The Alpha-Omega Works — books (official site)

Official site: ammoncovino.com — books, free download, and buying live there.

Public contact: contact@ammoncovino.com

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Four books about why things do what they do.

Systems fail in the same shapes whether they are governments, companies, churches, or bodies. Not because of villains. Because of structure, incentives, and time.

Start free. Read one in an hour and decide for yourself.

Read Ants, Butterflies, and Roaches free →

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Get the free book

Enter your email on ammoncovino.com and Ants, Butterflies, and Roaches arrives as a PDF and EPUB. No series of automated emails. You will hear from me when there is a new book, and not otherwise.

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The books

Ants, Butterflies, and Roaches

The gap between what you think is there and what is actually there · Free

Four insects. Four ways a system answers pressure. Ants optimize, butterflies transform, roaches endure, and termites show what all three depend on. Most of the damage in the world comes from running the wrong response at the wrong time.

About an hour to read. The shortest way into everything else here.

Download free on ammoncovino.com →

Also published as Part Four of The Lens. If you buy that, you already own this.

The Mitochondrial Self

The Adventures of Life Itself · $4.99

Well over a billion years ago a cell took in something it could not digest, and the something stayed.

If the structures producing your energy, regulating your hunger, and shaping your mood descend from something that was never originally you, how much of what you call yourself is actually yours?

Short, sourced, and written to be handed to someone.

Buy on ammoncovino.com →

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Homo Sapiens

An Operating Manual for Life · $9.99 ebook

You have been living inside something since before you could see walls. It came through the words your parents used, the stories your church told, and the way your school arranged the desks. From the inside it does not look like a model. It looks like reality.

Four tools, then the model taken apart with them.

Buy on ammoncovino.com →

The Lens

Why Humans Mistake Models for Reality · $9.99

A lens is not a belief system. It does not tell you what to value. It shows you what moves through a system, what accumulates, and what can never get out again, then points that at democracy, government, religion, poverty, prisons, markets, surveillance, and war.

Four parts in one volume, ending with Ants, Butterflies, and Roaches.

Buy on ammoncovino.com →

LIFE

In progress

The last of the four questions: why any of it does anything at all.

Tell me when it's out →

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The set

The Alpha-Omega Works: Four Books, One Continuum · $24.99

Ants, Butterflies, and Roaches. The Lens. The Mitochondrial Self. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Homo Sapiens. All four books in one 612-page volume, in reading order, delivered as PDF and EPUB.

Buy the set on ammoncovino.com →

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What these books do and do not do

They do not tell you what to think. They are diagnostic. If you want a program, wait for LIFE.

They label their own claims. Where something is established, it is sourced. Where it is my reasoning, it says so. Where the evidence does not settle it, it is marked as a position rather than a finding. You are meant to check me, not trust me.

They do not have villains. The argument throughout is that most harm produced by human systems requires no bad actor. Only incentives, scale, and time. That is harder to accept than a conspiracy and much harder to dismiss.

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A.M. Covino · THE ALPHA-OMEGA WORKS · Covino Press
ammoncovino.com · contact@ammoncovino.com

My San Antonio Horn Shark

Actual San Antonio Aquarium horn shark

So a lot of people have asked me to publish the actual picture of Miss Helen the Horn shark that was stolen. Here she is! Have to give Jenny Spellman and Jamie Shank credit for grabbing her from the suspects house and Ammon Covino for making it happen and orchestrating the whole thing.

My San Antonio Aquarium is blowing up all over the news

Shark disguised as baby stolen San Antonio Aquarium

For Miss Helen, Saturday began like any other day. The young, 16-inch-long female horn shark, one of the animals in the San Antonio Aquarium’s interactive shark touch pools, spent the morning swimming around the exhibit receiving food and petting from curious visitors.

But three aquarium-goers wanted to do more than just touch and feed the relatively harmless Miss Helen, police say. They allegedly planned to steal her.

By Monday night, two people had confessed to taking the shark from the aquarium, Leon Valley Police Chief Joseph Salvaggio told reporters. Miss Helen was found alive in the garage of a San Antonio home that looked like a “mock-up” of the aquarium, Salvaggio said. A 38-year-old man has been charged with theft. Charges against the other two suspects are pending, Salvaggio said.

“Luckily, the thief was somebody who knew what he was doing,” he said. “Luckily for the shark and for the aquarium, we were able to get that animal back in one piece.”

Salvaggio added that local law enforcement is working with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to see whether the theft involves federal charges.

It all began Saturday afternoon when two men and a woman with a baby sneaked into the aquarium through its back entrance, the aquarium’s owner Ammon Covino told The Washington Post.

After milling around the aquarium, the trio made their way to the exhibit where visitors are allowed to feed and touch various types of marine animals, Covino said.

There they allegedly waited for the perfect moment to strike.

“They staked out that exhibit waiting for the employee to leave,” Covino said. “The minute she walked out the door, they grabbed that shark.”

The tools needed to pull off the heist? A net, a bucket, a blanket and a baby stroller.

Surveillance video taken at about 2 p.m. captures a man leaning over into the exhibit and emerging with the shark in a net. Cradling the shark in his hands, he walks past visitors looking at other displays and out of the camera’s sight, leaving a trail of water on the aquarium’s floor. Another man is also seen following closely behind.

According to a statement posted to Facebook, the aquarium said the thieves took the shark into one of their filter rooms. Once inside, they placed other animals in danger when they emptied a bucket full of bleach solution used to clean equipment into a display’s filtration system. The “sanitation bucket” was used to transport the shark, the statement said.

When the men reappear on video, one of them is holding a bulky cloth-wrapped bundle under one arm, which he loads into a baby stroller. The woman stands nearby holding the baby.

As this is happening, an aquarium employee can be seen walking by, stopping at least twice to stare at the group. Covino said the employee immediately reported the suspicious behavior to the aquarium’s general manager, Jenny Stellman.

Stellman told The Washington Post that she found the man in the parking lot about to get into a truck. She said she told him she had seen water leaking from the baby stroller.

“He said the water was dripping because they had spilled a Yeti cup onto the stroller and they were leaving in such a hurry because their baby that was with them needed medication.”

But when asked if the vehicle could be searched, the man refused, “jumped in his truck and drove off,” Stellman said.

The theft was the first of its kind at the aquarium, Ammon Covino said.

Even police had a hard time believing the crime was real, Salvaggio told KSAT.

“When we first got the call, we thought it was kind of a hoax being that it was Shark Week last week,” Salvaggio said, referencing the Discovery Channel’s week-long TV programming dedicated to sharks. “But it turns out someone actually went inside the aquarium there in Leon Valley and stole a horn shark.”

This year, Shark Week ran from July 22 to 29. Miss Helen was allegedly taken July 28.

Losing the shark was devastating, Ammon Covino said.

“Every animal is important to us, and to have one taken right out of the San Antonio aquarium, everybody, all of the staff, were just extremely upset.”

However, Covino said he knew the heist’s success would be short. In addition to the surveillance footage, the aquarium’s staff had a license plate number.

“From that point on, I knew that we were at least going to get justice if we weren’t going to get the shark back,” Ammon Covino said.

On Monday night, the aquarium announced that employees were on their way to retrieve Miss Helen — and she was alive. Stellman said she and Jamie Shank, the aquarium’s assistant director of husbandry, were present for the rescue. In a video, Miss Helen can be seen swimming near the surface of a large circular tank that also had an array of colorful corals inside.

“We’re so lucky they were amateur aquarium enthusiasts,” Stellman said, adding that she saw several other sharks in the garage’s tanks. “If it had just been someone off the street who had no idea about anything, we would have a dead shark on our hands.”

Speaking to reporters, Salvaggio said police believe the shark was stolen to be kept as a pet.

“We don’t think he was planning to sell it,” he said. “He didn’t say that, but from looking at the other animals there, it was more than likely it was something that he wanted. He had had one of these in the past . . . obviously he likes those types of animals.”

Horn sharks are commonly found in warm-temperate to subtropical waters and can grow to about four feet long. Although they are carnivores, their diet consists mostly of small fish and invertebrates. According to the International Shark Attack File, a database of known shark attacks compiled by the Florida Museum of Natural History, only one incident of a horn shark biting a human has been recorded.

Video of Miss Helen’s return to the aquarium showed the staff waiting to greet her, bursting into raucous cheering and clapping when she arrived.

While the shark appeared to be in good condition, Stellman said she is in quarantine and being monitored.

“We do still have to watch her because some stress reactions can be delayed,” she said. “She’s not out of the woods just yet.”

New favorite quotes.

"If the law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so."
 Thomas Jefferson

 “The best way to take control over a people and control them utterly is to take a little of their freedom at a time, to erode rights by a thousand tiny and almost imperceptible reductions. In this way, the people will not see those rights and freedoms being removed until past the point at which these changes cannot be reversed.” — Adolf Hitler
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When I have tried all my life to be good why has this happened to me?

I was sent this video by my brother Vince Covino when I was down into a deep depression. I remember it perfectly as if it were yesterday. I was in the Dallas airport, I was by my self traveling back from Florida, there were people around me sitting next to me and across from me and looking at me as I watched this video on my phone and cried silently as tears ran down my cheeks, much like I'm doing now, as I began to realize there is so many things to be grateful for most of all family both wife and children and also brothers and sisters.

 

 

Baby on the way

We finally have a baby on the way, due in 3 weeks, it's a boy so that will be different, I'm used to girls around me all the time. Crysty is about to pop, every time I see her I laugh a little.

Idaho Aquarium Finished

The Idaho Public Aquarium is finally done after a few years of planning and construction. I am happy to say it has made life easier. I have been busy making all the animals same and happy in their new homes. Things are looking great so far at the Aquarium. Find the Aquarium web site here