Invaders Are Taking Over!

Last week, an article appeared on the site vtdigger.org, about the rise of a particular invasive species in Vermont - Japanese Knotweed.

We have Japanese Knotweed here on campus. The closest patch I know of is directly across the school entrance on Academy Road, just to the left to the entrance of the trail down to the woodlot (we passed it last week. Mr. Bugg also has noticed a lot of knotweed around his house). Alien plants are plants that come into new areas from other areas. Typically, their seeds or bits of plant are carried in by animals, boat ballast water, or people not careful about what's attaching to themselves (or their forest products - especially wood). Invasive plants are like alien plants, only they come into new areas and take over.

Invasives are particularly good at adapting to live in new habitats. And they multiple quickly. End result: they force native species out but conquering the habitat and depriving native species of much needed sunlight and/or nutrients. Or they simply multiply so quickly, that they literally smother native plants out. (There are also invasive animal species that operate in the same manner).

Some foks believe that climate change is making Vermont a more hospitable place for more and more invasive species. Tim Schmalz, a plant pathologist with the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets, says he isn't so usre. Schmalz remains skeptical of studies that say particular weeds will spread as the climate changes. "“There are a lot of things that may happen or may not happen,” said Schmalz. “It’s very hard to predict environmental change on that scale.”

Others belive that invasive plants and weeds will become much more acclimated to Vermont as our weather continues to change due to carbon dioxide build up. Invasives including Poison Parsnip, which secretes an oily substance that transfers easily to your skin. The substance (its sap) reacts with sunlight to give you a good (bad?) case of phytophotodermatitus (phyto = plant, photo = light, dermatitus, well, you know). The end result is that your skin feels like it's on fire. While it subsides over time, it never truly goes away.

Someimes there is no single cause. A bit of invasive comes in on manure. Or. farm equipment on loan. Or transport for intra-state commerce. There is so much change going on in our state. But maybe - just maybe - climate change is making Vermont a more hospitable place for these new invaders.

Take Japanese Knotweed for example. This hollow-stemmed plant spreads by underground stems. When it’s torn apart by floods, (or Hurricanes, as in "Irene") pieces of the stem wash into new areas. In a matter of weeks, it takes over - destroying gardens, natural habitats, and sometimes wreaking economic havoc.

Sometimes, invasives are good. Invasives have been known to speed up the re-forestation efforts in some areas devastation by flood or fire. They can also assist in re-establishing riparian growth, the shrubs or trees that grow along a riverbank and help maintain the strength and integrity of the soil that forms along the bank, preventing flooding.

But in truth, there is little saving grace in Japanese Knotweek. It's a nasty plant that is hard to get rid of, and takes over habitat. It deprives natural native plants of resrouces, and in so doing, deprives native animals of food from the plants that they replace. So what do you think? How can we - as a class - make a difference? How can we develop some kind of service learning project to clear our campus (and Mr. Bugg's yard?) from this invasive plant?

Please share your thought about invasive species and their eradication in your comments below! Thanks!

Let's jump right into the frying pan, shall we?

Figuratively speaking that is.

Just a few days ago, on August 19, the New York Times published an article previewing the work of the International Panel on Climate Change. This panel was made up of several hundred (!) scientists, working under the aegis of the United Nations, and includes some Nobel Prize winners. The upcoming report is the fifth time that the panel has published a report since 1988, and the news is not good. Basically, the panel rebukes those who doubt climate change, or speak of the process slowing down. The panel states that temperatures are continuing to rise in many areas. So are ocean levels. In fact, this huge committee reached consensus on stating that sea levels have the potential to rise more than three feet by the year 2100. This level of change would flood major cities across the globe, including Miami, New Orleans, New York, and Boston. Not to mention Shanghai, Venice, Sydney, and London.

 What's striking about this report is that for the first time, the panel members laid the blame on us. The report states that human activities, particularly those resulting in increased emissions, are the principle cause of the climate changes being observed and recorded.

What are those changes? Well, carbon dioxide levels, up 41% since the end of the 19th century, have increased at a faster rate in the past 20 years than has ever been seen in human history (at least as far as we can tell using ice core samples retrieved in the arctic and antarctic - I'll talk a bit more about this in class). And if you were born after April 1985, as all of you were, you have never experienced a single month of "below average" temperature.

Think about that for a second. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (our country's main weather and sea conditions information source) reports that 2012 was the warmest year - ever. (I'm assuming that they are referring to "ever" in the sense of human history. My guess is that the earth was a lot warming when the dinosaurs were roaming around the planet chomping on 30 foot tall ferns).

The main concern is that every increase, every single degree of temperature, adds a tremendous amount of heat energy to the planet. This energy has an exponential effect on other systems. This means that a 1X increase will cause a 10X increase in say, ocean temperatures, that would then cause a 100X increase in something else.  Looking at things exponentially, the possibility that human activities may lead to an increase in temperature of up to 5 degrees in the coming 200 years has the potential to be catastrophic. We may not be around to be effected by its full impact, but is that the type of environment we want to leave to our children's children?

 Every major scientific academy in the world, or at least 99.8% of them, agree that climate change is real and that it is happening now. Some scientists however question the role of mankind and human activities in creating this situation (or at least, in making it worse). There seems to be consensus that the panel has tried to be conservative in their predictions. In fact, they have even laid out some scenarios in which the temperature and sea level increases might be bad, though not nearly as catastrophic as many think.

What to do, what to do.

Well - what should we do? How should we react to this news?

I invite you to watch the video clip that I have embedded below, titled "The Most Terrifying Video You Will Ever See". It's a 9 1/2 minute long lectur-ette (not counting whatever ad YouTube as in front of it which I encourage you to skip!) and well worth seeing. After you watch the video, I'd like you to reflect on what I wrote, and what was presented in the video. After thinking about for several minutes, I'd like you to post a comment on the blog that reflects your personal response to the question: "What should we do?". One paragraph to relate your response to the video, and another with your top 3 choices about changes that you, or all of us, can make in our lifestyles right now to help things out a bit.

Because, the thought of doing nothing at all is, frankly, terrifying.

How Big is Big? How small is small?

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on;
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.
(Augustus De Morgan: A Budget of Paradoxes)

There's so much we don't know, so much we don't understand. Sometimes we are like elephants, trying to understand the mosquitos that bite us. Other times we are the mosquitos, trying to make sense of the enormity of the elephant upon which we have landed.

Think about this: scientists have just discovered the largest structured formation in the universe. A group of quasars; primitive, pulsating centers of potential galaxies that stretch across a space of 3 billion light years. In other words, light emitted from one end of this structure would take three billion years traveling at light speed to reach the opposite end of the structure. It boggles the mind.

At the other end of the size spectrum lies the bacteriophages. A bacteriophage is a virus that attacks bacterial cell. Imagine how small a virus is compared to a single bacteria. You could fit 4000 or so of these phages inside of the width of a human hair. They're incredibly small! So cover your nose and mouth when you cough or sneeze. You're ejecting tens of millions of these suckers each time you do.

The phage virus has a protein capsule head, a tail, and some legs that act like a tripod, allowing it to land/stand on the cell surface. It's a classic, instantly recognizable "bio shape" that sort of looks like a lunar (moon) lander:

Take a look at that sucker! It's a marvel of evolution! A sub-microscopic structure that has evolved for one purpose and one purpose only: to ensure its own survival. To reproduce. The head/capsule (capsid) is like a jiffy-pop popcorn pan. Except there's no popcorn inside of the phage capsid - what's inside? You got it - phage DNA. It's code of viral life. Or semi-life. Or, whatever a virus is, scientists aren't really sure. The phage lands on the bacteria, drills its way through the bacterial cell wall, and then injects its own DNA into the bacterial cell, forcing the bacteria to make copies - millions and millions of copies - of the phage DNA and new viruses.

These viral offspring fill the cell to the bursting point, at which time the cell releases millions of new viruses. It's quite similar to what's going on in many people who are combatting the influenza virus - "the flu" - right now. ("The Flu" - so named because Renaissance Italians believed that those who got sick fell under the influenza (influence) of unhealthy astrological alignments.)

The evolutionary precision of this design is magnificent, and has been known for decades. But something was recently discovered that blew me away. The virus's legs, those tripod-like things, are not merely a way for the virus to stand and attach to the bacteria. Recent electron micrographs reveal that they remain tucked away - folded up into the phage until they're needed. And then, the virus unfolds its "legs" and they do something amazing: they walk. They walk the virus along the surface of the cell looking for a good point of attachment. A suitable entry point for its own DNA.

Scientists have taken a series of electron microphotographs of this process and have recreated the series of events that occurs. Now, watch this CGI recreation of the process below. There's a blue protein capsule, and the yellow legs. And that DNA that has to be injected to infect the cell. The phrase "dynamic conformation" is used. It just means that the legs are capable of changing their shape.



How does this occur? Why does this occur? How does the virus - which obviously doesn't have a brain, or even the neural net of a starfish - "know" how to do this? Is the virus alive? And if the virus is alive, does this mechanism demonstrate a primitive kind of intelligence? Don't laugh - searching for, and locating the proper point of entry seems pretty intelligent to me. Luke Skywalkeer had a heck of a time trying to do it.

What are the lives of animals and plants ultimately about? Survival. Reproduction. Passing on their genetic material to the next generation. Some viruses, the phages, attach to bacterial cells in order to do this. And 90% of all of the cells in the human body, 90% of human mass, is composed of bacteria - not blood, heart, lung, skin etc. So what does that make us? Who, or what are we? Are we merely the containers, the environment, required by a more plentiful yet more primitive form of life? Who is really in charge? Is it humans, with their arsenal of antibiotics and vaccinations? Or is it this unbelievably small form of life that lives within us, benefitting us, yet also holding the potential to become lethal and harm us?

Are we the elephants? Or are we the mosquitos, gazing out at the vastness of the universe of which we are but a small part?

What are your thoughts on this?

Whose Genes Are They Anyway? A bioethical dilemma.

In this weekend's reading in The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks we read about the first legal fights over the control, and ownership, of human cellular material. Court battles like these that took place in the early 1970s must seem like old history to you. 1973? The Beatles had broken up, Richard Nixon was President, and Disco was just beginning to define the decade. These are old battles. Surely they must be over, decisions must have been made - legal precedents and business models must have been established. Don't you think?

How ironic then, to read about a case going before a federal courthouse in Washington D.C. tomorrow as in April 4, 2011 to settle the same fundamental questions as the ones we read of this weekend: are isolated human genes, and their respective sequences of bases - of As-Ts-Cs and Gs - patentable? More specifically, if a company analyzes and sequences two genes responsible for a percentage of the incidence of breast cancer in patients - and perform research to identify and analyze those genes in patients' cells - can they patent their product?

That is the central argument going before the court tomorrow in the case of Association of Molecular Pathology, et al. v United States Patent and Trademark Office. At stake is a profit potential of billions of dollars.

The company, Myriad Genetics, has sought a patent for a the BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene (Breast Cancer Susceptibililty Gene 1 and 2). The BRCA genes only account for 10-15% of all instances of breast cancer, but 80-90% of those women who have this gene do go on to develop breast cancer. Myriad Genetics discovered and has patented the genes. Only now, an appeals court is asking the federal court to determine if these genes can be patently or not - based on the the argument we read about in TILOHL, that "products of nature" cannot be patented.

Now, what about a "molecular diagnostic product"? Myriad Genetics, claiming a patent on the genes, has developed a product to determine if a woman has either BRCA1 or 2. It's called BRACAnalysis. Clever, huh? Here's the pitch:

"BRACAnalysis® assesses a woman's risk of developing breast or ovarian cancer based on detection of mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. This test has become the standard of care in identification of individuals with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer and is reimbursed by insurance."

Having discovered these genes, Myriad Genetics was awarded a patent on BRCA1 and 2. In 2010, a judge ruled that the BRCA 1 & 2 genes were unpatentable products of nature - and that BRACAnalysis, an offshoot of that illegal patent, resulted from exclusive research that Myriad Genetics did based on that patent. So - the product should not be allowed to be brought to market based on Myriad's "exclusive" rights to research, and develop products from, the BRCA genes.

Confusing? It is confusing to me, too - legal arguments can get pretty dense. Here's some backround.

In late 2009 a group of physicians, patients, and the ACLU, filed a lawsuit against Myriad, claiming that their exclusive patent on genomic information kept knowledge, research, and testing from populations of patients who could possibly benefit from them. In the case of the new test, women who are at a higher genetic risk of having the BRCA genes would be prohibited from testing for it unless they used the Myriad BRACAnalysis product.

The US Patent and Trademark Office countered with an argument defending its decision to award the patent, stating that Myriad had invented something truly beyond anything found as a "product of nature", and as such, was worth protecting with a patent certifying ownership.

In 2010 a judged tossed out the decision, saying that isolated, individual segments (genes) of DNA were no different - just segments - of the whole molecule found in nature. Therefore, he ruled that the patent office was wrong in their decision to award Myriad a patent in the first place.

One analyst viewed this reasoned decision as a reflection of the increasing knowledge and awareness of DNA in our society - that an isolated part is not really different from the whole. It is still a "product of nature". Looking at genes in isolation is representative of our information age. We view things in bits and bytes. Genes are bytes of genetic information.

Monday's decision will determine the availability of this test (and perhaps billions of dollars in profits) to perhaps millions of people around the globe. What do you think? Can we - should we - be able to own/patent genetic information? If not - if we remove the incentive to make a profit from such research, why should companies bother to conduct the research? Is less knowledge, less technology, fewer diagnoses, fewer treatment - the price we ultimately pay for this? Or should we allow Myriad Genomic, and others like them, the right to patent the essence of what it means to be human?

(Don't worry about either side of the argument - chances are it will go to the Supreme Court!)

The Brain - Remixed

First week of the fourth quarter - your responses have been wonderful! Let's start with a brief post, and your brief response to it. The Brain - bits and pieces from famous neurologists, scientists, and Bill Nye The Science Guy - remixed and mashed to a beat.

Watch it, and then think about the excerpt from Andrew Sullivan's political blog, The Dish that follows.



The question I want to pose is this: Do we have "free will", the ability to think for ourselves? Or does our brain make our decisions before we are consciously aware of making the decision?

"Researchers implanted electrodes in patients to track their neurons. They asked them to look at a clock and press a button, and then to tell them the exact time they decided to press the button. Daniela Schiller and David Carmel report:

[A]bout a quarter of these neurons began to change their activity before the time patients declared as the moment they felt the urge to press the button. ... So it turns out that there are neurons in your brain that know you are about to make a movement the better part of a second before you know it yourself. What does that mean?

It might be tempting to conclude that free will is an illusion.

Some have believed this since the days of (the scientist), who recorded EEG (brain waves)and found it contained a specific pattern that predicted his subjects movements before they felt the conscious will to act. EEG measures electrical activity on the surface of the head, combining information from billions of neurons; Fried and his colleagues have gone further, by finding individual neurons that do this. But before reaching any sweeping conclusions, it is important to remember that this study looked at a very rudimentary kind of action. The decision to move a finger hardly ranks as the same kind of free will we exercise when we make moral choices or major life decisions."

So - what do you think? Is free will (the ability to make up our own minds and decide for ourselves) an illusion? Or is it real? Do we consciously decide to go to the doctors, or have that ice cream cone on a hot summer's day?

Or do our neurons fire up the decision before we're even aware of asking ourselves the question?

And if you really want to take it a step further - ponder the role of the epigenetic genome on the idea of free will. (I really hope someone does that... :)

Does it have to be a complete sentience -or- How about some news to make you smile? :)

I try to take a course at the College Of The Atlantic every two years. Why not? The courses are informative, interesting, and lots of fun. And they happen to be taught on a small, but pretty, campus that is located just minutes away from one of the hidden jewels of the national park system - Acadia National Park, in spectacularly beautiful Bar Harbor, Maine. I've taken courses in Tide Pool Ecology, Conservation Photography, Creative Writing in Botany, and several others. Without question, one of the most enjoyable courses was one on Biological Oceanography, taught by a fellow named Sean Todd - one of the foremost marine mammal biologists on the East coast. (I often kidded Sean, asking him if there was a family connection to Sweeney.) Come to think of it - I wrote a song about him - which I sang to the class at the end of the course - to the tune of Under The Sea from The Little Mermaid. Perhaps I'll share it with you guys and gals.

But I digress.

I learned a lot through that course with Sean. Sean is one of the biologists who is called upon to do a forensics pathology report when a marine mammal washes up on shore. (Marine mammals are protected by federal law - the Marine Mammals Act. Therefore a cause of death has to be reported for every marine mammal that appears on shore.) During one class, I asked Sean the inevitable questions: Are whales sentient creatures? Do they think? Are they self- aware? Sean, who had obviously been asked this question many times before, replied "No", and explained that he thinks of whales as "the cows of the ocean" - no smarter than livestock. They follow each other, emit sounds that allow them to locate each other, but as for true intelligence, in his estimation (which was considerable) the answer was an unequivicable "no".

I have to admit, it was a difficult answer to accept. I recognize that there was a lot of personal bias there. We want whales to be sentient, intelligent beings. We, as humans, want to believe that whales lord over the oceanic realms as we do, for better or for worse, on the terrestrial realm. We want to - if for no other reason - than to believe that on some primordial, spiritual level, we are not alone. Disney's Fantasia 2 may have been terrible (don't get me started) but no one, regardless of age, could fail to be moved at the final tableau where the whales were seen to fly balletically out from the ocean to meet their ultimate, predestined celestial destiny. Hmmm - digressing again. (I do say to you - let your mind dance, right? Well, I'm dancin', I'm dancin...)

Turns out that whales - at least sperm whales - may in fact be more than the "cows of the seas". About a week ago, biologists at Scotland's University of St. Andrew's - where golf was invented - discovered that sperm whales seem to announce their presence with "discrete personal identifiers". In other words, it appears that the whales announce their presence by stating their names.

This conclusion is preliminary - they've only studied three caribbean whales, but the data is intriguing, and in some ways, somewhat startling. The whales, which typically use clicking sounds to communicate across vast stretches of oceanic water. A kind of cetacean (whale) morse code. Whales will greet each other by attaching a distinct coda to their clicks. In music, a coda is a musical phrase that is attached to end of a piece. In this case, the coda is "created" by the individual whale to identify him or herself. Called 5R, it’s a distinct sound made up of five consecutive clicks, with varying pauses between the clicks. While it may sound identical in each whale to casual listeners, variations in click timing became apparent after careful data analysis. Each of the researchers’ whales had its own personal 5R coda. In other words, each whale had an identifier - a name.

Could this be a random occurrance? A meaningless exception without importance? Perhaps. But it has been noted that dolphins have individualized whistles. And like dolphins, sperm whales maintain complex inter-relationships and social groups over long distances. Individual identification would be something that would provide a distinct benefit to the social order.

Man's history with sperm whales is fraught with confrontation and adversity. Hunted with a vengeance for the substance that fills their head. This is the "melon" used for sonar/navigation, thought to be "spermaceti" - sperm - by the ancient marriners. "spermaceti" - a waxy substance that provided light to the world before the age of petroleum, and their blubber was "rendered" or boiled down to create fuel. Man hunted whale, and occasionally the sperm whale torpedoed itself in suicdal attacks against man in his whaling ships. Such an occurence happened to the whaling ship Essex in the mid-19th century. This incident influenced Herman Melville to write Moby Dick - arguably the greatest American novel, and one which virtually no one has read. It is tough reading.

But I digress.

Whaling has not disappeared, but it has certainly narrowed in its scope and intensity. All around the globe,countries gain more income from eco-tourism - whale watching - than from killing whales. Live whales are have become an economic asset, to be both protected and cherished. They are beautiful, magnificent creatures to behold. Once seen, never forgotten. And now it seems, they do not forget each other. It seems that whales do not merely communicate with each other, but also identify each other, and themselves, with names. We have so much more to learn. What more could they possibly teach us?

Some scientists argue that whales, like primates, should be considered "non-human person" - sentient, thinking, self-aware creatures that maintain complex societies and display evidence of sophisticated thought processes. On a physical/neurological level, their brains display many similarities to those of human beings. Yet we know that despite similarities in 99.5% of our DNA, no one would ever confuse a human with a chimpanzee. One half of one percent difference is profound. But it certainly suggests a strong familial relationship.

What are the criteria we should be looking for to determine a status of "non-human personhood"? How should humans interact with these sentient beings of land and sea? Are humans the "lord of the manor", or do we need to re-examine our relationship to the rest of the world - even further than we already may have done? And once we align ourselves to the rest of the world, what then?

Perhaps that is one other "ghost in the machine" - one other singularity that we will one day attain. And perhaps, at that moment, an unforeseen destiny will have been met. And the whales will be seen emerging out of the oceans, in silent flight, towards the celestial heavens above.

Japan

It's mind-boggling. Mind numbing. Beyond one's comprehension. And impossible not to think about this weekend.

An earthquake measuring 9.1 on the Richter scale. If a 1 on the scale represents a release of 1 unit of energy measured, the exponential nature of the scale means that a 9 represents 100,000,000 units of energy. Enough energy to shift the coast of Japan 8 feet. Enough energy to shift the earth's axis 4 inches (it did). And enough to create a wall of water 30 feet (10 meters) high along miles and miles of Japan's coastline.

We see the pictures, and video, shot from helicopters and planes. The water looks stream-like - a wide swath, flooding fields and streets, yet somehow benign and harmless - as if people could somehow walk through it to shelter and safety. Then we watch newly released video taken from those trapped in building and see the wall of water for what it is. A wall of death, washing away people, cars, houses, and in one case an entire train traveling up the Japanese coast.

The next day, we read of impending nuclear catastrophe. First at one reactor. Then two reactors in one plant. Then, possible, six reactors at multiple plants. Why? Why Japan? Why the only country in the world to have already suffered the devastation of nuclear devices, during World War II?

We search for meaning, we search for hope. We think of the embedded ironies - former enemies, we dropped the bomb on Japan. Now friends, and iron-bound partners in trade, we are the first to extend aid and the hand of friendship. And we warn our citizens not to travel there. In case of nuclear meltdown, the radiation released would cause a disaster on an unprecedented scale. Yet we have just read, in The Immortal Life... of radiation being used in hope of treating Henrietta Lacks all those years ago. Henrietta is long gone from this world, but her cells live on. Some of them, I would imagine, in laboratories in Japan. I suppose one of our citizens is, in some sense, already there. Would those HeLa cells survive this new calamity? Ironies.

Is there a reason? Was there a cause? It's our nature to try to make some sense out of this. Over zealous environmentalists have already claimed that climate change and global warming may have contributed to this disaster. The melting polar ice caps, they say, is shifting the weight on the earth's oceanic plates, causing an increase in tectonic (earthquake) and volcanic activity. Doubters of climate change have fired back: “This is not the first time earthquakes have been blamed by the Shamanistic, Magical-Thinking Left on the all-purpose Zeus-substitute of global warming” said one. The other side answers back: True, Japan sits on a subduction zone, where plates move past earth other, but climate change can be shown to lead to more tsunamis (although not on Friday's scale) that could impact the United States". The argument and the fight goes on.

Economists debate the disaster's impact on the Japanese economy, as well as our own ("There may be an increase in the sale of American cars if people question the availability of Japanese cars and parts".) Some pundits predict a decrease in the price of petroleum, as declining Japanese demand leads to an increase in supply. CNBC stock market commentator Larry Kudlow actually said that ""The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll and we can be grateful for that". Others have noted concern for Tokyo Disney World's safety (Disney World!!) as it is built on landfill, while other worry about............

This is madness. Insanity. Why the need to fight about causes? Why the need to over-analyze things? Why the need to focus on the material loss and cost of the disaster? Why do commentators need to compare it in magnitude to disasters of the past? "This is the worst earthquake Japan has experienced, and the fifth strongest since records were started to be kept in the 1860s...."

Somehow in our interconnected, app-driven, 4G world, we have lost sight of humanity. I saw a picture on CNN.com of a young child, of maybe 6 or 7 years. Surrounded by a team of physicians in radiation protective gear, his hands were outstretched, over his head, reaching toward the ceiling, as the well protected scientist/physician scanned his little body for exposure to radiation.

For me, it was like the moment Mary, ever stoic, viewed Henrietta Lacks in her coffin and glanced momentarily at her red painted toe nails. It was the moment I focussed on, and saw, the individual effected. I thought of the individuals standing without their homes, without drinking water, and possibly, without family members.

And I cried for the people of Japan.

(In response to ML's comment: there's no question to respond to. Respond to Japan. Respond to the ironies. Respond to the post. Anything that gets your mind making connections.)