Amazon, Ecuador

Lagoons & Lookouts

by  •  • 2 Comments

Early the next morning we headed back to the same lagoon we had visited in darkness. It was pretty neat to see the lagoon in the light of day.  Birds were singing and flying around everywhere. The Hoatzin, pictured below, didn’t even seem real or like it should be from this era.  It looked prehistoric and wild to me.

This bird is called a Hoatzin. They were hanging around in the trees surrounding the lagoon.

This bird is called a Hoatzin. They were hanging around in the trees surrounding the lagoon.

After the canoe ride, we hiked around the lagoon to a rickety lookout that we scrambled up, restricted to 6 people at a time, to get a different perspective of the terrain. Along the hike we saw a Conga Bullet Ant, which is a huge black ant whose bite leaves you with paralysis and a fever, but won’t kill you.

View of the lagoon from the rickety lookout.

View of the lagoon from the rickety lookout.

When we returned we attended a live basket weaving demonstration by one of the guides. Of course we had to prepare the materials by ripping strips of bark off of a Toquilla plant stalk. Getting a nice even strip was harder than it looked. During the demonstration I spotted the first toucans in the trees. They were multi-banded aracaris. Unfortunately they were too far away for photos, but watching them with binoculars was pretty amazing.

Following lunch we learned how to prepare chocolate from roasted cacao beans. We had to shell the beans before processing them through an old-fashioned hand grinder three times to make a soft, silky cocoa paste. Pretty delicious.

Then we left for an afternoon hike to another lookout to learn more about the plants and to search for more animals.The air felt moist and humid.  Everything around me was buzzing with energy and life, although I was too dense to actually see most of the animal activity, even when it was right in front of me.  One of our guides captured a poison dart frog by trapping it between some leaves or I probably wouldn’t have seen anything.

Everything in the jungle is built for survival, in whatever way it can find.

Everything in the jungle is built for survival, in whatever way it can find.

The afternoon lookout was similar to the one from the morning, rickety and high, but the views were pretty incredible.

Another stunning view of the jungle.

Another stunning view of the jungle.

Social Media

Yo! Still At It

by  •  • 1 Comment

I’ve blogged about Yo! twice before and every so often I check in on the app’s progress.  Initially I was fascinated with how many millions of people downloaded, used, and raved about the app when it was launched.  The app offered a way to communicate with others by using the word “yo”.  Once sent, the onus was on the recipient to infer the context and meaning of the two-letter message.

It seemed useless and annoying to me.  How many Yo’s could one person send and/or receive?  Even with the rapid deterioration of communication between humans in verbal and textual forms, I would imagine that “Yo” would get boring, tedious, and confusing.  I like to think as a species we’ve already advanced way past mono-syllabic grunting to communicate and there’s no turning back.

According to the articles I read, it seems the creators of Yo also feel the real potential was not in communicating with others, but rather as an alternative way to receive notifications from vendors, stores, services, etc.   Yo is supposed to simplify things, but it seems like it’s inserting itself as a middle-man between an app and you.

If I want updates from somebody’s Instagram or a news source, I sign up for the notification service directly with the owner.  No need to have a separate app in the middle for filtering.  If I don’t want the notifications, I unsubscribe.  No big deal.  And if I’m not interested enough to have the app, I’m not interested enough in receiving notifications. It’s not complicated in my brain.

One way I imagine Yo making things easier is by potentially cutting down the number  of accounts/logins a person needs & on the number of email notifications received. For example, if notifications for multiple subscriptions can be channeled to a single Yo account, it means the recipient only needs one account.  But then again, that account will be flooded with everything.

I’m astounded, amazed, and frankly a little irritated that this app received $1.5 million in funding for product development.  Aside from sending a “Yo” to somebody with two actions, instead of the half dozen or so required to send it another way, I don’t really see how it does anything that hasn’t already been done before.

Digital Dilemma

When Smartphones Make Us Dumb

by  •  • 4 Comments

From the first moment I turned on my smartphone I was enchanted.  Upon activating, the device emitted a strange, though not unpleasing, ethereal noise as an electric blue swirl flashed on the screen.  I resisted buying one until 2013.  As predicted, I love everything I thought I would love about it and feel irritated by everything I thought would be irritating.

Recently I started wondering what the name “smartphone” is really defining.  Does it refer to the actual phone, meaning that it’s “smart” because it possesses technological capabilities to make our lives easier?  Or does “smart” refer to the owner, who is, in some sense, smarter because of the phone?  Having a smartphone means never getting lost, being able to access & retrieve information anytime/anywhere, and receiving notifications/reminders to keep us on track with communication and other aspects of daily life.  These all seem like really positive aspects of having a smartphone, which is why I’m amazed at the ways in which I’m becoming “dumb” for owning one.

I know a number of people, some of whom are smartphone owners, who call me for directions. First of all, most people are pretty adverse to picking up the phone for something as ordinary as a conversation.  And second of all, the smartphone makes you smarter – use the map app!  And if you can’t read a map, google “how to read a map” or “how to activate map voice commands” and the magic inside the phone will give verbal instructions.

And this leads me to the next point, having access to so much information all the time means that I’ve become a bit “dumb” about socializing and communicating with people. My skills are deteriorating because I rely on technology so I don’t need to interact with people to get the information I need.  I’m waiting for a facial-expression app for when we lose our natural abilities to infer meaning from body language.

Smartphones make us dumber by remembering so much for us. When was the last time you remembered a phone number instead of relying on speed-dialing, a contact list, or a voice command?

And lastly using the smartphone makes me “dumb” about my surroundings.  I find that when using the device, even just for taking notes, I’m so focused and absorbed that it consumes all my concentration.  I understand why people have accidents due to “distracted driving.”

 

Amazon, Ecuador

The Jungle

by  •  • 1 Comment

We arrived in the evening and drank icy cold beers while listening to the nightly chorus of animals. We assembled early the next morning for bird watching. As an added bonus spider monkeys dropped from the trees to feast on bunches of bananas left for them by the docks.

Spider monkeys came down from the trees to eat the bananas left for them.

Spider monkeys came down from the trees to eat the bananas left for them.

After breakfast we boarded a canoe to visit a schoolhouse and meet some of the children before eating a traditional lunch hosted by one of the families living in the area.  The lunch required us to prepare some of the meal, including a packet of fat juicy larvae wrapped securely in a banana leaf.  I was squeamish and could only stroke the soft, wrinkled skin of the wriggling grub, but my mother prepared 8 of them.  First she crushed their heads with her thumb to kill them before threading a skewer through the soft, silky body. Then she sliced the flesh with a knife to let the guts ooze out to prevent them from exploding while cooking.

The larvae.

The larvae.

I ate the crunchy head of a cooked one with my meal of fresh fish, plantains, yuca, bananas, and salsa.  It tasted like crispy chicken skin.

Next to the house was a Kapok tree, one of the tallest in the jungle.  It can live for hundreds of years.

A view of the Kapok Tree. It was so big it was hard to get it all in one frame.

A view of the Kapok Tree. It was so big it was hard to get it all in one frame.

In the afternoon we learned more about the plants and their medicinal properties. One of my favorites was the Dragon Blood Tree. Our jungle guide cut into one with his machete and extracted a red, viscous sap. He rubbed it over a scrape of mine turning the sap into a fluffy pinkish-white cream.  Another favorite was the Walking Palm, which grows roots to pull the tree towards a light source.  In this way the palm “walks” 10-20cm a year!

In the evening we boarded the motor-powered canoe to see another side of the jungle, the oil industry.  Oil is mined from deep in the jungle  leaving pollution and residue behind.

Two towers of eternal oil burn.

Two towers of eternal oil burn.

We restored ourselves after by visiting a lagoon in 4 smaller canoes to listen.  Lightening bugs twinkled around us and their eggs glowed brightly on floating plants. A few people glimpsed the glowing, fiery eyes of a caiman in the water and of a bird called a Great Potoo in a tree.

Deletion, Digital Dilemma, Facebook, Social Media

Tracking Toxic Relationships

by  •  • 5 Comments

I recently heard about a new app called pplkpr, pronounced “people keeper”, to help you keep track of your emotions when interacting with people.  It’s designed to help you discover patterns and trends in your emotional state based on who is around you.  The idea is to keep the people who impact you positively while eliminating interactions with people who stress you out.

The app works by:

  • using GPS to monitor when you are moving, and
  • detecting variations in your heart rate to determine if you are having an emotional reaction to something.

According to the website, “pplkpr is based on measurements of heart rate variability, where subtle changes in heart rhythm signal changes in your emotional state. pplkpr knows when you’re having a strong emotion, and lets you decide what that emotion is.”

The heart rate is monitored through a Blue-tooth enabled wearable fitband, or by inputting data manually. Pplkpr connects to your Facebook friends, but it’s not clear if you can add people outside of your FB network.  At the moment, only in-person interactions can be recorded as no options exist for communications through email, text, social media, or phone calls.

The app collects and analyzes the data over time identifying patterns of your emotional state when interacting with certain people.  Once identified, the app can be programmed to block out stressful people while initiating engagements with others that have a positive effect.  On one video clip of pplkpr, users spoke of the benefit of being able to use technology as a definitive justification for breaking off a friendship or relationship.

We’re relying on technology to discover patterns about ourselves that we’re too disconnected to notice, even though we live through them 24/7, as a way to become more engaged.  And then we’re relying on the technology to manage the relationships to tell us who we should be spending more time with instead of connecting with them personally.  Am I missing something?

It’s supposed to make us feel more connected, or more aware of our connections, but does so in a way that is disengaging in the moment.  To me this is just inserting a “third-party” into the equation.  Perhaps if we spent our time together in engaging, meaningful ways we would be able to feel and recognize what is going on, rather than distracting ourselves by measuring and punching in data.

 

 

Human Archives

Flying

by  •  • 2 Comments

Have you ever been asked if you would prefer to have wings or a tail?  I always answer “tail” but the overwhelming majority of people pick “wings”.  Whenever I ask “why wings” the answer is always the same, “then I could fly.”  However, not all wings are designed for flying and wings are not the only way to fly.

If we think about how often and in which contexts we use the phrase “flying through…” we might be surprised to discover wings are not always present.  We use “flying” to describe feelings of weightlessness, soaring through air, or moving at terrific speeds, not all of which require wings.  Additionally many animals accomplish flying in ways that diverge from wings and/or air.  Think about flying fish, penguins, or other diving birds that use their wings to “fly” in the water.  Consider fast moving land animals, such as cheetahs or gazelles, that are often described as flying.

I discovered my “wings” through swimming.  Nothing makes me feel better than flying through the water. Last summer I went swimming in the Atlantic Ocean while vacationing on Fire Island.  At the time I was recovering from a shoulder injury and had been swimming less than usual.  I had been restricted from doing butterfly specifically because it’s so strenuous.

One day in the salt water, surrounded by waves, an irresistible urge took over.  And then I did it, a few flaps of fly just to remember the sensation of “flying through the water.”  For a few brief moments I was a great sea creature, like a penguin or dolphin, propelling myself effortlessly through the waves.  The rush, the feeling, soaring through the air and water against the dynamic motion of the waves and the undertow.  Incredible.  My shoulder reacted later with a few sharp pangs, but it was totally worth it.

How could I resist?

How could I resist?

*Bonus: Why do I always pick tail?  There’s no rational reason. I think tails are cool and extremely expressive for most animals.  I have a natural aversion to feathers so the thought of having feathered appendages coming out of my back sounds creepy.  To me having “wings” is not synonymous with flying.  What if I got dirty pigeon wings?  Or small sparrow wings that couldn’t lift me off the ground?  Also wearing shirts would be challenging.  A tail seems easier to accommodate.