Tertiary Tributary

What inspires me today...

Coincidence vs Chaos 

A few things of note from the past week: 

1. They (scientists) recently found 50-million-year-old bugs encased in amber in the Indian rainforest. 
2. Friday October 22nd was the actor Jeff Goldblum's birthday.  This year he turned a whopping 58 years of age. 

These two seemingly unrelated facts may seem uninteresting and useless... to the untrained eye.

Let me teach you a lesson, dear readers, in critical thinking about things that really don't matter or make much sense.

Not only were they (scientists) able to extract perfectly preserved 50-million-year-old bugs using toluene and chloroform due to the unique soft nature of the Indian amber, dating the rainforest back before the Miocene as originally speculated, placing it as over 60-million-years-old, and Jeff Goldblum has now grown one year closer to the obscurity we have all been anticipating since his small-screen debut on Law and Order: Criminal Intent...

BUT 

these two strands of information are actually more closely circulating then we could ever imagine.

I saw these at first as completely coincidental, but looking closely at the teachings of chaos theory, nothing is random.  It is all deterministic, yet completely unpredictable.

True fans may have predicted by now the juncture where chaos theory has brought Jeff Goldblum to insects encased in amber....

 boom...boom...

...a 1990 novel written by Michael Chriton adopted in 1993 into the Steven Spielberg motion picture "Jurassic Park." 

We all know what this means.

A wealthy billionaire and dinosaur enthusiast will clone the dinosaur DNA found within a mosquito from the amberand create an island theme park on an island near Cosa Rica, with the main attraction being, you guessed it, dinosaurs (all female, of course) where a couple anthropologists, their bratty kids, and a researcher will get stuck while the gates are opened as a bumbling research tech tries to steal embryos for [insert generic rival corporation name] and make a couple bucks. 
They will survive, barely, just in time to make a sequel and eventually a trilogy. 

Let's hope this doesn't happen again (and again, and again, and again).

 

I'm not saying that I'm not curious to see what it would be like to ride around on a triceratops, obviously that is an ideal situation.  I'm just stating that although it would seem to be a hilarious and thoughtful gesture to create dinosaurs for Jeff's birthday, it would be ill-conceived and a little insensitive. We all (no one) saw Jurassic Park III.  Goldblum doesn't make an appearance. 

A world with dinosaurs but without Jeff Goldblum is a world I want no part it.

But, as the ever insightful Dr. Ian Malcolm says, "I'm simply saying that life, uh... finds a way."

Land of Milk and...

What inspires me today...

Bee attitudes. 

Remember a few years back when you couldn't turn on the news without hearing about the mysterious disappearance of the honey bee, but didn't hear another word about it in the media because someone was assassinated/a war started/some oil spilled in Mexico?

I will play the part of news provider by filling all of you out there, chomping at the bit, in to know what happened in the honey bee saga.

The name of the problem:
Colony Collapse Disorder.

There are many theories and factors thought to cause CCD, but clearly my favorite (quickly proven false) theory would have to be: 

Cell phone radiation interfering with their homing techniques.

"Why should I care about half the honey bee population dying suddenly and in mass quantities?"  
You may, but probably won't, ask.
How does $15 million in crop value sound? 
You have no idea what that means or why that is the case.
It's not good.  And pollination.

The factors thought by most to be causing this phenomenon: a spreading harmful pathogen and pesticides.  These cause an immune-deficiency disorder.

Bee AIDS is real.

Think about that the next time you're sucking honey straight from the bear.