Everything is relative

Predictably Irrational was written by Dan Ariely, a behavioural Economist with many unique insights. IN the next few days I will post a video of each chapter of the book

Everything is relative: Chapter One

Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up. -Pearl S. Buck

Would you change?

Anybody Home?

Instructables

Instructables

Instructables: Maybe everyone in the world knows about this site but me but if you don’t here is its address. This site is a place where it appears millions of people have taken the time to share how you too can do things from DIY to cake decorating to robotics.


What a resource! It even has contests you can participate in.

http://www.instructables.com/tag/type-id/?sort=POPULAR

Bill Gates discusses the Future of Energy (the planet)

Police must be accountable and Video tape is within our rights as Citizens

The video posted below discusses a situation in the States. A motorcycle driver is stopped by plain clothed officer in an unmarked car for speeding (which the motorcycle driver admits). The man who accepted the ticket without complaint, posted the video on the internet and is now being charged and has the potential of going to jail for 5 years.
What if the people who video taped the Rodney King beating had been sent to jail? The police officers have a tough job but they have had the power of their word against average citizens for a long time and they do not like the shift in the odds. This stop was clearly done illegally to me. If I were confronted by a gun toting man in an unmarked car, I would not have known it was a police officer and I think that it violated every idea of a legal stop. (the whole motorcycle ride with the stop at the end is posted below from youtube but it has no sound).

Choice- cultural differences in choosing

Building Emotional Muscles

Define meme

Richard Dawkins used the term 'meme' to refer to any cultural entity that an observer might consider a replicator. He hypothesised that one could view many cultural entities as replicators, and pointed to melodies, fashions and learned skills as examples. Memes generally replicate through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient copiers of information and behaviour. Because humans do not always copy memes perfectly, and because they may refine, combine or otherwise modify them with other memes to create new memes, they can change over time. Dawkins likened the process by which memes survive and change through the evolution of culture to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution.


Dawkins defined the meme as a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation, but later definitions would vary. The lack of a consistent, rigorous, and precise understanding of what typically makes up one unit of cultural transmission remains a problem in debates about memetics.[12] In contrast, the concept of genetics gained concrete evidence with the discovery of the biological functions of DNA. In the context of the exact sciences, memetics suffers in comparison because, unlike the idea of genes, memes do not necessarily have or need a concrete medium in order to transfer

Seligman on Life Satisfaction

The Happiness Project- ask for help

The Truth about Mother Goose

Truth about Mother Goose






Truth about Mother Goose Part 2

Why is fundamentalism Growing in all religions

Physical and Emotional wounds

Our bodies were created with the ability to heal. Many physical injuries are made good as new if we take a bit of care and allow enough time but we have to cooperate with the process:

1. The wound is cleaned and not exposed to contaminants.

2. The wound is covered and protected from further injury.

3. The wound is exposed to the air, so it doesn't get overly moist.

4. The wound is not exposed to other wounds, so as to avoid cross contamination.

5. Sometimes, it needs to be treated with an antiseptic, or stitched, or otherwise treated.

Emotional wounds need care too. We can cooperate this process to by ensuring that:

1. The wound is not exposed to contaminants such as anger, bitterness, the wounds of others, hatred.

2. The wound is protected from further injury, perhaps through distance and careful decision making.

3. The wound is not hidden away to fester, but exposed (carefully) through sharing and acknowlegement.

4. The wound is not exposed to similar wounds, by combining/conflating all similar experiences as one and going over it with other people who have similar wounds.

5. Sometimes, a bit of outside help is needed in the healing process.

Self care

In this hurly burly world self care is crucial to ongoing health and survival. Take a few minutes now to remind yourself exactly what comes under that category and promise yourself that you will practice these 10 steps.

Its not the critic who counts....

"It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows great enthusiasms, great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."


- Theodore Roosevelt

Jack Johnson You and Your Heart

"The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience."

- Eleanor Roosevelt

Shut out all of your past except that which will help you weather your tomorrows.

Sir William Ossler

Motivation

Social Networks

We are not fully aware of how we affect one another. When one person experiences something difficult, everyone who cares about that person echoes their pain and distress. This man is an MD who started in palliative care. His insights are worth hearing.

Happiness logic

The Web's Secret Stories

How much information is gleaned on blogs without awareness?

Children see, Children Do

Elephants rescue a baby elephant

If you ever wondered if elephants are sentient or if they love, here is the answer.........
Community of Elephants rescue a baby from drowning

Dan Ariely- Behavioural Economics

Sexuality and condoms

Writing Analysis compares your writing to published authors

Did you ever wonder if your writing style was like someone else's. I came across and interesting website that I am sharing in this post. I write like…..simply requires you to place a segment of your writing into the box and it will come back with an analysis in seconds. Give it a try! Just press "analyze your writing'!

I write like
James Joyce

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Eve Ensler- In praise of the Girl within

A Man In Love

See more funny videos and TBT Videos at Today's Big Thing.

Anxiety and the Body

Brain and Emotion

Brain and Emotion (5 minutes)

How Photos Connect us

The happiness Project –Work -aim higher

Alternative treatments

I have a pretty good education and I am a capable woman but discerning among alternative treatments makes me want to run away. I have friends who swear by Chiropractors, others who love naturopaths, and still others who cannot live without accupunture- just to name the most common ones. I am reaching an age where I really need to face that focusing on my health is a now or never sort of proposal. It is not that I am a disbeliever, but I just cannot evaluate whether they are worth spending money on. Supplimentary vitamins for example are not supported by research that I have read and have been referred to as "expensive pee". My biggest reservation is that I am not yet doing all the things I KNOW are valid and that I should be doing. For example, I still eat some sugars and white grains in my diet. I should lose weight and exercise more. Right now, I am fairly healthy (at least symtomatically) and I cannot get excited about any new treatments when I have not plugged in all the recommended ones.

Brain aging

Universal Declaration of Human Right

Fleeting moments of life

"The applause dies. Awards tarnish. Achievements are forgotten. Accolades and certificates are buried with their owners. The people who make a difference in your life are not the ones with the most credentials, the most money, or the most awards. They are the ones who cared."- Charles Schulz

Damn! Just a bit too accurate!

Help for Kids diagnosed with Autism

Hunger and obesity

Points on Stress

A lecturer, when explaining stress management to an audience, raised a glass of water and asked, 'How heavy is this glass of water?' Answers called out ranged from 20g to 500g.

The lecturer replied, 'The absolute weight doesn't matter. It depends on how long you try to hold it. If I hold it for a minute, it's not a problem. If I hold it for an hour, I'll have an ache in my right arm. If I hold it for a day, you'll have to call an ambulance. In each case, it's the same weight, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it becomes.'

He continued, 'And that's the way it is with stress management. If we carry our burdens all the time, sooner or later, the burden will become increasingly heavy: and we won't be able to carry on.'

'As with the glass of water, you have to put it down for a while and rest before holding it again..

When we're refreshed, we can carry on with the burden. So, before you return home tonight, put the burden of work down: don't carry it home. You can pick it up tomorrow. Whatever burdens you're carrying now, let them down for a moment if you can.'

So, my friend, put down anything that may be a burden to you right now. Don't pick it up again until after you've rested a while.

Here are some great ways of dealing with the burdens of life:
* Just accept that, some days, you're the pigeon: and, some days, you're the statue.
* Always keep your words soft and sweet, just in case you have to eat them.
* Always wear stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
* Drive carefully. It's not only cars that can be "recalled" by their maker.
* If you can't be kind, at least have the decency to be vague.
* If you lend someone $20 and never see that person again, it was probably worth it.
* It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to be kind to others.
* Never put both feet in your mouth at the same time, because then you won't have a leg to stand on.
* Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance.
* Since it's the early worm that gets eaten by the bird, sleep late.
* The second mouse gets the cheese.
* When everything's coming your way, you're in the wrong lane.
* Birthdays are good for you. The more you have, the longer you live.
* You may be only one person in the world, but you may also be the world to one person.
* Some mistakes are too much fun to only make once.
* We could learn a lot from crayons... Some are sharp; some are pretty; and some are dull. Some have weird names; and all are different colours; but they all have to live in the same box.
*A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.

Situational Ethics

In the 1960s an Episcopal priest named Jospeh Fletcher tried to figure out how to sort among ethical choices. He based the concepts below on 'agape' love which is the Christian term for 'absolute, universal, unchanging and unconditional love for all people". Fletcher wanted to find a middle road when a dilemma in ethics arose so that people could come out with what I call the 'highest best'. Normally people are forced by their ethics to choose a) a legalistic aproach which is a rule is a rule, or b) anything goes but Fletcher proposed a situational approach based on 'love your neighbor as yourself'.

His four working principles are:

pragmatism: it must be practical and work relativism: consider the situation- never and always won't work positivism: a person freely chooses to believe in agape personalism-laws are for the benefit of people The 6 fundamental principles are based on the following propositions:

love is the only thing that is intrinsically good all Christian decisions should be based on love love and justice are the same thing for justice is love distributed, justice is Christian love using its head and coping with situations where distribution is called for Love wills the neighbours' good, whether we like him or not Only the final outcome justifies the means, nothing else Love's decisions are made situationally, not prescriptively. He gave 4 illustrative examples that are tough situations.

The man who can leave his family with an insurance policy if he does not take the pills which will prolong his life but take him just beyond the time when the policy has to be renewed and for which he will not quality again.

The politicians and scientists who decided about dropping the bomb on Hiroshima

The female CIA agent who finds that it is against her moral beliefs to sleep with the enemy spy but if she did she could enable the government to end a war through blackmailing the spy for information.

The female prisoner of war who knows that the only way she can be released to go back to her family is if she is pregant (and a guard is willing).

Surely, these are not tougher situations than we might face in our life situations. I wonder if this is helpful?

Cancer 2007

In case of emergency....

Dan Ariely: Why Pacebos work

Daniel Ariely and Irrational Behavior

Quote of the Day

Are you a "meticulous steward of the pain and injustice that people have visited upon you"? Wally Lamb, author of This Much I know to be True"

Learning to be Unhappy and Learning to be Happy

http://www.ted.com/talks/srikumar_rao_plug_into_your_hard_wired_happiness.html

The link above will take you to a talk on happiness. It discusses the 'if/then model of happiness". The more we focus on the "if" the less happy we will be. The speaker asks us to remember times when we were happy and to realize that in those moments we accepted the universe exactly as it was.

Srikumar Rao was an executive at Warner Communications and McGraw-Hill before he created his celebrated MBA course, "Creativity and Personal Mastery." The course shows students how to discover their unique purpose, creativity and happiness, through group work and a philosophical perspective. Its popularity has led to write-ups in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Business Week.

Rao is also an adviser to senior business executives, whom he helps find deeper meaning and engagement in their work. He's the author of Are You Ready to Succeed: Unconventional Strategies for Achieving Personal Mastery in Business and Life, and has been a contributing editor for Forbes.

"[Creativity and Personal Mastery] is a forum for self-exploration, meant to help future business leaders define their personal ethics and goals."

Loving Inspiration from the Past and the Future

When I was a child I visited my dying grandmother in a hospital and every Christmas as a married woman I was reminded of that visit. My children’s father was a candy cane fanatic and he bought every flavour of candy cane he could find. The blue ones, which he found every year, creeped me out because they turned my children’s mouths blue just as I remember my grandmother’s mouth being just before she died. At some point I must have told my children about that visit (minus the blue horror story). What I remember almost as vividly as her mouth was the fact that she had no flowers. Every other room I passed on the way to hers seemed to have flowers. I was only about ten then but somehow this spoke to me of loneliness, of being poor and of dying alone. December 17th, 2006 I had cancer surgery and the floor I was on was so like that. Codes were called, our doors were closed and people died.

It was pretty tough. The cancer was so rare that I had one shot and that was surgery. There is no radiation or chemotherapy protocol for many types of abdominal cancers and I had one of those kinds- a soft tissue sarcoma. I got through the long and tricky surgery pretty well but I was left with a hole in my body the size and depth of a coke can with three deeper crevices penetrating into my abdomen. The surgeon had to take so much tissue that they could not close the wound. It had to heal from the inside out with the help of salt encrusted inner bandages that had to be removed and replaced several times a day. Even though I had a morphine drip going directly into my spinal fluid, they wanted me to walk the hallways of the hospital to keep my circulation moving. It was difficult at first, dragging the IV pole and willing my brutalized body to make the circuit of the hospital floor by willing one foot ahead of the other.

It is amazing what children remember and what impresses and stays in their small spirits. My children (aged 13- 23 at the time) ensured that I knew I was loved and cared for. They filled my room with a riot of flowers at every visit- consciously, sweetly, kindly. Not Christmas flowers but bouquets and favourites that defied any season bringing the vividness of life to me. I had a constant reminder that they were with me willing me to embrace life.

Between visitation times, I walked the hallways, self centred and in pain but soon I began to lift my head and see my surroundings. As I walked past rooms with open doors, I could not help but notice that others were suffering too. Many were not as mobile as I was. Many were alone in rooms without flowers and appeared to be very sick. This began to sink in. As I walked I also passed a service room and I eventually noticed that many empty vases were stored there.

One trip, I made a detour into the service room and smuggled out a vase. I think my return trip to my room was a bit faster and less painful, at least I did not notice the pain as much. Once back in the room, I felt a little thrill of pleasure and purpose as I arranged a selection of flowers from my abundance into the vase. After a bit of a rest, I challenged myself to deliver the flowers unseen to the gloomiest room on the floor and I got away with it. I was walking a bit faster, a bit straighter and noticing the pain less. Now, I was walking with a purpose and I was walking a bit more often. Each time, I was scouting out who needed to have a bit of brightness and smuggling back another vase. My flowers never seemed to diminish in my room as they travelled further out to other rooms. Their beauty was more spectacular and immediate to me as I handled and arranged them. Soon I began hearing snippets of conversation in the corridor about the mystery of the flower angel. I even heard a sound I had not remembered hearing there before: laughter. While I was never ‘caught’ I was caught up in a mini every day miracle from which I benefited most. My Grandmother would have liked that little adventure.

Of course, you have anticipated that the additional walking was very good for me. I had been told before the surgery that I would have to spend Christmas in the hospital but on the morning of Christmas Eve, my husband arrived to take me home. The doctors had decided that with the help of home care nursing to change the bandages and tend the wounds, I could go home for Christmas.

Home for Christmas with my family! Never has any turn of events been as sweet. I saw my children with new eyes and with a glimpse of the wonderful adults that they all would become. I felt a profound gratitude as I left the hospital that was mixed with a tincture of guilt. Many were not going home for Christmas and many others would never go home. For me, it turned into one of the most memorable and special Christmases of my life. For Christmas that year, I put one memory to rest by honouring my Grandmother and received far better ones in return.