While the proximate mechanisms of these anthropogenic changes are well studied (e.g., climate change, biodiversity loss, population growth), the evolutionary causality of these anthropogenic changes have been largely ignored.

There must always be more, but there is never enough.

when you when you sort of take a step back and look at that part of the distraction and the 00:14:47 chaos that Trump and these GOP trolls deliver it's it's a wonderful Boon for the oil and gas industry and the Koch brothers and the guys that fund these campaigns and the federal Federalist 00:14:59 Society you know that's owning the Supreme Court they want to keep doing business as usual and the easiest way to do that is to have this big chaotic GOP that ignores climate change and to play 00:15:11 into what they want is the mainstream media not focusing more on climate change let alone making those two connections and a lot of mainstream media is scared to make that connection because oil companies are paying the bills 00:15:23 and CNN and every other network

acting locally 00:24:28 with knowledge is how we bring about systemic change

to live for the common good is a very good purpose but purpose is a gift and the purpose of our life here on Earth is to change the environment which we met for something better because there is 00:21:54 always an opportunity for something better [Music] or to be in a learning mode and we when we know things to be in a teaching mode 00:22:11 also that is propagating what we know sharing it with others and making this knowledge open source for the world and especially to help train a young 00:22:24 generation of new leaders who are going to be the ones that grapple with these problems

people from all different aspects all different kinds of business people in in governments not just the finance people but the environmental 00:20:09 section and so on they need to get together and discuss calmly and and productively what we can do to move it 00:20:20 to creating a new mindset foreign s but also our common sense and we can only work out a future economy if people come in from these different sectors and 00:20:41 talk together not in a controversial way but in a way of we must find a solution because humanity is not exempt from 00:20:53 Extinction

professor John on Beatty will always say 00:14:07 I am because we are since we are therefore I am so my being is not just my being alone and being the richest in the world and 00:14:19 owning everybody my property has no meaning my wealth has no meaning if it's not of service to the community so if you come to my Village and many other villages in the African continent and someone says is a wealthy person but 00:14:33 is not bringing his wealth to Advanced education Advanced roads and infrastructure train people support agriculture people don't care he's not respected but once you bring your wealth and no matter how poor you are that you 00:14:47 are contributing to the society you are considered great so these are the values we think we can start discussing in the International Community

what I'm advocating here isn't radical redistribution it's merely more 00:13:08 redistribution in a and structurally dependable manner that is fair that is inclusive and that allows for the poor and improvised Nations to be granted excess not just a vital strategic resources that are very much needed in 00:13:21 maintaining the quality of life at own citizens but also more importantly the ropes to climb the ladder

the problems I've mentioned are being tackled by groups of people 00:11:18 sad thing is those people are often operating in silos just concerned to solve their particular problem not realizing that if they don't have the whole picture they may solve their 00:11:31 problem and cause problems in other places

the victims that suffer under over consumption over 00:10:38 depletion and environmental degradation they don't really have a say so we want a fair World At Large we need to start with Fair countries and with Fair countries the prerequisite is fair cities what's needed here too is direct 00:10:51 mechanisms by which they're people can have their voices heard can hold Elites accountable and fundamentally have an opportunity to partake in the designing of the rules of the institutions and of 00:11:05 the outlying sort of overarching structures of their cities and therefore we move from cities to countries and countries to the World At Large

we humans depend on the natural world 00:07:01 [Music] but what we depend on is healthy ecosystems [Music] that are made up of a complex mix of plants and animal species each one has a 00:07:24 role to play and you know I see it as like a beautiful living tapestry and as an animal or plant species disappears from that ecosystem it's like pulling 00:07:38 out a thread and if enough threads are pulled then the tapestry will hang in tatters and the ecosystem will disappear

there's the unsustainable lifestyle of so many of us and I include myself I have far more than I need and 00:10:11 some people take this to excess and they have way way way more than they could ever possibly need and this is something that somehow we have to change

Estimates indicate that nearly 20–30% of our male ancestors died in intergroup conflicts.

Adam Philips’ expression, “if the art legitimates cruelty, I think the art is not worth having.”

When the tribe is not a cohesive group but an assemblage of thousands or millions whose only commonality is the place they call home, what exactly does the “collective interest” even mean?

At the same time, our whole sense of community has been lost as the requirement of modern societies rely on us living in anonymous neighbourhoods with people we don’t know or share much of anything in common. Who are these representatives presuming to represent anymore anyway?

Human institutions are purely human creations. Theironly legitimate purpose is to serve the people on whomtheir existence ultimately depends. If institutions fail toserve us, then it is our right to eliminate or transformthem

The surplus of life’s labor is not sufficient to con-tinue bearing the burden of a caste system devoted tocontrolling the many so a few can indulge in egotisti-cal displays of privilege on a dying Earth. The more ofhumanity’s labor we devote to maintaining the system ofdomination, the less that is available to secure life’s wellbe-ing and the more rapid the living system’s collapse.

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."

beauty is how truth feels

I personally think that there needs 00:03:26 to be some kind of of religion scale energy uh quality um to the way in which human beings confront this problem

The common definition of a progress trap is derived from the book’s cover text: “..it is the condition in which we find ourselves when science, technology and industry create more problems than they can solve. Often inadvertently.”

Since  humanity is a small product of nature, he can by definition not control nature. To believe that he can is a delusion.

if we want to end up with a world that is shaped by the best of us, rather than very often the worst of us, we have to think carefully, we have to engineer a system.

Lord Acton

I try to remember that it's not me, John Seed, trying to protect the rainforest. Rather I'm part of the rainforest protecting myself. I am that part of the rainforest recently emerged into human thinking.John Seed (in Macy, 1991: page 184)

We will act to save “life on this planet” only if we recognize at a deep level that our “self” includes all beings. We need to recognize and feel at a deep level that ultimately we are not biologists trying to save other species. Rather, we are one emergence of life on this planet trying to save itself.

“If we want to continue to enjoy our rivers ‐ to swim in them, walk beside them, even drink their water ‐ we have to adopt the non‐dual perspective. We have to meditate on being the rivers so that we can experience within ourselves the fears and hopes of the rivers. If we cannot feel the rivers, the mountains, the air, the animals, and other people from within their own perspective, the rivers will die and we will lose our chance for peace”

“We will prosper in the pursuit of life, or we will perish in the pursuit of money. The choice is ours.”

We see virtually no prospect that the Wall Street system will transform itself from within. Change depends on citizen’s working from outside the establishment to create from the bottom up a New Economy based on new values and institutions.

The third great separation was the industrial agricultural revolution.

BY 2029, ARTIFICIALLY INTELLIGENT MACHINES WILL SURPASS HUMAN INTELLIGENCE BY 2049, AI IS PREDICTED TO BE A BILLION TIMES MORE INTELLIGENT THAN US

there is a greater Danger from artificial intelligence if we allow it to become self-designing for then it can improve itself rapidly when we may lose control

“Pandemic or not, I will still lie awake each night with the persistent and unpleasant thoughts of my certain death, but I will choose not to smother this existential dread or anxiety. Instead, I want to explore it, befriend it. I have learned that the only way to conquer the darkness is to venture through it,”

For many, Covid-19 was the rude awakening that death was not a long-distance relationship so much as a close neighbor.

Paul Kingsnorth

paper enforces single sequence and there's no room for digression it imposes a particular kind 00:01:03 of order in the very nature of the structure

in my teen ISM it seemed to me that paper was a prison

any melodic line can be represented by a chord and/or harmonicprogression and, conversely, any chord or harmonic progression can be horizontalizedwith a melodic line

J'en atteste les temps; j'en appelle à tout âge; I of them attest the times; I of them appeal to all age; I display the times; I appeal to the age Jamais au public avantage Never to the public advantages The public never has the advantage L'homme n'a franchement sacrifié ses droits; The man not has clearly sacrificed his rights; Certainly, mankind has not sacrificed his rights; S'il osait de son cœur n'écouter que la voix, If he dared of his heart not to hear but that the voice, If mankind dared but to listen to the voice of his heart, Changeant tout à coup de langage, changing all at a blow of language, changing suddenly the language, Il nous dirait, comme l'hôte des bois: He to us would say, as the host of the woods: He would say to us, as he would to the animals of the woods: La nature n'a fait ni serviteur ni maître; The nature not has made neither servant nor master; Nature created neither servant nor master; Je ne veux ni donner ni recevoir de lois. I not see neither to give nor receive of law. I seek neither to rule nor to serve. Et ses mains ourdiraient les entrailles du prêtre, And his hands would weave the entrails of the priest, And his hands would weave the entrails of the priest, Au défaut d'un cordon pour étrangler les rois. To the lack of a cord for to strangle the kings. For the lack of a cord with which to strangle kings. Without the original text and the interlinear text, one has as my approximate translation of Diderot: I display the times; I appeal to the age The public is never advantaged Certainly, mankind has not sacrificed his rights; If mankind dared but to listen to the voice of his heart, changing suddenly the language, He would say to us, as he would to the animals of the woods: Nature created neither servant nor master; I seek neither to rule nor to serve. And his hands would weave the entrails of the priest, For the lack of a cord with which to strangle kings. A similar sentiment is attributed to Jean Meslier (1664–1729), but, as of yet, I have no citation for it: "Je voudrais, et ce sera le dernier et le plus ardent de mes souhaits, je voudrais que le dernier des rois fût étranglé avec les boyaux du dernier prêtre."

AsSchullerpointsout:“Thereisnoquestioninmymindthat theclassicalworldcanlearnmuchabout timing.rhythmicaccuracyand subtlety fromjazzmusicians,asjazzmusicianscanindynamics.structureandcontrastfromthe classical musicians.”

scary smart is saying the problem with our world today is not that 00:55:36 humanity is bad the problem with our world today is a negativity bias where the worst of us are on mainstream media okay and we show the worst of us on social media

the biggest threat facing Humanity today is humanity in the age of the machines we were abused we will abuse this

if we give up on human connection we've given up on the remainder of humanity

with great power comes great responsibility we have disconnected power and responsibility

the biggest challenge if you ask me what went wrong in the 20th century 00:42:57 interestingly is that we have given too much power to people that didn't assume the responsibility

this is an arms race has no interest 00:41:29 in what the average human gets out of it it

“Protracted immaturity and dependence on paternal care is not an unfortunate byproduct of our evolution but instead a highly adaptive trait of our species, which has enabled human infants to efficiently organize attention to social agents and learn efficiently from social output

the beauty of perceptual immaturity in altricial species is that it makes learning easier by reducing the complexity of the world

“Rather than requiring hard-wired, innate knowledge of social abilities, evolution has outsourced the necessary information to parents,”

we've got a whole generation of young people who are already hybrid cyborgs they live half their life on the internet

I think to me there's a tragic quality to that which we just have to embrace and we have to lean into you know the sort of the The Human Condition is in the sense a tragic one

there is this growing Chasm between our Paleolithic brains and what we're designed for and the niches we're built to inhabit and this new technologically infused world that we're living in

far 00:28:27 from delivering Utopia

you'd have to be wildly optimistic to think we can blithely Market marketize over greater swathes of our embodied selves without opening new Vistas for class asymmetry and exploitation 00:26:44 and it makes no sense to argue that we will stay well protected against such risks by moral safeguards at least not within a transhumanist paradigm because transhumanism itself requires an all-out assault on the 00:26:56 humanist anthropology that underpins those moral safeguards you can't have transhumanism without throwing out humanism

“To use a computer analogy, we are running twenty-first-century software on hardware last upgraded 50,000 years ago or more. This may explain quite a lot of what we see in the news.”

This is how wealthy individuals or corporations translate their economic power into political and cultural power

It’s one thing to say that an object is possible according to the laws of physics; it’s another to say there’s an actual pathway for making it from its component parts. “Assembly theory was developed to capture my intuition that complex molecules can’t just emerge into existence because the combinatorial space is too vast,” Cronin said.

I’d rather challenge people to figure out a way to get their work to connect with what really means something to them, however they’re going to do it. It doesn’t always mean writing about what you know, but it means writing about something in a way that’s going to get you to use your best and most troubling material.

I was told to write poems that cost me something to write them. They cost me a lot. Too much? I’m still carrying ones and zeros on the budget. I go to poems looking for heart. You can tell when a poet has put a lot of heart into the poem and you can tell when they left it out. Some of them favor brain. But for me, all brain is no ache but headache.”

“You throw it all away and invent from what you know. I should have said that sooner. That’s all there is to writing.”

Write as if you were a movie camera. Get exactly what is there. All human beings see with astonishing accuracy, not that they can necessarily write it down.”

“You absolutely should write about what you know. There are all sorts of small things that you should store up and use, nothing is lost to a writer. You have to learn to stand outside of yourself. All experience, whether it is painful or whether it is happy is somehow stored up and sooner or later it’s used.”

“I just try to work on ideas that interest and perplex and absorb me. People say, “Write what you know,” but for me it’s more like, “Write what obsesses you.”

For me, it’s the difference between fiction that matters only to those who know the author and fiction that, well, matters.

I think what’s behind “write what you know” is emotion. Like, have you known happiness? Have you ever been truly sad? Have you ever longed for something? And that’s the point, if you’ve longed for an Atari 2600, as I did when I was twelve, all I wanted was that game console, if you have felt that deep longing, that can also be a deep longing for a lost love or for liberation of your country, or to reach Mars. That’s the idea: if you’ve known longing, then you can write longing. And that’s the knowing behind “write what you know.””

What is the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without parallax, without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear?

Let us remember that our knowledge of the world begins not with matter but with perceptions. I know for sure that my pain exists, my ‘green’ exists, and my ‘sweet’ exists… everything else is a theory. Later we find out that our perceptions obey some laws, which can be most conveniently formulated if we assume that there is some underlying reality beyond our perceptions. This model of the material world obeying laws of physics is so successful that soon we forget about our starting point and say that matter is the only reality, and perceptions are only helpful for its description.

Our argument for a mental world does not entail or imply that the world is merely one’s own personal hallucination or act of imagination. Our view is entirely naturalistic: the mind that underlies the world is a transpersonal mind behaving according to natural laws. It comprises but far transcends any individual psyche…. The claim is thus that the dynamics of all inanimate matter in the universe correspond to transpersonal mentation, just as an individual’s brain activity – which is also made of matter – corresponds to personal mentation.

Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans.

“young adults age 18-24 were five times more likely to have mental health challenges compared to their grandparents' generation.

Any resemblance between the above views and those of my employer, my terminal, or the view out my window are purely coincidental. Any resemblance between the above and my own views is non-deterministic. The question of the existence of views in the absence of anyone to hold them is left as an exercise for the reader. The question of the existence of the reader is left as an exercise for the second god coefficient. (A discussion of non-orthogonal, non-integral polytheism is beyond the scope of this article.)

By looking at practices of note-taking for their ownsake we can get a better idea of how people performed intellectual work in the past, what caughttheir attention and how they moved from reading to producing a finished work, often via note-taking.

1% of the world's population is responsible for an estimated 50% of emissions from commercial air transport, most of this associated with premium class air travel of affluent frequent fliers

5245 superyachts with lengths of 30–180 m in 2021, a five-fold increase from 1090 yachts in 1990

the top 1% now being responsible for 17% of total emissions, the top 10% for 48%, and the bottom half of the world population for only 12% (in 2019).

close to two thirds of the overall carbon footprint of those billionaires owning yachts is caused by yacht-ownership. This implies a contribution to climate change that is up to 6500 times greater for these individuals than the global average of 4.5 t CO2 per capita and year, or up to 300,000 times greater than the contribution of the poorest, at 0.1 t CO2 per person and year

the top 0.01% emitting in excess of 2300 t CO2-e per capita in 2019, compared to 6 t CO2-e on global average.

“A hundred years ago, the robber barons built libraries. Today, they build spaceships.”

He said he and Arkush “went through every possible objection” and found no legal barrier for prosecutors to raise criminal charges against companies that he said have lied about their knowledge of the danger of burning fossil fuels. “What’s really probably stopping them is that no one has done it before,” Braman said. “The level of culpability and the extent of the harm is so massive that it’s not the kind of thing that prosecutors are used to prosecuting.”

our practical faith in 00:09:05 progress has ramified and hardened into an ideology a secular religion which like the religions that progress has challenged is blind to certain flaws in its credentials 00:09:18 progress therefore has become myth in the anthropological sense and by this i don't mean a belief that is flimsy or untrue successful myths are powerful and often partly true

For Becker this is literally true: what we regard as normality is our collective, protective madness, in which we repress the grim truth about the human condition.

do our fears cause us to perceive the world the way we do, and might someone experience the world differently if they were brave enough to face the thing we avoid most?

"In the very long term, we suggest that humans are evolving from individual genetic organisms to cultural groups which function as superorganisms, similar to ant colonies and beehives,"

“increased knowledge tends to strengthen our position on climate change, regardless of what that position is” (Hoffman 2015:5)

unconscious motivations have not been eradicated by rational analysis.

If the facts don’t fit the frames in your brain, the frames in your brain stay and the facts are ignored or challenged or belittled” (Lakoff 2014: xiv).

“increased knowledge tends to strengthen our position on climate change, regardless of what that position is” (Hoffman 2015:5).

more research and development dollars focus, for example, onnew medications for the pets of the affuent than for all African trop-ical diseases. And monies spent on innovations in the packaging anddistribution of bottled water for rich-world consumers dwarfs researchand development investments in clean-water systems for the poor inAsia and Africa

How to satisfy these needs can be a question of personalchoice, as long as maximum consumption standards are not violated.In other words, “satisfers” do not receive the same kind of protec-tion via consumption corridors that “needs” receive

Film is the reflection of our society, and Coach Carter reflects not only the reality of sports in Americanhigh school but also the reality of education. Sports are 1mportant but not enough.

The movie has sent a strong message against the common belief ofsuccess can be found in sports but the classroom, especially for African American young menparticularly, and minority populations in general.

Nonetheless, Coach Carter is still more or less a typical sports movie and it is understandable if themovie follows some conventional and stereotypical formula, especially the biased reactions from thecommunity, the portrayals of the girls or the depiction of school

ell let me tell you what I see, I see a system, that is designed for you to fail, now I know thatall of you like stats so let me give you some, Richmond high only graduates 50% of it's students,and of those that do graduate only 6% go to college, Which tells me when I walk down thesehalls and look in your class rooms, maybe only one student 1s going to go to college, Well damnCoach Carter if I ain't going to college where am I going to go? Well that's a great question andthe answer for young African-American men in here is this, probably to prison, 1n this county20

This storyprovides an msight on how the boys see their future, with and without guidance. The second sidestory was about Cruz and his process of becoming a man, when Cruz with the influence from hiscousin can easily become a drug dealer or a thug in the futur

In fact, there is a common myth that sport can be the way to the richness andsocial class, especially in minority populations. ‘Thus, the movie challenges this idea through the storyof sport.

However, the designingprinciple or how the stories are told is what makes Coach Carter standing out and different from others.At the beginning, it started as a normal sports movie with a coach and team struggling to be better.However, the main conflict of the movie revolves around the idea of which is more smportant: a gloryseason in high school or a secure place in college and life.

“...the universe is individuating (in and through each of us) as the individual is universalising.”

)he whole is not resolvable into parts & putting together parts will not producewholes or account for their character and behaviour

He tried to show that this‘favorite topic’ of his, ‘insistence on exactness in chronological dates’, amounted tomore than a trifling (Deutsch, 1915, 1905a). Deutsch compared such historical accuracyto that of a bookkeeper who might recall his ledger by memory. ‘People would look uponsuch an achievement’, he reflected, ‘as a freak, harmless, but of no particular value, infact rather a waste of mental energy’ (Deutsch, 1916). However, he sought to show thatthese details mattered, no different from how ‘a difference in a ledger of one centremains just as grievous as if it were a matter of $100,000’ (Deutsch, 1904a: 3).

Bruno Latour has reflected, information is more malleable when it is not too large(Daston, 2002; Latour, 1986: 19).

we're running 21st century software on hardware last upgraded fifty thousand years ago or mor

if mankind does not put an end to war war will put an end to mankind

progress creates problems that are or seem to be soluble only by further progress

myth is an arrangement of the past whether real or imagined in patterns that reinforce a culture's deepest values and aspirations

the future of everything we've accomplished since our intelligence 00:06:55 evolved will depend on the wisdom of our actions over the next few years

The humanities are the process of pres-ervation and appropriation of that pastness, a process thatrequires specific skills acquired through practice, as all skillsare.

While cross-country emission inequalities remain sizeable, overall inequality in global emissions is now mostly explained by within-country inequalities by some indicators.

Now I understand the artists I love, no matter their medium, because I would write even if I never published a word. I have to write. It’s the only way I can figure anything out. So, maybe all those years of misery and dread were what I needed to overcome, and if so, totally worth it.

“She is likely our earliest Black female ethnographic filmmaker,” says Strain, who also teaches documentary history at Wesleyan University.

Knowledge work requires not only our time and effort, but also our engagement and creativity. For that reason, personal motivation is the prime problem that supersedes all other problems.

I am a lumper, not a splitter.

argeting a climate resilient sustainable World involves fundamental changes to how Society functions including changes to our underlying values Our World Views ideologies social structures political economic systems 00:35:07 and power relationships I mean it's in other words throw it all up in the air and start again and that's in the ipcc which I'm amazed that ever got past the the lawyers um because it's very carefully checked when these things are published but 00:35:21 anyway that quote is in there from working group too and I think that captures the essence of the source the changes we're talking about

In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind

“It is important to learn to be surprised by simple facts.”

For every minute spent in organizing, an hour is earned.by Benjamin Franklin

A typical ridiculous, unquestioned business adage is "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it." That's BS on the face of it, because the vast majority of important things we manage at work aren't measurable, from the quality of our new hires to the confidence we instill in a fledgling manager.

GNU Emacs, which is a sort of hybrid between Windows Notepad, a monolithic-kernel operating system, and the International Space Station. It’s a bit tricky to explain, but in a nutshell, Emacs is a platform written in 1976 (yes, almost half a century ago) for writing software to make you more productive, masquerading as a text editor.

Like an invasive species,

One man’s ways may be as good as another’s, but we all like our own best

Husbands and wives generally understand when opposition will be vain

How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!

“Incentives are  powerful, and may compel management teams to lean conservatively on their numbers ahead of a spin. This could be  prudent, opportunistic, in their self   –  interest, or all of the above.”

“[Idea] sourcing is mostly following the news flow and  paying attention. Having been at this  game a little while, it’s a bit simpler to identify the  particular drivers for each idea and to decide which ideas to allocate more time to.”

“That’s what  portfolio management and hedging are about. You have to be  prepared for those unexpected events and be in a position where you can manage those risks.”

“We look for things like regulatory changes, policy changes, or demographic changes … We find that often  provides ripe areas for further investigation and a way to develop themes.”

“Expertise in any field is largely driven by a mental database of experiences and  patterns that are recognized by having lived through the different environments. To us, studying history is really important.”

Backing out was not too difficult, but did take some work. I encountered the same obstacles as when I went in. After I wiggled my hips out of the hole, which took some time, I had trouble getting my shoulders out. Both arms were overhead at this point. My shirt was getting caught on the rocks and my shoulders were brushing the sharp rocks. After struggling to find a good position I gave up and just pulled my upper body out. SCRAAAAPE! My shirt pulled up over my head, and I had some nice scrapes on my shoulders, but I didn't care. To me this trip was a success. I had pushed myself beyond what I though was possible. I kneeled at the entrance and looked into the narrow passage I had just been in. The rock wall was now at the 11 foot mark (I had pushed it a little with my forward arm). The smallest point was at the 9 foot mark. We were close. Between the work and the excitement I was tired. I just sat on the rope bag, grinning. Whew! What a trip!

The entire time you are lying there you think about how you are going to get back out. And, what if...?

While lying in the darkness, in a passage deep within a cave, one is in a unique position to ponder. A mountain literally resting on top of me, the entire earth lying below. One tiny movement of earth and I would cease to exist. Or worse, to recognize the fear shared by Floyd Collins as he lay there, trapped for days deep within the heart of Mother Earth, incapable of freeing himself from his earthen prison.

My little trip into the passage represented a major milestone in my caving "career". When I began caving I did not feel overly comfortable going through tight spaces. Even the little squeeze at the beginning of this cave was an obstacle to overcome. By pushing myself and forcing myself to try the narrow passages I have become much calmer about tight spaces. Still, this passage represented a new benchmark in small spaces. I had not been faced with anything this small. I don't remember having to take off my helmet before now. With this passage, it is mandatory. As I mentioned before, not only do I have to take off my helmet, but I have to turn my head to the side in order to fit.

I CANNOT believe that we were so willing to get right back into the cave after hearing the scream. Part of the reason I went along with the idea was because B seemed so indifferent to any possible dangers. Even if it were an animal (which I did not believe, but could offer no better explanation), weren't we possibly putting ourselves in harms way? In retrospect I still have difficulty understanding our thought process at that time. We were just too eager to discover virgin cave passages. I now think it can be summed up with one word: testosterone!

I still harbor the fantasy that there is a hidden entrance to the other side of the passage and years ago Spanish explorers hid their treasures in the cave and sealed up the entrance. And it has remained untouched until we find it! B has a more realistic, although more mundane theory. He figures there is more cave on the other side. We'll see who is right.

It is always fun to tell people about the tight squeeze we are going to have to go through to get into the passage. Most people have little desire to voluntarily subject themselves to incredibly tight places. Actually neither do I, but I will do it in order to get to the other side. Good motivation.

In retrospect I can't believe how casual we were about everything that was happening in the cave. At the time the only thing we could think about was getting into the passage. Everything else was just a minor distraction. I do recall thinking that it would be nice to get in and see how the mechanics of the cave worked (where the wind was coming from, what was making the noise, etc.) Now, weeks later, I think of my ignorance and naivete, and shiver.

Then something bizarre happened that I can't quit explain. The dog began exploring as soon as we let her off the rope. She was in hog heaven, sniffing and darting about around our feet. She would run from one person to the other as we made our way back to the work site. At the point the cave splits into four passages the dog seemed to run out of juice. She just stuck right by either B or me. That seemed kind of odd. As we progressed further into the cave she would only stay by B. She seemed edgy. Like she saw something she didn't like. As we approached the short drop-off before the hole, she stopped and would only come further after we coaxed her. The hair on her back stood on end. Finally, as we got to within 20 feet of the hole she began to whimper, and hide behind B. Her tail was between her legs and she was cowering down on the ground. Strange! I have seen her square off with dogs twice her size, but now she acted as if Satan himself was lurking in the darkness. I figured there must have been animals that used the cave as a home, and Whip smelled their scent. Too bad it upset her, because there was no way she was going into the passage. We decided that with this new development (the nervous dog) one of us would work while the other stayed with the dog a few feet away from where we normally rested. We got right back into our routine of drilling, hammering, etc. With our extra supply of batteries we were able to really push hard on the drill and not have to worry about using up the batteries. This did not make our work any easier, but it did speed things up a little bit. Progress was still SLOW. I really didn't mind, though. My journal goes on for a while about the progress we were making. The entire time we worked, Whip did not move. She just laid there on a rope-bag, shivering. She would whimper from time to time. One thing I didn't think about at the time was that she would not take her eyes off the hole. We should have been more observant of this intuitive animal.

I remember that I frequently looked and the hole and thought, "Hey, it's big enough. I think I can squeeze through" only to be disappointed in my attempt. However, even after the first attempt and failure I knew that I would keep working on the hole until I got through. This despite the fact that I knew it would take many more hours of hard work. It actually became an obsession with me. I tried to get out to the cave and work as often as I could. I hoped that the passage led to a larger undiscovered cave that we would be the first ones to enter. I guess the explorer in me wanted to find a new frontier there in the cave. Since B is such an avid caver he was motivated by the same desire to find a new unexplored cave. What we did find was not at all what I expected...

As has been my tradition for all the years I've been caving, the party reaches a point in the cave, usually at the deepest part of the cave, that all lights are extinguished. Complete blackness fills the eyes. For a moment the individual caver strains the eye muscles, focusing in and out with the expectation of catching a crumb of light somewhere in the false night. After several futile moments the caver turns his head at a sound- perhaps another caver- only to have the other senses return, and then heighten. The sounds, smells and feelings that have been overlooked to this point come racing to the caver in perfect detail. The pain of their own behind sitting on the cave floor. The smell of dust, sweat, guano. The sound of modern material shifting on age-old rock as cavers attempt to find comfort on this solid foundation. At the back of every caver's mind at this time is "What if?". What if a person HAD to climb out of the cave with no light. Would he make it? Would he find all of the turns and bends which got him to this place? If not, would a rescue party find him in time? The depth of darkness recognized at this time is something that is rarely experienced outside a cave. Many first time cavers erroneously declare that they have to hold their hand to within 2 or 3 inches of their face before they can see it. The truth is the human eye is incapable of seeing in an absence of light. If they did not hear something coming toward them, they would feel it before they saw it. COMPLETE and TOTAL dark! This exercise is a great way to remind people to take backup lighting.

We even thought about using liquid nitrogen to freeze the rock and make it more brittle!

Ha Ha! In retrospect it is funny how simple I thought it was going to be. I figured a few hours work and we would be in. Had I known how long it was going to take I doubt I would have even begun the project. Had I known what I was going to experience in the cave I never would have returned.

tes due to their particularly large collision cross-sectional area. Because of their small diameter, tethers of a normal design may have a high probability of being severed by impacts with relatively small meteoroids and orbital debris. The resulting tether remnants may pose additional risks to operating spacecraft.

It was the expe­ri­ence of draft­ing the spec that changed my view, and my pace. Writing! Gets you every time!