This has to be one of the best songs and videos I’ve ever come across:
Here’s another version of the tune.
Tag: Uncategorised
Understanding Exponential Growth
Very important video. Please take the time to let it load and watch it. You will thank me. (You will need the Real video player)
Launch in external player
Tall Grass Bakery
Today on the Vinyl Cafe, Stuart McLean talked about an amazing enterprise called the Tall Grass Bakery. Here are two quotes from the segment that really stood out for Michelle and I:
You can’t get rich when you pay fair wages to both farmers and staff but you can make a decent living.
And:
If something’s too cheap, that means someone’s paying the cost somewhere along the line. Maybe it’s the environment, or maybe it’s someone else.
Here is the segment of the show where he talks about this wonderful bakery. We were really inspired by this and hope that you are too.
Lose the tie!
So enough doom and gloom. Here is some good news:
Japan kicked off its summer “Cool Biz” casual clothing campaign Thursday with politicians ditching their suits and ties to encourage the nation to use less air-conditioning.
In 2005, the first Cool Biz drive helped cut carbon dioxide emissions by 460,000 tonnes — equivalent to the combined emissions from one million Japanese households per month, the government said.
How cool is that? LOL
See here for the full article.
For more stories like this, check out the great news network.
The Human Parasite
The idea that the Earth is a living system or organic being has been called the Gaia hypothesis. Gaia is the Greek name for the Earth Goddess. Some believe that our mother Earth as a living organism will adapt herself to changes that threaten her life. From the Earth’s viewpoint humans are a parasite on her body; if those parasites threaten her health, she may find ways to make them change their behavior or possibly even eliminate them.
Mad-cow disease, avian flu, and other diseases may cause epidemics so that humans will reduce their eating of other animals. One aspect of this megacrisis is that humans in their spiritual evolution may be learning not to kill other animals, especially those that are more evolved such as fellow mammals. Eating the meat of mammals is less healthy than consuming fish and fowl and much less healthy than living on vegetables, nuts, and fruit. As society takes on the responsibility of making sure that everyone has good health care, those personal actions that tend to cause one’s health to deteriorate may be discouraged by taxing them in such a way as to pay for the health care costs they cause. In this way the freedom of each individual to choose those less healthy behaviors is still preserved, but they are held accountable by having to pay the true costs for their choice. Another example is taxing tobacco and other harmful drugs.
Update:
It looks like we have VHEMT to the rescue!
Update 2:
Take the challenge
While browsing Wikipedia I came across an article about a great idea someone had a while ago called TV Turnoff week. I was quite familiar with this event from the many AdBusters magazines I have read. What was news to me from the article and which is a natural follow-on to the original event is PC Turnoff week. Now this is fairly current in my mind because my parents (now on a fixed income, like many retirees) recently had to get major work done on their car. As you can imagine, this made finances a little tight. Now what should happen next but their main (for like most first-world folks, they have more than one) TV died on them. What to do? Go out immediately and buy a new (and coincidently better) one of course!
Now please don’t get me wrong, I am not slamming my parents! They are no different than the rest of us. (As a point of fact, go into even the poorest of homes and while you may indeed not find much for food, you will almost certainly find a TV.) And I think this is the point I am trying to make. We all have addictions in our lives, whether we realize it or not. Don’t have any additions, you say? Can quit whenever you want, you say? No problem I say — try it! The only way you will truly ever get the slightest notion of just how dependent you are on a certain behaviour is to attempt to go without it (voluntarily) for a period of time (say one week).
I know this works because I have done it. Twice now when I found that I was having health problems due to over consumption of sugar (my all time record was 5 doughnuts, 1 muffin and sundry cookies in one day!), I went without sweets for a week. The first time I did this it was hard. Surprisingly hard. But I did it. A test of the will. The second time I did it I figured: well I’ve done this before so I should have no problem this time. HA! I was positively shocked as to how hard it was. I was severely tested and almost didn’t make it. I couldn’t believe it.
So, my challenge to you (assuming anybody has actually made it this far in the post) is to pick something that you do everyday (or nearly so) that you suspect may be an addiction, and try to stop for a week. Just one week. How hard can that be? Are you up for it?
The hidden crisis
Don’t delete. This could save your life
“Traffic accidents kill more people than intentional killings and kidnappings,” Rosenthal says. “When a child is kidnapped, it’s front page news for weeks, sometimes months.” In fact, one of the reasons you don’t hear about heart attacks or pedestrian accidents much in the news – unless it’s someone famous – is that it’s so common, it’s not considered news. Kind of scary, eh?
…and…
“If you’re worrying about the terrorists, which is out of your control, and you’re not gaining anything from caution, you might be causing more stress on your body,” Rosenthal suggests. “Since cardiovascular disease kills so many people and one of the risks for that is stress, you could make a case that more people die from worrying about these things than actually die from terrorist attacks.”
How to achieve bliss without drugs
Today I was reading the comments to a post about an interesting technology. The technology the post describes is about evoking pleasure by Electrical Stimulation of the Brain (ESB). The comment that caught my attention was this:
I must admit, sometimes I would just love to throw it all away, plug myself to some machine and only for a moment, forget about all my current issues.
And this got me to thinking, “You know there is another way to achieve this.” The other way that I was thinking about was meditation. The problem with meditation of course is that it is difficult to practice (for a multitude of reasons.) The beauty of meditation is that, because it is difficult to practice, we as a society are unlikely to forgo all our responsibilities to constantly pursue it. If this same euphoria is made available at the press of a button however, it has been shown that even food is passed up for the pleasurable feeling, eventually leading to starvation.
See here for the original post and comments.
The future arrived while no one was paying attention
One of the problems of being inside time is that most things change gradually. A consequence of this is that you tend not to notice when things have radically changed over the course of a few decades. When I was a boy, an amazing movie came out that blew me away. It had cool futuristic things like robots and space travel. Well it seems that reality is quickly catching up.
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