NYT includes Philippines as one of the 46 travel destinations- and I agree.
Saturday, January 12, 2013
12 January 2012: Abstract is more real than reality
We trust realities less and abstract
more. We get less pleasure out of real things and more from abstract things.
Both trust and pleasure are abstract. Are abstract things real? We believe some
of the abstract things so much that we take them for granted ‘real’. In course
of colandering real from abstracts, let me offer you a few words to filter. As
you go through the list judge them from your angle if they are real or abstract.
1. Dream
2. Happiness
3. Patriotism
4. Relationship
5. Wisdom
6. Age
7. Prophesy
8. Future
9. God
10. Heaven
Give 10 points to each word that
you think is abstract and -10 if you think it real. Sum up. The sum you get the
percentage how realistic you are.
If you gave -10 to any word, you
are on the majority side. Only those people who think the above ten word as nonexistent
are realistic. Realistic people, beware of the dreamer. All great truths are
shielded by the abstract believers. People who score less than 50 are gullible.
…………
These 12 days, I have added one
more item in my list to love and take care. This time it’s my Liver. First I realized
and gave some attempts. Attempts include: a teaspoonful of garlic power once every
week, a tea spoonful of turmeric powder once every week, Z twist exercise twice
a day, no fermented food, no soda and regular exposure to fresh air.
Liver: When liver has too much
work to perform, it sets aside fat deposits. These gradual deposits accumulate
and prevent the circulation of fat through liver, reduce the fat breakdown and
use. Subsequently, the underutilized, excess fat gets deposited in the median
part of the body, belly, waist and thigh. People look spindle shaped. If
someone begins fatty, first doubt is the initiation of malfunctioning of liver.
So to prevent that, let the liver
do its work. Slightly excite the liver with Z twist exercise, feed it with
liver flush antioxidants. The work is done. However, overweight is good news obesity
is bad. But overweight is the bridge to obesity. So it’s up to us to decide
where to park your body.
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Mark Lynas apologies for Anti-GMO mistake.
Original Link
Lecture to Oxford Farming Conference, 3 January 2013
Lecture to Oxford Farming Conference, 3 January 2013
[Please check against delivery - see video below for speech as given.]
8 Jan: comments are temporarily disabled while I move the site to a server which can deal with the traffic.
I want to start with some apologies. For the record, here and upfront, I apologise for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonising an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment.
As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely.
So I guess you’ll be wondering – what happened between 1995 and now that made me not only change my mind but come here and admit it? Well, the answer is fairly simple: I discovered science, and in the process I hope I became a better environmentalist.
When I first heard about Monsanto’s GM soya I knew exactly what I thought. Here was a big American corporation with a nasty track record, putting something new and experimental into our food without telling us. Mixing genes between species seemed to be about as unnatural as you can get – here was humankind acquiring too much technological power; something was bound to go horribly wrong. These genes would spread like some kind of living pollution. It was the stuff of nightmares.
These fears spread like wildfire, and within a few years GM was essentially banned in Europe, and our worries were exported by NGOs like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth to Africa, India and the rest of Asia, where GM is still banned today. This was the most successful campaign I have ever been involved with.
This was also explicitly an anti-science movement. We employed a lot of imagery about scientists in their labs cackling demonically as they tinkered with the very building blocks of life. Hence the Frankenstein food tag – this absolutely was about deep-seated fears of scientific powers being used secretly for unnatural ends. What we didn’t realise at the time was that the real Frankenstein’s monster was not GM technology, but our reaction against it.
For me this anti-science environmentalism became increasingly inconsistent with my pro-science environmentalism with regard to climate change. I published my first book on global warming in 2004, and I was determined to make it scientifically credible rather than just a collection of anecdotes.
So I had to back up the story of my trip to Alaska with satellite data on sea ice, and I had to justify my pictures of disappearing glaciers in the Andes with long-term records of mass balance of mountain glaciers. That meant I had to learn how to read scientific papers, understand basic statistics and become literate in very different fields from oceanography to paleoclimate, none of which my degree in politics and modern history helped me with a great deal.
I found myself arguing constantly with people who I considered to be incorrigibly anti-science, because they wouldn’t listen to the climatologists and denied the scientific reality of climate change. So I lectured them about the value of peer-review, about the importance of scientific consensus and how the only facts that mattered were the ones published in the most distinguished scholarly journals.
My second climate book, Six Degrees, was so sciency that it even won the Royal Society science books prize, and climate scientists I had become friendly with would joke that I knew more about the subject than them. And yet, incredibly, at this time in 2008 I was still penning screeds in the Guardian attacking the science of GM – even though I had done no academic research on the topic, and had a pretty limited personal understanding. I don’t think I’d ever read a peer-reviewed paper on biotechnology or plant science even at this late stage.
Obviously this contradiction was untenable. What really threw me were some of the comments underneath my final anti-GM Guardian article. In particular one critic said to me: so you’re opposed to GM on the basis that it is marketed by big corporations. Are you also opposed to the wheel because because it is marketed by the big auto companies?
So I did some reading. And I discovered that one by one my cherished beliefs about GM turned out to be little more than green urban myths.
I’d assumed that it would increase the use of chemicals. It turned out that pest-resistant cotton and maize needed less insecticide.
I’d assumed that GM benefited only the big companies. It turned out that billions of dollars of benefits were accruing to farmers needing fewer inputs.
I’d assumed that Terminator Technology was robbing farmers of the right to save seed. It turned out that hybrids did that long ago, and that Terminator never happened.
I’d assumed that no-one wanted GM. Actually what happened was that Bt cotton was pirated into India and roundup ready soya into Brazil because farmers were so eager to use them.
I’d assumed that GM was dangerous. It turned out that it was safer and more precise than conventional breeding using mutagenesis for example; GM just moves a couple of genes, whereas conventional breeding mucks about with the entire genome in a trial and error way.
But what about mixing genes between unrelated species? The fish and the tomato? Turns out viruses do that all the time, as do plants and insects and even us – it’s called gene flow.
But this was still only the beginning. So in my third book The God Species I junked all the environmentalist orthodoxy at the outset and tried to look at the bigger picture on a planetary scale.
And this is the challenge that faces us today: we are going to have to feed 9.5 billion hopefully much less poor people by 2050 on about the same land area as we use today, using limited fertiliser, water and pesticides and in the context of a rapidly-changing climate.
Let’s unpack this a bit. I know in a previous year’s lecture in this conference there was the topic of population growth. This area too is beset by myths. People think that high rates of fertility in the developing world are the big issue – in other words, poor people are having too many children, and we therefore need either family planning or even something drastic like mass one-child policies.
The reality is that global average fertility is down to about 2.5 – and if you consider that natural replacement is 2.2, this figure is not much above that. So where is the massive population growth coming from? It is coming because of declining infant mortality – more of today’s youngsters are growing up to have their own children rather than dying of preventable diseases in early childhood.
The rapid decline in infant mortality rates is one of the best news stories of our decade and the heartland of this great success story is sub-Saharan Africa. It’s not that there are legions more children being born – in fact, in the words of Hans Rosling, we are already at ‘peak child’. That is, about 2 billion children are alive today, and there will never be more than that because of declining fertility.
But so many more of these 2 billion children will survive into adulthood today to have their own children. They are the parents of the young adults of 2050. That’s the source of the 9.5 billion population projection for 2050. You don’t have to have lost a child, God forbid, or even be a parent, to know that declining infant mortality is a good thing.
So how much food will all these people need? According to the latest projections, published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we are looking at a global demand increase of well over 100% by mid-century. This is almost entirely down to GDP growth, especially in developing countries.
In other words, we need to produce more food not just to keep up with population but because poverty is gradually being eradicated, along with the widespread malnutrition that still today means close to 800 million people go to bed hungry each night. And I would challenge anyone in a rich country to say that this GDP growth in poor countries is a bad thing.
But as a result of this growth we have very serious environmental challenges to tackle. Land conversion is a large source of greenhouse gases, and perhaps the greatest source of biodiversity loss. This is another reason why intensification is essential – we have to grow more on limited land in order to save the rainforests and remaining natural habitats from the plough.
We also have to deal with limited water – not just depleting aquifers but also droughts that are expected to strike with increasing intensity in the agricultural heartlands of continents thanks to climate change. If we take more water from rivers we accelerate biodiversity loss in these fragile habitats.
We also need to better manage nitrogen use: artificial fertiliser is essential to feed humanity, but its inefficient use means dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and many coastal areas around the world, as well as eutrophication in fresh water ecosystems.
It is not enough to sit back and hope that technological innovation will solve our problems. We have to be much more activist and strategic than that. We have to ensure that technological innovation moves much more rapidly, and in the right direction for those who most need it.
In a sense we’ve been here before. When Paul Ehrlich published the Population Bomb in 1968, he wrote: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” The advice was explicit – in basket-case countries like India, people might as well starve sooner rather than later, and therefore food aid to them should be eliminated to reduce population growth.
It was not pre-ordained that Ehrlich would be wrong. In fact, if everyone had heeded his advice hundreds of millions of people might well have died needlessly. But in the event, malnutrition was cut dramatically, and India became food self-sufficient, thanks to Norman Borlaug and his Green Revolution.
It is important to recall that Borlaug was equally as worried about population growth as Ehrlich. He just thought it was worth trying to do something about it. He was a pragmatist because he believed in doing what was possible, but he was also an idealist because he believed that people everywhere deserved to have enough to eat.
So what did Norman Borlaug do? He turned to science and technology. Humans are a tool-making species – from clothes to ploughs, technology is primarily what distinguishes us from other apes. And much of this work was focused on the genome of major domesticated crops – if wheat, for example, could be shorter and put more effort into seed-making rather than stalks, then yields would improve and grain loss due to lodging would be minimised.
Before Borlaug died in 2009 he spent many years campaigning against those who for political and ideological reasons oppose modern innovation in agriculture. To quote: “If the naysayers do manage to stop agricultural biotechnology, they might actually precipitate the famines and the crisis of global biodiversity they have been predicting for nearly 40 years.”
And, thanks to supposedly environmental campaigns spread from affluent countries, we are perilously close to this position now. Biotechnology has not been stopped, but it has been made prohibitively expensive to all but the very biggest corporations.
It now costs tens of millions to get a crop through the regulatory systems in different countries. In fact the latest figures I’ve just seen from CropLife suggest it costs $139 million to move from discovering a new crop trait to full commercialisation, so open-source or public sector biotech really does not stand a chance.
There is a depressing irony here that the anti-biotech campaigners complain about GM crops only being marketed by big corporations when this is a situation they have done more than anyone to help bring about.
In the EU the system is at a standstill, and many GM crops have been waiting a decade or more for approval but are permanently held up by the twisted domestic politics of anti-biotech countries like France and Austria. Around the whole world the regulatory delay has increased to more than 5 and a half years now, from 3.7 years back in 2002. The bureaucratic burden is getting worse.
France, remember, long refused to accept the potato because it was an American import. As one commentator put it recently, Europe is on the verge of becoming a food museum. We well-fed consumers are blinded by romantic nostalgia for the traditional farming of the past. Because we have enough to eat, we can afford to indulge our aesthetic illusions.
But at the same time the growth of yields worldwide has stagnated for many major food crops, as research published only last month by Jonathan Foley and others in the journal Nature Communications showed. If we don’t get yield growth back on track we are indeed going to have trouble keeping up with population growth and resulting demand, and prices will rise as well as more land being converted from nature to agriculture.
To quote Norman Borlaug again: “I now say that the world has the technology — either available or well advanced in the research pipeline — to feed on a sustainable basis a population of 10 billion people. The more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use this new technology? While the affluent nations can certainly afford to adopt ultra low-risk positions, and pay more for food produced by the so-called ‘organic’ methods, the one billion chronically undernourished people of the low income, food-deficit nations cannot.”
As Borlaug was saying, perhaps the most pernicious myth of all is that organic production is better, either for people or the environment. The idea that it is healthier has been repeatedly disproved in the scientific literature. We also know from many studies that organic is much less productive, with up to 40-50% lower yields in terms of land area. The Soil Association went to great lengths in a recent report on feeding the world with organic not to mention this productivity gap.
Nor did it mention that overall, if you take into account land displacement effects, organic is also likely worse for biodiversity. Instead they talk about an ideal world where people in the west eat less meat and fewer calories overall so that people in developing countries can have more. This is simplistic nonsense.
If you think about it, the organic movement is at its heart a rejectionist one. It doesn’t accept many modern technologies on principle. Like the Amish in Pennsylvania, who froze their technology with the horse and cart in 1850, the organic movement essentially freezes its technology in somewhere around 1950, and for no better reason.
It doesn’t even apply this idea consistently however. I was reading in a recent Soil Association magazine that it is OK to blast weeds with flamethrowers or fry them with electric currents, but benign herbicides like glyphosate are still a no-no because they are ‘artificial chemicals’.
In reality there is no reason at all why avoiding chemicals should be better for the environment – quite the opposite in fact. Recent research by Jesse Ausubel and colleagues at Rockefeller University looked at how much extra farmland Indian farmers would have had to cultivate today using the technologies of 1961 to get today’s overall yield. The answer is 65 million hectares, an area the size of France.
In China, maize farmers spared 120 million hectares, an area twice the size of France, thanks to modern technologies getting higher yields. On a global scale, between 1961 and 2010 the area farmed grew by only 12%, whilst kilocalories per person rose from 2200 to 2800. So even with three billion more people, everyone still had more to eat thanks to a production increase of 300% in the same period.
So how much land worldwide was spared in the process thanks to these dramatic yield improvements, for which chemical inputs played a crucial role? The answer is 3 billion hectares, or the equivalent of two South Americas. There would have been no Amazon rainforest left today without this improvement in yields. Nor would there be any tigers in India or orang utans in Indonesia. That is why I don’t know why so many of those opposing the use of technology in agriculture call themselves environmentalists.
So where does this opposition come from? There seems to be a widespread assumption that modern technology equals more risk. Actually there are many very natural and organic ways to face illness and early death, as the debacle with Germany’s organic beansprouts proved in 2011. This was a public health catastrophe, with the same number of deaths and injuries as were caused by Chernobyl, because E.-coli probably from animal manure infected organic beansprout seeds imported from Egypt.
In total 53 people died and 3,500 suffered serious kidney failure. And why were these consumers choosing organic? Because they thought it was safer and healthier, and they were more scared of entirely trivial risks from highly-regulated chemical pesticides and fertilisers.
If you look at the situation without prejudice, much of the debate, both in terms of anti-biotech and organic, is simply based on the naturalistic fallacy – the belief that natural is good, and artificial is bad. This is a fallacy because there are plenty of entirely natural poisons and ways to die, as the relatives of those who died from E.-coli poisoning would tell you.
For organic, the naturalistic fallacy is elevated into the central guiding principle for an entire movement. This is irrational and we owe it to the Earth and to our children to do better.
This is not to say that organic farming has nothing to offer – there are many good techniques which have been developed, such as intercropping and companion planting, which can be environmentally very effective, even it they do tend to be highly labour-intensive. Principles of agro-ecology such as recyling nutrients and promoting on-farm diversity should also be taken more seriously everywhere.
But organic is in the way of progress when it refuses to allow innovation. Again using GM as the most obvious example, many third-generation GM crops allow us not to use environmentally-damaging chemicals because the genome of the crop in question has been altered so the plant can protect itself from pests. Why is that not organic?
Organic is also in the way when it is used to take away choice from others. One of the commonest arguments against GM is that organic farmers will be ‘contaminated’ with GM pollen, and therefore no-one should be allowed to use it. So the rights of a well-heeled minority, which come down ultimately to a consumer preference based on aesthetics, trump the rights of everyone else to use improved crops which would benefit the environment.
I am all for a world of diversity, but that means one farming system cannot claim to have a monopoly of virtue and aim at excluding all other options. Why can’t we have peaceful co-existence? This is particularly the case when it shackles us to old technologies which have higher inherent risks than the new.
It seems like almost everyone has to pay homage to ‘organic’ and to question this orthodoxy is unthinkable. Well I am here to question it today.
The biggest risk of all is that we do not take advantage of all sorts of opportunities for innovation because of what is in reality little more than blind prejudice. Let me give you two examples, both regrettably involving Greenpeace.
Last year Greenpeace destroyed a GM wheat crop in Australia, for all the traditional reasons, which I am very familiar with having done it myself. This was publicly funded research carried out by the Commonwealth Scientific Research institute, but no matter. They were against it because it was GM and unnatural.
What few people have since heard is that one of the other trials being undertaken, which Greenpeace activists with their strimmers luckily did not manage to destroy, accidentally found a wheat yield increase of an extraordinary 30%. Just think. This knowledge might never have been produced at all, if Greenpeace had succeeded in destroying this innovation. As the president of the NFU Peter Kendall recently suggeseted, this is analogous to burning books in a library before anyone has been able to read them.
The second example comes from China, where Greenpeace managed to trigger a national media panic by claiming that two dozen children had been used as human guinea pigs in a trial of GM golden rice. They gave no consideration to the fact that this rice is healthier, and could save thousands of children from vitamin A deficiency-related blindness and death each year.
What happened was that the three Chinese scientists named in the Greenpeace press release were publicly hounded and have since lost their jobs, and in an autocratic country like China they are at serious personal risk. Internationally because of over-regulation golden rice has already been on the shelf for over a decade, and thanks to the activities of groups like Greenpeace it may never become available to vitamin-deficient poor people.
This to my mind is immoral and inhumane, depriving the needy of something that would help them and their children because of the aesthetic preferences of rich people far away who are in no danger from Vitamin A shortage. Greenpeace is a $100-million a year multinational, and as such it has moral responsibilities just like any other large company.
The fact that golden rice was developed in the public sector and for public benefit cuts no ice with the antis. Take Rothamsted Research, whose director Maurice Moloney is speaking tomorrow. Last year Rothamsted began a trial of an aphid-resistant GM wheat which would need no pesticides to combat this serious pest.
Because it is GM the antis were determined to destroy it. They failed because of the courage of Professor John Pickett and his team, who took to YouTube and the media to tell the important story of why their research mattered and why it should not be trashed. They gathered thousands of signatures on a petition when the antis could only manage a couple of hundred, and the attempted destruction was a damp squib.
One intruder did manage to scale the fence, however, who turned out to be the perfect stereotypical anti-GM protestor – an old Etonian aristocrat whose colourful past makes our Oxford local Marquess of Blandford look like the model of responsible citizenry.
This high-born activist scattered organic wheat seeds around the trial site in what was presumably a symbolic statement of naturalness. Professor Pickett’s team tell me they had a very low-tech solution to getting rid of it – they went round with a cordless portable hoover to clear it up.
This year, as well as repeating the wheat trial, Rothamsted is working on an omega 3 oilseed that could replace wild fish in food for farmed salmon. So this could help reduce overfishing by allowing land-based feedstocks to be used in aquaculture. Yes it’s GM, so expect the antis to oppose this one too, despite the obvious potential environmental benefits in terms of marine biodiversity.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough. So my conclusion here today is very clear: the GM debate is over. It is finished. We no longer need to discuss whether or not it is safe – over a decade and a half with three trillion GM meals eaten there has never been a single substantiated case of harm. You are more likely to get hit by an asteroid than to get hurt by GM food. More to the point, people have died from choosing organic, but no-one has died from eating GM.
Just as I did 10 years ago, Greenpeace and the Soil Association claim to be guided by consensus science, as on climate change. Yet on GM there is a rock-solid scientific consensus, backed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Society, health institutes and national science academies around the world. Yet this inconvenient truth is ignored because it conflicts with their ideology.
One final example is the sad story of the GM blight-resistant potato. This was being developed by both the Sainsbury Lab and Teagasc, a publicly-funded institute in Ireland – but the Irish Green Party, whose leader often attends this very conference, was so opposed that they even took out a court case against it.
This is despite the fact that the blight-resistant potato would save farmers from doing 15 fungicide sprays per season, that pollen transfer is not an issue because potatoes are clonally propagated and that the offending gene came from a wild relative of the potato.
There would have been a nice historical resonance to having a blight-resistant potato developed in Ireland, given the million or more who died due to the potato famine in the mid 19th century. It would have been a wonderful thing for Ireland to be the country that defeated blight. But thanks to the Irish Green Party, this is not to be.
And unfortunately the antis now have the bureaucrats on their side. Wales and Scotland are officially GM free, taking medieval superstition as a strategic imperative for devolved governments supposedly guided by science.
It is unfortunately much the same in much of Africa and Asia. India has rejected Bt brinjal, even though it would reduce insecticide applications in the field, and residues on the fruit. The government in India is increasingly in thrall to backward-looking ideologues like Vandana Shiva, who idealise pre-industrial village agriculture despite the historical fact that it was an age of repeated famines and structural insecurity.
In Africa, ‘no GM’ is still the motto for many governments. Kenya for example has actually banned GM foods because of the supposed “health risks” despite the fact that they could help reduce the malnutrition that is still rampant in the country – and malnutrition is by the way a proven health risk, with no further evidence needed. In Kenya if you develop a GM crop which has better nutrition or a higher yield to help poorer farmers then you will go to jail for 10 years.
Thus desperately-needed agricultural innovation is being strangled by a suffocating avalanche of regulations which are not based on any rational scientific assessment of risk. The risk today is not that anyone will be harmed by GM food, but that millions will be harmed by not having enough food, because a vocal minority of people in rich countries want their meals to be what they consider natural.
I hope now things are changing. The wonderful Bill and Melinda Gates foundation recently gave $10 million to the John Innes Centre to begin efforts to integrate nitrogen fixing capabilities into major food crops, starting with maize. Yes, Greenpeace, this will be GM. Get over it. If we are going to reduce the global-scale problem of nitrogen pollution then having major crop plants fixing their own nitrogen is a worthy goal.
I know it is politically incorrect to say all this, but we need a a major dose of both international myth-busting and de-regulation. The plant scientists I know hold their heads in their hands when I talk about this with them because governments and so many people have got their sense of risk so utterly wrong, and are foreclosing a vitally necessary technology.
Norman Borlaug is dead now, but I think we honour his memory and his vision when we refuse to give in to politically correct orthodoxies when we know they are incorrect. The stakes are high. If we continue to get this wrong, the life prospects of billions of people will be harmed.
So I challenge all of you today to question your beliefs in this area and to see whether they stand up to rational examination. Always ask for evidence, as the campaigning group Sense About Science advises, and make sure you go beyond the self-referential reports of campaigning NGOs.
But most important of all, farmers should be free to choose what kind of technologies they want to adopt. If you think the old ways are the best, that’s fine. You have that right.
What you don’t have the right to do is to stand in the way of others who hope and strive for ways of doing things differently, and hopefully better. Farmers who understand the pressures of a growing population and a warming world. Who understand that yields per hectare are the most important environmental metric. And who understand that technology never stops developing, and that even the fridge and the humble potato were new and scary once.
So my message to the anti-GM lobby, from the ranks of the British aristocrats and celebrity chefs to the US foodies to the peasant groups of India is this. You are entitled to your views. But you must know by now that they are not supported by science. We are coming to a crunch point, and for the sake of both people and the planet, now is the time for you to get out of the way and let the rest of us get on with feeding the world sustainably.
Thankyou.
389 comments
Friday, January 4, 2013
4 JANUARY 2013: People peg themselves
Homo sapiens are nomads. This
term may have changed to vagabond, gypsy, migrant, immigrant, emigrant, travelers,
tourists, visitors or invader. The allusion is the same. People change places
for too many reasons. However, instinct to remain attached to some space using house
as a peg has not disappeared even after 3 million years outside the cave. People
move out and return. They return for various reasons. I am interested to know
the anatomy and genetics of people who love to remain free of pegs. How many
people don’t want to tether themselves to a house, village or country? Are
there any people who are free (totally) on their own will? It would be an
interesting finding if we could genetically analyze a wide range of people from
those who want to be pegged to others who shun attachments. GWAS could find the
genes. What to do once the gene is identified? With identified gene it’s
possible to transform the coming generation to the type we choose. But what do
you choose your children to be? Pegged to a place, or liberated from
attachments.
This thought came to me when I realized, the visa and passport system is
designed to control the flow of people from one place to another, especially
from one political state to next. This will continue for several decades or
centuries, though the system will be more efficient and people friendly in the
days to come.
Today, most of my time was spent in advancing the process for a visa
sticker. The importance of the sticker has increased. Thinking of the harassment at the airports, I don’t feel like travelling. But every time pride fills
within and spills out of me; every time I raise my head above my
contemporaries, and ignore the basic moralities, I realize it’s time for me to travel.
In every airport, departure or entry, I wait till the last for discourse on why
I travel, give dozens of explanations to scores of idiots. These conversations
treat me a lesser Homo sapiens. These
treatments cleanse my pride from climax to null and void to anti climax. That
is why travel is important, redeeming and refreshing to me. Hassle during air travel invigorates me more
than spa, meditation or sky-dive. Though late, there is a travel in my card.
Before my next airport clearance, I want to do something heavy that infuses
enough pride and boastfulness in me, so that I can purge during the check up. Although
my intuition summons me to peg somewhere in a beautiful high land facing an ocean;
the grand realities offer me liberty of a vagabond, I accept travels as the panacea
to calm frequent emotional volcanoes of pride and hyper-confidence.
The research is getting on the track. Update part needs more leverage. The plants are going well. Manpower is well mobilized. I am now preparing for a sum up of the field experiment.
Good Friday, Good night and have
a great weekend.
Thursday, January 3, 2013
3 JANUARY 2013: Nature takes its course
Today my excitement was beyond control when i was back on the desk with research
data heaped for analysis. A lot of time is needed to go through the heap thoroughly. I visited the green house after a long time, took part in screening but for a short time. We planned
for coming works, discussed with the group and reshaped the implementation.
I showed
AFSTRI’s office to Ando, the new AFSTRI president. I also introduced her to
Anilyn and Frulian Fule. I explained her
idea of IAAS Fund over coffee. The Currier has started moving. Now it is
in Manila. I still hope to get a positive response by early next week. I am now addicted
to listening the interview of Lee Kuan Yew from his book HARD TRUTHS. It is easy
to listen.
I left office early (5:10 pm) for home. I need some rest tonight. Back at home I ran washing machine and dryer. No dinner tonight.
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
2 JANUARY 2013: SENSE OF SUPERIOR THOUGHT
Second day into 2013, the trend of new year wishes is
ongoing. The official New Year has
begun. I had a nice day today. No worries. Whether I get permit or not I feel
happy. There are thousand ways to smile but
I choose only one way. I believe my intuitions and move on my ways. These days I begin to love English grammar.
These days I also am after sting ideas to do new things. I am looking for suitable friends with similar (weird) ideas to carry on with the plans. But how do I find treatable friends whom I can rely on to advance on these crazy projects. I am into the projects. I am sure I will be out with it on my hand.
I watched a couple of videos. I usually watch films and
videos for entertainment and new ideas. I seldom watch them to share
sentiments. Today a 3 minute video catches my sentiments. I simply could not
avoid mentioning it here. It is ‘The
Migrant Manifesto”. I feel for it.
After a long, long time, I spent enough time in social networks chatting with
friends and relatives. From tomorrow I will be in the regular 7-5 office
duties. That is what I enjoy most out of all.
That is where my interest will be waiting for me.
SEE YOU TOMORROW!!!
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
January 1 2013: Tuesday
To bring excitement to normalcy the night was short enough to offer me a sleep. Until midnight, the blasts of fire crackers kept me awake and the rest of the night "Hard truths". In morning I went around the park in pleasant village sometimes running and other times walking. I tried to sort out the works done and made a temporary "to-do" list to begin the works immediately. I tried contacting and updating Shanta. She is in Kathmandu now.
I spent most of the day, looking back at the yesteryears and getting lost at the miracle power of brain. The most important aspect of the brain is its ability to forget difficulties. Although we try to recall pleasant moments more than the unpleasant ones, brain has its own ways of purification. If our brain did not have this capacity to absorb and earth the shocks and sadness, the world would have been a difficult place to live.
I don't have many hard resolutions this year compared to those ambitious resolutions mentioned last year. Even outside the resolution, 2012 was a great year to me. The most important was the successful organization of the First Young Scientists Conference. It was not in the resolution.
For 2013, I am glad that I have enough challenges to tackles and keep myself sharpened and ready. This year I plan to try several new things that I haven't attempted/thought in the last 4 decades. When I write the December 31 2013 page I want to write with the same energy and enthusiasm as I am writing this page now.
Govinda Rizal
Monday, December 31, 2012
2013: Resolutions
Last year at this time I wrote THIS
Resolution of 2013
1. Keep up the excellence achieved
2. Improve the weakness
3. Try new things that has not been tried.
Resolution of 2013
1. Keep up the excellence achieved
2. Improve the weakness
3. Try new things that has not been tried.
Tuesday, December 25, 2012
I READ 14 BOOKS IN 2012
I Read 14 Books in 2012
14th Book: Lee Kuan Yew: HARD TRUTHS to
Keep Singapore Going. A series of Interviews.
13th Book: Looking for Alaska- a novel by
John Green.
12th Book: Steve Jobs thinking
Differently: A Biography by Patricia Lakin.
11th Book: Rice Research and Development Policy: A First Encounter: Edited by R.S. Zeigler
10th
Book: Scientists in Conference, the Congress organizer's handbook, the Congress
visitor's Companion- By Volker Neuhoff.
Scientists in
Conference is a one sitting book
(220 pages) for reading and a prewritten DIARY for people organizing
conferences. I takes away the time necessary to plan events.
Some GEMS from the
book:
He who offers an inch
may lose a yard.
If our organizer is
himself a well organized human being, the sort of fellow who plans erverything
well in advance, then the entire planning can be so conveniently spread
over months that his everyday work need not suffer at all.
He who treats each
small part with respect will be respected as the master of the whole.
The organizer should
not be the one of those who find it hard to utter "thanks" even in
cases where the help received is only slight.
To have confidence is
good to check up is better.
Keep a notebook to
serve as "idea bank".
Humor is a gift from
god, but god doesnot distribute his gifts lightly.
If something has to be
applied or asked for; it is better not to write right away but to seek a
personal interview, preferably with the very man on whom the decission depends.
He who comes last to
the mill is the last to get his corn ground- German saying.
There is always
overlapping or cross pollination between program planning bodiies.
9th
BOOK: THE MAN WHO FED THE WORLD
Norman Borlaug was born on March 25, 1914 to
Norwegian immigrant family resettled in the United States. From age
seven to nineteen, he worked on the 106-acre (43 ha) family farm west
of Protivin, Iowa, fishing, hunting, and raising corn,
oats, timothy-grass, cattle, pigs and chickens. He attended the
one-teacher, one-room New Oregon #8 rural school in Howard
County, through eighth grade. On advice of his grand dad who
said "You're wiser to fill your head now if you want to fill your
belly later on" He pursued his studied in the university of
Minnesota. To finance his studies, Borlaug periodically took jobs. One of
these jobs, in 1935, was as a leader in the Civilian Conservation Corps,
working with the unemployed on U.S. federal projects. From 1935
to 1938, before and after receiving his Bachelor of Science in
forestry in 1937, Borlaug worked for the United States Forest
Service at stations in Massachusetts and Idaho. From
1935 to 1938, he worked for the United States Forest Service at
stations in Massachusetts and Idaho. He enrolled at the
University to study plant pathology , received a Master of Science degree
in 1940 and Ph.D. in plant pathology and genetics in 1942.
From 1942 to 1944, he worked as
a microbiologist at DuPont in Wilmington, Delaware. In
July 1944, after rejecting DuPont's offer to double his salary, and
temporarily leaving behind his pregnant wife and 14-month-old
daughter, he flew to Mexico City to head the new program as
a geneticist and plant pathologist.
In maxico he crossed one strain of wheat with
another, trying thousands of variations to find those that would flourish in
Mexican soil and resist rust and other parasites. In time, he hit on an
unprecedented idea. The wheat-growing season in the central highlands, where
Borlaug was working, took place slightly earlier than the season in the Yaqui
Valley of Sonora, farther north. If he planted the same seeds at the highland research
station during the summer and in the Yaqui Valley station immediately
afterward, he could see his crops through two growing seasons in a single
year. Planting the same seeds at different altitudes, where they were
exposed to different temperatures, sunlight and rainfall, yielded a wealth of
information and enabled Borlaug to create wheat varieties that flourished under
very different conditions.
In the early '50s, Borlaug acquired a variety of
dwarf wheat from Japan and cross-bred it with North American strains to produce
a semi-dwarf strain with a thicker, stronger stalk, capable of supporting a
heavier load of grain. Crossing these with his rust-resistant strains produced
ideal wheat for Mexico's needs.
By 1963, more than 95 percent of the wheat harvested in
Mexico was grown from seed developed by Borlaug. The country was now producing
more than enough wheat for its needs and was exporting wheat to the rest of the
world, while Borlaug's techniques were being applied to other grains.
In the 1960s, Pakistan and India were on the brink of
war, and the entire subcontinent of South Asia was beset with famine and
starvation. He began supplying seeds to India and Pakistan. Pakistan
became self-sufficient in wheat production by 1968; India was self-sufficient
in all cereal crops by 1974. Since then, grain production in both countries has
consistently outpaced population growth. Borlaug's achievements in Mexico,
India and Pakistan were hailed as a Green Revolution.
While crop failure and hunger persist in many parts of
the world, the mass starvation predicted by many experts in the '60s and '70s
were avoided by the efforts of Borlaug and his followers.
In October 1970 Nobel Peace prize was announced and
Borlaug got it. The world for once survived from the famine and starvation, and
proved Malthus wrong. Borlaug died of lymphoma at the age of 95,
on September 12, 2009, in his Dallas home.
8th
BOOK:THE LOST SYMBOL BY DAN BROWN
Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is summoned
to give a lecture at the United States Capitol, with the invitation
apparently from his mentor, a 33rd degree Mason named Peter
Solomon, who is the head of the Smithsonian Institution. Solomon has also
asked him to bring a small, sealed package which he had entrusted to Langdon
years earlier. When Langdon arrives at the Capitol, however, he learns that the
invitation he received was not from Solomon, but from Solomon's
kidnapper, Mal'akh, who has left Solomon's severed right hand in the
middle of the Capitol Rotunda in a recreation of the Hand of
Mysteries. Mal'akh then contacts Langdon, charging him with finding both the
Mason's Pyramid, which Masons believe is hidden somewhere underground in
Washington D.C., and the Lost Word, lest Solomon be executed.
Langdon is then met by Trent Anderson, head of the
Capitol police, and Inoue Sato, the head of the CIA's Office of Security.
Examining Solomon's hand, they discover a clue leading them to a Solomon's
Masonic altar in a room in the Capitol's sub-basement, where they find a small
pyramid lacking a capstone, with an inscription carved into it.
Sato then confronts Langdon with the security x-ray taken
of his bag when he entered the Capitol, which reveals a smaller pyramid in the
package Langdon brought in response to the request by the kidnapper posing as
Solomon. Because the package had been sealed for years, Langdon was unaware of
its contents, but Sato, dissatisfied with this, attempts to take Langdon into
custody. Before she can arrest him, however, she and Anderson are assaulted by
Warren Bellamy, the Architect of the Capitol and a Freemason, who then flees
with Langdon during the melee.
Mal'akh is a Freemason with tattoos covering almost his
entire body. He infiltrated the organization in order to obtain an ancient
source of power,[8] which he believes Langdon can unlock for him in return
for Peter's life. As Langdon deals with the events into which he has been
thrust, Mal'akh destroys the Smithonsonian-sponsored laboratory of Dr.
Katherine Solomon, Peter's younger sister, where she has conducted experiments
in Noetic Science. Mal'akh is also being pursued by Sato in the interests
of National Security.
Mal'akh captures Langdon and seriously injures Katherine
Solomon. He places Langdon in a tank of breathable oxygenated liquid, from
where Langdon unlocks the code at the Pyramid's base for Mal'akh, who then
flees with Peter Solomon to the Temple Room of the Scottish Rite's House
of the Temple. Langdon and Katherine are eventually rescued by Sato and her
staff who race to the House of the Temple where Mal'akh threatens to release a
heavily edited video showing government officials performing secret Masonic
rituals. Mal'akh, who turns out to be Peter's long-believed dead son, Zachary
Solomon, forces the Word—the circumpunct—out of his father and tattoos it
on his head on the last portion of unmarked skin on his body. Mal'akh then
orders Peter to sacrifice him, as he believes that it is his destiny to become
a demonic spirit and lead the forces of evil. Director Sato, however, arrives
at the Temple in a helicopter, which smashes the Temple's overhead glass panel,
the shards of which fatally impale Mal'akh. The CIA then thwart Mal'akh's plan
to transmit the video to several leading media channels using
an EMP blast, disabling a cell tower in the network path leading from
Mal'akh's laptop computer.
Peter informs Langdon that the circumpunct Zachary
tattooed on his head is not the Word. Deciding to take Langdon to the true
secret behind the Word, Peter leads him to the room atop the Washington Monument and
tells him that the Word—a common Christian Bible, the "Word of
God"—lies in the Monument's cornerstone, buried in the ground beneath the
Monument's staircase. Langdon realizes that the symbols on the pyramid's base
spelled out the words Laus Deo which translate to Praise
God. These words are inscribed upon the small aluminum capstone atop the
Monument, which is the true Masonic Pyramid.
Peter tells Langdon that the Masons believe that the
Bible is an esoteric allegory written by mankind, and that, like most religious
texts around the globe, it contains veiled instructions for harnessing man's
natural God-like qualities—similar to Katherine's Noetic research—and is not
meant to be interpreted as the commands of an all-powerful deity. This interpretation
has been lost amid centuries of scientific skepticism and fundamentalist
zealotry. The Masons have (metaphorically) buried it, believing that, when the
time is right, its rediscovering will usher in a new era of human
enlightenment.
7th BOOK: When All you have Ever Wanted is not
Enough: HAROLD KUSHNER (repeated reading in 2012)
6th BOOK: It’s ALL ONE CURRICULUM: Guidelines
and Activities for a unified approaches to sexuality, Gender, HIV, and Human
Rights Education
5th BOOK: I Know This much is True: Wally Lab
4th
BOOK: HOW TO DEAL WITH DIFFICULT PEOPLE-
VERNON HOWARD
3rd
Book: THE DO'S AND
TABOOS OF HOSTING INTERNATIONAL VISITORS - Roger E. Axtell.
2nd
Book: The Vertical
Farm: Feeding the world in the 21st century- Dr. Dickson Despommier
The dedication reads as below: “For the more than one
billion people who, through no fault of their own, go to sleep hungry each
night; and for the three billion more who will most likely arrive on this
planet over the next forty years to join them in their suffering, if nothing
changes.”
Fifteen thousand years ago there was not a single farm on
the planet. Now we farm a landmass the size of South America. By 2050, we need
added cropland of size of Brazil. This is the message from the early chapters
of the book – Vertical farming.
Vertical farm is a solution to the waste in cities, the
migration from villages to cities, long distance transportation of foods, and
for making cities food sufficient. The cities of near future- with
vertical farming system, shall meet the standard of self reliance. Using sun
and other energy sources, the crops are grown in sky crapper tall multi storied
structures with each farm as an eco system in itself.
Nothing endures but change
If we the humans were to suddenly disappear from the
plant how plants and animal will continue their life (The world without us – Alan Weisman). The assemblage of
plants and animals organize into mutually dependent network called ecosystems.
In techno-sphere- (Cradle to cradle- William
McDonough and Michael Braungart), the urban centers have no apparent cutoffs
regarding constraints of growth. Urban farming opportunities that arise
directly from the creation of vertical farms provide jobs to migrants from
farming background in villages. It is a better outcome for the displaced
agricultural personnel to discover that they can still plant and harvest- that too
in a controlled environment. No more praying for rain or sunshine or moderate
temperatures: they could save their prayers for things like winning the
lottery.
If we do not change our direction, we are likely to end
up where we are headed
By 2050- the world population is projected to be
8.6 billion. The hunting was an advanced technique over gathering and
scavenging strategies ( 2001:
A Space Odyssey). Omiverous nature of the human made them survive over the
generations.
Great Minds Think Alike
Don’t Worry Be Happy (page 68-69)
Author goes to Bhutan to explain the agriculture system.
It begins “Stewardship is an integral part of our moral contract with the
natural world that surrounds us. One place that still exemplifies this concept
is the country of Bhutan, a land of gentle, friendly people.”
…
“Again, I could not help thinking that I had
time-travelled back to the very origin of agriculture. These are the images I will
take to my grave”. It ends.
There is nothing like returning to a place that remains
unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered
The origins of 21st century agriculture can be traced
back to the convergence of four things: The American Civil War, The discovery
of Oil, The development of internal combustion engine and the invention of
dynamite.
In early colonial days, the New Englanders tried and
failed in farming. The native Americans helped the colonizers in farming
corn. A six inch deep hole in the ground, a small fish and a kernel of
corn was all it took , but Europeans unfamiliar with the need to fertilize in
their new homeland- often left out the fish part, and many got the whole thing
wrong from the beginning.
Basic nutrition, 1500 calories of disease free food, is
already considered luxury in some parts of the world. If people are starving,
and indeed they are, then its due to issues related to mal-distribution and
mean spirited politics, not actual crop shortage.
For long I was looking for an answer to the question, why
are the people in the agriculturally most advantageous tropics poorer than
their counterparts in climate betrayed colder regions. I got the hint. I hope I
can write that answer in my book.
There is nothing wrong with the change, as long as it is
in the right direction
The definition of how much is enough is largely
determined by the haves and not by the have-nots. The future wars in Middle
East will be on water not religion or oil. Hydroponics, aeroponics and drip
irrigation methods have improved vastly over the last ten years, to the point
of revolutionizing the ways in which we can produce indoor crops at will.
Despite all our cleverness, the connection between us and the rest of the world
remain strong and immutable.
Advantages of vertical farm include:
Year round crop production; No weather related crop
failure; No agricultural runoff; Allowance for ecosystem restoration; No use of
pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers; Use of 70-95 percent less water; greatly
reduced food miles; more control of food safety and security; New employment
opportunities; purification of grey water to drinking water; and Animal
feed from post harvest plant materials.
Be willing to surrender what you are for what you want to
become
The choice is ours as to whether or not we will carry out
our lives in an ecologically responsible fashion. The time has arrived for
humans to reassess their place in the natural world, embrace and celebrate the
differences between us and the rest of the creatures that comprise it, and
incorporate a reverence for our origins that reflect itself in a new respect
for the DNA molecule, no matter what forms it takes. In doing so, we will have
achieved a major milestones in our evolutions: sustainability into the
millennium level.
The First BOOK Read in 2012:From Third
world to First- Lee Kuan Yeu- i started reading it in 2011.
One
of the best autobiographies ever writen "From Third World to First"-
Lee Kuan Yew.
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Read that, and try telling yourself its comparable to 50 deaths and 3,500 kidney failures…it isn’t.