Categories
Exercise

The job interview

You can file this under “when men were men.”

In Iceland, stones were used to qualify men to work on fishing boats.

Four different stones were available. The heaviest stone you could manage to lift to a ledge at hip height designated your ability as follows:

“full strength,” weighing 155 kg (341 pounds)
“half strength,” 104 kg (228.8 pounds)
“weakling,” 49 kg (107.8 pounds) and
“useless,” 23 kg (50.6 pounds)

A 49kg “weakling” lift was the minimum to qualify for fishing boat work.

You’d be qualified you as “useless” in Iceland’s fishing industry if the most you could heft was a 23kg stone.

I saw an article on lifting stones for strength workout.

An interesting observation from the article was that your brain knows better than to allow you to lift things your hands cannot grip.

Categories
Ideas

Bless my phone

Pope Francis blesses a photo of a child displayed on a mobile phone at the end of a special audience

Here’re some ironic and some strange recent headlines and sentences I’ve noted:

– A 19-year-old anti-violence volunteer was fatally shot in Chicago.

-There Are Bowhead Whales Alive Today Who Were Born Before Moby Dick Was Written.

-Even the most effective police departments solve only about three-quarters of homicides. Each year, about five thousand people kill someone and don’t get caught, and a percentage of these are repeat killers.

-Coastal Labs Studying Increased Flooding Consider Moving Because Of Increased Flooding

-As housing prices rise in an area, dog breeds tend to skew smaller and more expensive.

-Beneath Yellowstone National Park lies a supervolcano far more powerful than your average volcano. It could expel more than 1,000 cubic kilometers of material at once – 2,500 times more than Mount St. Helens expelled in 1980, which killed 57 people. That could blanket most of the United States in a thick layer of ash and even plunge the Earth into a volcanic winter.

-Most prodigies grow up to be thoroughly unremarkable on paper. They don’t, by and large, sustain their genius into adulthood.

-When men see a doctor about fertility problems, they often provide semen samples collected while masturbating to porn. Since it features novel women, “the ejaculates produced in fertility clinics may be of higher quality than usual, which may conceal any potential fertility problems experienced in the bedroom.”

-In the course of a lifetime, sixty tons of food pass through the gastrointestinal tract, an exposure to the world that is fraught with risk .

-Supposedly, three and a half feet of debris will keep a person warm above thirty degrees Fahrenheit. Four and a half feet is good to zero degrees. And six feet of dry, dead debris will keep someone alive at forty below zero.

 

Categories
Ideas

Bringing astronomy home

I don’t know how many kids check these out, but these videos really give you an appreciation of objects in space. They’re great for adults too.

Here’s a cool NYT video about a kilonova.

If the Moon was replaced with other planets in our solar system shows how the other planets in our solar system would look to us if they were as close as our moon normally is.

If the Space Station was replaced by the Moon video shows what the moon would look like up close – when it’s only the distance of a satellite from the earth.

Categories
Ideas

Threes

Supposedly, people tend to only take away three ideas from talks. For some reason I’ve noticed some groups of three ideas that are useful and interlocking. Here’re four groups of three things.

Good, true, or helpful. If what you’re about to say or email to someone doesn’t meet two out of those three criteria, reword it or don’t say it at all.

When you’re communicating try to remember ABC, which stands for accurate, brief, and clear.

By taking these 3 steps  you’ll go a long way in helping your exposed skin as you age: in the morning apply vitamin C serum and sunscreen, later before bed apply a low strength retinol.

There are lots of smart, interesting normal people out there, and from them you learn that the best thing in life is following the straight and narrow, observing social conventions, and working a steady job.

Categories
Happiness

Money

If you figure out money, life is incredibly easy. If you don’t, life is insanely hard. You don’t need lots of money. But you do need enough, and be able to deal with it.

The simplest way is low overhead and no debt. People who live far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyles can’t fathom because it’s hard freeing people from the chains they revere.

Not needing wealth is more valuable than wealth itself. The late NYC street  photographer Bill Cunningham treated his independence fiercely. He said “Once people own you, they can tell you what to do. So don’t let ’em. If you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do.”

Categories
Food and Drink

Beer or Bread

Which came first, bread, farming, or maybe beer?

A recent find in Jordan of a 14,500-year-old flatbread indicates that bread was first made about 4000 years before agriculture was invented.

The flatbread, was fashioned from wild cereals such as barley, einkorn or oats, as well as tubers that had been ground into flour.

Did the invention of bread drive the invention agriculture?

One researcher  wondered, “We now have to assess whether there was a relationship between bread production and the origins of agriculture. It’s possible bread may have provided an incentive for people to take up plant cultivation and farming, if it became a desirable or much-sought-after food.”

Another researcher thought, “Bread provides us with an important source of carbohydrates and nutrients, including B vitamins, iron and magnesium, as well as fiber.”

There’s also another  theory that’s difficult to prove, but plausible. It was the human desire for a steady supply of alcohol, not food, that drove the shift to agriculture and settlement. Maybe beer came before bread. And as soon as people got a taste of it, they would’ve wanted more than could be produced by gathering seeds or fruits or honey.

This would certainly help explain why early humans would ever have traded the comparatively easy lifestyle of the hunter-gatherer, who typically devotes far less time and effort to obtaining food than the farmer, for the toil and inferior diet of the early agriculturist.

(I think this was chopped and changed from an article on Kottke.org)

Categories
Happiness Ideas

Snap out of it

People’s worries are endless. “My mother didn’t love me.” “I try to do too much.” “My husband isn’t attracted to me.”  “I’m a success but I’m still alone.” “I can’t leave my house.” “So and so at work avoids me.”

Jerry Seinfeld and a comedian pal were riffing about what happens during most psychotherapy sessions. They speculated on the best  advice the therapist could offer, concluding the best response a therapist should usually give at the end of a session was, “Snap out of it!”

Andy Warhol supposedly said that sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, “So what?”

The vast majority of most lives will be boring and not noteworthy. It’s normal and it’s okay. So “Snap out of it.” might be good advice. Or maybe try similar ideas like: move on, so what, or just drop it.

Marcus Aurelius said that you have power over your mind but not external events. If you can abide by that,  you’ll be able to go through life less perturbed.

Not everyone has the privilege of saying “Snap out of it, move on, or so what?” in every situation, but changing your perception about things you have little control over is a powerful tool.

Categories
Ideas

Looking forward with Bucky

There’s more talk lately about creating some sort of guaranteed basic income once, or before, AI and more automation come online. Basically everyone gets the same monthly amount. It’ll be enough to live on and up to you to pursue more money or other interests.

It sounds radical to most people, but some form of it will probably happen. But it’s not a new concept. A little ahead of his time, in a 1970 issue of New York magazine article Buckminster Fuller said this about the massive economic lever of technology:

We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It’s a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist.

So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

Categories
Happiness

Telluride 12 years later

We returned to Telluride, Colorado in May after a 12 year hiatus.

In many ways it’s the same town I lived in for 13 years before we moved, just more expensive.

Many of the houses are beautifully renovated. They’re so nicely renovated that the renovations could only be afforded to be done by wealthy folks. They’re second homeowners in Telluride because they need to live somewhere else most of the time so they can make enough dough to afford to have a house here.

The result is that some of the neighborhoods are very quiet. You can see lots of stars at night when you walk around because there aren’t many lights on.

There’s always a lead/lag going on with housing and the people interested in living in a beautiful spot. So we’ll have to see how long this predicament goes on. Maybe billionaires will chase out the millionaires. One thing making Telluride so appealing is it’s small size, but the inability to grow also drives up the real estate market.

Telluride is still a great place to live, and we’ll be back next summer.

Categories
Uncategorized

Deep Survival

It’s not what’s in your pack or even what’s in your mind.
The first lesson is to remain calm and not panic.
Only 10 to 20 percent of untrained people can stay calm and think in the midst of a survival emergency. They’re the ones who can perceive their situation clearly, plan, and take correct action, the key elements of survival. Confronted with a changing environment, they rapidly adapt.
Adaptation is another word for survival.
Those are some highlights from “Deep Survival” by Laurence Gonzales, a book about wilderness survival stories. It gives insights from survivors of the worst situations and insights from the mistakes made by those who didn’t make it.
In a post a couple of years ago, I said the key to survival is a good attitude and having a down jacket.
Plus, if you work your way through obtaining shelter, water, fire, then food you’ll probably do ok.
Here’re some other highlights I made in “Deep survival:”
The first rule is to face reality. Good survivors aren’t immune to fear. They know what’s happening, and it does “scare the living shit out of” them. It’s all a question of what you do next.
Moods are contagious, and the emotional states involved with smiling, humor, and laughter are among the most contagious of all.
Laughter makes the feeling of being threatened manageable.
Survivors joke about dark situations because if you get too serious, you’ll get too scared, and once that devil is out of the bottle, you’re on a runaway horse. Some fear is good. Too much fear is not.
Plato understood emotions could trump reason and that to succeed we have to use the reins of reason on the horse of emotion.
“Cognition” means reason and conscious thought, mediated by language, images, and logical processes. “Emotion” refers to a specific set of bodily changes in reaction to the environment, the body, or to images produced by memory. Cognition is capable of making fine calculations and abstract distinctions while emotion can produce powerful physical actions.
Emotion is an instinctive response aimed at self-preservation involving numerous bodily changes in preparation for action. The nervous system fires more energetically, the blood changes so it can coagulate more rapidly, muscle tone alters, digestion stops, and various chemicals flood the body to put it in a state of high readiness for whatever needs to be done.
The quality which is perhaps the only one for survival success is self-control.
There’re at least two separate brain systems that can generate behavior. The way they work, the way you capture experiences, and turn them into learning (memories), can influence your ability to survive.
Unconscious operations of the brain is the rule rather than the exception throughout the evolutionary history of the animal kingdom.
From the point of view of an organism in desperate trouble, an organism that evolved by relying on emotions as the first line of defense, cognition is irrelevant and gets set aside. It’s slow and clunky so there’s no time for it.
Because the system is designed to work without the assistance of logic or reason, there’s now an answer to the question: What were they thinking? They weren’t. The whole point of the system is that you don’t have to think.
We think we believe what we know, but we only truly believe what we feel.
When the bad outcome connected with a given response comes into mind, however fleetingly, you experience an unpleasant gut feeling. Using that system, you can choose very quickly and may be unable to explain your choice afterward. The best and worst decisions are made that way. You don’t have to think about it. It just feels right.
A dog is like the amygdala, when anyone comes to the door, it barks before I even hear anything.
Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little.
Mismatching the abilities of people in the outdoors is a sure way to get into trouble. People routinely fail to realize that they have to travel at the speed of the slowest member.
Generally, they’d be wiser and safer to stay put and get as comfortable and warm as possible, but many feel compelled to push on, urged by subconscious feelings.
A working definition of being lost is the inability to make the mental map match the environment.
Admitting that you’re lost is difficult because having no mental map, being no place, is like having no self. It’s impossible to conceive, because one of the main jobs of the organism is to adjust itself to place.
The organism’s main task is to map the self, map the environment, and keep the two in harmonious balance. Without the balance, the organism dies.
Those who die can do so surprisingly quickly, and hypothermia is usually the official cause. Hypothermia is frighteningly insidious, but in some cases people just give up.
It’s simple. Fail to update your mental map and then persist in following it even when the landscape (or your compass) tries to tell you it’s wrong.
Whenever you start looking at your map and saying something like, ‘Well, that lake could have dried up,’ or, ‘That boulder could have moved,’ a red light should go off. You’re trying to make reality conform to your expectations rather than seeing what’s there.
Everyone who dies out there dies of confusion.
There can be a destructive synergy among numerous factors, including exhaustion, dehydration, hypothermia, anxiety, hunger, injury. It’s called “woods shock.”
Being lost, then, is not a location; it is a transformation. It is a failure of the mind. It can happen in the woods or it can happen in life
Dougal Robertson, at sea for thirty-eight days, advised thinking of it this way: “Rescue will come as a welcome interruption of…the survival voyage.”
She looked to herself, took responsibility, made a plan.
The survival instructor kept talking about Positive Mental Attitude. It was the number one item on the checklist he’d given us.
A survival situation is a ticking clock: You have only so much stored energy (and water), and every time you exert yourself, you’re using it up. The trick is to become extremely stingy with your scarce resources, balancing risk and reward, investing only in efforts that offer the biggest return.
In survival situations, people greatly underestimate the need for rest.
You should operate at about 60 percent of your normal level of activity and rest and rehydrate frequently. If the weather is cool and you’re sweating, you’re working too hard.
Purpose is a big part of survival, but it must be accompanied by work.
The survivor plans by setting small, manageable goals and then systematically achieving them.
Don’t get comfortable. Get confident.
It’s amazing to see what a fire can do for your outlook. Like making art, making fire is a deeply human act. Through it, we know our world in a way that no animal ever will.
Bruce Chatwin wrote “The Songlines” about Aboriginal methods of mapping.
Each child in Morey’s school selects a “secret spot” in the woods. Every day, the students are directed to spend some time at their secret spot. They do this through all the seasons. They learn to stop and think. They learn to be calm and alone. They will never feel that the woods are alien. So, if they ever get lost or otherwise disoriented they can comfort themselves.
You can learn to turn around and see where you’ve been, which is a means of paying attention.
Starting the moment an accident occurs, it’s necessary for a survivor to take control of his situation. Turn fear into focus – the first act of a survivor.
When the personality is ripped away there has to be a core remaining to carry the person through. If a person can carry all his support within him then it matters little what the external environment comprises. It’s not that cool people are unafraid. They’re very afraid. But they are “Afraid to panic.”
In the heat of a crisis, the only thought you can allow yourself concerns your next correct action.
Callahan dove underwater at night into his damaged, sinking sailboat to retrieve his emergency supply bag. He had just saved his life by risking it, which is the essential task of every organism. No risk, no reward. Then he set up a small, attainable goal. He was giving himself something to do and a chance for success both of which are necessary early in the survival scenario.
A sense of humor is not a luxury, it’s vital for survival.
“I’ve got to do the best I can,” he told himself. “The very best. I cannot shirk or procrastinate. I cannot withdraw.” Begin taking delight in small achievements, celebrating early victories. You must help yourself.
Callahan constantly reminded himself of the basic things, the important things: “The important thing is to keep calm…. I can only afford success. Don’t hurry. Make it right…. Patience is going to be the secret, and strength.”
Admit the situation’s reality and adapt to it. Be here now. Place yourself in relation to it and say: Before I came here, the world was as it is now; after I am gone, it will be that way still.
To experience wonder is to know this truth: The world won’t adapt to me. I must adapt to it. To experience humility is the true survivor’s correct response to catastrophe.
Privacy is essential to life. Life itself can be seen as arising from a self-organizing force that gathers certain materials, hoards and tends them, and protects them from becoming part of the rest of the world, even while delicately interacting with, finding a place in, taking from and giving to the world. Privacy is life, but so is community. It’s another balancing act, to have boundaries and not be completely alone. At times when nature is trying to reclaim the materials of life, to turn you into the raw stuff of the world.
Gratitude, humility, wonder, imagination, and cold, logical determination: those are the survivor’s tools of mind.
“Man is a creature who can get used to anything, and I believe that is the very best way of defining him.”
Leadership, order, and routine are all important elements of survival.
The best survivors spend almost no time getting upset , especially in emergencies, about what has been lost, or feeling distressed about things going badly. For this reason they don’t usually take themselves too seriously and are therefore hard to threaten.
To make a pattern, to use rhythms, means quite literally to live.
Epictetus said, “Lameness is an impediment to the leg, but not to the will. And add this reflection on the occasion of everything that happens; for you will find it an impediment to something else, but not to yourself.”
Not being lost is not a matter of getting back to where you started from; it is a decision not to be lost where ever you happen to find yourself. It’s simply saying, “I’m not lost, I’m right here.”
Don’t feed that amygdala any scary raw data. A survivor must compartmentalize and set small goals. It would kill him not to.
Some instructors at survival schools use the acronym STOP—stop, think, observe, plan.
We come from cities and learn to expect things to stay the same. But they don’t in the wilderness. And it kills us, quickly or slowly.
Don’t think that just because you’re good at one thing, it makes you good at other things.
 NOLS says ‘The summit is not the only place on the mountain.’ So turn around when conditions warrant it.
Set up small, manageable tasks. Survivors quickly organize, set up routines, and institute discipline.
Horace Barlow, a neurobiologist, says that intelligence is a matter of “guessing well.”