The Silver Rail Tavern in the 1950s, located at 225-227 Yonge Street. Toronto Archives, F1257, S1057, item 073.
The last time that I visited the Silver Rail Tavern was in 1995, when an elderly aunt and I visited it for lunch. I chose "the Rail" as I knew that when she had been younger, it was one of her favourite places to dine and enjoy a drink. She was thrilled with my choice, as she had not been inside it for many years. When she stepped in the door, she gushed, "It's exactly as I remember it. Oh! how I enjoyed sipping the Manhattans here." The Silver Rail did indeed change very little since it first opened, and this was one of it's charms.
The Silver Rail was the first bar in Toronto that received a liquor license from the LLBO when Premier George Drew, on April 2, 1947, relaxed the laws governing alcohol. Prohibition had ended in 1927, but there remained many restrictions, such as alcohol only being served in public places if it were purchased with food. It was common to see a person having a beer in a licensed establishment, a small sandwich or other low-cost item from the menu on the table, but untouched. The new law made it possible to order a beer or a glass of wine without ordering food. However, when the Silver Rail opened, no women were allowed to sit at the bar, and only one drink per person was permitted on the tables at a given time.
Previous to the Silver Rail, on the site had been Muirhead's Bar and Cafeteria. Its ground-floor space was designed by N. A. Armstrong in 1934, and it included a long bar that extended the entire length of the room. It was aligned with the north wall. Patrons were able to sit at the bar to eat or have a drink. Along the south wall, there were rows of tables. A silver-coloured rail, located beside the stairs that led to the lower level, provided the inspiration for the name of the new bar that opened on the same site— the Silver Rail.
It was In 1947 that Louis David Arnold and Michael P. Georges opened the Silver Rail, each investing $50,000 in the enterprise. It was located in the southwest corner of the ground floor of the Ryrie Building, which was on the northeast corner of Yonge and Shuter Streets. The owners of the Silver Rail maintained the basic layout that Armstrong had created for Muirhead's Bar, but on the south wall, instead of tables, they installed curved booths. In the lower level (basement) of the Rail, there was a classy restaurant, its decor elegant, with immaculate white table clothes. The waiters carried silver water jugs, and were attired in formal white jackets, and black trousers. The restaurant featured live music on weekends, and it was said that on one occasion, Oscar Peterson gave an impromptu performance on its baby grand piano. It was in this restaurant that my aunt and I enjoyed lunch in 1995.
The Silver Rail was renown for its excellent cuisine, specializing in steaks, roast beef, and seafood. In the 1940s and 1950s, these were the usual items on restaurant menus in Toronto, as they were based on traditional British fare. The dishes were popular, even though they were rather basic if compared with the city's multi-ethnic and gourmet menus of today. The bar more than compensated for the lack of variety in food, as it stocked a large assortment of whiskies, brandies, champagnes and a wide range of cocktails. The year it opened, highballs were 45 cents. Its location was close to Massey Hall, around the corner on Shuter Street. This made it a favourite for a drink, either before, or after a concert or event. The first month The Rail was open, it earned $90,000 in profits.
In 1948, the artist Eric Aldwinckle was commissioned to paint a large mural for the bar. During the 1950s, the Rail was a favourite of the employees of Eaton's and Simpsons stores. A friend of mine who worked at Simpson's in the 1950s, was paid 60 cents an hour. Sometimes he splurged and had lunch at the Rail, paying $1.50 for spaghetti. He considered this to be "high living." The tavern closed in 1998, and when the space was renovated for a new tenant, Aldwinckle's mural was lost.
My aunt was saddened by the closing of the Silver Rail. Then, only two restaurants remained that she had visited in her younger days — Fran's (famous for its rice pudding) and the Old Mill in Etobicoke (well known for dining and dancing).
Muirhead's classic Art Deco facade in June 1934. Photo from Construction Magazine, Vol. 27, in the collection of the Toronto Public Library.
The Silver Rail Tavern, which maintained many features of the facade of its predecessor, Muirhead's. Photo from the Ontario Archives.
The mural painted in 1948 by Eric Aldwinckle. Photo by Michael McClelland.
View looking north on Yonge Street from Shuter Street in 1949. The street is covered with thick timbers to allow the digging of the subway below. The marquees of the Imperial and Downtown Theatres are visible in the distance, to the north of the Ryrie Building where the the Silver Rail was located. Toronto Archives, S 381, fl 0019, id 6288-2.
The Ryrie Building in 1950, on the northeast corner of Shuter and Yonge Streets. Toronto Archives, F 1257, S1057, item 0738.
The Ryrie Building and the Silver Rail on May 11, 1977. Toronto Archives, Fonds 1526, fl 0004, item 001.
The camera is pointed north on Yonge Street in 1980. The Ryrie Building and the Silver Rail can be seen. On the left, a portion of the Eaton Centre is visible. Toronto Archives, Fonds 124, fl 0003, id 0127.
Gazing south on Yonge Street from a short distance north of Shuter Streets. Toronto Archives, S1465, f 1305, Item 0002.
The space in 2014 at Yonge and Shuter Streets, in the Ryrie Building, where the Silver Rail was located.
One of Toronto's newest "red rockets," northbound on Spadina Avenue on July 10, 2015.
When the city of Toronto was the small colonial town of York, people travelled by horseback, carriage, wagon, or on foot. Even after the city was incorporated in 1834, these methods of transportation prevailed. However, as the city expanded, these means became inadequate. As a result, in 1849, Burt Williams, a cabinetmaker and undertaker, decided to extend his services and transport the living as well as the dead to their destinations. He built several 6-passenger stagecoaches, which he named the Williams Omnibus Line. It commenced at the St. Lawrence Market, journeyed west on King Street, and then, north on Yonge to the town of Yorkville.
As Toronto's population grew further, the Omnibus service also became inadequate. In 1861, the Toronto Street Railway Company (TSR), financed by a group of businessmen, commenced operating horse-drawn Hadden streetcars, capable of carrying many more passengers. The first streetcar route was the same as that of the Burt Williams Omnibus Line. The second route established was Queen Street, from the St. Lawrence Market to Ossington Avenue. The 30-year contract of the Toronto Street Railway Company was terminated in 1891.
Next, the Toronto Railway Company (TRC) was granted a 30-year contract to provide transportation services. The same year (1891), the city's first electric-powered streetcars appeared on Church Street. However, as the city annexed more communities, such as Dovercourt and Earlscourt, the TRC refused to build tracks into the new districts, insisting that servicing these areas was not part of their mandate. Because the TRC's contract did not terminate until 1921, in 1911 the City of Toronto created the Toronto Civic Railway Company (TCR) and became directly involved in owning and operating streetcars.
During the years 1912-1917, TCR laid tracks along streets that the TRC were serving but refused to extend. The Danforth line was continued from Broadview to Luttrell, the St. Clair route connected between Avenue Road and Lansdowne Avenue, the Lansdowne line pushed as far south as the CPR tracks, streetcars added on Bloor Street between Dundas and Runnymede, and the Gerrard streetcars extended beyond Greenwood. To meet the needs of the longer routes, the company purchased about 70 new streetcars.
In a plebiscite in 1946, Torontonians voted in favour a subway on Yonge Street and also on Queen Street. Construction on the Yonge line began in 1949. Unfortunately, the Queen Street line was cancelled as the federal government failed to provide the funding. Does this situation seem familiar? Canada's first subway opened in 1954, between Union Station and Eglinton Avenue. The same year, the name of the company was changed to the Toronto Transit Commission.
The Peter Witt cars were retired in 1963, but the PCC cars continued until 1995. As these older models were phased out, the CLRV streetcars (Canadian Light Rail Vehicles), as well as an articulated version commenced operating. In 2014, the first of the new streetcars began service on the Spadina line. These will eventually replace all the CLRV cars that remain in service as of 2015.
Horse-drawn streetcars operated by the Toronto Street Railway Company in the 1890s. These cars were operated only in the summer as they were not enclosed. View gazes east along Queen Street East from Church Street. The St. Lawrence Hall is visible in the background.
A winterized streetcar on Spadina Avenue in 1890. Photo, Toronto Reference Library. In that decade, many impressive homes lined Spadina Avenue as it was an affluent residential street.
Electric-powered streetcars first appeared in 1891. This photo shows the cars on Yonge Street, c. 1900. They were essentially larger versions of the horse-drawn streetcar. View gazed north on Yonge from King Street.
Avenue Road streetcars in 1912. Toronto Archives, F1231, it.1660. These are the same type of streetcars as in the previous photo.
Streetcars continued to increase in size. This streetcar was operated on St. Clair Avenue by the Toronto Civic Railway Company. Photo was taken in 1913, the year the St. Clair line opened. The streetcar is eastbound and was photographed near Wychwood Avenue.
A Peter Witt streetcar on York Street on October 30, 1928, the Royal York Hotel under construction in the background. These cars commenced service in the city in 1921 and retired in 1963. Toronto Archives, Series 71, S0071, it6396.
A PCC streetcar heading eastbound on Carlton Street near Church Street. Maple Leaf Garden, the Odeon Carlton Theatre and Eaton's College Street store are visible in the background. Photo, Ontario Archives.
A PCC streetcar on Dundas Street West near Huron Street in Chinatown in 1970.
A westbound PCC Streetcar on Queen Street East at Church Street in 1970.
A Peter Witt streetcar at the Halton County Radial Railway Museum. Visitors to the museum are able to ride aboard these famous old cars.
Interior of a Peter Witt streetcar at the museum.
A westbound PCC streetcar in the Labour Day Parade in 2012, view gazing east along Queen West at Spadina Avenue. This streetcar is maintained by the TTC to aid tourism and is available for private hire.
A CLRV streetcar on King Street East at Church Street, St. James Cathedral in the background.
Articulated light rail vehicles (ALRV) on Queen Street, westbound near Yonge Street.
Interior of a ALRV on Queen Street.
A CLRV westbound on Queen West at John Street in 2013, the Princess of Wales Theatre in the background.
An articulated light rail vehicles (ALRV) eastbound on Queen Street West near Bathurst Street in July 2013. The marquee of the old Orpheus Theatre is visible on the right-hand side of the photo.


text:
module Sequel
  module EmulateOffsetWithRowNumber
    # Emulate OFFSET support with the ROW_NUMBER window function
    #
    # The implementation is ugly, cloning the current dataset and modifying
    # the clone to add a ROW_NUMBER window function (and some other things),
    # then using the modified clone in a subselect which is selected from.
    #
    # If offset is used, an order must be provided, because the use of ROW_NUMBER
    # requires an order.
    def select_sql
      return super unless o = @opts[:offset]

      order = @opts[:order]
      if require_offset_order?
        order ||= default_offset_order
        if order.nil? || order.empty?
          raise(Error, "#{db.database_type} requires an order be provided if using an offset")
        end
      end

      columns = clone(:append_sql=>'').columns
      dsa1 = dataset_alias(1)
      rn = row_number_column
      sql = @opts[:append_sql] || ''
      subselect_sql_append(sql, unlimited.
        unordered.
        select_append{ROW_NUMBER(:over, :order=>order){}.as(rn)}.
        from_self(:alias=>dsa1).
        select(*columns).
        limit(@opts[:limit]).
        where(SQL::Identifier.new(rn) > o).
        order(rn))
      sql
    end

    private

    # The default order to use for datasets with offsets, if no order is defined.
    # By default, orders by all of the columns in the dataset.
    def default_offset_order
      clone(:append_sql=>'').columns
    end

    # Whether an order is required when using offset emulation via ROW_NUMBER, true by default.
    def require_offset_order?
      true
    end
  end
end

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Combustible. Finely dispersed particles form explosive mixtures in air. NO open flames. Closed system, dust explosion-proof electrical equipment and lighting. Prevent deposition of dust. Use water spray, foam, dry powder, carbon dioxide.
Cough. Sore throat. Wheezing. Use local exhaust or breathing protection. Fresh air, rest. Half-upright position. Refer for medical attention.
Abdominal pain. Do not eat, drink, or smoke during work. Rinse mouth. Do NOT induce vomiting. Give one or two glasses of water to drink. Refer for medical attention .
Separated from combustible substances, reducing agents, strong oxidants, strong bases, strong acids and food and feedstuffs. See Chemical Dangers. Ventilation along the floor. Dry. Well closed.
WHITE LUSTROUS CRYSTALS WITH CHARACTERISTIC ODOUR.
Decomposes on contact with hot water. This produces phthalic acid. Reacts with strong oxidants, strong acids, strong bases and reducing agents. Reacts violently with copper oxide and sodium nitrite on heating. This generates explosion hazard. Attacks many metals in the presence of water.
The substance is severely irritating to the eyes, skin and respiratory tract.
Repeated or prolonged contact may cause skin sensitization. Repeated or prolonged inhalation may cause asthma. See Notes.
TLV: 0.002 mg/m3, as TWA; 0.005 mg/m3 as STEL; (skin); (SEN); A4 (not classifiable as a human carcinogen).
The substance may be transported in molten state.
Rest and medical observation are therefore essential.
For materials containing more than 0.05% of maleic anhydride the UN number is 2214, hazard class 8, packaging group III.


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I've Seen Home, And This Ain't It!
I grew up in Walker County, Alabama in the 1950's and '60's. It was in a valley about 1-2 miles long, running east and west, nestled between two hillsides. It was a beautiful place, much smaller than but not a lot unlike Cades Cove in East Tennessee (at least in the mind of a child). The fields were fertile and the Bermuda grass pastureland where the Black Angus cattle were raised was deep and thick. The Mt. Hope church building, where I attended as a child, was just a short distance from the house. Not a lot of folk there, but they were "salt of the earth" people. In that valley, a young boy found the nourishment he needed to grow both physically and spiritually, but it wasn't to last.
I was only about 10 or 11 years old when the first open coal mine appeared. One by one the farms and the fields disappeared under mounds of dirt and rock. The old church building mentioned earlier was rendered uninhabitable by rocks which came through the roof, caused by pit blasts far to near. One by one, many of the people who made that valley home were forced to move out. I moved to Birmingham, got married, and the rest of that story is history.
From time to time, I've gone back to survey the damage and remember and, honestly, it makes me want to cry. You see, I've seen and remember home — and that ain't it. There's just no resemblance between the place I grew up and what it is now. And just calling all that to mind causes me to ponder.
You see, through the eye of faith I've seen my real home. God tells you and me about it in His word. It is a place that flesh and blood cannot inherit (1 Cor. 15:50-53) where we will have new, immortal, bodies like that of the Lord (cf. 1 Jn. 3:1). Peter describes it as an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and one that will not fade away (1 Pet. 1:4). It is a place of eternal life (Jn 3:16) that Jesus promised to prepare so that we can be with Him (Jn. 14:1-3). The throne of God is there and myriads of angels (Rev. 4-5). The renowned faithful of all the ages will be there — Moses, Abraham, Paul and Peter. There's going to be people like you and me there too — surely some you know — people whose names neither sacred writ nor the history books of men record but whose names are written in the Lamb's Book of Life.
Paul knew that after life's final breath this reward awaited him (2 Tim. 4:8). He looked forward to the moment when He could "depart and be with Christ" (Phil. 1:23) where, once there, he would be "at home with the Lord" (2 Cor. 5:8).
I've seen home, and this world ain't it (Dear Mrs. Snow, please pardon my incorrect English for sake of emphasis?). The "world", consists of the "lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life"(1 Jn. 2:15-17). These are the "thorns" of this life — worries, riches, and pleasures — things that strangle spirituality and become a stone of stumbling to us as we seek to serve Jesus (Lk. 8:14). Examples are found throughout Scripture.
The "lust of the flesh." The very first sin in the Bible started when Eve "saw that the tree was good for food" (Gen. 3:6). The Sodomites "... burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts" and God said that "those who practice such things are worthy of death." God burned the city to the ground (Gen. 19:5,24; cf. Rom. 1:27,32). And don't forget David, who burned in his lust for Bathsheba (2 Sam. 11:2-4). David's son reminded us, "The one who commits adultery with a woman is lacking sense; He who would destroy himself does it. Wounds and disgrace he will find, And his reproach will not be blotted out" (Pro. 6:32-33). Too bad he didn't heed his own wise words (1 Kgs. 11:1-4). Such is the lust of the flesh, and in whatever form it takes it has been the downfall of many men and women.
The "lust of the eyes." Eve saw that the forbidden fruit was "a delight to the eyes" (Gen. 3:6). She may have been the first but she certainly is not the only person to have been taken in by what they saw or what they were attracted to. Lot "lifted up his eyes and saw all the valley of the Jordan... Sodom and Gomorrah... like the garden of the Lord" (Gn 13:10). He pitched his tent toward, moved into, set in Sodom's gates, and lost his family as the result of his choices. Space won't allow me to speak of Achan (Josh. 7:21), Ahab (1 Kgs. 21), and many others, but such is the lust of the eyes and the sin to which it leads.
The "boastful pride of life." Consider the building of the tower of Babel (Gen. 11:4). The people wanted to wanted to "build a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and... make for ourselves a name... (Gen. 11:4). God intervened to stop such arrogance and scatter the people. King Uzziah was only sixteen years old when he became king. God helped him, strengthened him, and made him famous. Militarily he was without a peer. But, "when he became strong, his heart was so proud that he acted corruptly, and he was unfaithful to the Lord his God..." (2 Chr. 12:16). Nebuchadnezzar boasted, "Is this not Babylon the great, which I myself have built as a royal residence by the might of my power and for the glory of my majesty" (Dan 4:30). God responded by removing him from the throne, sending him into the fields to eat grass like cattle, "until you recognize that the Most High is ruler over the realm of mankind and bestows it on whomever He wishes" (Dan. 4:32). And don't forget the proud Pharisee (Lk. 18:11). The vital lesson we learn is that, "Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before stumbling" (Pro. 16:18).
This is the "world" of which John said, if you love it, you can't love the Father. James warned that, "...friendship with the world is hostility toward God. Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God" (Jas. 4:4).
You and I need to always keep in mind that we are "aliens and strangers" in this world (1 Pet. 2:11). These two words mean nearly the same thing. The first carries with it the idea of "one who lives in a place without the right of citizenship" (Logos). The second involves "a person who comes from a foreign country into a city or land to reside there with the natives temporarily" (Logos). Three vital lessons are found here.
1. We don't belong here. God created us — and then in Jesus He re-created us — for something different, something better: eternal fellowship with Him. As long as we stay in this life, we'll never be citizens of this world, but of heaven (Phil. 3:20-21).
2. We are transients here, temporary, just passing through. Our real home is in heaven, where the Lord is (2Co 5:8). We don't need to form any attachments to this world that will hinder us from going home when that time comes.
3. While here, we are going to be different from the world around us. People will see it in us — in the way we talk, how we act, what we wear, and where we go (2 Cor. 6:14-7:1)— and they will treat us differently (1 Pet. 4:1-4). Don't fight it. Embrace it!
We sometimes sing, "This world is not my home, I'm just a passing through; My treasured are laid up, somewhere beyond the blue." It's a beautiful song with a powerful message, but is it true of you? Is it possible that sometimes you act more like a citizen of this world than a citizen of heaven?
One day this world and all it contains will be destroyed in a ball of blazing fire (2 Pet. 3:10). Time as we know it will end. Then comes that inevitable interview with God (2 Cor. 5:10). You can't avoid it. You can't run from it. You can't let someone stand in your place. You can't hide the things you have done, nor the things you have said (Heb. 4:13). What will the judge of all the earth say to you?
Sometimes I've wondered, as I return to survey those rock pits in Walker County, if in His providence God didn't do that on purpose, i.e., destroy my earthly "home." Had it not happened, I don't know what I would be, where I would be, or what I would be doing. I can picture myself being drawn back there, were it still the same, and that's probably not a good thing. Maybe it is good that it was destroyed because I will tell you, I still have a strong desire for home — just not the one at Route 3, Box 50, Parrish, AL. I've seen home, and this ain't it!


text:
The following texts have been used as "Quote of the Week" on the web page at https://bwo.life. They are arranged here from latest to oldest.
Nine years ago Richard Conn Henry, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University, published an opinion piece in Nature entitled "The Mental Universe". He urged the scientific community to repeat Galileo's achievement in "believing the unbelievable", and recalled Sir James Jeans' famous remark that "the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine". We don't know all that this implies, he continued, "but — the great thing is — it is true. ... The Universe is immaterial — mental and spiritual. Live, and enjoy".
The most dramatic thing about the article was the lack of drama: it produced no visible controversy. After all, physicists have long been accustomed to receive such assertions peaceably, because the science itself seems tolerant of them.
But suppose Henry had made a narrower and more modest claim — just a small part of what he implied in "The Mental Universe". Suppose he had written only of "The Mental Cell". Would the occasion have been equally unremarkable? Most molecular and cellular biologists, I suspect, will readily picture the unseemly consequences likely to follow upon the appearance of words like immaterial, mental, and spiritual in their published papers. It would be as if an unspoken taboo were violated.
(from "Let's Loosen Up Biological Thinking!)
From humans to bacteria, every organism is a cognitive creature, carrying out mind-like functions in every aspect of its life. All biologists know this, even if they are strongly encouraged by the reigning intellectual climate to forget it. Be aware, however, that one might speak of the mind-like aspects of simpler organisms (1) without suggesting that these organisms have minds in anything like the familiar human sense, and (2) while recognizing that the effective wisdom playing through the simplest, one-celled organism — and the cells of our own bodies — far transcends any mental achievements we humans are consciously capable of.
(from "Psyche, Soma, and the Unity of Gesture", Part 2 of "From Bodily Wisdom to the Knowing Self")
It ought to be a truism among biologists that our understanding of living creatures must be, at its most fundamental (irreducible) level, an understanding of activity. And therefore our knowledge of changes in the organism — for example, evolutionary changes, or the transformations during development — must be, fundamentally, a knowledge of changes in activity, not mere rearrangements of things with predefined functional identities. The experimentalist, in comparing two specimens under different conditions, can note down all the differences in quantities of this or that molecule, or all the differences in morphology of leaf or limb. But each of these changes precipitates, so to speak, out of an altered process.
The organism is always a becoming, and to think about a capacity for becoming is radically different from thinking about a collection of well-defined (which is to say, context-independent) things. If the biologist's training included even one week where this difference was held up for attention, everything in biology would be colored differently. We can perhaps glimpse the difficulty of the task by asking: How would we characterize a change in directed (forming) activity, as opposed to a change from one finished form to another, or a mere rearrangement of things?
(from "Who Are You and Who Am I and Who Are We?")
Mathematical biologist Joshua Plotkin, referring to the discovery of vast regulative processes bearing on DNA, concludes: "Just the sheer existence of these exotic regulators suggests that our understanding about the most basic things — such as how a cell turns on and off — is incredibly naïve" ... And referring to the "huge number of potentially regulatory elements in a very crowded nucleus", University of Massachusetts geneticist Job Dekker wonders "How do cells ensure that genes only respond to the right regulatory elements while ignoring the hundreds of thousands of others"
It's a good and obvious question. An editor of Science amplifies it this way: "If you think air traffic controllers have a tough job guiding planes into major airports or across a crowded continental airspace, consider the challenge facing a human cell trying to position its proteins". A given cell, he notes, may make more than 10,000 different proteins, and typically contains more than a billion protein molecules at any one time. "Somehow a cell must get all its proteins to their correct destinations — and equally important, keep these molecules out of the wrong places". And further: "It's almost as if every mRNA [an intermediate between a gene and a corresponding protein] coming out of the nucleus knows where it's going".
Of course, there's not much sense in saying particular molecules "know" where they are going. But the context they find themselves in certainly embodies and gives expression to a kind of wisdom that proves highly effective in coordinating their movements.
(from "How Biologists Lost Sight of the Meaning of Life")
A reader responded to my article, "The Reduction Complex", by complaining that "Talbott never defines what he means by 'quality'". Another reader voiced a similar concern when he asked me for a definition of "the exact method of holism — how it runs as a science and not as poetry". I respect these requests. This essay is the beginning of a response. But I am afraid my response may not be quite what my correspondents were looking for. The crucial issue, we will find, is whether their insistence upon a definition and an exact method is an insistence upon conformity to the very science we need to reform. After all, we typically try to define a thing by holding it fast, freezing it, nailing it down. We want to say what it is, so that we can point at and delineate it in no uncertain terms. We want to grasp it securely and without ambiguity.
There is, in other words, an aggressive philosophical stance concealed in the seemingly innocent demand for a definition. But what if reality, like water, slips through our clutching fingers? How much good will it do us to pin something down if the reality we are trying to lay hold of is a power of movement and becoming — a living, animating power by which each thing is continually becoming something different? What if the entire business of qualities is to express the moving, pulsing, darting, gliding, ascending and descending, throbbing, living, self-transforming character of the world's phenomena? Can we exactly define that which is continually transforming itself?
If, from the start, we insist that the poet could not possibly be exercising badly needed cognitive faculties neglected by today's dominant science — well, then, we are not asking what sort of new science might arise. Rather, we are insisting that, whatever it is, it must embody the limitations of the science we already have.
(from "Recognizing Reality")
Tolkien once wrote that we create "by the law in which we're made." Our own creative speech is one, or potentially one, with the creative speech of nature that first uttered us. (How could it be otherwise?) This suggests that our relation to every wild thing is intimate indeed. We speak from the same source. We cannot know ourselves — cannot acquaint ourselves with the potentials of our own speaking — except by learning how those potentials have already found expression in the stunning diversity of nature.
Every created thing images some aspect of ourselves, an aspect we can discover and vivify only through understanding. The destruction of a habitat and its inhabitants is truly a loss of part of ourselves, a kind of amnesia. Wendell Berry is right to ask, "How much can a mind diminish its culture, its community and its geography — how much topsoil, how many species can it lose — and still be a mind?" As Gary Snyder puts it, "The nature in the mind is being logged and burned off."
When Thoreau told us, "In wildness is the preservation of the world," the wildness he referred to was at least in part our wildness. If humankind fails to embrace with its sympathies and understanding — which is to say, within our own being — every wild thing, then both we and the world will to that extent be diminished. This is true even if our refusal goes no further than the withdrawal from conversation.
(from "A Conversation with Nature")
It is not at all clear how a universe of appearing things — things declaring themselves to us and bearing the sources of our language and thought within them — could possibly be alien to our own story. Not only have we drawn our interior life from the world's meanings, both sublime and awful, but we live in a world whose very nature is to be encompassed within our consciousness — to live within us. Far from finding ourselves strangers in an alien universe, we embrace with our imagination and understanding the most distant galaxies, bearing witness to the significances of their light.
(from "A Physicist, a Philosopher, and the Meaning of Life")
How does the cell divide? How is body temperature maintained? How do signals originate, move through the uncertainties of multicellular environments, get transduced, and ultimately produce their specific effects within individual cells? — such inquiries about sustained narratives commonly provide the questions for molecular biological research projects. But the "explanations" arrived at typically abandon the narrative context of the original inquiry and focus instead on isolated physical causes. For example, how does the structure of this molecule fit together with the structure of that one, or which proteins interact with which others? It may be implied that answers to such questions explain the narrative, but they never do. The physical transactions are simply caught up in the narrative.
The truly biological problems have to do with how countless such interactions are woven together as the threads of an integral and recognizable story, when it would be perfectly lawful, in a physical sense, for every one of the interacting molecules to head off in a direction irrelevant to the storyline and engage in any one of a thousand other transactions. No analysis of physical lawfulness can distinguish the different cases, because physical laws know nothing of the organism's storyline.
What the typical explanations fail to acknowledge, in other words, is the overall, ongoing, coordinated activity — the appearance of purpose — that prompted the very questions the biologists began investigating. The language of physical causes never gets us to the story of the organism — never traces the organism's unique and colorful path through its own world. Of course, we do need the usual physical picture, but we get its meaning only when we look through it, rather as we "listen through" the physical sounds of speech in order to discern the thoughts and intentions of the speaker.
(from "The Problematic Effectiveness of Reason in Biology", Part 1 of "From Bodily Wisdom to the Knowing Self")
The problem of form in the organism — how does a single cell (zygote) reliably develop to maturity "according to its own kind" — has vexed biologists for centuries. But the same mystery plays out in the mature organism, which must continually work to maintain its normal form, as well as restore it when injured. It is difficult to bring oneself fully face to face with the enormity of this accomplishment. Scientists can damage tissues in endlessly creative ways that the organism has never confronted in its evolutionary history. Yet, so far as its resources allow, it mobilizes those resources, sets them in motion, and does what it has never done before, all in the interest of restoring a dynamic form and a functioning that the individual molecules and cells certainly cannot be said to "understand" or "have in view".
We can frame the problem of identity and context with this question: Where do we find the context and activity that, in whatever sense we choose to use the phrase, does "have in view" this restorative aim? Not an easy question. Yet the achievement is repeatedly carried through; an ever-adaptive intelligence comes into play somehow, and all those molecules and cells are quite capable of participating in and being caught up in the play.
Meaning is a fundamental given of the world we live in. If there is anything in the evolutionary literature purporting to explain the origin of speech that does not already assume a capacity for speech, I would like to know about it. As Owen Barfield has succinctly fingered the matter: asking about the origin of language is like asking about the origin of origin. We can speak only because we were first spoken. And before we were spoken, the single cell was spoken, bearing in all the narrative details of its molecular adeptness and harmony the reverberating imprint, the resonance, of the speaking through which it lives.
So, no, we do not require a tortuous philosophical analysis of meaning. We need only wake up to the sea of meaning within which we all swim, and without which we would have no world whatever. We live by grace of meaning; our world is a logos-world. To pretend to refuse this meaning is to attempt a self-effacement (and a world-effacement) we can never fully carry out. It is to refuse to stand awake as human beings.
Meaning never arises from the non-meaningful. The question we should ask ourselves is not whether meaning can arise from what is not meaningful, but whether "not meaningful" makes any sense at all. Which, of course, is to ask whether "meaninglessness" has any meaning. That's the kind of absurd territory we lose ourselves in when we ask for an informative and truthful science without meaning.
Nothing here implies that humans possess greater "moral worth" (whatever that might mean) than other living things. What distinguishes us is not our moral worth, but the fact that we bear the burden of moral responsibility. That this burden has risen to consciousness at one particular locus within nature is surely significant for the destiny of nature. When Jack Turner suggested that the last ten thousand years of human history may have been "simply evil," he ignored the worthy historical gift enabling him to pronounce such a judgment. How can we downplay our special gift of knowledge and responsibility without fatal consequences for the world?
We have seen that a great unknown presses in upon us from all sides. Despite our impressive technological successes, the fundamental terms of our science remain seemingly impenetrable mysteries. What one physicist wrote in 1985 is no less true today: "As yet no physicist can tell you what sort of world we happen to live in". Humbling as it may seem in an era so arrogantly dismissive of the past, our current physical science gives us no basis for belittling the ancient human experience of living in something rather more like a universe of beings than a universe of things.
But we have also seen that an intelligible world is more intimately near to us than most of us have dared to hope. If we understand the world at all — and we are all convinced we do — it can only be because it consists, by nature, of qualitative appearances ("phenomena") available to experience. It presents itself on the stage of our inner being.
And, finally, by looking at the history of language we have seen that the expressive face of the world appeared to our ancestors as a kind of speech, and it was from this presentation that our own powers of speech derived. Like language, every natural phenomenon was an exterior through which there shone interior significances. The essential elements of nature were not mute, expressionless things, but resonant images symbolizing meanings.
We find some sort of reason and intention (or purpose) at all levels of biological description. No explanation of electrical, mechanical, and chemical interactions in a dividing cell conveys the narrative meaning of cell division. Nearly all the specific interactions, considered singly, could occur under other circumstances, or could occur differently in the present circumstances. Their elaborate and magnificently coordinated "striving toward cell division" — a striving that tries to adapt in a consistently directed way to whatever conditions the environment may throw up — does not lawfully follow from the underlying physical lawfulness. The striving and adjustment to circumstances, rather than being explained by the physical lawfulness, gives direction to it.
In one way or another all biologists acknowledge intention or purpose in this inescapable, practical, and descriptive sense. They recognize that the objects of their study are creatures caught up in a narrative — a narrative that is coming from somewhere and going somewhere in a reasonable, means-end sort of way, and not merely a law-abiding way. Organisms live purposeful lives. Yet, it is this narrative stream that the molecular biological literature assiduously ignores.
Even a superficial acquaintance with the biological literature today makes it clear that the effort to explain the whole organism as a result of self-contained causal parts that do not participate in, and are not sustained by, the life of their larger context is destined to fail. If biologists are going to speak incessantly about the importance of context, then they need to reckon honestly with the problems it raises, rather than immediately change the subject to "controlling factors" — factors that, as the contemporary literature makes so vividly clear, never do control in absolute terms. If all such factors are context-dependent, we ought at least to ask ourselves how this qualification modifies the notion of "control".
We are, in fact, beset by questions on all sides. What exactly are we referring to when we speak of "context" and "organism"? How can we make these terms, as we are compelled to use them, more than necessary blanks in our descriptive language — blanks about whose necessity we can say nothing? For example, does our actual use of these terms differ much from the way people of an earlier era might have used "archetype" or "entelechy" or "being"?
When biologists speak of the organism's activity, who exactly do they mean to say is performing that activity? When they acknowledge that something in the organism is context-dependent, what in fact is it dependent upon — what agency, or unified sphere of activity, or principle, or lawfulness, or other reality of any sort are they appealing to? They cannot be pointing merely to a particular collection of objects, because the collection can be endlessly varied or perturbed, and yet the context remains more or less coherent, and the organism more or less maintains its character. What is coherent? What has this character?
If we cannot define "meaning", what are we doing when we ask what someone means? Apparently what we're asking for is not something neatly packageable or nailed down like a ... — well, I was going to say "like a dictionary definition". But, of course, dictionary definitions do not nail down anything at all. They define words by using other words, and simply assume that we will be able to dance our way into the midst of the circling words by moving in tune with the meanings we already possess and improvising upon them.
Meaning of any significance is never something we can hand someone definitively, because each word we speak depends upon and participates in all the others. We can never say of any profound meaning, "There! I've got it!" Meaning is a journey. We can only track meaning as we might track the blossoming of a flower, getting to know it better and better even as we continually lose its old form and must rediscover its truth newly metamorphosed.
The English philologist, Owen Barfield, reminded us that we can suggest meaning, but cannot convey it as though it were a "bit" of the information biologists are so fond of. This is why, as Barfield demonstrated, our grasp of new meaning is typically mediated by figurative or metaphorical language — language that can only encourage and assist us toward exercising our own powers for intuiting the content at issue. We do not transmit information; we assist at the birth of insight.
When we consider that an almost unfathomable intelligence is already at work in the zygote — for example, in the very processes through which the future brain will be formed and begin to function — it seems rather rash to regard the conscious intelligence with which we employ our brains as absolutely separate from that earlier, brain-forming intelligence. It's not clear how we might even speak coherently about the presence of fundamentally disconnected intelligences at play within the unity of an organism.
(from "Toward a Thought-Full Teleology")
The well-intentioned exhortation to replace anthropocentrism with biocentrism, if pushed very far, becomes a curious contradiction. It appeals to the uniquely human — the detachment from our environment that allows us to try to see things from the Other's point of view — in order to deny any special place for humans within nature. We are asked to make a philosophical and moral principle of the idea that we do not differ decisively from other orders of life — but this formulation of principle is itself surely one decisive thing we cannot ask of those other orders.
There is no disgrace in referring to the "uniquely human." If we do not seek to understand every organism's unique way of being in the world, we exclude it from the ecological conversation. To exclude ourselves in this way reduces our words to gibberish, because we do not speak from our own center.
So far as the historical record testifies, our evolutionary trajectory has not accorded with the usual assumptions. There is no evidence that we slowly ascended from a crude life of material unmeaning to a humanly contrived realm of meaning, value, culture, and spirituality. Our life today, with its materialistic convictions about the meaninglessness of nature, has required a long descent from the living, ensouled landscape upon which our ancestors were nurtured.
Organisms do things; rocks have things done to them. Even at rest a cat is doing something; rocks do not rest, but are brought to rest. An organism is always engaged in tasks, always going somewhere. Its activity is directed and in some sense intentional and purposeful ("teleological"). Its judgments in responding appropriately to environmental challenges reflect a profound biological wisdom.
From the molecular level on up, organisms mobilize their resources in order to achieve things, whether replicating DNA, splicing RNA, orchestrating cell division, forming embryonic organs, healing wounds, breathing, constructing a nest, securing food, caring for offspring, shedding a skin, maintaining body temperature, hibernating, or anything else we can properly regard as biological activity. Such activity is always part of a life story, and the protagonist in that story is in some sense what every story protagonist must be: a reasoning agent.
But you will already have asked, quite rightly, what is meant by "reasoning agent"? And even if we are driven to use such a phrase, how can we distinguish an aphid's "reasoning" from that of a nuclear physicist? This is the question I will address here. Until we sort the matter out, the language of the preceding paragraphs (and even much of the standard biological literature) invites horrible misunderstandings. Note that I have already twice said, in some sense. We must be on our guard.
[Regarding the hair follicle niche in mammals and the primacy of context over cellular identity:] Dramatically, the authors [of a technical article] show that "niche stem cells can be dispensable for tissue regeneration, provided that the overall integrity of the niche is maintained". When the stem cell population in the bulge or hair germ is destroyed by laser ablation, distant epithelial cells flow toward the damaged compartment and go through a transformation of identity enabling them to replace the lost cells. As the authors summarize it, "The overall structure and function of the tissue is maintained because cells are capable of adopting new fates as dictated by their new niche microenvironment".
It is impossible to reconcile these goings-on in the hair follicle with the picture of an organism being constructed from an available collection of well-defined parts as building blocks. The larger context helps to "decide" what sorts of elements it will have, how they should be transformed, and how they will come into mutual relationship. Nothing could be further from the common picture of the organism or the cell as a product of bottom-up causation, where the sole basis for understanding consists of putting back together in our minds the parts we have previously analyzed out of — and severed from — their life-receiving connection to the whole.
[Regarding physicist Steven Weinberg's remark that "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless":] By "pointless", Weinberg later explained, he meant "not particularly directed toward human beings" (NPR interview, undated). But what does that mean? Surely we do not need, or want, the universe pointing to us in some selfish sense. But when we comprehend things — when we are joined to them in an act of understanding — they lend themselves to the intimacy of our innermost being; their sensibility becomes our own. A universe that gives itself to us in this way does not seem to have the "chilling, cold impersonal quality" Weinberg finds in it.
Actually, you couldn't find more anthropomorphic — which is to say, more humanly meaningful — terms than "chilling", "cold", and "impersonal". Weinberg, one happily notes, has not entirely fled his own humanity. And we doubtless do run into things we justly describe with the qualities he discerns, thereby relating them to our inner life and discovering something about their character. It's just that these are not the only or even the most common qualities human beings find when they gaze, fully informed, into a starry sky or the teeming protoplasm of a living cell.
When a pianist plays a Beethoven sonata, the infinitely complex movements of her fingers, arms, and whole body must somehow express her intentions. On any particular occasion — say, a funeral or wedding — she may inflect her interpretation so as to yield a slight shift of character and mood. This means she will modify all those complex movements in an almost unthinkably nuanced manner.
The result is an utterly refined physiological realization of her intentions, all the way down to the finest details of gene expression. These must vary, for the sake of the performance, from one cell to the next over trillions of cells.
So tell me: Do we, in this picture, find any break between the pianist's conscious effort to realize her expressive intentions, and the unconscious expression of those intentions at the molecular level? Is not every cell of her body informed by her thoughts, feelings, and intentions — this despite the fact that no cell thinks, feels, or intends in any way we would want to call "conscious"?
(from a talk titled "Toward a Thought-Full Teleology")
The classicist, Bruno Snell, somewhere remarked that to experience a rock anthropomorphically is also to experience ourselves petromorphically — to discover what is rock-like within ourselves. It is the kind of discovery we have been making, aided by nature and the genius of language, for thousands of years. It is how we have come to know what we are — and what we are is (to use some old language) a microcosm of the macrocosm. Historically, we have drawn our consciousness of ourselves from the surrounding world, which is also to say that this world has awakened, or begun to awaken, within us.
Historically, then, nature presented us with exteriors whose inner significances were, so to speak, written on their faces. Phenomena constituted a living language, rather as, still for us today, the sense-perceptible human face can scarcely be distinguished from its expressive eloquence — from the meaning it communicates. Similarly, it was from the evocative countenances of nature that our forebears discovered, in a living unity, the profound potentials of meaning that eventually yielded our current, analytically refined language.
How, precisely, do we define a protein, when its form and function depend on the molecules with which it associates? How do we understand the identity of a cell in the developing embryo, when it can become any one of many different kinds of cell, depending on where it migrates to? And when we find the same plant with a radically different character in different environments, what are we recognizing as the "same"? How, if at all, can we conceive the separate identity of something that is always taking on the character of its larger context?
To demand a definition of "meaning" — that is, to ask for the meaning of "meaning" — is actually to run away from it. Meaning is where we start from. We cannot define it because meanings are what we employ in order to define things. Asking what "meaning" means is like trying to prove the validity of the logic we use in proofs. As human beings we must — and do every day — simply wake up to meaning. If we possess cognitive capacities, even as infants, it can only be because these capacities are themselves products of the world's play of meaning — call it the logos if you wish — through which you and I have come into being.
So asking about the meaning of "meaning" does not send us in a circle. It returns us to our origin and to the immediately given character of the world that produced the deer and bee and us.
It seems that, while we are free to imagine organisms chock full of machines, information processors, and cybernetic devices — all of which import the human interior into the organism — any actual reckoning with this conscious interior is taboo.
[Regarding the view that humans are incompatible with nature and can only harm it:] We do as much damage by denying our profound responsibilities toward nature as by directly abusing them. If you charge me with anthropocentrism, I accept the label, though on my own terms. If there is one creature that may not healthily scorn anthropocentrism, surely it is ó anthropos. How should we act, if not from our own center and from the deepest truth of our own being? But it is exactly this truth that opens us to the Other. We are the place within nature where willing openness to the Other becomes the necessary foundation of our own life ...
The story of the Greek sun-god "Helios" could hardly have originated as an animistic effort to account for a material sun, given that neither the history of language nor what we know of mythic consciousness affords any evidence that a purely material sun had yet been conceived. The sun's glory, its light and warmth, were directly and non-reflectively experienced as ensouled realities.
What do we mean when, regarding ourselves, we speak, as so many do, of a psychosomatic unity? Who will specify exactly what is meant by the psychological half of "psychosomatic"? And whatever is meant by it, how and in what sense do psyche and soma become a unity? — a question neither biologists nor cognitive scientists nor philosophers have been able to resolve with any hint of consensus, despite centuries of effort. Looking beyond ourselves, in what sense do we find anything like a psychosomatic unity in chimpanzee, nightingale, cricket, or amoeba? If we cannot answer such a basic question despite our being driven to employ a descriptive language that includes both physical and psychic terminology, then what do we understand?
We are nothing but creatures of meaning. We never make a movement that isn't a meaningful gesture — one that the psychiatrist, physical therapist, student of temperaments, sociologist, stage director, and all the rest of us can read with more or less success. Even an infant, in its own way, finds significance in the most subtle human movements. Any infant who is not raised in a speaking environment fails to develop anything like normal human capacities. And "speaking environment" refers to the meaning implicit in every significant gesture. Before they themselves can speak, infants take an interest in and learn to read gestures — to the point of distinguishing, in silent videos, between speakers of two languages they have never heard before.
Meaning is just there, whether we speak words or not. Every act of ours is a signifying. And we collectively understand each other's meanings well enough to engender civilizations that are infinitely complex tapestries woven from those meanings ...
Here, then, is my question for the skeptic: Where in the pervasive matrix of meaning I have just characterized do you find an unscientific obscurantism? More particularly, which of the meanings you speak and understand and found your life upon and discover in other creatures is a puzzle to you? I would like to know the precise nature of the disreputable element in these meanings you live by — for example, in all the words you have spoken, understood, and been willing to respond to today. This collection of words, I am sure, goes far beyond the more acceptable technical terms of any particular science. Yet, apart from specially deserving cases, you don't recoil from such words in disgust.
[Regarding human manipulation of the natural environment:] There is an alternative to the ideal of prediction and control. It helps, in approaching it, to recognize the common ground beneath scientific managers and those who see all human "intrusion" as pernicious. Both camps regard nature as a world in which the human being cannot meaningfully participate. To the advocate of pristine wilderness untouched by human hands, nature presents itself as an inviolable and largely unknowable Other; to the would-be manager, nature is a collection of objects so disensouled and unrelated to us that we can take them as a mere challenge for our technological inventiveness. Both stances deprive us of any profound engagement with the world that nurtured us.
My own hope for the future lies in a third way. Perhaps we have missed this hope because it is too close to us. Each of us participates in at least one domain where we grant the autonomy and infinite worth of the Other while also acting boldly to affect and sometimes even rearrange the welfare of the Other. I mean the domain of human relations.
We do not view the sovereign individuality and inscrutability of our fellows as a reason to do nothing that affects them. But neither do we view them as mere objects for a technology of control. How do we deal with them? We engage them in conversation.
In Odysseus' day, techne was a conscious resourcefulness that had scarcely begun to project itself into the material apparatus of life. What apparatus existed was an enticement for further creative expression of the nascent human self. While the technology of the Greeks may seem hopelessly primitive to us, it is worth remembering that the balanced awakening heralded by Homer culminated in a flowering of thought and art that many believe has never been surpassed for profundity or beauty anywhere on earth.
Today, that balance seems a thing of the past. The powers of our minds crystallize almost immediately, and before we are aware of them, into gadgetry, without any mediating, self-possessed reflection, so that we live within a kind of crystal palace that is sometimes hard to distinguish from a prison. The question is no longer whether we can use the enticement of clever devices as a means to summon the energies of dawning selfhood; rather, it is whether we can preserve what live energies we once had, in the face of the deadening effect of the now inert cleverness bound into the ubiquitous external machinery of our existence.
(from "The Deceiving Virtues of Technology", Chapter 1 of In the Belly of the Beast)
We have learned, especially since Darwin, that knowledge of the past illuminates the biological present — that, as the mantra of contemporary evolutionary theorists would have it, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution". The mantra could serve as Barfield's theme as well, but with this difference: he did not forget to include consciousness in that which evolves. The omission, after all, looks on its face to be disastrous. If we had no hope of fully understanding the biology of organisms before the idea of evolution dawned upon us, how much more must we remain in darkness while ignoring the evolution of the cognitive instruments through which alone we can grasp that idea — that is, while ignoring the evolution of the instruments of our understanding itself.
In biology, the word "mechanism" today often refers merely to "lawful physical interaction". This habit of expression makes it easier to associate physical lawfulness with machines. But clouds, though physically lawful, are not machines. Nor are rocks and rivers. Nor is cytoplasm.
If only biologists using the word "machine" were required to say what they mean beyond "lawful physical interaction"! The only thing distinguishing a machine from physical objects generally is the human purpose unnaturally imposed on the arrangement of parts. So anyone who feels the need to draw on the idea of a machine rather than lawful objects unmanipulated by human intelligence, is probably invoking human purposes under the table, even if unwittingly.
(from a draft of a talk titled "Toward a Thought-Full Teleology — Beyond the Hollow Organism". The talk, not yet publicly available, is scheduled to be delivered at a June 28-29, 2021 conference sponsored by The Linnean Society of London. The conference theme is "Evolution 'On Purpose': Teleonomy in Living Systems".)
In every sphere of knowledge it's easy to put out of mind those questions that are so fundamental and yet so seemingly impenetrable that they leave everything we think we understand woefully ungrounded. Biology is no exception.
Who, or what, is the organism, and what guarantees the remarkable unity of character, the distinctive and recognizable way of being, consistently achieved by the developing individuals of a species? Where do we look for collection of parts — an explanation for the integral performance of the whole?
Are the meanings we find in the world specifiable? I would answer that we can always make a start at a valid description and, happily, we can never make an end of it. In observing the rose, we may note its color and beauty, its water- and sap-transporting processes, its thorny power of rending, its changing appearance under sunlight, shade, and moonlight, its unique relationship with each insect among its circle of animal companions, the scent of its flowers, its way of reflecting the world in a dewdrop, the distinctive pattern of its root growth, its cellular metabolism from one cell type to another, the sour taste of its fruits, and much, much more. And we may hope to glimpse, running through all these features, the unity that constrains the entire ensemble to perform qualitatively and harmoniously as this kind of plant, and not another.
No human biography or characterization of a plant is ever complete, but neither are we absolutely barred from any understanding we may seek. That is the way with meaning; we can always plumb it more deeply or from different angles. Meaning is never a fixed quantity, but always opens out onto the entire universe of meaning. Text and context are inseparable. And if we know enough to ask a half-way coherent question, then in the very framing of the question we have already found our way toward some of the understanding we seek.
Why, after all, does Jack Turner agree with his opponents that acceptable "messing" with ecosystems would have to be grounded in successful prediction and control? Once we make this assumption, of course, we are likely either to embrace such calculated control as a natural extension of our technical reach, or else reject it as impossible. And yet, when I sit with the chickadees, messing with their habitat, it does not feel like an exercise in prediction and control. My aim is to get to know the birds, and to understand them. Maybe this makes a difference.
[Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov remarked that] "The body of the universe is the totality of the real-ideal, the psycho-physical". Solovyov points out that there can be no such thing as a "material unity" — not, at least, as matter is normally conceived. "Material things", imagined as empty of thought, just coexist side by side. Any unity must be ideal. After all, even the mathematical laws of physics, which offer one route toward a unified understanding of phenomena, are ideas — but ideas that belong both to our understanding and to the nature of things themselves.
(from "Vladimir Solovyov on Sexual Love and Evolution")
[It would be well to say:] "technology is our hope if we can accept it as our enemy, but as our friend, it will destroy us." Of course technology threatens us, and of course it calls for a certain resistance on our part, since it expresses our dominant tendencies, our prevailing lameness or one-sidedness. The only way we can become entire, whole, and healthy is to struggle against whatever reinforces our existing imbalance. Our primary task is to discover the potentials within ourselves that are not merely mechanical, not merely automatic, not reducible to computation. And the machine is a gift to us precisely because the peril in its siding with our one-sidedness forces us to strengthen the opposite side — at least it does if we recognize the peril and accept its challenge.
According to the evolutionary story that most of us have forcibly absorbed from a young age, humankind somehow raised itself above the beastly, mindless, material substrate of its origin so as to achieve, step by step, the mystifying wonders of language and poetry, music and art, politics and science, and all the other sublimations contributing to high culture. The sea of meaning within which we now swim — without which we would have nothing we could recognize as human life — somehow bubbled up from somewhere, if only as an illusion of the human mind, and cast a kind of spell over the bedrock meaninglessness of brute matter.
"Somehow", I say, since the meaning at issue, and the question how it could have emerged from an eternal silence of Unmeaning is so great an enigma for conventional thinking that it has received no fundamental elucidation. Nor is it evident that we need to seek an origin of meaning. Perhaps what we will actually discover is a larger, meaning-soaked surround, progressively coming to a focus in human minds.
René Descartes' cleaving stroke through the heart of reality has been almost universally accepted — perhaps most of all in biology. We live with the violence done to the unity and harmony of the world by that stroke, and merely choose which half of this improbably fractured whole to accept and which half to reject. And so the "material" that materialists accept is dualistic material, just as the mind, or interiority, they reject is dualistic interiority. Instead of searching for a non-Cartesian way forward, we imagine ourselves shut up in suspiciously deceptive minds, looking out at an alien world of mindless extended substance.
(from a draft of a talk tentatively titled "Toward a Thought-Full Teleology — Beyond the Hollow Organism". The talk, not yet publicly available, is scheduled to be delivered at a June 28-29, 2021 conference sponsored by The Linnean Society of London. The conference theme is "Evolution 'On Purpose': Teleonomy in Living Systems".)
Precisely at the point in evolutionary history where the understanding consciousness arises and becomes aware of itself, it begins to deny its own powers. We are those who, by grace of our own evolutionary inheritance, can in one way or another enter into the meaning of the life of every living creature and make it our own. Yet, fearing "anthropocentrism" — which is to say, fearing ourselves — we end up belittling the gift of understanding.
As for the dangers of anthropocentrism: yes, there are such dangers. Projecting ourselves onto other creatures as if they were blank screens is always a temptation. But I would say an equal danger today is quite the opposite. We are òi anthropoi, and it is therefore our obligation to be properly anthropocentric — to exercise our full potentials rather than to project onto ourselves and fellow organisms the character of particular mechanical products of our own activity. Scientists wish to understand life. Wouldn't it be far better if they brought to bear upon this life the expressive powers of the living, cognizing thought through which we conceive and build machines, rather than constrain their thinking to the deadened terms of the contrived objects?
If bird feeders are problematic [because of an unnatural crowding of birds], what was I to think of my own habit of sitting outside for long periods and feeding birds from my hands? Especially during the coldest winter weather and heavy snowfalls, I sometimes found myself mobbed by a contentious crowd, which at different times included not only chickadees but also titmice, red- and white-breasted nuthatches, hairy woodpeckers, goldfinches, juncos, blue jays, cardinals, various sparrows, and a red-bellied woodpecker. To my great delight, several of the less wary species would perch on shoulders, shoes, knees, and hat, as well as hands.
But by what right do I encourage tameness in creatures of the wild? The classic issue here has to do with how we should assess our impact upon nature. Two views, if we drive them to schematic extremes for purposes of argument, conveniently frame the debate ...
The Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov spoke of a two-fold impenetrability of things: they are separated from each other both in time and in space. "That which lies at the basis of our world is being in a state of disintegration, being dismembered into parts and moments which exclude one another".
Overcoming this disintegration — re-membering ourselves and the world in which we live — is, as Solovyov saw it, a personal and social task with cosmic implications ... He cited — to give but one example of the principle of unity — a simple, profound, and universal physical phenomenon, one that would change a great deal of modern thought if we would only spend some time contemplating it: I mean the phenomenon of two objects gravitationally attracting each other. In Solovyov's language: here we see that "parts of the material world do not exclude one another, but, on the contrary, aspire mutually to include one another and to mingle with each other".
We could not retain our commonplace image of separate parts if we truly reckoned with the mutual participation of two objects gravitationally attracted to each other. It is not a matter of one object exerting an external force upon another "from a distance" (as students are often asked to imagine the matter), but of two entities caught up in a single, unified embrace wherein the being — the very substance and activity — of one is inseparable from that of the other. This truth, evident enough to the physicist, suggests that there is something pathological about our routine habits of perception through which we form our picture of a world consisting of separate and disconnected objects.
Early technological man carved out his civilized enclosures as hard-won, vulnerable enclaves, protected places within an enveloping wilderness full of ravening beasts and natural catastrophes. We, by contrast, live within a thoroughly technologized and domesticated landscape where it is the remaining enclaves of wildness that appear painfully delicate and vulnerable. Today, if we would set bounds to the wild and lawless, it is the ravening beast of technology we must restrain. If nature still threatens us, the threat is that it will finally and disastrously succumb to our aggressions.
The question, "What sort of world do we live in?" came to be enveloped in darkness precisely at the point where our science was thought to be most fundamental! We have a physics of light and color framed as far as possible in language suitable for those who cannot see, and a science of acoustics that might just as well have been formulated by those who cannot hear.
The dismissal of qualities from science — which is to say, the dismissal of the world of experience — has meant that physicists, when they venture at all beyond their equations and well-designed instruments, lose themselves in a Wild West of speculation, illustrated by the "many worlds" theories so prominently heralded today. This is high-flying conjecture that puts to shame those medieval doctors whose soaring intellectual acrobatics were precisely what the pioneers of the Scientific Revolution so badly wanted to bring down to earth, where ideas could be tested within human experience.
Where do we look for an understanding of life? Where, if anywhere, does life put its own meaning on display most forthrightly and clearly?
There is one high promontory within the sprawling panorama of life on earth that does indeed afford a perspective upon the whole — a place from where the unique processes occurring throughout the kingdoms of life become peculiarly visible, manifesting their significance. There is, we can know without a doubt, one evolutionary achievement that offers not only an unlimited survey of the entire drama of life, but also lends itself to the penetrating insight we need for recognizing and expressing the many meaningful aspects of the drama.
This evolutionary achievement lies in the place we know best — in fact, the only place where the necessary sort of knowing occurs at all. It is where life becomes conscious of itself — where the living creature not only acts out its own significant existence, but is capable of contemplating this existence along with that of all other living things. It is the one outgrowth within the great, age-old tree of life where life's own power of survey blossoms and reaches its fullest fruition: the understanding consciousness of man.
What must be realized through individual human striving today can be seen as an expression — a further development and transformation — of the very processes that were at work in simpler, less individuated life forms. When we observe animals of increasing complexity, we notice a progressive internalization of function and an expansion of interior, sentient life, culminating in self-awareness. That which worked on the organism throughout evolutionary history to develop this capacity for self-awareness, now works through the human being in the exercise of this capacity. Is there any reason to doubt that it is the same power in both cases?
All of which suggests that evolution has had a certain mindful character all along — or a more-than-mindful character, inasmuch as the power to engender minds can hardly be alien or inferior to the capacity of the minds it engenders.
I'd like you to think for a moment of the various words we use to designate technological products. You will notice that a number of these words have a curious double aspect: they, or their cognate forms, can refer either to external objects we make, or to certain inner activities of the maker. A "device," for example, can be an objective, invented thing, but it can also be some sort of scheming or contriving of the mind, as when a defendant uses every device he can think of to escape the charges against him. The word "contrivance" shows the same two-sidedness, embracing both mechanical appliances and the carefully devised plans and schemes we concoct in thought. As for "mechanisms" and "machines," we produce them as visible objects out there in the world even as we conceal our own machinations within ourselves. Likewise, an "artifice" is a manufactured device, or else it is trickery, ingenuity, or inventiveness. "Craft" can refer to manual dexterity in making things and to a ship or aircraft, but a "crafty" person is adept at deceiving others.
This odd association between technology and deceit occurs not only in our own language, but even more so in Homer's Greek, where it is much harder to separate the inner and outer meanings, and the deceit often reads like an admired virtue. The Greek techne, from which our own word "technology" derives, meant "craft, skill, cunning, art, or device" — all referring without discrimination to what we would call either an objective construction or a subjective capacity or maneuver. Techne was what enabled the lame craftsman god, Hephaestus, to trap his wife, Aphrodite, in a promiscuous alliance with warlike Ares. He accomplished the feat by draping over his bed a wondrously forged snare whose invisible bonds were finer than a spider's silken threads. The unsuspecting couple blundered straightway into the trap. As the other gods gathered around the now artless couple so artfully imprisoned, a gale of unquenchable laughter celebrated the guile of Hephaestus. "Lame though he is," they declared, "he has caught Ares by craft (techne)." Here techne refers indistinguishably to the blacksmith's sly trickery and his skillful materialization of the trick at his forge.
Likewise, the Greek mechane, the source of our "machine," "mechanism," and "machination," designates with equal ease a machine or engine of war, on the one hand, or a contrivance, trick, or cunning wile, on the other. The celebrated ruse of the Trojan Horse was said to be a mechane, and it was admired at least as much for the devious and unexpected turn of mind behind its invention as for the considerable achievement of its physical construction.
If we believe that an empirical (experience-based) science — a science grounded in the conceptual ordering of sensible appearances — really does give us genuine knowledge of the world, then a reasonable conclusion is that this world is, by nature, a realm of conceptually ordered appearances possessing the qualities of sense. It asserts its existence and character in the terms of conscious, thought- and sense-derived experience.
[Regarding the nineteenth-century Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov's treatment of evolution:] Consciousness alone is where the evolutionary process is first fully and explicitly realized. Evolution here "comes into its own" and declares itself in human awareness. That which has gone on from the beginning now operates, at least in part, through the conscious choice of the individual and the quest for universal ideals.
In slightly different words: what must be realized through individual human striving today can be seen as an expression — a further development and transformation — of the very processes that were at work in simpler, less individuated life forms. When we observe animals of increasing complexity, we notice a progressive internalization of function and an expansion of interior, sentient life, culminating in self-awareness. That which worked on the organism throughout evolutionary history to develop this capacity for self-awareness, now works through the human being in the exercise of this capacity. Is there any reason to doubt that it is the same power in both cases?
[Concerning the fairly recent researches into "competing endogenous RNAs":] They participate in a vast "breathing" process, one of whose primary outcomes is the regulation — the balancing and counterbalancing — of the mRNAs themselves in proper relation to ever-changing conditions in the cell and its environment. The challenge for our understanding is considerable when we realize that all these RNAs are (to revise the metaphor only slightly) "swimming" in a common pool, one whose significant eddies and currents can be intricately distinct even as they continually flow one into the other.
The upshot of it all is that protein-coding RNAs are found to share broadly in the fluid life of the organism, and not to be mere cogs in a deterministic mechanism. In particular, they gain additional, noncoding (regulatory) functions, and the sharp distinction between coding and noncoding regions of DNA begins to look even more artificial than it has already become.
(from "RNA: Dancing with a Thousand Partners")
Surely our technological prowess does reflect a practical knowledge of the world. But the pleasure and wonder of it easily blinds us to the fact that we remain infants in fundamental understanding. How often do we remind ourselves that the nature of matter and energy is a mystery to us, or that, when we speak of "the physical", it is difficult to indicate even roughly what we mean? When we get down to the submicroscopic specifics, we find nothing there, no thing of any recognizable sort. We identify reliable mathematical relations suggesting particular structure, but we do not know: the structure of what?
(from "A Physicist, a Philologist, and the Meaning of Life")
[Owen Barfield, commenting on nineteenth-century philosopher Vladimir Solovyov's view of sexual attraction and evolution, writes that Solovyov] opens with a biological survey which easily, and to my mind irresistibly, refutes the age-old assumption … that the teleology of sexual attraction is the preservation of the species by multiplication. On the contrary, it is apparent from the whole tendency of biological evolution that nature's purpose or goal (or whatever continuity it is that the concept of evolution presupposes) has been the development of more complex and, with that, of more highly individualized and thus more perfect organisms. From the fish to the higher mammals quantity of offspring steadily decreases as subtlety of organic structure increases; reproduction is in inverse proportion to specific quality. On the other hand, the factor of sexual attraction in bringing about reproduction is in direct proportion. On the next or sociological level he has little difficulty in showing that the same is true of the factor of romantic passion in sexual attraction. Both history and literature show that it contributes nothing towards the production of either more or better offspring, and may often, as in the case of Romeo and Juliet, actually frustrate any such production at all.
Why then has nature, or the evolutionary process, taken the trouble to bring about this obtrusively conspicuous ingredient in the make-up of homo sapiens?
One finds that in once-isolated and sharply focused areas of molecular biological investigation, the focus is rapidly becoming less sharp. Boundaries are becoming more permeable, so that it is difficult to separate one topic from another. Every "classical" function of a molecule or structure or pathway is turning out to be just one of many different and often (at first) seemingly unrelated functions. Every niche is interwoven with other niches, and the play of "causes" and "effects" is more like the flow of a stream with its endless, interpenetrating eddies than an interaction of discrete machine parts
That's why terms such as "network", "systems approach", "interconnected", "combinatorial complexity", and above all "crosstalk" and "context-dependence" now show up with such striking frequency in technical papers. The take-home message is that we're witnessing a transformation in the way we must think of organisms.
(from "Dancing with a Thousand Partners")
Can the kind of agency we witness so obviously in the development of an individual organism be at all applicable to evolution — that is, to vast populations of co-evolving organisms?
When we speak, not about physical processes as such, but rather about an underlying biological agency, intention, and purposiveness, then the distinction between an individual animal as a collection of molecules, cells, and tissues, on the one hand, and an entire population as a collection of organisms, on the other, becomes an open question. The whole business of telos-directed biological activity, wherever we have observed it, is to bridge radically different physical processes. That is, it brings diverse and complex physical phenomena — for example, in the brain, heart, liver, intestines, and skin of a developing mammal — into integral unity and harmony, making a larger whole of them. When we have seen this purposeful coordination and harmonization in one organic context involving many distinct physical elements, it is only natural to look for it in other organic contexts.
(from "Teleology and Evolution: Why Can't We Have 'Evolution on Purpose'?")
When we speak of agency, we speak of capacities we ourselves routinely exercise. But at the same time we must admit that our experience of our own agency is closely bounded on all sides by mystery. We do not fully understand where our thoughts and actions come from, or how our intentions move our bodies. It would be a mistake to clothe the mystery of biological agency in the imagined form of a grandly sovereign, all-knowing human individual.
And if we cannot be entirely clear about the sources of agency in our own lives, we can hardly be dogmatic about the nature of the agency — or diverse agencies — at work in a single bee colony, a particular species of rodent, or the biosphere as a whole. Nothing, however, prevents our being good observers of living beings, which is also to be observers of the clear manifestations of biological agency. In this way we become familiar with the complex and perhaps many-voiced character — the way of being — of particular organisms.
This sort of interpenetrability [characteristic of biological agencies] is exactly what we find in language — that is, in different contexts, and even in different words and phrases. We can put words together in infinitely varying ways. Any two words or ideas or philosophies, no matter how different, can be brought into meaningful relation, thereby modifying each other. A word is given its meaning by the character of the larger thought in which it participates, just as a heart receives its meaning from the larger organism in which it participates. Neither the word nor the heart thereby suffers a loss of identity, but rather gains in the richness of its meanings and its relational potentials.
An animal's development from zygote to maturity is a classic picture of telos-realizing activity. Through its agency and purposiveness, an animal holds its disparate parts in an effective unity, making a single whole of them. This purposiveness informs the parts "downward" from the whole and "outward" from the inner intention, and is invisible to strictly physical analysis of the interaction of one part with another.
Technology is our hope if we can accept it as our enemy; as our friend it will destroy us. If we look to technology for the solution to our problems, we will only worsen our existing one-sidedness and invite the destruction of everything worth saving. If, on the other hand, we oppose technology with what is not machine-like in ourselves — with an ability to read the world instead of merely manipulating it and losing sight of it — then we will receive from technology the gift of our highest selves.
(from "Owen Barfield and Technological Society")
Steve Talbott :: Biology Worthy of Life

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
package examples.todolist.persistence.runtime

import cats.Monad
import doobie.implicits._
import doobie.util.transactor.Transactor
import examples.todolist.model.AppModel
import examples.todolist.persistence.AppRepository

class AppRepositoryHandler[F[_]: Monad](implicit T: Transactor[F])
    extends AppRepository.Handler[F] {

  import examples.todolist.persistence.runtime.queries.AppQueries._

  def list: F[List[AppModel]] =
    listQuery.to[List].transact(T)
}


text:
Losing wildlife triggers collapse of ecosystem
'Habitat loss, over-harvesting, climate change' top three threats wildlife facing today, says expert
Burak Bir | 03.03.2020
With all species of the world are connected through complex systems such as food webs, losing wildlife would bring on the collapse of the entire ecosystem, according to an expert.
"As we lose wildlife, we lose these connections, and the web begins to collapse. The loss of one species causes the loss of another species that depends on it," Jennie Miller, senior scientist at the U.S.-based conservation organization Defenders of Wildlife, told Anadolu Agency.
Speaking on the occasion of World Wildlife Day celebrated on March 3 under the theme of Sustaining all life on Earth, which encompasses all wild animal and plant species as key components of the world's biodiversity, she said the world cannot be imagined even without bees, wolves or coral.
"In many places, these species are already gone, and we can measure the gaps: less pollination, so less fruit; more deer and more vehicle collisions; lifeless tropical reefs with collapsing fisheries."
On Dec. 20, 2013, at its 68th session, the UN General Assembly proclaimed March 3 as UN World Wildlife Day to celebrate and raise awareness for the world's wild animals and plants. World Wildlife Day has become the most important global annual event dedicated to wildlife.
Habitat loss, over-harvesting, and climate change are the top three threats the wildlife is facing today, Miller said.
Human beings, who Miller says is the main threat to the wildlife, have caused all three by excessive hunting and fishing, as well as by producing too much greenhouse emission.
This is why, she said, the world is in a "period of the Anthropocene" as scientists say, referring to humanity's "greatest" influence on the planet and environment.
'World entering sixth mass extinction'
Defending the claim that the earth is now entering the sixth mass extinction, Miller stressed that as many as one million species on the planet are at risk of extinction due to human pressure.
"Our wildlife disappears and our planet's climate transforms. We will live in a completely different world, with fewer wildlife, who live mixed up in different communities and different locations," she said, referring to the worst-case scenario if the ongoing threats continued to cripple wildlife.
She went on to say that how the worst-case scenario would affect people and how they would be able to survive is "very uncertain".
Even in the best scenario, where people live now, ecosystems have large gaps of missing species, and people have to step in to provide the missing connections, Miller stressed.
"But there's a message of hope here: If we choose, we humans can wield our intelligence and technology to recover wildlife," she said.
Touching on a possible solution to prevent further loss of wildlife and to recover the ecosystem, Miller said there are so many things everyone can do to help wildlife such as avoiding plastics that pollute the world and harm wildlife.
"Transform your home and community space into a wildlife-friendly area. Replace lawns with native gardens with plants that support pollinating insects, birds, and mammals. Learn about the species in your backyard by watching wildlife, and serve as a citizen scientist by submitting your data on eBird and iNaturalist."
eBird, launched in 2002, is an online database of bird observations that provide scientists, researchers, and naturalists with real-time data about bird distribution. Founded in 2008, iNaturalist is a citizen science project built on the concept of mapping and sharing observations of biodiversity across the globe.
Miller also suggested that people should speak to government officials and authorities about their concerns over wildlife as well as sharing their concerns through an organization.
"By protecting wildlife, we safeguard ourselves by protecting the ecosystems that create the vital resources we depend on," she concluded.
The special place of wild plants and animals in their many varied and beautiful forms as a component of the world's biological diversity will be celebrated as part of this year's World Wildlife Day, according to its official website.
biodiversity climate change Defenders of Wildlife Environment Nature wildlife World Wildlife Day
Two-thirds of China's total GDP at risk of disruption from nature loss: Report
Millions across Horn of Africa facing 3rd season of severe drought, says UN
Around 1.8B in 25 countries experience record-warm temperatures in 2021
Turkiye to expand ambitious Zero Waste scheme nationwide
Downpours in Tanzania exhume graves amid mounting climate-caused floods
1 in 2 children undersized by chronic malnutrition in southern Somalia: Report


text:
STROBE STC
Institutional Research Capacity. STROBE has 31 active researchers (25 faculty and six academic
scientists) across six institutions, five of which offer Ph.D. degrees. STROBE trainees make up a large part of the Center, with 43 graduate students, 11 postdocs, and 18 undergraduate students directly supported by STROBE and/or performing research in a STROBE-funded laboratory. Already in the first year of NSF Funding (October 2016-September 2017), STROBE investigators published 14 manuscripts and were invited to give 95 plenary, keynote, and research talks. During this time, STROBE researchers also submitted five patents, 15 provisional applications, and one licensed technology. STROBE's cutting edge imaging technologies, advanced instrumentation, and collaborations with national laboratories and
industry uniquely positions STROBE to build the microscopes of tomorrow and train the next generation of scientists to be agents of innovation.
PREM Pathway Starting Point. STROBE is an NSF Science and Technology Center on Real-Time
Functional Imaging, composed of six universities (UCLA, UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, CU Boulder, FIU, and FLC) across the country. STROBE was formed by a group of diverse scientists who were passionate about creating a thriving STC ecosystem that could cultivate diverse people, ideas, and research. Thus, STROBE's diversity efforts are woven throughout the Center's fabric by design, as illustrated by its membership, with STROBE faculty, staff, and trainees representing 2-5 times more than the national average for women and UR groups in physics. STROBE's interdisciplinary collaborations and diverse representation of faculty, staff, students, and leadership have allowed the Center to develop its own unique community for innovation that acts as the bedrock for a thriving ecosystem for all.
Challenges and Opportunities. STROBE recognizes that continuing recruitment from diverse undergraduate student pools is essential for STROBE's success as a Center, however diversity of Ph.D. recipients in race and gender in physics and engineering remains abysmal. Therefore, STROBE's major role in PREM is to leverage its research strengths, cross campus infrastructure, and community for innovation to increase the recruitment, retention, and degree attainment of NSU and FLC undergraduates my immersing them in wrap-around best practices programming. The unique community found across STROBE will integrate NSU and FLC to create a welcoming, inclusive, and diverse community for PREM trainees and will prepare them with the deep technical understanding and experience required to be competitive in the STEM fields and the broad transferable skills that employers seek in 21st century applicants. This diverse pool of physics and engineering graduates may choose to enter graduate programs within STROBE, at NSU, or elsewhere to make an impact on STEM communities across the country.


RGS-R9244GP+ series are Layer-3 Gigabit managed redundant ring Ethernet switch with 24x10/100/1000Base-T(X) ports and 4x1G/10GBase-X SFP+ ports. These switches support Layer-3 function like RIP and static routing. Also RGS-R9244GP+ series support Ethernet Redundancy protocol, O-Ring (recovery time < 30ms over 250 units of connection)/Open-Ring/O-Chain/MRP/Fast Recovery and MSTP (RSTP/STP compatible) can protect your mission-critical applications from network interruptions or temporary malfunctions with its fast recovery technology. RGS-R9244GP+ series support wide operating temperature from -20 oC to 60 oC. RGS-R9244GP+ series can also be managed centralized and convenient by Open-Vision as well as the Web-based interface, Telnet and console (CLI) configuration.


The release of Portal 2 is less than a month away, and many of us here at Co-Optimus can't wait. Today, we have a new trailer for your viewing pleasure. It's 47 seconds of good times. Wait! There's a catch. The trailer is in German, which makes it even more hilarious, or possibly a little evil. I was raised on Indiana Jones films, so to me, it is decidedly evil, in a funny, face-melting kind of way. It also depicts robots taking human jobs, which is pretty evil, as well. My knowledge of the German language is about as good as my Japanese, therefore I won't bother to translate for you.
Portal 2 comes out on April 19 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC. The title supports two player local and online co-op.
Now in English! Hilarious, and 57% less evil.
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Last week I was selected as a member of Michael Hyatt's Platform Launch Team. Along with an incredible group of writers, speakers, bloggers and other leaders, I am helping to launch his new book, Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World.
If you are not already following Michael Hyatt's blog, you really should. He blogs about intentional leadership, productivity, publishing, and social media. He is the Chairman of Thomas Nelson Publishing and served as CEO until he chose to step down to pursue his writing and speaking full-time. He generously shares his experience and expertise on his blog and in his book.
Over the past several years, I have watched as Michael grew his platform to over 400,000 monthly blog readers and 122,000 Twitter followers.
When he asked his readers to apply for a spot on his launch team, over 900 of us did. Imagine having 900 people who want to help you launch your book!
Only 100 were selected. As a part of his team, I received an advance copy of Platform, which I read and reviewed on Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com and ChristianBook.com.
The launch team members have been sharing notes and reviews with each other while we brainstorm ways to improve our own platforms. We are also learning directly from Michael. So far, it has been a powerful experience.
I am getting an education in both building a platform and launching a book. I'm excited about the impact this education will have for Inspire as I implement what I'm learning.
As a writer, you will need to build a platform, too. I highly recommend Michael's book as the blueprint for creating the platform you need to get your message, your book in front of people where it can minister to them.
Platform will be released the week of May 21st. But don't buy it yet! Michael is offering seven free bonus gifts valued at $375 when you purchase the book during the release week. I will blogging more about this next week, so stay tuned!
What has been your biggest challenge in building your own platform? What unexpected blessings have come from building your platform?