Rural Resilience

Finally my old friend Professor Hegney’s team’s research on resilience of rural people has been published online. Here is my bottom line summary. Find the full paper here

Individual resilience in rural people: a Queensland study, Australia

Hegney DG, Buikstra E, Baker P, Rogers-Clark C, Pearce S, Ross H, King C, Watson-Luke A.  Individual resilience in rural people: a Queensland study, Australia. Rural and Remote Health 7 (online), 2007: 620. Available from: http://www.rrh.org.au

Resilience = perserverance (internal toughness), adaptability (individual capacity and skills), social support (community capacity, belonging in community and family),  hope (future visions), spirituality (external faith), connectivity to the environment (belonging in place).

Resilience is undermined by multiple stressors.

My nemesis, the stinging tree

A week on, and the pain a distant memory I went out this morning to take some photos of a stinging tree. I found a large clump of them. With caution I got in and took some photos. Occasionally I could feel a leaf scrape the brim of my cap but kept a steady foot and continuous scan of the space and so got the photos I wanted without incident. See my flickr site. Is it with all enemies that when seen calmly, up close, they can seem quite wonderful?

A Week of Pain

Last weekend I was looking for headwaters of a creek through rainforest that had become overgrown with ‘wait-a-while’ vine, when I stumbled and placed my hand on the trunk of a ’stinging plant’. These nasty trifeds are covered with thorns with silicon hairs that pierce the skin and cause excruciating pain. I hit the plant with the tips of three fingers on my left hand and within ten minutes they were very swollen, there was pain radiating up to my chest, and my axilla lymph nodes were swollen.  I shortened my excursion but still took 1.5 hours  to get home. I waxed the area to get any exposed silicon hairs out. I thought I could put up with it but after another hour I rang my GP who got me down and hour later for a morphine shot. The morphine let me go to sleep for three hours but occassionally I would wake with a sting of pain in my fingers. The next morning the swelling was down and, with just some panadeine I could go to work which takes a lot of hand use. Now the fingers feel fine unless I put them under cold water and then the pain comes ferociously back.

So, tonight, I went to my weekly game of touch football with some other middle aged fellows. Half and hour into the game I pulled a calf muscle.

I am becoming paranoid about my mouse. There it sits, begging for use. I reach tentatively as visions of tendinitis drift through my mind.

Lord Avery wins Blomfield Award

The Blomfield award is given in memory of Lady Sarah Blomfield, early English Baha’i and responsible for the Children’s Fund after WWI. She was also responsible for mediating communications between the middle east and the English war office  that lead to the taking of palestine in WWI especially to take Haifa and save the life of Abdu’l-Baha, then head of the Baha’i Faith.

Lord Avery’s acceptance speech can be found here. Eric Lubbock, Lord Avebury, b September 29, 1928. Upper Canada College & Balliol College Oxford (BA 1949, boxing blue); Welsh Guards (Second Lieut) 1949-51; Rolls Royce (aero-engine division) 1951-6; Production Engineering 1956-60; Charterhouse Group 1960-2. MP Orpington 1962-70; Liberal Chief Whip 1963-70; Chair, Parliamentary Civil Liberties Group 1964-70; Parliamentary Human Rights Group, 1976-1997; Traveller Law Reform Unit; Peru Support Group, 2003-; Cameroon Campaign Group 2003- Speaker’s Conference on Electoral Law 1963-5; Select Committee on Science and Technology, 1968-70; Royal Commission on Standards of Conduct in Public Life, 1974-6 President, Data Processing Management Association, 1972-5; Fluoridation Society, 1972-84; Conservation Society, 1973-83; London Bach Society, 1984-98; ACERT (Advisory Council for Education of Romanies & Travellers) 2001-;TAPOL (Indonesian human rights); Kurdish Human Rights Project; Patron, Angulimala (Buddhist Prison Chaplaincy), 1992-; Founder, Parliamentarians for East Timor, 1988; Vice-Chair, Parliamentary Group for Tibet; Member, Institution of Mechanical Engineers (MIMechE); Fellow, British Computer Society (FBCS).

Birth of the Bab

One of the two founders of the Baha’i Faith, titled the Bab (B ah b) was born on 20th October 1819, in Shiraz, Persia (Iran).  I have written a short essay on His life, here. Baha’is commemorate the anniversary as a holy day.

Ignoble Prize: vanilla from poo

Cows – vanilla factories of the future

This story from the CSIRO, “Science by Email”, Australia.

Mayu Yamamoto has won this year’s Ignoble Prize in Chemistry for discovering how to produce vanilla flavouring and fragrance from cow dung.

The chemical extracted is called vanillin, traditionally found in vanilla beans and responsible for the distinctive smell and taste of vanilla products.

Dung processing is simple and only costs half as much as making vanillin out of vanilla beans. It involves heating the cow poo for one hour then placing it under pressure.The vanillin could be used in products including shampoo and scented candles.

Mayu says it is unlikely it will be used in food because of its unsavoury origin.

“This component is exactly the same, but it would be difficult for people to accept it in food given the recent rules of disclosing the origins of ingredients,” Mayu said.

The excrement of grass-eating animals, like cows, is full of lignin. Lignin is the chemical Mayu used to make the vanillin. It’s just a matter of knowing the right chemistry to get it out.

“Lignin is difficult to decompose. Farmers are troubled by how to dispose properly of animal excrement. We tried to solve this from a recycling viewpoint,” she said.

Once processed, the leftover dung is easily returned to the soil – an environmentally friendly solution to a pooey problem.

The gourmet ice cream shop Toscanini’s created a new flavour especially for the Ignoble Awards ceremony. They have named it the “Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist” in Mayu’s honour.

The Ignoble Prizes are designed to “first make people laugh, and then make them think”. These prizes are awarded to scientists in celebration of obscure and bizarre scientific discoveries.

Other winners worked on projects such as the maths of wrinkly bed sheets, investigating mindless eating by feeding people a self-refilling bowl of soup, and the medical consequences of sword swallowing.

To be Human is to have Faith

I have written more under my page, Baha’i – My Belief, and link to ‘What is Faith?”. My short argument is that faith is an inherent aspect of the human mind / brain function. Connected to the ability of humans to ponder on the future and recognise the possible inconsistencies in the provision of needs, faith develops on a functional structure of the brain that allows us to deduce there is a consistency in life that we can rely on. On the other hand there are many unknowns. Faith, then provides us a capacity to behave in accord to a judgement about the unknown that we can then rely. As a definition, I have come to a conclusion that Faith is a sense of security with the unknown as deducted by a belief in the consistancy of provision of resolutions to need.

A metaphor to kill anthropomorphism and save humanity

Anthropomorphism, (anthropos, man, and morphe, form). A term used in its widest sense to signify the tendency of man to conceive the activities of the external world as the counterpart of his own. In religious thought it is the ascription to the Supreme Being of the form, organs, operations, and general characteristics of human nature. The justification for anthropomorphic expression in religious writings is found in the fact that truth can be conveyed to men only through the medium of human ideas and thoughts, and is to be expressed only in language suited to their comprehension.

 

The neurologist, Ramachandran (Reith lectures 2003), makes an attempt to define the bootstrapping in the brain that the metaphor gives us, to make us intelligence. Synaesthesia, the cross-wiring of two functional aspects of the brain, so that, for example, seeing a number means that number has a certain colour, is more prevelant among arty types. And arty types are good at metaphor. Synaesthesia is genetic. If it expresses generally in the brain you get greater hyperconnectivity throughout the brain making you more prone to metaphor, links seemingly unrelated things because after all concepts are also represented in brain maps. The connections between different parts of the brain in this way could also have lead to language.

 

Yet the Great educators made it explicit that the anthropomorphic expression was only a metaphor, a way of understanding. The reality of the Supreme Being was far different. “God, the unknowable Essence, the divine Being, is immensely exalted beyond every human attribute, such as corporeal existence, ascent and descent, egress and regress. Far be it from His glory that human tongue should adequately recount His praise, or that human heart comprehend His fathomless mystery” Baha’u’llah Kitab-i-Iqan p98.

So is it time to undo anthropormorphism. Can we do away with anthropomorphism without doing away with the metaphor on which our whole system of language and understanding is based?

 

If we realise that God is the Creator, and God is nothing like us, then maybe the existence (that which is created) is also nothing like we can understand. Well we can always understand something that our brain has bootstrapped, but it would be just another type of anthropomorphism to accept that this is much at all. If we destroy anthropomorphism, then, when we say God is Great, then we know we are not great. But maybe the only way to challenge our mindset about this is to use metaphor. Let us turn ourselves inside out and upside down. We are not at the centre of the galaxy, but on the outer edge of a sparsely populated neighbourhood far from the centre. And all our existence and understanding in relation to God is like that (new metaphor). God has created thousands of other systems, each with tens of worlds, each which we cannot travel, cannot understand.

 

But all of that galaxy is part of the bigger world that we are apart. It is the true driving force of our world. Without that galaxy we are destroyed, non-existent.

And so we use this metaphor to find an understanding that we are forms at the end of a galaxy of being. We see a model of existence in which our deaths mean nothing to the greater reality. Our lives may have other importance.

Marriage is designed to control men

And we need it. There is an argument that proposes that humanity would have achieved its ethical constructs without religion. However, even a cursory look at the primate male recognises that, as this creature evolves higher and higher powers, he beomes more and more dangerous to other males and the children of other males. The primate male is designed to be the usurper of all other males, or to be usurped. There is ample evidence from the behaviour of modern human males to suggest that, unfettered, such behaviour would have stalled the civilising processes that have occurred over the last 200,000 years, and, presumable started before that. If human males were advanced primates without the ability to take on a religious viewpoint, the inter-male behaviour would have prevented enough stability of the tribal unit from creating an adequate hunter-gather paradigm, let alone develop agriculture. It is only by the institution of a system that allows males all equal ‘rights’ to sex with females and progeny, could inter-male cooperation be established. I have no doubt that the institution of marriage, advanced with the fears and rewards of the after-life, has enabled the management of male urge so that the more intelligent males and females could find a handhold by which to begin investigations of their environment.

To be sure, those primate behaviours haven’t gone away. The lurk well out in the open, today. Males beat their chest, none more so than those who control nations and engage with bared teeth and rattling prions.

As to female primate behaviour I have little to say, except that it might do all of us some good if some among us temper their primate instincts with a little more thought.

But where to now? I will suggest that the primate behaviour that prompts much of the agony we humans endure, is only tenuously under management. Therefore, it is not for human society to delude themselves that their power over their own selves permits them to do away with religion. Rather I would suggest that even more than ever, the moderations, temperances, and disciplines demanded by religions is of paramount importance in human society.