comparable to cloves.

Extraction

Charring barrels at Brown-Forman / Picture Credit score: Brown-Forman

Subtraction

Charcoal mellowing at Jack Daniel’s/ Picture Credit score: Jack Daniel’s

Oxidation

A bourbon rickhouse

Magic

The submit Aging Spirits: The Magic of Oak seemed first on The Distiller Blog.

The post Getting older Spirits: The Magic of Oak appeared first on Liquor Gift Baskets.

from http://liquorgiftbaskets.net/2018/10/26/aging-spirits-the-magic-of-oak/

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djgblogger-blog · 7 years

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Influenza's wild origins in the animals around us

http://bit.ly/2IgamqM

People and animals live side by side – and can have pathogens in common. Nichola Hill, CC BY-ND

In the early 20th century, the leading cause of death was infectious disease. Epidemics erupted with little warning, seemingly out of the blue. When the “Great Influenza” struck in 1918, it killed thousands of people a week in American cities and spread like wildfire around the globe. My great aunt, still a teenager, and living in the San Francisco area, was one of its estimated 50 to 100 million victims worldwide.

Neither public health authorities nor medical researchers understood that it was a virus that caused the 1918 pandemic – most of the world at that time didn’t even know what a virus was. A century later, death due to infection is much less common, thanks to public health efforts and improved medical technology and expertise. Once common diseases are now rare. Nonetheless, 100 years later, infectious disease specialists like me still fear the emergence of viral diseases that we will not be able to control, including influenza.

My laboratory, along with others around the world, is working to understand how and why new influenza viruses may grip us again. To do so, we need to go far beyond human hospitals and into the wild, where viruses persist in animal populations. As disease ecologists, we aim to understand the dynamics of pathogens in the environment and their interactions with hosts. By understanding more about what’s happening with viruses in animals, we believe we can be better prepared to evaluate, predict and respond if an infection spills over to humans, making people sick.

Tens of millions died, but no one knew a virus was to blame. U.S. National Library of Medicine, CC BY

Identifying the invisible, infectious virus

Until well into the 1930s, the “Spanish flu” was mistakenly thought to be a bacterial infection, with Haemophilus influenzae commonly blamed. This bacterium is a pathogen in its own right and may have contributed heavily to the 1918 pandemic’s death toll – but it was a secondary infection in many of the severe cases, not the original cause of victims’ illnesses.

Researchers had only identified viral particles for the first time less than 30 years before the height of the flu pandemic and the fledgling field of virology was just beginning to identify them as causes of disease in plants and animals. Scientists were only first able to visualize a virus, the tobacco mosaic virus, after the 1931 invention of the electron microscope. Though the technology, knowledge and pace of research was different early in the 20th century, why did the discovery of influenza virus take so long?

A transmission electron microscopic image of recreated 1918 influenza viral particles. CDC/Dr. Terrence Tumpey, CC BY

The answer, it seems, lay at least in part in people’s naiveté about the relationship between animals, the environment and human disease. In 1918, veterinarian J.S. Koen noted a very similar disease to influenza in pigs. Yet, it wasn’t until 1931 that researcher Richard Shope identified a filterable agent, smaller than bacteria, as the cause of the disease in pigs and demonstrated the transmission of an influenza virus. That work spurred the description of human influenza virus in 1933.

The tools of molecular biology, including nucleic acid sequencing, developed through the latter half of the 20th century, finally helped open the vault on the origins of the 1918 pandemic. In 2005, through a combination of sleuthing and sequencing of the viral genome, Jeffrey Taubenberger and a team of researchers pieced together the genetic sequence of the deadly 1918 virus, using viruses collected from the corpses of soldiers and other bodies preserved in the Arctic permafrost who died during the pandemic.

They were able to connect the origins and evolution of the 1918 pandemic with viruses that circulate in other animals, particularly those from birds and the pigs examined by Dr. Koen. Just as seen in more recent outbreaks of new influenza viruses, the 1918 pandemic traced its origins to virus strains circulating in nature.

Disease ecologists now know that waterfowl can be a reservoir for influenza virus, and conduct surveillance on wild birds. Paige Gingrich, CC BY-ND

Natural world a reservoir for human disease

The critical insight that led to the work reconstructing the 1918 virus had come in the 1970s. Led by the determination of virologist Rob Webster, researchers realized that influenza viruses are rampant in the natural world, particularly in waterfowl. In birds and possibly other animals, influenza viruses are able to replicate and transmit to new hosts without causing any severe disease. On rare occasions, given the right circumstance, this new host is a different species. This cycle, common in many pathogens, is an important part of how virus is maintained in nature and explains how animals can be a reservoir for novel influenza viruses that can cause human illnesses.

As researchers have sequenced the influenza viruses found in ducks and other birds, as well as people, swine and other animals, a picture of viral ecology based in nature has come into focus. Birds serve as a reservoir for a vast diversity of influenza viruses to which all the major human pandemics trace their origin. People were largely unaware that at the same time as the 1918 flu pandemic, pigs were sick with the disease and influenza viruses were also causing ongoing fowl plague epidemics. Exactly how and where the 1918 virus entered the human population remains controversial. But the realization that influenza virus happily exists in a wild animal reservoir has influenced the way scientists study flu – and moreover, emerging disease of any sort.

This understanding is also part of what underlies the One Health movement – the concept that the health of humans is entwined with the health of animals and of the environment. The One Health and Evolutionary Medicine initiatives are forging collaborations between medical doctors, veterinarians, ecologists, environmental researchers and those in many other fields to describe the connections among environmental change, animals and human health.

Understanding virus ecology means figuring out what strains are circulating and how new strains are created in the wild. Nichola Hill, CC BY-ND

Watching the wild world to protect human health

We now know that a full 60 percent of human infectious diseases are spread from animals. In the past 20 years, that awareness has resulted in stronger efforts at influenza surveillance worldwide and the identification of several other influenza viruses that threaten public health. In my lab’s work, we endeavor to describe the ecology and natural history of influenza virus in animals to understand how new viruses arise and what the risk is of spillover into new hosts where they may cause disease.

For instance, human activity – such as the existence of open landfills, habitat destruction or farming practices – can attract or force animals to crowd into spaces they normally may not. When interactions between species and the environment are disrupted in this way, how does it affect the circulation, evolution and movement of influenza viruses or other pathogens that those animals host? Changes in the ecology of pathogens in the wild are what most frequently leads to spillover into human populations and disease outbreak.

The author and colleagues draw samples from wild seals in New England. Yvonne Vaillancourt, obtained under NMFS #17670, CC BY-ND

Following an epidemic of seal deaths in 2011 in New England, our broad group of collaborators has spent cold winter days sampling seals, where we’ve discovered evidence of persistent circulating influenza viruses. These results are leading us to explore how influenza is affecting the seals, but also what the impact of a rapidly expanding seal population will be on the virus. If seals are a mammalian reservoir more commonly infected than we knew, their populations may affect influenza disease ecology.

Surveillance and research work like that on influenza and its animal hosts has led to more aggressive efforts to stamp out emerging infections before they become human pandemics. It gives biomedical researchers a head start on characterizing possible pandemic viruses to understand their potential impact. And public health workers gain new insights on prevention and control of infection.

That information may be crucial in identifying and containing the next pandemic virus. The One Health community’s experience with influenza has informed how scientists try to understand and prevent the spread of other diseases, including SARS, Ebola and Zika. Researchers were quick to chase after the animal source of SARS and are still hard at work to identify reservoir hosts and understand the disease ecology of the Zika and Ebola viruses.

Sampling birds, as at this market in Bangkok, lets researchers keep track of viruses circulating and mixing in human environments. Richard Nyberg, USAID, CC BY-NC

One hundred years after the “Great Influenza,” there’s still much to learn to lessen the risk of a repeat of 1918. In the last 10 years, thanks to the efforts of many researchers worldwide, including a renewed effort funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the pace of sequencing influenza viruses has leapt forward. Scientists are beginning to understand the true diversity of influenza virus, not only in birds, but in other animals as well.

Efforts at producing a universal vaccine to prevent influenza infection in humans show promise. But the ability to test those vaccines and to prepare for and predict emerging strains will not be complete without a strong understanding of the origin, movement and risk of viruses circulating in the animals and environment around us. With better understanding of these ecological connections coming from continued research, we hope we can be better prepared for the next pandemic.

Jonathan Runstadler receives funding from National Institutes of Health (HHSN272201400008C)

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netmaddy-blog · 8 years

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Basic Aquarium Guide

New Post has been published on https://netmaddy.com/basic-aquarium-guide/

Basic Aquarium Guide

We are discussing the general setup for the Tropical and Coldwater aquarium. The differences between Tropical and Coldwater aquarium are assumed to be understood by everyone and hence will not be discussed in great details. Below is a breakdown of the comparison of the 2 type of aquarium.

Cold Water -Low Variety of Species, High Availability, Low Fish-stocking density, Low cost of set-up

Tropical – High Variety of species, High Availability, High Fish-stocking density, Low cost of set-up.

Basic Aquarium Guide in Few Words.

Start-up equipment needed for both type of aquariums:

– Aquarium Tank

– Hood

– Filter

– Substrate

– Water conditioners

– Test kit

– Thermometer

– Heater (Tropical)

– Decoration

– Stand

Aquarium Tank

When you are choosing your first tank, take time before purchasing to make sure that you are buying the right tank for you and for you fish. There’s a wide range of tank designs available but the one preferred generally is the standard rectangular shaped tank. This is because rectangular tanks, being 2 or 3 times as long as they are wide, have a large surface area for the exchange of gases and the uptake of oxygen by the water. Also, better for them in terms of the swimming space it provides. Bigger is better for any aquarium, as even a large aquarium is very small compared to the natural range that any fish has been used to in the wild. The larger the tank, the most water it will hold and the more fish it will be able to sustain and support. It will also provide more stable water conditions than a small tank.

Below is a guide to stocking level:

Coldwater — 2.5cm (1 in) of fish per 60 sq cm (9.3 sq in) of tank water surface area

Tropical — 2.5cm (1 in) of fish per 30 sq cm (4.65 sq in) of tank water surface area

Note: Surface area of the aquarium if calculated by multiplying the length by the width.

Hood

Serve as a place for your lightings .Unless you are having an open concept set-up; it is generally an important part of the tank. Lower evaporation rate of the water, preventing dust from getting into the tank and avoid fish from jumping out of the aquarium are some important aspect of having a hood.

Filter

Filtration is the life-support system for any aquarium and is vitally important for the well-bring of the fish that live within it. Without exception, all aquarium fish need filtered water that is free from pollutants, which is left to build up can be hazardous to their health. Unfiltered aquariums are not safe for living fish since, unless the water is changed several times a day, fish become poisoned by their own waste products and may die as a result.

Type of Filtration (Specific info about filtration coming soon):

Mechanical Filtration – This is carried out by passing water through media that are designed to trap particles and remove them from the water column. Mechanical filter media can be in the form of a sponge or fine wool, and are cheap and readily available. Most filters work mechanically, and the effectiveness of the process is indicated by the way the tank water clears.

Biological Filtration – This method harnesses the power of nature by providing areas within the filter where microscopic bacteria can live and multiply. The media should have a high surface area in relation to their volume, so that more bacteria can live within the space. All tanks will have some sort of natural biological filter either from the bacteria that live on the surface of the substrate or the surface of the plants.

Chemical Filtration – This process is where chemical pollutants and metals are removed from the water by special absorbent resins and granules. Once saturated, the media are normally spent so are then discarded and replaced. The most common form of chemical medium available is aquarium-grade carbon, which can remove dyes, odours and medications from tank water, as well as chlorine from tap water.

The substrate of any aquarium is the material that is placed on the bottom of the tank for decoration. Traditional substrates include sands and gravels, which can be found naturally in the any body of water. In most freshwater aquariums the substrate should be inert, which means that it will not dissolve or leach elements into the water particularly any that may affect the pH of the tank water.

Different type of substrate

Pea gravel

This material is an excellent choice for coldwater and tropical aquariums and is safe to use with all types of fish. It is available in sizes from 4mm (1/8 in) up to 2cm (3/4 in), and its round particles make it good for fish that like to dig. It will not readily compact and it can also be easily cleaned. Pea gravel should be used in a layer about 5cm (2 in) deep. It offers good anchoring for plants, the smaller particle sizes being best for prolonged plant growth.

Silica sand

Silica is available as sand and grit and can be used in all freshwater aquariums. It is very dirty when first purchased and will take a lot of rinsing before the water runs clear. Its colour is similar to that of soil and it can be used to good effect for creating natural-style aquariums. Its small particle size is useful for plant growth and it should be used at a depth between 2.5cm (1 in), where there are no natural plants, and 10cm (4 in) for heavily planted aquariums.

Silver sand

This is the original universal aquarium substrate, given that it is found naturally all over the world in streams, rivers, lakes and oceans. Its name is a little inaccurate, since its overall colour is golden and is essentially the same material as that found on most beaches. It needs to be washed thoroughly when first purchased, and it can be messy to work with because its tiny particles get everywhere. Plants can be grown in it, but some species are better suited to it than others. For a heavily planted tank, mix silver sand with substrate fertilizer and use a heating cable to prevent stagnation.

Colour gravels

There is a huge market for colour gravels and every imaginable colour is available, from black to shocking pink. It is mainly used in ornamental aquariums and can liven up tanks that are not brightly lit. Light colours will attract algae growth and should be regularly cleaned to prevent it. Black gravel looks attractive in natural-style aquariums and highlights fish and plant coloration. Wash all colour gravels because a lot of plant covering will have ground off the gravel particles in the bag.

Grit

Grit is a term used for substrates with a particle size between fine sand and fine gravel – that is, 2-3 mm (1/16 – 1/8in) and is fine enough to encourage plant root growth within it.

Pro and Cons summary of various substrates,

Pea gravel

Pros

– Easy to clean; inert; safe for all fish

Cons

– Too coarse for some plants to grow in

Silica sand

Pros

-Cheap; Natural looking; good for plant growth

Cons

-Needs thorough washing when purchased to remove dust

Silver sand

Pros

-Natural looking; suitable for all aquariums

Cons

-Prone to clogging; particles can end up in filter chambers and power heads

Colour gravel

Pros

-Brighten up aquariums; popular with children

Cons

-Colours fade over time bright colours attract algae growth

Grit

Pros

-Small enough to anchor plants

Cons

-Can be dirty when first purchased

Water conditioners

There is much different type of Water conditioners out there for aquarium. But the most important we are talking about here is Chlorine Neutralizer. The water coming out from our type has abundances of chlorine contained in it and we want to remove it. It’s optional to have water conditioners as by leaving water in a buckets or tanks for over 24hrs will have most of its chlorine content removed naturally.

Test kits

The importance of water testing for modern aquarist cannot be underestimated. Water testing can tell us so much more about how the tank is running than is possible with the naked eye. Water can be crystal clear and yet still contain extremely high levels of toxic ammonia and nitrite, as well as nitrate and phosphate. The pH and hardness of aquarium water are also impossible to tell just by looking, so a test kit can be used to determine whether particular pollutants are present and whether subsequent action should be taken.

Test kits work by using reagents that change colour, which can then be cross-referenced against colour charts. Usually each reagent will test for only one parameter, such as pH, and so a kit will include several different tests. A recommended test kit is the Freshwater Master Test Kit (Picture above). The kit is complete for testing tap water and aquarium water. It includes pH (6.0 to 7.6), high range pH (7.4 to 8.8), Ammonia, Nitrite, and Nitrate. A cheap and reliable test kit to buy.

I will try to set up a more thorough explanation of test kits sometimes in future.

Thermometers are an inexpensive necessity; it monitors the most important attribute of the fish tank. Something can always go wrong with your aquarium heater and you need to know it immediately. Read the thermometer at least once a day is important as if something goes wrong with your heater, it could be deadly. There are many type of aquarium thermometer out there in the market. Choose one that you like best.

Heater

The temperature of the world’s ocean, lake and river differs considerably and the fish that inhabit each ecosystem have evolved to thrive in certain temperature range. Fish that we consider to be tropical live in a water temperature of 24-30°C (75 – 86 °F) all year round, with tropical marine fish living in a more stable environment of an almost constant temperature of 24°C (75°F). Heating the water in an aquarium to the temperature required for tropical species is both simple and inexpensive.

There are several types of heating element available; including special mats and cables, but the essential item you need to heat and regulate the temperature in your aquarium is a heater/thermostat. As a heating element at the bottom of the heater heats up, so the water in contact with the outside of the heater warms. A thermostat reads the temperature of the water and turns the heater on and off to maintain the desired temperature. The heater and thermostat are housed in a glass tube with a sealed top. This piece of equipment is placed fully submerged in the tank; the temperature adjusted and then plugged in for 24 hours a day.

There are many different sizes of heater available. The wattage required depends on the volume of water to be warmed. A 25 Watt size heater is enough for a 30cm (12in) long aquarium while a 300 watt heater is enough for 120cm (48 in) long tank. Any size later than this will require more than 2 heaters. Look at the table below to have a better view.

Tank Size Heater size

30cm (12in) 25 watts

60cm (24in) 50 watts

75cm (30in) 100 watts

90cm (36in) 150 watts

100cm (39in) 200 watts

120cm (48in) 300 watts

Decorations

There are many types of Aquarium Decoration available to choose from. They are namely substrate (we mentioned before), rocks, wood, ornaments, artificial/natural plants and backgrounds.

The use of rock in the aquarium is as old as the hobby itself and there are now many types available. Rockwork can provide a backdrop, hiding places for fish and potential spawning sites. More articles about rocks will be posted in future.

Wood can be used very effectively as a design feature in aquariums and helps to provide a natural setting. Not all wood is safe to be used in aquariums, so only obtain wood from aquatic retailers. Fish use wood for camouflage and hiding places and it can also be used to highlight planting. Wood should be pre-soaked to remove unwanted chemical that it might have.

For a discerning fish keeper ornaments may have no place in the aquarium, but some do not know what they are missing. Fish are not fussy about what their home looks like, and species that like to hide may just be happily reside under a bridge made from resin as one made from piled stones. For those of you that like a colourful underwater wonderland, they are a must to have.

Artificial plants have come a long way since they were first introduced and now look more realistic than ever. Their durability also makes them suitable to keep with fish that would destroy live plants and those that would eat the real things. They are useful for hiding equipment and making areas feel more secure for nervous fish, and, of course, they will tolerate any type of water.

Aquatic plants can look stunning when they are properly displayed, but they offer many additional benefits to the aquarium and its inhabitants. However, if they are to provide any of the benefits, you will have to meet their needs, which includes providing appropriate lighting, fertilization and substrates. See basic plant guide.

An appropriate background is important if you want to imitate an underwater scene in your aquarium. They can give the effect of increased depth and can also hide any trailing cables. Internal and external backgrounds can be purchased, or you can make one yourself.

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michaelshanesimpson-blog · 8 years

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Shelving Beliefs

At the age of 21 the world is wide and full of possibility. You can have a thousand new experiences in a day and, in the next, still have a thousand more. The importance of experience cannot be stressed enough because it is our beliefs that either hold true or wither away as we gather new experience. I do not necessarily refer to sensory experience either as the empiricists believe or have believed for a long while. Experiences, in the case of this essay, can refer to both the sensory and ethereal, that which we can see and that which we can reason. Can we take our knowledge and dictate that we know it? How do we know what we know? Is there a point to expanding our beliefs? Oftentimes, it seems, there is more to life than just those initial beliefs and there might be more for us to look at beyond our original assumption, our original knowledge.

At the age of 22, now my age, I take what I used to know and throw it out the window, simply because I know there could be more out there than that which I may know. There’s always more to what a person may know. What is the point in believing you know everything? There’s no way to take everything and filter it so it is better to start from scratch every once in a while and to not pursue every bit of knowledge that could go your way.

As we grow older, we develop certain beliefs for ourselves, taking into account what our parents had believed and the environment in which we grew as individuals. Aetius, a pre-Socratic philosopher, said this: "When a man is born, the Stoics say, he has the commanding part of his soul like a sheet of paper ready for writing upon.” Each person takes what they see and what they hear and form a worldview around it. Where the empiricists are incorrect is their inability to see that reason also is taken into account in the development of worldviews from a young age upward. What we must do is take into account both the experiential and reasonable to create our beliefs. It is not rational to take only one into account and not the other when questioning or developing beliefs. Should our beliefs be purely sustained by what we reason them out to be? If we take a picture of a leaf with two leaves on it and see that it is green, does it matter if we reason it out to be green through argument? Both should be seen and taken into account.

What happens when we have developed a belief of some sort? What must we say when we have formed the bases for our argument? As we develop and sustain these worldviews, it seems to me that what we believe may not necessarily hold up to the standard of scrutiny that it should. When we were young, we believed, of course, in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, but as we grew older and saw evidence to the contrary, we realized that there were no such beings. It was simply two stories that parents gave us to either teach morality (as in the former) or to entertain (as in the latter). Once certain evidence came to our attention, such as parents telling us they were lying or finding it out the hard way on the playground, we take those beliefs and discard them as being wrong and childish. We only believed what we did because we were told to believe a certain way.

“Reasoning is something we do. Experience is something we suffer (Short 2).” Experience is far less narrow a term that observation, which is how, according to empiricists (those who believe we gain knowledge solely from experience), we actually gain knowledge. “In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence (Hume).” We take what we see and we either conform it to our worldview or we let it conform us to its worldview. There are several philosophers who would disagree, though, with that line of reasoning, believing that our senses and observations are too inaccurate. We must be able to logically reason a belief before accepting it as accurate to our life. This is why I do not believe in a god and would not accept any evidential arguments. If a position cannot be reasoned from logic as well, observational evidence is not enough to convince me.

We as adults now have certain beliefs, whether political, philosophical or just about life in general, and one can never be too sure how well it holds up under the scrutiny of actual evidence. Do I believe the way I do because I was born under the proper conditions to believe that way? Of course, you believe that way and feel are right to believe that way as it is the correct way to believe, but can you honestly say you looked at your belief and critiqued to the point where you feel comfortable saying that you believe that way because YOU absolutely believe it?

At what level do we take our beliefs and say that it is good enough to believe it? There are thousands of groups devoted to Bigfoot and the possibility of Sasquatches but the amount of evidence for there being an actual Sasquatch seems small. It requires what seems to be a lot of faith to believe in this being without ever seeing it, relying on rusty eyewitness accounts and old journals from former Presidents. Terrible videos later proven false tend to bring out the influence that there is a Sasquatch. So many live under the belief that there is a Bigfoot based on slim evidence and reality television shows.

Imagine a seven-year old who believes that the ice cream truck will always stop at a certain place each day at a certain time to sell ice cream. If the seven-year old wanted to be sure of his belief, what evidences would he use to confirm or deny his belief? Perhaps, he would use sensory experience in this case. He sees the ice cream truck at noon each day in front of his school building just in time for his lunch hour. This happens every single day of the school week. Now, if this were to happen every day, he could reasonably assume that it will happen again the next day because the experience provided him.

An easier way to gain knowledge is a posteriori. If he really wished to know when the ice cream truck came, it would be very easy to find out. After all, somebody must, reasonably speaking, drive the ice cream truck and, unless the kid is mute, he would be able to ask the ice cream truck driver if he was going to keep coming by every day. He could, further still, ask someone in a position of authority at the school. Would it be reasonable to believe that somebody gave the driver permission to sell ice cream at the lunch hour? What is to stop the kid from finding more information about who set up the permission and thus know more than before?

How do we take into account emotions in our pursuit of change and in our reasoning? Should we discount it entirely in our pursuit of the self? Plato did not feel we should rid ourselves entirely of emotion but we must keep our soul properly ordered for ‘passions’ to overwhelm us into the bad qualities that emotions may have. “But in a disordered soul its passions nourish exaggerated aggression and vainglory (Dabrowski 8).” His pupil, Aristotle, felt that emotions were based on beliefs, meaning that what we believe will dictate our emotional state and well-being. For example, if you live an entire life believing a certain group of people are bad, emotions towards said people will be dictated on that belief (Dabrowski 9). Hate leads to anger, after all. When our emotions dictate action, therein lies our moral state.

“The challenge for a man was to know and accept the nature of things, his own emotionality included (Dabrowski 12).” The importance of finding oneself includes finding where our emotions come from and why we do or must feel certain ways. Why does my heart skip a beat when I see my friend? Is the emotion that I feel positive or negative, and for what reason is either? As we change belief or look at our own belief, it is important to note that sometimes our passions for our previous belief may change. Oftentimes, we may feel disgust for what we had believed previously. The changes within ourselves may even bring about disgust or dislike. It is natural and healthy.

Sometimes, in belief, it is better to not settle once you are no longer convinced that your belief is not the proper one. For a time, when I was younger, I wasn’t entirely convinced of Christianity so I instead dabbled with Buddhism and incorporated those ideas into my belief system. I was influenced by a summer camp I had gone to the summer before my senior year. My course I went to (it was an unusual camp, dealing primarily with those whom could pass a rigorous application) dealt with purely philosophy. It was the most fun I ever had in a class before, expanding what I knew and convincing me there was more out there than before. However, I could not fully get a grasp of my belief. “Philosophy is in large part concerned with questions that we have not yet found a satisfactory and systematic way to answer (Searle 544).” That which I knew were the questions previously unanswered or of which I was unsure. There is not always a good answer to a question and the point of philosophy is to pursue the answers that make you feel most uncomfortable. As a Baptist Christian, anything that did not conform to my worldview would make me uncomfortable. The class did not make me feel uncomfortable because I was not yet ready to fully question my own worldviews. There were several moments when that which was said was also accepted in my pubescent mind. It was wrong to do this and it was wrong to do that simply because someone reasoned it from Scripture and reasoned it from what another pastor said.

Maybe this is a better example for you. Imagine your parents teaching you that all cats are bad creatures and give you several reasons to fear them: scratching and biting, potential to be allergic, feral tendencies in the wild. It is possible to convince a younger person that something as benign as a cat could be mean or evil towards them and thus needs to be avoided. That could be enough for anyone if your parents have convinced you of their evil. Take it one step further. Let’s say they let you near a cat one day and the cat was feral. They convince you this is the example of a cat, and this cat is representative of all cats. Now, it is based on your experience that all cats are evil based on the one example you are given.

The above example sounds like how racism is indoctrinated into younger people; give a bad example of a person and chalk it up purely to race. It happens quite often in other countries and happens here in the United States. In reality, one could create an assumption around a religion, gender or sexual orientation, making them an evil to the individuals being taught.

Unfortunately, poorly-evidenced beliefs and bad assumptions are a dime a dozen in society and are generally held by most people, regardless of the make or take of the belief. It seems impossible to change ones’ belief with or without evidence affirming or denying it. What an individual can do, however, is take what beliefs they know and recognize in having and seriously regarding them, looking at what evidence supports or denies it. Take an analytical approach to who you are as a person. One can never be too honest with themselves if action is the next step.

Plato described the process of removing bad beliefs in an allegory. Imagine being in a cave where you have been tied to a wall since birth. The only thing you are able to see is the shadows in the wall directly in front of you, shadows cast by a fire behind you. The shadows come from the people behind you, and their voices seem to come from the shadows because of the echoes in the cave. You will spend your entire life believing this to be your reality because this is all you know to be.

The prisoner, in the allegory, is freed and takes a look around him. The fire directly behind him blinds him, so he is unable to see all that is behind the fire. He walks around and stumbles out in the bright light, and it is difficult to adjust at first, being used to the total darkness. The freed prisoner doesn’t know how to comprehend what is around him. It takes time to adjust his eyesight and mind to the new images around him. He sees the trees and beauty around him once he does. Everything has changed for him.

Once he goes back to the cave, his eyesight is only adjusted to the outside world, so it is the equivalent of being blind in the darkness of the cave. He cannot free the other prisoners there, those who see reality as the shadows on the wall. Because he is blind, the other prisoners believe that what has happened to him is a bad pain. The only way for them to leave the cave now is by kicking and screaming. They don’t wish to change their reality.

Several scholars have taken Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and analyzed it to the point of beating it like a dead horse but it is important to understand Plato and what he means by this imagery for our own philosophical journeys. If there was a philosopher I would recommend first in the overall scheme of exploring your own beliefs, Plato would be the first to read. You can find the Allegory in “The Republic.”

We can relate the Allegory back to our discussion on sensory knowledge and its non-reliability as the sole way of gaining knowledge. “What we see in the physical world, compared to true, intelligible knowledge, is like shadows cast by fire on the wall of the cave, compared to the reality of the objects outside the cave that cast these shadows. (Contemporary Psychoanalytical Studies 42).” Of course, we must take into account that which we see in our pursuit of what is true, but what we see is not always true.

What we can take from what we read here is actually quite applicable to our lives. It is important to note that changing belief can be harmful to our interpersonal relations or own selves. The LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) community has experience with “coming out of the closet,” or revealing their identities to closest family members, friends or society. To become an atheist in the mid-South (born and raised in a decent-sized town in Kentucky) was not a pleasant experience for me, in way of changing belief. I had been an atheist for a while, but felt uncomfortable with expressing that to others. I really was not sure how my family or friends would react to me. Both my foster mother and father were strong Christians when I had been growing up and had instilled everyone in my family with a strong sense of belief (they all strayed but stuck to that belief in god). I was hesitant to say the least.

Those who had been around me when I was a hardcore Christian saw the difference as hostile towards their own beliefs. As I grew as a person and in my beliefs when I was 20 years old, I realized that I did not have enough evidence to support the idea of a god. Experiential evidence and environmental bias was not nearly enough to believe in a god who I believed was, at best, not a strong position I could argue. I believed in the Christian god because I was instilled those same values as my other family members were. From an early age, I was taught that those who did not believe in god but it was my duty as a Christian to bring my beliefs to those around me who did not. My teenage years, I was obsessed with proselytizing and sharing that belief with as many people as I could. It made for many awkward exchanges and conversations, those individuals expressing discomfort but with my push and non-hesitation. I was obsessed with the concept and read as much as I could that confirmed my beliefs. It is quite easy to mold that which you read to your own beliefs.

Does what we believe force us to be obligated to those beliefs? Let’s say we do believe in a god and that there are those who do not believe in god. If we did not share our evidences for a god and there were to be people condemned to hell because we did not share, the pain is on whose hands? Where does the suffering of those people go and who should be held accountable? The same must be reversed. If we knew a belief to be false and people were to waste their lives when they could do something universally useful, who is truly at fault?

At church, oftentimes, I would sit uncomfortably in my chair as it was explained to me that homosexuals were going to hell. Scripture was taken and analyzed on this large front screen in the front, a PowerPoint pointing out specific verses that mention that certain people will go to hell. They would tell me that it is never okay to have an abortion, and then other churches would tell me there are exceptions. Who was guaranteed to go to hell no matter what? The ideological practice enforced it within me a severe discomfort with whom I sat, looking upon and believing were going to one day burn in hell. They had convinced me that it was my duty to convince those people that this god had loved them but their beliefs and identities must completely change to fit with my own ideologies and worldviews before being able to experience love from this god.

“Very young children apparently have a different conception of the relation of belief to truth from that of adults (Searle 553).” This means it is quite easier to convince a child of a false belief. Belief is far stronger when enforced at a young age. You will notice programs are developed in churches specifically geared towards students and children so they may learn about those beliefs. I dislike the comparison but one could imagine Hitler Youth going along the same lines. Create an official ideology, force the adults of society to voluntarily let their children participate in a group that will convince them of this ideology, and, in no time at all, you have raised generations devoted to your cause, devoted to your ideology. Hitler had a lot of success. The Hitler Youth formed their own units towards the end of the war just to fight those invading their native homeland.

Many will take into account only the evidence that supports their position best. I would read Christian apologetics that would confirm what I already believed. I did not start from the base premises and think about it from there. Is there a god? Why would there be a god? In order to fully understand theology, history must be taken into account. What basis was there for a belief in divinity? Our own beliefs do not necessarily have to conform to what has been accepted, historically, but should at least take into account what has been thought previously. The past is important in that role, bringing us thoughts that do not align with our own beliefs and forcing us to examine what we believed previously.

As my beliefs shifted and my views changed, I became less convinced that any person was going to hell. Of course, the primary argument against my new founded beliefs was that it was my human understanding was getting in the way. This was leveled at me whenever I made mention of my atheism to those Christians around me God’s way were so far above my own that we could not understand why a loving god could not accept those people into his heaven. It seemed strange to me that other practices would take it further and say that our belief only exists because this god inspired it within us and that we were chosen by him to believe in him. Do not take me as an anti-theist though. Later essays in this series will show that I believe that there are several good qualities to religion, and religious concepts of compassion and non-selfishness should definitely be admired. Atheism does not need to equate hatred towards religion or religious groups, but merely a general distrust in the idea of there being a divine being.

There are philosophers who believe it is impossible to not believe in a god because where would there be morality without a god of some sort? Immanuel Kant felt that not believing in god would lead to ‘moral despair.’ You lose a certain aspect of morality when you lose a belief in god. Tied into directly into his argument is that there must be an overall morality and that it is objectively true, created by an otherworldly being. This being is what makes and dictates the rules for humanity (Van Impe 766).

Does it mean I am no longer a moral person when I do not believe in a divine being to give me the rules? No, not necessarily. Moral subjectivity is a strong view that branches out into what we dictate as our morals to be. Who should define what our morals should be? As I wrote this essay, I wondered where I would like to culminate the idea that we should shelve beliefs and critique all we know. I do not mean to make a single person lose all that they hold dear, but, if all held dear happens to never been analyzed, can those ideas be truly accounted for? What is next once you realize your beliefs may be wrong or you do throw out your set of beliefs?

It takes a lot of proper research and finding oneself to accumulate valid beliefs. By finding oneself, I mean to pursue knowledge that will make your life worthwhile. What should I pursue? Once, I believed that god or gods were the meaning of life, but now, the question of the meaning of life is open-ended. I pursue lines of thought oftentimes, asking myself about what life is for me, and where it leads. The sinnsfrage, the meaning question, asks us what features go about bringing meaning to life, and what we should ask ourselves about life (Rowlands 379). If you find yourself lacking in belief after soul-searching, it is time to look for that which is meaningful to you and grow as a person.

This New Year, take it as a personal challenge to take your views and look at them a different way. Find someone who believes the opposite you do and listen to them and see what they say. If your belief can be researched, research it and find out why it may not make sense to another individual. I am not asking you give up your beliefs as I would never do that. I will not tell you atheism or agnosticism is the only to believe or that if you do not believe it, you must be a purely irrational creature. I ask you to look at your beliefs because of the Shakespeare quote, “To thine ownself be true.” Why believe in something if it is not true? Why believe in something, more importantly, that isn’t true to you or you cannot fully prove to yourself that it is true? The only thing you have to lose, in your search for knowledge, is a false belief and what you could gain is a stronger belief or a better belief.

Works Cited

Dąbrowski, Andrzej. "Emotions In Philosophy. A Short Introduction." Studia Humana 5.3 (2016): 8-20. Academic Search Complete. Web. 10 Jan. 2017.

Hume, David, and Tom L. Beauchamp. An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Print.

SHORT, T. L. "Empiricism Expanded." Transactions Of The Charles S. Peirce Society 51.1 (2015): 1-33. Academic Search Complete. Web. 8 Jan. 2017

"Notions Of Truth In Philosophy." Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies 22.(2016): 39-69. Academic Search Complete. Web. 8 Jan. 2017.

Rowlands, Mark. "The Immortal, The Intrinsic And The Quasi Meaning Of Life." Journal Of Ethics 19.3/4 (2015): 379-408. Academic Search Complete. Web. 17 Jan. 2017.

VAN IMPE, STIJN. "Kant's Moral Theism And Moral Despair Argument Against Atheism." Heythrop Journal 55.5 (2014): 757-768. Academic Search Complete. Web. 10 Jan. 2017.

SEARLE, JOHN R. "The Future Of Philosophy." Nova Et Vetera (English Edition) 14.2 (2016): 543-558. Academic Search Complete. Web. 8 Jan. 2017.

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