General Comments

Good Theory for Colony Collapse Disorder

Mommy, where does a bee go when it dies?

A couple years ago I got interested in following the honey bee die-off problem that has come to be known as Colony Collapse Disorder. At first it appeared that there might be something mysterious going on that caused the bees to disappear. Being open to strange things, I figured I’d listen and see if some reasonable explanation would come along. For if it didn’t, without honey bees to pollinate humanities crops, we’d be in for a big hungry problem in no time at all.

A quick search on Google finds a reasonable Wikipedia entry that reads:

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) or sometimes honey bee depopulation syndrome (HBDS)[1] is a phenomenon in which worker bees from a beehive or European honey bee colony abruptly disappear. While such disappearances have occurred throughout the history of apiculture, the term colony collapse disorder was first applied to a drastic rise in the number of disappearances of Western honey bee colonies in North America in late 2006.[2] Colony collapse is economically significant because many agricultural crops worldwide are pollinated by bees. European beekeepers observed similar phenomena in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain,[3] and initial reports have also come in from Switzerland and Germany, albeit to a lesser degree[4] while the Northern Ireland Assembly received reports of a decline greater than 50%.[5] Possible cases of CCD have also been reported in Taiwan since April 2007.[6]

The cause or causes of the syndrome are not yet fully understood, although …

That’s the basic background into the problem. Now, what might be the cause?

About a year ago, I stumbled upon a great YouTube video from a passionate woman posting as “beepassionate’s channel”. What she happened to say struck me as a reasonable solution to the problem.

So, rather than spelling it all out here for you to read, I’m just going to link in her original video and the followup video that came along 18 months later.

I would be willing to guess that Colony Collapse Disorder is not some mysterious mystical happening, but rather man run amuck in the chemical factory! It seems, others might be figuring this out too:

Honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder Finally Explained: Too Many Chemicals

(NaturalNews) A combination of toxic chemicals and pathogens are probably to blame for colony collapse disorder in honeybees, according to a study conducted by researchers at Washington State University.

Researchers conducted careful studies to uncover contributors to the disorder, in which seemingly healthy bees simply vanish from a hive, leaving the queen and a handful of newly hatched adults behind.

“One of the first things we looked at was the pesticide levels in the wax of older honeycombs,” researcher Steve Sheppard said.

The researchers acquired used hives from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, finding that they had “fairly high levels of pesticide residue.” When bees were raised in these hives, they had “significantly reduced longevity,” the researchers said.

…

Here is another article from the same site:

Colony Collapse Disorder Debunked: Pesticides Cause Bee Deaths

(NaturalNews) The great mystery of bee deaths has been solved. Colony Collapse Disorder is poisoning with a known insect neurotoxin. Clothianidin, a pesticide manufactured by Bayer, has been clearly linked to die offs in Germany and France.

Although the bee die offs that have occurred recently are more severe, there have been many in the past from the same and similar products. In North Dakota, a lawsuit is pending against Bayer for the loss of their bees in 1995, the result of spraying rapeseed with Imidacloprid. In 1999, the same product was banned in France for use as a seed dressing for sunflowers when they lost one-third of their hives after widespread spraying. In 2004, it was banned for use on corn. Recently, France refused to approve Bayer’s request to sell Clothianidin.

Clothianidin and Imidacloprid are both members of a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids. They are well known as insect neurotoxins, especially with regard to bees. The spokesperson for the Coalition Against Bayer Dangers, based in Germany, stated, “We have been pointing out the risks of neonicotinoids for almost 10 years now. This proves without a doubt that the chemicals can come into contact with bees and kill them. These pesticides shouldn’t be on the market.”

…

Looks like Mother Earth News picked up on this problem.

Colony Collapse: Are Potent Pesticides Killing Honeybees? 

Colony collapse disorder has wreaked havoc on U.S. beekeeping businesses (and the agriculture industry) since its devastating arrival in 2006. The veiled killer entered hives across Japan for the first time earlier this year, affecting 25 percent of the national beekeeping association members. Now the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is being sued by the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) for withholding details about the impact of neonicotinoids — a class of widely used pesticides — on honeybees and other pollinators

…

If you want a bigger list of articles, search Google using the string “colony collapse disorder causes pesticide”.

The way I see it, this type of problem is money based. Thus, to change it, we need to change where and how we spend our money. Basically, don’t spend your money to buy products from companies that you know are part of the problem. Buy products from companies that are part of the solution.

Surfing and encountering malicious software

A couple days ago I was researching for the “You full of Crap?” posting and came across some malicious software on one of the websites that I visited. Every time I come across something like that I get flashbacks to different attacks that I experienced in the early days of the net – say, a little more than ten years ago.

Dang, those attacks where full of popup storms where the act of closing a window popped up a dozen more. And every time, the content was more than triple-x.

I have to say that I’ve been lucky to not have to deal with losing control of a computer for quite some time now.

Fortunately, the other day I was able to successfully kill the explorer before doing anything foolish. In other words, as soon as I detected something unusual, I switched to the task manager and proceeded to terminate the internet explorer and then ran a virus check using the software that I’ve got installed for just such occasions.

The scan didn’t turn up anything wrong.

It was at that point that I took a second visit to that sight just so I could gather the following information:

  • A screen shot(or two) and
  • The explorer address

The screen shots follow:

Notice that I caught this software running a progress bar from 0 to 100% at 96%. Just after it hits 100%, it appears to pop up a dialog allowing the user to remove the malicious software. That dialog is shown  in the second image.

Click for larger image
click for larger image

Things to note:

Take a good close-up look at the first diagram. This information is shown inside IE (Internet Explorer) – it’s NOT a dialog like it looks. The designers of this malicious software want you to think that Windows has detected an issue and Windows is trying to warn you.

Aero is missing. One of the cool display items that came out with Windows Vista was the transparent application title bar. It looks like this:

Click for larger image

Notice that you can partly see through the title bar of the dialog showing you what’s underneath. Now look back at the malicious software dialog – you can’t see through the title bar AND it’s the  old windows classic style. This difference can be seen in the first screenshot looking at the top right hand side of the picture. The minimize, restore and close icons are different than the malicious software dialog. If things don’t look right, they aren’t.

Also notice that they cleared out the content of the website.  Why? Because you’re not on the website that you thought you were on. Take a look at the name in the address bar of the explorer. I copied it so you could see the entire address

http://www1.firesavez7.com/?p=p52dcWpkbmqHjsbIo216h3de0KCfYWCcU9LXoKitaVzHysd2lJOCeXBarK3NapqXYWRha2VrlGXIVqPajtfZ1m5do3OL1cytnpl2Wp6dpJ6eU9rPlqdqWpuooWOYXmKZYpGak19oaGeL08ifb1qtp3VlanCUYJucaWNmWqarlmqTYmeZYJqam2RwWJnInriMWKuimHVscXE%3D

I went looking for www1.firessavez7.com and couldn’t find anything useful. But this definitely is not the website that I wanted to visit.

Now here is where it gets tricky. You know how when you click on a webpage the explorer will perform operations for you? Well, these dialogs are itching for you to click on them. Don’t you just want to click on the “Remove all” button? 

  • Don’t.
  • Resist.

If you do anything, click on the ‘x’ associated with IE’s tab. This little area:

Click for larger image

When you click here, the internet explorer will shut the page down. But, the page complains with a frightening warning – that I did not capture. Fortunately, that dialog is a legitimate dialog (look at how it looks) and instruct it to close the page.

At this point, you’re heart might be beating fast, but you didn’t empower the malicious software to install anything!

I guess the reason for this post is to let you know that you can get out of some situations relatively unscathed.

Remember, if in doubt, bring up the task manager (right click the task bar select Start Task Manager) and terminate the explorer. Afterwards, run your favorite virus scan for piece of mind.

If you want to search for more information on this using Google, search for “Security Threat Analysis virus”. Microsoft has a write up here.

Humans giving off light

Today, I came across a very interesting article that I have to share. It was posted last summer on the LiveScience website and just found its way to me. It’s titled Strange! Humans Glow in Visible Light.

It looks like scientists in Japan have been able to develop cameras sensitive enough to capture images of visual light emitted from people. The article first states:

The human body literally glows, emitting a visible light in extremely small quantities at levels that rise and fall with the day, scientists now reveal.

I don’t find this strange, but rather view it as it’s about time. If you look back at a previous article that I wrote, Is food another form of light?, you’ll notice that when the body breaks down sugars (or any other molecule that has stored energy) the process releases electromagnetic energy (light). Thus, if the body is constantly breaking down sugar, it’s constantly emitting light, which should be measurable (in some way).

Thus, the scientists went to work to measure the emitted light:

To learn more about this faint visible light, scientists in Japan employed extraordinarily sensitive cameras capable of detecting single photons. Five healthy male volunteers in their 20s were placed bare-chested in front of the cameras in complete darkness in light-tight rooms for 20 minutes every three hours from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. for three days.

The researchers found the body glow rose and fell over the day, with its lowest point at 10 a.m. and its peak at 4 p.m., dropping gradually after that. These findings suggest there is light emission linked to our body clocks, most likely due to how our metabolic rhythms fluctuate over the course of the day.

Faces glowed more than the rest of the body. This might be because faces are more tanned than the rest of the body, since they get more exposure to sunlight — the pigment behind skin color, melanin, has fluorescent components that could enhance the body’s miniscule light production.

So they too might see the connection between digestion and body glow. But here they hide that connection in the fancy term metabolic rhythms.

Yet, I have to wonder about the article’s author’s reference to why the faces give off more light. I would guess that it would have to do with nerve endings or brain activity. The face is just one side of the head. Did they attempt the same experiment having the person face away from the camera? I would be willing to bet that they’d get a similar reading. In which case, the finding would have nothing to do with faces are more tanned, but maybe something like, the brain gives off more light.

It’s good to see articles like this. The body does release light, but I’m still waiting for them (some scientist somewhere) to make the connection between how plants store sunlight in the form of sugar to how the body releases the light as it breaks down the sugar. Or, more importantly, does the body run on sugar or … light?

One day we shall see.

Talent that can’t be hidden

Here’s a Youtube channel that I just stumbled upon again; Sungha Jung. I’m blown away by the number of postings he’s made. At this point, it’s more than 250! If that’s not being productive, I don’t know what is.

In any case, here’s a rendition of Come Together by the Beatles. It’s definitely worth the couple minutes.

Enjoy.

If you liked this, you might want to visit his channel and view a few more.

Building a vibrational pyramid of words

When I think about my childhood and all the philosophical statements that my parents spoke, one of them stands out as being the phrase upon which all others are built. I don’t know why it made such an impression on me. And, in a conversation with my mom today, it turns out that it was a statement that resonated with her as a child. It was a statement that she’d heard and it shaped her life in mysterious ways. That statement is:

If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

That saying is so simple, yet so amazingly powerful.

As a child, I learned that saying in the middle of one of my childish name calling sessions with a sibling or friend. Yet as an adult, the meaning behind the words resonates to create an environment where you’ll always see the cup as at least half full.

If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

It’s always worth repeating and, more importantly, it’s worth practicing.

This particular concept can come down to the actual words that you use. Every word that you choose has a feeling that it will convey and, if it’s accepted as the truth, it will resonate in the listener as the truth until that listener finds a way to perceive the word or words differently. If they are successful at revisiting the words and understanding them from a different perspective, the listener may be able to find that the words that were spoken (at one time in the past) no longer hold up at being the truth.

For instance, here is a phrase that was used against me at one time in the past; “You’re a Q-Tip!” The person that spoke these words empowered them with the emotional intent of an insult. When I heard them, I could easily read the tone of an insult, so the words carried the vibration of being an insult. Yet, the damaging association comes if the listener finds truth in the statement. At the time, for a while, after I figured out what the insult meant, I found a little truth in the statement. (Insult: you’re nothing but a stick with a fluffy cotton head. In other words, you’re a 98 lb weakling and you have no brains.) Sure, I’ve always been tall, skinny, not very athletic and my hair tens to stand on end. By golly, there is a bit of truth in that statement.

So, in the act of accepting that statement, I accepted the vibration intended by the speaker. For a time, I allowed myself to see the truth in the words that were spoken, and in so doing that, the insult resonated within me. I took on that anger. I took on the words spoken by someone else as if they were the truth. I saw myself as a 98 lbs weakling. I saw myself as empty headed.

Today, I view the world from a slightly different perspective. I have experienced the words others have spoken and, with many of them, I have found different truths. It is clear, in the simplest of terms, I am more they a stick with a fluffy cotton head. I no longer resonate with that insult.

The most profound part of this insult example is that the feeling or intent of the words is what shines through and resonates in the listener. That is the vibration that the listener starts to resonate with. That is what the sub-conscious takes on and makes happen. That becomes the truth. That is, it becomes the truth if the listener believes it to be the truth.

The same holds if you speak words of praise. “That is so lifelike, you are an amazing artist!” I’ve also heard words like this that carry a genuine feeling of respect and admiration for a drawing that I’ve sketched. Being the listener, if the words are accepted as being the truth, that feeling generated from the person that spoke them will resonate within you and the sub conscious will ultimately make that feeling the truth. I am an artist. I still carry the confidence spoken in those words with me today.

Now the tricky part is whose to say that the person that hears your words will be able to discern the truth from the lie? In other words, if you say “That color looks awful on you”, will the person hearing those words accept them as the truth and forever carry the association between that color and looking awful in it? Could your words, by chance, forever shape someone’s life so they never wear that particular color again?

As simple as the phrase is “that color looks awful on you”, the ramifications can be significant if the listener accepts your words as the truth.

So now, when I look at the saying:

If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

I think twice about what it is that I’m going to say. I want the words that I speak to generate feelings that uplift and inspire others with vibrations (and thoughts) that strengthen their character and help build a solid foundation upon which they can develop their own understanding of what the truth is.

When words are accepted as being truthful, the associated feeling becomes the foundation of the pyramid that goes into making up what we choose to be.

Lay a solid foundation and build a rock solid pyramid. Choose your words carefully and generate phrases that carry positive vibrations. Those around you will be forever grateful to you for your disciplined approach to speaking.