September 28, 2010
All our lives, we have been taught that if our actions cause harm to another, we ought to apologise.
Without a true feeling of regret, words mean nothing. Without the spoken words, the wronged person can never know that a feeling of regret even exists.
Without willing, unforced action taken to mend the wrong, words and feelings alike are meaningless.
That every act we take has consequences is as inevitable as the tides: yet unforced actions taken willingly to mend a previous wrong, without righteousness and without resentment, have much more weight than consequences forced upon us.
Regret, and apology, and willing action to undo the wrong. Together, they make up the three sorrys.
Perhaps one day we can come to accept that consequences are as much a part of the action as breathing, something to be understood and embraced as a part of the action and not something to be feared and avoided at all costs. Perhaps one day we will be willing to understand the difference between a briefly gratifying short-term gain and a long-term perspective on that gain, knowing with certainty that, had we the emotional awareness of today but the same limited information as we had at the time, we would still have taken exactly the same road. There will always be difficult choices: but perhaps one day we may have the wisdom to appreciate the human consequences of our actions, to see things always from the other's perspective, to know ourselves and be true to that knowing -- to avoid those actions which cause sorrow and are unnecessary, to take those actions we understand to be necessary with sorrow but without regret, and thus never to take an action that we will have to regret later.
Until that day, we have the three sorrys.
Without a true feeling of regret, words mean nothing. Without the spoken words, the wronged person can never know that a feeling of regret even exists.
Without willing, unforced action taken to mend the wrong, words and feelings alike are meaningless.
That every act we take has consequences is as inevitable as the tides: yet unforced actions taken willingly to mend a previous wrong, without righteousness and without resentment, have much more weight than consequences forced upon us.
Regret, and apology, and willing action to undo the wrong. Together, they make up the three sorrys.
Perhaps one day we can come to accept that consequences are as much a part of the action as breathing, something to be understood and embraced as a part of the action and not something to be feared and avoided at all costs. Perhaps one day we will be willing to understand the difference between a briefly gratifying short-term gain and a long-term perspective on that gain, knowing with certainty that, had we the emotional awareness of today but the same limited information as we had at the time, we would still have taken exactly the same road. There will always be difficult choices: but perhaps one day we may have the wisdom to appreciate the human consequences of our actions, to see things always from the other's perspective, to know ourselves and be true to that knowing -- to avoid those actions which cause sorrow and are unnecessary, to take those actions we understand to be necessary with sorrow but without regret, and thus never to take an action that we will have to regret later.
Until that day, we have the three sorrys.
September 24, 2010
English translation from the official Nobel Prize website
I, the undersigned, Alfred Bernhard Nobel, do hereby, after mature deliberation, declare the following to be my last Will and Testament with respect to such property as may be left by me at the time of my death:
To my nephews, Hjalmar and Ludvig Nobel, the sons of my brother Robert Nobel, I bequeath the sum of Two Hundred Thousand Crowns each;
To my nephew Emanuel Nobel, the sum of Three Hundred Thousand, and to my niece Mina Nobel, One Hundred Thousand Crowns;
To my brother Robert Nobel's daughters, Ingeborg and Tyra, the sum of One Hundred Thousand Crowns each;
Miss Olga Boettger, at present staying with Mrs Brand, 10 Rue St Florentin, Paris, will receive One Hundred Thousand Francs;
Mrs Sofie Kapy von Kapivar, whose address is known to the Anglo-Oesterreichische Bank in Vienna, is hereby entitled to an annuity of 6000 Florins Ö.W. which is paid to her by the said Bank, and to this end I have deposited in this Bank the amount of 150,000 Fl. in Hungarian State Bonds;
Mr Alarik Liedbeck, presently living at 26 Sturegatan, Stockholm, will receive One Hundred Thousand Crowns;
Miss Elise Antun, presently living at 32 Rue de Lubeck, Paris, is entitled to an annuity of Two Thousand Five Hundred Francs. In addition, Forty Eight Thousand Francs owned by her are at present in my custody, and shall be refunded;
Mr Alfred Hammond, Waterford, Texas, U.S.A. will receive Ten Thousand Dollars;
The Misses Emy and Marie Winkelmann, Potsdamerstrasse, 51, Berlin, will receive Fifty Thousand Marks each;
Mrs Gaucher, 2 bis Boulevard du Viaduc, Nimes, France will receive One Hundred Thousand Francs;
My servants, Auguste Oswald and his wife Alphonse Tournand, employed in my laboratory at San Remo, will each receive an annuity of One Thousand Francs;
My former servant, Joseph Girardot, 5, Place St. Laurent, Châlons sur Saône, is entitled to an annuity of Five Hundred Francs, and my former gardener, Jean Lecof, at present with Mrs Desoutter, receveur Curaliste, Mesnil, Aubry pour Ecouen, S.& O., France, will receive an annuity of Three Hundred Francs;
Mr Georges Fehrenbach, 2, Rue Compiègne, Paris, is entitled to an annual pension of Five Thousand Francs from January 1, 1896 to January 1, 1899, when the said pension shall discontinue;
A sum of Twenty Thousand Crowns each, which has been placed in my custody, is the property of my brother's children, Hjalmar, Ludvig, Ingeborg and Tyra, and shall be repaid to them.
The whole of my remaining realizable estate shall be dealt with in the following way: the capital, invested in safe securities by my executors, shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind. The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts, which shall be apportioned as follows: one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics; one part to the person who shall have made the most important chemical discovery or improvement; one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine; one part to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction; and one part to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses. The prizes for physics and chemistry shall be awarded by the Swedish Academy of Sciences; that for physiological or medical work by the Caroline Institute in Stockholm; that for literature by the Academy in Stockholm, and that for champions of peace by a committee of five persons to be elected by the Norwegian Storting. It is my express wish that in awarding the prizes no consideration whatever shall be given to the nationality of the candidates, but that the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be a Scandinavian or not.
As Executors of my testamentary dispositions, I hereby appoint Mr Ragnar Sohlman, resident at Bofors, Värmland, and Mr Rudolf Lilljequist, 31 Malmskillnadsgatan, Stockholm, and at Bengtsfors near Uddevalla. To compensate for their pains and attention, I grant to Mr Ragnar Sohlman, who will presumably have to devote most time to this matter, One Hundred Thousand Crowns, and to Mr Rudolf Lilljequist, Fifty Thousand Crowns;
At the present time, my property consists in part of real estate in Paris and San Remo, and in part of securities deposited as follows: with The Union Bank of Scotland Ltd in Glasgow and London, Le Crédit Lyonnais, Comptoir National d'Escompte, and with Alphen Messin & Co. in Paris; with the stockbroker M.V. Peter of Banque Transatlantique, also in Paris; with Direction der Disconto Gesellschaft and Joseph Goldschmidt & Cie, Berlin; with the Russian Central Bank, and with Mr Emanuel Nobel in Petersburg; with Skandinaviska Kredit Aktiebolaget in Gothenburg and Stockholm, and in my strong-box at 59, Avenue Malakoff, Paris; further to this are accounts receivable, patents, patent fees or so-called royalties etc. in connection with which my Executors will find full information in my papers and books.
This Will and Testament is up to now the only one valid, and revokes all my previous testamentary dispositions, should any such exist after my death.
Finally, it is my express wish that following my death my veins shall be opened, and when this has been done and competent Doctors have confirmed clear signs of death, my remains shall be cremated in a so-called crematorium.
Paris, 27 November, 1895
Alfred Bernhard Nobel
September 21, 2010
He who hesitates wakes up to a damp slipper (courtesy of the dog having thoroughly licked it out).
September 16, 2010
Twenty-three years ago on this date, 196 nation-states committed to ending ozone depletion by phasing out the use of chloroflurocarbons (CFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs). The CFC Phase-Out Management Plan is complete: CFCs can no longer be found anywhere in the commercial market. The HCFC Phase-Out Management Plan is scheduled to begin in earnest in 2013, with phasing out to be completed by 2030.
The Montréal Protocol may be the most successful environmental treaty ever created. Thus far, the global CFC reductions have resulted in a 10% drop in the (atmospheric) effective equivalent chlorine level between the 1994 peak and 2008. This is still a drop in the bucket: yet it is enough that the ozone layer is now finally starting to stabilise. Ozone depletion has not yet stopped, but it is slowing down. A statistically significant turnaround may even be detectable by as early as 2024. We can't expect it to be a fast thing: a single chlorine atom can keep on destroying up to 100,000 ozone molecules for as much as two years. If we continue along this track, we can hope for ozone levels to return to 1980 levels by around 2070: nearly eighty years of CFC-free recovery to balance out a single decade of careless CFC use.
(Back in those days, our weather forecasts did not include UV warnings; and we did not have to rely on sunscreen to protect us from our own native sun.)
It will take even longer for our ozone layer to return to its pre-CFC state. CFCs can survive intact for up to a century before they finally react with ultraviolet light to break down and, in the process, release those deadly chlorine atoms in the upper atmosphere. Some models predict that it will be a hundred and fifty years before the ozone "hole" over Antarctica ceases to exist.
We take this connection for granted today: but it took decades of research and argument to convince others that human-created CFCs were indeed having any kind of significant environmental impact. Frank Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina were the first to connect the known reaction between chlorine and ozone with CFCs. Their 1974 seminal paper eventually won them the 1995 Nobel Prize for Chemistry: but not before strong opposition by DuPont almost quashed follow-up research. The findings were commonly dismissed as utter nonsense. At one point, Rowland nearly lost his job over his public statements.
Even then, the primary argument against the link between CFCs and atmospheric ozone loss was that natural sources of clorine far outweighed any human effect. It is true that natural sources of tropospheric chlorine are as much as five times greater than manmade sources. Yet for the ozone layer, only stratospheric chlorine levels matter: and there the reverse is true, since the levels of stratospheric chlorine depend on the kinds of long-lived chlorine compounds not seen in nature. The only stratospheric halocarbon which has a predominantly natural source is methyl chloride: and it is responsible only for 20% of all stratospheric chlorine.
Yet the 1970s was also a time when many environmental skeletons were beginning to surface, even against strong scientific, economic, and political opposition: a growing awareness that would culminate in the 1980 creation of Superfund sites. The DDT environmental hazards, known since the 1940s, had been made public and popular knowledge through Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring: but the book only put into words and reasons the declines in bald eagle and peregrine falcon populations that people had already been starting to notice. Cleveland's Cuyahoga river had just caught fire yet again for at least the thirteenth time: [i]Times[/i], covering the 1969 fire, described it as the river in which a person "does not drown but decays." Although the Love Canal debaucle was yet to surface, people could see the high incidence of birth defects and illnesses in the region for themselves. At the same time, the 1974 Watergate scandal shook the public's faith in beneficent authority.
Rowland and Molina were taken seriously enough that they were invited to testify before the United States House of Representatives in December 1974: which led to public funding to examine the findings. The essential validity of the hypothesis was confirmed by the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1976. Related research continued for most of the next decade: fought at every step by DuPont.
Possibly it might have stayed there, even with all the growing evidence showing a clear and growing danger. After all, the ozone layer is a long way away; and long-term solutions are never politically popular. As long as it was still functioning, the problem was not immediate, not the way a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was, let alone a new theocracy and the national shock of the United States embassy in Iran being taken hostage. Jimmy Carter was out. (Sayyed Ruhollah Khomeini carefully timed the release of the hostages to ensure it.) Reaganomics was in.
In 1985, the British Antarctic Survey discovered the first "hole" in the ozone layer over Antarctica. Shortly afterward, a second hole was discovered near the north magnetic pole -- which placed it over inhabited land.
Even then, after most of the major CFC-producing nations had recognised the sudden immediacy of the problem and signed the Vienna Convention (the immediate precursor of the Montréal Protocol), DuPont was still running a public relations campaign of resistance. Again, the language coming from DuPont's Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy might seem very familiar: the science was still "too uncertain" to justify any change in policy. As late as 1987, DuPont representatives testified before the United States Congress that there was "no immediate crisis that demands unilateral regulation." Even today, echoes can still be heard of DuPont's blurring between the natural ozone cycle, which annually reduces polar ozone by some 30%, and the depletions caused by CFCs, which follow a completely different pattern and reduce the natural low by half again.
Had the various governments of the world taken DuPont at its word and seen no reason to change: where would we be now?
The Montréal Protocol may be the most successful environmental treaty ever created. Thus far, the global CFC reductions have resulted in a 10% drop in the (atmospheric) effective equivalent chlorine level between the 1994 peak and 2008. This is still a drop in the bucket: yet it is enough that the ozone layer is now finally starting to stabilise. Ozone depletion has not yet stopped, but it is slowing down. A statistically significant turnaround may even be detectable by as early as 2024. We can't expect it to be a fast thing: a single chlorine atom can keep on destroying up to 100,000 ozone molecules for as much as two years. If we continue along this track, we can hope for ozone levels to return to 1980 levels by around 2070: nearly eighty years of CFC-free recovery to balance out a single decade of careless CFC use.
(Back in those days, our weather forecasts did not include UV warnings; and we did not have to rely on sunscreen to protect us from our own native sun.)
It will take even longer for our ozone layer to return to its pre-CFC state. CFCs can survive intact for up to a century before they finally react with ultraviolet light to break down and, in the process, release those deadly chlorine atoms in the upper atmosphere. Some models predict that it will be a hundred and fifty years before the ozone "hole" over Antarctica ceases to exist.
We take this connection for granted today: but it took decades of research and argument to convince others that human-created CFCs were indeed having any kind of significant environmental impact. Frank Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina were the first to connect the known reaction between chlorine and ozone with CFCs. Their 1974 seminal paper eventually won them the 1995 Nobel Prize for Chemistry: but not before strong opposition by DuPont almost quashed follow-up research. The findings were commonly dismissed as utter nonsense. At one point, Rowland nearly lost his job over his public statements.
Even then, the primary argument against the link between CFCs and atmospheric ozone loss was that natural sources of clorine far outweighed any human effect. It is true that natural sources of tropospheric chlorine are as much as five times greater than manmade sources. Yet for the ozone layer, only stratospheric chlorine levels matter: and there the reverse is true, since the levels of stratospheric chlorine depend on the kinds of long-lived chlorine compounds not seen in nature. The only stratospheric halocarbon which has a predominantly natural source is methyl chloride: and it is responsible only for 20% of all stratospheric chlorine.
Yet the 1970s was also a time when many environmental skeletons were beginning to surface, even against strong scientific, economic, and political opposition: a growing awareness that would culminate in the 1980 creation of Superfund sites. The DDT environmental hazards, known since the 1940s, had been made public and popular knowledge through Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring: but the book only put into words and reasons the declines in bald eagle and peregrine falcon populations that people had already been starting to notice. Cleveland's Cuyahoga river had just caught fire yet again for at least the thirteenth time: [i]Times[/i], covering the 1969 fire, described it as the river in which a person "does not drown but decays." Although the Love Canal debaucle was yet to surface, people could see the high incidence of birth defects and illnesses in the region for themselves. At the same time, the 1974 Watergate scandal shook the public's faith in beneficent authority.
Rowland and Molina were taken seriously enough that they were invited to testify before the United States House of Representatives in December 1974: which led to public funding to examine the findings. The essential validity of the hypothesis was confirmed by the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1976. Related research continued for most of the next decade: fought at every step by DuPont.
Possibly it might have stayed there, even with all the growing evidence showing a clear and growing danger. After all, the ozone layer is a long way away; and long-term solutions are never politically popular. As long as it was still functioning, the problem was not immediate, not the way a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was, let alone a new theocracy and the national shock of the United States embassy in Iran being taken hostage. Jimmy Carter was out. (Sayyed Ruhollah Khomeini carefully timed the release of the hostages to ensure it.) Reaganomics was in.
In 1985, the British Antarctic Survey discovered the first "hole" in the ozone layer over Antarctica. Shortly afterward, a second hole was discovered near the north magnetic pole -- which placed it over inhabited land.
Even then, after most of the major CFC-producing nations had recognised the sudden immediacy of the problem and signed the Vienna Convention (the immediate precursor of the Montréal Protocol), DuPont was still running a public relations campaign of resistance. Again, the language coming from DuPont's Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy might seem very familiar: the science was still "too uncertain" to justify any change in policy. As late as 1987, DuPont representatives testified before the United States Congress that there was "no immediate crisis that demands unilateral regulation." Even today, echoes can still be heard of DuPont's blurring between the natural ozone cycle, which annually reduces polar ozone by some 30%, and the depletions caused by CFCs, which follow a completely different pattern and reduce the natural low by half again.
Had the various governments of the world taken DuPont at its word and seen no reason to change: where would we be now?
September 09, 2010
Sunset is sweeping the world from east to west, bringing Ramadan to an end and heralding the joyous Muslim holiday of Eid ul-Fitr, a holiday bearing a similar emotional weight to the Chinese New Year or the Christian Christmas. Once again this year, family and friends will come together over large parties, children, gifts, and lots and lots of food.
Because the Islamic calendar is lunar, its dates shift from year to year relative to the Gregorian calendar. This year, this particular Eid has an unfortunate coincidence of dates.
Respecting this coincidence, in western countries the celebrants will do their best to keep their celebrating low-key and indoors, even though on this day, prayer and celebration alike are usually conducted in large, open spaces. (Imagine having to do the same with Christmas!) In countries where the Muslim religion predominates, the celebrations will be proportionately more visibly joyous. In many of them, Eid ul-Fitr is a national holiday.
The circumstances are ripe for misunderstanding: but we can choose instead to understand and to appreciate these special community holidays, no matter the form they take. We all partake in them. How can we not, when we are all humans alike, with friends and with family? So why not focus on a celebration of a special time of year with family and friends instead of on an unfortunate coincidence of dates?
Should you happen to hear of celebration in the news or see public celebration over the next three days, please remember: it is Eid, after all.
Because the Islamic calendar is lunar, its dates shift from year to year relative to the Gregorian calendar. This year, this particular Eid has an unfortunate coincidence of dates.
Respecting this coincidence, in western countries the celebrants will do their best to keep their celebrating low-key and indoors, even though on this day, prayer and celebration alike are usually conducted in large, open spaces. (Imagine having to do the same with Christmas!) In countries where the Muslim religion predominates, the celebrations will be proportionately more visibly joyous. In many of them, Eid ul-Fitr is a national holiday.
The circumstances are ripe for misunderstanding: but we can choose instead to understand and to appreciate these special community holidays, no matter the form they take. We all partake in them. How can we not, when we are all humans alike, with friends and with family? So why not focus on a celebration of a special time of year with family and friends instead of on an unfortunate coincidence of dates?
Should you happen to hear of celebration in the news or see public celebration over the next three days, please remember: it is Eid, after all.
