Daniel Salzler No. 1175 EnviroInsight.org Four Items November 11, 2022
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- COP 27. World leaders from around the world are meeting in town of Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt to address Climate change. The conference was opened with comments by U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, offers a sharp rebuke to companies that claim to be tackling climate change without doing the actual work.
The report to World Leaders was delivered by COP-27 President Shoukry. Here is the report:
Dear friends,
In just days, our planet’s population will cross a new threshold.
The 8 billionth member of our human family will be born.
This milestone puts into perspective what this climate conference is all about.
How will we answer when “Baby 8 Billion” is old enough to ask:
What did you do for our world – and for our planet — when you had the chance?
Excellencies,
This UN Climate Conference is a reminder that the answer is in our hands.
And the clock is ticking.
We are in the fight of our lives.
And we are losing.
Greenhouse gas emissions keep growing.
Global temperatures keep rising.
And our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible.
We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.
But climate change is on a different timeline, and a different scale.
It is the defining issue of our age.
It is the central challenge of our century.
It is unacceptable, outrageous and self-defeating to put it on the back burner.
Indeed, many of today’s conflicts are linked with growing climate chaos.
The war in Ukraine has exposed the profound risks of our fossil fuel addiction.
Today’s crises cannot be an excuse for backsliding or greenwashing.
If anything, they are a reason for greater urgency, stronger action and effective accountability.
To read the entire, very important report, go online to https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/ sg/statement/2022-11-07/secretary-generals-remarks-high-level-opening-of-cop27- delivered-scroll-down-for-all-english-version
2. Bird Brain Versus The Human Population. Two Watershed Info issues ago (No. 1173) this newsletter provided a discussion on crows and ravens. A new study recently published in “Science Advances” states that a facet of complex thought long believed to be unique to humans may be for the birds, too.
Crows can learn a skill previously believed to distinguish the minds and communication of humans from other animals, according to a study published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. The research could help bolster evidence that recursion, defined in the study as the cognitive ability to embed a structure within similar structures, is a skill that some animals, like some monkeys and birds, can learn.
Two crows appeared to grasp the cognitive concept at a toddler’s skill level, the study said. The crows required just a few days of training before they learned the skill.
“Crows are really smart,” said Diana Liao, a study co-author and postdoctoral researcher at Germany’s University of Tübingen. “But the speed they were able to do this was surprising to us.”
Linguists including Noam Chomsky hypothesized in the early 2000s that recursion is a unique cornerstone of language that makes it distinct from animal communication. Dr. Chomsky, professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said recursion could explain humans’ capacity for complex thought.
Some other species may be capable of creating similarly-embedded structures, research has shown. A 2020 study in Science Advances tested humans and rhesus macaque monkeys on their ability to arrange colored brackets into specific nested sequences.
Three- to five-year-old children and people from other groups were able to create such sequences with little training, the study showed. The monkeys required more training but demonstrated they could grasp the concept as well as the children, the study said.
In the new study, two crows were trained to create embedded sequences by pecking at brackets of colors and shapes on a screen. When the crows pecked a correct sequence, a chime sounded and the birds were rewarded with birdseed pellets or mealworms. If they pecked an incorrect sequence, a buzzer blared and the screen went dark for two seconds before the training resumed.
After a few days, the crows learned to peck correct sequences using bracket combinations they hadn’t encountered before at rates significantly higher than chance, Dr. Liao said. They pecked correct patterns at around the same rate as U.S. children and outperformed monkeys from the 2020 study, she said.
Earlier research showed crows can manipulate tools, remember human faces and may even be capable of conscious thought. They have as many neurons as some monkeys, studies have shown.
Rules people use to understand grammar and math go far beyond a crow’s recall of a few sequential patterns, Dr. Chomsky said. “It’s easy to show that humans have the rule in their heads,” he said. “There’s no evidence that corvids have the rule.”
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Crows belong to the corvid family, a group that includes jays and ravens.
People have recursion, which is the ability to make combinations indefinitely, in part because of a capacity to conceive of the infinite, Dr. Chomsky said. Access to what he referred to as external memory, like the ability to write things down or use a computer, allows people to further make use of this cognitive skill.
Some cognitive scientists have said the methods used to test the crows might not demonstrate real recursive thinking as brackets are arbitrary symbols unlike phrases in language which can be meaningfully related to each other. Dr. Liao said the method is useful for testing animals that don’t use language. Source: Dominique Mosbergen at dominique.mosbergen@wsj.com
3. We Just Recently Experienced A Time-Shift! Just a reminder, last Sunday, November 6th, 2022, time as we know it made a shift as Daylight Savings Time ended.
All of Arizona with the exception of the Navajo area does NOT CHANGE TIME. The Navajo area changes time as does the majority of the rest of the country.
As of Sunday 2:00:00 am clocks were turned backward 1 hour. So, when it is noon in Arizona and Hawaii, the time will be 11:00 in California and 2:00 p.m. on the East coast (2 hours).
United States first observed Daylight Saving Time in 1918.
One of the earliest prominent backers of daylight savings time was Abraham Lincoln Filene (of Filene’s Department stores), who was a driving force behind the movement during World War I. Other supporters included the gardening industry, as well as pro baseball and tennis, according to historian Mike O’Malley of George Mason University.
When Congress held hearings on extending DST in the mid-1980s, officials from the golf industry said an “additional month of daylight saving was worth $200 million in additional sales of golf clubs and greens fees,” Downing told NPR in 2007. “The barbecue industry said it was worth $100 million.”
It all started out as an energy policy
For decades, shifting the clocks during the months that have the most sunlight was promoted as a way to save energy. Indeed, the most recent expansion of DST came via an energy bill that Congress passed in 2005.
In the late 1700s, Benjamin Franklin was a prominent supporter of daylight saving time. He “calculated that the city of Paris could save millions of pounds of candlewax every year if residents woke up early in the morning and went to bed early at night,” according to the House of Representatives’ history blog.
We should note that despite inspiring Franklin’s idea, Paris, aka the City of Light, doesn’t seem to have embraced it.
Critics say there’s a flaw in the idea that America will save energy if people don’t use their lights as much: We now have many more ways to consume energy, including running air conditioners and TV sets at home. We also consume more gas while we drive around to enjoy that bonus hour, according to Downing.
“Daylight saving is a loser as an energy plan, but it’s a fantastic retail spending plan,” he said in his video on the issue.
Still, even Downing recognized that daylight saving is a huge hit: “I don’t think it’s ever going away,” he said.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
4. Friday Celebrate Veterans Day. Veterans Day is a U.S. legal holiday dedicated to American veterans of all wars, and Veterans Day 2022 will occur on Friday, November 11. In 1918, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, an armistice, or temporary cessation of hostilities, was declared between the Allied nations and Germany in World War I, then known as “the Great War.”
Commemorated in many countries as Armistice Day the following year, November 11th became a federal holiday in the United States in 1938. In the aftermath of World War II and the Korean War, Armistice Day became known as Veterans Day.
The Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919, marking the official end of World War I. Nonetheless, the armistice date of November 11, 1918, remained in the public imagination as the date that marked the end of the conflict.One year later, in November 1919, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed November 11 as the first commemoration of Armistice Day. The day’s observation included parades and public gatherings, as well as a brief pause in business and school activities at 11 a.m.
On June 4, 1926, Congress passed a resolution that the “recurring anniversary of [November 11, 1918] should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations,” and that the president should issue an annual proclamation calling for the observance of Armistice Day.
By that time, 27 state legislatures had made November 11 a legal holiday. An act approved May 13, 1938 made November 11 a legal Federal holiday, “dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be hereafter celebrated and known as ‘Armistice Day.’” Source: https://www.history.com/topics/holidays/history-of-veterans-day
Celebrating Veterans Day. Veterans Day is a U.S. legal holiday dedicated to American veterans of all wars, and Veterans Day 2022 will occur on Friday, November 11. In 1918, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, an armistice, or temporary cessation of hostilities, was declared between the Allied nations and Germany in World War I, then known as “the Great War.”
In 1975, after it became evident that the actual date of Veterans Day carried historical and patriotic significance to many Americans, President Gerald Ford signed a new law returning the observation of Veterans Day to November 11th beginning in 1978. If November 11 falls on a Saturday or Sunday, the federal government observes the holiday on the previous Friday or following Monday, respectively. Government offices are closed on Veterans Day. Source: https://www.history.com/topics/holidays/history-of-veterans-day.
Copyright: EnviroInsight.org 2022
