Memories of 21, 42, 63 ... the 84th meandering

August 10, 2009
The Puppy Diaries
Illness and the Pack
By JILL ABRAMSON

I am one of those mothers who checked in the middle of the night to make sure my children were breathing. So it’s not surprising that I fret about Scout’s health. Especially because once, we had a puppy that was very sick.

A few years after we got Buddy, our beloved Westie, we decided to get a second dog to keep him company.

One of my colleagues at the time also wanted a Westie pup, so I arranged to collect two females from the same litter. Carting those two white fluff balls home in our van, I told my children, then 11 and 13, that we would let my colleague’s two small daughters, who had never had a dog, pick the one they wanted.

Unknown to me, Will, our son, had fallen head over heels for the smaller of the two pups. She had a vulnerable look that claimed his heart. Cornelia, our daughter, noticed that the little girls always expressed a preference for whichever puppy they were holding at the moment they were asked to pick. She successfully steered them to the bigger pup.

We named ours Dinah, but we also gave her the nickname Tiny. She didn’t grow as quickly as Buddy had, which began to worry me. Then, at about 4 months, her back legs began to tremble. During a routine vet visit for both dogs, I asked about this.

Our great, thorough vet, Dr. Kay Young, was concerned. She ordered tests and did further research. She wanted to rule out a rare, genetic neurological disease that was inherited by Westies and Cairn terriers. She sent Dinah’s tests to the University of Pennsylvania Veterinary School, one of the best in the country.

A week later we had our devastating diagnosis. Dinah, indeed, did have globoid cell leukodystrophy, also known as Krabbe disease. There is no cure. It is fatal. Most dogs die within a year. The disease also afflicts humans, and in infants it is often fatal before age 2.

After many tears, we immediately contacted the owners of Dinah’s parents, so that they would not produce more puppies that either carried or had the disease. My colleague’s dog, thank goodness, was fine (she’s still alive, in fact) and since she was spayed, she couldn’t pass along the Krabbe gene.

Soon Dr. Mark Haskins, a professor at Penn’s School of Veterinary Medicine, was on the phone to me. Having a dog with Krabbe would be valuable to his research, Dr. Haskins explained. He invited me to visit the large animal colony at Penn’s highly regarded veterinary hospital complex. Dinah could live there, he suggested.

The issue of giving her up was even tougher for our family to absorb than the fact that we would be caring for a puppy that would suffer seizures, blindness, deafness and loss of most motor control. We were prepared to give her our love, not to give her away.

Nonetheless, I traveled to Philadelphia to meet Dr. Haskins, a kindly man with a long white beard and mustache, and to check out the Penn veterinary facilities, which were impressive indeed. Still, I could not bear the idea of leaving Dinah there. Then, Dr. Haskins gave me a pile of newsletters to read.

They contained the accounts of parents of children with Krabbe, often accompanied by pictures. There were tragic and heroic stories of parents and doctors looking for useful therapies to ease the ravaging symptoms of the disease, and of their desperate search for effective treatment. All of this put some immediate and necessary perspective on our own family plight. If Dinah could help in the research of this fatal disorder, perhaps providing even a tiny step forward, how could we say no?

I asked Dr. Haskins if there was perhaps a middle way: would it be useful if we kept Dinah at home but took her to Penn, as frequently as he wanted, for testing and observation. He agreed. For the next eight months, we alternated. Sometimes we drove Dinah to Penn. Sometimes Dr. Haskins’ students or aides drove down to Virginia to pick her up. They treated her like a medical celebrity. Usually she was back home in a matter of days. Throughout this torment, she remained sweet and playful, a great companion to Buddy, and to us.

Although she did lose her eyesight, her quality of life was still pretty good as she marked her first year. But, as her limbs failed and she had frequent seizures, it became apparent that it was time to put her out of her misery. Because Dinah’s most valuable contribution to Dr. Haskins would be in an autopsy, I drove her one last time to Philadelphia. Dr. Haskins sat beside me for more than an hour to comfort me after she was gone.

Buddy, surprisingly to us, did not seem traumatized and enjoyed being the sole focus of our love and attention once again. And, for a very long time afterward, I wasn’t ready to risk losing another puppy to illness.

Until now. One lesson I took away from the experience with Dinah is how important it is to have a vigilant vet. Another, from our own experience and from talking to many friends who have nursed their dogs through cancer and other chronic illnesses, is that a sick dog is often especially loyal and lovable, and can bring the pack, dog and human, closer together.

I contacted Dr. Haskins recently. I hadn’t been in contact with him since Dinah died. He said that he remembered Dinah vividly and that she was the oldest dog with Krabbe that his team had ever seen. There have been some new developments in research and treatment, he reported, including a requirement in New York State that every newborn be tested and research conducted on cord blood transplantation. But still, unfortunately, there is no cure.

So cute

Visiting deer sit on the lawns, trim hedges, and the babies drink water from the bird feeder - all quiet and serene. Then one day i saw the mamma deer herd Amanda down the drive to the road. 'huh' i said.

Not certain what transpired except catching mamma deer herding kitty gently along toward the road, so I walked across the lawn (the deer and I don't have a prob communin') and called Amanda who just sat at the end of the drive. When I attempted to pick her up, she refused, then walked up the driveway with an 'i'll do it myself' look, slowly walked passed mamma deer, and went inside the house.

Wish i could have seen what transpired before kitten was banashed. To this day, Amanda keeps her distance from deer, and stays on the porch whenever they visit.

Sue, glad kitty's feeling better. Triple digit weather's a bear for animals.

Good articles, thanks

http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

Good to see you all today.

Great collection of articles Sumac.

Thanks sumac. Interesting stuff.

Good one re. the deer and the cat, Stradee. Probably had something to do with a little one.

Have no idea, but your suggestion makes sense. Maybe Amanda decided to meet one of the little ones, and mamma said 'no'? Protecting her babies and most importantly teaching them is her job. There are enough predators in the forest to keep mamma deer busy 24/7. Amanda may be gentle, but i'm certain a puma baby (with big mamma cat nearby) is a huge threat.

You and your 301 friends have supported 2,941,851.0 square feet!

Marine Wetlands habitat supported: 225,739.6 square feet.

American Prairie habitat supported: 69,211.5 square feet.

Rainforest habitat supported: 2,646,899.9 square feet.
)

Great about Amanda and the deer. Cats are cats to deer, I guess, but once one of my cats went nose to nose with an adult deer. Wish I had had a camera.

Hope all are reading my postings. Some particularly interesting stuff about insect stings and another one about puppies.

Clicked.

August 12, 2009
Editorial
Salmon Test

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration must notify a federal court next month whether it will do what is necessary to save endangered salmon in the Pacific Northwest. The decision will tell us a lot about how the administration sees its obligations under the Endangered Species Act. The Bush team evaded its responsibilities with amazing acts of legal casuistry.

A dozen salmon species in the Columbia River Basin have been declared endangered or threatened " their spawning grounds destroyed by logging and commercial development, and their route to the sea made more arduous by a gauntlet of hydroelectric dams.

Over the years, the Bonneville Power Administration, which runs the dams, and other agencies have unblocked spawning streams and increased water flows over the dams to help young fish reach the sea. But that has not been enough to restore what scientists regard as sustainable fish runs. And it has not been enough for James Redden, a federal district judge in Oregon who has become the salmon’s most reliable defender.

Since 2003, Judge Redden has rejected two recovery plans devised in the Clinton and Bush administrations. Both promised further habitat restoration and further modifications in dam operations. Neither, in the judge’s view, did enough to ensure the fish’s long-term survival. And while the Endangered Species Act requires that every effort be made to ensure the recovery of a species, the Bush plan promised little more than allowing the fish to go extinct at a slower rate.

Judge Redden was about to toss a second Bush plan earlier this year on some of the same grounds when the Obama administration asked for time to review it. The judge said fine, while warning that he could not accept any revision that adopted the Bush administration’s misinterpretation of the law.

Significantly, he also said that any new plan should leave all recovery options on the table, including the idea of breaching four dams on the lower Snake River. We have long recommended such a course, which many scientists see as the surest means of restoring the fish.

The judge has now given the administration 30 days to get this right. The official who will ultimately make the decision is Gary Locke, the secretary of commerce and former governor of Washington. We would be surprised if he recommended immediate breaching. Ways must be found to replace the power that the dams generate, which amounts to 4 percent of the region’s total. But he has to do better than his predecessors, otherwise Judge Redden could well place the operations of the hyrdroelectric system under court order and devise a plan of his own.

This means that at the very least Mr. Locke must reject the Bush plan, promise to devise a new one in close consultation with regional interests and keep dam removal on the table as very real backup if all else fails.

I couldn’t help chuckling at myself the other morning as I typed “Humpty Dumpty” into the search box of one of the big science databases. Humpty Dumpty, as anyone who remembers their nursery rhymes will recall, is an egg-shaped fellow who takes a bad fall. At which point, “All the King’s horses / and all the King’s men / Couldn’t put Humpty together again”.

But, as I discovered during my researches, Humpty Dumpty is an important personage. He has, for example, had a gene named after him. In fruit flies, mutations to the Humpty Dumpty gene produce a number of unfortunate effects, including thin egg shells. He has also lent his name to a scale that measures the severity of falls.

But neither of those is what I was looking for. I was looking for papers on the Humpty Dumpty community.

To see what this means, imagine a small pond. Let’s say that it’s home to a flourishing community of species " insects, fishes, algae, weeds, and so on. Now, suppose one of the species disappears " let’s say that humans fish out all members of one of the fish species. You want to undo this little extinction.

The obvious thing to do is to add fish of the missing species back into the pond. Which might work. But it might not. It might be that some other animal has occupied the fish’s niche, preventing the fish from moving in again.

Or it might be that the fish can only become established in the presence of, say, a certain species of insect " but that insect has long-since vanished. If this were the case, you’d have a Humpty Dumpty community: if it disintegrates, you cannot rebuild it from its parts. In other words, the ability to reconstitute the community depends on species that are no longer there.

How common is this phenomenon? It’s not clear. Humpty Dumpty effects often occur in mathematical models of ecosystems. But whether Humpty is important in nature is an open question.

Which isn’t surprising. Ecology is one of the hardest branches of biology, possibly of all science. Real ecological communities are fantastically complex " think of a rainforest, or a coral reef " and hard to dissect and understand. Experiments in the wild are difficult to control, and important variables are often hard to measure. Imagine trying to measure the impact that, say, earthworms have on oak trees: it’s damnably difficult.

Experiments in the laboratory are problematic too. Microcosm experiments " where you set up miniature worlds inhabited by just a few species of single-celled beings " quickly become massive. For instance, suppose you’re interested in the question of whether individuals of different species can live together. (This is an important question, for it bears on how ecosystems form.) To keep things simple, you decide to investigate a mere six species. You want to be thorough, so you’re going to consider all combinations, from each species living alone, to all six together.

But that’s already 63 combinations. Worse, in order to be more confident about the results, you can’t just do each one once, you need to replicate them. So you set up each combination six times. That’s 378 microcosms. Worse still, ecosystems " even small and simple ones " don’t stabilize in an afternoon. You have to wait for several months before you can be sure the system has settled into a “final” form. See what I mean? (Incidentally, I didn’t invent this experiment: it has actually been done. Those 60-plus combinations produced only eight different communities that were stable and persistent. Most of these were simple, containing only one or two species.)

Of course, Out There in Nature, there’s no such thing as a “final” form. New immigrants regularly arrive, whether we’re talking about a mangrove swamp in Florida, or the most remote islands in the Pacific. Sometimes these new arrivals fail to thrive. Sometimes they become established, perhaps driving other species extinct as they do so.

Or perhaps they have a more subtle effect: they fail to thrive and yet they drive other species extinct. Such species have been called “ghosts,”, the idea being that they have a definite, but unseen, impact on the stability of the community.

Again, ghosts have been detected in mathematical models more often than they’ve been sighted in nature. In fact, it’s not clear that they exist. The best evidence that they might be important comes from those microcosms I was mentioning. Earlier, I described only the first half of the experiment. The second half took the persistent, “final” form communities and subjected them to various invasions. In several cases, the invaders could not become established, yet the composition of the community shifted, with one of the original species going extinct.

Humpty Dumpty and the ghosts " the names are light-hearted, the theory is esoteric, but the problems they touch on are urgent. How do ecosystems form? How much impact do invaders have? What are our chances of restoring damage done by fishing or farming? We are pushing our ecosystems to the brink. If we don’t understand how they work, we can’t hope to limit the damage. And we need to try: after all, this is our home.

Report: NASA can't keep up with killer asteroids
By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein, Ap Science Writer 1 hr 44 mins ago

WASHINGTON " NASA is charged with seeking out nearly all the asteroids that threaten Earth but doesn't have the money to do the job, a federal report says.

That's because even though Congress assigned the space agency this mission four years ago, it never gave NASA money to build the necessary telescopes, the new National Academy of Sciences report says. Specifically, NASA has been ordered to spot 90 percent of the potentially deadly rocks hurtling through space by 2020.

Even so, NASA says it's completed about one-third of its assignment with its current telescope system.

NASA estimates that there are about 20,000 asteroids and comets in our solar system that are potential threats to Earth. They are larger than 460 feet in diameter " slightly smaller than the Superdome in New Orleans. So far, scientists know where about 6,000 of these objects are.

Rocks between 460 feet and 3,280 feet in diameter can devastate an entire region but not the entire globe, said Lindley Johnson, NASA's manager of the near-Earth objects program. Objects bigger than that are even more threatening, of course.

Just last month astronomers were surprised when an object of unknown size and origin bashed into Jupiter and created an Earth-sized bruise that is still spreading. Jupiter does get slammed more often than Earth because of its immense gravity, enormous size and location.

Disaster movies like "Armageddon" and near misses in previous years may have scared people and alerted them to a serious issue. But when it comes to doing something about monitoring the threat, the academy concluded "there has been relatively little effort by the U.S. government."

And the U.S. government is practically the only government doing anything at all, the report found.

"It shows we have a problem we're not addressing," said Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society, an advocacy group.

NASA calculated that to spot the asteroids as required by law would cost about $800 million between now and 2020, either with a new ground-based telescope or a space observation system, Johnson said. If NASA got only $300 million it could find most asteroids bigger than 1,000 feet across, he said.

But so far NASA has gotten neither sum.

It may never get the money, said John Logsdon, a space policy professor at George Washington University.

"The program is a little bit of a lame duck," Logsdon said. There is not a big enough group pushing for the money, he said.

At the moment, NASA has identified about five near-Earth objects that pose better than a 1-in-a-million risk of hitting our planet and being big enough to cause serious damage, Johnson said. That number changes from time to time, usually with new asteroids added and old ones removed as more information is gathered on their orbits.

The space rocks astronomers are keeping a closest eye on are a 430-foot diameter rock that has a 1-in-3,000 chance of hitting Earth in 2048 and a much-talked about asteroid, Apophis, which is twice that size and has a one-in-43,000 chance of hitting in 2036, 2037 or 2069.

Last month, NASA started a new Web site for the public to learn about threatening near-Earth objects.

___

Interesting sumac,

If certain insects become extinct - so do we human beings. And, we wouldn't want that to happen!!

Here is something I read that seems to support what you presented =

"Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect."
Chief Seattle - 1855

Wise old men in those days.

Was reading about the Meteor Showers and the gargantuan rock circling the sun - a good portion of the light show.

I guess when and if an astroid decided to crash into the earth, we will have found some way of detering its path. hopeful

NASA should be one of the government agencies overfunded, imo.



http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

You and your 301 friends have supported 2,941,917.6 square feet!

Marine Wetlands habitat supported: 225,761.8 square feet.

American Prairie habitat supported: 69,211.5 square feet.

Rainforest habitat supported: 2,646,944.3 square feet.

Wise old men indeed. And yes to giving NASA every penny that they ask for.

Having trouble clicking. Will try again later.

g'day wildclickers



13: A Secret Number of Sacred Power




We are told that 13 is an unlucky number. The date Friday the 13th is taboo because the Knights Templar were arrested and condemned by the seneschals of Philippe IV, King of France, in a "pre-dawn raid" on Friday, October 13th, 1307. The number 13 has been shunned for centuries. Some architects omit the 13th floor from office buildings to this very day. Is it possible that the folklore associated with the number 13 is absolutely apocryphal? Or that it has become a demonized numeral precisely because it was sacred in pre-Christian times? Think about it. It is an oddly recurring sum. 12 apostles and a messiah. 12 Knights of the Round Table and King Arthur. The number 13 recurs too consistently in such significant contexts to be purely arbitrary. And of course, it’s not.

13 was a number central to certain traditions of sacred geometry, because it reflected a pattern which could be seen to exist in man, nature, and the heavens. For instance, there are 13 major joints in your body. There are 13 lunar cycles in a solar year, and the moon travels 13 degrees across the sky every day. Six circles placed around a seventh central circle is a model of geometric efficiency and perfection in the second dimension that has been known to mathematicians for ages. But this same configuration in three dimensions consists of 12 spheres arranged around one central sphere, making 13 in all - the most compact three-dimensional arrangement recurrent in nature. A commentator writing about the Aztec calendar once said that, "Thirteen is a basic structural unit in nature. It means the attracting center around which elements focus and collect." Is this, then, the reason for Christ’s 12 disciples, King Arthur’s 12 knights, or the 12 major constellations in relation to our sun? The likelihood seems great indeed.

Assuming that the number 13 played a prominent role in the sacred traditions being preserved by the Knights Templar, and that the Vatican wished to keep this from coming to light, does it not follow that they purposely chose Friday the 13th as the date upon which to arrest the Templars? In many traditions, Friday is a holy day. If our assumptions are correct, Friday the 13th would be doubly sacred to the Templars. This may well have constituted the Church’s final "screw you" to the Order whose power they so feared and envied.

13 is of particular interest to us because of Tracy Twyman’s work on the "Golden Calendar", which is based on multiples of 13, such as 26 and 52. Interestingly, our modern calendar still bears vestiges of this, and retains the concept of 52 weeks in a calendar year. According to the website dayofdestiny.com, the Aztec century was based on a unit of 52 years, and native people in South America, who believed in an impending apocalypse that would occur on a certain date, would, "ritually demolish and destroy their civilization every 52 years", as a sort of "dress rehearsal." The glyph which represents both the start and end of the Aztec calendar is known as "13 Cane", and symbolizes the death of one cycles, followed by the birth of another - the Alpha and Omega. Strangely, this is very much what the 13th rune - called "Eiwaz" - means in the Northern European mythos. It represents the balance point between light and dark, the creative force and the destructive force, or the heavens and the Underworld. It too is the Alpha and Omega at the same time. It signifies death, but it also signifies eternal life. In the traditional tarot deck, the 13th card is the Death card. It also represents not merely death, but rebirth and renewal. These were obviously pivotal concepts to ancient cultures, the understanding of which has faded down the centuries. But isn’t it remarkable that this specific notion always seems to be associated with the number 13, even in cultures as seemingly dissimilar as those of Northern Europe and South America?

It is interesting to note that although the 13th rune was the central rune in the oldest runic alphabet, and the symbol around which all the others were ordered; by the time the second runic alphabet emerged, the "Eiwaz" rune was absent. What this seems to indicate is that even in very ancient times, this symbol so representative of the world-view central to Northern European thought had vanished due to the fact that the idea it represented had also been lost. This idea seems to constitute some ancient understanding of Hermetic thought. Of course, the idea didn’t simply disappear, it was kept alive by certain initiates who preserved and passed down the secrets of an esoteric tradition. Perhaps this is why the number 13 has always been associated with magic and the occult, and why it is a number perceived to possess some mysterious yet tangible power. It is an emblem of a secret knowledge, a knowledge which does indeed confer power upon those conversant with it. It is a knowledge that religious orthodoxies have long feared and tried to suppress. 13 may be perceived as unlucky to those who fear the secret gnosis it represents, but for adherents of that gnosis it is (as it always was), a sacred number.









http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

Really nice, Stradee.

The number thirteen is a transient number - it has many avenues of explanation.

Meine Got, there are toooooo many.

I think the best one is that - the average meal at the time these things were being counted were average ten to twelve and maybe one more - or so - per family.

Then, the family person to go and get the bread - or, what ever - was sent to get a dozen - or twelve - and, the person selling the stuff was apt to put an extra one of the items on the plate or whatever.

Oh, well......

Sounds good to me..... Big Grin

Damn, Stradee....................

You've just limited us to the year 2012.

That's when the ancient nativeamericans predicted the end of the world.

Actually, they predicted it to = December 24, 2012.

That's just f---ing amasing........

See ya'll later............

Thatta be a bakees dozen...grin

Maybe there's sumpin gonna happen near Maya land??? So don't go nowhere!

Nostra d predicted all sorts of stuff and says the worlds gonna explode.

We can't be worrying about when though. Just try and make the best of it whilst were here.

oh, and 13 is a Fibonacci Number

"13" sites
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&aq=0h&oq=&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLL_enUS303US303&q=number+13

clicking while I poke around at youtube looking for examples of Bedouin dancing

gotta love the internet

~~~

have a great earthturn dear WildClickers!

Weathers a bit cooler today ~ hurray!

Beth and all the wildclickers, have a marvelous day

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