Quotidian Miracles

Do you realise how many things in everyday life hang by a thread? I’ve been reading a lot of things scientific around our physical existence and a common element strikes me, the spiritual connotations of which get my mind racing around like a freight train running on nitrous oxide.

Here’s a few thoughts…

1) The Three phases of Water… do you have any idea what factors need to be in play for it to be possible just to have water in the form of solid, liquid and gas?… and it just happens to be fundamental to our existence.

2) Tectonic plates… Water in three phases is not all. The movement of our tectonic plates, and with it volcanoes, earthquakes, etc. are essential to managing the Earth’s temperature… without which, human life on the planet would not exist.

3) Day and Night… Apart from the fact that we just happen to be the perfect distance from the earth to sustain life on the planet with the Sun’s energy as well as contribute to the maintenance of the Earth’s temperature… the mere fact that the system revolves around us having a period of rest and work, Light and Darkness makes the Earth work and rest just as we do.

Right… now forget all the Scientific stuff… the temperature, the rest and work, the fact that we just happen to have all these things in a perfect balance and I haven’t even mentioned all of them. They also have an effect on our social atmosphere, health, behaviour. Again, all of which affect our ability to adequately LIVE on this planet.

It seems to me a bit convenient for all these critical elements which keep us alive to be a coincidence. At just how many ‘coincidences’ will we draw the line before we acknowledge the design?

The Dark Side of the Mind

Amazing article I found from Ego Development…

If you desire to stay positive in your life, try to avoid these bad human habits. When you make these changes, you will feel it will make great changes in the way you see things and will help you live a happier life.

1. Fear
“Fear” is one of the harmful negative or depressing emotions. Fear, like all other depressing emotions, poisons the body. This is not said in a figurative sense. It is an actual scientific fact; it has been demonstrated chemically. Were it not for the fact that the lungs, skin, kidneys and the bowels are constantly removing poisons from the body, an acute attack of fear would prove fatal.

2. Worry
Worrying is perhaps the most common and the worst of our mental sins. Worry is like a cancer: It eats in and in. It is destructive of both body and mind. It is due largely to lack of self-control and is a symptom of cowardice. Much worry is also indicative of great selfishness, which most of those afflicted will deny. Those who worry much are always in poor health, which grows progressively worse. The form of indigestion accompanied by great acidity and gas formation is a prolific source of worry, as well as of other mental and physical troubles. The acidity irritates the nervous system and the irritation in time causes mental depression.

3. Guiltiness/Regret.
For one thing, we are all guilty. We live not knowing as much as we need to know about the problems that we have, and so we make mistakes, all of us. It is Nature itself that is imperfect, and we are all the heirs of this imperfection. Knowing that you are totally created makes it possible to rise above personal injuries and move beyond guiltiness and regret. In the words of Lao-Tse, “When I let go of who I am, I become who I might be.”

4. Depression-despair.
Depression affects more than just an individual’s mood and general overall sense of well being. Depression surfaces in a number of other ways, including the form of eating disorders. To be a whole person again, you can move away from ignoring or repudiating your bad feelings and move into a position of being receptive to change. From this position you are compassionate – you recognize that you are more than your bad feelings. Implicit in this attitude lie the words, “I am with you. I do not turn away from you. I acknowledge you. I recognize your bad feelings. My compassion recognizes that you are more than you think you are. Who you are and who you have been have been produced by the processes of Nature/life. I do not repudiate or desert any of you. I do not turn my back on you. I do not try to will you out of existence. I acknowledge your existence, each part of your body and each part of your mind. A person is going to feel the full range of human feelings, including fear, shame, hostility, and guiltiness.

5. Anger.
Anger is a normal human emotion. However, when it’s unresolved or unchecked, it can lead to devastating consequences for the person holding onto the anger and those around him or her. The major reason that anger is so difficult to manage for most people is that it has become a habitual response to certain people, places and situations. Most habits tend to operate below our awareness—meaning we react without considering our choices

6. Self-blame
If you are down on yourself, practicing a lot of self-blame, please remember that it is very difficult to get by in this complicated world as it is without any disorders. Blaming yourself for all kinds of stuff such as whether other people are happy, whether other people work hard, whether your relationship fails to thrive, whether a social event is going well – is so much work! People who blame themselves for too much mistake influence for control. A mother may be able to influence her child when it comes to academic study but she can’t completely control the child’s motivation (or lack of). You may be able to influence whether your partner or friend has a good time but you certainly can’t be totally responsible.

7. Indifference 
An absence of compulsion to or toward one thing or another. To be indifferent is to realize that I have no interest — not now, not yet or maybe ever — in something I have become aware of and spent some time prioritizing. To not know is to realize how futile self-importance is. Ignorance however represents a procrastinization of thought. Ignorance is the substitution of belief for knowledge. Where continuing ignorance would curtain with darkness, realization provides the ubiquity of sun light. The bliss of ignorance is ironic — I’m giving away my bliss to the rapturous.

Ants go High-Tech

National Geographic has this interesting news piece from Bristol, United Kingdom.

— Image courtesy University of Bristol/PA via AP

The study was to find how ants choose nesting sites.

A study based on the experiments, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, showed that rock ants will go far out of their way to move to a better home–chosen based on the personal preferences of a few trusted scouts.

Technorati Tags: Science, Ants, technology, national geographic, experiment

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.

Mr. Green Genes, the Glow-in-the-Dark Cat!

What kind of freaks think up this stuff, I’m against all this genetic testing and playing God even if they do have the best intentions.  I did notice the article fail to mention how many times they failed before they came up with this cat.

“Mr. Green Genes is the first fluorescent cat in the United States and probably the world, said Betsy Dresser, the centre’s director.

The researchers made him so they could learn whether a gene could be introduced harmlessly into the feline’s genetic sequence to create what is formally known as a transgenic cat.

If so, it would be the first step in a process that could lead to the development of ways to combat diseases via gene therapy.”

Link

They’ve done much the same with a Goldfish as well, I’m wondering when we’ll see the next glow-in-the-dark humanoid. Fiction can’t beat reality, eh?

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

The Genetic Chain of Command

Carl Zimmer @ Wired has an interesting article which covers the new discoveries revolving around the structure of genes and DNA and how all the wiring works.

We all already know that DNA helps structure life and carry out its functions. But this is not enough, the genes need to become active at the right place and the right time, otherwise if they were firing randomly we’d end up as one big pile of mush. Scientists have then discovered that there are a few genes which regulate the rest and these genes are responsible for switching on and off the many various other genes which make up an organism. Basically, the genes formed a chain of command, where a few were responsible for activating and deactivating the rest.

What makes it a bit more complicated is that as certain genes are switched on and off, the one which was switched on by one gene could switch off that same gene which activated it, in order to create a balance.

I guess the really interesting question here is , how do these genes know what to do? Where is the deep intelligence at the core which tells it how life should be structured? Where did this come from? Did it really just form from years of evolution a sort of “inherited intelligence”? I don’t buy the explanation that we’re all randomly created through natural selection.

As Zimmer himself says at the end of his article… “The source of their strength lies not in a single molecule — DNA — but in a complicated web of relationships. The network itself is the mystery for biologists in the 21st Century.”

Related Topics :
DNA Found to Have “Impossible” Telepathic Properties

Scientists are reporting evidence that contrary to our current beliefs about what is possible, intact double-stranded DNA has the “amazing” ability to recognize similarities in other DNA strands from a distance. Somehow they are able to identify one another, and the tiny bits of genetic material tend to congregate with similar DNA. The recognition of similar sequences in DNA’s chemical subunits, occurs in a way unrecognized by science. There is no known reason why the DNA is able to combine the way it does, and from a current theoretical standpoint this feat should be chemically impossible.

I’ve found God says man who cracked human genome.

“I don’t see that as necessary at all and I think it is deeply disappointing that the shrill voices that occupy the extremes of this spectrum have dominated the stage for the past 20 years.”

For Collins, unravelling the human genome did not create a conflict in his mind. Instead, it allowed him to “glimpse at the workings of God”.

“When you make a breakthrough it is a moment of scientific exhilaration because you have been on this search and seem to have found it,” he said. “But it is also a moment where I at least feel closeness to the creator in the sense of having now perceived something that no human knew before but God knew all along.

“When you have for the first time in front of you this 3.1 billion-letter instruction book that conveys all kinds of information and all kinds of mystery about humankind, you can’t survey that going through page after page without a sense of awe. I can’t help but look at those pages and have a vague sense that this is giving me a glimpse of God’s mind.”

Technorati Tags: DNA, Genes, Wired, Carl Zimmer, Collins, Genetics

The Physics of Marketing

For anyone involved in Marketing in today’s times, it’s no understatement to say that it is sometimes downright confusing. Especially when you look at the three main weapons in the marketing arsenal today, Mass Marketing, Direct Marketing and Social Media Marketing. all three work according to very different rules and modes of operation.

I recently read this blog post which compared the Laws of Physics and how these three methods of marketing appropriately fit the explanations for the laws of physics.

Mass advertising is like Classical Physics; large-scale, mostly intuitive and somewhat predictable.

Direct Marketing is like Atomic Physics; small/medium-scale, mostly logical, but the segmentation aspects start to show some bumps and troughs on what appeared to be smooth and simple.

Social Media is more like Quantum Physics; small-scale, counter-intuitive and usually unpredictable.

• Traditional marketers deal with everyones opinions in big bins like sales figures, national focus groups, opinion polls, etc. These roll-ups average out the inconsistencies of individuals and blur together to form tendencies, trends and preferences. The actions taken in mass marketing can expect a relatively consistent result (i.e. send out a coupon and you can expect a certain level of redemption and sales revenue to come from it and the larger the audience, the more likely it is to average out at a predictable result). This is the world that marketers are familiar with and all-in-all it makes sense if you know the system.

• Social Media on the other hand acts on the niche and individual level where things are a lot less certain. The complex nature of blog posts is hard to parse out into definitive numbers and trends.The lack of large numbers makes the reaction and result of social media efforts difficult to determine and measure. It is much more difficult to roll up all of these disparate opinions into a meaningful decision than to look at an opinion pie-chart.So in essence, social media tools have given marketers a microscope powerful enough to see what is going on at smaller scales.

…many marketers in the classical camp are not very happy with what they see, because it doesn’t confirm what they thought they knew. Decisions which appear obvious when looking at large sample sizes becomes more nuanced and contradictory when you see everyone as an individual.

Beyond Darwin & Global Cooling

Two interesting stories I’ve been reading lately.

1) BBC: Global Cooling?

World Meteorological Organisation’s Secretary General says that the Earth’s Temperature to cool down in 2008, Thanks to La Nina (Opposite of El Nino), proving that the Earth is more resilient than we thought at controlling it’s own temperature.

2) WIRED: Beyond Darwin – Way Beyond

Trying to explain why certain jumps in evolution and adaptation which seem to defy explanation through solely individual properties or genetic changes. Scientists are now applying the evolution theory to larger groups calling them super-organisms. Including the Social Context and it’s ability to affect the evolution of groups as a whole. They example they use is the honey bee colony, where the individual characteristcs of the bees themselves have no change whatsoever, however the cahracteristics of the colony itself changes.

Technorati Tags: Darwin , Evolution, La Nina, El Nino, Global Cooling, Temperature, Climate Change

Scientists create Synthetic DNA!

The move, which comes after five years of research, is seen as the penultimate stage in the endeavor to create an artificial life form based entirely on a man-made DNA genome — something which has tantalized scientists and sci-fi writers for years.

“Through dedicated teamwork we have shown that building large genomes is now feasible and scalable so that important applications such as biofuels can be developed,” said Hamilton Smith, from the J. Craig Venter Institute, in the study published in Science.

The research has been carried out at the laboratories of the controversial celebrity scientist Craig Venter, who has hailed artificial life forms as a potential remedy to illness and global warming.

However, the prospect of engineering artificial life forms is highly controversial and is likely to arouse heated debate over the ethics and potential ramifications of such an advance.

Link

I was thinking of Aldous Huxley’s brave New World as soon as I read the Title of this article. Given mankind’s recent tendency towards wars and lust for power, I can only guess as to where this will go when it falls into the wrong hands. The way corporations had rushed to patent every little change they made in the DNA of organisms, I’m thinking the next step would be exactly what was mentioned in a Brave New World.

A world where you can order a fully customised labourer, complete with no ambition for authority, intelligence capped at a particular level to ensure optimal functionality for the task he was bought for and unable to think further than what he /she was created to do.

I hope mankind, has some sense of responsibility with this.

Technorati Tags: Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, DNA, Scientists, Responsibility