blogjou
It seems like at least the European CORONA crisis is coming to an end, so I need another socially accepted excuse for never being around anywhere. A blog!Darwin would not be published in Nature today
“Scientists apply themselves to what they believe to be the most important of the problems that seem tractable,” the Nobel Prize-winning biologist Francois Jacob wrote; “those that rightly or wrongly they think they will be able to solve.” Peter Medawar, another biology Nobelist, calls science “the art of the soluble.”
The mycorrhizal tragedy of the commons
Abstract
- trees trade C for N with mycorrhizal network
- this network is the “commons”, part of the tragedy
- trees gain additional N et the expense of neighbours by supplying more C to fungi
- this can lead to increased N immobilization (in fungal biomass)
The carbon costs of global wood harvests
Abstract
- counting newly grown wood from harvested forests as extra is wrong because this growth would also happen without harvesting
- harvesting forests leads until 2050 to additional eCO$_2$ in the realms of land use change due to agricultural expansion
Thank you. This I'm used to.
And then you are here. You are simultaneously engaged in her conversation and thinking about something else; she both gives herself to you and does not give herself to you; you find her objectionable and you deeply love her; she worships you and wonders what she might have missed with someone else.
The secret codes of life
The secret codes of life - whether presented as a gift or a burden - go totally unapreciated. And once again the Rewarder and the Punisher skulk off, struggling to understand why knowing the code behind the wine does not diminish its pleasure on your tongue, why knowing the inescapability of heartache does not reduce its sting, why glimpsing the mechanics of love does not alter its intoxicating appeal.
Scales
And God suddenly bolts up in His bed with a revelation: everything that creates iself upon the backs of smaller scales will by those same scales be consumed.
Meaning varies with spatial scale
Do you think it would have any meaning at all if you displayed of of your your Shakespearian plays to a bacterium? Of course not. Meaning varies with spatial scale. So we have concluded that communicating with her is not impossible, but it is pointless.
Slide down the intelligence ladder
And that’s not the worst of your revelation. You realize that the next time you return here, with your thick horse brain, you won’t have the capacity to ask to become a human again. You won’t understand what a human is. Your choice to slide down the intelligence ladder is irreversible. And just before you lose your final human faculties, you painfully ponder what magnificent extraterrestrial creature, enthralled with the idea of finding a simpler life, chose in the last round to become a human.
Fantasies
God: > Your fantasies have cursed your realities.
Egalitaire
The Communists are baffled and irritated, because they have finally achieved their perfect society, but only by the help of a God in whom they don’t want to believe. The meritocrats are abashed that they’re stuck for eternity in an incentivelesssystem with a bunch of pinkos. The convervatives have no penniless to disparage; the liberals have no downtrodden to promote.