1. Essential roles of synaptic transmission in brain functions
  2. Understanding molecular basis of synaptic function
  3. New properties of synapses revealed by imaging approaches
    1. Synapses are continuously built and eliminated during development
    2. Postsynaptic scaffolding molecules are densely packed within the PSD but dynamic
    3. Astrocytic contacts promote synaptogenesis
    4. Diversity in synapse formation
  4. Application of synapse imaging in studies of mental disorders
  5. Future directions in the research of synapse cell biology
    1. Building a quantitative model of synaptic molecular assembly
    2. Behavior of synapses in vivo

I Essential roles of synaptic transmission in brain functions

Brain functions, which are dependent on mutual communication of a tremendous number of neuronal cells, regulate the behavior of animals and humans. The main structure specifically differentiated for information exchange between neurons is called "synapse". Long-term maintenance of synaptic properties underlies stability and reproducibility of behavior in responses to external stimuli. In turn, alterations of synaptic properties are thought to be the basis of behavioral change in the course of animal development and also after learning. Therefore, synapses should be stabilized for a long term to realize fidelity of various animal behaviors, but also should be altered rapidly when animals adapt to a new environment. Molecular basis of this dichotomy, which is unique to synapses, is the main interest of our laboratory.

II Understanding molecular basis of synaptic function

Imaging is very powerful in characterizing synaptic structure and function. Synapse has been studied by using biochemical techniques, which isolate "synaptosomes" from the brain and identify individual constituents, or by electrophysiological techniques, which detect electrical signals derived from ionic currents through activated ion channels and receptors in living neurons. These two techniques have been extensively applied to the study of synapses and successful in characterizing population properties of synapses, but neither of them can provide information derived from individual synapses. An obvious advantage of optical methods is that they can detect and analyze signals from single synapses repeatedly. Therefore application of advanced optical techniques, including high sensitivity imaging of fluorescent proteins, confocal laser microscopy and multiphoton excitation of chromophores, is essential in the modern synapse research.

III New properties of synapses revealed by imaging approaches

What are the novel properties of synapses revealed by imaging approaches? Here I will summarize several new findings from our laboratory.

1. Synapses are continuously built and eliminated during development

A cultured hippocampal neuron expressing PSD-95 tagged with GFP. The image shows intracellular distribution of PSD-95 (Green) and neuronal morphology detected by DiI (Red). Images b-d (magnified images of the white box area in a) show spines containing PSD-95 clusters (arrows).

It has been widely accepted that synapses are stabilized after their initial establishment and show little change thereafter. Synapse formation and elimination are thought to take place in two distinct phases of neural network development. Synapse formation is the earlier event and generates redundant connections between neurons. Synapse elimination follows and unnecessary connections are removed from the network, probably by the extrinsic instructive signals such as sensory inputs. To see if the period of synapse formation is distinct from synapse elimination, we measured lifetime of individual synapses by using GFP-tagged scaffolding proteins localized in the postsynaptic density (PSD). In cultured hippocampal neurons, synapse density monotonously increases from 1 to 3 weeks after plating. Time-lapse imaging of GFP-labeled PSDs revealed elimination of a predominant proportion of newly formed synapses even in the early period of monotonous synapse increase. Within one day, 10-20% of total synapses were eliminated and a roughly equal number of synapses were newly generated to counterbalance the elimination. Detailed analysis of the balance between synapse elimination and formation indicated a slight bias toward synapse formation, which underlies gradual increase of the total number of synapses. This observation clearly illustrates the importance of single synapse analysis to characterize the mechanism of establishing neuronal connectivity in the developing brain.

Information processing is the major function of the nervous system. Synaptic transmission plays a key role in this process and is mediated by release of neurotransmitters from the presynaptic sites, a specialized compartment of the axon, and by subsequent activation of neurotransmitter receptors clustered on the postsynaptic membrane. A major excitatory neurotransmitter in the mammalian CNS is glutamate. Glutamate receptors, such as AMPA receptors and NMDA receptors, are clustered on the postsynaptic membranes. When new synapses are formed, both presynaptic release machinery and postsynaptic receptor should be recruited. However, the time course and order of the molecular assembly at presynaptic and postsynaptic sites were not clarified. Molecular assembly and structural change of single synapses were visualized by using synaptophysin-CFP as a presynaptic marker and PSD-95-YFP as a postsynaptic marker. This imaging analysis revealed rapid formation of synaptic molecular specialization in the time scale of 30 min to several hours. Global analysis of synapse formation indicated gradual increase of synapse density, which led to the contention that formation and maturation of single synapses are also gradual. However, visualization of single synapses clearly illustrated rapid formation of single synapses, concomitant dynamic remodeling of dendrites, and associated assembly of functional molecules.

Rapid formation of synaptic structure. (a) shows CFP fluorescence of dendritic and axonal structures. (b) shows PSD-95-YFP signals in assembling PSDs. (c) is the overlay of (a) and (b), indicating simultaneous formation of both spines (arrows in a) and PSDs (arrows in b). Numbers shown in (a) indicate elapsed time (min).

  1. Okabe, S., Kim, H., Miwa, A., Kuriu, T., and H. Okado. Continual remodeling of postsynaptic density and its regulation by synaptic activity. Nature Neuroscience, 2, 804-811, 1999.
  2. Okabe, S., Miwa, A., and H. Okado. Spine formation and correlated assembly of presynaptic and postsynaptic molecules. Journal of Neuroscience, 21, 6105-6114, 2001.
  3. Ebihara, T., Kawabata, I., Usui, S., Sobue, K., and S. Okabe. Synchronized formation and remodeling of postsynaptic densities: long-term visualization of hippocampal neurons expressing postsynaptic density proteins tagged with GFP. Journal of Neuroscience, 23, 2170-2181, 2003.

2. Postsynaptic scaffolding molecules are dynamic and densely packed

To obtain an integrated view on both synaptic structure and dynamics of synaptic molecules, it is necessary to build a quantitative model of molecular assembly in both the PSD and the presynaptic active zone. Essential information for building such a model is the absolute numbers of molecules localized within single synapses. Conventional immunocytochemistry and immunoblotting provided data on relative amount of proteins in specific locations or preparations, but could not report the absolute content of proteins per synapse. To reveal the number of specific PSD scaffolding proteins per synapse, we developed a new quantitative technique of fluorescence microscopy. We first compared fluorescence intensities of single GFP molecules and small fluorescent microspheres and calibrated the fluorescence intensity of fluorescent microspheres. Next we obtained confocal images of single synapses expressing GFP-tagged PSD scaffolding proteins with calibrated fluorescent microspheres attached to the culture substrate, measured signals derived from two fluorescent objects, and calculated the number of GFP molecules within single synaptic sites. Finally, we performed quantitative immunocytochemistry to determine the relative level of overexpression of GFP-tagged PSD scaffolding proteins in transfected neurons. From these parameters, it is possible to estimate the absolute numbers of endogenous PSD scaffolding proteins localized within single synaptic sites. This approach enables us to obtain the absolute synaptic contents of multiple PSD scaffolding proteins (PSD-95, Homer, GKAP, and Shank molecules), which are in the range of 100 to 500 per synapse. From the quantitative data, we propose a model of molecular architecture of the PSD, which indicates relatively dense distribution of PSD-95 in the PSD structure and high probability of PSD-95 and NMDA receptor interaction by random collision of two molecules in the microenvironment of the postsynaptic membrane.

Estimation of absolute numbers of GFP-tagged PSD scaffolding molecules. We determined relative fluorescence ratio of fluorescent microspheres (arrow), calibrated against single GFP molecules, and individual PSD clusters (arrowheads) and estimated absolute numbers of GFP-tagged PSD scaffolding molecules in single synapses. Presynaptic boutons (red) and dendritic shafts (blue) were also identified by synaptophysin staining and MAP2 staining, respectively.

Turnover rate of four PSD scaffolding molecules estimated by fluorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP). Left graphs show quantitation of fluorescence recovery. PSD-95, GKAP, Shank, and Homer molecules show distinct recovery profiles.

How is assembly of individual postsynaptic scaffolding molecules regulated and how is it related to the large-scale remodeling of synapse structure? By using a technique of fluorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP), turnover rates of PSD scaffolding molecules were estimated at the level of single synapses. Time constants of turnover were in a range of several minutes to several tens of minutes, indicating faster assembly-disassembly rate of scaffolding molecules compared with the life time of the PSDs themselves. This observation indicates continuous replacement of synaptic molecules within the established PSDs and we can expect complete renewal of molecular constituents of the PSD if we wait only for a few hours. An important question is, in spite of the complete renewal of molecular constituents every few hours, why various parameters of synaptic functions, such as transmission efficacy, can be preserved for a long period. Currently we have no definitive answer to this question. One possibility is that we are still missing the key molecules which permanently reside within the established PSD. Another possibility is that even without persistent molecules in the PSD, molecular interactions in the synaptic cytoplasm is designed to maintain synapse stability, possibly by using feedback regulatory system. The latter possibility is more attractive, as molecular machines designed to keep their own functional states may be a fundamental component of cellular signaling systems. Our imaging analysis revealed that the actin cytoskeleton is an important regulator of postsynaptic scaffolding molecules. One obvious possibility is that bidirectional regulation between the PSD and the actin cytoskeleton is a part of the above mentioned feedback regulatory system.

  1. Sugiyama, Y., Kawabata, I., Sobue, K., and S. Okabe Determination of absolute protein numbers in single synapses by a GFP-based calibration technique. Nature Methods 2, 677-684, 2005.
  2. Okabe, S., Urushido, T., Konno, D., Okado, H., and K. Sobue. Rapid redistribution of the postsynaptic density protein PSD-Zip45 (Homer 1c) and its differential regulation by NMDA receptors and calcium channels. Journal of Neuroscience, 21,9561-9571, 2001.
  3. Kuriu, T., Inoue, A., Bito, H., Sobue, K., and S. Okabe Differential control of postsynaptic density scaffolds via actin-dependent and independent mechanisms. Journal of Neuroscience 26, 7693-7706, 2006.

3. Astrocytic contacts promote synaptogenesis

Technology of single synapse visualization can be applied to the analysis of interaction between synapses and surrounding non-synaptic components. Major structural components present in the vicinity of synapses are processes of glial cells. Previous studies have shown that diffusible factors released from astroglia (a type of glial cells most intimately associated with synaptic structure) facilitate formation and maturation of synapses. Electron microscopic analysis confirmed the presence of direct contacts between synapses and astroglial processes. It has not yet been clarified if there is any local regulation on the development and maturation of single synapses by the direct contact of astroglial processes to synapses. In hippocampal slice culture preparations, contact events between astrocytic processes and dendritic spines were visualized by introducing two different chromophores into neurons and nearby astrocytes. By analyzing the relationship between astrocytic contacts and subsequent stabilization and maturation of spines, we found that local astrocytic contacts promote spine stabilization and structural maturation. Single astrocytes generate exclusive domains against the other astrocytes and contact with thousands of synapses within their own domains. Therefore astrocytes have a potential to either regulate single synapses locally or influence thousands of synapses within their domains at once. Molecules involved in local signaling from astrocytes to spines have not yet identified and future analyses should be necessary to clarify the relative contribution of diffusible factors and contact-mediated signaling in astrocyte-dependent facilitation of synapse development.

Contact between dendritic spines and astrocytic processes. In A, hippocampal pyramidal neurons were filled with red fluorescent dye and astrocytes were infected with recombinant adenoviruses for GFP expression. Contact sites can be identified. In B, two-photon imaging revealed individual contact sites between spines (red) and astrocytic processes (greed). C shows an image after surface rendering, which facilitates visualization of contact sites between two cell types (arrows).

  1. Nishida, H. and S. Okabe Direct astrocytic contacts regulate local maturation of dendritic spines. Journal of Neuroscience 27, 331-340, 2007.

4. Diversity in synapse formation

Excitatory synapses between pyramidal neurons in the hippocampu and the neocortex have been the default model of synapse formation in the CNS. However, the principles of synapse formation identified in one synapse subtype may not be applicable to other synapse subtypes. A clear example of unique principles in synapse formation was found in the case of excitatory synapses on dendrites of cortical interneurons (which are inhibitory neurons and use GABA as a main neurotransmitter). Although excitatory synapses on interneurons share common properties with those on pyramidal neurons, the strategy taken by interneurons was found to be quite unique by our imaging analyses. Namely, we found retrograde transport of synaptic structure along dendritic protrusions in immature interneurons. Translocating synapses gradually reach the main dendritic shafts and stop their movement. After maturation, dendritic protrusions are also eliminated and a majority of excitatory synapses remains on the surface of dendritic shafts. Interestingly, synapse translocation was driven by dynein motor proteins, which move along the rails of microtubules. This dynein-dependent motility is regulated by dynein-interacting molecule Lis1. Synapse mobility based on microtubule-dependent motor molecules is a novel finding and may contribute to clarification of cytoskeletal contribution in synapse formation and maturation.

A second example of unique strategies taken by specific neurons in synapse formation was found in the cerebellum. Detailed analyses of postnatal synapse development between cerebellar Purkinje cells and granule cell axons (parallel fibers) led to the discovery of small axonal protrusions at the contact sites with Purkinje cell dendrites. These axonal protrusions of granule cells wrap dendritic spines of Purkinje cells and facilitate synapse maturation. Formation of axonal protrusion was mediated by signaling pathway triggered by a soluble factor cbln1. This finding revealed sequential interplay between dendrites and axons plays an essential role in synapse maturation.

Even in the case of excitatory synapses in pyramidal neurons, which have been studied extensively, new principles and new regulatory molecules could be discovered by the progress of our understanding in nervous system development. Microtubule-associated protein DCLK1 shows very strong activity of facilitating microtubule assembly and stabilization. Interestingly, DCLK1 is preferentially localized at the tips of growing dendrites. This unique localization of DCLK1 helps facilitation of microtubule assembly at the tips of dendrites. On the other hand, DCLK1 shows suppressive roles in spine growth, assembly of PSD molecules, and postsynaptic receptor functions. Namely, DCLK1 controls dendritic growth positively and synapse maturation negatively at the tips of growing dendrites. The dual roles of DCLK1 may be critical in local control of dendritic functions during development.

PSD-95-GFP clusters translocating in a retrograde fashion along dendritic protrusions. These long protrusions are unique structure present in inhibitory neuron dendrites and are eliminated after maturation of inhibitory neurons. Synapses eventually reach dendritic shafts and become stationary.

Developmental changes in the morphology of synapses between parallel fibers (GFP signal, green) and Purkinje cell dendrites (anti-calbindin staining, red). At postnatal day 18, unique protrusive structures (arrowheads) can be identified, which contact with Purkinje cell spines.

DCLK1 is localized at the growing tips of dendrites and facilitate process growth. On the other hand, DCLK1 suppresses maturation of synapses locally and keep dynamics of distal dendrites. Green; anti-DCLK staining, Magenta; distribution of a dendritic marker MAP2.

  1. Kawabata, I., Kashiwagi, Y., Obashi, K., Ohkura, M., Nakai, J., Wynshaw-Boris, A., Yanagawa, Y., and S. Okabe LIS1-dependent retrograde translocation of excitatory synapses in developing interneuron dendrites. Nature Communications 3, 722, 2012.74.
  2. Ito-Ishida, A., Miyazaki, T., Miura, E., Matsuda, K., Watanabe, M., Yuzaki, M and S. Okabe Presynaptically released Cbln1 induces dynamic axonal structural changes by interacting with GluD2 during cerebellar synapse formation. Neuron 76, 549-564, 2012.
  3. Shin, E., Kashiwagi, Y., Kuriu, T., Iwasaki, H., Tanaka, T., Koizumi, H., Gleeson, J. G. and S. Okabe Doublecortin-like kinase enhances dendritic remodeling and negatively regulates synapse maturation. Nature Communications 4, 1440, 2013.

IV Application of synapse imaging in studies of mental disorders

Technology of synapse imaging is now expanded to the field of in vivo synapse analyses. This was enabled by introduction of two-photon excitation laser scanning microscopy in the analyses of neuronal morphology and function in intact brain tissues. With adequate surgical techniques and cranial window preparations, the same cortical regions can be imaged repetitively and time-lapse images of dendrites and synapses in vivo can be recorded with time scales of minutes to months. By applying this imagine technology to the analyses of model mice of mental disorders, neural circuit-level dysfunctions in vivo may be identified. Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are early-onset metal disorders characterized by deficits in social behaviors, restricted interest, and repetitive behaviors. Recent genetic studies revealed strong link to genes encoding synaptic cell adhesion molecules and scaffolding proteins, suggesting functional changes of synapses in ASD patients. We analyzed three mouse models of ASDs with distinct genetic backgrounds and identified common phenotypes in synapse dynamics. Both synapse formation and elimination are enhanced in cortical pyramidal neurons during the early postnatal period. If future studies confirm enhancement of synapse turnover as a core feature of neural circuit in mouse models of ASDs, this finding will greatly contribute our understanding in pathophysiology of ASDs.

Proposed neural circuit alterations present in mouse models of ASDs. ASD-related genetic modifications will alter the speed of synapse turnover, which may increase the mismatches between pre- and postsynaptic components. These mismatches affect proper functions of the cortical neural circuits, which may be fixed after suppression of synapse dynamics in adult stage.

  1. Isshiki, M., Tanaka, S., Kuriu, T., Tabuchi, K., Takumi, T. and S. Okabe
    Nature Communications 5, 4742, 2014. doi: 10.1038/ncomms5742.

V Future directions in the research of synapse cell biology

Cell biology of synapses has made significant progress after introduction of imaging technology, which enabled analyses of single synaptic structure and molecular assembly within the synaptic cytoplasm. I placed emphasis on the dynamics of PSD scaffolding proteins, which are the major interest of our research group, but there has also been rapid progress in our understanding of the behavior of synaptic vesicles in the presynaptic cytoplasm and the mobility and insertion of neurotransmitter receptors in the postsynaptic membrane. Based on these accumulating data on rapid structural remodeling and protein dynamics in synapses, future perspectives on the problem in the field of synapse cell biology will be discussed.

1. Building a quantitative model of synaptic molecular assembly

The molecular repoirtre in synapse architecture has been revealed by proteomic analysis of the biochemically purified synaptosomal fraction. Furthermore, quantitative analyses of proteins localized at synapses have reported absolute content of molecules per single synapses. Data on the molecular contents, together with the exchange rate of individual molecules, will facilitate our attempts to build realistic models on the molecular assembly at synapses. Electrophysiological analyses of synapses suggested that various functional alterations in synapses, such as long-term potentiation and depression, have relatively narrow dynamic range, which is in the order of 150-300% of the baseline value. Proposing molecular mechanisms that enable precise regulation of synaptic function with this dynamic range is challenging. Models should predict functional changes with high precision and accuracy. Functional changes associated with overexpression or knockdown of specific proteins should also be explained by using the same models. General principles on macromolecular assembly extracted from these models on synapses should be useful in other attempts to quantify the dynamic behavior of intracellular molecular assemblies in a variety of cells and organisms.

2. Behavior of synapses in vivo

Until recently, research on synapse biology was mainly based on analyses of dissociated neurons or tissue slices maintained in vitro. Information on synapse dynamics in living animals was not widely available. An important next step is to answer questions associated with functional and structural change of synapses during maturation of neural networks in situ. New optical techniques, especially two-photon excitation of GFP molecules expressed in neurons, are currently successfully applied to visualize individual synaptic structures in the superficial layer of the neocortex. We can expect that further development of imaging technologies and genetic manipulations will extend the limitation of imaging depth and the target brain structure. Future development of optogenetic technologies manipulating synaptic activity and neuronal firing in situ will also open the way to directly correlate synaptic functions and diverse behavior of animals.

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Telekinesis (also known as Psychokinesis) is the ability to manipulate and control objects without physically touching them, especially with the mind.

One individual who possessed this power was the human Jimbo Cobb. His command of it was sufficient to completely overturn a car. However each use induced intense headaches.

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Advantages Of Septic Tank Cleaning Service

Regular septic tank cleaning is a task that is often overlooked by many homeowners until the unexpected happens. Situations, such as a blockage and foul smells, can be avoided by enlisting the services of a professional plumber to ensure the tank is clean. Depending on the capacity of the tank, household size, and the daily volume of wastewater, it is recommended to clean your tank after 1 to 3 years. Here are a few reasons regular septic cleaning is necessary:Experiencing a clogged tank is the last thing many homeowners would want to deal with. A blockage can result in poor drainage, which can be quite distressing. In some cases, sludge buildup can lead to bursting of the septic tank, and this can be rather costly to repair. Some repairs will require the installation of a new drain field. This is an expensive and time-consuming undertaking that needs extensive landscaping.

Working with a plumber beforehand helps to avoid costly repairs in the long run.In areas where groundwater is used as drinking water, regular septic tank cleaning and inspection becomes an even more important task. Some homeowners experience a leaking tank without knowing, which results in water contamination and can lead to serious illness and other health issues. These tanks contain harmful bacteria and viruses that cause contagious diseases when they get in the water, causing the water to become unsafe for swimmers, fishermen, or others.A clogged tank can release contaminants into the water of a particular area. This can be especially hazardous for people living near streams and lakes. In coastal areas, contaminated water can be quite dangerous as it damages the natural ecosystem in these regions and can affect daily activities. Regular inspection by a plumber helps to detect possible leaks early before the situation becomes worse thus costly to resolve.


A Morning With You | The Custatis Family | Oaks Family Photographer

My experience with the Custatis family has always been a rewarding one. Anyone who walks into their old, cozy house would immediately feel the love that lives in these walls as I did as soon as I came in that morning. Maggie (mommy) was a little anxious about what we would do once I arrived. Most Moms have this concern. I told her that in my experience, the kids usually take care of that for us.

The kids filled it up with room tours, toy chest tours, dress up, anecdotes about how mom doesn't like when their teeth fall out (in a grossed out way more than a sentimental way), tower-building, banner-making, diaper changing, tickle-fighting, on and on.

Courtney + Jason | An Intimate New Jersey Wedding

Courtney + Jason put a lot of emphasis on family, + spending quality time with their guests on their wedding day. Part of that was finding a photographer who didn't mind documenting the day + not posing the couple for a single photo.

Hello dream wedding.

What I love about photography is the documentation of a life. Any life. So the more freedom a couple gives me to make it about them enjoying themselves instead of me making it about how my portrait portfolio looks, the happier + more fulfilling I feel in my work.

So, welcome to the wedding I have essentially been waiting 7 years to photograph.

A Morning with You | The S Family

A sink bath. An alphabet puzzle. Hopping across the kitchen on what Dad thought was the dumbest thing the Easter Bunny could possibly bring. Keeping the sneaky dog out of the bedroom. A few choruses of, "I can do it myself." and "Where's his bottle?". A few minutes spent in time out, alphabet puzzle time again, feeding time again, lunch time at the table. Tickles in between bites from mom, side eye from Dad when tootsies make their way on top of the table.

Typed out it might not look like much. And if you listed your daily activities you may not see the beauty in the minutiae of your morning. To see that, you'd have to slow it down; maybe even freeze it so you can take a closer look.

A Morning with the Baldasano Family | Boyertown Family Photographer | Almond Photography

"We got him that stool so he could brush his teeth, and reach the top of his dresser, and now he uses it for everything. Any time we're doing something, "STOOL!" He picks it up over his head and  uses it all the time. It's hilarious."

I had already taken a photo of Lukas tiptoed on said stool getting his space projector ready when his mother, Caitlin, laughed about how he uses his beloved stool for as many tasks as possible. It's just this kind of personal detail that has me so fascinated with photographing families in their home. Suddenly, who knows when, Lukas just won't need that stool anymore. He won't proudly carry it around over his head through the halls of the house. It's part of a milestone in his childhood at this time; the need to be independent but still (not that all children his age like to admit this) very dependent on his parents.

The Sunday morning I spent with the Baldasano's was brimming with love and laughter. That sounds like a wooden DIY sign you might hang over an archway in your house, but in this case, it is true. Coming into a house like their's with such life and warmth to photograph is my absolute favorite. Thank you for having me.

Berks County Family Photographer | The Dries Family | In-home family photographer

I really didn't want to start this post off talking about how I've been photographing this family at least once a year since before both of these boys were born, but that's sort of what this whole thing is about, so I don't see any way out of it.

That's the goal when you become a family photographer; to be invited back to document the LIVES of these children. I've photographed these boys since they were days old and it's honest-to-God so cool to see how they are developing. They're going to have such a comprehensive record of their childhood, and that is an amazing gift to give your children.

Jaclynn + Chris | In-Home Engagement Session

A few weeks ago, I was invited into Jaclynn + Chris's home for their engagement session. A home they only just moved into this past December. It's already been a host to a few family parties, + a forever home to their pup.

I love doing these in-home engagement sessions. I know that Jaclynn + Chris will make many many changes in this space as they make it their own. They won't always sleep on a mattress in the spare bedroom. Not once they're done painting their bedroom. And how else would I know the little intricacies of their lives? Like how the Tigger Mug is the one they fight over using (every home has THAT coveted mug that everyone wants for themselves).

Over time, my work has become all about the connections I'm documenting and less about where we are. As long as it's important to the couple, it becomes important to me too.

Twin Newborn Session | Gwen + Porter | Philadelphia Newborn Photographer

Meet Gwen + Porter. They're twins who behaved like seasoned pros the day I came to photograph them at their home with their mom + dad. Weighing in (at the time of our session) at a whopping 3lb. + 5lb. , respectively, it's hard to stay calm and content when you're that tiny. It's hard to stay warm, it's hard to stay full; life in general is HARD at 3 + 5 pounds. But these twins were as serene as a 9lb. baby after a feeding. What a lovely present for Mom + Dad.

Elopement Photographer | Sandy + Tommy | Douglassville Wedding

Sandy + Tommy got ready in their bedroom, came downstairs to welcome the only two people who would be present to witness their ceremony (their photographer + their reverand).

I would have to guess that it's easy to brush off a small ceremony like this as something that does not need to be professionally photographed, but it makes me soar when a couple contacts me for an extremely private ceremony like this.

These two got married in the home they've been sharing for over a decade. When they had their "first kiss" after the ceremony, I was the only one to throw my arms up + cheer for them. The emotion was palpable. Just as much, if not more so, than I have ever witnessed at a "traditional" full wedding that doesn't take place in the couple's home.

So why wouldn't someone document this day, no matter what it looks like? It is still important even it is small. Even if you baked the cake yourself. Even if you're going to get into sweats 45 minutes later and cook dinner.

I can't thank Sandy + Tommy enough for inviting me into their home last week for the honor of being one of the very few to document this ceremony.

I hope if you or someone you know is having a small ceremony like this that you'll let them know that there's a photographer out there who wants to tell their story.

Glenolden Family Photographer | A morning with the M Family | Almond Photography

I threw my camera bag over my shoulder and fished for my keys in my coat pocket; another successful and fun family session in the books. “Thanks so much again for inviting me back, Jen. It’s so much fun for me to see all the things that are different-” “And how much is the same!”, Jen quickly added.

Her interjection caught me off guard in the best way. One of those moments when you can feel your mind opening up to a new perspective on something you’ve done/thought about hundreds of times.

I’ve had the privilege of working with this family since Jen & Steve were engaged a few years ago. Since then, I photographed their wedding, maternity photos, newborn photos, and now their first son, Logan, at one year of age. I’m always so careful to document the moments that I know are fleeting, and the traditions that will inevitably die out  when I come back into a family’s life for an annual shoot, but she brought up a valid point; so much stays the same.

How many times have you heard stories about a sibling, your parents, or your grandparents, (or maybe even stories and photos about yourself)  and with a knowing laugh, proclaimed the old adage, “Some things never change!”

Photographs are an excellent means preserving the everyday moments that will shift slightly over a short period of time. They also serve as a living testament to all the constants that have remained throughout the ever changing seasons in our lives.

What a beautiful paradox. Thanks, Jen❤.


No Creationist Scientists with Real Credentials?

The truth is quite the contrary and atheist TV evangelists preaching, proselytizing and indoctrinating others with this kind of spurious codswallop ought to be severely reprimanded.

Creationists developed and established the scientific method – not atheists.  Virtually no atheists were even involved. Historical fact.  Indeed, atheists, under atheist assumptions about the universe, could never have developed the method.  Why? Because they have no reason at all for believing in an ordered and comprehensible universe. Under atheism, the universe should be chaotic and incomprehensible. It is neither.

Atheism has never brought any good to humanity whatsoever. In fact, quite the contrary with more than 170 million murders perpetrated by atheists under officially atheist governments in the 20th century alone.

“Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator.” – C. S. Lewis on Mere Science  1998 First Things 86 (October, 1998): 16-18.

Atheism would never have given birth to modern science at all. It is perfectly at home with all kinds of  idiocy, superstition and irrational nonsense like “a universe from nothing”.

And yet atheist fanatics are all running around slandering and whining against them and their followers and successors.

The ironic thing is that all these irrational ignorant atheists these days, that think they’re so smart and highly educated, are virtually all educated in schools, colleges and universities founded by creationists : Yale, Princeton, Oberlin College, Harvard, Dartmouth, McGill, Laval, Oxford, Cambridge, McMaster, Cornell, and almost all the great universities of Europe and the West. Not to mention hundreds in Africa, South America and Indonesia where it is Christian missionaries that started the school systems there as well as the hospitals!

“The Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine 1904 Ivan Pavlov”. Nobelmedia. Retrieved 2 February 2012.
“Gov’t Rejects Newspaper Story”. The News 2014-05-07. Accessed 2014-05-09.
Martin 2008, p. 30
“Nobel Prize” (2007), in Encyclopædia Britannica, accessed 14 November 2007, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online:
“All Nobel Laureates”. Nobel Foundation. Retrieved 2010-03-01.
“Alfred Nobel, hans far och hans bröder”. March 2013. Retrieved 9 December 2013. “(swe: Genom dop och konfirmation var Alfred Nobel lutheran -en: Alfred Nobel was through baptism and confirmation a Lutheran)”
33.2% of 6.7 billion world population (under the section ‘People’) “World”. CIA world facts.
“The List: The World’s Fastest-Growing Religions”. March 2007. Retrieved 2010-01-04.
“Major Religions Ranked by Size”. Retrieved 2009-05-05.
ANALYSIS (2011-12-19). “Global Christianity”. Retrieved 2012-08-17.

Take Dr. AE Wilder Smith for example – a young earth creationist – with 3 earned PhDs :

AEWilder-Smith# Ph.D. in physical organic chemistry at University of Reading, England (1941)

# Former Director of Research for a Swiss pharmaceutical company

# NATO three-star general

How’s that for real credentials?

 “Scientists who utterly reject Evolution may be one of our fastest growing controversial minorities… Many of the scientists supporting this position hold impressive credentials in science.” – Larry Hatfield, “Educators Against Darwin”. Science Digest Special, Winter, pp. 94-96

And what of Copernicus, Galileo, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Kelvin, Faraday, Pasteur, Townes, Godel, Marconi, Pupin, von Braun, … these were all men of strong religious beliefs. They were all theists and mostly full fledged creationists.

The atheists have done nothing but cripple the scientific method with their groundless, a priori insistence that only the natural can explain the natural. And how exactly, do they know this? They don’t. That claim is a metaphysical, materialist presumption, and total bollocks. For if you cannot see beyond the material world how in the world can you predicate, with embarrassing certitude as atheists do, that there is nothing outside the material world?

Excluding ANY possibility from science is idiocy. Excluding metaphysical existences from science is nothing but a religious prejudice. We should always seek material explanations, but not where no such explanations suffice and design is the only “Occam’s Razor” answer possible. The beginning of the universe is precisely one such case.

Creationists number among the greatest scientific minds in all history. And today’s creationist scientists are very well educated in their scientific domains in major universities.  Don’t swallow the atheist propaganda, its pure bull.

What is Natural Selection Really?

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God of the Gaps?

Well here we go ladies and gents.  Yet another piece of Darwinian/atheist bad thinking must be exposed for what it really is.

Will this kind of thing ever end? Not until atheists finally admit that their position – it’s not merely a “lack” of a position, as they foolishly pretend to themselves these days – is devoid of intelligence and in fact annihilates intelligence itself since atheism cannot have true rationality.

In atheism all rationality is the end product of completely non rational processes and of course is an “accident”.  Under atheism, rationality is just electrochemical movement in the brain – 3 lbs of meat.  As Francis Crick himself said,

The Astonishing Hypothesis is that “You,” your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased: “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.” This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people today that it can truly be called astonishing.”  -(p. 3) -Francis Crick (1994) The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons

Atheism says that your rationality, your logic, your reasoning faculties; all together is “nothing but a pack of neurons.  Well, Sir Crick has passed on to the other realm that is much more solid than this one and has been obliged to give an account for his own life, including his denial of the Deity, so we can’t ask him the obvious question, “Why should we listen to what a pack of neurons is saying?”, or “How can a pack of neurons be true or false?”.

Other interesting questions like this could and should be posed to atheists as often as it takes to get the message, the logical conclusions and implications of their position, into their all too often stubborn minds.

In any case, we must take a quick and dirty look at one Darwinism’s chief complaints against both creationism and Intelligent Design (no, these are not the same).

Often when theists or even deists point out to Darwinists that their theory cannot account for the intricacies and functional complexities and semantic structures found in every living thing, they will tell you that you’re committing a logical fallacy.  Specifically they claim this type of statement is a “God of the gaps argument”.  This simply means that, because you can’t explain how something occurred, you simply invoke God as the answer.  God fills in the gap where the knowledge of how is missing.

God is used to explain what evolutionism can’t explain.  This is of course a form of “argument from ignorance”.  And believe me, Darwinians everywhere are quick to parrot their fave priests that have told them this, over and over and over.  Here I would love to start a nice discussion of how virtually every amateur and professional Darwinist in the world is little more than a parrot. They are always parroting what they were told in school, in their temples (universities), on their fave web sites, in books etc. Of course, everyone does this to some degree, citing authorities, but the atheist Darwinian crowd does little else.

They do not seem to think well or for themselves, so having been forced into the standard Darwinian mantra through the public education system, they simply parrot what they were told by their priests and gurus.  So, they have indoctrination and “counseling” from their priests to know what to believe.

So, on to the infamous parroted “God if the gaps” accusations.

First of all, arguments of the pattern:

“Evolution cannot explain this therefore God did it” arguments, are almost never used by any informed theist and never by any of the major Intelligent Design or creationist debaters, scientists etc. on this.

People like Stephen Meyer, William Dembski, Douglas Marks, Jay Richards etc, do not use “gap” arguments at all.  What they really do is argue from a simplified form of “statistical mechanics” (for lack of a better term). This means that when an IDist says anything like, “no evolutionary evidence exist for this, no known evolutionary pathway exists to explain this, no known mechanism exists that can accomplish this”,  They are not saying “you can’t explain it, therefore God must have done it”.

That is simply and categorically false.

They are saying that 1) there is no evidence at all that evolution did this, but 2) there is great evidence that Darwinian evolution cannot do this, and there is irrefutable evidence that only intelligent agents can produce algorithmic, prescriptive information that is found everywhere in biological systems.  Therefore, the best explanation is not evolution but intelligent origin.

Very few creationists or IDists will simply say,  “God did it and that’s it that’s all, no need for further research”.  In recent years, I’ve never heard any of them say anything even remotely like that.  So, when misinformed and disingenuous Darwinian fanatics claim that this is what they’re saying, they are lying, or, incapable of thinking straight, seriously not listening, or all of the above.

In my personal experience it is always been the last 2 options. and sometimes the first as well.

Again, what are IDists saying? Based on the principles of statistical mechanics, they’re saying that we already know that such mechanical sophistication and algorithmic information cannot arise by chance no matter how much time is allotted.  The probability of such machinery and circuitry being constructed, with the plans for making the parts and the assembly instructions for putting them together with all this being algorithmically encoded in DNA, is so astronomically small that it may as well be considered impossible.  It is in fact, statistically impossible by any known random or stochastic process including mutations, plus selection.

So, this has nothing at all to do with “gap” arguments but is merely stating the obvious based on the laws of probability! Something Darwinian biologists tend to be uniquely against applying to their own theory. How many times have I read that “probabilities do not apply to living, reproductive organisms”? Too many!

Designists are not saying, “we can’t see how this happened therefore God id it” at all; on the contrary!  They are saying, “the laws of probability”, thermodynamics and physics do not allow any purposeless, unguided process to create this kind of integrated, specified functionality.

That is a very different thing from a mere gap argument.  So in fact, they are not arguing from ignorance but from well documented knowledge!  Knowledge of proven mathematics applied to the mechanics of biological machinery. That is NOT a gap or ignorance based argument at all.  It is a solid scientific empirical method being used to calculate whether nature can even do such things. When facing the odds of events that have estimated with between 1 in 10^20 to 1 in 10^130 to even less odds, the obvious answer is that blind evolution could not have done it, no matter how much time you allot.

Secondly, there is a humongous hypocrisy at work among the Darwinists when they foolishly choose to use this rebuttal. Notice that Darwinists have never, not even once, provided a viable mutation/selection pathway for the existence of even the smallest living things.  This means that the only way they can claim that any living thing evolved is through speculation and conjecture – most of the time just wishful thinking and vivid imaginations are all they have. Just-so stories fill the Darwinian literature.

For example, how does Darwinism explain the incredible integrated circuitry of vision, the eye? They invent, yes invent, out of thin air, a story!

If you’ve seen the perfectly naive, childishly simplistic explanations given by Darwinists for the origins of sight and eyes you know what I’m talking about it.  Even the scenarios given by so-called professional scientists.  There simply are no viable, serious Darwinian pathways for vision and eyes.  None.  Not even remotely close.

Their explanation is always the same – an imaginary pathway – less than 100 steps (rotfl) – that they think may have, could have, must have etc., been the real evolutionary one. So how about evidence for such naive suppositions – they’re always ridiculously naive – on how something may have happened by evolution? Nope. Don’t need any real empirical evidence.

Really? Why not?

Because they simply invoke evolution of the gaps. They do this everywhere, “evolution did it”. Oh, sorry, they use slightly different terms but the answer is always the same in meaning – evolution did it.

In other words, Darwinists are the worst offenders of “gap”, ignorance-based arguments!  They never have any viable mutational-selection pathways to explain anything but the very, very trivial!  So, without a grain of empirical evidence that really does explain how vision systems developed without a “seeing” intelligence, they simply claim -loudly and with much bombast and pompous dismissal of any other theory, “evolution did it!”

“We don’t need proof!! We know evolution did it!”

“How do you know this, without proof?”

“Because no God exists!”

Yes, many of them really do say this in such terms.  Meaning that their real reason for supporting neo Darwiniism is religious, not scientific! There you have it.  The cat is out of the bag.  The whole system is 99% religion based. Metaphysical Naturalism. In other words. The religion of atheism.

Don’t believe this? Well then you’re being naive and demonstrating a profound ignorance. Just to help you out:

– Richard Lewontin, 1997. Billions and billions of demons, The New York Review, p. 31, 9 January 1997 (review of Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark).- Dr. Richard Lewontin, Geneticist, Harvard U.

And just look at this quote:

Wow, if that isn’t clear enough, nothing is.  And say what?! Scientists lie!? Oh my, who would have thought?!
So, neo Darwinists are, for the most part, in fact religious adepts of Naturalism (materialism), a very old heathen religion.
Religion? Yes. Therefore it should be illegal, in the USA, to teach Darwinism in public schools.  So why isn’t it?

The New Atheism’s Prime Idiocy

This is not hard!

Answer: Of course not.

St. Darwin’s Death or A Theory In Ruins

The Darwinian propaganda juggernaut is a lot like a T-Rex: huge, stupid, vicious and utterly intolerant of dissension.  But it’s slowing down.

Its engine is broken down to the point that it can no longer provide the force necessary to keep its velocity.  The engine runs on gas (hot air) and the hot air is the only thing keeping the machine from completely falling apart.

In my last article I talked about the implications of finding the abstract concept of zero  and the decimal point encoded in the genome. Those implications, by themselves, dismantle at least 90% of the Darwinian juggernaut -making it slowly devolve into a rusty old truck ready for the scrap heap of scientific blunders where it belongs.

Discoveries such as shCherback’s ruin Darwinian hopes for a badly needed religious revival of the metaphysical materialist underpinning of the whole schema.  Yes, Darwinism is a religion. It’s called Metaphysical Naturalism -a very old religion to boot. This is the religion of the atheists, or materialists if you will.  It origins myth is Darwinism (the modern synthesis or neo-Darwinism).  Michael Ruse, evolutionist science philosopher admitted,

“Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.” – Ruse, M., How evolution became a religion: creationists correct? National Post, pp. B1,B3,B7 May 13, 2000

The drivers of this rusting old  junk heap of a machine are still at the wheel but they’re finding it harder and harder to steer, harder and harder to keep it on its course and harder to keep it moving.

Here’s a short list of reasons why Darwinism, like its master St. Charles, the prophet of materialism, is dead already:

*Genetic entropy

-shows that neutral and harmful mutations are far more numerous than beneficial ones and that therefore
-shows that genomes are devolving not evolving
-the mechanism that leads to mutational meltdown cannot be the same mechanism by which ~10 million life forms arose n earth
-all by itself Gentropy (new word if you please) should have eliminated Darwinism as a viable theory

*Information theory

-Nature has no mind and abstractions only exist in minds
-Information itself is metaphysical, not matter or energy as atheist Darwinism hold
-Specifically, encoded prescriptive or algorithmic information cannot arise by any natural means since codes are universally symbolic sign systems. Sign systems are universally abstract & arbitrary requiring a conceiver. Abstractions do not and cannot exist in nature as nature has no mind or ability to conceptualize.
-Since codes cannot arise by any stochastic process this means DNA was designed, as shCherbak stated, it must be artificial.  This too, all by itself and for obvious reasons, reduces Darwinism to dust & ashes

*Statistical mechanics

-By this I refer to probability & statistics applied to genomes and their structures
-The vast quantity of well structured, functional machines working in genomes -with purpose- requires instructions for the assembly of their component parts, DNA/RNA contain these instructions
-The parts of any compound components requiring precise assembly, must be precisely shaped, sized, fitted and implemented with materials capable of resisting environmental pressures such as sheer, compression, friction etc. inherent in any machine. To assume that blind unguided nature somehow stumbled up so many of such objects of the right shape, materials, properties and sizes by mutation, and that they accidentally happen to work together, is insanely ludicrous and defies everything we know of the laws of probability & mechanical engineering;
-Functional, useful, compound nano machines and the instructions necessary to assemble them cannot be symbolically encoded  by any random mutational process;  symbols do not exist in nature, they are conceptually determined (mind); no more than computer programs can write themselves by juggling millions of bits for all eternity could ever create an operating system
-Genomes are far far greater, and strictly regulated, than any human designed OS is and probably ever will be
-The combinatorial dependencies created by biological nano machines are a statisticians nightmare.  They are humongous in number, and this also rules out any chance of random mutations + selection creating any of these machines, their assembly instructions and the assembly machinery itself. Machine parts must be in correct position, size, shape, etc. with each other or you end up with a literal combinatorial “explosion” of the machine itself in the cell. Combinatorial explosions are exponential. This complicates things for Darwinian theory infinitely, to the point of no return.

*Inter cooperating nano machines

-Biological machines cannot ‘know’ what to do, where to go etc. yet are assembled for and function for clear precise purposes in genomes
-Hundreds if not thousands of such machines exist in the genomes of any complex species
-If the Darwinian mechanism of mutations + selection could create such machines we should see useless ones scattered everywhere in genomes; but we don’t. We always find perfectly functional machines and clear purpose
-The Darwinians respond to such facts with their usual mere denial. Denial of these being “real” machines -its just a metaphor they claim. But it is no analogy. As Yockey proved that the genetic is is mathematically identical to human devised codes and languages, this applies to biological nano machines as well. They are real machines as much as any automobile motor or space shuttle are real machines.

*The fossil record

-The fossil record is sorely lacking in genuine intermediate forms; such forms should number in the billions given the number of species and their vast differences from the so-called “last universal common ancestor”. Yet there are none that can be proved.
-Biological explosions such as the Cambrian or Avalonian reveal species showing up complete, fully adapted suddenly (in geochrono terms) with no know ancestors
-A very curious thing that Darwinists never seem to grasp is that when they claim something found in the fossil record is an ancestor or a link to some other newer species, they are already assuming the validity of Darwinism. In other words, in order to claim anything is an ancestor of any other thing, one has to assume Darwinism is true beforehand. This is not only a logical fallacy but a lack of thinking on their part
-In Darwinism every living and every dead thing is an intermediate. So why bother shouting so loudly, “Hey we have found an intermediate!”. Really? Well seeing that everything is, by default, an intermediate, the only response is, “So? Who cares? Everything and everyone is an intermediate. Everything is in transition from being to becoming”.
-Another fundamental problem with pretending anything is a link to something else, is that no fossil ever comes with its pedigree inscribed in it. Such pedigrees are only and always assigned by the Darwinian discoverer of the fossil. Based on what? It’s always based on his assumption that the theory is true. Hardly scientific. Thus, imagination is the closest thing to the reality of alleged intermediate forms.

“Fossils can tell us many things, but one thing they can never disclose is whether they were ancestors of anything else.” — Colin Patterson, paleontologist, 1978

*Laboratory experiments

Lenski‘s experiments, if they reveal anything, tell us that you can only get E.coli out E.coli
-These experiments have produced over 50K generations of E.coli; this is equivalent to approximately 1 million years of human generations. But there’s a very serious flaw in this whole thing.  Consider: In the corresponding time it has taken humanity’s alleged last common ancestor to evolve into homo sapiens from some primitive primate, which is allegedly about 2.3 million years, E.coli has done nothing but trivial adaptation to one unique environmental stress. And that with information loss!

Think about that in reference to Darwinist devised time lines. Humans supposedly came about 2.3 million years ago? Wow, in all that time E.coli are still E.coli, but homo sapiens is endowed with such a vast number of traits, not found in its alleged ancestors that one is at a complete loss to explain how such vast changes could have all happened in such a ridiculously short geological time.  We’re talking millions of uninterrupted beneficial mutations to get from some ape-like ancestor to full fledged human. In just a bit less time than that, poor E. coli has managed only a couple of trivial mutations!

The real question here is, “Why do Darwinists continue to believe their own sorry hypothesis, when faced with such salient anomalies?  Well, the only real, honest answer to that is, “by faith”. Blind faith to boot. For, the very experiments designed to show us all Darwinian evolution in action, have shown us all almost nothing worth noting, very trivial evolutionary change.

Such gratuitous credulity is hardly based on the results of these experiments, or any others. Its based rather on religion, Metaphysical Naturalism, i.e. good old self contradictory atheism. Or, if you please, on wishful thinking.

Much more could be written here, but suffice it to say that neo Darwinism should have been buried years ago. However, seeing as how metaphysics underlies its whole raison d’être and that devout Darwinian adepts refuse to abandon it, it’s not surprising that this debunked theory still lingers on.  They won’t leave the materialist religion they rely on for their personal sense of psychological security in their worldview. Thus, we have seen no funeral.

What we are seeing today is a veritable “scientific community” version of “Weekend at Bernies”, where the cadaver is propped up and made to appear alive. This is exactly current Darwinism, the new corpse. Propped up by hype, propaganda and lots of story telling (should I mention “threatenings and slaughter”?) to divert the public attention away from Bernie’s true condition.

Of course, all this was very frustrating and confusing for Paulie, the mob hit man who, falling for the ruse, was still trying to kill poor dead Bernie.

Another Headache for Darwin

In 2008 Vladimir ShCherbak published information his book “The Codes of Life” with a chapter entitled “The Arithmetical Origin of the Genetic Code”.  (Biosemiotics Volume 1, 2008, pp 153-185 –

The discoveries covered in this are yet another wonderful refutation of Darwinism.

Of course, we know beforehand that the Darwinians will deny these clear implications, as they always do when any discovery challenges their secular humanism-based theory.  That’s because Darwinism is materialism’s origins myth.

For example shCherbak writes,

“There seems to be but one conclusion: the genetic code is itself a unique structure of arithmetical syntax. The arithmetical syntax is separated from natural events by the unbridgeable gap between the fundamental laws of nature and the abstract codes of the human mind (Barbieri, 2005). Chemical evolution, no matter how long it took, could not possibly have stumbled on the arithmetical language and initialized the decimalization of the genetic code. Physics and chemistry can neither make such abstractions nor fit the genetic code out with them.”

“First, a general and the most forcible argument: it has been found that the genetic code is governed directly by the arithmetical symbol of zero. This striking fact is verified simultaneously by several independent orderlinesses – logical, arithmetical, and semantical… Incidentally, such an acting zero alone might be sufficient to assume an artificial nature of the genetic code.”

Zero is indeed an abstraction, as is the decimal point.  Only minds can entertain abstractions. Nature, being mindless, cannot therefore create or use abstract data like this. Abstractions don’t exist in nature’s matter and energy.

Indeed, the very definition of the word abstract is as follows:

3. theoretical; not applied or practical: abstract science.
4. difficult to understand; abstruse: abstract speculations.

9. an abstract work of art.

Note: removed unrelated definitions (related to arts)

Abstractions are only and always conceptual, requiring a mind.  Thus Nature, DNA and life as a whole, cannot know or understand abstract concepts like zero and the decimal point.  Matter and energy alone cannot abstract.

The obvious conclusion of the existence of abstraction being used in the genetic code is a proof – not mere evidence – that the genetic code was created by a mind, an intelligence.

ShCherbak states this very clearly in his statement- that I repeat for emphasis, “Incidentally, such an acting zero alone might be sufficient to assume an artificial nature of the genetic code.

An “artificial origin” is the same as “intelligently designed”.

There is no other source for abstraction but mind and only mind can understand it.

Is this thus the end of Darwinism?

Well the truth is that Darwinism died many years ago with the discovery of the genetic code itself.  How so? Code is a symbol system.  Codes do not write themselves. Codes are conventions of symbols contrived to represent something other than themselves.  Algorithms cannot create themselves. No random process can create algorithmic symbol systems. Algorithms, being instructions and how to do something – like make a blueberry pie or build car –  require a mind.

As Dr. David Abel explains,

The specific term PI originated out of a need to qualify the kind of information being addressed in peer-reviewed scientific literature. Shannon measured only probabilistic combinatorial uncertainty. Uncertainty is not information. It is widely recognized that even reduced uncertainty (“R,” poorly termed “mutual entropy”) fails to adequately describe and measure intuitive information. Intuitive information entails syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Syntax deals with symbol sequence, various symbol associations, and related arbitrary rules of grouping. Semantics deals with the meanings represented within any symbol system. Pragmatics addresses the formal function of messages conveyed using that symbol system.” –

More information and several articles one should read to grasp the concepts discussed can be found here.

Again Abel notes,

Differential survival/reproduction of already-programmed living organisms (natural selection) is not sufficient to explain molecular evolution or life-origin (Abel, 2009b). Life must be organized into existence and managed by prescriptive information found in both genetic and epigenetic regulatory mechanisms. The environment possesses no ability to program linear, digital folding instructions into the primary structure of biosequences and biomessages.

What he is saying, for those not used to the terms of reference and concepts of the laws and nature of information, is that Darwinism cannot be true because matter + energy, random mutations + “selection” (a mere filter) cannot create abstractions like codes and symbol systems.  It just doesn’t happen. No more than your rose bush can do arithmetic.  Math is abstract in itself, nature knows nothing out it.

Therefore this arithmetical nature of the genetic code, with its zero and decimal, its algorithmic information, cannot be natural. This is a defeater for Darwinian evolution – period.

The current generation of elder Darwinian fundamentalists will probably never accept these obvious facts since it counters their whole worldview and makes them nervous and insecure.  That’s why the Darwinistas are so enraged, loud and adamantly resistant.  They are the new inquisition. It’s about religion for them, not science, whether they confess this “sin” or not.

This was revealed by one of their own, who at least was honest enough to admit it. Richard Lewontin,

‘Scientists, like others, sometimes tell deliberate lies, because they believe that small lies can serve big truths.’ – Lewontin, R.C., The Inferiority Complex, New York Review of Books, 22 October 1981, p. 13.

Well we can take his word for it, right? Well um … if you can trust a scientist that tells you that he lies!   This is nevertheless a very strange statement. He says the materialism is absolute, and we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. But atheism has no absolutes. Curiouser and curiouser.

The Darwinists only logical response to this is to claim some version of panspermia, an extra-terrestrial origin for DNA.  But that only pushes the problem back one step, for then we need to ask, “How did they get here?” Now, supposing that the ETs themselves are DNA based will only leave us with the same question of the origin of life.

It will of course take a long time before these perfectly logical conclusions are accepted – perhaps the next generation of students of biology and other related domains will accept the truth. I fear that we’ll have to wait till this generation dies off.

charles-darwin-headache 😉

On the Problem of Evil & Suffering

God is all-powerful, loving, and perfect.
The universe is not perfect but contains evil and suffering.
Therefore, God does not exist.

Basically, it’s always some form of the Epicurean paradox.

So in short, either God is not good, or not all-powerful or he does not exist, because if he did exist then surely he could stop all the suffering. The atheist then concludes that both the idea of a bad God and the idea of a limited God make no sense, therefore God must not exist. Variations on this ages old theme exist but that is the gist of it.

So how does one answer this type of objection?

That’s all well and good. But forget all that for now. There is a much simpler way to demonstrate why this argument is flawed.

Easy.  Without God, there is no good or evil.
The atheist high priests, quoted above say so.

The goes the ball game for the atheist objector. The atheist shoots himself in the foot with such arguing against God based on “there is so much evil”.  For such an argument becomes too obviously wrong given that “no God = no evil”. So how does the atheist argue against God based on something that does not and cannot exist in his own worldview? Contradiction much? Indeed.

Suffering becomes a mere amoral, purposeless event in a cold uncaring cosmos. Or as Dawkins put it, a blind, pitiless, indifferent universe. Suffering, but without God suffering is neither evil nor good nor “bad”, since godd and bad only exist as humans illusions.

One might even state,

“Evil exists.  Therefore God exists. God defines ultimate good. Evil is all that is contrary to that good. No God, no evil”

Thus the atheists using this argument, show a rather stunning lack of perception.  But in this case it is a lack of perception of their own arguments logical implications and flaws! To argue against God based on the existence of evil is to argue for God based on the existence of moral right and wrong. So when atheists use the old “problem of pain and evil” argument they are unwittingly admitting of a transcendent Law that defines evil by the existence of absolute good – which is the ONLY way evil can be defined!

C.S. Lewis wrote,

–The Allegory of Love

Thus the whole “evil and suffering” based argument falls apart under its own underlying assumptions. This argument actually does more to uphold the existence of God than it can ever do to refute it.  Sadly, most atheists do not and will not see this, such is the hardness of their hearts.


Has Libertarianism Failed?

In a four-part series I presented the current state of the U.S. economy. Overall, things look relatively good here: growth is moderately good, private consumption is moderately healthy, business investments are stabilizing at a good rate and government consumption and investment spending is under control.

Generally, the private sector of the U.S. economy is in fairly good shape. So what is there to complain about?

First of all, the growth rates that I refer to as “moderately good” are at least a full percentage point below what we should have at this stage of a recovery, even from a deep recession. There are reasons why we are not at higher growth, one of them being the kind of government spending that does not show up in GDP: entitlements. Another reason is the Obama administration’s affinity for regulations. Without big entitlements and invasive regulations we could easily be growing at 3.5-4 percent per year.

Secondly, the biggest strength of the U.S. economy is relative, not absolute. As I continuously report on this blog, Europe is in a perennial state of stagnation and industrial poverty. The Chinese economy is in what looks like a relatively serious recession; add to that a real estate bubble that they still don’t know how to handle and the growing trend of job migration from China to lower-cost countries like Vietnam. Japan is fledgling but not much more than that.

And third – well, there is always Obamacare… Fortunately it looks like that reform, well-intended as it was, is being reshaped into something more palatable and manageable. It takes time, though, and while the president understandably holds on to his trademark legislative achievement he, too, must come to the conclusion that not all is good in America’s most complicated piece of legislation ever. When that happens, another ball and chain around the ankle of the American economy will fall off and allow free-market Capitalism to grow even bigger.

Bottom line: the U.S. economy is not very impressive when compared to itself a couple of decades ago, but at least from an international perspective it is the best place to be for job seekers, families and businesses.

The big question is why we can’t do better. What is holding us back? As a libertarian my conclusion is “big government”. As an economist my conclusion is “it depends, but big government is a strong candidate”. But that does only begs another question: how is it that the United States, a constitutional republic born from the yearnings of freedom, has fallen for the temptation of the big welfare state?

This is a big question to answer. A good way to start is to ask what has happened to the most freedom-loving movement in recent American history – the libertarian movement – and why it has failed to turn the tide on big government. After all, modern libertarianism is now almost half-a-century old. The intellectual groundwork was laid in part by economists like Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek (who, by the way, allegedly did not get along with one another…) and partly by the great moral philosopher Robert Nozick. In his Anarchy, State and Utopia, originally published in 1971, Nozick challenged the prevailing wisdom of redistributive justice and – by implication – the theoretical foundations of the welfare state. His vision of the minimal state was close in theory to the small government that would be necessary for Hayek’s and Friedman’s free-market Capitalism to work.

The Reagan presidency marked a surge for libertarianism in America. Similarly, the Thatcher era unleashed libertarian thinking and activism in Britain. While its success on continental Europe was more limited, the libertarian movement made its footprints, especially in Scandinavia and eastern Europe, where it helped inspire the liberation from the Soviet empire.

But what looked like a success story back then never translated into policy success. Why?

The question is highly relevant. In a world where government consumes 40 percent or more of GDP; when taxes can take away more than half of a man’s earnings; when government controls or wants to control the education of all children and the health care of all citizens; in that world, libertarianism seems to be little more than a topic for esoteric dinner conversations.

Where are the libertarian victories? Can libertarianism even be saved?

Yes, it can. But only under some very important conditions. For more on this, check in tomorrow.


Wright Museum to restore John Thomas Biggers' social realist painting

John Thomas Biggers' The Mandolin Player is an important painting for many reasons. First, the painting is representative of the social realist movement of the '30s and '40s. You might know another famous artist who made social realistic art, his name was Diego Rivera. He's kind of a big deal in Detroit.

Second, Biggers was a "master artist, educator, author, draftsman and sculptor, and one of the most prominent African American artists to emerge in the years following World War II." Maya Angelou was even quoted as saying that the artist, “leads us through his expressions in to the discovery of ourselves at our most intimate level.”

Third, it shows that the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, which is already pretty great for any number of reasons, is committed to maintaining important works of art and art history. The restoration is happening in partnership with Bank of America, which is providing funds for the project.

The Mandolin Player depicts a black mandolin player strumming against a backdrop of an impoverished black community and is "firmly grounded in conversation with other works in the history of painting musicians."

The painting, which was completed sometime in the 1940s, has been in the museum's collection since 1988. According to a press release the painting will undergo "cleaning, removal of surface soil and stain; and consolidation to restore as much of the original color and hue as possible. It will also stabilize the canvas to prevent further deterioration."


D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism: A Study of Influence

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The significance of D. H. Lawrence's reading of two Italian Futurist volumes in the summer of 1914 is widely acknowledged, but the nature of its significance has not been more closely examined, nor traced through his major fictional and discursive writings of the Great War and its aftermath. D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism addresses the oversight, firstly by examining the context to Lawrence's now famous June 1914 letters concerning Futurism; secondly, by placing Futurism - and Lawrence's interest in Futurism - in the ...


The Known Lands are connected through the Great Arch. Time is constant across the Known Lands, though each land may have different ways of measuring years. Earth is probably an unknown land, and most in the known lands do not know of it. There are likely more known lands than the ones listed below, or to be exact 27.

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China plans to build 36 marine law enforcement vessels in next five years

Jan 25, 2013- Right safeguarding and law enforcement tasks in China are substantial because of the vast territorial waters under its jurisdiction.

It is reported that an additional 11 decommissioned vessels of Chinese navy are modified or rebuilt into ocean surveillance ships to alleviate the shortage in the number of marine right safeguarding vessels.

814 boat converted into a 112 China Marine Surveillance ship.

It is a routine practice in China as well as a common practice around the world to modify and rebuild decommissioned naval vessels before handing them over to maritime surveillance and fishery departments. These decommissioned naval vessels mainly include destroyers, icebreakers, and surveying vessels. The modification process mainly includes dismantling of the missiles, heavy caliber artillery, and other heavy weaponry. The naval vessels with relatively large tonnage and carrying platforms are equipped with as many helicopters as possible to perform maritime public affairs and law enforcement. The cabin is also modified to store more oil, water, and other supplies so that the law enforcement ships can sail in sea for longer time.

China Marine Surveillance Corps is the marine administrative and law enforcement team subordinate to the State Oceanic Administration, mainly responsible for patrolling and surveillance on the territorial waters under China's jurisdiction to investigate and handle violations of maritime rights and interests, illegal exploitation of the territorial waters, damage to maritime environments and resources, destruction of offshore installations, disrupt of maritime order, and other illegal behaviors.

With the increasingly intensified struggles in safeguarding maritime rights, China plans to build 36 maritime law enforcement vessels in the next five years in order to enhance its maritime rights safeguarding and law enforcement capacity. Reinforced by the new generation of maritime law enforcement vessels, the capacity of China's maritime law enforcement vessels will be significantly improved in terms of overall tonnage, voyage endurance, and functions.


Leaders need to see from multiple perspectives

 Complexity and Control

Jordan Greenhall recently used an interesting metaphor for why we have ended up with hierarchical organisations and leaders who operate from control-based structures in order to manage complexity.

 I’ll quote it in fully here because I doubt I could express it any better:

“Imagine a boat. We are going to row that boat, starting with but one paddle. If you’ve ever learned to canoe, you know that this isn’t simple. There is an art to it. You have to hold the paddle correctly, you have to learn how to put it into the water, how to stroke, how to return. The difference between doing it well and doing it poorly is significant. But, with a little practice, almost everyone can get at least reasonably capable of rowing their canoe.

This is a “management of complexity” problem. The relationship between oar, water, boat and person is complex. All of these systems are feeding back on each other in subtle and hard to predict ways. But the “control capacity” of a standard-issue human is up to the task. The human body, adapted to things like walking upright on two legs and throwing rocks has enough control capacity to manage this level of complexity.

Now add another oar. Generally, even someone experienced with a single paddle takes a little while to get it figured out. In particular, you have to learn how to simplify the problem by constraining some of the degrees of freedom of the paddles. Perhaps you fix the oars to the boat so that they can only traverse a single path. Certainly, you are going to have to make sure that you are paddling both oars in the same rhythm. By getting the oars into “coherence,” you can get the complexity of the problem inside your control capacity.

Coherence is one of the most important concepts in the management of complexity. When you take two systems (two paddles) and synchronize them, you radically simplify the complexity of the overall system. By getting two paddles into coherence, you are able to turn two paddles that you can’t manage into one big paddle that you can manage.

Now add another person to the mix. Side by side — each with one oar. This kicks the complexity up a lot. We are now dealing not only with two oars, we are dealing with two different control structures. And, of course, the only way to get things moving is for the control structures to get into coherence. Fortunately, humans are pretty good at this too. Like dancers or musicians playing together, we have a lot of bandwidth for small group synchrony. Getting into flow together takes some doing, but with a little practice we can manage this complexity.

Now add another ten people into the boat. This is a real problem. The complexity of this overall system exceeds the natural control capacity of “group flow”. Try as you might, it is darn near impossible for a group of twelve people to “self organize” into an effective rowing team.

Unless you put someone in charge.

Add someone to the front of the boat whose job is nothing but synchronizing the whole team (“stroke!”) and reduce everyone else’s job to responding to the signal coming from that leader (“stroke!”) and suddenly the system comes back into control. In effect, you’ve replaced thirteen individuals with one “group of people” and one “leader” in a control hierarchy. This is a radical simplification. As the Greeks and Romans of old discovered, it scales. As long as the people rowing the boat stay inside their box and focus only on doing their job, and as long as the coxswain says in a simple rhythm, you can stack dozens of rowers and get the job done.

Notice what happens here. In particular, notice what has to happen up and down the control hierarchy. The bandwidth (the amount of signal) going up and down the hierarchy has to be extremely simple. (“Stroke!”) Imagine if the rowers had to paddle and converse about where the boat should go. It couldn’t be done. Imagine if the coxswain had to try and control two boats simultaneously. Except in the very rare circumstance that the two boats could be consistently and precisely coherent, it couldn’t be done.”

What struck me immediately was that once there are multiple boats all trying to coordinate then the complexity increases and the various forms of control cease to be as effective. Any number of historic sea battles spring to mind.

Likewise the excellent recent movie Eye In the Sky starring Helen Mirren and the late Alan Rickman. It can be interpreted in terms of the tension between the technical, practical and moral dimensions and the dynamics of power and personality as the situation unfolds in complex and unpredictable ways.

Capacities for Leaders

What fascinates me at the moment is the question of what capacities leaders might need to “find their way about” in situations that are still “in motion” or where they face difficulties or disquiets that are of a more practical and moral nature. The kind of situations that can be contrasted with those simply arise from technical problems that can be solved with accurate problem definition, sufficient information and good decision-making.

What might be the characteristics of “culturally mature” leaders who are capable of operating in emerging, unfinished situations and circumstances in which no-one knows their way about?

An interesting starting point can be found in the work of Charles Johnston who has developed a Cultural Maturity Model. With some colleagues he has articulated some characteristics of culturally mature leadership. Over the next few weeks I’ll consider these suggestions and explore the connections to other stuff I’ve been reading and thinking about. I’ll start here:

“The ability to utilize multiple intelligences. If you wish to successfully address systemic questions, you must be able to access all of yourself as a system. You must draw on your whole self — your body, your imagination, your feelings, and your spirit, as well as your intellect — to effectively understand and effectively lead.”

Perhaps I would change this to refer to multiple “perspectives” or “orientations”. The significance of being able to “access all of yourself”, however, for our ongoing capacity to learn, not just “from” experience, but “within” experiences and situations cannot be underestimated.

In my view the ability to integrate of “1st person” awareness and inquiry with other more familiar forms, is one of the things that will set leaders of the future apart. This, along with the courage to be openly unknowing and vulnerable will be what will galvanise and inspire, especially when we do it intentionally and collectively. We must be able to increasingly draw on multiple perspectives to “read” situations. Perspectives that are familiar and ingrained along with those we are still discovering and learning our way into.

To bring “all of oursleves” to the table we must work on our skills and develop practices and heuristics for reading situations and circumstances in terms of:

Our bodily responses

Our relationships and power dynamics and how we express them in our shared language

Our learned capacities and capabilities

Our goals and purposes and the strategies we adopt to achieve them

Our willingness and capacity to doubt and re-define what we have previous taken for granted

Our capacity for personal, group, organisational/institutional and societal transformation

Our ongoing commitment and willingness to not take ourselves and/or the prevailing view too seriously and to actively seek further de-definition and transformation

In this we will be moving beyond binary “either/or” and complementary “both/and” thinking into something that is both “dialogic” and “polyphonic”.

In the next week or so perhaps you could try an exercise in intentionally applying some or all of these perspectives (particularly any you typically don’t adopt) to a situation you are in by asking some of these questions.

What physical sensation(s) do I experience when I’m in this situation? Where do I feel the situation in my body? What emotions does the situation arouse in me?

Who else is involved in the situation? Imagine the situation is in the centre of the room: What is everyone’s position and stance in relation to the situation? Who has power? What kind? How do they use that power?

What expertise and capacity do I/we have to deal with this situation? What might our expertise/knowledge gaps be? What capacities could/should we develop?

What is my/our sense of what this situation calling for? What does our current thinking suggest we should be trying to achieve here? What other possibilities are there?

After you have done this ask yourself:

What are my anticipations, feelings, intuitions and educated guesses about what will happen next in this situation?

Then as the situation plays out monitor your anticipations, noticing in particular when what happens isn’t quite in sync with what you anticipated.

What do you learn from this noticing?

Adaptive Action and Schroedinger’s Cat

Two articles particularly caught my eye this week. Both are well worth a read.

The first, by Lisa Gill, begins by quoting Margaret Wheatley who suggests that:

“I realised I had been living in a Schroedinger’s cat world in every organisation I had ever been in. Each of these organisations had myriad boxes, drawn in endess renderings of organisational charts. Within each of these boxes lay “a cat,” a human being, rich in potential, whose fate was determined, always and irrevocably, by the act of observation.”

Schroedinger’s cat, of course, refers to the controversial thought experiement related to quantum physics, designed to debunk the idea that in some instances we don’t know the outcome in a situation where there are multiple possible outcomes until we “open the box” and take a look. The debate about this is continuing but the big question remains.

To what extent does our way of observing or measuring something determine what kind of result we will get?

If you like the Big Bang Theory here’s an amusing take on Schroedinger’s Cat (you need to watch to the end).

When I read this I was reminded of a question I had been asked in a conversation the previous day, about why there is so much emphasis at the moment on 360 degree feedback, particularly in public sector organisations. Reading this quote and Lisa’s article led me to wonder about the impact of our “observing” in this particular way and raised a number of questions:

  • How is observing in this way constraining what we can think about people’s competence, or otherwise?
  • To what extent does the nature of our observing determine the kind of outcome we will get?
  • What are the constraints on our observing?
  • How are the outcomes to be understood in context?
  • What other observations could we make? How might they give us an alternative perspective?

The second article, by Dr. Mee-Yan Cheung-Judge, on OD Practitioners and Complex Change, describes a 5 day “laboratory” she and a colleague designed and ran in which they sought to help practitioners experience how to work in an “infinite game” situation.

The idea of an infinite game comes from a book by James Carse in which finite games, that are predictable with defined boundaries and agreed goals and rules about how to succeed, are contrasted with infinite games, with open systems, unpredictable boundaries and unclear or non-existent rules and ways of doing things.

Here’s how Mee-Yan describes what had happened by Day 2 of the laboratory – it’s worth quoting in full:

We saw, first hand, how the unpredictable and complex situation has managed to raise the level of anxiety in a short time, which in turn impacted upon group dynamics (competition, attitude towards authority, the balance between task and maintenance….etc) while the ability of the group to accomplish the task fell significantly. Most delegates felt a level of disorientation that rendered them a bit paralyzed. Instead of choosing to scale up their self-organising ability, they regressed to “please tell us more”, “please explain more”. What surprised the delegates themselves was that in the face of uncertainty, instead of deploying their energy in doing creative work to get themselves out of the sense of stuck-ness, they regressed back to the paradigm that “only if we know more, change could be managed, and we must try harder”.

Following an extensive de-brief with participants and what sounds like a considerable amount of soul-searching he suggests that four questions are important:

  1. How do we teach complex change to clients? I’ve written about this previously.
  2. How do we help both OD practitioners and clients to trust the simple methodological implications from complex change enough to play with them? Jennifer Garvey-Berger and Keith Johnston’s book, Simple Habits for Complex Times is well worth a read on this.
  3. How do we make teaching complex change and working with complex change less challenging?
  4. How do we help all of us to accept that we (OD practitioners) can no longer ride on the identity of being an expert?

It is these last two questions that particularly interest me because they raise this issue of how we relate ourselves to a situation, not so much this time through out way of observing, but through the orientation or action logic we bring and what anticipations this generates.

If, for example, our “teaching” comes from an expert orientation or action-logic it will take a particular form. Likewise, if we orient ourselves to a complex “infinite game” situation from an expert or perhaps even an achievement perspective then the form of our response might be not unlike that of the participants in the laboratory, seeking to find our own form of “control” by developing more and better expertise or needing a greater level of “blueprint” or guidance about what needs to be achieved than is available.

If our orientation or action-logic is more in the realm of re-defining, however, it might be more likely to be characterised by a focus on collaboration, sharper awareness of context, a heightened sense of the contingency of particular actions and a greater awareness of owning a particular perspective while remaining open to it changing in the light of experience. We are also more likely not just to be tolerant of diversity but to engage with difference as a resource for understanding. If we adopt such an orientation and it guides our anticipations we are much more likely to notice and be open to the striking moments that can generate new possibilities. The downside to this is, of course, is that in doing any of it we will almost inevitably challenge group norms and can easily be disregarded or considered something of a maverick.

… those of us who have a need to know and are used to play[ing] a role in predicting what is going on for our organisations and clients will find ourselves paralyzed when we have neither the power of prediction nor the ability to hold onto certainty and be in the know. This impact can be disproportionally tough at the intrapersonal level as our professional identity as an expert and the relevance of our professional beings are being called into question.

It seems to me that this represents a significant developmental question for most of us who seek to lead and support organisations as the challenges they face become increasingly complex. I doubt it will be a challenge that can be addressed within the confines of much of our existing thinking about leadership and organisational development.

In her article Lisa Gill proposes three things that might help an organisation avoid having a Schroedinger’s cat problem:

  • Using alternative tools to liberate people’s potential. Lisa suggests having a look at liberating structures. To explore this more deeply it’s worth exploring Bob Kegan and Lisa Lahey’s work on deliberately developmental organisations.
  • Creating a culture of psychological safety and learning. Lisa suggests reading Amy Edmondson’s book on Teaming. For a sneak peak see this video or a short HBR article on the three pillars of a teaming culture.
  • Presupposing that people are inherently motivated and want to improve. This, of course, is based on the well known idea of the pygmalion effect. For me it also raises the issue of how we orient ourselves to a situation and what action-guiding anticipations that orienting generates.

More later on other things that might also be useful ….

“Feelings of tendency”

Words in their speaking

We don’t just use words and language to name and describe things. More often than not our words are designed to do things: to direct; to evoke; to command; to unsettle and to pacify or calm – and much more!.

As obvious as this may seem, and as central as it is to how we go about our everyday business, we generally have very limited awareness of this aspect of our own involvement in the various circumstances that go to make up the multitude of intersecting worlds we inhabit.

Part of the reason for this low level of awareness is, I suspect, the likelihood that in order to participate in a particular world at all, to be intelligible and able to coordinate actions and activity with others, we must share a way of relating and a language for doing so that doesn’t require constant attention and which can be brought to bear effortlessly. That way we can focus on what we agree is important and we must, therefore, do in the circumstances.

Of great importance in our continuing ability to do this are our anticipations about what will happen next in any language-enabled interchange. When these are largely fulfilled we are able to move forward with ease and confidence and a certain resourcefulness that can often be mistaken for certainty. It’s when these anticipations aren’t fulfilled or perhaps come with subtle variations, that we can be roused out of our entrained ways of working and, as a consequence, see new possibilities.

We don’t however have lots of highly developed practices that keep us alert, ready to notice and respond to these disruptions or ‘striking’ moments. We therefore often go past them, put off for a moment but quickly regaining our composure and, to our disadvantage, plough on as if the mismatch between our anticipation and what actually occurred is some sort of aberration, rather than a clue or a glimpse into the unique nature of this event and these circumstances and the possibilities it holds.

Recommended – Humble Inquiry by Edgar Schein

Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

“Questions are taken for granted rather than given a starring role in the human drama. Yet all my teaching and consulting experience has taught me that what builds a relationship, what solves problems, what moves things forward is asking the right questions.”

“What we choose to ask, when we ask, what our underlying attitude is as we ask—all are key to relationship building, to communication, and to task performance.”

Edgar Schein,

I will do a larger review early in the new year. These quotes are a taster!


Fabio Turchet visiting Pixar, CA

Hello I am Fabio Turchet, a highly motivated and passionate graduate with production experience in the computer graphics industry as Rigging TD, seeking for a research job opportunity. My interests are broad and include: physical simulations, muscle systems, VFX and rigging software development, GPU programming, real-time/offline rendering.

Working knowledge of Autodesk Maya, good knowledge of Houdini and good programming experience gathered both at the university and at work where team work and problem solving skills were further developed.