ThinkingShift

I guess like any other person obsessed with blogging (yep, sad I know), occasionally you have a look at the statistics and suss out what people are reading. Recently, two posts attracted good traffic: the Top 10 Endangered Species post had over 3,000 visitors in one day; and my latest rant on privacy issues and the surveillance society attracted over 1,500 readers in one day.

Now, I fully admit that the ThinkingShift blog has yet to settle into a theme and maybe it never will. My interests are diverse, ranging from quantum mechanics to the environment to information and knowledge management. A quick scan of the topics I’ve covered so far since flinging myself into the blogosphere shows the range. But I thought - great, people are interested in endangered species and the surveillance society. That is, until I caught sight of the search terms that people are seeking information on and somehow stumble onto the ThinkingShift blog. I imagined people would search for stuff on KM or information management given that these disciplines are my main areas of expertise; or people might search for stuff on libraries or leadership. In my wildest dreams, I hoped people would start to find me by searching for climate change, endangered species, history or archaeology stuff. But never did I imagine the search terms I encountered when I perused the stats!

I’ll try and cluster the oft bizarre search terms that led people to the ThinkingShift blog in some sort of sensible arrangement. Here’s a run-down of the highlights:

• There seems to be an awful lot of people out there interested in horses. These are some of the search terms - “parts of the horse”; “horse images”; “horse bits”; “horse in a black hole” and the one term that appears everyday - “horse penis”. I think I’ve only mentioned the word “horse” in one post and I don’t recall referring to “bits” or “penis” - so I’m perplexed!

• Similarly, lots of people seem to be concerned about getting stuck in black holes. Thankfully, I did a post on what to do in a black hole only recently, so have managed to put information seeker in touch with pertinent information:)- But search terms that led to the ThinkingShift blog are curious - “black hole Siberia”, “black hole in tooth”, “Australia black hole” and the aforementioned horse in the black hole. Now, I sometimes wonder whether culturally Australia is stuck in a black hole, but not sure what to say about Siberia.

• Then we have the serious searchers, interested in climate change and endangered cultures. Some search terms are - “shining examples of CSR”, “culture and remote tribes”, “science involved with carbon emissions”, “carbon emissions and flight”, “Google and remote tribes”, “smart corporations social responsibility”, how much CO2 does a tree take up”. A bit of a puzzle is “Alexander the Great climate change”.

• Followed by people clearly interested in animals and endangered species - “how can we help the brolga”, “amur leopard”, “cheetah populations”, “tiger eating gazelle”, “ban on tiger parts”. Since I’ve blogged about most of these animals, I can understand the link to the ThinkingShift blog.

• A lot of people seem to be worried about the future and some of my posts on future trends and predictions may have calmed them or worried them even more! Here are some of the search terms used: “fear of nuclear war in the future”, “the world in 2050″, “is nuclear war a social problem”, “robots in the future”, “will world survive beyond 2012″.

• I was pleased to see people share my concern with the surveillance society and they found the blog by searching: “surveillance in Australian society”, “CCTV privacy”, “Kevin Bankston smokes” (well, Bankston is the privacy lawyer for Electronic Frontier Foundation); “Google Big Brother”, “Google privacy concerns”, “generational gap privacy”, ‘live CCTV pictures Hampshire”.

• Then there are the history buffs out there searching for: “solutions to ancient Rome challenges”; “nefertiti quantum mechanics” (okay not really history and not sure what Nefertiti has to do with quantum mechanics); “ancient roman names for sustainability”, “Keku life”, “Mayans in Peru”, “Mayans and knowledge management” (what the???).

• The blog also seems to attract people interested in space and space travel with the following popular search terms used: “Neil Armstrong”, “Guss Grissom death”, “Guss Grissom museum”, “original seven”.

• Then there are the following search terms that led people to finding the ThinkingShift blog and for which I simply have no explanation for!

* Dino the dinosaur sound bytes

* asians that are not naked

* beehive concept map

* camel meat cost and recipes

* natural medicines of civil war

* dangdut belly dancer (alarmed, I tried this search on Google and there was my blog sitting at No 10 on the retrieval list. About to shoot off an angry tirade to Google, I clicked on the result and lo and behold up came my post on Eurovision. The “dangdut” came courtesy of a comment from Matt Moore and the belly dancer was a remark I made about the Turkish entry!).

* David Jones department store vision

* how to buy a house under a trust (okay, I can help you, I’m a lawyer!)

* heaving (sad to think this term led to ThinkingShift)

* sexy historic account (of what I ask??)

* quizz funny personal questions

* “temple university” “library fines”

* Salford University rant

* asian men

* french car sex (do the French know something we don’t??)

* without a donkey (what the?!)

* Sarawak plastic surgeon (okay I admit I’ve thought about botox, but I’m not ready for the slice and dice just yet)

* a list of symbols found on the round zod (que?)

* YUM (in capitals and appears everyday in the stats - does anyone know what on earth this means??)

I’ve read about someone visiting the Google headquarters and being shown a large screen or screens that showed what people were searching for around the world in real time. Looking at how people have found my blog is my own mini-Google experience, but I’m not about to do posts on “horse penis” or “asian men” - so those people, please go elsewhere!

And welcome home Atlantis.

Yikes! Matt Moore has tagged me and I’m supposed to reveal eight things people don’t know about me. Matt’s blog post poses two questions: do the people he’s tagged read his blog and do we have a vanity feed in place? Well, the answer to the first question Matt is yes, I read your blog, it’s on my RSS feed. The answer to your second question is: no, I don’t have a vanity feed in place. Not sure why not, but frankly it’s never occurred to me!

Now, generally I don’t like doing these sorts of things where you talk about yourself and (hopefully) reveal something witty or amazing. I’m actually quite a secretive type (there’s something random about me). But I have done one before for my “young” friend, Patrick Lambe of Green Chameleon and I’ll respond to Matt, although I feel the pressure :)- I’ll respond quickly because if I think about it for too long, I’ll get paralysed! Mind you, I think I’m going to be hard-pressed to cough up 8 random or unknown facts about me. Why do I say this? Because a quick scan through my blog posts shows that I’ve already revealed a lot about myself. Here’s what you could say about me:

• a conspiracy theorist
• slightly if not totally paranoid about any form of surveillance or invasion of privacy
• wanted to be an astronaut or archaeologist when I grew up (well, I still haven’t grown up, so there’s hope for me yet)
• believe in global warming
• in despondent moments, believe that the future will be a dark place
• concerned about how human activity is threatening other species on this planet.

Okay, so here’s what people don’t maybe know about me and it will probably show you that I’m a frightfully boring person. And I’m not really sure how much one is supposed to reveal, so I’ll just go with the flow:

• I collect roosters: not real ones, just rooster images. I have a large and varied collection from all around the world - crystal roosters, jade roosters, metal roosters, rooster statues, rooster tiles. Sad but true.
• I design jewellery and many of the pieces I wear are original designs or designs my husband (architect) has conjured up.
• I worked for many years in a psych hospital as a teacher of emotionally disturbed children.
• My background is Welsh - my maiden name was Evans-Jenkins (can’t get much more Welsh than that). Although I also have some Russian ancestry and could once speak very good Russian; more rusty Russian these days.
• I visited the USSR before it collapsed and was tailed by the KGB, along with my Russian friend - scary stuff that I vividly remember to this day.
• My favourite place in the world is Madiera.
• I travel to far-flung places to do special things - Namibia to see the fur seal colony; South Africa to adopt a cheetah; Nicaragua to explore the jungle with a native plant expert; Mozambique to learn about medicinal properties of herbs and plants.
• I dislike cities/urban areas and choose to live in the “bush”. I would one day like to live on some remote island somewhere, far removed from “civilisation”, and lead an eco-friendly lifestyle.

Okay that’s eight, enough. I think I’m now supposed to tag another eight people, but will have to think about who the victims - sorry - people would be as most of them have been tagged already - Patrick Lambe, Matt Moore, Dave Snowden…….

Time for a change of pace. I’ve been researching more into my pet topic - the surveillance society - and have thoroughly depressed myself (watch out for a post soon on my findings). So I needed some light relief. I’ve been reading a great book - Andrew Chaikin’s A Man on the Moon, and have just polished off the first authorised biography of Neil Armstrong, so I’m obviously in some sort of space travel frame of mind. Beam me up Scotty!

I started thinking about whether astronauts have seen UFOs on their space voyages and this led me to thinking about the history of UFO sightings, and the ultimate question: whatever happened to Kenneth Arnold, the salesman and pilot who reported way back in 1947 that he’d spotted nine objects flying in a V formation that tipped their wings like “a saucer if you skip it across water”. And so the term ‘flying saucer’ entered the lexicon.

I am a sucker for a good conspiracy theory and as I was growing up, I was convinced that aliens were amongst us (well, I still think that in some organisations I’ve worked in, aliens have been present!). I was obsessed with UFOs; I watched Star Trek episodes repeatedly to the frustration of my parents; I could name the planets in order by the time I hit kindergarten (easier to recite now that poor old Pluto has been vanquished); I was precocious enough to blurt out to my teachers that the two moons of Mars are Deimos and Phobos, doesn’t everyone know this?; I dreamed of being an astronaut (I wasn’t astute enough at such a young age to figure out that only men reached the moon until the Shuttle programme gave women a ticket to ride). By the time I reached high school, I could recite any fact you needed to know about Neil Armstrong, the first human to set foot on the Moon. I still marvel at the feat of the Powered Descent in Eagle, using primitive 1960s computers.

When I was about 14 years, I was waiting outside the house for my parents - we were off to dinner - I was gazing at the night sky and saw two UFOs. They were probably satellites, but I was convinced. Surely my father would understand - he’d been an air force fighter pilot and must have seen white lights dancing around the sky or UFOs tracking him - but he just looked at me with a perplexed expression. He stared skyward but could see no UFOs.

Somewhere in my 20s, I lost interest. Studying law tends to do that to you - there’s no “Alien Rights Bill” or Alien Discrimination Act to learn about :)- But recently, I’ve been drawn to the space travel section of my favourite bookstore and bought 5 books on the Apollo programme…and then…in came an article from Wired on 60 years of UFO sightings that really piqued my interest.

But first, whatever happened to Kenneth Arnold, the man who sparked off the whole Roswell conspiracy theory? A quick dive into Wikipedia tells us he died in 1984 and, following his 1947 UFO sighting, he seems to have spent the rest of his life interviewing UFO witnesses and even wrote a book (mmm…missed that one).

Now, I’ve always wondered why contactees of aliens seem to come across them as the aliens wander through the desert. The most famous contactee was George Adamski, who allegedly met an alien called Orthon in the California desert on November 20, 1952. These “friendly” space people warned of the dangers of scientific progress and gave spiritual messages for humanity. Did Orthon lose his GPS and couldn’t find the bright lights of LA? And what’s with the strange monikers aliens seem to be labelled with: Orthon and Eloha.

Eloha is an interesting alien sighting. I didn’t know about the International Raelian Movement, founded in 1974 by Rael, aka Claude Vorilhon, a former French motor-racing writer. Apparently, Rael encountered Eloha (probably in the desert) and Eloha told him that humans are the product of a cunning DNA experiment and that the Bible and other religious texts refer to encounters with aliens, not God or His angels.

This Rael dude thinks he is related to Jesus and Mohammad and has managed to attract several thousand followers who are planning to make their headquarters in Las Vegas. Las Vegas?? How perfect if you ask me. Las Vegas: the venue for the 2007 UFO Conference and the place where Prophet Yahweh, Seer of Yahweh, called down UFOs and spaceships for the media to photograph. Seems the aliens and their spaceships missed the glossy photo shoot as they never appeared.

I ended up thinking that the hysteria over UFOs, alien abductions, aliens with dire prophecies for mankind and so on, was the result of too many people in the 1960s taking magic mushroom trips or perhaps was a result of the jet and space age following WWII. With jet planes, military and weather balloons, satellites and meteor showers whizzing through the atmosphere, our imaginations were bound to leap to the extraordinary.

But maybe not: approximately half the US population currently believe the media is conditioning them for an alien encounter. As recently as 2002, a Roper Poll found that one in seven people in the US claim to have spotted a UFO or have been a contactee (no word on whether all alien encounters occurred in the desert). I haven’t looked into whether Australians believe the same but we do of course have our very own UFO capital - Wycliffe Well, near Tennant Creek in Central Australia (the Outback, the desert - is there a pattern here?)

I remember being caught up in the Roswell thing - that some poor aliens crashed their spacecraft in Roswell, US and the US Government recovered the technology and conducted autopsies on the alien bodies. I think somewhere I even read the suggestion that what the US Government recovered allowed the Americans to build the lunar landing vehicles or Apollo spacecraft. And then of course we had Alien Autopsy in 1995 - supposedly genuine footage of an autopsy of one of the Roswell aliens, obtained from an old US cameraman. This was around the time of the X-Files, a TV series said to have been inspired by Roswell (and great TV viewing if you ask me). Why the old footage made its surprise appearance in 1995 and not years earlier I don’t know.

Actually, the 1990s was gripped by refueled interest in UFOs and aliens - Hollywood films like Independence Day (1996) and Men in Black (1997) - but things really started heating up in 2005 when a document said to have been written in the 1970s came to light. One of the Roswell aliens survived the crash in the 1940s (he was called EBE1, not Joe or Bob or Bill). EBE1 rounded up some military types and specially trained them and then they all took off for EBE1’s home planet, Serpo. Twelve humans stayed on Serpo from 1965 to 1978 - two remained on Serpo whilst the others died on the planet or when they returned to Earth. Say what??? You can read about it here. Mind you, this story does explain what has happened to some of the relatives I lost touch with - phone home please :)- Apparently, Serpo is a planet of Zeta Reticuli (where?). I had to fight hard not to succumb to the temptation of reading the report and getting caught up in this stuff.

Getting back to us being groomed to the idea of meeting aliens, some Ufologists considered the film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), a U.S.-government-backed project to get the public used to the idea of friendly aliens. The film had such an impact on the British House of Lords, it held a three-hour debate on alien abductions in 1979. Her Majesty’s government, however, decided UFOs were not alien spacecraft and were not a threat to the nation. Thank goodness, can you just imagine Her Majesty meeting someone called Eloha or Orthon.

NASA is now talking about a manned mission to Mars and “terraforming” is the new buzz word with news that Lowell Wood, a noted physicist, has outlined a plan to transform the Red Planet into a habitable world by the end of the 21st Century. Will we now see a spate of Martians whizzing around our planet in UFOs or walking aimlessly in some desert somewhere? As we get closer to a possible Mars mission, will UFO hysteria crop up again I wonder.

What’s always intriguing to me is that aliens seem to all be doctors. Barney and Betty Hill were driving peacefully in their car in 1961 when they noticed a UFO following them (as you do). When they reached home, they could not remember a large chunk of the journey and hypnosis revealed the couple recalled being abducted by aliens who subjected them to intimate and gruelling medical examinations. I can’t remember large chunks of my life, so a spot of hypnosis might just reveal that I haven’t really been working in law or KM - that I was abducted by aliens who conducted their nasty experiments (send the medical reports to my doctor please).

Joking aside, there are some people out there who are very serious about UFOs and aliens - take Stanton Friedman, a leading Ufologist who says: “The evidence is overwhelming that some UFOs are intelligently controlled ET spacecraft...” and he argues further “that the subject represents a cosmic Watergate, that there are no good arguments against these conclusions and that flying saucers and the worldwide government cover-up are the biggest story of the millennium“. You can check out Friedman’s site here.

And then there’s the Disclosure Project: ex-CIA and military officers describing their experiences covering up UFO and extraterrastrial encounters. I haven’t checked this site out thoroughly yet, but I plan to. Just in case you come across an alien, here’s a Layman’s Guide to Alien Contact.

I’ve spent so many years in law, teaching, information and knowledge management, that I’ve lost touch with the latest in alien encounters and UFO theories. But I often think that this vast universe can’t just be ours alone. What are your thoughts: why do humans seem to be so keen to believe that we are not alone in the Universe? Ever encountered an alien or seen a UFO?

Like Darwin, Leonardo Da Vinci has gone digital. The Leonardian Library in Vinci, Tuscany is digitising Da Vinci’s work. Specifically, the Madrid Codices and the Codex Atlanticus — two collections of scientific and technical drawings – will be available as a free digital archive called e-Leo (love the name!).

The project is being financed by the European Union and will include the Windsor folios and 12 notebooks from the Institut de France. 12,000 pages of Da Vinci’s work will be available, creating the most extensive public online archive of Leonardo’s codes.

But don’t rush off just yet to check if Dan Brown had all his facts right. Apparently, you need a good grasp of 15th Century Italian to navigate your way around Da Vinci’s designs and notes. Forms in English are expected in about two months; an index of drawings in English is expected by year’s end.

Indexing the collection has been an interesting task as Da Vinci often clustered together non-related items such as technical specifications with shopping lists. Text mining company Synthema, along with engineers from the University of Florence and the Accademia della Crusca, Italy’s national language institute founded in 1582, teamed up to index the great master’s work and offer semantic search functions and clustered results for delighted academics. Amongst the Codex Atlanticus is a technical drawing for a spring-propelled vehicle that perhaps inspired the Mars rover.

Over at the British Library, two of Leonardo’s notebooks are freely available for six months. The Codex Leicester is owned by Bill Gates for which he paid US$30.8 million; the other, Codex Arundel, is owned by the British Library. Go here to check it out.

The President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, has an interesting perspective on climate change. Recent European summers have been the warmest in 500 years, most notably the scorching heatwave that shimmered across Europe in 2003. The global temperature increased by 0.6% during the 20th Century. Both these facts, according to Vaclav, have caused environmentalists and their followers to suggest radical action is needed to curb global warming.

In the past year, we’ve had Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, shown in cinemas around the world; the Stern report warn of dire predictions; and the Group of Eight summit grappling with what to do about climate change. But Vaclav queries whether climate change rhetoric is just plain propaganda and whether it is now becoming politically correct to embrace global warming at the expense of alternative viewpoints. The grand narrative – the established truth - he suggests is that of climate change. Vaclav says that global warming hysteria has become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem and suggests that some leading scientists protest against the arrogance of those who advocate the global warming hypothesis and relate it to human activities.

He has of course lived in a communist regime and feels the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity is ambitious environmentalism, not communism. Vaclav maintains that environmentalists are demanding immediate political action rather than believing that long-term positive change can result from economic growth and technological progress. In an interesting comment he suggests “..the higher the wealth of society, the higher is the quality of the environment”. Not quite sure how he reaches this position because if we look at the wealthy, developed countries, they are the ones ripping the environment apart with carbon emissions, deforestation and so on. Vaclav believes that scientists should declare their political and value assumptions and how this might affect the selection and interpretation of scientific evidence.

Like many people who question the veracity of the climate change argument, Vaclav questions why we seem to ignore the cyclical nature of climate fluctuations throughout history. There was a well-documented warmer climate during the Middle Ages and as recently as the early 20th Century, temperatures were warmer than now. In suggesting this, Vaclav perhaps chooses to ignore the rapidly climbing temperatures identified in the Hockey Stick graph (shows temperatures shooting up in the latter half of the 20th Century).

He places great faith in contemporary society when he states: ”Due to advances in technology, increases in disposable wealth, the rationality of institutions and the ability of countries to organise themselves, the adaptability of human society has been radically increased. It will continue to increase and will solve any potential consequences of mild climate changes.”

Given that recent articles have suggested that Paris, France and Mediterranean countries could be facing an increase in hot days by up to 500%, I’m not sure how he concludes that we’ll be facing mild changes.

Professor Richard Lindzen from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says: “future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age”. This is a position Vaclav seems to be taking when he says: “The issue of global warming is more about social than natural sciences and more about man and his freedom than about tenths of a degree Celsius changes in average global temperature.”

Living for most of his life under a communist regime, Vaclav is perhaps finely tuned to political ideologies and seems to be worried that a global warming grand narrative will emerge from a politically centralised approach to climate change. To prevent this from happening, he suggests we keep in mind the following:

• small climate changes do not demand far-reaching restrictive measures;
• any suppression of freedom and democracy should be avoided;
• instead of organising people from above, let us allow everyone to live as they want (yes, well: can we allow people to wantonly spew carbon emissions into the atmosphere; threaten endangered species???);
• let us resist the politicisation of science and oppose the term “scientific consensus”, which is always achieved only by a loud minority, never by a silent majority;
• instead of speaking about “the environment”, let us be attentive to it in our personal behaviour (Vaclav seems to be assuming that people can or will be personally responsible for their actions – a risky notion if you ask me);
• let us be humble but confident in the spontaneous evolution of human society. Let us trust its rationality and not try to slow it down or divert it in any direction;
• let us not scare ourselves with catastrophic forecasts, or use them to defend and promote irrational interventions in human lives.

Okay I admit I struggle with Vaclav’s approach. Because he has lived under a communist regime, I wonder if he swings to the other end of the spectrum by asking that we be personally responsible for our actions; that human society should evolve naturally without any intervention; that nothing and no-one should be suppressed. Could this position be to the detriment of our world and society?

Well, at the risk of getting savaged again on one of those social networking sites, today’s post highlights climate friendly companies. And if I’m accused again of being “one of those whining greenies who believe in climate change”, then yep, I admit it - I’m deeply concerned about how we’re damaging the planet, killing off species, stuffing up the climate. So….I was pleased to come across this article, which talks about how companies are getting ranked on global warming from the consumer’s viewpoint.

A new non-profit, Climate Counts, has produced a climate scorecard based on 22 criteria. Companies are graded from 1 to 100 on whether they measure their carbon footprint; how they are reducing their impact on the environment; compliance with legislation; and what they publicly disclose about corporate activities and environmental impact.

Fifty-six companies from North America and the UK have been ranked. So who’s on top and who’s at the bottom? Canon, Nike and Unilever came out shining with scores of 77, 73 and 71 respectively. Amazon.com, Wendy’s, Burger King, Jones Apparel, CBS and Darden Restaurants (Red Lobster, Olive Garden) all got zeros. Apple, eBay.com and Levi Strauss also were among 16 companies with scores under 10. Being an Apple fanatic, I was a bit disappointed with Apple’s score (2) - lift your game! even Google is going green with their ambitious plan to team up with Intel and cut the amount of energy computers consume by 2010. Regular ThinkingShift readers will know I’m somewhat obsessed with Google (over privacy concerns) but have to admit that at least they’re trying to do something about carbon emissions :)- Overall, electronics/computer companies scored well: IBM, Toshiba, Motorola, Hewlett-Packard and Sony, Dell, Hitachi, Siemens, Samsung and Nokia were all in double digits.

Companies in the food industry didn’t fare too well: Starbucks ranked highest in this group, with 46, followed by McDonald’s at 22. Yum Brands — which includes Kentucky Fried Chicken and Taco Bell — scored a 1.

The climate scorecard was developed with assistance from business and climate experts and you can go here to check out the scorecard. It’s a great way for consumers to decide which companies are committed to reducing their contribution to global warming and this results in empowered purchasing decisions. There’s even a downloadable pocket version [PDF] of the scorecard you can carry with you.

Well, here’s an interesting way to look at humanity’s impact on the environment - if all humans disappeared off the planet, how would the world fare without us? This is a scenario that the current issue of Scientific American explores (subscription needed, but I’ll give you the gist of the article). Science writer, Alan Weisman, conducts a thought experiment in his book, The World Without Us, and looks at the sequence of events that would most likely occur in the years, decades and centuries following our demise.

Weisman doesn’t actually say what might cause humans to be snuffed out but he starts off by saying that infrastructure would begin to crumble immediately - without street maintenance, road crews and cleaners - highways and boulevards would crack and crumble. Over the decades, houses, office buildings and shopping malls would become dusty caverns but ordinary, everyday items made from stainless steel, like pots and pans, could last for millennia and common plastics could last for years before microbes evolved to consume them. The concrete jungles that are our cities would be reclaimed by verdant forest. Subways would be overrun by water - apparently the New York subway system requires 13 million gallons of water per day to be pumped out otherwise the subways would flood. Focusing on Manhattan, Weisman says that the waterways and rivers that used to form part of Manhattan have been channelled underground and it takes an extraordinary daily effort to hold off nature in her attempt to claim back land and waterways.

Should humans disappear, one of the first things that would happen is the power would go off without people to maintain grids, pumps and so on. The subways would flood; sewer systems would overflow; leaf litter, which is normally swept away by maintenance workers, would clog up drains. The rising rivers would cause the steel frames that hold up the subways and office buildings to corrode causing streets to collapse into the subway system and tall buildings to topple over, perhaps taking others with it. Into the cleared spaces, seeds from plants would blow in off the wind and take hold in the cracks, crevices and pavements. Powdered concrete from decaying buildings would provide lime - a less acidic environment for various species. A city would start to develop its own little ecosystem.

As part of his research, Weisman visited places that humans had abandoned or left to see how nature has evolved. One of these places was the primeval forest in Europe, on the border between Poland and Belarus. It was a game reserve set aside in the 1300s by a Lithuanian duke who later became king of Poland. A series of Polish kings and then Russian czars kept it as their own private hunting ground. There was very little human impact and after World War II it became a national park. Giant oaks and ash trees gently sway in the breeze; wolves howl at night; woodpeckers stuff pine cones into trees; and the last remaining wild herd of Bison bonasus, the native European buffalo, still roams. Weisman also visited the Korean demilitarised zone where a thriving wildlife reserve exists between two armies facing off each other and where wild cranes roost. He suggests that without humans North America would turn into a giant deer habitat; forests would re-establish themselves over the continent and, over time, large herbivores and predators would evolve. The chemicals we have introduced, specifically since the end of WWII, the pollutants and the damage we are currently doing to the environment may have longevity that we can’t yet predict.

It’s not all prophecies of doom and gloom. As Weisman points out, humans have created beautiful and expressive artefacts - sculptures; architecture; fine art; literature - and he asks wouldn’t it be sad for the Earth not to have humans?

The picture he paints of deserted, decaying cities reminds me of a film where many years later humans who survived whatever calamity visited the urban canyons that were once thriving cities. Wild winds whooshed through what were once busy streets and intersections; a lion appeared on the steps of a public building. I can’t recall the film but it sure gave me shivers. Would the world be better off without us?

Okay, I admit I haven’t read the book yet, just the Scientific American article - but I wonder if Weisman considers the hundreds of nuclear reactors out there. If they’re not maintained, wouldn’t they suffer a melt down and leach toxic waste into the atmosphere or soil and kill off life sans humanity?

Anyway, it’s an interesting thought experiment and you can watch a video of it here - but the scary looking dude in the video put me off a bit!

Well, the Mayans predicted that the world as we know it will cease on December 21, 2012 (darn…I won’t get any Christmas presents!). If the Mayans are wrong, we could still be wiped out in that year by a comet smacking into Earth. Michael Drosnin, author of The Bible Code, found a hidden message in the Pentateuch (aka first 5 books of the Bible) that predicts said comet. Not sure if this will happen before or after December 21, but either way, 2012 (which is a Leap Year BTW) is not shaping up to be a good year :)- The Earth’s magnetic field is also predicted to reverse in 2012 and who knows what that will mean. Seems an awful lot of people might be smoking whacky tobaccy, which causes them to make dire predictions for 2012. But should we survive 2012, a year that will also include solar eclipses, then we really have to start worrying about 2060.

Now, when you think of Sir Isaac Newton, you think of the father of modern physics and astronomy, a scientist and a rationalist - not someone warning of the Apocalypse. But seems Newton was also prone to the odd crackpot theory. A 1704 handwritten manuscript of Newton’s has just been put on display at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Newton secured a royal exemption from ordination in the Church of England so he would not have to follow Biblical teachings, so it’s somewhat surprising to discover a deeply spiritual side to this famous analytical scientist. Newton analysed the Book of Daniel and predicted the world will end in 2060, exactly 1,260 years after the foundation of the Holy Roman Empire. Well, Napoleon dissolved the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, so I think we’re safe and Newton’s just plain wrong. But it makes you a tad uneasy when you realise that Newton’s predictions about the laws of gravity and the motion of the planets were proved correct.

Maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised about Newton’s religious side because he dabbled in alchemy (the idea that base metals could be turned into gold. Now where’s Newtons’ knowledge management manual on alchemy I ask - could do with the ability to turn things into gold!). He believed that alchemy could reveal God’s secret laws of the universe.

Apparently, Newton believed in the Book of Revelation, which predicts plagues and fires amidst the climactic battle between good and evil. So much so that Newton also predicted that the Second Coming of Christ would follow the calamities and would precede a 1,000-year reign by the saints on Earth - of which he would be one.

Well, forget let’s party until it’s 2012; now we can party until 2060.

Historians and journalists have something in common: they reconstruct events by following the actions of characters, whether the character is Alexander the Great or Joe Smith, citizen. A historian studies a character or set of characters; builds a portrayal of the character’s personality and physique; attempts to tell the narrative of the character; explores motivations, themes and emotions; will attempt to describe what happened and why. Often historical narratives will pitch protagonist and antagonist together in a gripping yarn: Cleopatra against Octavian, Ulysses S. Grant against Robert E. Lee.

Similarly, a journalist tries to reconstruct and explain events or compile a narrative after the compilation of facts. And there might be one or more plausible narratives the journalist can tell and often the most popular one becomes the dominant narrative.

Take the story of plucky little terrier, George. The following story appeared in a Wellington, New Zealand newspaper:

“A plucky Jack Russell terrier named George saved five children from two marauding pit bulls…. George was playing with the group of children as they returned home from buying sweets.” By this stage of the story, George has been anthropomorphized. Then…

“Two pit bulls appeared and lunged toward them.” Then there is a quote from one of the children: “‘George tried to protect us by barking and rushing at them, but they started to bite him.’ The child interprets the dog’s actions as trying to protect the group of children. And then the ending: “We ran off crying, and some people saw what was happening and rescued George.”

So this is an emotive story of a brave, plucky little dog valiantly protecting small, frightened children against two snarling pit bulls. As the article in Scientific American points out, this may indeed be what happened. But then again, based solely on facts, perhaps this is what happened:

“The pit bulls appeared and moved in on the group; the terrier rushed at them; the pit bulls focused their attention on the terrier; the kids ran away. In other words, the same reported facts could have led to a story that carried the headline “Five Frightened Kids Flee as Tiny Dog Is Attacked.”

Two versions of reality told from two different perspectives - the perspective of frightened children and a beloved dog and the perspective perhaps of an eyewitness who didn’t tell a story centred on a little dog’s actions.

This is why encouraging organisational stories is an important means of uncovering organisational reality. Employees will tell anecdotes about events that happened in an organisation and these anecdotes reveal the pattern of the organisation - its culture, values, employee experiences and so on. You may find a plucky little George story - an employee who bucked the system and pitted himself against bureaucracy. But that same story could be told from another perspective - said employee just didn’t suit the organisational culture and was a “stirrer”. Either way, allowing people to tell their stories in their own words helps colleagues to learn from others’ experiences.

I ask this question because of what Schrödinger did to that poor feline in his famous thought experiment of 1935. Let’s recall what he did to kitty before we find out how said kitty cat may thankfully be rescued from the brink of death. Schrödinger was an Austrian scientist who (along with Einstein) refused to accept quantum mechanic’s notion that nothing is real and that we cannot predict or say anything about what is happening when we are not observing. In other words, the act of observation creates reality.

To demonstrate the absurdity of the quantum world, Schrödinger’s thought experiment placed a live cat in a box that contained radioactive material. Quantum mechanics tells us that the cat exists in an indeterminate state: neither dead nor alive. This is the phenomenon of superposition - both alive and dead. There is no reality until the box is opened and the cat is observed - then, Hello Kitty! The act of observation forces the object to take the position of either dead or alive. This thought experiment caused Einstein to utter: “God does not play dice“.

In our everyday world, we think of an object as being in either position A or B. In the quantum world, however, objects can exist at both A and B simultaneously. In 1982, a scientific team tested Schrödinger’s mythical cat concept when they sent two photons or particles of light flying off into opposite directions at the speed of light. The photons were observed and, measurements made on one photon, had an instantaneous effect on the behaviour of the other photon - suggesting that they are inextricably linked and that their interaction and information exchange disobeys Einstein’s theory that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. This experiment showed that superpositions really do occur. But it’s not easy to spot a cat both alive and dead in real life, so we can never really see the phenomenon of superposition for ourselves!

Okay so much for the theory, now for an interesting question: what if kitty could be brought back from the brink of death? This question revolves around something scientists have been pondering - exactly how does measurement achieve which position an object takes and is there any way to undo the effects of measurement? In 2006, scientists took a quick peek inside the box to check out kitty’s state (reported in Science Vol 312, p 149 and they found that rather than collapsing in an instant, the superposition proceeds towards collapse one step at a time. It is this gradual collapse that might save Schrödinger’s cat: scientists believe they could monitor kitty’s state and undo any damage the monitoring has done.

The May 12 issue of New Scientist (sorry, subscription needed) reports on a landmark thought experiment that may save kitty, which is to be conducted by physicist, John Martini, at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Here’s how it will happen:

• a loop of superconducting wire (known as a phase qubit) will be manipulated by firing a finely tuned microwave pulse at the loop;
• this will put the qubit in a ‘cat state’ (dead or alive);
• to find out whether kitty is dead or alive, the researchers will look to see whether the qubit performs a quantum trick called tunnelling;
• when a quantum particle is faced with an insurmountable barrier it can take advantage of the uncertainty principle, which says you can never precisely define all the particle’s properties. So this means there is a small probability we will find the particle on the other side of the barrier having tunnelled its way to a higher energy state.

Of course, if the particle has tunneled, it means the measurement was completed and kitty is dead or alive. The trick is to catch the qubit before it tunnels. To sneak a peak at the qubit’s state midway through its collapse, the researchers induce a steadily increasing voltage across the wire. This teases the qubit into thinking about tunnelling. The voltage is then lowered, which is like opening the box and quickly closing it again.

Lowering and raising the energy barrier acts as a “weak form of measurement”. If the qubit hasn’t tunnelled, it is in the lower energy state and its delicate superposition has not been destroyed. To undo any harm that has been inflicted, another microwave pulse, known as a pi-pulse, is fired at the qubit. This reverses the quantum state of the qubit ie back to a high energy state - and so it’s as if the qubit had never been disturbed at all because the second measurement cancels out the first one.

Weak measurements give the opportunity to peek into the box and partially determine kitty’s fate (eg the cat may be close to expiring), undo the weak measurement and restore kitty to the original unknown quantum state.

What’s the point of all this? well, scientists have up to now thought of quantum measurements as creating reality - until things are measured, they have no independent existence. But if some forms of measurement, such as weak measurement, are reversible, then the theories of quantum mechanics go far, far deeper than scientists have thought. If you create reality with weak measurements, does undoing the measurement erase the reality you created by doing the measurement? So maybe we don’t actually live in a real or permanent cosmos because, just maybe, it could one day unravel before our very eyes.

Phew! poor kitty :)- I pinched the image accompanying this post from Boing Boing - part of the LOLCats fun they’ve been having over there.