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The ancient Japanese poetry form of haiku was originally the opening verse of a longer poem, the renga. Refined by the poet Basho, it has since evolved into an independent art form. At times delicate and willowy, at times punchy and ironic, these bite-sized poems deliver maximum effect with minimum description. Kigo (season words) often set the tone:

Icy cold, brown slush
seeps stealthily through leather
finds hole in my sock

Today, the winter solstice, is National Haiku Poetry Day.

Quote: “The haiku lets meaning float; the aphorism pins it down.”

— Mason Cooley

[via Spotlight @ Answers.com]

The Japanese characters and written or spoken words are are called ‘kanji’. The word kanji is from kan (the name given to a great part of China thousands of years ago, from where the language and characters were adopted by Japan) and ji, meaning language or words.

The image to the left is an example for haiku. Kanji is written from right to left and from top to bottom. The three columns on the left are the cherry blossom haiku verse; the next column of two characters represents Maitreya’s original Japanese name, Koji, which interestingly means ’supervisor of cultivation’; and the final column far left is the date, which traditionally includes the emperor’s name, hence so many characters.

Quite an interesting little clip showing i a very abbreviated form the long history of anti-western sentiment in Saudi Arabia Wahhabism, one of which Osama Bin Laden could be seen as the latest incarnation.

Recent events have exposed complex problems that are beginning to arise from humanity’s sharing the atmosphere.

Date Posted on Global Envision: September 27, 2007

Some months ago, an American astronaut accidentally let a tool escape into orbit, eliciting concern about its hazardous potential as a hurtling object that could destroy an expensive satellite or even threaten lives aloft. Shortly afterwards, China blew up one of its satellites, immediately doubling the type of fine orbiting debris that is dangerous because it is hard to track. Once again the world became aware of the strange situation emerging in our skies. The sky is a unique domain, and one that is inadequately regulated. With the advent of global pollutions and technologies, remedying this is becoming an increasingly urgent problem.

In most cases, the laws for skies mirror those governing the world’s oceans. Oceans belong to everyone except those near landmasses, which are managed in a similar manner to the country’s land-bound borders. As a result, the sky is usually conceptualized in terms of traffic. Airliners and fighter planes operate in “controlled” air close to the ground, while nationality is supposed to matter less the higher you go. Fragile treaties that cover this are enforced mostly by the fact that few nations can afford to place assets that high.

But lately, more complex problems are beginning to arise from humanity’s sharing the atmosphere. Carbon and fluorocarbons affect everyone’s children. When Chernobyl exploded, it was not Ukraine alone that inherited generations of radioactive effects. Soon nations will colonize the moon, giving rise to the same unsatisfactory and tentative situation we have in Antarctica, where nations essentially take without legally owning. A more enlightened approach to shared resources is needed, one less dependent on neo-colonial control.

Some suggest that sky governance follow the precedent set by the electromagnetic spectrum. The “airwaves” are used for a variety of communications, including government use and public access like radio. The range of usable territory - the spectrum - is administered by governments as though it were real estate, and is broken up according to wavelength, with an amount apportioned for cell phones, other bits for military pilots, and so on.

This situation would be disastrous if it could not be closely managed, because people would broadcast on top of one another. Soon, we will see the spectrum become even more active, with the merger of cell phone infrastructure and the relatively unregulated Internet.

This will likely be followed by more sophisticated means of communications based on access to the air. To some extent, everyone will benefit from this, because governments will be less able to censor information. But would it be a better model of atmospheric administration?

Perhaps not. The problem is that at least some electromagnetic waves are dangerous. Consider this: at any given moment, the average citizen in the developed world has billions of messages passing through his or her brain. It can be shown that cells are able to detect these messages, but the extent to which they affect the body is unknown.

However, it is known that bees are dying in the northern hemisphere. This is a major concern because so much food depends on bees for pollination. The primary causes of this recent epidemic are germs and mites, but these have always been with us. So why are they affecting bees now?

A German study suggests that the proliferation of cell phone towers is weakening bees’ immune systems (the study correlates towers and signal strength to bee deaths). The jury is still out, but it may be that there is no safe level of exposure to many common radiations; the more we are exposed, the more damage we do. We would see the result of this in indirect effects, such as growing rates of asthma and hyperactivity in children.

So perhaps the problem with existing regulatory models lies in the assumption that the entire atmosphere is available for unconstrained use. We have an intuitive understanding of the importance of limits when the loss of our sky is articulated in poetic terms. As light pollution covers more of the planet, we are losing one of our oldest connections to nature: the ancient ability to gaze at the stars. If dying bees do not inspire formal guidelines about how the sky should be shared, let us hope that empty space will. The sky must belong to the people. Abuse of it harms everyone, and profits from its use should benefit all as well, implying the need to establish worldwide democratic rights over what is an unarguably universal resource.

Contributed by H. T. Goranson, the Lead Scientist of Sirius-Beta Corp and formerly a Senior Scientist with the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Reprinted with permission from Project Syndicate.

To learn more about the regulation of open spaces, see The Democratic Republic of Cyberspace?

The world’s sea levels could rise twice as high this century as UN climate scientists have previously predicted, according to a study. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change proposes a maximum sea level rise of 81cm (32in) this century. But in the journal Nature Geoscience, researchers say the true maximum could be about twice that: 163cm (64in). They looked at what happened more than 100,000 years ago - the last time Earth was this warm. The results join other studies showing that current sea level projections may be very conservative.Sea level rise is a key effect of global climate change. There are two major contributory effects: expansion of sea water as the oceans warm, and the melting of ice over land. In the latest study, researchers came up with their estimates by looking at the so-called interglacial period, some 124,000 to 119,000 years ago, when Earth’s climate was warmer than it is now due to a different configuration of the planet’s orbit around the Sun. That was the last time sea levels reached up to 6m (20ft) above where they are now, fuelled by the melting of ice sheets that covered Greenland and Antarctica.

‘Robust’ work

The researchers say their study is the first robust documentation of how quickly sea levels rose to that level. “Until now, there have been no data that sufficiently constrain the full rate of past sea level rises above the present level,” lead author Eelco Rohling, of Britain’s National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, said in a statement. Rohling and his colleagues found an average sea level rise of 1.6m (64in) each century during the interglacial period. Back then, Greenland was 3C to 5C (5.4F to 9F) warmer than now - which is similar to the warming period expected in the next 50 to 100 years, Dr Rohling said.

Current models of ice sheet activity do not predict rates of change this large. However, they also do not include many of the dynamic processes already being observed by glaciologists, the researchers said. “The average rise of 1.6m per century that we find is roughly twice as high as the maximum estimates in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, and so offers the first potential constraint on the dynamic ice sheet component that was not included in the headline IPCC values,” explained Dr Rohling. Last year, a separate study found sea level rise projections could be under-estimating the impact of human-induced climate change on the world’s oceans.

Stefan Rahmstorf, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany, and colleagues plotted global mean surface temperatures against sea level rise, and found that levels could rise by 59% more than current forecasts.

[BBC News]

I have been quite slack with posting lately … this one though I found quite fascinating coz it shows quite well how development happens as an emergence of potentials, possibilities and probabilities. Quite a beautiful aspect of life …