"Clouds" by Mahendra (Speedy) Gonsalkorale

I have been indulging in some creative activity. I have always been fascinated 

by clouds and here is my effort to communicate my feelings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8LEd21t4DA  

Speedy

METROSIDEROS EXCELSA - Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

 

Here’s my promise of several moons ago to Sumathi that I would send photos of the Pohutukawas when they are in bloom.The delicate blossoms open close to Christmas, coloring the New Zealand coastline a brilliant red- hence also referred to as the New Zealand Christmas trees.

I would like to take this opportunity to wish all our batchmates a Very happy festive season, together with good health and happiness in the new year.

                    Cheers

Rohini

Sent by Rohini Anandaraja

The Sunset - Nature's Art with a Message

From today's Island newspaper. Published on the blog earlier, but what appears below is a modified version.

January 5, 2019, 6:17 pm

By Dr. Nihal D. Amerasekera 

"Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty if only we have the eyes to see them." — John Ruskin

I have often wondered why sunsets being a natural phenomenon occurring everyday evoke such intense passion and emotion. Is it the crimson glow that mesmerise us?  But we never pine for the day that’s gone! The combination of the sun, the clouds and their reflection on the water gives the sunset a magical status.  Light reflecting from the setting sun behind a city skyline or a distant mountain, with bright orange hues are a magnificent spectacle of mystical charm. I am reminded of Rabindranath Tagore’s poem "Stray Birds"

"Clouds come floating into my life,

no longer to carry rain or usher storm,

but to add colour to my sunset sky."

There is something very soothing for the soul in looking at the sky. When darkness overcomes us we tend to look to the skies. Tagore’s message is something to remember when we behold those enchanting sunsets in the midst of tough times.

Sunsets mirror our lives in many ways. They are transient. Although unfailingly regular it’s never the same in appearance even at the same venue. So much like our own lives changing from day to day and from year to year, sometimes the ‘clouds’ hiding the beauty within.

Sunset ushers in the end of the day and the conclusion of our toils. It brings on the silence of the night and the peace that comes with it.  During my sojourn in Arabia I found the Muhsin’s melodious evening call for prayer from his minaret, hypnotic, as the sunset across the ever-changing sand dunes. I grew up living opposite a church in Nugegoda. Every evening at 6 pm the church bells rang rhythmically and gave us kids a clue it is time to wind down and find refuge in our homes. This reminds me of Gray’s Elegy written in a Country Churchyard.

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,

The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

By Thomas Gray (1716-1771)

Despite its beauty Sunset ushers in the dusk, darkness and drawbacks. It is true people don’t fear the darkness of the night as they used to. In the tropics, the night energisers hordes of mosquitoes to torment us in waves! Worldwide it is a busy time for thieves and burglars to earn their living, leaving behind a catalogue of grief.

Sunsets we have stored in our memories are linked to places and people. In 1962 my parents lived in Weligama. It was a daily ritual to visit the Rest House to see the setting sun and watch the fishing boats with their flickering lamps disappear into the horizon. This also brings back the joys of my youth when I had all my life before me. It is a reminder of the time spent with my parents and their infinite love and care. When my best friend was a doctor in Hingurakgoda in 1971, I spent a weekend with him. One evening we sat on the bund of the Minneriya Tank watching the sun go down. The sky was orange with a dazzlingly beautiful cloud formation. There were flocks of geese flying in V- formation while a multitude of bats were taking to the skies. I remember with such clarity hearing a lone bamboo flute playing the haunting melody of "Ranwan Karalin Pasila" made famous by Susil Premaratne. It was a sublime experience. Sadly, my friend and his wife are no more and my parents too have now crossed the vale. But I will cherish these effusive memories forever.

I am born a dreamer. Once it nearly cost me my life. I was living at the Jeewaka Medical Hostel in 1966 and was preparing for the "finals". It was a comfortable but humble dwelling on Turret Road. After a long afternoon of study, I walked to the Colpetty beach with a friend, to sit on a rock and watch the sunset. We often talked about things spiritual to relax and unwind. As darkness fell we started to walk back, deep in thought. When I was about to cross the railway line, my friend pulled me back with great force - and I saw the train go whizzing past me. I could feel the heat of the steam and coal and was just inches away from a certain death.

It must be the diurnal variations caused by our hormones which make us more serene and emotional past sunset and a lot more amorous and sensual too. With all its beauty, sunset ushers in a seedy aspect to life and none more graphic than the wartime music of Marlene Dietrich, then a symbol of sophistication and titillation. These were popular when WWII was raging. The song ‘Lili Marlene’ conjures up images of a young lady waiting under a gas street lamp for her Army lover to return.

Underneath the lantern

By the barrack gate

Darling I remember

The way you used to wait

‘Twas there that you whispered tenderly

That you loved me

You’d always be ………

My Lili of the lamplight

My own Lili Marlene

Everything that has a beginning also has an end. For the light of the day, sunset is its end. It is a reminder for us all of our own mortality and also a memory of those who have gone before us. It enlightens us to use our time wisely and to keep our thoughts calm and peaceful. For us older folk, these are our sunset years. The simple thought that we leave this earth as we came, with nothing, appeals to our generosity and altruism.

In my retirement I made a special attempt to see the places I’ve always wanted to see. I recall with much nostalgia the sunset at Angkor Wat seen from the top of the thousand year old temple. It is now being restored by the Cambodian government. The southern hemisphere has its own beguiling sunsets. Gordon’s Bay sheltered by the Helderberg mountains in Cape town provides a wonderful vantage point to watch the sunset knowing well there is no land beyond its horizon before the South Pole. South America is unlike anywhere else on earth for its climate, mood and scenery. Sunsets across the breath-taking landscape of the Atacama Desert showing the reflections of the sky on the sand dunes is stunning. The kaleidoscope of vivid colours at sunset seen across the Magellan straits in Punta Arenas in Chile is an awesome spectacle that will remain with me forever.

I have kept the best for the last. A visit to Agra is a unique experience as it unravels its enigmatic mysteries of the Mughal Empire. The sad story of the Taj Mahal has resonated through history and its magical beauty fails to hide its grief and torment. The sunset beyond the Yamuna river with the shiny white marble of the Taj Mahal as a back drop is a sight fit for the Gods.

My grateful thanks go to my parents for taking me to watch this nature’s beauty as a child. My life was enriched by the sunsets I saw from the historical elegance of the Ramparts in Galle, the splendour of the Galle Face Green and by the weathered rocks near the New Rest House in Negombo. Although I preferred to suck Aleric’s Ice Cream and chase frolicking brown crabs in the sand, the sunsets have left a lasting impression on my psyche to bring peace to my soul

.I dedicate this note to my parents as they lie in the Churchyard of St Mary and St John in Nugegoda listening to the tolling of Church Bells, in calm silence. May their Souls Rest in Peace.

Meanwhile the sun will continue to rise and set until the end of time.

The End of Scarcity.

The End of Scarcity.

A thought provoking article by Zita Subasinghe Perera based on a BBC Radio 4 programme.¹

The end of scarcity, want, poverty, shortfall, deficiency? I know the above pronouncement will catch the eye of any human being. But it’s exactly the meaning behind a talk on this subject by James Burke on 26-12-2017 on BBC Radio 4. I listened to the recorded version twice as I was fascinated by the idea and now I am sharing it with you as it is thought provoking and it is not too far-fetched. Well, let me get on with it. The idea is one we are familiar with: The present state of science, technology and the advancements during the past, nearly 150 years of industrial revolution, has provided us the means to live without ‘want’. The principle of Mr Burke’s thesis is that ‘necessity sparks, sets off and keeps in motion, Innovation’. So, the lack of ‘Want’ can spell the end of Innovation.

Happily, the first WW in the early 20^th Century gave a spurt of energy to advancement in ‘Innovation’. The piston pump was replaced by the rotary pump, a Glasgow University repairman being credited with this. WW2 in the mid 20^th century gave rise to the need for units like ‘ladies who calculated the angle at which a shot has to be fired to hit the enemy target’ and at that time they were called ‘computers’.

The first mechanical Computer

And now in the mid to late 20^th century, the innovative geniuses produced the first ‘computer,’ a machine to handle the multiple calculations which were earlier done by the ladies of WW1.Mr Burke refersto this as ‘the intention to give humans a means to do complex activities in a very short time and expense.’

Big Data

The computer has the ability to hold big numbers- called Big Data which big companies use for ‘predictive analyses. Big Data leaves a footprint whenever and wherever we do something ‘online’ and companies use this to send us adverts and pressurise us to buy stuff. Big data uses our smart phones in our pockets to learn where we are and prompt us what to buy things and even the payment can be done instantaneously by connecting us to our bank accounts. It happens already in certain Big Stores the whole process being calledGrab and Go.

The Start of the end of Scarcity

In the 1950s they were able to predict that if we went on with ‘business as usual ‘and scarcity gradually ended we’ll face economic collapse by the end of the 21^st century as the stimulus of Scarcity to bring about Innovation would not be there. Early to Mid 20^th C saw the start of over population, industrialisation, starvation and resource depletion driven by our consumer life style. The international political reaction to this was putting the brakes on fossil fuels and cutting back on urban expansion and industrialisation, almost Apocalypse Now!

Making machines smaller the answer?

Fortunately, the innovative thinker in the form of Nobel Prize winner Richard Fyneman comes to the fore. He thought the answer is to make machines as small as possible. It turns out that it is possible to make each ‘bit’ (a piece of info) as small as one atom long. It took a while to get things moving but in 1987 two IBM ers invented the scanning, tunnelling microscope to make molecules. There are ‘gazillions of molecules everywhere, an inexhaustible resource’. Using this new device, one could put atoms and molecules together and you could produce anything you want even a cup of tea! These machines were in nanometres (the width of a hair is 80 nanometres.) This Nano processor is also called a moat a word derived from a ‘moat of dust’ as that is the size of this machine!

Nanoproducts and Nanotechnology

These products, called Nano-products, are already being made in about 2000 labs around the world! Nano particles are found in cosmetics, bacterial bandaging and wrinkle free, water-proof clothing. Using a Nano processor,one could ‘stick the end of a straw into dirty water and drink clean water at the other end’. Nano technology can be used to produce solar cells enabling the consumerisation of the 8 billion people of the earth in one giant economy therefore costing no fuel but just the energy of the sun in the solar cell. Many big Institutes around the world are working flat out to achieve this.

Replication

 Like in ‘Star Trek’ we are making the road map to Replication, i.e. to replicate anything. You can call this ‘merging computation and communication with fabrication to bring the programmability of the digital world over to our analogue world’. But remember, you are making what you CAN make and not what you NEED to make. And you can end up with a surplus.

Digitising designs and materials.

So, as told above, onecan digitise designs.

The next is to digitise materials using elements H, O, C, N and 20 amino acids. That is all you need. This is anyway what man has done in the past 4 billion years or so of evolution. Difference? Now it will be so much faster. These machines called moats do away with the need to cultivate the land and harvest or work in factories. It’s all there in a machine at atomic level giving you all you need. And all you need to do is talk to it. Yes, you actually ‘talk to it’. Science fiction? No! It’s Fact and it happens now!

End of Innovation and Isolation of man

The problem is that the End of Scarcity spells the End of Innovation, stand- still and isolation of man.  Family is not necessary, under this scheme. Socialisation? No! You can have your grandma and your pals and treat them to a slap-up dinner. You can tell your Moat and it will enable you to talk to them and they will come as 3D holograms so real that you forget they are not. You’ll never be lonely or bored.

Spending time with Nature

Want to visit the countryside? You can create it where you are, with all the features you want, a river, a farm, anything you like. All you do is tell your moat to do it. Sounds like winning the lottery? Well Yes and No! Read on and you will see the reason.

What’s awaiting mankind

You send a Nano factory to every city country and village and they make all the extra ones they need and make one available to every family, even every individual. There would be no need for money, or a job, no need for taxes, in fact, no need for governments as what they do is spend our tax money to maintain the infrastructure.

Education and Health?

Moats controlling the medical devices made at home can look after health. As for Education: education for what? In today’s world with robots taking over our jobs, and education is to make us creative, one can ask, creative for what purpose?

Culture

What about the culture we shared? Well, we’ll never again need to group together to survive.

Abundance

We know how to deal with scarcity, i.e. Innovate! But abundance? We have little experience of that. But all this will take no more than 50 years to hit us. Is all this a figment of the imagination? Well, even if some of it happens to be, surely, we ought to think about it?

The final outcome

In the popular joke, a man drops from the top of a sky scraper and as he is passing the 50^th floor you ask him how he’s doing. And he says ‘So far so good!’ But you know ‘hitting the bottom’ is not far away!

-          The End!-

Reference:1. James Burk (B B C Radio 4 on 26 12 2017) End of Scarcity

Earth.... our only home

Sent in by Cyril Ernest. Embellished by Mahendra Gonsalkorale

I think most of us know Carl Sagan, American astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, science populariser, and science communicator in astronomy and other natural sciences, born in 1934 died in 1996.  This is the script of the video.

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.” 

― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.

More on whales - Super pods of sperm whales put on marine spectacle

From the Sunday Times of April 2nd, 2017.

Super pods of sperm whales put on marine spectacle

News

Super pods of sperm whales put on marine spectacle

By Malaka Rodrigo

View(s): 885

The eight-strong orca pod get ready to charge towards the sperm whales. Pix courtessy Andrew Sutton

While observing a super pod of nearly 100 sperm whales, marine mammal expert Ranil Nanayakkara witnessed a rare occasion when killer whales attacked the marine giants in the seas off Kalpitiya. It was an epic battle.

Sri Lanka is famous for wildlife spectacles such as this along with the largest gathering of Asian elephants, huge pods of blue whales and rare sightings of leopards.

One spectacle in the making is super pods of sperm whales (physeter microcephalus). The sperm while is the largest ‘toothed whale’ which can dive to depths of 3,200 feet in search of its favourite food – the giant squid. Female sperm whales and their calves live in pods of 15-20 members, while males tend to roam alone in cooler waters closer to polar regions. A super pod of whales is formed when such smaller pods gather for feeding, socialising or mating. March to April seems to be the time such super pods form and in 2012 the largest such gathering consisting of over 100 individuals was recorded.

Marine biologist Ranil Nanayakkara who has studied the sperm whale super pods from 2010, left Kalpitiya shores on March 23 to scan the ocean specially for sperm whales. It turned out to be their lucky day when they witnessed the sperm whale super pod about 15 nautical miles from Kalpitiya at 9.15 am after travelling for about one hour. “There were over 150 sperm whales on the ocean of around one kilometre. The super pod we saw consisted of 50 to 60 individuals,’’ Nanayakkara said.

Together with Ranil, British author Philip Hoare and photographer Andrew Sutton were on the boat and it was a show of a life time. The larger sperm whale males had joined the super pod and they witnessed love making on a massive scale. The team witnessed foreplay — rubbing against each other, tail slapping, spy hopping, rolling over. Even researchers could see the animals’ aroused genitals and as they watched, a pair swam belly to belly under the boat.

The sperm whale is also famous for making sounds. It makes the loudest sounds of any animal and also emits morse-like “codas” used to communicate long distances. The sea is full of sound as well and Nanayakkara was listening to these codas using special ear phones.

The ocean was like an opera, said Nanayakkara.

A large male sperm whale that came to rescue the weaker pod

They observed a large male deviate from the super pod and swim rapidly northward. “When a sperm whale swims fast, its large head stays out of the water – so we could clearly say it was in a great hurry. Then several other large males started following the first one. Seeing several large male sperm whales moving northward we thought it could be an aggression related to mating, so we followed them,” Nanayakkara explained.

After travelling two or three kilometres, the team found the large males with a pod of about 10 females with younger whales. The males packed their bodies tightly and it was like several logs stacked tightly. The men in the boat also saw something else. One person in the boat alerted the others to a dolphin but to their surprise it was the unmistakable dorsal fin of an orca. The sperm whales had rushed to protect the pod that came under attack by the orcas.

The black and white orca (orcinus orca), is a mid-sized toothed whale. it is the largest member of the dolphin family and became a popular after being featured in the movie ‘Free Willy’. But the orca is not an innocent animal as it is an agile predator in the ocean also known as the ‘killer whale’.

“It was a pod of about eight orcas attacking a weaker maternity pod. The large males would have heard the distress call and had rushed to protect them. The males packed their bodies side by side tightly guarding the weaker whales from the predatory orcas,” Nanayakkara said. The water around the smaller pod was cloudy with orangish whale poop – a defense mechanism used by the distressed whales to conceal themselves from the predators.

Killer whale attacks on other whales have been reported on a handful of occasions previously. Working as a team, they usually challenge the weaker female or a calf to hunt it down. According to Nanayakkara, the orcas found in our waters is transient and they are born hunters.

“We had also observed an amazing communal defense mechanism used by the sperm whales where the males encircle the weaker females and young putting their bodies in front of the attacking killer whales,” Nanayakkara said. This is a known as the “marguerite formation”, named after the shape of the flower by that name. In this formation, the heavy and powerful tail of an adult whale is pointed outward, readying to deliver lethal blows to any incoming attacker.

Ranil Nanayakkara Listening to the songs of sperm whales

The researchers also experienced a somewhat scary experience. Since the marguerite formation was not effective, the whales started using the boat as a cover to avoid the orcas. They moved to the other side of the boat when the orcas charged and a collision could have been dangerous.

This ‘battle of the titans’ dragged on for more than an hour. The sperm whales finally made the orcas give up. Nanayakkara said there were about 20 killer whales at that time and it could also be the largest orca pod seen in Sri Lankan waters.

Nanayakkara said it was one of the amazing moments he had witnessed in his whole life.

Know the sperm whaleThe head of the whale contains a liquid wax called spermaceti, from which the whale derives its name. Spermaceti was used in lubricants, oil lamps, and candles. Scientists have yet to understand its function, but believe it may help the animal regulate its buoyancy. Some also believe that the spermaceti has bio-acoustical amplification properties, enabling the whale to produce the loudest sounds of any animal.Mature males average 16 metres (52 ft) in length but some may reach 20.5 metres (67 ft), with the head representing up to one-third of the animal’s length. Capable of plunging to 2,250 metres (7,382 ft), it is the second deepest diving mammal, following only the Cuvier’s beaked whale. The sperm whale’s clicking vocalisation, a form of echolocation and communication, may be as loud as 230 decibels under water. The sperm whale has the largest brain of any animal on Earth, more than five times heavier than a human’s. Sperm whales can live for more than 60 years according to sources on the Web.Ambergris, a waste product from its digestive system, is still used as a fixative in perfumes.

Drama in the high seas off Kalpitiya

Sent in by Srianee Dias

Hi Lucky,

This link was sent to me by one of my younger relatives.  It is a series of outstanding photographs taken in the ocean off Kalpitiya.  The photos document a confrontation between Orcas (called 'killer whales' but in actuality the largest species of the dolphin family) and whales. There is also a narrative accompanying the photos that explains the drama.  I have been on a few whale watching trips in the USA, both on the West coast and off Cape Cod, but have never seen anything as dramatic as this.  Unfortunately, the website includes some advertisements.  I felt that it was something worth sharing, because the whales that are inhabiting the ocean around Sri Lanka are getting a lot of international attention.  I have not yet been able to see the whales in Sri Lanka, but hopefully will get around to it very soon.  Check it out Lucky, and post it if you think it is appropriate. It is quite amazing!

Srianee

See some wonderful images and the story behind them…. Drama in the high seas of Kalpitiya

 

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2017/mar/29/sex-death-sperm-whales-orcas-indian-ocean-in-pictures

Winter Wonderland in Staten Island, NY

One by one, they are returning home after attending the Batch Reunion 2017 in Negombo. Some are still here - in Jaffna, Trinco, Anuradhapura, Minneriya, Kandy, Digana, Galle, Kataragama and so on. Indra Anandasabapathy has sent these beautiful pictures from Staten Island soon after he and Rani returned to NY.

You will soon see the Batch Reunion 2017 in pictures.

The incomparable Beauty of Autumn

“No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face."

― John Donne

I am sure these photos will be appreciated by our discerning colleagues. This was prompted after reading Razaque's last post. Autumn in England is time of continually changing panorama of beautiful colours. Of course this is also the case in many other countries and one of my most vivid recollections of autumnal beauty was at Central Park in New York a few years ago. They call it Fall of course - very appropriate after the Fall in grace of the US people following the Rise of Trump!