init7

In India, termite mounds are culturally revered and even worshipped.

I was fascinated by permaculture and tried my hand at digging pits, swales and ponds. We would hire local earthmoving machines to dig large amounts of mud.

Over time I observed that the operators of these machines would never - 1. Break a termite mound 2. Cut a ficus tree

Long story short, we now try to incorporate termites into our work. And even rats!

Normally, every pit you dig for water recharge eventually fills up with biomass and silt. We plant root based crops like sweet potato and tapioca inside the pits to attract rats and termites.

They dig deep beneath the pits and multiply surface area of soil-air boundary millions of times over.

I am beginning to belive that a lot of nature's algorithmic intelligence is in surface areas, folding, unfolding.

A tree takes up a square metre on the ground but creates many football fields worth of leaf areas over. A termite mound does the same below.

I heard that Sri Lanka had terminated rats and as a second order effect, their aquifers dried out. They later had to import rats.

Hats off to termites - a very difficult to understand algorithm of mother nature.

As an outsider, I feel the narrative has totally turned for the rest of the world.

Israeli citizens protesting against the genocide and war crimes rekindled faith that it's mostly the top of govts and military industrial complexes pushing for this.

Not just BBC, most media ended up out in the open this time around. Or maybe it has always been like this, we are just growing up now and taking notice.

It is quite fascinating to think that leaves are not just a static end product but make further leaves that can again spin off more leaves via many trees in parallel.

Like the algorithm that began billions of years is nowhere done and is expanding. What we build on the other hand crumbles every few years.

Foxbat/MiG 25 was another classic aircraft -

For pure speed, they notched 1,852 mph. They could climb to 98,425 feet in four minutes and 3.86 seconds and ultimately reached an absolute altitude record of 123,520 feet.

https://www.historynet.com/mig-25/

When a big systemic circle is imbalanced, we often feel that adding a smaller circle of push or nudge will balance it.

But there are wobbly second order effects and the curves finally settle in the third order, often further away from our initial imagination.

Iatrogenics is the branch of science studying outcomes where interventions make the situation worse off.

Not a judgement on this or any other method, but a recurring pattern to be aware of.