If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome!
The natural world always behaves like this. It attempts, in its own way, to overcome every obstacle put in its path. Organisms of all kinds make the best they can of every situation.
What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every few days.
Click to enlarge
Fancy a swim? No, I don’t either.
As with the last two Image of the day posts, this is once again from the River Great Ouse. Rubbish of all kinds gets into the river by a variety of routes. Sometimes people may just chuck stuff in – empty cans, plastic wrappers, paper bags. More often, perhaps, they leave items on the grass or the path, the wind blows, and voila! More flotsam.
But there’s not just human junk here, there are a lot of feathers too, mostly swan feathers though there might be goose and duck feathers as well. And there are leaves carelessly discarded by the trees in the park. However, the situation is not as bad as it seems; the photo was taken in a little corner where the river current doesn’t reach, a stagnant space where, if things move at all, they go around in lazy circles. There’s also some kind of floating weed here, thriving amongst the trash.
The natural world always behaves like this. It attempts, in its own way, to overcome every obstacle put in its path. Organisms of all kinds make the best they can of every situation. Often, the impact of floating waste is negative, but sometimes there may be exceptions.
On a much larger scale
I expect readers are aware of the massed floating zones of plastic at the centres of our oceans, the so-called Pacific garbage patch is the best known example although there are others. Some organisms have adopted these patches as suitable places to settle and there are now thriving colonies of algae, fish, and more. Attempts to collect the plastic for removal may need to be reconsidered and the situation is still under investigation.
Humans individually and collectively
It’s tempting to assume that my individual action has little effect. And there’s some truth in that – If I throw away a plastic sandwich wrapper as I walk in the countryside (having a quick look around first to see if anyone’s watching, of course), it’s easy to assume it doesn’t matter. But if I do it it every day that will be 365 plastic sandwich wrappers lying in the countryside. And if a thousand other people do the same thing that’s a third of a million wrappers. Suddenly the problem seems greater than I first imagined!
Collectively we are doing an enormous amount of damage. We need collective actions to make things better. This is happening, and we can all contribute, individually and collectively. If I act to improve things a little, and do it often, I will make a real difference. Or a local group removing litter from public spaces can make a larger difference much more quickly.
Somehow, collectively, we need to change from causing more damage to thinking things through and acting more responsibly. If we can’t or won’t, things will go from really bad (where we are now) to far, far worse (a place we definitely don’t want to be). Yet there’s still time, if not to put everything right, at least to reduce the harm very significantly.
It’s not only about rubbish
There are many things we can do to help the world cope better. Some of the links below offer good practical suggestions. Thinking about what we eat, how we use water, reducing energy consumption (and many other actions) can help the planet.
If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome!
Downtime is recuperative. It gives us time to just be, time to think, contemplate, dream. And when we return to the business of the day, perhaps we’ll do it with renewed vigour and purpose.
What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every few days.
Click to enlarge
I took this photo in 2012 when we lived in St Neots. It shows one of the bridges across the River Great Ouse in Bedford, much of the area around the river is parkland. It’s a wonderful breathing space in the heart of the hustle and bustle of the town and a relaxing stroll at lunchtime is always good in the middle of a busy day. There are places to eat and drink, or you can bring your own food and find a place to sit on the grass or choose a bench by the water. Lovely.
Downtime is important in our lives, it’s not good to be busy all the time. So whether it’s a week’s holiday, or even two; or a day off; or just 30 minutes in the middle of the day in the sunshine – downtime is recuperative. It gives us time to just be, time to think, contemplate, dream. And when we return to the busy business of the day, perhaps we’ll do it with renewed vigour and purpose.
And there’s something else in this photo.
Crossing a bridge
It’s impossible to miss the man crossing the footbridge. He looks purposeful, yet relaxed. The placid beauty of his surroundings would make it easy to feel relaxed. He’s crossing from one side to the other and I think he knows where he’s going.
Now I’m going to say something that some will accept and others will reject. But please reject it slowly if that’s your response. Read to the end and then reject it if that’s your decision. The man on the bridge is like a person following Jesus. That’s a bridge I have crossed in my own life. We’re all free to choose, but before walking away (if that’s your choice) please consider that even if you don’t believe all of his claims, Jesus is worth your attention because of his philosophy. He chose kindness, love and generosity over the prickly hatred and meanness that we so often see in our world. Jesus is worth hearing for his non-spiritual views, quite apart from anything else. Take a look. I did. My story is here on Journeys of heart and mind.
If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome!
If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome!
What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every few days.
Click to enlarge
This is the same river as the previous post, the River Great Ouse. That previous image captured a view from St Neots in Cambridgeshire; this one is from further upstream in Bedford.
The swans you see here are doing what swans do. They pair for life, but they also congregate in larger social groups (known as a bevy). When a swan dies and leaves a lonely partner, the remaining swan will often bond with a new mate.
In this sense swans are very like humans; we usually form lasting male/female pairs and in the same way, if one partner dies, the other will often (sooner or later) find a new partner. But there is a significant difference: swans act on instinct. We do too, but in humans there are additional layers. I can think of at least two – culture and reasoning.
Culture
Human culture is habitual behaviour; it may differ greatly from population to population. It’s easy to find differences between a Western wedding, an Indian wedding, an Afghan wedding, and a Japanese wedding. We could easily extend that list. There are also differences (though more subtle) between a French wedding, a US wedding, and a Polish wedding. And there will be still other differences between Anglican, Catholic, Baptist and Pentecostal weddings. Swans have nothing remotely like this, in fact they don’t have weddings at all. All of the foregoing is cultural; it’s a human layer overlying the instinctive animal processes of bonding, producing offspring and helping them grow safely to adulthood. There’s some evidence for elements of culture in certain birds, and some primates, and in some whales and dolphins – but well below the levels seen in human populations.
Reasoning
This is another layer but again, it’s mostly limited to human populations. It’s reasoning that enables us to have governments, science, technology of almost unlimited variety from farming and construction to ships, railways, aircraft and computers. Reasoning involves observation, drawing conclusions, finding ways of persuading others, differentiating between what works and what does not, making choices, and planning ahead. Again, you can see glimmerings of reasoning in some birds, some mammals, and in the octopus.
Faith
Faith seems to have no place whatsoever for swans, chimps, or any other creature on the planet. Faith draws on elements of both culture and reasoning, yet it’s not defined by either and is not dependent on either. It’s unique to humans. You’ll find quite lot on this website concerning faith one way or another; I won’t write about it further here, but I’ll leave a few suggested links below.
Conclusion
From observing a group of elegant birds on a river, we have thought about things that groups of people and groups of animals have in common, and how our abilities rise to at least two higher planes above the level attained by almost all other animals.
If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome!
What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every few days.
Click to enlarge
Before moving to Cirencester in April 2017, we lived for many years in St Neots, Cambridgeshire. One of the things I miss most (and there are several) is the River Great Ouse passing right through the centre of the town. This photo was taken from the town bridge; while looking ninety degrees to the right would reveal the Market Square, just a hundred metres away.
I like this photo because it has so much interest packed into one scene. You might not see the geese at first; they form a small in-line flotilla at the bottom right. The reflections in the water are lovely, and the surface rippled enough to add a sense of movement. The willow on the bank is typical of the trees in the Riverside Park which is out of sight but stretches behind and to the left from this position. The tree also divides the buildings along the river bank; they stand where the medieval priory once was, and the modern building to the left of the tree is ‘The Priory Centre’, the town’s major meeting and activity centre where Open Door Church used to meet on Sunday mornings. In the far distance you can just make out the Marina.
From priory to a new church building
While we’re thinking about the medieval Priory and the modern Priory Centre we might also think about the way church has changed since the year 313 AD. Prior to that year, the expectation was that church meant people gathering in homes without formal leaders like bishops, deacons, elders, pastors, popes, priests, rectors or vicars. There were informal leaders, confusingly with some of the same words being used to describe them – apostles, deacons, elders, evangelists, prophets, shepherds and teachers. But Christianity was illegal, persecuted, and therefore often hidden from public view.
When Christianity was legalised in 313 AD, and made the state religion in 380 AD, everything changed. It’s possible that by that time, burgeoning, even explosive growth in Christianity had reduced worship in the Classical Greco-Roman temples to a low ebb. The buildings were expensive to maintain, and the solution would have seemed obvious, legalise Christianity, hand over the buildings for Christian use, let them modify them for their new function, pay the maintenance costs, and manage the administration. Problem solved for the Roman state.
If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome!
It was an opportunity for Donna to feed the lemurs and see them up close, and for me it was an opportunity to take some photos in a very unusual setting!
What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every few days.
Click to enlarge
I have another animal photo for you today, this is a fairly close shot of a ring-tailed lemur taken from inside the enclosure.
Donna had booked a visit to Paradise Wildlife Park near Broxbourne (now Hertfordshire Zoo), signing up for an opportunity to enter the lemur enclosure with staff, armed only with slices of apple. The lemurs are not tame, but they are habituated to people. They are visited often by parties such as ours so they are used to people, and nobody has harmed them or frightened them and they are very fond of sliced apple so they will happily approach, even sit on your shoulder, take the proffered apple and eat it.
Visiting the lemurs
It was a wonderful opportunity for Donna to feed the lemurs and see them up close, something she’d wanted to do for some time so a dream fulfilled. And for me it was an opportunity to take some photos in a very unusual setting! I have to say, it was quite an amazing experience.
Habituation
All animals (including humans) can become habituated to many kinds of stimulae. For example, someone who is scared of spiders, if exposed to very small spiders regularly, will react less and less to their presence because the small spiders have never done them any harm. Then it may be possible to graduate to slightly larger kinds of spider.
If you live near an airport you will probably be habituated to the sound and appearance of low-flying, large aircraft. Your visitors may be alarmed, but for you it’s an everyday experience and you hardly notice it.
And of course it’s easy to become habituated to situations and behaviours that might be harmful, for example driving too fast. If you’re habituated to something inherently unsafe, you probably need to think it through logically and carefully.
If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome!
What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every few days.
Click to enlarge
Here’s something you may never have seen, unless you’re a farmer or a vet – a calf suckling from its mother. When we lived in St Neots, there was a footpath running past our back gate in Eaton Ford and running very straight to the churchyard of St Mary’s in Eaton Socon. The path led past a large field, Bedfordia Meadows, and sometimes cows were kept in this field.
On one particular day in 2012 I was using the footpath and this cow and her calf were close up against the fence. I was able to take the photo without even stepping off the path. I’ve been working my way through my photos from July 2012 recently, looking for images for articles like this one. And it seemed to me that many of you might like to see this moment from a summer’s day 13 years ago.
For the cow and the calf this is a matter of life and death. Without the mother’s milk a new-born calf would not survive long. Milk contains the water and all the nutrients needed for the calf to grow and become capable of drinking water and eating grass for itself. In the wild, like all mammals, the cow would stop producing milk once the calf stopped needing it. But domesticated cattle have been bred to produce milk for much longer and a cow would quickly be in pain and in danger of serious infection if not regularly milked twice a day.
Mammals provide milk, birds lay eggs
Both dinosaurs and mammals developed from early reptiles. At the time of the Cretaceous extinctions caused by the impact of the famous asteroid, when all the large dinosaurs died out, there had long been early mammals and some of the smaller kinds survived. One branch of the dinosaurs survived as well and we are all familiar with them, they are called birds! A number of small reptiles and amphibia survived too so today we have toads and frogs as well as crocodiles, alligators, lizards and the snakes. But most air-breathing vertebrates in the world today are either mammals providing milk to their young, or the egg-laying birds.
If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome!
Once it was realised that a letter could be coded as any other letter except itself, even this tiny clue could help point the cryptographers in the right direction.
What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every few days.
Click to enlarge
Why is this old computer enigmatic? Some of you will know, some might guess correctly, others may have no idea. I took the photo in July 2012 at the Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park where highly secret work was done during the Second World War to break the German Enigma code as well as other enemy codes and ciphers.
This is a working replica of the famous Colossus computers used to crack those very difficult codes. And computer power alone couldn’t do it, it required clever minds to look for little hints that could make the ‘unbreakable’ code breakable. As an example, once it was realised that a letter could be coded as any letter other than itself, even this tiny clue could help point the cryptographers in the right direction. And there were always cribs that could help, the knowlege that a particular operator always began with the same phrase was an enormous help.
No original Colossus machines exist, after the war ended, Churchill gave strict orders that they should all be dismantled and the parts broken into small pieces.
The idea behind Colossus was the brainwave of Alan Turing, a mathematical genius who worked at Bletchly Park during the war. The Bombe that preceded it was originally designed and built by Polish engineers. Turing and his team designed and built a British version, physically different but doing the same job.
CSO (then based at Bletchly, now at GCHQ) intercepted the coded messages, while teams produced the German plain text, translated it into English and passed it to the British government and military planners.
If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome!
What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every few days.
Click to enlarge
Today’s photo is slightly giddying. This is Paradise Square in Sheffield; I took it in July 2012 when we were visiting family there. Here’s an amusing thought, but perfectly true – more car parking spaces are available in Paradise Square than had it been on level ground! But that doesn’t mean it’s a car parking paradise. Make sure your handbrake is firmly on and if your car has a manual gearbox, perhaps leave it in gear for added safety. Be careful when opening the door, too. I wonder if car insurance is more expensive if your address is on Paradise Square?
And consider the poor removals staff when it comes to picking up or delivering a whole houseful of furniture. Those hydraulic lifts at the back of the vehicle, usually so helpful, would be almost worse than useless! Would it be best to park across the slope? Or would facing uphill or downhill be better?
This must be one of the steepest car parks in the world. If you’re aware of one with an even steeper slope than Paradise Square, leave a comment. Thanks! (I found one, linked below, but I bet there are more.)
If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome!
Journeys of Heart and Mind 