2012 was Warmest Year on Record

 Do keep in mind that it was not the warmest globally but still a warm year even there. What appears clear though is that odd spring and odd fall jumped the averages and gave us this exceptional record. That all looks like the right confluence of major weather events paying off in the same year with a low likelihood of repetition.

As posted in the past, the average climate in the past two decades has held at about a half degree over the Holocene mean. Since the actual Holocene spread is around plus or minus one degree, we remain well within the working range. Thus exceptional years are very much in order since we are a half degree of the peak levels.

If we are fortunate, this warm northern hemisphere will be sustained for some time. Yet I suspect that we have just had our best year. All that needs to happen is for the Southern Circumpolar Current to shift its amplitude Eastward and we have a downward change in heat transfer. Historical records only promise short interludes such as the past decade. I still think we have another decade and a couple more passes at record making.

2012 Hottest Year On Record For Lower 48 States, NOAA Confirms

01/08/13

From Climate Central's Andrew Freedman:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/08/2012-hottest-year-on-record_n_2433210.html

It’s official: 2012 was the warmest year on record in the lower 48 states, as the country experienced blistering spring and summer heat, tinderbox fire weather conditions amid a widespread drought, and one of the worst storms to ever strike the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 2012 had an average temperature of 55.3°F, which eclipsed 1998, the previous record holder, by 1°F. That was just off Climate Central’s calculation in mid-December, which projected an expected value of 55.34°F, based on historical data.

The 1°F difference from 1998 is an unusually large margin, considering that annual temperature records are typically broken by just tenths of a degree Fahrenheit. In fact, the entire range between the coldest year on record, which occurred in 1917, and the previous record warm year of 1998 was just 4.2°F.

The year consisted of the fourth-warmest winter, the warmest spring, second-warmest summer, and a warmer-than-average fall. With an average temperature that was 3.6°F above average, July became the hottest month ever recorded in the contiguous U.S. The average springtime temperature in the lower 48 was so far above the 1901-2000 average — 5.2°F, to be exact — that the country set a record for the largest temperature departure for any season on record.

"Climate change has had a role in this [record],” said Jake Crouch, a climate scientist at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. He said it isn't clear yet exactly how much of the temperature record was due to climate change compared to natural variability, but that it's unlikely such a record would have occurred without the long-term warming trend caused in large part by emissions of greenhouse gases.

During the summer, nearly 100 million people experienced 10 or more days with temperatures greater than 100°F, which is about one-third of the nation’s population, NOAA reported.

With 34,008 daily high temperature records set or tied the year compared to just 6,664 daily record lows — a ratio of about five high temperature records for every one low temperature record — 2012 was no ordinary weather year in the U.S. It wasn’t just the high temperatures that set records, though. Overnight low temperatures were also extremely warm, and in a few cases the overnight low was so warm that it set a high temperature record, a rare feat.

Even more astonishing is the imbalance between all-time records. According to data from NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, there were 356 all-time high temperature records set or tied in 2012, compared to four all-time low temperature records. All of the all-time record lows occurred in Hawaii.

As the climate has warmed during the past several decades, there has been a growing imbalance between record daily high temperatures in the contiguous U.S. and record daily lows. A study published in 2009 found that rather than a 1-to-1 ratio, as would be expected if the climate were not warming, the ratio has been closer to 2-to-1 in favor of warm temperature records during the past decade (2000-2009). This finding cannot be explained by natural climate variability alone, the study found, and is instead consistent with global warming.

Driven largely by the warm temperatures and the massive drought, one measure of extreme weather conditions, known as theClimate Extremes Index, shows that it was the second-most extreme year on record, second only to 1998. Studies show that in response to global warming, some extreme events, such as heat waves, are already becoming more likely to occur and more intense.

Nineteen states had their warmest year on record in 2012, mainly in the Plains and Midwest, where summer heat and drought was the most intense. An additional 26 states had one of their top 10 warmest years on record. Remarkably, every state in the lower 48 experienced an above-average annual temperature.

The extreme heat is even more vivid when examined at the local level. Cities such as New York, Boston, Washington, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Denver, Des Moines, and Chicago all set records for their warmest year.

Marquette, Mich., which is well-known for its cold and snowy winters, not only set a record for the warmest year, but also set a record for the most amount of days above freezing (32°F) in a single year, with 293 such days, and the number of consecutive days above freezing, with 237.

In Des Moines, which set a record for its warmest year smashing the old 1931 record by 1.5°F, it was the first year not to reach 0°F. In addition, March had the largest monthly temperature departure from average of any month on record there, coming in at 16.4°F above average.

The year was also characterized by extreme drought, and two states — Nebraska and Wyoming — also had their driest year on record. Eight more states had annual precipitation totals that ranked in the bottom 10.

At its maximum extent in July, drought conditions encompassed 61 percent of the nation, with the most intense conditions in the Great Plains, West, and Midwest. The nationally averaged annual precipitation total was 2.57 inches below average, making 2012 the 15th-driest year, and the driest year since 1988, which also featured a major drought.

The drought of 2011-12, which is still ongoing, is comparable in size to severe droughts that occurred in the 1950s, and is already being blamed for more than $35 billion in crop losses alone, according to the reinsurance company Aon Benfield. In fact, it’s quite possible that damage from the drought will eclipse the total bill from Hurricane Sandy, which some estimates place at more than $100 billion. Overall, the drought could end up robbing the limping U.S. economy’s GDP of a full percentage point, said Deutsche Bank Securities.

The drought was instigated in large part of very low snow cover and warm temperatures during the winter of 2011, and record warmth during the spring, which allowed for an early start to the growing season and depleted soil moisture earlier than normal. The record March heat wave put the drought into overdrive, accelerating its development across the Plains and Midwest in particular.

The drought conditions created ideal conditions for wildfires, as 9.2 million acres went up in smoke in the West, the third-highest on record.

The same weather patterns that led to the drought helped suppress severe thunderstorms and tornadoes, with a final tornado count that is likely to be under 1,000, which would be the fewest twisters since 2002.

According to NOAA, the year saw 11 natural disasters that cost at least $1 billion in losses, including Hurricane Sandy, which struck the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast on October 29-30.

Globally, 2012 is expected to be ranked as the eighth-warmest year on record, with that announcement coming later in the month.

Brain Science Connecting

Quite rightly, research in Brain science is booming as has all biological science. We are getting answers and lots of them.

What is missing yet though is a clear understanding of memory itself. My own conjecture is that we establish a linkage directly to the time and place in which an experience took place partly because I suspect that this will turn out to be possible and really possible at the molecular level and nature is wonderful at grabbing every opportunity.

Thus the brain is about linkages only which is just what we are looking at.

This item tells us just how exciting the field has become.

Ancient systems in the brain drive human cravings

Source: http://www.cbc.ca

By Kelly Crowe, CBC News

http://chrisinmaryville.net/ancient-systems-in-the-brain-drive-human-cravings.html

The neurotransmitter dopamine does its work through a form of unconscious learning

Neuroscience is the new black, when it comes to fashion in scientific research.

“The gene was the central issue in biology in 20th century,” Nobel Laureate Dr. Eric Kandel, neuroscientist at Columbia University said in an interview in Toronto recently. “The mind is the essential issue for biology in the 21st century.”

“And certainly if you think of public health consequences, the diseases, pain, schizophrenia, depression, manic depressive disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, God knows what, so many miseries of humankind come from psychiatric and neurological disorders,” Kandel added.

Back in the 1960′s, when Kandel began his Nobel prize winning work searching for the biological source of memory, neuroscience was a lonely field. “It didn’t interest many biologists. Anatomy was considered boring, and electrophysiology was too technically complicated for most scientists to pay attention to,” he said.

Richard Beninger is a behavioural neuroscientist at Queen’s University, who recalls that as a student he studied the brain as a collection of parts. “You could see white matter and dark matter and lots of fine detail, right down to the neuron level, but it was all morphology, structure,” he said.

“But all of that changed, once scientists began to understand the chemical pathways in the brain. The morphology is still there, but now we know what the transmitter systems are. So we have a whole new brain only in the last 40 years to work with,” Beninger said.

Today’s technology allows scientists to put living, breathing humans into a magnetic resonance imaging machine, tell them to think about something, and watch as the biological traces of thought appear and disappear in colorful bursts, measured by changes in blood oxygen levels. It means scientists can now explore the neural landscape in real time, and chart the cognitive forces that have shaped our species from our earliest days.

As they investigate this neural wonderland, scientists are probing the very essence of what makes us human. It’s as though they are lifting the hood of humanity, and tinkering with the wiring to find how what makes us do what we do. And they are discovering that the secret to everything we do, think, or feel, is in that wiring, a constantly changing network of neuronal connections sculpted by evolution and fired by electrical and chemical interactions.

Dr. Kandel calls it the most complex organizational structure in the universe. “So we’re far from understanding it completely, very far, but the beginning has been quite dramatic,” he says.

“It’s certainly extraordinary, our entire experience of life, all of our mental experiences, if they all result from the activity of chemistry in our brain, the activity of neurotransmitters and neurocircuits, it’s amazing,” Beninger said.

Dopamine key to behaviour

For Beninger, dopamine is the most fascinating neurotransmitter, allowing us to interact with our environment, sending us in search of the things we need for survival. “Something that’s biologically valuable, food, for example, water, sexual partner, social companion, social cooperation, those are things that activate the dopamine system,” he says.

“These systems are ancient, you know, fruit flies have similar systems, and worms,” he says. “They’re found in fish and all vertebrates, they’re very old, these dopamine neurons,” Beninger said.

Which means the same chemical impulses that lead a fruit fly to dive into your wineglass also makes you reach for the bottle and pour that second glass.

“When dopamine neurons are activated, whatever’s being encountered at the time gets a stronger ability to attract in the future,” Beninger says. “So for an animal in the wild, food-related stimuli, things that signal food, like a particular place, a particular object, then acquire the ability to draw the animal in the future.”

Dopamine does its work through a form of unconscious learning, teaching the brain to recognize environmental cues, sights sounds, smells, feelings that lead back to the thing that first excited the reward pathway, even if that ‘thing’ is dangerous. “So drugs that are abused by people, all of them activate the dopamine system,” Beninger explains.

Increasingly scientists also believe food can hijack the brain’s reward system. At York University, Professor Caroline Davis is studying the biological basis of food addiction. She says the brain’s reward system can be particularly sensitive to highly processed food with combinations of salt, sugar, fat and flavours found nowhere in nature.

The brain and food addiction

“Because they’re so palatable, we tend to eat a lot of them and they give us a greater dopamine boost than broccoli does,” Davis said. “The things loaded with sugar, loaded with fat, salt, in combination they’re very, very hard to resist and there’s evidence that if you eat enough of these foods, in some vulnerable people, they display behaviour that is very similar to the behaviour that we see in other addicts.”

When lab rats are given access to sugary food, they binge, and when the sugar is taken away they show physical withdrawal systems that resemble the animal’s withdrawal from heroin. Research has shown that dopamine is one of the pathways activated in these sugar-addicted mice.

Caroline Davis has discovered a dopamine link in food-addicted humans, a genetic profile that is associated with stronger dopamine signalling, and she believes those genes might make some people more vulnerable to dopamine’s cues.

“People that tend to be very sensitive to reward, our data suggests, it may be more difficult for them, in this environment. In another era, it would have been quite adaptive because they would have gotten a great pleasure out of food and they would have been the ones to pack on the pounds and survived longer. But it doesn’t work so well in this environment.”

Dopamine linked to motivation

Back at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., Richard Beninger is watching a series of videos of laboratory rats on a chin up bar, taken by his students. When a normal rat is placed on the bar, it gets down immediately. But something amazing happens when researchers give the animal a drug that blocks the dopamine receptors. Now the rat stays on the chin up bar, longer and longer after every dose.

“The animal will just sit there if their dopamine is blocked. It’s not that they can’t move, they are just not motivated to move,” Beninger said. “It seems that you need dopamine to engage in the environment.”

“I’m still struggling to understand the implications of this condition, ‘catalepsy,’ he said. But he calls it an exciting finding. “I think there’s some new, valuable information in this phenomenon.”

“I think the cues that are around us, the things we interact with day to day, all that we are able to respond to, pick up, and handle, all that requires a certain level of dopamine. And if we repeatedly are exposed to stimuli, with dopamine reduced, we lose our ability to respond to those particular stimuli. It seems that dopamine gives you a reason to move, get off the bar, act on a stimuli, and without it, you have no interest in reacting the stimuli or environment.”

Beninger says it resembles the movement disruption in people with Parkinson’s disease, which is associated with reduced dopamine activity, something he is also studying in his lab.

Dopamine’s role in relationships

Beninger is also studying how dopamine shapes our relationships. It seems that when someone is nice to us, our dopamine will draw us back to that person.

“So when I interact cooperatively with someone else and they interact cooperatively with me, that person, which is a representation in my brain, by the action of dopamine, gains an enhanced ability to attract me in the future,” Beninger says. “So the dopamine sculpts our social landscape.”

I think it’s an absolute marvel, you can only marvel more as you begin to learn more about the chemical neuroanatomy of the brain,” Beninger says. “It’s all of that working together that creates my mental experience, my whole life. It’s an absolute marvel.”

If they understand brain chemistry neuroscientists believe they will be able to offer therapies to fight mental illness and improve the entire human experience. And Dr. Eric Kandel says discoveries are inevitable, in part because there are now so many scientists in the field.

“When I was a medical student, I wanted to take an elective in brain cell science, but there was only one lab in New York City that had a good person I could work with. It was unheard of. Now you go in the street and every other person you meet is doing brain science.”

“I was working in a lab for the first time in 1955. By 1969, a society had formed in North America, called the Society of Neuroscience, and it had 600 members. Now it has 35,000 members. The number of people now working in brain science has grown enormously. It’s gone from an arcane discipline. Now it’s one of the most exciting, if not the most exciting area in biology.”

This is part two of a four part series called Inside Your Brain on CBC’s The National, World at Six and CBC.ca exploring how modern neuroscience is changing the way we think about the way we think. In part three Kelly Crowe discovers that our brains are highly active even when we perceive them to be idle and the idle brain may be the key to conciousness. The research for this series was funded by a Canadian Institutes of Health Research journalism award.

Monarch Butterfly Migration Film

This will be neat to see. It is one of the great migrations in the world and perhaps one of the most unlikeliest. I grew up with them and even collected pupae to watch them emerge.

A real surprise is that a tagged butterfly from Wisconsin made it all the way down to Mexico in one generation. These are amazingly, generational migrations.

Fears about this butterflies future are likely misplaced now that the winter refugia is well known and the insects have zero economic value.

However poaching suggests that landholder are uncompensated and need to be bought out. Do that and establish a conservatory and the problems will go away.

At the same time, the milk weed needs to be cultivated for its natural product stream anyway.

Beautiful New Film Follows The 40-Year Search For The Monarch Butterfly's Winter Home

Randy Astaiza

Jan. 1, 2013, 1:23 PM

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/flight-of-the-butterflies-movie-2012-12#ixzz2Gq5cRDp4

http://www.businessinsider.com/flight-of-the-butterflies-movie-2012-12

Flight of the Butterflies, opening in New York at The American Museum of Natural History on Jan. 5 lets you take a journey with monarch butterflies during their annual migration. Theirs is the longest insect migration, which spans thousands of miles and several generations and took 40 years to uncover.

Director Mike Slee co-wrote the script with co-executive producer Wendy MacKeigen to reenact the discovery of a lifetime. They received help from the world's top monarch butterfly experts and major funding from the National Science Foundation.

"...This new film allows the audience to experience the natural world of butterflies as never before — in metamorphosis inside a chrysalis, in flight a mile high, migrating over great distances, and in tree-laden monarch sanctuaries," said executive producer Jonathan Barker, the CEO of SK Films in a press release. "In 'Flight of the Butterflies,' we are able to utilize the spectacular giant screen technology to follow an even more fascinating creature — the fragile yet tenacious monarch — and bring to life the compelling detective story and heroic efforts by an intrepid scientist and real individuals to solve a scientific mystery."

An IMAX experience

I was invited to see the movie on Tuesday, December 11, 2012 in IMAX 3D in New York. You have to see this movie to believe it: The film was absolutely stunning and the 3D on the IMAX screen made me feel I was there surrounded by butterflies, flying a mile high on the way from Canada to Mexico. There was such an incredible number of butterflies in some scenes that it was hard to believe none of the butterflies are computer generated.

The only computer graphics in the movie was the amazing animation looking into the chrysalis, the hard outer protective layer in which the caterpillar transforms into a butterfly (colloquially known as a cocoon, though those are technically only for species of moths). Researchers used special scans to see how the caterpillar changes, including growing wings, long legs, and its organs changing in order to become a butterfly, then computer animated this portion of the film. 

The butterfly sanctuary in Mexico where the monarch butterflies spend their winter is a truly unbelievable sight. So many monarchs cover the trees, that they appear to be part of them.

The Story

This docudrama follows the 40 years that Fred Urqhart and his wife Norah Urqhart spent searching for the winter home of the Monarch butterfly.

With the help of thousands of volunteers they tagged butterflies from Canada, America, and Mexico. It was two volunteers in Mexico, Ken Brugger and Catalina Aquado, who discovered the monarch's winter home in 1976: A butterfly sanctuary in the 10,000-feet-high Sierra Madre Mountains of Mexico.

Actress Stephanie Sigman playing Catalina Aguado replicates the famous picture on the cover of National Geographic.

When Nora and Fred visited the sanctuary they find a monarch, PS397, which was tagged by two school boys and their teacher in Minnesota, 2,000 miles away, four months before.

National Geographic featured the discovery of the Mexican sanctuary in their August 1976 issue with a picture of Catalina Aquado surrounded by butterflies on and around her on the front cover. In the movie actress Stephanie Sigman recreates that scene.

Monarchs now

Thanks to the movie the butterfly sanctuary was declared a World Heritage Site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. But, the World Wildlife Fund reports that the butterfly population in the sanctuary has dropped one third since 2011 due to illegal logging, industrial farming, and climate change.

The monarchs are now classified as near threatened. A significant amount of the box office revenue will go towards protecting the butterfly sanctuary.

Watch the trailer and a "teaser" below for a glimpse of just how spectacular the monarchs' migration and sanctuary are:

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/flight-of-the-butterflies-movie-2012-12#ixzz2Gq3VX0e6

News of the Oaks #1124

This newsletter is worth a read as it is a snap shot on a prospering communal society engaged in agriculture. Not everything is worked out yet but a lot of bogus ideas are also missing.

This not the only such enterprise and such endeavors do work out many of the issues so making a transition to an enhanced version of all this can become natural and even obvious. What most have failed to do has been to integrate better into the economic life of the local community. Once that can be done with an internal economy that balances inputs and spreads the lifeway organically, we will have an excellent lifeway module.

Enjoy the read. I will try to post this letter as it comes in for your enjoyment and all that.

News of the Oaks Issue #114

by Valerie

With autumn comes harvest season, and there is a lot of Farm and Food news to report. Our intrepid Garden Crew harvested over 4,200 pounds of potatoes this fall, a higher-than-average yield. In October, we had 7 cows pregnant at once - a rare occurrence - and so we can expect a bounty of milk in the coming months. In addition to drinking the milk, we use it make a variety of dairy products including Romano, Stilton, cream cheese, yogurt, butter and for special occasions, ice cream! (more about our Dairy Program in this newsletter) There are several fruit orchards throughout the community and this year we were lucky enough to be eating hardy kiwis (the most northerly-growing variety) into November. We also picked a single pomegranate off of the tree outside Morningstar, and look forward to more as the tree matures in coming years.

The community is still, 15 months later, experiencing the effects of last summer's earthquake. When the water flow of our well began losing volume, apparently from underground shifts due to the quake, we researched the problem and found a surprising solution. Many people are familiar with the practice of fracking, notably in the news these days related to natural gas extraction. But it's also used to restore and improve water flow in potable (drinkable) water wells, using less pressure and no chemicals. Now, three months post-fracking, the well is performing normally and we're able to meet all of our own domestic and industrial water needs once again.

Twin Oakers were active in a number of events these last few months. We held our annual Communities Conference, a weekend event for people interested in ecovillages, cohousing, communes, and all forms of cooperative living - we had a record 185 people in attendance! Sadly, we had to cancel our herstoric Women's Gathering this year. A number of members took part in the Heritage Harvest Festival at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, a huge sustainable food event co-organized by Ira, a long-time Twin Oaks member. And lastly, a number of members were active in local and presidential election campaigning - the community has a policy that members cannot engage in political activism in the name of Twin Oaks, but members can be active as an individual.

On the internal political front, we've had a few happenings in both the money and labour scene. We raised the amount of our personal spending money to $90 per month - an all-time high in our 45-year history! The amount is tied to our quarterly income, and when our collectively-owned businesses earn more, the bulk of that money goes to our communal expenses, but individuals also receive an increase. We've also agreed to experiment with altering our communal labour system. In 2013 and 2014, we will be trying out using "Flex Hours". In Twin Oaks jargon, instead of people claiming "over-quota" labour credits for any work done over and above our 42-hour-per-week work quota, all work will be done "in-quota" and each member will have 60 "Flex Hours" that can used to do extra work in the area of their choosing.

On-the-farm activities of the last few months have included an all women's ultimate frisbee game, which was well-attended including some new recruits. Thanksgiving brought the Twin Oaks "Turkey Bowl", a touch-football game with a half-time show featuring our ad hoc Marching Band playing the theme from "Rocky". We also had a musical extravaganza "Oakstock", a one-day concert show-casing many members' musical talents. We hosted an evening of "The Music of Winter", all songs with a winter theme. And lastly, this winter Tuesdays mean dueling D&D, with two different Dungeons and Dragons games happening the same night.

Beginnings and Endings

Due to our size and demographics, Twin Oaks has a certain amount of turnover, with people arriving and leaving with some regularity. This is a significant part of life here--new people bring fresh energy into the group, but it can be difficult to say goodbye. Here Ali and Janel share their experiences from both ends of the spectrum.

Arriving at Twin Oaks: Ali's One Month Perspective

by Ali (member Nov. 2012-?)

As a new member at Twin Oaks, a question I get a lot is, "What work are you going to be doing?" and by this they mean "Where are you going to focus?" It seems that most people here do several things, but have a few areas where they focus and get most of their labor credits from. It's fairly typical for new members to have lots of different jobs and then find a few things they like as they age in membership. This may happen to me, but at least for right now I'm loving the variety. I found myself entirely bored in my last job in "the mainstream," doing the same thing all day every day and the work variety is one of the main things that drew me to Twin Oaks. Since arriving, I have done at least 15 different jobs including cooking, cleaning, childcare, making pillows, tofu & hammocks, splitting wood, hanging drywall, gardening, caring for the chickens and milking the cows. Some are jobs I actively enjoy and some I feel are a contribution I make to the community, but doing so many things keeps me interested and excited.

The other question I get a lot is "How are you adjusting?" and this I take to mean "Do you have any friends yet?" and "Are you okay with your room/the bathroom/the kitchen/living in community?" I have been in group living situations before, so sharing space and being around other people all the time feel normal to me. As for my room in Ta Chai, it's far nicer than many places I've lived (which include an old horse stall and a broken down bus). In terms of the social scene, I've been blown away by the amount of fun things to do here and cool people to do them with. When I moved to Pittsburgh last year it took me weeks to meet my neighbors and a month before I was invited over for dinner. At Twin Oaks I just check the Today Board, wander around looking for people or express an interest in a plan and I end up with more things to do than I have time for. As I was warned about, the challenge here seems to be saying "no" (both to work and play) and getting enough sleep! From dance parties to bonfires to board games I don't have nearly as much time for reading as I expected.

The question I get from friends and family "on the outside" (and one I regularly ask myself) is "Are you happy at Twin Oaks?" When I have days where my face hurts from smiling so much, I think I can safely answer that with a yes.

Leaving Twin Oaks: Janel's Retrospective

by Janel (member Sept. 2010-Oct. 2012)

Moving to Twin Oaks was a pure leap of faith. After working at sea as a cruise ship singer, all I wanted to do was live on a farm, taking in the pleasure of land and the homegrown food that came with it. I didn't really understand this yearning (and my parents certainly didn't). But the heart understands things long before the head does.

When I became a member at 23, I was sure of only two things: that I wanted A) to have an adventurous life and B) to challenge the status quo. Up to that point, I had the adventurous part down. Living in an alternative society certainly seemed to satisfy the second life requirement. Little did I know that Twin Oaks would challenge me. No one expects that they're going to move to a commune and learn more in two years than in eighteen years of school. Twin Oaks is where I learned to discipline myself and be my own boss. It's where I learned that I have the entrepreneurial energy to take a floundering project and turn it into something new. (Few are the places you can be a manager at 24.)

Twin Oaks is where I figured out why I moved there in the first place - that I have a deep passion for sustainably produced food. I guess it took one ultra-processed cruise ship meal too many to set me on a journey to figure that out. After working with the community poultry program and gaining networking skills through the Communities Conference and Acorn's Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, I realized that my goal is to propagate the local food movement currently sweeping the nation. After two years at Twin Oaks, I decided this goal would be best fulfilled in California, the agricultural heartland of the U.S. and location of my childhood home.

I know it can be hard on Twin Oaks when members come and go. But as much as it is a home for 100, Twin Oaks is an incubator - of new ideas, of skills, of people who think outside the box. Twin Oaks is where my understanding of my ideals, talents and dreams crystallized. Twin Oaks is where I truly grew up. If there's one way that the community challenges the status quo, it's through people who's worldviews have been rocked; people who take what they've learned at Twin Oaks into the wider world and do their part to transform it. My hope is to do exactly that.

A few years before he died, Steve Jobs said it was only in looking back on his life that he could "connect the dots" and understand the implications and effects of every action he took. I already feel this way about my time at Twin Oaks - it illuminated the direction I want my life to take. And for now, that direction is west. But a piece of my heart will always lie in Virginia.

The Community that Dines Together, Aligns Together

by Valerie

Ah yes, the community meal table. Communal dining can be a glorious bonding experience, as members recreate the feeling of an earlier era when the tribe gathered at the end of the day to share the fruits of their bounty. On the other hand, it can also bring out certain aspects of the cook's personality, as sure as Myers-Briggs. Here is a sampling of the "Cook du Jour".

"Le Chef" - Before joining community, this member ran their own French restaurant. They know that presentation makes the meal, and people ooh and aah over their concoctions. Their cooking is generally well-appreciated, with the exception of people who like their green beans other than dripping with butter.

"The Ethnic Specialist" - Thai, Indian, Chinese, Ethiopian - it's a geographical whirlwind as each week we're whisked off to another exotic food locale. The underlying theme: more spice is twice as nice. Bland is banned, so it's peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich night for those with sensitive palates.

"Food as Art" - This member doesn't see any reason why their creative, whimsical side needs to be left at the kitchen door. Tofu sculpted to resemble a recent guest or a Thanksgiving turkey, a rainbow salad including beets, carrots, peppers, kale, blueberries and grapes, or a cake in the shape of a body part - their creativity knows no bounds on the serving table. (Results may vary, depending on actual cooking skill)

"Agit-Prop Cuisine" - When politics and food collide (think Chairman Mao with a measuring cup). All-vegan-all-the-time, no refined anything, no profit-mongering corporate ingredients to be found in any dish. The heart and mind can enjoy this meal, but the stomach may stage it's own protest....

"Locavoracious" - A lighter-hearted version of the above, this cook sources their food from within 100 miles, or better yet, 100 yards of the communal kitchen. No flora or fauna are exempt, and dinner may include what you previously thought were weeds growing beside the porch or the groundhog that was last seen invading the garden.

"The Mess Hall" - Prior military, cafeteria or summer camp experience informs this cook's style. Mass-produced and designed to appeal to the masses, these meals are heavy on the mac-and-cheese, gravy-laden entrees, and all things carbohydrate.

Regardless of style, as we sit down to a meal together in accordance with our own community traditions - be that thanking the cook, saying a prayer, or simply digging in - we can appreciate that the simple act of sharing food is an important part of the "community glue" that holds us all together. Bon Appetit!

(Valerie has eaten more than 14,000 communal meals over the course of her 20-year membership.)

(Copyright 2010 Communities Magazine and Valerie Renwick. This article first appeared in the Fall 2010 "Power and Empowerment" issue of Communities: Life in Cooperative Culture [#148];

see communities.ic.org)

Cows in Community: Our Dairy Program

by Keegan

Being able to work in the dairy was one of the primary motivations for my move to Twin Oaks. As a city kid woefully unskilled in practical work, the possibility of shifting from an uneasy off-and-on consumer of meat products to raising, milking, slaughtering, and butchering my own cows was intoxicating. My enthusiasm was well-timed, and within months of joining, I was made the dairy manager.

For me, the greatest part of working in the dairy, besides the pleasure of working with such characterful creatures, has been the experience of eating animals that I have personally cared for; of facing the ethical problem of eating an animal without hypocrisy. This is not to say that I believe eating local meat with the appropriate labels cleanly resolves the problem of killing, but that knowing the animals I am to eat is the bare minimum required for me to do so with dignity.

Our dairy program is unique even compared with other small organic operations. We do not sell our products, and so our considerations are primarily quality-of-life. For instance, it's illegal in Virginia to sell raw, unpasteurized milk, and yet we consume it here in large quantities every day. The food we make with it would be ludicrously expensive in the mainstream: imagine seeing icing in a store made with raw milk from grass-fed cows raised in a local, worker-owned dairy. Such luxurious and ethical goods are standard fare here.

Many of our cows are also of a rare breed known as Dutch Belted. Though unpopular with commercial dairies (probably because milk production is lower than with commercial breeds), they are extremely well-suited to our purposes: they survive very well on grass (other breeds require lots of supplementary grain), are long-lived, get big enough to be useful for beef, and have a higher conception rate and fewer birth complications than other breeds. For us, this means less money on grain (our biggest dairy expense), less money on vets, and less stress.

Our milking shifts are pretty big tasks: a single individual is responsible for herding, milking, caring for calves, checking for cows in heat, and cleaning the barn. There's a lot that can go wrong. But this level of responsibility means that the burden of running a dairy is shared. We all get vacations. We all get to sleep in if we choose. And despite being the manager, there are days every week when I'm not in the barn at all. It's a good and balanced life. [ without question, animal husbandry needs to be a communal enterprise. The classic single family farm that accidentally became our norm mostly because of settlement practices and tradition just made the family a complete slave to the enterprise. - arclein]

New Benefit of Resveratrol

Resveratrol packs a one two punch. It activates key stem cells for circulatory healing and its also activates telomase which is clearly prospective in terms of outright life extension.

Needless to say, taking supplements is strongly indicated. Even better it supports the arguments for the benefits of grapes and the strong red fruit in our diets. The best take home that I get from this is that it is a really good idea to make dried fruit and nut blends a mainstay of your snacking needs to pretty well the exclusion of anything else. I made that last comment mainly because anything else is generally unsatisfactory and simply by default, I use this regimen. I am merely making it easy for you as you have little choice to begin with.

This is important medical information that is not yet common knowledge and it needs to be. Share it.

New Benefit of Resveratrol

http://www.alsearsmd.com

Here’s great news that will help you slash your risk of heart attack, high blood pressure and all forms of heart disease: Researchers uncovered “hidden” benefits from the popular heart and longevity nutrient resveratrol.

Turns out resveratrol stimulates the production of adult stem cells called endothelial progenitor cells.

These stem cells are so powerful, they have the ability to seek out, repair and heal the trouble areas in the lining of your blood vessels called the endothelial cell barrier or ECB.

Since the release of a landmark study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2003, scientists and researchers have focused more and more on the power of these endothelial progenitor cells.

And for good reason. The study from the New England Journal of Medicine showed a “strong correlation” between the number of progenitor cells circulating in the blood and a person’s overall risk of heart disease.1

The connection is so strong, I could make the case that the number of progenitor cells will become the new “marker” of cardiovascular health, even replacing the two major forms of cholesterol, HDL and LDL.

Simply stated, the more of these progenitor cells you have, the more likely you are to avoid disease. This view is supported by the fact that patients with diabetes, high blood pressure and/or cardiovascular disease have low levels of progenitor cells.

Studies showed, “the number of endothelial progenitor cells was significantly reduced in patients with hypercholesteroemia (extremely high cholesterol levels) compared with that in control subjects.”2

In these patients with very high cholesterol, they found the ability of endothelial progenitor cells to proliferate, migrate, adhere to vessel walls and induce the regeneration of blood vessels was weakened.

Resveratrol had the opposite effect.

In many recent studies I’ve read, I find that resveratrol increases the number of these endothelial progenitor cells.3,4,5,6

Resveratrol also has the distinction of activating telomerase, the enzyme that rebuilds your telomeres.

These two critical functions are enabled by resveratrol’s ability to “turn on” genes that promote longevity, and “turn off” genes that promote disease.7

By influencing the way genes are expressed, resveratrol has the ability to activate anti-aging genes called sirtuins.

Sirtuins transmit signals to every cell in your body that literally cancel out the effects of aging. They bring the processes that lead cell death to a crawl, buying your body more time to repair the DNA damage that brings life to an end.

I recommend adding foods rich in resveratrol to your diet. They include grapes and vacciniumberries like blueberries, bilberries and cranberries. Peanuts also have resveratrol.

Wine and related beverages are a particularly good source of dietary resveratrol. But you’d need to drink hundreds of glasses of wine to experience the life-extending benefits of resveratrol.[ please note this - arclein]

Resveratrol supplements are a better option. They’re inexpensive and completely safe. You can take it any time of day, with or without food. You can find them in health food stores or on line. I recommend taking at least 10 mg to 20 mg per day for telomerase activation and the stimulation of endothelial progenitor cells.

1. Hill JM, Zalos G, Halcox JP, et al. Circulating endothelial progenitor cells, vascular function, and cardiovascular risk. N Engl J Med. 2003 Feb 13;348(7):593-600.
2. Chen JZ, Zhang FR, Tao QM, Wang XX, Zhu JH, Zhu JH. Number and activity of endothelial progenitor cells from peripheral blood in patients with hypercholesterolaemia. Clin Sci (Lond). 2004 Sep;107(3):273-80.
3. Balestrieri ML, Schiano C, Felice F, et al. Effect of low doses of red wine and pure resveratrol on circulating endothelial progenitor cells. J Biochem (Tokyo). 2007 Nov 4.
4. Wang XB, Huang J, Zou JG, et al. Effects of resveratrol on number and activity of endothelial progenitor cells from human peripheral blood. Clin Exp Pharmacol Physiol. 2007 Nov;34(11):1109-15.
5. Lefèvre J, Michaud SE, Haddad P, et al. Moderate consumption of red wine (cabernet sauvignon) improves ischemia-induced neovascularization in ApoE-deficient mice: Effect on endothelial progenitor cells and nitric oxide. FASEB J. 2007 Jul 19.
6. J G, Cq W, Hh F, et al. Effects of resveratrol on endothelial progenitor cells and their contributions to reendothelialization in intima-injured rats. J Cardiovasc Pharmacol. 2006 May;47(5):711-21.
7. Wang XB, Zhu L, Huang J, Yin YG, Kong XQ, Rong QF, Shi AW, Cao KJ. Resveratrol-induced augmentation of telomerase activity delays senescence of endothelial progenitor cells. Chin Med J (Engl). 2011 Dec;124(24):4310-5.

Chinese Experiment Confirms Light Speed for Gravity

Yes, it should. Yet if matter is created, its effect on the universe is instantaneous. All good fun.

This is a delightful experiment and it nicely comes up with the right answer. Even better as we go out into to solar system, this can be replicated everywhere to great effect and will become a standard.

Thus any residual doubts about gravity been linked electromagnetic propagation can be set firmly aside.

I am presently using a superior nomenclature to describe what has been called electromagnetic radiation or anything else. My descriptive phrase is now partially bounded curvature or pbc. Bounded curvature or bc is effective for discussing particles. A Mobius strip is a partially bounded curvature. I am doing this because the historical language interferes with the communication of these ideas.

Chinese scientists find evidence for speed of gravity

by Staff Writers

Beijing (XNA) Dec 28, 2012

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Chinese_scientists_find_evidence_for_speed_of_gravity_999.html

Chinese scientists revealed Wednesday that they have found evidence supporting the hypothesis that gravity travels at the speed of light based on data gleaned from observing Earth tides.

Scientists have been trying to measure the speed of gravity for years through experiments and observations, but few have found valid methods.

By conducting six observations of total and annular solar eclipses, as well as Earth tides, a team headed by Tang Keyun, a researcher with the Institute of Geology and Geophysics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), found that the Newtonian Earth tide formula includes a factor related to the propagation of gravity.

"Earth tide" refers to a small change in the Earth's surface caused by the gravity of the moon and sun.

Based on the data, the team, with the participation of the China Earthquake Administration and the University of the CAS, found that gravitational force released from the sun and gravitational force recorded at ground stations on Earth did not travel at the same speed, with the time difference exactly the same as the time it takes for light to travel from the sun to observation stations on Earth.

The scientists admitted that the observation stations are located near oceans, indicating that the influence of ocean tides might have been strong enough to interfere with the results.

Consequently, the team conducted separate observations of Earth tides from two stations in Tibet and Xinjiang, two inland regions that are far away from all four oceans, as well as took measures to filter out other potential disturbances.

By applying the new data to the propagation equation of gravity, the team found that the speed of gravity is about 0.93 to 1.05 times the speed of light with a relative error of about 5 percent, providing the first set of strong evidence showing that gravity travels at the speed of light.

Their findings have been published online in English by German science and technology publishing group Springer.

Printed articles in both Chinese and English will be carried in a January 2013 edition of the Chinese Science Bulletin, according to the CAS Institute of Geology and Geophysics.