Exactly How Smoking Will Kill You

via /ninja
Technorati Tags: Humour, Cigarettes, Tobacco Kills

Stealing Second Base

“Progress always involves risks. You can’t steal second base and keep your foot on first.” – Frederick Wilcox

This is an aspect of all initiatives to move forward. You can’t get ahead if you’re still stuck where you are. You can’t expect anything different or better if you keep doing what you’re doing. First step of the change is to recognise where you are and make significant changes, either the environment you find yourself in, or the people that surround you, the habits you have, the things you keep on doing. Recognise it and change it.

It’s not easy and it is a challenge. That’s the point. If you’re comfortable, that’s when you should be worried. That’s when you get hit out of the blue with the unexpected. If you don’t wake up yourself to the reality that things keep changing and you need to change with them, Life will Smack you upside your head and then you’ll be forced to change, which is even harder then if you chose the path yourself.

Ready? Go.

Technorati Tags: Life, Philosophy, Stealing Second Base

I’m Tired…

I’m tired of this writers block… It’s like a catch-22 where I can’t think of anything good to write, so I don’t… but if I don’t put anything down then how will I know if it’s good or not? I’ve always said that writing about writer’s block is a cop-out but now I’m not so sure. Nobody knows where it comes from it’s just that sometimes you hit a wall.

Well it’s starting here. I’m tearing down the wall. Brick by brick, letter by letter. The stories will be written, the words will flow and all of these damn thoughts in my head will pour onto paper (or screen) and I will say what I have to say just as I always have. I know I’ve always had a bad relationship with grammar but so what, I’ll edit after the ideas are out there. I will sit and pick apart what I’ve written when I’ve actually written something. Not doing anything is not only idiot it’s insane. How can anyone expect motion without no initial force being applied?

So the last two paragraphs are like a brain massage. Re-training to shift thought to action. No more Cop-out videos with no words, the words are the tool. The videos and pictures are merely supplementary, they are NOT the real thing. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but one string of words can paint a multitude of pictures. No contest.

Let this be the mission statement.

Right… so now what should I write about?

Technorati Tags: Writing

What Arab Boys do at Shopping Malls…

This is an interesting twist for in-store marketers… The opportunities if we only had our target markets just sitting and staring at our store displays!

Can you imagine the statements after some official gets to see this picture? It won’t be that young men should control their hormones and get a clue… it’ll be that shop owners are no longer allowed to display mannequins in their underwear in the window.

I guess with the current laws in place in a heavily restrictive society, you can’t expect anything else. A trend which may arise from this… Increased internet purchases of Blow-up dolls? Rise in female clothing retail stores, owners being young men ofcourse?

And you thought Parkour was recent trend…

This was done in the 1930′s… Absolutely Awesome.

Coffee Addicts: The Calculus of Caffeine Consumption

Got this from Arvind Narayan’s blog post, in which he takes us through his research on caffeine consumption from a scientific point of view (Click on his blog to read the full analysis), with pretty cool results and analysis for Coffee Addicts (which are generally the corporate riff-raff) and how to use caffeiene to your best advantage.

I’ll just cover his basic results here:

1) Caffeine tolerance builds up rather quickly (2-3 weeks) and further, is near-total. That means that if you drink coffee regularly, pretty soon you start producing more adenosine in respose; thus you need your caffeine dose just to get up to your normal level of brain activity, and you’re dopey if you don’t take it.

2)  Caffeine blocks adenosine receptors in the brain (by tricking your brain into thinking it is adenosine.) A decrease in the activity of adenosine (which is a sleep chemical) increases neuron firing rate and increases focus and concentration.  (see above picture)

3)The best time to drink coffee is when you are already very alert.

4) When adenosine peaks, the best response is not to fight it, but “go with the flow” and (shock, gasp) sleep.  Sleep has effects on memory consolidation and is extremely beneficial in overcoming cognitive bottlenecks, making the brain maximally alert right after waking up. Thus, a possibly very effective coffee drinking pattern would be two cups a day, one early in the morning and one right after an afternoon nap. (Unfortunately, napping is stigmatized in the Western work culture, despite much scientific evidence touting the benefits. I hear that such stigmatization is non-existent in China. Good for them.)

5) Consistent caffeine consumption is as good as nonconsumption, because of (you guessed it) tolerance. a better strategy is periodic abstinence, it lets adenosine levels return to normal. With complete abstinence, it takes 5 days to reach adenosine normality; conservatively, and with imperfect abstinence, a week or 10 days may be required.

That’s about it… interesting eh?  What wasn’t covered in the research and what I’m interested in is the placebo effect of caffeine. As far as I recall there was some research done where 10 people were in a room 9 were given pure caffeine and 1 was given concentrated valium (all of them were told they were being given concentrated caffeine, and in another room it was vice versa.  In each case the subjects given valium in a caffeiene context and caffeine in a valium context had still manifested symptoms as the rest of the group in their particular context.  Hence, both the caffeine and valium had the opposite effect in those individuals.  word.

All in All, I think the above research has very interesting insights into coffee addicts planning their coffee consumption to get the most benefit.  Other than that I just don’t think most people would really care.

Writer’s Block

I don’t know what it is but lately I’ve just found myself absolutely blank when it comes to writing something down. I know I have a lot of interesting things going through my head but nothing seems to materialise on paper or anywhere else.

I have pinpointed the problem though… the lack of me putting things on paper is very closely linked from my lack of reading recently. I had stopped reading and at the same time stopped writing. Just yesterday I was reading one of Neil Gaiman’s stories on the Matrix and boom, the writing bug hit me again. It was just the way he wrote and the content… it was the same stuff which goes through my head but only his short story was to the point and painted such a cool picture with so little words it really inspired me.

So here I am writing about not writing. That must be a cop-out of sorts, but there is a learning here if you missed it a paragraph or so back. If you want to write… read.

Word.

More pen to paper to come :)

Peace!
: Writers Block, Writing

What was your favourite Limmerick as a kid?

I can still remember English Class… getting an entire lesson in the poetry section devoted to Limmericks. I also remember my favourite becuaause it was so ingenious…

There was an old man from Nantucket,
Who kept all his cash in a bucket.
He had a daughter named Nan,
but she ran away with a man.
And as for the bucket, Nantucket.

I loved that one and remember repeating it to everyone I met after that… as most kids do, some things never change :)

So what was your favourite Limmerick? or Haiku even… pick your poetic structure, just tell me. I love language and ingenuity.

And here’s a modern one you might not get, but its pretty cool.

: Limmericks, Limmerick, poetry, Language, Writing

The Ultimate Scratch: You Can’t Beat This

This from the New Yorker…

“Scratching is one of the sweetest gratifications of nature, and as ready at hand as any,” Montaigne wrote. “But repentance follows too annoyingly close at its heels.” For M., certainly, it did: the itching was so torturous, and the area so numb, that her scratching began to go through the skin. At a later office visit, her doctor found a silver-dollar-size patch of scalp where skin had been replaced by scab. M. tried bandaging her head, wearing caps to bed. But her fingernails would always find a way to her flesh, especially while she slept.

One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, “this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.” She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.’s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.“

That’s unbelievable… I can’t imagine having an itch that bad that I’d scratch right through bone? I’m skeptical as to whether this story is even true, seems extremely bizarre and also very scary.

Watch your fingers.

: Weird, Scratching, Science, Itch

Charlie Chaplin vs Adolf Hitler: It’s the hat.

What a brilliant ad…

I do think that Hitler actually shaped his moustache because he liked Chaplin.  I recall a while back a story coming out about Hitler drawing pictures of Disney characters because he liked them so much.  Strange man that one.

Beautiful ad this one.  Clever.

: Charlie Chaplin, Adolf Hitler, Advertising, Cool

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