This morning Lise and I ran down to the Schooner Waterfowl Production Area in Lenaweee County to find a whooping crane. Not quite sure what a waterfowl production area is but I imagine it involves some happy waterfowl. Apparently the crane has been around the area for a couple weeks but nobody put it on the listserves. We drove an hour and a half, found the parking area, hopped out of the car, and there it was. Whoopers nest mostly in Alberta with a small whooping crane breeding ground in Wisconsin. Either way, this guy was off course but gave us another species for the year.
Whooping crane with sandhill cranes.
I just finished reading The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. They do a great job of taking some fairly complex topics and boiling them down such that we mere mortals can understand them. Life, the universe, and everything, without equations. I find the weak and strong anthropic principles particularly interesting as a way of explaining the universe.
The weak and strong anthropic principles go something like this; the laws defining the universe fit into a model that produces intelligent life because intelligent life is observing the universe. Only in a universe capable of producing intelligent beings will there be intelligent beings that can observe the nuances that make a universe capable of producing intelligent beings. If there wasn’t intelligent life to observe it, the universe wouldn’t be what it is and couldn’t be observed by intelligent life.
While the weak and strong anthropic principles can explain that the laws guiding the universe are what they are because they produced intelligent life is all well and good, how does one account for the huge lack of intelligence in FOX News, Al Qaida, the Flat Earth Society, the Tea Party, and Jersey Shore. Lately the Republican Party seems hell bent on getting into that club too.
To account for this lack of intelligence in a universe that produced intelligent life I’d like to propose the misanthropic principle. For a universe to produce intelligent life it must also produce a certain level of idiocy as a negative feedback to temper unchecked gains in intelligence and progress. That prevents the intelligence of the universe from getting so dense that it warps space time and creates an anomaly that sucks us all down into it, thus ending the universe that supports intelligent life. Might need a little work to come up with the math behind it but I’m pretty sure it goes something like that.
Ed's and Lise's Biggish Years 