Slave to the Blog

An activist-turned-informant

2006-05-10T14:10:00.000-07:00

An activist-turned-informant

By Hal Bernton

Seattle Times staff reporter

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TIM LEWIS, 2004

Federal investigators got their break with Jake Ferguson.

SKY SHIVAH / KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS, 1996

The protests: The Warner Creek logging protests of 1995-96 brought out activists who spent more than 300 days blockading a road that led to a 14-acre patchwork of old-growth timber scheduled to be cut in the Willamette National Forest.

EUGENE, Ore. — The arsonists hit

EUGENE, Ore. — The arsonists hit before dawn, laying down fuel-soaked sheets and jugs of gasoline to torch 35 SUVs at a Chevrolet dealership.

The communiqué from the saboteurs — acting under the banner of the Earth Liberation Front — proclaimed a new, more militant era, when the sins of the "rich who parade around in their armored existence" would no longer go unchallenged.

Federal, state and local officials converged on the scene after the March 2001 attack, sifting through charred wreckage for evidence — just as they had in more than a dozen other major arson attacks around the West claimed by the ELF or the Animal Liberation Front.

The investigation hit a dead end. As in the other attacks, prosecutors couldn't muster enough evidence to charge anyone.

"If you don't get a break, arson is a really tough case to make," said Thad Buchanan, a retired Eugene police captain involved in the investigations. "Most of your evidence burns up."

Three years after the Eugene fires, investigators finally got their break: A sinewy, tattooed heavy-metal guitarist named Jake Ferguson agreed to cooperate and donned recording wires to meet with other activists.

Soon, the secrets of the underground network thought responsible for the attacks began to be exposed.

Ferguson was a high-profile participant in some of these crimes, according to court documents and court statements by defense attorneys with access to unreleased documents.

Is it terrorism?

FBI says yes, even though environmental militants target property, not people.

Related material

FBI chronological summary of terrorist incidents, 1980-2004
FBI report on intelligence sharing (PDF). The report discusses "social" protests, protesters and groups in several places, most notably on report page 34.

It is unclear whether he had any role in the Eugene fires. But he admits to helping out in at least four arsons, including a 1998 fire at a federal facility in Olympia, according to a court statement by Craig Weinerman, a federal public defender involved in the case.

As federal prosecutors prepare for trial this fall, Ferguson's tapes and testimony will likely play a large role in the fate of 13 men and women accused of a conspiracy to carry out 17 acts of arson and sabotage between 1996 and 2001.

Most of those accused now face spending decades in prison if convicted. Some could wind up with life sentences if found guilty at trial.

So far, Ferguson remains free and hasn't been charged with any crimes.

But his cooperation with investigators has made him a notorious figure among militant environmentalists: Ferguson has received threatening phone calls and been repeatedly trashed on activist Web sites as a turncoat, snitch and worse.

In an interview with The Seattle Times, Ferguson declined to comment on the alleged crimes and bristled at accusations that he was the first to fold.

"I didn't roll; people rolled on me, and I was faced with a situation where I could go to jail for the rest of my life," Ferguson said.

A devoted father who liked guitar, Aikido Ferguson lived in the Whiteaker neighborhood of Eugene, a collection of aging wooden homes. It's a place where people can find shelter in aging buses parked in a front yard or a yurt that features access to an organic garden and wood-fired sauna, and — in years past — weekly meetings to debate anarchist philosophy.

He was known for being into his music, playing lead guitar in a band at a local bar. He also trained in Aikido, and, friends say, was devoted to his young son, who lives with his mother.

There was another side to Ferguson, as well.

In 1999, he was arrested on charges of carrying a concealed weapon in his pickup — a 9 mm handgun, according to Eugene court records.

He also has struggled with a heroin addiction, and at times displayed a volatile temper, according to Micah Griffin, a former bandmate.

"There was a certain aura about him," said a former housemate. "He was the bad boy. And there was a certain attraction to that in an anarchist movement full of pirate talk."

Ferguson earned some of his early activist credentials when he joined the marathon Warner Creek logging protests of 1995 and 1996.

Protesters spent more than 300 days blockading a road that led to a 14-acre patchwork of old-growth timber scheduled to be cut in a burned-over area of the Willamette National Forest.

At Warner Creek, Ferguson was a tactician, someone who helped fortify the lines by digging ditches and building barricades.

In a documentary titled "Pickaxe," a bearded Ferguson smiles as his head pokes above the walls of a log stockade strung across the road.

"We've had schoolkids from Vermont come here to do all-night watch shifts with their teachers," Ferguson told the interviewer. "It's really been an inspirational place for activists from all over the country."

The protest spurred nonviolent civil disobedience around the region, with hundreds arrested before the Clinton administration finally backed off from logging that tract.

There was tension about how far to take the protests: Some people held fast to civil disobedience in the traditions of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi.

Others thought violence could be justified against an industrial society doing plenty of violence against the Earth.

"It was a constant debate, and people weren't just sitting in a room, they were sitting in the middle of the road, so the argument was based on the reality of what might be happening that day," said Tim Lewis, an activist who produced the "Pickaxe" documentary.

Those camped out included Kevin Tubbs, a Nebraska-reared son of a Vietnam Marine veteran. Then 26, Tubbs already had made a name for himself as an animal-rights activist with a passion for rescuing stray animals.

At Warner Creek, Tubbs tied himself on top of a wooden tripod set in the middle of a road. It was rigged so that the smallest bump from a logging truck would dislodge the structure, and "bring me crashing to my death," he told an interviewer in the documentary.

The protest also drew Bill Rodgers, a soft-spoken, balding man who loved to hike, explore caves and read books. He had a mystical streak, taking the nickname "Avalon," from "The Mists of Avalon," a novel about King Arthur told from the perspective of a druid priestess.

Others who joined the Warner Creek protest don't recall any special bonding among Tubbs, Rodgers and Ferguson.

But court documents and statements by attorneys allege that in the years to come, the trio — sometimes working side by side — would help carry out a wave of arson attacks on behalf of the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front.

The first ELF attack took place a month after the Warner Creek protests, a failed attempt to burn down a Willamette National Forest ranger building. Two nights later another ranger station burned down.

In the years that followed, the saboteurs hit 15 other targets with a mix of stealth and bravado, sometimes spray-painting the ELF or ALF initials at the scene. They used homemade bombs, sometimes consisting of 5-gallon jugs filled with gasoline and detonated with electronic timers. But they left scant evidence behind.

To make headway, investigators needed somehow — some way — to penetrate the underground.

"It was very difficult. It was a very tight group. We knew that it was going to be a long, slow process," said Buchanan, the retired Eugene police captain.

Unexpected lead gives investigators "a red flag"

Around the time of the Chevrolet dealership fire, police and federal investigators got an unexpected lead.

Shortly after the arson, a woman reported a stolen vehicle and believed that Ferguson had taken it, according to Buchanan. She then had a change of heart and withdrew that report.

A few days later, another woman showed up at the Eugene police station and asked for information about the stolen-vehicle report and the fire at the dealership, according to police and federal sources.

Police were surprised by this query.

Could Ferguson — and this truck — have been involved with the fires?

"It was a tremendous red flag," Buchanan said. "Before that, we had never head of Ferguson. He wasn't on our radar."

Investigators located the truck. But a search didn't turn up evidence that linked the fires to Ferguson, according to Buchanan.

But Ferguson was still a suspect when federal investigators began looking into the dealership fire again. By then, ELF and ALF attacks in the Pacific Northwest had ebbed, but other actions were continuing elsewhere.

In Eugene, a federal grand jury summoned numerous witnesses, including several of Ferguson's friends.

By the summer of 2004, Ferguson would tell friends that "the feds" were closing in on him, even following him as he drove through town.

"Most of the time he joked about everything, and it was hard to know when to take him seriously," said a former housemate. "But the one time he really seemed serious, he said that they [federal authorities] were trying to get him for [the dealership] fire."

Several defense attorneys say they've seen no evidence that Ferguson participated in the dealership fires.

Federal prosecutors decline to discuss Ferguson, though U.S. Attorney Karin Immergut said in a news conference that inside information was of "critical importance" in cracking the case.

Ferguson did not say who put the federal officials on his tail, what information persuaded him to cooperate or what kind of deal, if any, he struck with prosecutors.

But by September 2004, Ferguson was cooperating with investigators, according to defense attorneys who have gained access to numerous FBI affidavits.

In some of those documents filed in court, Ferguson appears as "CW-1" (Confidential Witness 1) or simply "CW" (Confidential Witness), according to Weinerman, a defense attorney for an alleged co-conspirator in some of the arsons. In indictment papers that outline the crimes, Ferguson appears as a "person known to the Grand Jury," according to a motion filed by another defense attorney.

In these documents, Ferguson, as CW, talks about joining Tubbs on a 1998 road trip from Eugene to Olympia. There, they joined with Rodgers in an arson attack on a federal wildlife-research facility. The group had an unreliable vehicle, a van that kept breaking down. Eventually, it had to be dropped off at a Federal Way repair shop, according to an FBI affidavit.

In late 2000, Ferguson claimed to have joined Tubbs and three other people to scout out another target — an Oregon poplar farm, which would eventually be set fire to on May 21, 2001, along with the UW Urban Horticulture Center. And as an informant, he would later return to the area to point out landmarks to an FBI agent.

To bolster the case against other alleged cell members, Ferguson also agreed to don a body recorder, and travel around the country coaxing at least six of his alleged accomplices to talk about past exploits. Those recordings included conversations with Tubbs reminiscing about the Olympia attack, and Rodgers discussing his work on a how-to manual, "Setting Fires with Electronic Timers."

Ferguson's work made him a notable recruit in a broader FBI effort to penetrate the ALF and ELF.

The feds begin to make arrests

The federal crackdown began early last December.

Rodgers was among the first taken into custody. He was arrested at the bookstore and community center that he had opened in Prescott, Ariz.

"Never did I imagine that things would turn out like this. I have been betrayed before and each time I was astonished, and saddened," Rodgers wrote from jail. "But this is the ultimate betrayal, delivered straight into the hands of my enemies. On top of all that, I can see that multiple parties are willing to blatantly lie and exaggerate."

He also wrote a will. Two weeks after his arrest, the 40-year-old Rodgers pulled a plastic bag over his head and committed suicide. His girlfriend received some 30 pages of letters, including a farewell note.

"Certain human cultures have been waging war against the Earth for millennia," Rodgers wrote. "I chose to fight on the side of bears, mountain lions, skunks, bats, saguaros, cliff rose and all things wild. I am just the most recent casualty in that war. But tonight I have made a jail break — I am returning home, to the Earth, to the place of my origins."

Tubbs, who was arrested in Eugene where he worked at an adult bookstore, made a different choice.

Accused of involvement in at least nine attacks, he faces the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison. He has chosen to cooperate.

In a Jan. 31 letter, he appeared hopeful his assistance would earn him release on bail so he could reclaim his job as an assistant retail manager at an adult video and magazine store and share some time with his family and six cats and two dogs.

"I sincerely regret any involvement in the activities I am accused of," Tubbs wrote U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Coffin. "I was motivated only out of a desire for positive social change, but I have long since realized events like those actually do more harm than good. To prove this point, I am doing everything I can to help resolve this complicated case as quickly and easily as possible."

In a February court hearing, prosecutors portrayed Tubbs as a desperate man willing to die for the cause and a flight risk. They persuaded Coffin to deny the bail motion.

Ferguson has become a target for scorn

Ferguson, at least through early March, was still living in the Eugene area. Though he's kept a low profile, he became a target of scorn in some activist circles.

"The reason why a community has been shaken to the core is this: Jacob Ferguson," declared a posting on the Indymedia Portland Web site.

"In a community where there is distrust, even disgust for the federal government and especially its law-enforcement operatives, Jake pretended he was one of us. He was and is one of them."

A former housemate was surprised to see him earlier this year driving one of the ELF's despised symbols of industrial excess — a gray SUV. Ferguson said it was a rental vehicle.

Once this winter, Ferguson also ventured to an old Eugene hangout, the Tiny Tavern.

"I didn't know whether I wanted to hit him, or give him a hug," said Griffin, his former bandmate.

Ferguson told Griffin about his difficult upbringing without his father, who spent time in prison. Ferguson hoped his cooperation with the Justice Department would spare his own son the same fate.

Still, he feared he might have to serve as much as 10 years behind bars. Throughout their meeting, Ferguson was full of tears, sorrow and regret.

"He said he had become a victim of his own crimes," Griffin said.

Artist hosts workshop, encourages students' talents - News

2006-04-26T19:06:00.000-07:00

Artist hosts workshop, encourages students' talents - News

93

2006-04-02T15:23:00.000-07:00

SONNET 93
So shall I live, supposing thou art true,
Like a deceived husband; so love's face
May still seem love to me, though alter'd new;
Thy looks with me, thy heart in other place:
For there can live no hatred in thine eye,
Therefore in that I cannot know thy change.
In many's looks the false heart's history
Is writ in moods and frowns and wrinkles strange,
But heaven in thy creation did decree
That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell;
Whate'er thy thoughts or thy heart's workings be,
Thy looks should nothing thence but sweetness tell.
How like Eve's apple doth thy beauty grow,
if thy sweet virtue answer not thy show!

73

2006-04-02T15:15:00.000-07:00

SONNET 73
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

bard

2006-04-01T15:00:00.001-08:00

She speaks yet she says nothing: what of that?
Her eye discourses; I will answer it.
I am too bold, 'tis not to me she speaks:
Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,
A whisper, full of desire Having some business, do entreat her eyes
A gasp of sweet surrender To twinkle in their spheres till they return.
As passion fuels the fire What if her eyes were there, they in her head?
No words spoken between them The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars,
No promises to be kept As daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven
No lies being told tonight Would through the airy region stream so bright
No looking back - no regrets That birds would sing and think it were not night.
Longing to hold each other See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand!
Such precious little time O, that I were a glove upon that hand,
Both vowed to another That I might touch that cheek!

erotic verse

2006-04-01T15:00:00.000-08:00

Passion's Flames

by Jeffrey Carter
A touch, soft and tender.
A whisper, full of desire
A gasp of sweet surrender
As passion fuels the fire
No words spoken between them
No promises to be kept
No lies being told tonight
No looking back - no regrets
Longing to hold each other
Such precious little time
Both vowed to another
Being lonely their only crime
Tomorrow bringing sorrow
A brief moment of shame
With the memory of this one night
A release from passion's flames

Knocout Stances + Power development Kata

2006-03-29T14:42:00.000-08:00

SOLARIS

2006-03-14T15:19:00.000-08:00

CinemaShrink
by Dr. Jane Alexander Stewart

Solaris

CinemaShrink Says "If you've ever felt the daze of inconsolable despair after the loss of a loved one, go see Solaris. Solaris makes the invisible world of emotional pain visible. And while science fiction buffs may object, it may only be in the imaginary realm of outer space that a vision for resolving maddening grief and guilt can be explored."

Linearity be damned in the realm of a man's emotions after he loses his wife to suicide. Even, or perhaps especially when that man, Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) is a psychologist who depends on putting feelings in perspective and can't. Initially, Kelvin avoids thoughts and feelings about his wife's suicide, going about the business of his practice as usual. In particular, he avoids reflecting on his own responsibility in what happened. But the simplest of self-inflicted wounds, cutting himself with a knife while making a salad, happens just as a phone call to make a visit to a space station orbiting a planet called Solaris comes in.

Emotionally, Kelvin had left his wife, Rhyea (Natascha McElhone) before she died. Once he had felt great ecstatic joy with her but as she began to display erratic moods, he let her slip away. Her suicide provokes a longing to restore what was lost, a return to what he once felt. Now an agony of depression more kaleidoscope than any story can contain flips through his unconscious. Memory of the past merges with visions of a future lost that cannot be held to earthly standards, seeming to have a self-consciousness of its own that is impossible but, nevertheless, true.

Kelvin gets a call to solve a mysterious problem occurring at a space station rotating around a far star, Solaris, where strange things are happening. Presumably, since a psychologist can make sense of things in the inner realm of the psyche where events slip between time zones and ordinary boundaries with ease, he could do so in outer space. It's a small leap to the realization that Kelvin has never left his own psyche. After slicing his finger making a salad, he receives the 'mythic call', pulling him away from ordinary life to a quest for peace of mind. Kelvin's conflict between despair and denial is not easily resolved because it arouses an implacable guilt. When guilt is not a feeling but a fact, it cannot be erased. It can only be transformed.

Once upon a time, the Greeks imagined descents into the underground to look at transcendental issues of life and death. Today, we visualize going into outer space to examine projections of life after life. Solaris is reminiscent of the brave descent of Orpheus into the underground to rescue his beloved Euridyce. In effect, Kelvin pursues Rheya after death in a realm known as Solaris. There, like Orpheus and Euridyce in the underground, Kelvin and Rheya experience an impossible reunion. And Kelvin, like Orpheus, seems to be given a choice to accept her death as final or to take her back with him. This is not a choice of the upper world of everyday matters but of the inner, limitless and merged world of the psyche.

Being drawn into an exploration of life after death, Kelvin goes to Solaris

where overlapping realms of inner and outer space are the norm. Seeking respite from guilt as well as longing for an impossible restoration of life with his beloved, Orpheus attempted to bring Euridyce back to the upper world. Similarly, Kelvin attempts to regain happiness with Rheya. The death of love often feels like the death of a loved one. In Solaris, the two are overlapped. When the 'in love' feeling disappeared, Kelvin withdrew from Rheya as if a death had occurred. His rejection shattered her, turning an emotional event into a real one. Kelvin needed something more than therapy to make this right within himself; he needed a spiritual revelation.

Science fiction or emotional healing? That is the question and not all viewers want their science fiction mixed with psychology -- or vice versa. But Solaris is a rare gift to the viewer who wants a peek at the mysteries of the human psyche where time and space let go, suggesting possibilities far beyond logic.

In the beginning of Kelvin's journey, as he arrives at the Solaris space station, he encounters the contents of his own mind's eye as if they were as real as any ordinary reality. He is offered his dream come true. But the possibility of a full reunion with a Rheya who is alive but knows she's dead is a form too terrifying, too threatening to the very structure of his sanity. He leaps back into the defense of denial and rejects her. Quite fantastically, he traps his image of Rheya into a space station transport pod and ejects her as a confection of his mind into outer space.

Of course, Rheya comes back. She's already been coming back in his dreams and now she's returning in what are often considered lucid dreams. Lucid dreaming can feel make people seem more real as an image than they are in real life. They take on special qualities not actual but virtual and, as such, virtually wish-fulfilling.

The events of Solarisbegin to mirror the events on earth that Kelvin has not been able to face. For instance, his ejection of Rheya in the pod replicates his rejection of her on earth that led to their estrangement from one another in marriage and contributed to her death. She frightened him on earth after they married when she turned out not to be more than the stunning dreamgirl he married. Beneath the surface, Rheya was a woman with disturbing, disruptive emotions. The relationship died, their unborn child died and she died. Only after her death, Kelvin realizes that it was not his wife who fell from grace but his own idealism that betrayed him. Though it appears that he turns outward to Solaris, he actually turns inward for wisdom and healing.

At his wits end, Kelvin returns from Solaris, leaving Rheya to be an imaginary figure dwelling in another world. Deadened by irreparable loss, Kelvin is saved by a child reaching out to him symbolizing the miracle of healing that is the province of children. The mentality, vitality and enthusiasm of a child who faces a world unknown without even an slight understanding of courage provides a critical bridge for Kelvin to a connection with his wife not broken by time and place.

The connection with the child - finger to finger like the great painting of Michelangelo on the Sistine Chapel - reinstates innocence, not as a solution but as a reminder of continuity that exists beyond physical form. Kelvin searches for a time that lies beyond rational. If this is too fantastical, there is the cucumber. Kelvin cuts himself slicing a cucumber for a salad. A physical wound heals, leaving scant evidence of it ever happening. What accounts for such a disappearance? It hints at a human healing without limits and without edges, dimensions beyond science suggested by a visionary reality explored in Solaris. "Any death shall have no dominion", a quote from a Dylan Thomas' poem used in the film, holds the Solaris promise. The poem is printed in full below, well deserving of a reading to feel the truth of Solaris.

On Orpheus' ascent back to ordinary life with Euridyce following behind him, Orpheus succumbs to a feeling of elation -- or insecurity. He looks back just once to be sure Euridyce is there, violating the one rule that assures her loss forever. And that is where ancient mythology left off; a projection of death as a final ending, a separation of one from another beyond repair.

In Solaris Kelvin steps forward into a world of possibility where the human form is mutable. His route may be no less painful than being bound to an understanding solely of the objective mind. His destination may be as unknown, suggested only by a faraway galaxy imagined as Solaris where realities merge and continuity reigns.

And Death Shall Have No Dominion - Dylan Thomas

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone, They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

Dr. Jane Alexander Stewart is a clinical psychologist in private practice who provides professional supervision, consultations on creative works in progress and workshops on psychological issues. She leads seminar presentations on "Myth in Film; Myth in Your Life," writes analytic essays on film and lectures on mythic themes in film. She views film as if it were a modern storyteller reflecting modern mythic themes active in popular culture.

Great Drawing site!

2006-03-09T20:58:00.000-08:00

http://www.sibleyfineart.com/index.htm?tipsndx.htm

This is the key to negative drawing; the technique that you must learn - as you work, focus your full attention not on the actual lines you are drawing but on the spaces in between them. In common with watercolour painting, the only white available to the Graphite Artist is the white of the paper. To produce a white line you must therefore define that line by outlining it in a darker tone. The line you are drawing has no importance in itself. It is the space between the lines that is paramount.


Are these black lines on white or white on black? If these are black lines drawn on white paper then the drawn lines are positive marks.		White lines on black? They appear to be so only because the black defines their boundaries. The black is drawn solely to create the white. This is negative drawing.

I have two basic ways of working - both equally justifiable - "dash and rehash" and "slow 'n steady". The first often works well and it's the one I recommend for drawing grass - it contains an element of spontaneity and some surprising results can emerge. It's quick, it's immediate and requires only a little, if any, retouching (the "rehash" element). We'll come back to "Slow 'n Steady" later and then combine the two.

Imagine that there are only two marks that we can make: one upwards and one down. I'm going to use the upwards stroke to "draw" the stalks that spring up from the base of a clump of grass. The downward stroke is going to taper off and define the tops of the stalks in the clump below the one I'm drawing. The upward stroke draws a positive mark, the downstroke draws in negative.

Working quickly, more strokes have been added...

...the area is expanded...
(the box encloses the previous image)

...then I draw back down into the base to further define the white spaces.

cell immortalization products

2006-03-07T20:07:00.000-08:00

Cell immortalization products

Our allow you to look beyond the limits of primary cells. We now offer immortalized cell lines or you can immortalize your own with our telomerase cDNA tools. The possibilities are endless.
Human endometrium cells immortalized with hTERT

Gathering the stuff from my wish list!!

2006-03-07T16:05:00.000-08:00

How to Clone a Human (Version 1.1)

This procedure is based upon the Sheep cloning procedure. The mouse cloning procedure seems to have worked better, so I'll be changing this page to Version 1.2 when I get all that information together. The two procedures are similar, but not identical.

Rumor has it that I personally have cloned 7400 people, but when I got to Subject: 07401 I ran into trouble!

This page provided courtesy of:

The BioFact Report

Materials

Human Tissue: Pure human cells of one tissue type, from the individual who will be cloned.
Human Tissue Culture Media: Media in which these human cells will grow and divide.
Minimal Human Tissue Culture Media: Media in which cells will stop dividing, and enter a state of "quiescence" without dying.
Laboratory supplies: Incubator, Sterile Hood, petri dishes, microscopes, and tools capable of removing and implanting cellular organelles, such as the nucleus, from one cell to another.
Unfertilized human egg cells.
Human Egg Cell growth media: Media where fertilized eggs will grow and divide.

Procedures

Grow the human cells to be cloned until you have a good supply.
Transfer the cells to minimal media. [For now, The Sheep Cloning Paper is a good reference for exactly how long.] This should allow the cells to live, but they should stop dividing and enter quiescence. This is likely the step in which the cells lose their differentiation, and revert to a more totipotent state.
When the cultured cells are in the quiescent state, get an unfertilized human egg cell. Remove the nucleus from this egg cell. Try to minimize damage done to this cell and discard the nucleus.
Take one of the quiescent cells in it's entirely, and implant it inside the coat around the egg (known as the zona pellucida) next to the egg itself.
Electroshock the egg. [For now, The Sheep Cloning Paper is probably a good reference for how much and how long to electroshock.] The electroshock induces the fusion of the two cells, so you should be able to tell when you've electroshocked enough just by looking at the cells. The rebooting of the human genetic program is believed to be initiated by the replacement of donor cell protien signals by egg cell protien signals, but the electroshock might assist in moving those protien signals across the nuclear membrane as well. Electroporation is a common technique for moving DNA molecules through a cellular membrane.
Repeat the last three steps as necessary until you have enough clones. Expect a lot of them not to survive because of cellular damage and other mishaps. Allow the embryos to grow and divide a few times in Human Egg Cell growth media.
Implant the embryos in human mothers where they will can be carried to term, and born normally.

The content of this page is solely the responsibility of Arthur Kerschen.

You can also visit my Cloning and Genetic Engineering Page, or Yahoo's Human Cloning Links. I also maintain a Gulf War Syndrome Page.

Visitors since Feb 24, 2006

funny

2006-02-25T15:18:00.000-08:00

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Michael Moschen Juggling Lesson!!!

2006-02-25T11:07:00.000-08:00

Michael Moschen

January 17th, 2005

This past Saturday the world-famous juggler, mime, and performance artist Michael Moschen did a benefit performance at a local high school for our local After School Arts Program (ASAP). Michael lives in the next town north of us (Cornwall, Connecticut) so I see him from time to time in the hardware store.

I’ve never had the nerve to ask him about juggling (something I do from time to time) but then, he’s not really a juggler in the traditional sense, or, he’s gone so far beyond juggling that juggling three balls (which he did magnificently in this performance) is not the place I want to make contact about.

What he’s done (and he received a MacArthur Fellowship Genius Award for it) is to take the control of objects to a place far beyond what most people could imagine. He’s combined skill and imagination in a way that makes the result go far beyond “mere” juggling all the way to art, in the best sense of the word.

Between his “pieces” he’d come on stage and talk with the audience about juggling, dance, practice, kinesthesia, and more. He had us do a few participation exercises and one of them caught my attention because I play drums, and also because I think it’s a great kinesthetic exercise. Michael was trying to give us an idea of what jugglers (and drum set drummers) experience when they do different things with each hand (and foot).
Here’s the exercise:

Point your left hand out in front of you. Take your pointer finger and slowly and carefully draw a square in the air, counting as you go:

1-down 2-right 3-up 4-left

Practice this for a bit until you get it. Now let’s change the count, simply repeating the square 3 times for a total of 12, counting all the way up to 12:

1-down 2-right 3-up 4-left 5-down 6-right 7-up 8-left 9-down 10-right 11-up 12-left

Great, so we just did some math: turned 4 into 12 by multiplying it by 3.

Now things get interesting. First, shake your hands out (and your brain) and check out Michael juggling inside a triangle. He had multiple balls going all over the place in the triangle, making fantastic rhythms at the same time he was tapping his feet in another count. Okay, back to work for us…

With your right hand, with the same slow movement draw a triangle like so:

1-down 2-right 3-up and left (the hypotenuse)

Practice the triangle for a bit with your right hand, then change the count, repeating the triangle 4 times for a total of 12:

1-down 2-right 3-hypotenuse 4-down 5-right 6-hypotenuse 7-down 8-right 9-hypotenuse 10-down 11-right 12-hypotenuse

More math: we turned 3 into 12 by multiplying it by 4.

I swear if you can do these two in isolation you’ve achieved something but of course, Michael went further and took us where he wanted to go. The idea is to combine these with the count being constant, like this:

1: left hand down, right hand down
2: left hand left, right hand right
3: left hand up, right hand hypotenuse
4: left hand right, right hand down
5: left hand down, right hand right
6: left hand left, right hand hypotenuse

(at this point because the entire thing repeats I’ll just copy and paste and change the count)

7: left hand down, right hand down
8: left hand left, right hand right
9: left hand up, right hand hypotenuse
10: left hand right, right hand down
11: left hand down, right hand right
12: left hand left, right hand hypotenuse

As an audience, we struggled with it and I’m going to work on it from time to time for fun. Michael, not really showing off, did it so fast and crisply (he’s a mime so of course) that it took my breath away.

Let me know if you try this and what you think, it’s hard at first but as you do it more it gets easier. Have fun.

Michael Chabon

2006-02-23T14:23:00.000-08:00

Randomly Selected Reading Material

The Mysteries of Berkeley

Selected from Essay

Where passion is married to intelligence, you may find genius, neurosis, madness or rapture. None of these is really an unfamiliar presence in the tree-lined streets of Berkeley, California. For a city of one hundred thousand people—toss in another thirty thousand to account for the transient population of the University—we have more than our share of geniuses. The town, to be honest, is lousy with them. Folklorists, chefs, tattoo artists, yogis, guitarists, biologists of the housefly, GUI theorists, modern masters of algebra, Greil Marcus: we have geniuses in every field and discipline. As for neurosis, you can pretty much start at my house and work your way outward in any direction. Obsession, fixation, phobia, hypochondriasis, self-flagellation, compulsive confession of weakness and wrongdoing, repetition mania, chronic recrimination and second-guessing—from parents of toddlers, to fanatical collectors of wax recordings by Turkish klezmer bands of the 1920s, to non-eaters of anything white or which respires, to that august tribunal of collective neurosis, the Berkeley City Council: if neuroses were swimming pools one might, like Cheever's swimmer, steer a course from my house to the city limits and never touch dry land. Madness: a painful thing, which it does not do to romanticize. But it seems to me that among the many sad and homeless people who haunt Berkeley one finds an unusually high number of poets, sages, secret Napoleons and old-fashioned prophets of doom. The mentally ill citizens of Berkeley read, as they kill a winter afternoon in the warmth of the public library; they generate theories, which they will share; they sell their collected works out of a canvas tote bag. As for rapture, it is harder to observe firsthand, and is furthermore something that people, even people in Berkeley, do not necessarily care to discuss. But Berkeley is rich with good places to be rapt: at the eyepiece of an electron microscope or a cloud chamber, at a table at Chez Panisse, in a yoga room, under a pair of headphones at Amoeba Records, in Tilden Park, in the great disorderly labyrinth of Serendipity Books, on the dance floor at Ashkenaz while the ouds jangle and the pipes skirl, in a seat at the Pacific Film Archive watching Kwaidan (Japan, 1965). I'd be willing to bet that, pound for pound, Berkeley is the most enraptured city in America on a daily basis.

If that statement has the ring of boosterism, then permit me to clarify my feelings on the subject of my adopted home: this town drives me crazy. Nowhere else in America are so many people obliged to suffer more inconvenience for the common good. Nowhere else is the individual encumbered with a greater burden of shame and communal disapproval for having intruded, however innocently, on the sensibilities of another. Berkeley's streets, though a rational 19th century grid underlies them, are a speed-busting tangle of artificial dead ends, obligatory left turns, and deliberately tortuous obstacle-course barriers known as chicanes, put in place to protect children—who are never (God forbid!) sent to play outside. Municipal ordinances intended to protect the nobility of labor in Berkeley's attractive old industrial district steadfastly prevent new-economy businesses from taking over the aging brick-and-steel structures--leaving them empty cenotaphs to the vanished noble laborer of other days. People in the grocery store, meanwhile, have the full weight of Berkeley society behind them as they take it upon themselves to scold you for exposing your child to known allergens or imposing on her your own indisputably negative view of the universe. Passersby feel empowered—indeed, they feel duty-bound—to criticize your parking technique, your failure to sort your recycling into brown paper and white, your resource-hogging four-wheel-drive vehicle, your use of a pinch-collar to keep your dog from straining at the leash.

When Berkeley does not feel like some kind of vast exercise in collective dystopia—a kind of left-wing Plymouth Plantation in which a man may be pilloried for over-illuminating his house at Christmastime—then paradoxically it often feels like a place filled with people incapable of feeling or acting in concert with each other. It is a city of potterers and amateur divines, of people so intent on cultivating their own gardens, researching their own theories, following their own bliss, marching to their own drummers and dancing to the tinkling of their own finger-cymbals that they take no notice of one another at all, or would certainly prefer not to, if it could somehow be arranged. People keep chickens, in Berkeley—there are two very loud henhouses within a block of my house. There may be no act more essentially Berkeley than deciding that the rich flavor and healthfulness, the simple, forgotten pleasure, of fresh eggs in the morning outweighs the unreasonable attachment of one's immediate neighbors to getting a good night's sleep.

The result, perhaps inevitable, of this paralysis of good intentions, this ongoing, floating opera of public disapproval and the coming into conflict of competing visions of the path to personal bliss, is a populace inclined to kvetching and to the wearing of the default Berkeley facial expression, the suspicious frown. Bliss is, after all, so near at hand; the perfect egg, a good night's sleep, reconciliation with one's mother or the Palestinians, a theory to account for the surprising lack of dark matter in the universe, a radio station that does not merely parrot the lies of government flaks and corporate media outlets—such things can often feel so eminently possible here, given the intelligence and the passion of the citizens. And yet they continue to elude us. Who is responsible? Is it us? Is it you? What are you doing, there, anyway? Don't you know the recycling truck won't take aluminum foil?

So much for boosterism. And yet I declare, unreservedly and with all my heart, that I love Berkeley, California. I can't imagine living happily anywhere else. And all of the things that drive me crazy are the very things that make this town worth knowing, worth putting up with, worth loving and working to preserve.

Part of the charm of Berkeley lies in her setting: the shimmer and eucalyptus sting of the hills on a dusty summer afternoon, hills whose rocky bones jut through the skin of Berkeley in odd outcroppings like Indian Rock; the morning fogs of the flatlands along the bay, with their smell of mud and their magically vanishing glimpses of Alcatraz and towers of San Francisco. But I have lived in places, from the Puget Sound to the Hudson Valley, from Laguna Beach to Key West, that rivaled if not surpassed Berkeley in spectacular weather, thrilling vistas, and variety of terrain. Not, perhaps, all at the same time, but to greater extremes of beauty. And yet a city with a beautiful site is about as reliably interesting as a person with a beautiful face, and just about as likely to have been spoiled.

Laid atop her remarkable setting between hills and bay, less consistently fine but at its best no less charming, is the built environment of Berkeley. The town, though laid out in the 1880s, boomed in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake and fire, when it was settled by refugees from San Francisco, fleeing hither under the mistaken impression that the jutting rock ribs of Berkeley's hills would be proof against temblors. The town grew explosively, to its borders, in the twenty years that followed, and as a result the architecture, especially that of her houses, has a pleasing uniformity of variation, with styles ranging from Prairie school to Craftsman to the various flavors of Spanish. There is even a local style—I live in an exemplar, built in 1907—called the Berkeley Brown Shingle, which combines elements of the Craftsman and the Stick: overhanging eaves, square-pillared porches, elaborate mullions and built-in cabinetry, the whole enveloped in a rustic skin of the eponymous cedar or redwood shakes. It's a sober style, at least in conception, boxy and grave and appropriately professorial, and yet after decades of benign neglect and dreaminess and the ministrations of an unstintingly benevolent climate, the houses tend to be wildly overgrown with rose vines, wisteria, jasmine, trumpetvine, and outfitted top and sides with unlikely modifications: Zen dormers, orgone porches, Lemurian observatories. Certain of her streets offer endless instruction in the rich and surprising expressiveness of brown, houses the color of brown beer, of brown bread, of tobacco, a dog's eyes, a fallen leaf, an old upright piano. The harmoniousness of Berkeley's streets and houses is far from perfect—there are tons of hideous concrete-and-aluminum dingbat monstrosities, in particular around the university, and downtown is a hodgepodge of doughty old California commercial structures, used car lots and a few truly lamentable late-sixties office towers. But even the most down-at-heel and ill-used streets offer a promise of green shade in the summertime, and many neighborhoods are densely populated by trees, grand old plantations of maple and oak, long rows of ornamental plums that blossom in the winter, persimmon trees, Meyer lemon trees, palm trees and fig trees, monkey puzzles and Norfolk island pines, redwoods and Monterey pines nearly a hundred years old. One of the remarkable things about Berkeley is that, in spite of its decided inferiority to its great neighbor across the Bay in clout, preeminence, population, notoriety and fame, it has never seemed to dwell in San Francisco's shadow (unlike poor old Oakland down the road). I believe that this may be in part due to the fact that when it comes to trees—a necessary component, in my view, of the greatness of a city—the Colossus of the West can't hold a candle to Berkeley.

But houses and tree plantations, like hills and foggy mudflats, are no reliable guarantors of the excellence of a place to live. That elusive quality always lies, ultimately, in the citizenry; in one's neighbors. And it is ultimately the people of Berkeley—those same irritating frowners and scolders, those very neurotic geniuses and rapt madwomen—who make this place, who ring an endless series of variations on its great theme of personal and communal exploration, and who, above all, fight tooth and nail to hang on to what they love about it.

If there were a hundred good small cities in America fifty years ago—towns built to suit the people who settled them, according to their tastes, aspirations, and the sovereign peculiarities of landscape and weather—today there are no more than twenty-five. In ten years, as the inexorable lattice of sprawl replicates and proliferates, and the downtowns become malls, and the malls downtowns, and the rich syllabary of mercantile America is reduced to a simple alphabet composed of a Blockbuster, a Target, a Starbucks, a Barnes and Noble, a Gap, and a T.G.I.Fridays, and California herself is drowned in a sea of red-tile roofs from San Ysidro to Yreka, there may be fewer than ten. When the end finally comes, I believe that Berkeley will be the last town in America with the ingrained perversity to hold onto its idea of itself. This is a town—on the edge of the country, on the edge of the twenty-first century, on the edge of subducting plates and racial divides and an immense sea of corporate homogeneity—where you can still sign for your groceries at the store around the corner. A Berkeley grocer is a man who preserves such an archaic custom not in spite of the fact but exactly because it's an outmoded and cumbersome way of running a business.

It's in the quirky, small businesses of Berkeley, in fact, places like the old soda fountain in the Elmwood Pharmacy, Alkebulalian Books (specializing in books on the African diaspora), d.b.a Brown Records (just on the Oakland side of the city limits), or the Sound Well (used and vintage hi-fi and stereo equipment) that the tensions of Berkeley living, the competing claims on the heart of a Berkeleyite to follow one's bliss but at the same time to reach a hand out into the void and feel another set of fingers taking hold of one's own, are resolved. These are not merely retail establishments, poor cousins of Rite-Aid, Borders, Sam Goody's and Circuit City. They are shrines to the classic Berkeley impulse to latch on to something tiny but crucial—the warm sound provided by vacuum tube amplifiers, the mid-sixties sides of Ornette Coleman, the African roots of Jesus Christ and his teachings, or a perfectly constructed Black-and-White (with an extra three inches in the steel blender cup)—and pursue it with a mounting sense of self-discovery. And yet they are also, accidentally but fundamentally, gathering places; they all have counters at which the lonely amateur of Coleman or Marantz, the student of Martin Bernal can pull up a stool and find him- or herself in the company of sympathetic minds. Berkeley is richer than any place I've ever lived in these non-alcoholic taverns of the soul, these unofficial clubhouses of the oddball and outré. And it seems as if every year another one pops up, at the bottom of Solano Avenue, in a faded brick stretch of San Pablo Avenue, unfranchisable, inexplicable except as a doorway to fulfillment and fellowship. A business that would never thrive anywhere else, patronized by people who would never thrive anywhere else, in a city that lives and dies on the passion and intelligence, the madness and rapture, of its citizens.

Good Piaget Theory stuff

2006-02-23T10:17:00.000-08:00

Theory

Jean Piaget began his career as a biologist -- specifically, a malacologist! But his interest in science and the history of science soon overtook his interest in snails and clams. As he delved deeper into the thought-processes of doing science, he became interested in the nature of thought itself, especially in the development of thinking. Finding relatively little work done in the area, he had the opportunity to give it a label. He called it genetic epistemology, meaning the study of the development of knowledge.

He noticed, for example, that even infants have certain skills in regard to objects in their environment. These skills were certainly simple ones, sensori-motor skills, but they directed the way in which the infant explored his or her environment and so how they gained more knowledge of the world and more sophisticated exploratory skills. These skills he called schemas.

For example, an infant knows how to grab his favorite rattle and thrust it into his mouth. He’s got that schema down pat. When he comes across some other object -- say daddy’s expensive watch, he easily learns to transfer his “grab and thrust” schema to the new object. This Piaget called assimilation, specifically assimilating a new object into an old schema.

When our infant comes across another object again -- say a beach ball -- he will try his old schema of grab and thrust. This of course works poorly with the new object. So the schema will adapt to the new object: Perhaps, in this example, “squeeze and drool” would be an appropriate title for the new schema. This is called accommodation, specifically accomodating an old schema to a new object.

Assimilation and accommodation are the two sides of adaptation, Piaget’s term for what most of us would call learning. Piaget saw adaptation, however, as a good deal broader than the kind of learning that Behaviorists in the US were talking about. He saw it as a fundamentally biological process. Even one’s grip has to accommodate to a stone, while clay is assimilated into our grip. All living things adapt, even without a nervous system or brain.

Assimilation and accommodation work like pendulum swings at advancing our understanding of the world and our competency in it. According to Piaget, they are directed at a balance between the structure of the mind and the environment, at a certain congruency between the two, that would indicate that you have a good (or at least good-enough) model of the universe. This ideal state he calls equilibrium.

As he continued his investigation of children, he noted that there were periods where assimilation dominated, periods where accommodation dominated, and periods of relative equilibrium, and that these periods were similar among all the children he looked at in their nature and their timing. And so he developed the idea of stages of cognitive development. These constitute a lasting contribution to psychology.

The sensorimotor stage

The first stage, to which we have already referred, is the sensorimotor stage. It lasts from birth to about two years old. As the name implies, the infant uses senses and motor abilities to understand the world, beginning with reflexes and ending with complex combinations of sensorimotor skills.

Between one and four months, the child works on primary circular reactions -- just an action of his own which serves as a stimulus to which it responds with the same action, and around and around we go. For example, the baby may suck her thumb. That feels good, so she sucks some more... Or she may blow a bubble. That’s interesting so I’ll do it again....

Between four and 12 months, the infant turns to secondary circular reactions, which involve an act that extends out to the environment: She may squeeze a rubber duckie. It goes “quack.” That’s great, so do it again, and again, and again. She is learning “procedures that make interesting things last.”

At this point, other things begin to show up as well. For example, babies become ticklish, although they must be aware that someone else is tickling them or it won’t work. And they begin to develop object permanence. This is the ability to recognize that, just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it’s gone! Younger infants seem to function by an “out of sight, out of mind” schema. Older infants remember, and may even try to find things they can no longer see.

Between 12 months and 24 months, the child works on tertiary circular reactions. They consist of the same “making interesting things last” cycle, except with constant variation. I hit the drum with the stick -- rat-tat-tat-tat. I hit the block with the stick -- thump-thump. I hit the table with the stick -- clunk-clunk. I hit daddy with the stick -- ouch-ouch. This kind of active experimentation is best seen during feeding time, when discovering new and interesting ways of throwing your spoon, dish, and food.

Around one and a half, the child is clearly developing mental representation, that is, the ability to hold an image in their mind for a period beyond the immediate experience. For example, they can engage in deferred imitation, such as throwing a tantrum after seeing one an hour ago. They can use mental combinations to solve simple problems, such as putting down a toy in order to open a door. And they get good at pretending. Instead of using dollies essentially as something to sit at, suck on, or throw, now the child will sing to it, tuck it into bed, and so on.

Preoperational stage

The preoperational stage lasts from about two to about seven years old. Now that the child has mental representations and is able to pretend, it is a short step to the use of symbols.

A symbol is a thing that represents something else. A drawing, a written word, or a spoken word comes to be understood as representing a real dog. The use of language is, of course, the prime example, but another good example of symbol use is creative play, wherein checkers are cookies, papers are dishes, a box is the table, and so on. By manipulating symbols, we are essentially thinking, in a way the infant could not: in the absence of the actual objects involved!

Along with symbolization, there is a clear understanding of past and future. for example, if a child is crying for its mother, and you say “Mommy will be home soon,” it will now tend to stop crying. Or if you ask him, “Remember when you fell down?” he will respond by making a sad face.

On the other hand, the child is quite egocentric during this stage, that is, he sees things pretty much from one point of view: his own! She may hold up a picture so only she can see it and expect you to see it too. Or she may explain that grass grows so she won’t get hurt when she falls.

Piaget did a study to investigate this phenomenon called the mountains study. He would put children in front of a simple plaster mountain range and seat himself to the side, then ask them to pick from four pictures the view that he, Piaget, would see. Younger children would pick the picture of the view they themselves saw; older kids picked correctly.

Similarly, younger children center on one aspect of any problem or communication at a time. for example, they may not understand you when you tell them “Your father is my husband.” Or they may say things like “I don’t live in the USA; I live in Pennsylvania!” Or, if you show them five black and three white marbles and ask them “Are there more marbles or more black marbles?” they will respond “More black ones!”

Perhaps the most famous example of the preoperational child’s centrism is what Piaget refers to as their inability to conserve liquid volume. If I give a three year old some chocolate milk in a tall skinny glass, and I give myself a whole lot more in a short fat glass, she will tend to focus on only one of the dimensions of the glass. Since the milk in the tall skinny glass goes up much higher, she is likely to assume that there is more milk in that one than in the short fat glass, even though there is far more in the latter. It is the development of the child's ability to decenter that marks him as havingmoved to the next stage.

Concrete operations stage

The concrete operations stage lasts from about seven to about 11. The word operations refers to logical operations or principles we use when solving problems. In this stage, the child not only uses symbols representationally, but can manipulate those symbols logically. Quite an accomplishment! But, at this point, they must still perform these operations within the context of concrete situations.

The stage begins with progressive decentering. By six or seven, most children develop the ability to conserve number, length, and liquid volume. Conservation refers to the idea that a quantity remains the same despite changes in appearance. If you show a child four marbles in a row, then spread them out, the preoperational child will focus on the spread, and tend to believe that there are now more marbles than before.

Or if you have two five inch sticks laid parallel to each other, then move one of them a little, she may believe that the moved stick is now longer than the other.

The concrete operations child, on the other hand, will know that there are still four marbles, and that the stick doesn’t change length even though it now extends beyond the other. And he will know that you have to look at more than just the height of the milk in the glass: If you pour the mild from the short, fat glass into the tall, skinny glass, he will tell you that there is the same amount of milk as before, despite the dramatic increase in mild-level!

By seven or eight years old, children develop conservation of substance: If I take a ball of clay and roll it into a long thin rod, or even split it into ten little pieces, the child knows that there is still the same amount of clay. And he will know that, if you rolled it all back into a single ball, it would look quite the same as it did -- a feature known as reversibility.

By nine or ten, the last of the conservation tests is mastered: conservation of area. If you take four one-inch square pieces of felt, and lay them on a six-by-six cloth together in the center, the child who conserves will know that they take up just as much room as the same squares spread out in the corners, or, for that matter, anywhere at all.

If all this sounds too easy to be such a big deal, test your friends on conservation of mass: Which is heavier: a million tons of lead, or a million tons of feathers?

In addition, a child learns classification and seriation during this stage. Classification refers back to the question of whether there are more marbles or more black marbles? Now the child begins to get the idea that one set can include another. Seriation is putting things in order. The younger child may start putting things in order by, say size, but will quickly lose track. Now the child has no problem with such a task. Since arithmetic is essentially nothing more than classification and seriation, the child is now ready for some formal education!

Formal operations stage

But the concrete operations child has a hard time applying his new-found logical abilities to non-concrete -- i.e. abstract -- events. If mom says to junior “You shouldn’t make fun of that boy’s nose. How would you feel if someone did that to you?” he is likely to respond “I don’t have a big nose!” Even this simple lesson may well be too abstract, too hypothetical, for his kind of thinking.

Don’t judge the concrete operations child too harshly, though. Even adults are often taken-aback when we present them with something hypothetical: “If Edith has a lighter complexion than Susan, and Edith is darker than Lily, who is the darkest?” Most people need a moment or two.

From around 12 on, we enter the formal operations stage. Here we become increasingly competent at adult-style thinking. This involves using logical operations, and using them in the abstract, rather than the concrete. We often call this hypothetical thinking.

Here’s a simple example of a task that a concrete operations child couldn’t do, but which a formal operations teenager or adult could -- with a little time and effort. Consider this rule about a set of cards that have letters on one side and numbers on the other: “If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other side.” Take a look at the cards below and tell me, which cards do I need to turn over to tell if this rule is actually true? You’ll find the answer at the end of this chapter.

It is the formal operations stage that allows one to investigate a problem in a careful and systematic fashion. Ask a 16 year old to tell you the rules for making pendulums swing quickly or slowly, and he may proceed like this:

A long string with a light weight -- let’s see how fast that swings.
A long string with a heavy weight -- let’s try that.
Now, a short string with a light weight.
And finally, a short string with a heavy weight.

His experiment -- and it is an experiment -- would tell him that a short string leads to a fast swing, and a long string to a slow swing, and that the weight of the pendulum means nothing at all!

The teenager has learned to group possibilities in four different ways:

By conjunction: “Both A and B make a difference” (e.g. both the string’s length and the pendulum’s weight).
By disjunction: “It’s either this or that” (e.g. it’s either the length or the weight).
By implication: “If it’s this, then that will happen” (the formation of a hypothesis).
By incompatibility: “When this happens, that doesn’t” (the elimination of a hypothesis).

On top of that, he can operate on the operations -- a higher level of grouping. If you have a proposition, such as “it could be the string or the weight,” you can do four things with it:

Identity: Leave it alone. “It could be the string or the weight.”
Negation: Negate the components and replace or’s with and’s (and vice versa). “It might not be the string and not the weight, either.”
Reciprocity: Negate the components but keep the and’s and or’s as they are. “Either it is not the weight or it is not the string.”
Correlativity: Keep the components as they are, but replace or’s with and’s, etc. “It’s the weight and the string.”

Someone who has developed his or her formal operations will understand that the correlate of a reciprocal is a negation, that a reciprocal of a negation is a correlate, that the negation of a correlate is a reciprocal, and that the negation of a reciprocal of a correlate is an identity (phew!!!).

Maybe it has already occured to you: It doesn’t seem that the formal operations stage is something everyone actually gets to. Even those of us who do don’t operate in it at all times. Even some cultures, it seems, don’t develop it or value it like ours does. Abstract reasoning is simply not universal.

[Answer to the card question: The E and the 7. The E must have an even number on the back -- that much is obvious. the 7 is odd, so it cannot have a vowel on the other side -- that would be against the rule! But the rule says nothing about what has to be on the back of a consonant such as the K, nor does it say that the 4 musthave a vowel on the other side!]

References

It is hard to say, of Piaget's many works, which are most significant or interesting, but here goes:

The Moral Judgement of the Child (1932 -- one of the first five books), The Psychology of Intelligence (1947, in English 1950), The Construction of Reality in the Child (1937, in English 1954, based on observation of his own children), The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence (with Inhelder, 1958), The Psychology of the Child (with Inhelder, 1966, in English 1969), Insights and Illusions of Philosophy (1965, 1971 in English)

2006-02-23T09:57:00.000-08:00

The lost playgrounds...

When I was a young child, I remember going to playgrounds with my parents. I recall spending happy times swinging from monkey bars, rushing to the back of the queue to have yet another go on the big slide and jostling for position to be next onto the seesaw.

I also have less happy memories of the occasional bump on the forehead or graze on the knee from the inevitable trips and falls. Those childhood memories came back to me last summer when I travelled by coach through the town of Huntingdon. As I travelled through the town I saw several lovely parks with playgrounds attached. The English always seemed to me to value the importance of such public amenities.

Playgrounds gone

I was reminiscing about the trip recently when a number of thoughts struck me. Where have all the Dublin playgrounds gone? Have we stopped providing playgrounds for our children? I also began to contemplate with regret that the playground has possibly become another casualty to the increasing litigiousness of Irish society.

As the population of Dublin expands there is enormous pressure to build more accommodation for its burgeoning population. Housing densities will have to increase and the amount of green areas will correspondingly have to decrease. So where will the little Dubliners of the future go out to play? If public space is going to be reduced surely playgrounds for children will become more necessary than ever.

Child’s play is a very serious subject. It is an essential element in the normal development of the child. Jean Piaget the Swiss psychologist described a series of milestones in the evolution of the child’s pattern of play. In this influential theory he stated that these stages in play correspond to the successive stages in the intellectual development of the child. He called the first stage the sensorimotor stage, which extends from birth to approximately two years old.

Very young children are focussed on gaining mastery of their own bodies and the objects that surround them. Their play is characterised by repeated patterns of movement or sound such as banging, sucking, shaking and babbling. As the child learns more about the objects in their environment they begin to observe the effects of play on their environment and their relationship with that environment becomes increasingly systematic.

The stages of growth

Piaget described a further stage, which he called the preoperational stage. This stage extends from two to seven years. Toddlers move from the egocentric focus of infancy to an awareness that events are caused by influences outside themselves. Toddlers begin to realise that they are no longer the centre of the universe. They begin to master symbolic functions such as the association between words and objects. Their play is characterised by make-belief and the use of objects for purposes other than their intended function. I have fond recollection of this phase when pacifist friends of mine gave up on excluding toys such as guns and soldiers from their son when they observed him eating his toast in a strange manner. They knew they were fighting a losing battle when the piece of toast that remained in the child’s hand had assumed the shape of a handgun. A clear example of the use of an object outside of its intended function.

'Very young children are focussed on gaining mastery of their own bodies and the objects that surround them. Their play is characterised by repeated patterns of movement or sound such as banging, sucking, shaking and babbling'.

Between the ages of four and seven years, children become interested in games characterised by rules and structure. Social interaction with other children assumes greater importance. Between the ages of seven to eleven years children enter the stage that Piaget described as the concrete operational stage. They become increasingly focussed on the social aspect of play and the concept of group acceptance begins to take root. The final stage, which Piaget called the formal operations stage is characterised by engagement in competitive games and the gradual emergence of the mature ability to reason.

Well-rounded

So what have the theories of Jean Piaget to do with swinging from a set of monkey bars? Piaget clearly establishes that play is crucial to the normal development of the child. If a child were deprived of opportunities to play the development of that child as a well-rounded human being would be seriously stunted. The physical structure of the playground allows the child to engage in make-believe in the fresh air of the great outdoors. Not only do they have the opportunity to stretch their imaginations but they also have the chance to stretch their muscles and establish some sense of their physical limits.

I sometimes worry that Irish children today are exposed to fewer physical challenges than previous generations. If a child is not interested in field sports there are very few safe opportunities for that child to play in the fresh air. Playing on the street has so many inherent dangers that it is hardly necessary for me to list them.

Playgrounds are unisex environments where boys and girls share a common space for play. This characteristic sets playgrounds apart from other outdoor places of recreation. For example, field sports such as soccer, hockey and rugby are generally run along strict gender lines. Women may be developing a keener interest in team sports and many women now play such sports however the opposite sexes do not compete as mixed gender teams. Perhaps we should recognise and value the unique opportunity that the playground provides for asexual physical encounter between the sexes.

Computer games

Today’s child is far more likely to play indoors in comparison with the children of yesteryear. Play is more likely to take the form of interactive videogames with the television providing the role of surrogate parent or childminder. I have a disturbing image in my mind of a generation of unfit, sallow skinned, overweight children with remarkable hand eye co-ordination from all of those hours spent zapping virtual warriors. This hardly fits with the classical ideal of healthy mind in a healthy body.

At the outset I alluded to the possibility that we have fewer playgrounds today because of increased litigation for personal injuries. Perhaps local authorities are not prepared to build playgrounds because of fears of being sued. In making these comments I don’t wish to apportion undue blame to local authorities. I also believe that private developers have responsibilities in that regard. The good of society demands that playgrounds be constructed in accordance with best health and safety guidelines. It is a depressing thought that fear of being sued could be the excuse for not building playgrounds rather than the higher ideal of the public good. I look forward to the day when I see a public figure taking a photo opportunity by cutting the tape at the official launch of a new children’s playground. This would be a very positive initiative in relation to the health of our children.

My heart tells me that playgrounds are very special spaces for parents and their children. I recall the playgrounds of my childhood and I also fondly remember latter-day visits to playgrounds as a parent. Society is the poorer because of their scarcity.

In conclusion, I would like to quote from Oscar Wilde and substitute the word playground for the word school, which he used in his original commentary: "a playground should be the most beautiful place in every town and village - so beautiful that the punishment for undutiful children should be that they should be debarred from going to the playground the following day".

Tiresias

2005-12-22T19:59:00.000-08:00

Tiresias (teye-ree-see-uhs)

In classical mythology, the blind prophet who revealed the truth of the crimes of Oedipus. According to the Roman poet Ovid, Tiresias spent part of his life as a man and part of it as a woman, so he knew the act of love from both points of view. When asked by Jupiter and Juno who enjoyed sex more, he answered that women did. This answer so enraged Juno that she blinded Tiresias.

in Greek mythology, a blind soothsayer who appears in many legends. According to one myth, when he saw Athena bathing she blinded him, but by way of compensation granted him prophetic powers. Another story is that Hera blinded him for disparaging her sex when he claimed that women enjoyed love more than men; Zeus then recompensed him with long life and the power of prophecy.

Epic Nooner Share

2005-12-22T19:02:00.000-08:00

A sex-addict from NYC chaired today and really got me thinking.
I talked about what my Buddhism taught me about compulsion. How the main goal of Buddhism was to put the 'fire' out.
Dukkha Satya truth of pain
Samudaya Satya truth of causations
Nirodha Satya truth of cessiation
and The Arya Marga truth of the 8-fold path
How to 'know' you are enlightened is the main topic of the 3rd noble truth..Nirodha Satya. Nirvana has three main charactoristicts:

Adosa = no attachment
Adosa = no aversion
Amoha = no doubt

Translated into the language of modern behaviorism your reactions are beyond:
a) the avoidence of pain
b)the persuit of pleasure
c)the fear of change

The Monkey on your back has a whip AND a carrot, so you need to stop reacting to the carrot then the whip and then the chattering monkey.

You are either running away from your desires or towards them or vasilating inbetween somewhere. This applies to sex as well as drink/drugs which has always led me to suspect that Buddha might have been an alcoholic sex fiend, after all he started out as a prince sequestered in a pleasure palace!

Now later in my recovery I began to download all sorts of three-way porn compulsively, specifically male-male-female threesomes. This was probably just an exterior manifestation of an inner shift. Taz needed more behavoural latitude i.e. the need to behave with more receptivily, with more compassion, with more fluidity , more intuitivly, with more sensitivity etc.

Fantasizing a female partner to help me feel secure as I explored my receptive internal areas.

Exterior addictions and compulsions where suspicious reflections of some fundamental internal power shifts.

Desprately Seeking TAZ
One half trying to find and integrate with the other, using the world as a mirror to gain glimpses itself finally united.