Beautiful self-organized pattern: the huge hexagon at Saturn’s north pole

Take a look at this beautiful movie image of Saturn taken by NASA:

This nighttime movie of the depths of the north pole of Saturn taken by the visual infrared mapping spectrometer onboard NASA’s Cassini Orbiter reveals a dynamic, active planet lurking underneath the ubiquitous cover of upper-level hazes. The defining feature of Saturn’s north polar regions–the six-sided hexagon feature–is clearly visible in the image.

“Who built that hexagon on top of Saturn?” one might ask.  No one built it.  It’s a self-organized pattern.  And the area of the hexagon is large enough to fit four earths.

This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides,” said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “We’ve never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn’s thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you’d expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is.

But this striking pattern is merely one of the huge numbers of beautiful self-organized patterns one can find in our universe.  In Dynamic Patterns: the Self Organization of Brain and Behavior (1997), J. A. Scott Kelso describes the mysterious-seeming emergence of such dynamic patterns:

Patterns in general emerge in a self-organized fashion, without any agent-like entity ordering the elements, telling them when and where to go . . . [S]ystems that are pumped

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Want to adopt a baby from China? Not if you are an old, depressed, sick, poor, alcoholic, amputee, criminal, fat Jehovah’s Witness!

My wife and I adopted our two wonderful daughters from China on two separate occasions, in 1999 and 2001.  We very much appreciated the way that the Chinese orphanages took good care of our daughters.  When we traveled to China to meet our daughters, we were treated well by the many Chinese people we met who ran China’s adoption program.  Everything was straight-forward and as we expected.  I also cannot say enough good things about Children’s Hope International, the American adoption agency we used.

Throughout the adoption process one bit of irony repeatedly occurred to my wife and I: We had to be highly scrutinized before being allowed to adopt.  The Chinese government (and our own agency) wanted to make certain that we were going to be good parents.  My wife and I sometimes commented to each other that absolutely anyone is qualified to have a biological child, whereas people trying to adopt were treated with suspicion.  To be approved for adoption, we had to produce our arrest records, medical records, recommendation letters and a home study.

We periodically get newsletters from Children’s Hope.  This month’s letter includes the current requirements for adopting a child from China. Interesting stuff.  In fact, the requirements are much stricter than they were a few years ago:

  • China bases eligibility on each person’s age. If one spouse is under 30 or one spouse is over 55, the couple is not eligible to adopt.

Families are not eligible to adopt if any of the following …

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How to be happy

I often jump at the chance to report on new well-written articles regarding happiness, especially when they are based upon science rather than mere anecdotes.

Last year, I started a subscription to Scientific American Mind  It’s a well-written magazine that addresses lively and timely topics.  Be February-March 2007 issue contains an article entitled “Why It’s so Hard to Be Happy.” 

Why is it so hard?  After all (as the article points out), the buying power of average Americans has tripled since 1950, though we are not three times happier.  In fact, our children are more anxious.  Is happiness about achieving goals, for instance?  Apparently not.  The growing field of “positive psychology” shows that happiness

Is not something that can be achieved by hard work or good luck.  The happiest people seem to be those who are fully engaged in the present, rather than focused on future goals.

Evolutionary psychology suggests that humans have inherited “a remarkable capacity to habituate to, or become accustomed to, the status quo.”  While this is great when we are facing adverse conditions, it causes ongoing pleasant experiences to fade in the consciousness.  In fact, we seem to be especially well-tuned to notice dangers much more than pleasures. “The natural human condition is to take positive experiences for granted and to focus on the bothersome aspects of life.”  The article suggests that humans who were never satisfied had an survival advantage over their easily-satisfied peers. 

A twin study from 1996 indicates that 80% of the variation …

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