Hmmm. It's the sound of human thought expressed in writing, but could also denote humming. This week, I read ten compendia of the legal blogs and could not find anything inspiring. Of course, the Writers' and Actors' strike over the potential for AI to infringe their rights of personality and their copyrights is being widely discussed.
There is even an article about resurrecting James Earl Jones's voice from past libraries of recordings in order to have the famous Darth Vader voice in new movies in DISCOVER magazine
On the other hand, if humming (but not hawing) is my theme, I've been watching a lot of BBC programming. The
singing sands of Africa --according to one of David Atttenborough's
documentaries-- make a sort of humming, or booming, when sand shifts.
Facinatingly, the BBC filmmakers showed time lapse film of a desert taken over a year-and-a-half. The dunes rolled like tidal waves. Apparently, a sea of sand in Africa is useful because the dust blows across the Atlantic and fertilizes the Amazon rain forest... which latter may not (IMHO) need as much fertilizer since so much of it has been logged.
Apparently, there are remains of petrified forests in the Sahara. That area was once lush forest, which makes me wonder about Mars (the planet).
The book-made-into-a-movie, The Martin is fiction, of course, but we know that humans want to go there to see if there is a chance of life there.
Which brings me to a question. Why would human masterminds consider a seven-month (approx) trip to Mars? Why
wonder if Mars could be terraformed, or perhaps restored to a long ago
condition that it might have been in, when no one has tried to restore
the Sahara, or even a part of the Sahara (not counting the Sahel, about
which I wrote a few weeks ago), to a condition it might have been in
6,000 years ago?
If
tracts of the Sahara are not available for turning back time, there are
surely places that are hot and dry and not home to precious, naturally-space-suited ants.
Or maybe not. The American deserts are not wastelands and cannot be compared to Mars.
While it is noteworthy that sewage can be purified until it is potable, what would be the effect of dumping quantities of it, not into the oceans, but onto baking desert sands? Would the result be mutant scorpions?
In The Martian, raw sewage is pretty much --if you will pardon the adjective-- what the hero used to grow his potatoes. Possibly there are other plants that grow faster.
David Attenborough discussed the resurrection plant. Others are interested in it for its anti-oxidant properties. More
interesting than The Martian's potatoes, this plant seems to drop seeds
within hours of its dessicated tumbleweed-like body rolling into a puddle, and after subsequently being
rained on. Once heavy raindrops liberate seeds and knock them into wet ground, these seeds seem to sprout and grow very quickly. But are
they edible?
Changing
the environment under which a plant grows can change the properties of
the plant, so much research is needed. Research into the resurrection plant indicates that, where environmental conditions are not harsh, the plant produces lesser quantities of anti-oxidant. For instance, with potatoes, everyone knows that one
does not eat "the eyes" or the green parts, or the parts scarred from a spade, because potatoes have
defense mechanisms, and some parts are poisonous.
For many people who
suffer from arthritis, if they just stopped eating potatoes for a few months, their pain
and swelling and deformation should subside. Possibly, a lot of people would suffer a great deal less if they purchased and prepared their own potatoes from scratch. Potatoes are members of the deadly nightshade family. Other potential poisons are tomatoes, vegetable peppers, aubergines or egg plant, also insufficiently cooked lectins.
The links are luke-warm on whether or not what I just wrote is accurate, but, bear in mind, arthritis is big business and palliatives that cost nothing at all are not helpful to "society".
I'm just a tree-hugger, a bit of a sponge for information, and inquisitive.
Presumably, missions to other planets would be based on the idea of living in geodesic domes, especially if there is no oxygen. I imagine it probably would be somewhat like living for years on a low-end cruise ship (with
no shore excursions, no sunbathing, and no walks on the decks), run by
an unelected dictator who is an employee of someone far far away.
All the best,
Rowena Cherry 
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