I enjoy the teeny dopamine rush I get when the AHA! of connection happens.
I admit, I have been a kind of AHA! junkie over the years, and it is only getting worse. The recent “tools for though” aka “PKMs (Personal Knowledge Management tools) are aiding memory and helping “knowledge workers” to collect (if not find) associations between disparate bits of information.
Those knowledge-bits could come together from across decades for young people of today, who might adopt them and use them consistently to build “personal graphs” or “second brains.” Or not. Let me know what happens.
So here’s the skinny….
An updated fact from a new study on global male fertility (see link from EHN) reminded me this morning that I had read and started collecting highlights from multiple articles on the topic a few years back.
This astoundingly significant species-wide phenomenon causes very little general-public concern, and yet fertility-towards-zero (if that is even a possible terminal point) is of immense importance, if we are to avoid the inconvenience of extinction.
And the wee AHA! from this revisitation was to imagine this “sperm sickness” as a planetary system’s homeostatic way of ridding itself of pestilence. That’s not an earth-shaking epiphany, but an “atomic thought” for me that I’ll record and perhaps rediscover and recombine with new info again, somewhere down the road.
And while I’m rambling, it did occur to me that, if any nation suffering such a massive sperm-count decline were to discover that this biologic calamity was the work of a state’s enemy, poisoning the water for decades… imagine.
But nah. It’s only US together, self-dosing the poison to our children by the way we live. Better living through chemistry. Unless you’re a sperm.
🎉 NERD’s CORNER
The concurrent AHA! that I’ll only share with the two of you that have read down this far on the page comes from the synergy of a couple of those “tools” I spoke of earlier, that lead to the creation of the “featured card” above, extracted from the EHN article.
The two tools that worked together this morning are TANA and RAINDROP.io on which I will not dwell, you are welcome.
I had recently imported two year’s-worth of database from another previously-used tool (Roam Research) into TANA. Searching there today on “sperm count”, I found my older collection on male infertility.
Searching and finding without losing focus and flow is essential, and it worked for me here. Eureka!
THE IRONY: After writing all but this final paragraph, I returned to that collection of fertility links from more than a year ago, AHA! to find the curiously-similar bit of reflection on synchronicities and “idea sex” that I’d added in just that spot. How odd.
And yet another micro-dose of dopamine. Whoot!
You should now feel free to get on with your lives. Thanks for dropping by!
"... that I’ll only share with the two of you that have read down this far on the page.." --- and yes, I laughed.
I think that some people are connecting the dots and agree with Ms. Goodall -that we're destroying our only home, while others ---...? who knows why intelligent people ignore science and data! Sometimes the planet culls us in subtle ways and other times she tries to buck us off with hurricanes and earthquakes or with pandemics - yet the humans don't really want to alter habits or attitudes.
(" TANA and RAINDROP.io" were new words/terms for me --- The TANA site is now open for perusal - looks interesting...)
I read a sci-fi book a couple of years ago set after "The Gelding," an environmental event that caused 99.99% of humanity to become sterile. Beyond the mass depopulation event that occurs over 1 generation, it also throws humanity back to the dark ages, as there is nobody to run the power plants, nobody that knows how to make an antibiotic, etc.
Looking back at my 2020 reading list, I read a lot of dark, depressing, post-apocalyptic fiction that year. Reading about even worse circumstances than the early stages of an unknown pandemic must have been helpful to me in some way.