Saturday, May 26, 2007

Understanding weather, then climate

This is fun to post, as it is an update on Kristen Byrnes and a recent exchange which demonstrates just how much common sense and understanding she possesses, and, by inference, how both common sense and real understanding may be absent from the IPCC's politically motivated reports on climate change.

As an aside, I just wonder how many parents read this post and then (in love) look at their 15 or 16 year old and think...if only!

Economics, science and blogs

An interesting post by Hendrickson that open with this quote from Hayek:
  • It is an approach which has come to be described as the 'scientistic' attitude - an attitude which, as I defined it some thirty years ago, 'is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed.'
Hayek realised that many attempts to blindly use numbers as a sheen for "science" were in fact obscuring a profoundly non-scientific approach to a subject. Hayek was discussing the state of economics but his comments are equally valid today to a whole range of subjects from climate change to species extinction.

Hendrickson goes on to discuss the emergence of a new trend within economics:
  • While Levitt's arguments certainly have merit, his thesis is not what struck me as important. Levitt's musings were not published in a leading economic journal, but rather on his blog. Further, the comments were not accompanied by an econometric model that attempted to explain quality. In fact, especially poignant was that his writing was purely philosophical and based on simple economic principles.
What is causing economics to be revitalised and re-focused as a discipline is the increased and emergent use of blogs as a media for intellectual exchange.

This trend is likely to continue, as blogs allow for both a more immediate exchange of ideas and an interaction that is trans disciplinary: both features of contemporary issues in a globalized economy with a surfeit of information from disparate sources.

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Same topics: new voices

Wanted to post some different sites, new to me but with a consistent theme: contemporary environmentalism and its message.
  • a retired professor questioning the oft-cited sustainable population advocated by environmentalists
  • a conservative blog pointing out environmental hypocrisy, and
  • one of the most controversial right-wing commentators on climate change
For those who think spiked and Tech Central are extreme, recognize that the ideological spectrum extends a long ways, both left and right. On a spectrum from dynamist to stasist, dynamism covers a lot of diverse ideas about libertarianism, rational anarchy and individual empowerment -- just as stasism includes all manner of authoritarianisms, command and control advocates, technocrats, environmental idealists and social democrats.
Labels are useful descriptors but should not be used to pre-define content, acceptability nor our openness to read, understand and appreciate perspective.

update: and some stuff you just can't make up, see here and here


Trust, Elections and Leadership

It has long been a contention of mine that the only commodity for which there is a real shortage is leadership. In all domains, world-wide, the most pressing constraint on dynamic change is effective leadership. Now there is no shortage of people who want to be in charge, give orders and manage or administer things: but they are not empowering change in others, inspiring people to be their best nor facilitating development and growth. The former want to exercise power: leadership is about exercising character.

The most important aspect of leadership is resonance: setting the basis by which others are most effective. This post highlights one of the defining characteristics for effective leadership in politics: trust.

Trust and how it is communicated greatly affects the ability of leaders to change dominant mind sets. It also is a pervasive characteristic of leadership in all domains, whether it is the effectiveness of a coach (such as the Raptors Sam Mitchell or Liverpool's Rafa Benitez) or the ability of an individual player to inspire a team (like Steven Gerrard) or epitomise a team ethos (like Jamie Carragher).
  • basketball and the Raptors are one passion, a lifelong support for Liverpool continues especially with today's Championship Final (soccer).
  • why the sports metaphor? Because good coaching is all about leadership. Because individual talent doesn't win championships and titles: teams do. Groups are not teams. Teams require an understanding of people skills and mostly, they require leadership.
There is no sustainability without teams; no teams without leadership, and; no leadership without trust.

see
: Fullan and Doppelt.

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Debunking myths

Three excellent posts today, each deconstructing a dominant ecomyth but with different media and approaches.

  • The first comes from the Editor-at-Large of the Tribune papers, David Morgan. Adopting a conventional approach to journalism, Morgan examines the arguments, does his research and writes his assessment on global warming under the heading since when, and says who?
  • The second, fights fire with fire and is a film to counter a film: an inconvenient truth...or convenient fiction? It presents a counter argument to the Gore film and does so in a similar, personalized narrative.
  • The third uses a new media, blogging, to deconstruct the myth surrounding Rachel Carson's Silent Spring -- a book many environmentalists revere, but few actually have read. A book long on assertion and influence, but woefully short on scientific, empirical data.
Not much to add, other than to say there will be those who view all three and will instantly agree with what they say; there will be those who will instantly reject all that the sites suggest as falsehood, conspiratorial and/or seditious, and; there will be a third group for whom the attack on conventional ideas and icons will be new and challenging, causing them to think for themselves.

In the immortal words of Meatloaf: two out of three ain't bad.

update: submitted the above post before I finished all my reading for the day. Two additional reports fit the theme of myth debunking:
  • this post on the supposed absence of any moderate Islamic response terrorism (its there but just ignored by the mainstream media who prefer to frame the issue in their ideological straightjacket rather than learn anything new), and
  • this post on the decline of peer review to fear review: the fact that peer review is no longer a guarantee of good scholarship, objectivity and/or scientific evidence.

Sunday, May 20, 2007

blogging, the internet and education

In response to a post by Jackie Danicki, who asked "what is your degree worth?", Brian Micklethwait has this short but thought-provoking commentary. He writes:
  • I have long suspected that the main purpose of higher education is that you are proving that you are clever, rather than getting any cleverer. It's a signalling system, to enable you to communicate, very laboriously, with the world. So, the internet, the classic machine for enabling the individual to signal to and to communicate with the world, should be pretty good at replacing higher education. At any rate insofar as its signalling function is concerned.
The aspect of the internet mostly changing people's perception of traditional education? -- blogging. In particular, there is growing recognition and discussion of the role of blogs , both as a mass media, and as a replacement for both conventional education and conventional journalism, as a media for communicating and moulding public opinion.

So:
  • what is the purpose of higher education in today's internet generation?
  • is information and more research necessary for improved policy making in most areas?
  • or is there an abundance of information, but a shortage of knowledge: knowing when and how to best apply that information?
  • does higher education teach the judgement and inter-personal skills necessary to assist in the transformation of information into knowledge?
  • are refereed journal articles the best benchmark of knowledge?
  • what role can alternate media such as blogs play in the development and application of knowledge?
These questions will be recurrent themes within this blog as they appear to be foundational to tackling ecomyths in a positive and creative fashion.

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Understanding the global warming narrative

It is not often that a writer manages to approach a familiar subject and imbue in it a new meaning, an understanding that informs and provides guidance on how it should be analyzed and understood in the future. Josie Appleton has performed such a contribution with her review of a new book on global warming. It is easily the most original and provocative framing of the global warming narrative since Phillip Stott' summaries on Envirospin.

Appleton suggests that ..g
lobal warming is now not so much a problem to solve, as an issue around which to reorganise society.

She correctly identifies that the less self-reflective the science, and the more it is founded on political and moral campaigns, the less reliable it is likely to be. And...we see how global warming science has become a foil for a whole series of political and moral agendas, a way of discussing everything from the sins of consumerism to human arrogance.

Moreover,
it is perhaps political rather than scientific analysis that can help us to understand the bias that underlies today's climate science. The notion of nature as fragile and subject to collapse is a relatively recent one, which is likely to owe more to the anxious zeitgeist than to climate realities.

Pivotal to this political framing is the positing of environmentalism as a moral choice. Appleton highlights a quote from Al Gore who stated:
  • The climate crisis also offers us the chance to experience what very few generations in history have had the privilege of knowing: a generational mission; the exhilaration of a compelling moral purpose; a shared and unifying cause; the thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside pettiness and conflict that so often stifle the restless human need for transcendence….'
She then explores the ramifications of climate as a moral mission:
  • Here's the rub: when an environmental problem becomes a generational mission, nobody wants very much to solve it.
  • Carbon dioxide becomes the nexus between individuals, the thing that connects us to other people and to the future of the planet. This infuses the most banal acts with a deep moral meaning.
  • The campaign against global warming provides answers so that we no longer have to think about the questions. In Gore's words, this is 'the thrill of being forced by circumstances'. The certainty of planetary emergency seems to provide a cause that is solid, a cause that is not chosen and therefore beyond dispute and doubt. It is this relief of finding a point of ideological certainty that explains the grip of global warming on the contemporary imagination.
  • The notion of teleology that appeared first in Christianity (Christ's birth, death and return), then liberalism (progress towards a state of perfect liberty), and then certain brands of Marxism (the development of productive forces, leading towards revolution), appears now in the form of climatology. The progress of civilisation is re-read in terms of the accumulation of carbon dioxide, which will eventually – and as a result of feedback that occurs independently of human will – lead to a dramatic transformation in the planet's climate. Apocalypse and final judgement are replaced by the 'tipping point', with the downward spiral into the circles of global warming hell.
In contrast, climate change could be viewed as just another environmental issue to be resolved. How? The same way humans have resolved all real problems: by adaptation through the application of ingenuity and technological advancement.
  • Techno-fixes are not some airy-fairy notion, some leap of faith. This is otherwise known as innovation, the only way that environmental problems have ever been solved or new energy systems produced. I am not aware of a major environmental problem successfully tackled by the mass of people consciously and systematically abstaining from some or other desirable activity. The lesson of history is that techno-fixes happen, and they happen fast in societies that are looking for solutions.
Appleton concludes:
  • We need a new school of thought in the global warming debate, which is founded not on scientific facts but on political critique. It is only this that can explain the way in which the issue is framed, or its hold over social life and public debate.
It's not often I read something that causes me to pause and reflect as profoundly as did this article by Appleton. I have quoted from it extensively as it is both well written and well worth reading in its entirety. My only fear is that in the compartmentalized world of academia, many climate scientists will either fail to read it and/or fail to understand its import for the meaning of what they do and how it is their science is used in the real world politics of contemporary ecomyths.

Ponder the Maunder:update

Kristen Byrnes has this update to her website, Ponder the Maunder. It is an essay she wrote in response to the many emails she received from parents and students who had been shown Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" at school. Kristen's essay is, as usual, thorough in its research, well written and cogent. It is also a lesson in the difference between what education is and what it should be.

My question is: how many teachers who have presented Inconvenient Truth to their classes, also took the time to research item by item its veracity? Who is the student here and who is the teacher?

I expect Kristen will have her choice of university: I certainly hope so, as she is just the type of student every program needs: bright, articulate and most of all, an independent thinker.

And for those who still choke on receiving an education from a high-schooler, here is the latest post discussing the increasing level of skepticism on AGW and why it is increasing.

Monday, May 14, 2007

Zimbabwe and sustainable development

Sometimes its hard to think of an obvious oxymoron. However, the decision by the UN to appoint Zimbabwe to chair its Commission on Sustainable Development makes the task of ready contradiction much simpler. Despite clear, well-founded opposition, common sense and any sense of program integrity, the UN bureaucracy has again shown itself to be impervious to any logic or principle other than that of its own, arcane politics.
Zimbabwe: sustainable development.
Now I really do agree it is time to re-think, re-define and re-conceptualize the foundational construct for environmental policy and resource management.

update: good commentary here and here

Saturday, May 12, 2007

Thoughts from Reid Bryson

A wonderful interview is reported here with the Dean of North American meteorology, Reid Bryson. Emeritus Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Bryson is now 86 and appears to have lost none of his intellectual insight. He gives this pithy and graphic metaphor for putting contemporary climate change in context:
  • We ask Bryson what could be making the key difference:
  • Q: Could you rank the things that have the most significant impact and where would you put carbon dioxide on the list?
  • A: Well let me give you one fact first. In the first 30 feet of the atmosphere, on the average, outward radiation from the Earth, which is what CO2 is supposed to affect, how much [of the reflected energy] is absorbed by water vapor? In the first 30 feet, 80 percent, okay?
  • Q: Eighty percent of the heat radiated back from the surface is absorbed in the first 30 feet by water vapor…
  • A: And how much is absorbed by carbon dioxide? Eight hundredths of one percent. One one-thousandth as important as water vapor. You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.
Wonder if Al Gore realizes this: maybe all we need is new UN agency devoted to stamping out spitting and our dilemma with climate change will all be resolved.

update: short post here, but a wonderful series of comments to follow on the news that Neptune has now joined Mars in warming at the same time as good old Terra: perhaps it is the sun??

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Education and the revolution

All democracies in the developed world are facing a common set of policy challenges, including health care and education. While health policy appears to change very slowly (if at all) and debate is rarely about fundamental policy choices, education policy seems to be constantly changing as new ideas are in vogue and as soon as the next great innovation supplants yesterday's shining new ideas. It is in this policy milieu, that Emily Hill ponders the possibilities for educational reform in Britain in the wake of Tony Blair's departure. As she explains, under Blair British schools changed from being knowledge centres into social-engineering labs:
  • ...schools have become one of the principal instruments for manipulating a new generation into new thought patterns...This imposition of new rules and methods distances children from their own education.
  • In the school I visited, the early years teacher seemed to have lost confidence in her own ability to teach, following a negative Ofsted inspection. Her paperwork had been found wanting...Teachers, like every other public sector worker under New Labour, now drown in paperwork. There is an incessant flood of forms that need filling.
  • It is now all about the paperwork. Like a Soviet Five-Year Plan, if it's down on paper, it happened – if it's not, it didn't. So this school was hauled up for a 'culture of bullying' – not because it had a bullying problem (it didn't), but because it did not have a government-advised system of 'playground angels' and 'buddy benches' to deal with any potential bullying that might arise or have already arisen without the teachers noticing.
  • The targets obsession also masks a central problem with Blair's education revolution. New Labour is unable to articulate what a good education should consist of, and thus it simply draws up lists of things that children ought to be able to do or say or write by a certain age.
  • Children have been set on the conveyor belt of education. They have become, as the former employee of a government quango said last week, 'widgets on an assembly line'. Yet they're on an assembly line to nowhere; they will be equipped with a clutch of awards and grades and they will be able to articulate their feelings in a government-endorsed manner, but will the new generation really understand things and be able to think critically and independently?
There are many excellent new educational ideas extant, including teaching initiatives based around instructional intelligence, the increased use of emotional intelligence to inform teaching practices and the development of new software for classroom use. The problem does not lie with these innovations but, rather, with their imposition within a state-mandated, state-enforced and ideologically driven agenda for the purpose of education -- as the primary form of stasis social engineering and not as a means for individuals to learn self-responsibility, awareness, citizenship and life skills.

Sadly, what Hill describes as the wreckage wrought by Blair's Orwellian approach to society is a pattern other jurisdictions and sectors of education have emulated. At all levels of education, forms, grades and paperwork are in danger of supplanting real learning.

Teachers are either good or bad: no inbetweeens.

Good teachers are, first and foremost, enthusiastic and passionate -- they are genuinely interested in those they are teaching and they work to improve their craft on an ongoing basis. These are the teachers who will adopt best professional practices and have little or nothing to gain from persistent, intrusive and bureaucratic oversight.

Bad teachers are those will little to no enthusiasm for those they are teaching, little or no innate teaching craft, little passion to invest time and energy in developing their craft and minimal engagement in learning objectives. For these "teachers", bureaucracy is a wonderful shield behind which they can obscure their failings, lack of desire for learning and/or their pompous, self-righteousness.

Little wonder then that the Blair years have been so detrimental to the British school system despite their avowed goal of the opposite effect.

update:
  • and then, of course, there's always the situation where bad teaching and bad administration become synonymous: no education is better than bad education

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

The 21st Century's dividing lines

Its nice to be at the vanguard of new intellectualism. This post underscores the need for new defining constructs in understanding the world and advocates Virginia Postrel's use of dynamism and statsis. The organizing construct for this blog is dynamism and its application to dismissing the ecomyths employed to justify stasis controls: indeed, the inaugural post on this blog was similar in vein to that posted today on the Globalization Institute.

update:
found this image from a link on QandO today and couldn't resist the literal mind map:



Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Peer Reviews and Scientific Consensus

Within academia the gold standard for publication remains peer reviewed journals. Indeed, for many academics, it is the sole standard: so much so in some disciplines, that books (especially textbooks) and any other forms of publication (especially blogs), are discounted relative to peer-reviewed journal articles when decisions are made with respect to tenure, promotion and merit pay. Despite numerous examples of peer-review bias, failings and inaccuracy, the system often appears to be sacrosanct. It is within this context that this post is significant, especially as it profiles comments made by an eminent and well-seasoned academic.
As the review points out:
  • Personal vendettas, ideological conflicts, professional jealousies, methodological disagreements, sheer self-promotion and a great deal of plain incompetence and irresponsibility are no strangers to the scientific world; indeed, that world is rife with these all-too-human attributes. In no event can peer review ensure that research is correct in its procedures or its conclusions.
  • Peer review, on which lay people place great weight, varies from important, where the editors and the referees are competent and responsible, to a complete farce, where they are not.
This does not mean that peer-reviewed journals should be abandoned, nor should they be disregarded. However, it does mean we should not place them on an unwarranted not uncritical pedestal, nor should we ignore the value that new media, such as blogs and on-line journals, have as alternative venues for intellectual discourse.

Friday, May 04, 2007

Statistics, climate statistics and a lack of clarity

The title to this post is a little play on words and the familiar aphorism of 'lies, damn lies and statistics'. Part of the problem with climate is the lack of transparency and the selective framing of data to fit pre-determined ideological positions. So, one group will complain about mis-interpreted data, while themselves practising mis-interpretation. Meanwhile, others are staking their territory within the sociology of the science whilst conveniently excluding others, who's views are often mis-represented. Finally, data are released to the public with great alarmism without any caveats that might otherwise temper there utility.

As the follow up posts on each of these posts indicate, there are some observers who feel that overall, the exchange between science and policy is steadily improving: at the same time, there are those who see it the exact opposite way, with academia becoming even more exclusionary.

My own hope is that the blogosphere will continue to flourish, open-source journals and on-line publishing will increase and that knowledge will become more democratic and free: but it is a hope, not a prediction.


Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Ideology and framing political debate

Although this post is primarily concerned with US Federal politics it is relevant to any area of public policy and environmentalism in particular. It makes the point that many activists embrace
...the strange belief that politics is all about noise' and narratives'; whoever makes the most noise or gets the most Google hits is going to win, regardless of objective reality.
In this view of public policy, the prevailing sentiment is
... a belief that political discourse ought to be judged solely by its real-world effects...the notion of pursuing truth for its own sake nonsensical. Their interest in ideas, and facts, is purely instrumental.
and the relevant metric is no longer true versus untrue:
To an activist, the relevant metric is politically helpful versus politically unhelpful....A war of ideas, though, is not an intellectual process; it is a political process. As...Leon Wieseltier has written if you are chiefly interested in the consequences, then you are not chiefly interested in the ideas.
Again, apply these constructs to any contemporary ecomyth: the truth is incidental. Science is incidental. The only reality is the idealized "green", and whatever it takes to move people to that reality is justified.

That this is then framed as social justice is perhaps the biggest deceit.

Environmentalism uses science selectively to advocate its political ideology. It is not about intellectual scientific discourse: it is about compelling people to comply with a set of ideological constructs and dogma that are intellectually deficient.

Mouthwash for a smokestack

Forget replacing lightbulbs (a symbolic gesture to bring the "problem" to light, so to speak) if reducing carbon dioxide emissions is ever to be achieved it will be through technological change in areas were emissions are large. This technology is progressing beyond the development stage and offers intriguing possibilities, especially for retro-fitting old generating stations and for the likely addition of new power: how does the efficient provision of new technology alter the public perception of various power generating options such as coal, natural gas and nuclear versus more expensive, less efficient but green-advocated options such as wind, tidal, solar etc.?


Meanwhile, the public relations framing on climate continues, with a release from the UK Met Office cashing in on higher than seasonable temperatures in Britain to proclaim April 2007 as the warmest on record. To which the JunkScience site responds:
  • What didn't make the release:
  • "Mean Central England Temperature ranked coldest to warmest from 1659 to 2007", www.hadobs.org

    Warmest January to date is 1916, second warmest, 1796
    Warmest February to date is 1779, second warmest, 1869
    Warmest March to date is 1957, second warmest, 1938
  • This is the warmest April at 11.1, (provisional), beating the previous warmest, 10.6, in 1865, 143 years ago. Half a degree in 143 years, 0.035 degrees per decade. Wow, that's hot. CO2 really piles on the heat

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

correlation and causation

This comment was originally posted as a response to a discussion point on ClimateAudit.
The thread focused on the alleged discrepancy in the Great Global Warming Swindle documentary. The producer acknowledges the error and will correct it prior to the release of Swindle on DVD. Meanwhile, many, many proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) have jumped on this error as "proof" of the program's entire irrelevancy. The discussion at ClimateAudit lauds the scrutiny aimed at Swindle but queries why those self-same guardians of scientific integrity do not similarly deconstruct the IPCC report or Gore's Inconvenient Truth, or acknowledge the errors both have when others do establish them.

It is within this thread and discussion that Francois Ouelette posted this comment:


  • Francois Ouellette says:
  • May 1st, 2007 at 7:33 am
  • I urge everyone to pay attention to Friis-Christensen’s statement:
  • For a physicist a break down of a correlation where you would expect one is just as – or sometimes even more - informative as a good correlation when it comes to the ultimate goal, which is to understand the physics. Climatologists are more concerned whether the observations fit their preconceived model and prefer to describe solar activity by one single parameter.
  • The breakdown of the correlation between sunspots and temperature is used ad nauseam as an argument against a larger solar role in 20th century warming. Read RealClimate for example. Yet, as Steve points out, the same argument does not seem to hold for the divergence problem, or for the simple fact that CO2 and temperature do not correlate during the period. Thomoas Kuhn has described how, when faced with “anomalies”, scientists tend to refer to ad-hoc hypothesis to salvage a theory. In this case it’s either aerosols, or CO2 fertilization, or what else. But the anomalies are real, and they may indicate a more serious flaw in the theory. The same applies to any solar theory. There is a breakdown in correlation after the late 1980’s. Which just goes to show that, as Friis-Christensen aptly points out, correlations are but a clue to an underlying physical mechanism. One must then elucidate such mechanism before proceeding further, and, for example, including the mechanism in climate models.
  • There could be many physical reasons why the global temperature stops correlating well with the solar cycle at the end of the 80’s. GHG’s are one of them. Other human influences on climate are possible, as repeatedly pointed out by Roger Pielke Sr. It could also be that the mechanism linking the sun and the climate is just not linear, and past a certain level of solar activity (which is what happened lately), we enter a different regime. There could be a feedback or threshold effect that we’re not aware of. I have a paper somewhere (too lazy to look for it this morning) that has analyzed the correlation between the sun and the climate using wavelets, and they do see a change in the pattern at the end of the 20th century. There is still a correlation, but it seems to change phase or something. Phase changes have been noted by others whenever there was a big volcano eruption, like the Pinatubo in 1991.
  • So there is plenty of “juice” left in the solar-climate link research program. Whether that program will be allowed to proceed or will be censored by the pontiffs of AGW is an important question. Do we let scientific progress be conditional on political and ideological rectitude? Many argue that we are in a “post-normal” science era, where anything goes, as long as it suits a particular point of view. That would indeed lead us to disaster.
  • OT (but not quite): I’ve just seen the movie “The lives of others”, a German movie about how everybody was spied on in east Germany. All in the name of the good socialist state. Having known many former east-Germans (especially scientists), I know that this was just too real. Is that what we want?
Every so often, you read something so concise and accurate in its tone that it would be an injustice to paraphrase or selectively quote its meaning. That's how I feel about the above comment.

Scrutiny in science is good. Data disclosure and archiving should be the norm. Errors are something to learn from not hide from. False allegiance to dubious hypothetical constructs and post-normal science are a recipe for totalitarianism.

As another post states:
  • Grosverson says: May 1st, 2007 at 9:14 am
  • Let’s see, where have I seen this type of double standard before? Oh yes, in religion and politics. If catastrophic AGW is a religion or political movement, this double standard would all make sense.
  • This type of double standard in criticizing the faithful vs. criticizing heretics is common in religious hierarchies or political autocracies. It’s certainly not science.


Daily Show Slams Green Celebs

Here is a link to the Daily Show take on Green Day. 
 
However,  I suspect that anyone reading this blog either has already seen the clip (live, on YouTube or Google) or will have no idea who or what the Daily Show.  Or you could be like me in that you know what the Daily Show is, don't watch it regularly but do appreciate humour on pretentious topics. 
 
Either way its a good reminder for one of my favourite Ed Foreman mantras: life is about laughter, loving and living...not worry whining or work!