Human Devices
Here is an amusingly observative piece from Verlyn Klinkenborg in the NYT editorial page about how smart-phones are taking over the human race and turning us into weirdly asocial beings…
Healthier Eating is also good for the environment!
A study from Cornell University demonstrates a correlation between junk/unhealthful food and energy costs. Artificial stuff, junk food and red meat all require more energy and natural resources to produce than fruits, nuts, veggies, etc. So by eating real foods, you are not just helping your health - you are also helping reduce greenhouse emissions.
The Valley of Peace
Some will criticize this as Shimon Peres’s much-discounted "New Middle East" vision, but I love it, and I am confident that if Israelis and Palestinians get their act together and accept the historical compromises necessary to a comprehensive permanent agreement, this will only be the beginning. Check out this vision for the future of the Arava, intersecting Israel, Jordan and Palestine. It fits nicely within OneVoice’s Imagine 2018 Project.
Name that Tune
Before you could type the lyrics to a song and find what you were looking for through google. Now check out this very cool site: www.midomi.com.
Even for out of tune people who can’t sing, like me, you humm a song and the site helps you find what you were looking for.
When the site got a different song from what I tried to humm, I tapped to hear what it sounded like, and it actually sounded closer to what I ended up singing.
Quote of the Week: on digital natives
If you feel the need to refer to mobile phones, computer games, or digital cameras, you’re probably a ‘digital immigrant.’ To the natives [including most of those born in the 90s], these are simply phones, games and cameras.
- Julian Baggini, paraphrasing Mark Prensky’s concept of ‘Digital
Natives’, in a Financial Times review of Susan Greenfield’s article
Id: The quest for identity in the 21st Century, about the
commodification of human identity or ‘Nobodies’ who are hypnotized by a steady stream of stimulating but undemanding electronic noises and images.
Sent from my iPhone - pardon typos
Over-processed even in our minds
Today we received some samples of interesting products from Turkey: fruits stuffed with nuts. I thought they were great possible additions to our healthy snacks family - minimally processed, all natural, flavorful, just sun dried. But it was funny (and sad) that in informal focus groups, most consumers were turned off by the look of the dried figs and encrusted walnuts. Ok, dried figs and walnuts may well look like coarse mummy brains as some of my team members were saying.
But it seems like some people are getting too used to over-processed artificially created surfaces that are smooth, brightly bleached and homogenous. It is interesting that, while there is a huge backlash against these overly-processed products, some consumers have almost gotten hypnotized into expecting factory-bland looks, without recognizing the health implications. It is almost as if we are being conditioned to expect the factory look, rather than the natural.
Progressive Communal Health and Economic Policy, Invasive Police State, or Just A Starkly Different Culture?
The line may be blurry on this one.
Japan, Seeking Trim Waists, Measures Millions - an effort to prevent diabetes and obesity from the Japanese government by strictly imposing waistline limits on the population, with penalties for corporations and local governments that do not meet guideposts…
Our Bodies’ Cells are Outnumbered by Bacteria
It is not news that our bodies rely on bacteria to perform many functions, such as the bacteria in our digestive system that help deconstruct and process food.
But what is fascinating according to a story in Genome Research reported by The New York Times, is the sheer volume of such relations, to the point that:
…bacteria in the human microbiome collectively possess at least 100 times as many genes as the mere 20,000 or so in the human genome.
Since humans depend on their microbiome for various essential services, including digestion, a person should really be considered a superorganism, microbiologists assert, consisting of his or her own cells and those of all the commensal bacteria. The bacterial cells also outnumber human cells by 10 to 1, meaning that if cells could vote, people would be a minority in their own body.
Brain Molding
Robert Lee Hotz reports in the Wall Street Journal about how our brains are transformed by the alphabets and languages we learn. Those who learn English and those who learn Chinese use different areas of their brains - confirmed by alternate patterns of energy use and brain structure. Hotz explains this could also be behind ‘cultural differences in memory, attention, and visual perception.’
Now add evolving changes in learning behavior with the advent of SMS, internet, cell phones, and all instant-input technologies. Our brains are getting completely re-wired, and we don’t know what the implications of all that will be.
Quote of the Week: A Tiny Blue Dot
Look at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ’superstar,’ every ’supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
- Carl Sagan, commenting on a picture of planet Earth taken 4 billion miles away by NASA, showing a fragile speck of blue adrift in an unimaginably vast sea of space. See a film with Carl Sagan’s commencement address at the Pangea Day website.
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