RIP Wayne Dyer

I was sadden to hear of the recent death (at 75) of another personal hero of mine, Wayne Dyer.  Wayne grew up in Detroit, Michigan, and had a fairly rough go of it.  His mother made a couple of bad choices in husbands and her children suffered from it.  Wayne’s father just kind of disappeared.  Wayne found his grave years later in Mississippi.  The second husband was an alcoholic and this led to divorce.  These were not good times and Wayne’s mother was not in good financial condition so her children wound up in several foster homes.  Wayne managed to take all of this in stride.  She was eventually able to reunite the family.

After graduating from high school, Wayne did a stint in the Navy.  He then decided to go to college at Wayne State University in Detroit.  He had a bit of trouble getting in because of his previous academic performance.  He was admitted under special circumstances and came through with flying colors eventually receiving a doctorate from Wayne State.  He worked as a counselor and then became a professor at St. John’s University in NYC.  His first book Your Erroneous Zones was about how we defeat ourselves in life and how to overcome our self-limiting ideas. So he became a self-help guru with many books, TV programs on PBS, tapes, DVDs, seminars etc. to his credit.

His books have been a great help to me at certain low points in my life and I still read them and listen to his audios.  He got into more mystical things as he aged and I get some people criticized him for that.

I consider him another friend and teacher that I have never met.

Some resources.

• Wayne’s Website: http://www.drwaynedyer.com/ 
• Podcast Series:  https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/dr.-wayne-w.-dyer-podcast/id988177838?mt=2

RIP Wayne

RIP Oliver Sacks

I had just finished reading the latest Oliver Sacks book, On The Move, when I learned of his death.   I was sadden to hear this since I consider it a great loss to humanity.  He was 82 so he had a long and very interesting life.  On the move is really an autobiography so it is different from his other writing which mainly focuses on neurology.  He was an excellent writer and his work humanized the cases he talked about in his books.  He was a very humane and kind man.

I  first learned about him from the movie Awakenings.  This was inspired by his book Awakenings.  He was truly a wonderful science writer as well as being a practicing neurologist.  Awakenings is about his use of L-Dopa to try to relieve patents who suffered from the long-term effects of Encephalitis lethargica.  This was called sleeping sickness but is totally different from the protozoan sleeping sickness transmitted by the tsetse fly.  The cause of this disease is still unknown.  There was a breakout of it between 1915 and 1926.  Some of the people suffering from this developed a long-term situation where their bodies were sort of frozen.  Dr. Sacks wondered if this was related somehow to the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease and gave the patients L-Dopa.  The book and movie describe what happened.  It is an excellent book and made an excellent movie.  Dr. Sacks consulted on the movie.

I have read several of his other books including the well-known The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.  After hearing of his death, I plan to read his other books that I have not yet read.  I also watched the movie again.  Stars Robin Williams and Robert Di Nero.  I consider Oliver a friend I never met in person.

Some interesting links:

• A Tribute to Oliver Sacks on Science Friday.  http://www.sciencefriday.com/segment/09/04/2015/a-tribute-to-oliver-sacks.html.  He was a frequent guest on this show.
• Science Friday episodes with Dr. Sacks.  http://www.sciencefriday.com/search/index.html#page/full-width-list/1
• Fresh Air. Oliver Sacks: A Neurologist At The 'Intersection Of Fact And Fable'  http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/08/31/436289763/oliver-sacks-a-neurologist-at-the-intersection-of-fact-and-fable.
• His official website. http://www.oliversacks.com/.
  
  

RIP Oliver

Pay a Little More?

We had a discussion a few weeks ago in my Sunday school class at Williams Memorial United Methodist from the Cokesbury Adult Bible Study series with the title "The Choice to be Just."   One of the key readings was from Jeremiah 7 “⁵For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly execute justice one with another, ⁶ if you do not oppress the alien, the fatherless or the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, ⁷ then I will let you dwell in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your fathers for ever."

The discussion turned to such things as should we be willing to pay more for goods and services if it will allow others to be paid a living wage.  Or that we would have clean air and water and a good environment to live in.  Environmental law and a variety of issues were discussed.

This brought to my mind several items I have read or seen in the last year or so. 

• Several podcasts and articles on the minimum wage debate and executive pay.  One thing from the Brookings Institute.  http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/brookings-now/posts/2013/12/6-facts-about-a-minimum-wage-increase
• A lecture from Dr. Kati Stoddard about the differences in the environmental law concerning chemicals in the US and the EU.  In the European Union a company must prove a chemical is not harmful before it can be used in a product, in the US the chemical can be used and then it has to be proved harmful to remove it from the market.  Doesn't make much sense to me.
• The book and documentary Living Downstream.  Sandra Steingrabe is kind of a modern-day Rachel Carson.  She contracted bladder cancer and then began to look at the toxins in the environment.  She is a PhD scientist. 
• Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation by Dan Fagin.  I have just read the first part of this.  It discusses the problems caused by an industrial plant in Toms River, New Jersey.  Scary
• The Merchants of Doubt book and documentary.  These bring to light some of the dishonest things that major industries, like to tobacco industry, did to undermine the public perception of the health and environmental costs of what they were up to.  I watched the documentary on Amazon instant video.  I had read the book several years ago.
• Last Call at the Oasis.  You can watch this on Youtube or Netflix.  The is about water shortages but also talks about some toxic chemicals.  The real Erin Brockovich is in the film.
• The Human Experiment.  A film about toxins in the environment and in us.  Narrated by Sean Penn.  Available on Netflix.
• The "Dead Zone" at the mouth of the Mississippi River.  This is an area about the size of Massachusetts that is hypoxic due to the fertilizer coming down the river.  Hypoxic means no oxygen.
• http://www.healthygulf.org/blog/dead-zone-forecasted-be-average-and-thats-not-good
• http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dead-zone-size-connecticut-gulf-waters-180952260/?no-ist
• These are a couple of sites.  They are many more if you do a google search.

The redder the image the less oxygen.

Well I don't know how all that tied together, but would you be willing to pay a bit more for a better world?  Is it our duty?

The Small But Mighty Seed

I like to listen to audio podcasts.  I use a lot of them for my own "professional development".  These include science as well as other types of podcasts.  One of my favorites is Science Friday.  This is a two-hour podcast that originally airs on NPR every Friday.  I am at work when it is on live so I subscribe and listen to the podcast.  Sometimes I get behind like I have this summer.  I am just about to catch up now.  One of the shows I listened to aired originally in May and I finally listened to it last week. It was on the importance of seeds.  Ira Flatow interviewed three people on this segment.  One was Thor Hansen, the author of The Triumph of Seeds: How Grains, Nuts, Kernels, Pulses, and Pips Conquered the Plant Kingdom and Shaped Human History.  There is an excerpt from the book on the Science Friday website.  The small section is very interesting and very well written.  He is a biologist and has written several books that look like I should read them.

The second section of the interview was with Cary Fowler, (Advisor, Former Executive Director The Global Crop Diversity Trust) and Sandy McLeod (Director/Producer, “Seeds of Time”).  They discussed a new documentary about the program to try to save seeds and seed banks around the world.  This goes along with an earlier Science Friday interview with Fowler about the Arctic 'Doomsday' Seed Vault.  This is a seed bank located on an island about a thousand kilometers north of Norway. It is a vault was dug into the side of a mountain.  It is surrounded by the mountain and a layer of permafrost.

These seed banks contain important genomes that we may need in the future.  A lot of the varieties in the banks are no longer planted, but they may contain genes to resist drought and extreme heat that we may face in the future with climate change.

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Who is the Real Atticus Finch?

Although I have watched the movie several times I had never read Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. So with the publication of her second novel Set a Watchman, I decided to read them both.

I have always loved the movie. Gregory Peck is one of my favorites and his portrayal of small town lawyer Atticus Finch is one one of his best.  Atticus was a hero in Mockingbird but he turned out to be a racist in Watchman.  I must say I was really disappointed. I don't know what the critics are saying but I think Watchman was not quite as well written as Mockingbird but it was pretty close. I know that Mockingbird took place in the 1930s but it made me feel like I was at home as a child.

I grew up I a small town in central Texas. I swear that the people in the books must have lived in my town or at least clones of them. This was also a time of segregation.  We had “colored” schools, drinking fountains, separate places to sit at the movie house, etc.  I sometimes equate my Father with the Atticus Finch in Mockingbird. He was one of the few people in town that was not a racist. He treated all people with respect. He was a small town newspaper editor. The black people, who had been deprived of a good education by Jim Crow laws, often came to him to help them with complicated forms and advice..  They knew they could count on him to treat them properly. He was also the local Justice of the Peace and treated them fairly in court.  We lived near the black part of town and most of my best friends were black kids. We played all the sports and listed to rhythm and blues music together.  I still love those rhythm and blues!  I and my family were often called names like Atticus in Mockingbird.

Even though it was hard at times, I wouldn't trade what my Father taught me for anything.  Think I will go watch Mockingbird again and see who I hope is the real Atticus Finch.

Our Cousins the Yeast

Recently a group of scientists at the University of Texas published a very interesting paper, Systematic humanization of yeast genes reveals conserved functions and genetic modularity, in Science Magazine.  They found that a number of genes from humans could be inserted into yeast and get the same metabolic function.  It seems we have several thousand genes in common with our cousins the yeast.  The research group tried over 400 human genes and about half of them worked when placed in the yeast.  They first had to knock out the yeast genes to allow the human genes to work.  So be more respectful to that bread and beer from now on!.

You can hear an interview with one of the researcher on Science Friday.

Optimism and the Future?

In the last year I have read a couple of books with an optimistic view ofthe future of the world.  These are The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley and Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler.

I have read other works by Ridley including the excellent Genome: the Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters.  He is an excellent writer. 

This is the first book I have read by Diamandis.  He is apparently a well-known entrepreneur and the author of several books.  He was involved with the creation of the X Prize.  You can read more about Diamandis at http://www.diamandis.com/.

I am mostly an optimist but tend to be pessimistic when it comes to the outlook for our environment.  These guys seem to think that we will “create and invent” our way out of the problems.  I certainly hope they are right but am not sure that this will happen.  Anyway I recommend these for reading concerned with this topic.  You may be more optimistic after read these.