Category Archives: Science

Health, Politics, Science, Third Phase

Not Commendable, But True

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Mabon                                                                    Moon of the First Snow

 

Not commendable, but true. I’m finding the pink ribbons, glowing reports of breast cancer survivors and the breathless joy of pink clad marathoners and professional athletes annoying. No, I don’t begrudge a single woman their successful treatment. Far from it. I’m glad.

It’s just that my own crew, prostate cancer survivors, have their cancer, get treatment, then get back to their lives. I don’t see blue ribbons (the color for prostate cancer. which makes some gender stereotypical sense) on cars, athlete’s sneakers, bedecking runners in the prostate cancer marathon. No smiling men surrounded by their buddies cheering them on.

This year the National Cancer Institute estimates there will be 231,480 new cases of breast cancer diagnosed, 14% of all new cancer cases. Over the same period it estimates 220,800 new cases of prostate cancer, 13.3% of all new cancer cases. Breast cancer will cause the death of 40,290 women and a small number of men, 6.8% of all cancer deaths. Prostate cancer will account for 27,450 deaths, 4.7% of all cancer deaths.

The numbers, then, are very similar though breast cancer does occur somewhat more often and causes more deaths.

 

Still, when I saw a woman celebrating her survival of stage 1 breast cancer being feted like a celebrity, a slow wave of rancor pulsed through me. I had stage 2. This is childish, I understand that. My cancer was worse than yours and you get all the fun. Geez.

A woman I know, when I confessed this emerging feeling, said, “Well, breasts are visible, more important to a woman’s sexual identity.” More important than sperm to a man’s? I thought this, but didn’t counter. The childishness part repressed there, thank god.

Would I want to have my face with a victorious I put prostate cancer in its place expression made available to public news services? Probably not. But I’m sure there are men who would be delighted.

Not quite sure what I want from this conversation, but I needed to put it out there.

 

 

 

Beyond the Boundaries, Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Memories, Myth and Story, Science

Not Even Gone

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Mabon                                                                     Moon of the First Snow

It is so beautiful here around 5 a.m. when the sky is clear, which is most mornings. The stars leap out of the sky, reminders of the power they had when the only light pollution was an evening’s campfire. Orion stands high in the south, moving toward Black Mountain. The Big Dipper disappears behind the roof of the garage in the east, but the pointer stars are visible, showing the way to true north. Cassiopeia, that unhappy queen, extends her jagged W, a slash of stars.

Time travel has been with us since the first human looked up in wonder at the stars. What we see unaided and what we can see with telescopes comes to us from the distant, distant past. So distant that the miles come in units of time. Perhaps, in a way, our lives are like the heavens, still shining after long years, even after death, radiating out from our small sector of space-time to the far away future.

So you might go out and look at the stars and consider the bright lights in your life, still strong and beautiful, wonderful. And remember that someday, you too will shine for others. Not gone, not even absent.

Friends, Jefferson County, Mountains, Science, Shadow Mountain, Woolly Mammoths

Moon Rock and Baby Mountains

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Mabon                                                                       First Snow Moon

Friend Tom Crane sent me a package the other day. It had the familiar Amazon prime tape across it, so I didn’t check the sender. I just opened it. The first thing I saw was a blue nalgene water bottle. Filled with water. What? I ordered water from Amazon?

It was a heavy package for its size, 10# was written on the front. In bubble wrap I found two large chunks of rock, samples Tom had collected near Carleton Peak, east of the Temperance River. It’s anorthosite, he says in the accompanying note, which also identified the water as Lake Superior water.

Knowing me well, he said I’d look up anorthosite. Here’s the first thing I found:

Anorthosite /ænˈɔrθəsaɪt/ is a phaneritic, intrusive igneous rock characterized by a predominance of plagioclase feldspar (90–100%), and a minimal mafic component (0–10%). Pyroxene, ilmenite, magnetite, and olivine are the mafic minerals most commonly present.

Who needs to go further after a description like that?

Phaneritic means it has large, identifiable matrix grains. “This texture forms by the slow cooling of magma deep underground in the plutonic environment.”  wiki

“Mafic is an adjective describing a silicate mineral or rock that is rich in magnesium and iron, and hence is a contraction of “magnesium” and “ferric”. Most mafic minerals are dark in color, and common rock-forming mafic minerals include olivine, pyroxene, amphibole, and biotite.” wiki

“The Plagioclase series is a group of related feldspar minerals that essentially have the same formula but vary in their percentage of sodium and calcium.”  www.minerals.net

The most interesting thing I learned while looking up Anorthosite is that the highlands of the moon seem to be anorthosite, too. So the ancient Sawtooths, volcanoes of the midcontinent rift which pulled the North American landmass apart in precambrian times, created rock similar to that found on the moon.

Tom and Paul Strickland at the Ely greenstone site in Ely, Minnesota
Tom and Paul Strickland at the Ely greenstone site in Ely, Minnesota

It’s odd to consider but mountain ranges like the Sawtooths and the Appalachians, ground down by millions, even a billion, years of erosion, were once like the relatively young Rocky Mountains. So here on Shadow Mountain we are in, or rather on, a recent geological event compared to the precambrian era of the Sawtooths. In the Precambrian era life evolved and during its entire millions of years there were only animals with no hard parts.

To walk the shore of Lake Superior, in other words, is to walk on a truly ancient landform. The Canadian Shield, which exposes some of oldest rock on earth, underlies much of Minnesota, from the oldest deposits, gneiss in the Minnesota River Valley like near Morton, to the Ely greenstone found in the town of Ely.

On Shadow Mountain, by contrast, we live on evidence of the Laramide orogeny, (mountain building), only 85-55 million years ago.

GeekWorld, Great Work, Our Land and Home, Science

Power to the People

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Mabon                                                                          Elk Rut Moon

We sat down with Kaleb Waite of Golden Solar yesterday afternoon. He impressed us both. He had a clearer plan for our panels, which ones we needed. Smart panels. He had a nifty gadget that can project shadowing throughout the year from any tall object near the roof, like trees or chimneys. He did not dumb down his presentation and walked us through the particular advantages and challenges of our roof. When he finished, we’d made up our minds. Golden Solar will get our business.

With the eventual development of capable storage batteries, we may be able to go off the grid entirely, though for the time being we will still be connected to the Intermountain Rural Electric Association (IREA). The concept of radically distributed power generation, a form of disaggregation, is a small piece of the path leading to a sustainable future. Our choice, by itself, means almost nothing; gathered with others though and through that putting real change forward, an individual choice is not a small piece.

 

 

Colorado, GeekWorld, Great Work, Science, Travel

Martian Meteorites, Dinosaur Skeletons and Peyote

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Lughnasa                                                      Elk Rut Moon

The Denver Gem and Mineral Show. “Largest in the nation.” I believe it. Vendor upon vendor occupying all the audience circulation area around the seating in the Denver Coliseum (where the hot dogs and beer get sold. And big on its own.) The coliseum floor and the circulation area around it, plus tents in the rear parking lot. We ran low on energy before we could get outside.

Spoke with three vendors, each unique. One wore a t-shirt that said Save Our Sacrament. He’s part of a church in Arizona that considers peyote its sacramental substance. His church welcomes all races, so they’re not covered like the native americans though he claims using peyote as a sacrament is legal in five states (actually 6 according to the churches website): Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, Nevada and, drumroll please, Minnesota.

Second guy was a Colorado rockhound who clearly loves rocks. He told us about geodes with water inside (think how old that water is), how to tell jade from other rocks that look similar (put your hands on it. if it’s heavier and cooler than its neighbors, probably jade) and showed us his personal pendant, a space owl, a piece of agate (I think.).

Meteorites were the domain of the third guy. eegooblago meteorites. I asked him what an ungrouped meteorite was since a row of small pieces were labeled that way. He started slow, but got excited as he moved into his explanation. It involves an organization that is the only official meteorite naming authority. They have lists of meteorites by type, a sort of “canonical taxonomy”, great phrase. If, after a lot of checking a chunk doesn’t fall with the canonical taxonomy, then it’s ungrouped.

He went on to show us the Martian meteorite, the only one certified and named by the authority. (see picture) Not cheap. But, to own a piece of Mars? Wow.

I learned from him that deserts are great places to find meteorites and the Maghreb is one of the best. “Morocco,” he said, “has a very sophisticated meteorite market. The Maghreb itself not so much.” He and his partner do occasionally hunt on their own, but mostly they go to rooms in which many collected rocks have been gathered.

In the Maghreb they rely on the folks who travel the desert regularly. They pick up various rocks and bring them back to a collecting spot. Then, using a handheld device that can “read” elements, he and his partner decide which ones to buy.

There were things I wanted to buy. The Dinosaur Brokers had a very nice fossilized skeleton of a small meat eating dinosaur for only $4,200. Another outfit had a huge Woolly Mammoth tusk, gorgeous. $14,000 plus but they were willing to wheel and deal. Their words. Fossilized fish, Woolly Mammoth teeth and vertebrae. Dinosaur tracks. Most well out of my price range. Didn’t buy anything though Kate got a number of things for grandchildren gifts, including some coprolite, fossilized poop. For Gabe, of course.

 

 

Beyond the Boundaries, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Memories, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science, Third Phase

The Now and the Not Yet

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Lughnasa                                                                    Labor Day Moon

A curious bifurcation. Friends comment on how well my life’s going. I’m not feeling it. Kate says look at the big picture. That’s what they’re seeing. Time with grandkids. Settling into the mountains. Healthy dogs. Cancer season mostly over. Loft getting put together.

When Kate suggested I look at the big picture, I replied, “It’s not in my nature.” My comment surprised me. What did that mean? “It’s not in my nature.”

In the moment I meant the larger trajectory of my life always gets swamped by the quotidian. The generator, damn thing. Rigel’s cast. Aimlessness. Sleep. That’s what gets my attention, my focus. It’s the way of generalized anxiety. Yes, I can back off from the day-to-day, know that these things are transient and the bigger things more lasting, but I get dragged right back in. Gotta change our home insurance before October 31st. Like that.

But more to my question, what is my nature? What does that mean? I mentioned a while back I’m reading a book called How Forests Think. In it Eduardo Kohn makes a strong, a remarkable case for animism, identifying animism with the Selfhood of living things. Self, if I understand Kohn right, is the gathered experience of not only an individual tree, dog, human, but of the evolutionary and genetic inheritance each individual bears. In this sense my Self is the culmination of human adaptation over millions of years, specific adaptation in the instance of my particular genetic family and the moments since my birth that have shaped who I have become in dynamic interaction with those genetics.

I’ve always had a strong view of Self, that emergent being/becoming we each are. (BTW: we, in Kohn’s vocabulary, includes all living things) Thanks to many years of Jungian analysis I have tended to articulate Self in relation to Jungian thought as an entity rooted in the collective unconscious, born of the struggle between persona and our genetic tendencies, or, said another way, between our adaptative responses to the world and our animal inheritance.

It is in this sense that I meant it is not in my nature. Over time, thanks to events subtle and gross, I have learned to focus on the thing not finished, the matter with something left to do. That moves attention away from the completed, the resolved. Things like settling into the mountains, presumptively cancer free, time with the grandkids recede, get placed in the room marked o.k. for now.

So my nature is the sum of me, the skin-bound memories (another Kohn term) and the adaptative ancestry from which I descend. Here’s an interesting point about genetics and adaptation that Kohn makes, they are future oriented. That is, the adaptations that stick are, in essence, bets on a future that will require them. So, though they come from the past and manifest in the present, each adaptation represents a subtle reorientation of the species to a time imagined, in the most physical of senses, to have similarity with the near past.

Family, GeekWorld, Science, Weather +Climate

Harm No Human

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Lughnasa                                                                      Labor Day Moon

Fog this morning. Which reminds me. When we have thunderstorms here, often the lightning strikes and thunder are right on top of us. At 8,800 feet we’re at a height where cumulus clouds live. This gives the storms much more immediacy.

Longmont robotWe went to Longmont yesterday to their municipal museum which has a hands-on robotics exhibit. In one exhibit several buttons allowed control of an animatronics robot. It had a plastic face, with titanium bars for shoulders, arms jointed at the elbows and legs with knee joints. Pressing the buttons would make the robot bow and smile, jiggle its arms, wave in a chaotic fashion. Gabe thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen.

Another exhibit had several robot muscles, hydraulic powered for the most part, and buttons activated the muscles. It was interesting to see the parts and imagine fitting them into a robot. At one stop you could control lights and sounds using hands and feet. At another a joystick allowed control of a disaster robot as it investigated the site of an explosion.

Both Gabe and Ruth, but especially Ruth, have built several robots using a sophisticated lego kit we bought for them for their birthdays. Yesterday there was an article about purchasing used robots from industry as newer, better robots replace older models. It seems that the age of robots for domestic use, already evident with the Roomba, may be emerging. Asimov we need you now.

 

Health, Science

Ah

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Summer                                                                Recovery Moon

I won the catheter pull! It’s gone and I’m implement free for the first time in 39 days. Could you hear the sigh of relief?

My urologist, Ted Eigner, explained my pathology report and the next step, an ultra sensitive PSA done 8 weeks after the surgery. Anything under 0.2 PSA signals no apparent lingering prostate cells kicking out antigens. As time goes forward and the PSA’s continue with good signals the confidence level of a cure goes up. It’s pretty high right now, but not 100%. The reason: microscopic escapees taking up residence elsewhere in the body. That’s what the PSA tests for. The gross pathology of the removed prostate indicates no cancer in the area: clear margins.

A friend who has been through breast cancer wrote with feeling about those two words: clear margins. Not too important to you until they become very, very important.

I consider this the beginning of the end. The end will come when I’m fully continent and have had my first PSA test results. Eigner says about 3 months. Not bad.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Health, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science

Zombies

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Beltane                                                                         Closing Moon

Cancer still on my mind. This time the battle, war, fighting, struggle words so often attached to thoughts about it. Cancer caused 585,000 deaths in the U.S. in 2013. That’s a city, a whole city the size of Tucson or Milwaukee. From this social perspective perhaps a fight against or a battle against or a war against cancer makes some sense. That’s a lot of people to lose and war would be fought if some nation took out Tucson or Milwaukee.

On a personal level though, say my level, those militant words feel like the wrong metaphor. Cancer is not, in my body, an outside invader that has breached my defenses. No, it’s more like a group of deluded idealists, a utopian commune to which I (or at least parts of me) belong, dedicated to the concept of their own immortality. To extend this metaphor the commune might grow and grow and grow, taking resources from the larger population until everyone outside the commune starves.

Another metaphor might be mental illness. Gripped by the illusion that certain actions will make me live forever, I first cut off a foot and eat it, then a hand. Later, hungrier still, I cut off a leg. At some point there will be nothing left to feed the illusion, but the conviction remains and I take no other sustenance. Death results.

Cancer, of course, has no motive. It has no intention, other than survival. Yet, it is my own cells gone off on their own, to a different rhythm than the rest. As they grow, zombie like, staying alive when they should be dead, cancer recruits other cells to supply it. The host, me, must furnish more and more resources to keep the cancer cells alive. This process has a finite limit.

Cancer cells are more horror movie than battlefield. The first step, it seems to me, is to stop seeing cancer as an enemy and begin to see it for what it is, a deviation from normal cellular processes that left unchecked will slowly consume the host from the inside. It is not fear or violence that will put a stop to it, but careful application of known techniques like surgery (removal), chemotherapy and radiation (to stop the zombie cells). Will these techniques always succeed? No. Not right now.

Horror movies rely on fear for their effect. So do the metaphors of war. We need to back away from both and demythologize this monster. See it clearly. Then, deal with it.

 

 

Anoka County, Faith and Spirituality, Health, Our Land and Home, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science

they cannot and will not define my life

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Beltane                                                             Closing Moon

The closing process with dribs here and there. At the UPS store in Aspen Park, Lauren, in a turquoise UPS shirt, opened her book of notarial acts (not kidding) and recorded her work on our closing documents. I signed them in her presence. Creedence Clearwater played on the muzak. When I said, I like your music. She nodded, I’m 67. 68 here.

The closer wants a document we sent by USPS two weeks ago, a document we couldn’t fill out online. Why’s that? Anyhow I took a photo of it with my phone and e-mailed that to her this morning. Another hard copy goes in the mail today.

A lien waiver for work we had done to follow up the inspection report. None of this amounts to much, but after three months on the market and six with double mortgages everything related has an edge. Though. Glad to do it. Want this done.

Got an appointment for an echocardiogram next Tuesday. They’ll fit me with a Holter monitor, too. I’ll wear it for a month. This is the follow up to those episodes of shortness of breath and palpitations. Could be stress related, I suppose. Trouble is, I don’t feel stressed. Slept fine last night for example.

Then, in other news, I get my biopsy results tomorrow. You might image a scene from Mel Brook’s High Anxiety, but instead I’m calm. Yesterday, as I said, I was weary of all the threats to my life and with this weariness I felt a bit down, but that has lifted.

Exercise helps. So does having framed all this in the week after my physical. That frame puts all of it, the house closing, the prostate biopsy, the heart follow-up in life as it is, not as I wish it would be. The closing takes time and exacts small cuts, none fatal. The prostate and the heart, though each could be fatal, do not change my life. I can still read, laugh, love, plan, hope. They may define my death, though I hope not, but they cannot and will not define my life. However much of it is left.