Month: August 2023

Eco-transactions.

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A fledgling palm tanager (thraupis palmarum) I rescued sometime in the early 2000s. It ended up living at least to adulthood where I couldn’t pick it out anymore.

When I wrote ‘Death by Transactions‘, it didn’t start off being about banks and technology. It started off with wondering why people who will complain about all the overhead of small transactions don’t use the same concept to tie it to ecosystems.

Every breath we take is a transaction. In turn, every time photosynthesis dumps oxygen into the atmosphere, it’s a transaction. At one point, we probably had a lot more oxygen on the planet than we do now, which probably kept the plants from going too crazy. I think I saw something on that in a recent documentary about the planet.

Nowadays, we have more carbon dioxide, so the plants are probably having a great time – those that have survived us. They don’t breath as animals do though, but in principle they help keep a balance for us to breathe oxygen. We don’t hear about the flow rates of plants producing oxygen to the atmosphere and we humans exhaling our carbon dioxide all over the place (plus we DO love combustion, don’t we?).

It’s complicated to prove, but we humans are only a part of the carbon dioxide exhalers. It seems like almost everyone but the plants is putting out carbon dioxide, even little baby birds. The interesting thing is that in cycles, the plants also produce carbon dioxide.

We haven’t had an epidemic I know of with people with low pulse oximetry yet, where people are falling below the range of 90%-100%. We seem to be getting enough oxygen still, but of course by the time that falls it will likely be too late to do anything about it. When we look at the history of oxygenation on the planet, it’s pretty interesting.

Earth didn’t always have oxygen, which is before Earth was called Earth by a bunch of primates.

We seem to be doing ok, but some other species are not doing so good.

…The ocean stabilizes the atmosphere in two important ways—it contains plankton and bacteria that produce somewhere between 50 to 80% of the world’s oxygen,1 and its water absorbs massive amounts of carbon—about one-third of the amount humans have put into the air since the Industrial Age2—reducing the impact of fossil fuel combustion. As the planet gets hotter due to increased CO2 concentrations, oceans are also warming up. As liquids warm, they can’t hold as much dissolved gas. This means a warmer ocean can’t hold as much carbon or dissolved oxygen, which marine life relies on for survival…

MIT Climate, “How will future warming and CO2 emissions affect oxygen concentrations?“, April 6th 2022.

Our planet has a history of warming and cooling. We know this, it’s no secret, and when the temperatures have shifted, extinctions happened, and new life popped up. Our planet is pretty volatile in that regard, but we don’t notice it because we live very short lives in comparison to the Earth.

We lose marine life, we start impacting non-marine life. You know. Ourselves. Some species will flourish, some won’t. We’re in uncharted territory. Here there be monsters.

If you think of every ancestor you ever had stringing back to the origins of humanity, that’s how many lifetimes we have managed to shove into our small time on this planet. 10,000 generations? 12,000? Either are guesstimates you can find on the web at the time of this writing. Humans have only been around 0.007% of the time the Earth has been swinging around the Sun.

If we work with the 10,000 generation number, that means our lifetime is only 0.000,000,7% of our time on the planet. (Can I use commas? I used commas. Count the zeroes). That means on average each one of us will have been around about 7 millionths of a percent of the age of Earth. For a while, at least.

In we got out of our own way and look at it as a planet, the planet is going through it’s own transactional cycles, and yes, we’re impacting it, which isn’t too much of a surprise because everything that has been trading oxygen and carbon dioxide has been doing so for millennia. This is the point many people make, and it’s valid except it forgets one very key thing. A somewhat important thing.

At some point, we won’t be around. And unlike any other bit of history of the planet Earth, we also can do things to help make sure that we are around.

But the Earth will be just fine.

Sidetracked by Me.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment
Goofing off between meetings at the first CARDICIS in St. Lucia, 2003.

As I mentioned here, I’ve been going through old images and in doing so have found myself looking at different versions of me over the years. It’s had me sidetracked in a thoughtful way.

I’d written about some things before, such as this transition, which is somewhat rare because almost as a rule I like to avoid writing about myself or even talking about myself. I prefer ideas, and in a way that is peculiar because ideas changed me.

The top picture is of me in 2003 in St. Lucia, at the first CARDICIS. I had been plucked by Daniel Pimienta to be part of that CARDICIS, as well as others, because he thought I had things of value to contribute and I’d like to think I did. Yet at the time, I believed I had been invited by mistake.

The pre-CARDICIS Taran was a young man who had returned to Trinidad and Tobago because his father had asked it of him, to help him out on some projects he was working on. Since he and I were constantly at odds, I found myself downstairs in an old colonial style house, open aired, with a desk made of a sheet of marine plyboard sitting on red bricks and a tenuous internet connection. From there I leapt into virtual worlds such as Second Life, I wrote technical stuff for websites to get paid, and I had begun reading much from Gutenberg.org.

My life had changed significantly from being a senior software engineer in my 20s. Where the United States was fertile ground for what I did, Trinidad and Tobago was a wasteland – a wasteland that at the time held promise, which was part of why I had come down besides my father. I had hoped to start a local software company and do all that I had been doing while having a mango tree in my yard. It was not to be, and so I adapted.

Speaking at the FLOS Caribbean Conference, 2003.

I was beginning to grow in different ways after living almost completely around technology. The PC revolution and the Internet had been good to me, as had Free and open source software, enough so that I had spoken about the importance of Trinidad and Tobago building it’s own technology capital based on Free and Open Source software at a conference in Port-of-Spain rather than continuing to buy proprietary software. To be ‘free’ in a sense.

It was an argument that was simple enough that was made by everyone who spoke at the conference – grow developers locally instead of the continued brain drain as people left to do such things abroad, spend less on software licensing locally which would mean decreased foreign exchange going overseas, and eventually being able to participate globally in the technological market. It was well received.

Twenty years later, I can tell you that the marketing department at Microsoft has done a lot better than we did at that conference, and Trinidad and Tobago’s technological ecosystem is, sometimes laughably so, dependent on Microsoft products. In the land of the origin of calypso, I would have thought other paths would have been taken but… for reasons I won’t speculate on, it was not to be.

Post-FLOS Conference at a nearby Pizzahut, 2003.

At least I got some beer out of it. The next image is of me pretending to drink straight from the pitcher (note the lips), but I might as well have that night. We all thought we had done something of note, we were happy, and we were around people with the same thoughts and dreams.

As it happened, we were all going in the same direction, but we all would have very different destinations.

Yet I remember, too, how much that experience and CARDICIS, as well as the infertile technological soil in Trinidad and Tobago would have caused change – even when I returned to the United States by a circuitous route. I’d picked up a gig at Linux Journal somewhere along the way, being the editor at 2 websites their publishing company owned, which in vision were ahead of their time and probably unlikely to have succeeded in meaningful ways. I attribute that to practicing the same concepts that the sites themselves were against, the boxing of technology snippets and piecemealed about, but it doesn’t really matter.

Making a point about not practicing colonialism while complaining about it, something I noted some were doing at CARDICIS (2003).

I would find that to be a common thread. People complaining about things while practicing the very same things in their own ways. It was frustrating to watch as rather than build new systems, people would attempt to leverage the very systems they were talking about replacing and swathing themselves in the very bureaucracies that stifled them.

I would find in time that this is just what people do. Very few go beyond what they know because it is uncomfortable, and being comfortable is more important to some people than creating better conditions.

When people have been locked in a prison long enough, giving them keys makes the key a new tyranny. As Heinlein demonstrated fictionally in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, after some generations the prison becomes it’s own culture and to leave it scares more people than we might like to consider.

And those people become our prison in their own ways.

I learned a lot in these past 2 decades, traveling, going back and forth and watching the world through my own lenses, not those as culturally enforced, and I have to wonder if I have accomplished anything more than being a better me.

Being a better me is enough, I suppose.

The Soundtrack of Life.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 9 Comments

As far back as I can remember, I remember music. First, The Entertainer – one of my first memories. Growing up with long rides on the highways of the United States, the 8 track would carry me through the 1970s and even into the 1980s, where old 8 track cartridges persisted longer than the 8 track player in the vehicles and – yes – the portable 8 track player.

Recently I’ve been watching a few people doing reels on Facebook that point out where particular songs borrow from previous songs – sometimes just a small composition, sometimes the majority of the song.

When, in the 1980s, people were re-making songs from the 1960s, I thought it was great. My father, on the other hand, did not. I did not understand. He said it was different when you’d lived through the times of those songs.

I understand. In fact, I imagine he could have gone on to say that it’s sad that we were borrowing their songs, that we should have songs of our own. Yet we did. The 1980s was pretty rich musically, with original artists creating not just pop music, but lyrical music, music that had meaning – and music that had no meaning at all.

Of course, he didn’t really see that. In the same way, I don’t see it in the generations that have followed too much. When I listen to some Otis Redding…

Oh, you thought Aretha did it first? Her version is awesome too.

It’s hard to compare that to anyone now. The recordings were different, but the voices were so much better than the stuff I hear on the radio nowadays. From that ‘before me’ era, there’s so many artists that just moved people across a much less tightly bound network as music crept across the landscape of the world through radio waves.

And that’s just the Motown stuff. Factor in bands like Led Zeppelin, Creedence Clearwater Revival… the folk singers like Jim Croce…

My era may not have been the greatest for music, but I think the 1980s and early 1990s were the last coughs of a victim of a hostile takeover as it increasingly became about what sells instead of what is good. We went from the local steakhouse, the 1980s might have been Outback, and from there it seems like it’s McDonalds most of the time with everyone getting toys with their Happy Meals.

It’s an opinion. It may not even be a good one. There are artists, I’m sure, that have great lyrics, great voices, great music… but I don’t really hear them on the radio. But in my time, I heard the songs of rebellion like Bob Dylan’s Hurricane, which I won’t insert in here because someone might get offended – so here’s a link to Polo reacting to Bob Dylan’s ‘Hurricane’.

There were songs of protest, of criticism, of… of life.

And I don’t know that we have that anymore. I just hear corporate stuff getting piped into the headphones of kids with no soul. And without soul feeding souls, we worry about technology taking over humanity when maybe we’ve already been losing it.

Beyond Children’s Books.

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I came across Let the Kids Get Weird: The Adult Problem With Children’s Books on LitHub.com and immediately thought of Andrea, Children’s Book Illustrator, mainly because she’s someone who does deal with children’s books. Her illustrations I particularly enjoy, because they’re playful in ways that the article mentions.

“…We reckon with our shadows in middle-age, according to the literature of psychoanalysis, a time when we may find ourselves ensconced in the children’s literature scene. Picture a middle-aged author wrestling their own existential fear of death while writing a bedtime story about bunnies: Writing good children’s fiction as an adult is hard.

“It’s hard not to get entangled in the collective consciousness, in simplistic moralism, in projections of various kinds, so that you end up with your baddies and goodies all over again,” wrote Le Guin. We toggle between confronting children with the reality of the world (note the bleak realm of climate fiction for young readers) and with blanketing them in fluffy chickens.

“The young creature does need projection. But it also needs the truth,” LeGuin wrote…”

Janet Manley, Let the Kids Get Weird: The Adult Problem With Children’s Books, July 17th, 2023

If that’s not a fair description of a generation gap, I don’t know what is. It’s something I’ve noticed a problem with myself, not because my nieces and nephews got older but because a part of me has remained younger than them in this regard, if that makes any sense to you.

I just slid up the same scale, but life for them has been different with a different start in the world in a different world. To write anything for anyone, to communicate anything to anyone, you have to first pull them into the world you see. To do that, you need to understand how they see the world, find the parts they like, reach in and grab them, then describe your world around them.

Since I don’t write children’s books, I never thought of this in that way. I’ve never actually purchased a book for my niece’s and nephews, though I may have given them some of mine over time in an attempt to grow a perspective closer to mine to handle a life hurdle. Life’s hurdles can be hard with the wrong mindset, I know.

Looking back, I didn’t buy children’s books because they already had too many. Apparently, every niece and nephew I had at that age was a voracious reader according to their parents at the time, but they did not remain so – and I wonder how much of that love of books was simply love of time spending with their loved one. I did not have such time that I remember, but memory is fleeting and fragmented. So if that’s the case, are you selling children’s books or building relationships with people who influence the children?

That’s not a bad thing by a stretch. The article talks about selling books that grandmothers would buy for children, and I’m not sure that’s a bad thing either. Helping build a relationship between a grandparent and child seems like a worthwhile task for anyone.

Yet.

I do agree with the article in that children also need the space to imagine beyond what is there, to be weird and goofy with what is there, and building a relationship with themselves. A book shelf of books for reading with grandma when grandma dies is a book shelf of reasons not to read again, a painful association, at least for a period. There needs to be a mix on that shelf.

I probably wouldn’t have even looked at the article had I not been following Andrea. She has been dragging me into her world and describing it to me, I suppose.