Communing with Nature...

Hiya! Great to see you (virtually, I mean). Grab a coffee and a low fat virtual doughnut filled with Bavarian cream and topped with chocolate sprinkles. Do you have a webcam on your computer? I have one on mine but don’t really make use of it. I was thinking that maybe sometime in the future, I could try doing podcasts (sounds like fishing for peas, doesn’t it). But that’d take some thinking about and research. My research assistant still hasn’t come back with info on that psychic who’s won the lottery. I’m patient, though… and so’s the car dealer holding my midnight blue stretch Lincoln towncar.

Hey, it’s June – not that it matters a heck of a lot here in Thailand. Same old same old except it’s a tad warmer right now …probably hovering around 35-36C (95-97F). Y’know… people talk about working together with nature and all its wee beasties. Well, I’m all for it - except when the critters are in our house. Like right now, eh!

Ask me what my favourite bread is here in Thailand…go on, ask! Okay…it’s Olive Chibata. Discovered it last year on our school outing to Hua Hin. Then a while back, I found that Carrefour in Pattaya makes and sells it in their bakery. Bought some last weekend. I usually keep fresh bought breads atop our toaster oven. That’s usually high enough to keep the ants at bay. Sunday, I opened the bag to munch on some chibata (dipped in olive oil) and guess what? Ants. Must have been Italian ants because they were scampering around my chibata. No they weren’t singing O Solo Mio far as I could determine. There wasn’t a hoard of them…just a few with a penchant for Italian bread. Ciao, baby! Outta here!

Sunday night, Nong went into the kitchen for something and I heard “Oh! Oh!” Ants in battle formation scurrying from the back door frame along the wall to the cupboard above the fridge. I cleaned them out quickly and we went back to the living room. An hour later, my turn to go into the kitchen (Nong having already retired). Lo and behold, instead of a platoon of ants, there was a battalion. Ant-to-ant lines of these tiny brown critters now going above the cupboard and headed somewhere unknown. Spray time!

Monday morning, I chanced to look out a back window and saw the reason for all the ‘ant’ics. See…we also have hornets just outside the back door trying to build a hive. There are about three hives hanging along the roof at the back. Nong knocks them down. Hornets build again. Nong knocks them down again. Hornets build them again. Could have something to do with the flowering bushes we have in the back. Anyway, there were pieces of hive on the ground just outside the back door and I could see that they were surrounded by ants…obviously eating whatever was in the hives. There was a long brown line moving from the hive pieces up to our outdoor light switch and going inside the switchbox. Where they were going from there is anybody’s guess.

When I got home last night, I looked out the same window. No ants but there was a house lizard, Jing Joke we call them. You may know the term Gecko. Anyway it was sitting about six inches away and watching the hornets rebuild their hive…again. I called out to Nong, “This Jing Joke is about to make a serious mistake!”  A hornet may look like a tasty treat to a small lizard but there were about a dozen or so of them around. Not a good dinner plan.

So much for communing with nature, eh!

See ya!

Bob

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Live to be 150? Save endangered species? It can be done!

G’day to you! I trust the world is treating you right today. No adverse energy in the air? Even if there is, a pleasant sit-ye-down with a good cup of coffee and a tasty treat will repel all that bad energy. Send it to a different universe, eh! Maybe there is a universe full of downright ugly energy. What do you think? Could be…

I was talking yesterday about Dr. Robert Lanza and his new theories about life and the universe or universes. One of his other articles asks, “Do we really only live once?”  Thailand, where I choose to live, is, of course, predominantly a Buddhist country and the basic premise of Buddhism is that we live many lives, ascending or descending until finally we reach either perfection or oblivion (samsara). 

Reincarnation was an integral part of the Christian religion for the first 100 years or so. Here, reincarnation is assumed. Of course it tends to get jumbled up with spirit worship – even the monks get into that so it’s not ‘pure’ Buddhism. Of course there are different sects anyway. But Dr. Lanza’s article talks about us each creating our own space and that when we die, the body dies but the spirit or soul moves on to… another time…another universe? That being the case, we are essentially the centre of our own universe – and theorists have it that we could possibly have many of those.

Meanwhile,until those theories get proven,  Dr. Robert Lanza continues his work in stem-cell research. Growing new body parts, reversing paralysis, stretching the limits of the human life span… This trailblazing stem cell researcher believes it is all within our reach.

He also says that we can save many endangered species through cloning and has already proven this can be done. The picture above is from Newsweek in 2000. That’s 11 years ago, already! I think that article I read years ago in The Economist about science being able to extend our lives by 10-20 years and then later by 20 – 50 - ?? is closer and closer to becoming a reality, don’t you? Fascinating stuff!

See ya!

Bob

Comment from Wayne in Quebec:

Bob,

I still say if we evolved from monkeys in an evolutionary chain, why are the damn monkeys still here?

Bones from Québec.

Bob’s reply:

Don’t know about you but, I really love bananas! There are still some Neanderthal types hanging around as well. I remember a long time ago in Montreal seeing a huge fellow whose cranial features were straight out of a prehistorical book. Always remember that sighting and, Wayne, I wonder the same thing… Could be just a reminder that if we screw up, back we go …or as a late Quebec friend said while poking fun at the English language, “Go ahead and back up!” Still like the old Planet of the Apes movies with Charlton Heston and Roddy McDowell!

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Why Are You Here? A New Theory May Hold the Missing Piece

Hey there! Great to see you as always. Que pasa? Help yourself to a coffee and a blueberry Danish, why don’t’cha? Question for the day is, “Do you ever wonder why you are here…I mean not sitting chatting with me at the moment but overall, why you are where you are at this present time? (Heavy, Bob…like, I just came in for a cup of coffee, eh!) No but, seriously, you must have wondered sometime or other. Thought I’d share this discourse from Dr. Robert Lanza. He’s a theoretical scientist and researcher and he’s got a theory about pretty well everything…

Why do you happen to be alive on this lush little planet with its warm sun and coconut trees? And at just the right time in the history of the universe? The surface of the molten earth has cooled, but it’s not too cold. And it’s not too hot; the sun hasn’t expanded enough to melt the Earth’s surface with its searing gas yet. Even setting aside the issue of being here and now, the probability of random physical laws and events leading to this point is less than 1 out of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, equivalent to winning every lottery there ever was.

Biocentrism, a new theory of everything, provides the missing piece. Although classical evolution does an excellent job of helping us understand the past, it fails to capture the driving force. Evolution needs to add the observer to the equation. Indeed, Niels Bohr, the great Nobel physicist, said, “When we measure something we are forcing an undetermined, undefined world to assume an experimental value. We are not ‘measuring’ the world, we are creating it.” The evolutionists are trying to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They think we, the observer, are a mindless accident, debris left over from an explosion that appeared out of nowhere one day.

Cosmologists propose that the universe was until recently a lifeless collection of particles bouncing against each other. It’s presented as a watch that somehow wound itself up, and that will unwind in a semi-predictable way. But they’ve shunted a critical component of the cosmos out of the way because they don’t know what to do with it. This component, consciousness, isn’t a small item. It’s an utter mystery, which we think has somehow arisen from molecules and goo.

How did inert, random bits of carbon ever morph into that Japanese guy who always wins the hot-dog-eating contest?

In short, attempts to explain the nature of the universe, its origins, and what’s really going on require an understanding of how the observer, our presence, plays a role. According to the current paradigm, the universe, and the laws of nature themselves, just popped out of nothingness. The story goes something like this: From the Big Bang until the present time, we’ve been incredibly lucky. This good fortune started from the moment of creation; if the Big Bang had been one-part-in-a-million more powerful, the cosmos would have rushed out too fast for the galaxies and stars to have developed. If the gravitational force were decreased by a hair, stars (including the Sun) wouldn’t have ignited. There are over 200 physical parameters like this that could have any value but happen to be exactly right for us to be here. Tweak any of them and you never existed.

Our special luck continues in the present time. Asteroids could strike Earth at any time, producing a surface-charring blast of heat, followed by years of dust that would freeze and/or starve us to death. Nearby stars could go supernova, their energy destroying the ozone layer and sterilizing the Earth with radiation. And a supervolcano could shroud the Earth in dust. These are just a few (out of billions) of things that could go wrong.

The story of evolution reads just like “The Story of the Three Bears,” In the nursery tale, a little girl named Goldilocks enters a home occupied by three bears and tries different bowls of porridge; some are too hot, some are too cold. She also tries different chairs and beds, and every time, the third is “just right.” For 13.7 billion years we, too, have had chronic good luck. Virtually everything has been “just right.”

It’s a fascinating story to tell children, but claiming that it’s all a “dumb” accident is no more helpful than saying “God did it.” Loren Eiseley, the great naturalist, once said that scientists “have not always been able to see that an old theory, given a hairsbreadth twist, might open an entirely new vista to the human reason.” The theory of evolution turns out to be the perfect case in hand. Amazingly, it all makes sense if you assume that the Big Bang is the end of the chain of physical causality, not the beginning. 

Indeed, according to biocentrism, it’s us, the observer, who create space and time (which is the reason you’re here now). Consider everything you see around you right now. Language and custom say it all lies outside us in the external world. Yet you can’t see anything through the vault of bone that surrounds your brain. Your eyes aren’t just portals to the world. In fact, everything you experience, including your body, is part of an active process occurring in your mind. Space and time are simply the mind’s tools for putting it all together.

Theoretical physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow recently stated:
There is no way to remove the observer — us — from our perceptions of the world … In classical physics, the past is assumed to exist as a definite series of events, but according to quantum physics, the past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities.”

If we, the observer, collapse these possibilities (that is, the past and future) then where does that leave evolutionary theory, as described in our schoolbooks? Until the present is determined, how can there be a past? The past begins with the observer, us, not the other way around as we’ve been taught.

 “Biocentrism” (BenBella Books) lays out Lanza’s theory of everything.

Just thought I’d tease you with a little heavy biocentrism theory to kick the week off, eh!

See ya.

Bob

Amazon – now an electronic powerhouse!

Hi ya! Nice of you to come on by. Fresh coffee in the pot next to the display of virtual goodies. Choose your pick and c’mon over. I want to ask you…have you ever bought anything from Amazon online? I have…from Amazon US and Amazon UK. 

Would you believe that Amazon.com controls about one-third of the ecommerce traffic in the USA and Canada? That’s what the business press estimates. They are now doing about $34 billion annually which easily makes them the largest electronic powerhouse for commerce on the Internet. They went through some tough times to get where they are today.

For the first ten years, Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos watched his company post losses every year. With B & N and others quickly jumping onto the bookseller bandwagon, he soon came to the conclusion that books, CDs and DVDs were not going to take his company to the top. He could see which way trends were headed and opted to expand into the digital market.

Digital media is great because it takes virtually no shelf space…only space on computer servers. The beauty of digital products is that they can be offered to consumers at low prices. They also have high profit value and Consumers gobble them up in high volumes.  Those three things make digital products a dream option for retailers. (I nearly bought one of their Kimble mobile readers when I was in Toronto – thousands of books, etc available for download. Fortunately, I resisted temptation…for the time being.)

The key to success in most businesses is diversification and Bezos realized this. He could see the competition crowding around in the book and CD/DVD market. Amazon has been adding about two new business categories a year. The latest is Web services.

Most people have no idea just how much of the Web was powered by Amazon's Web Services division. At least they didn’t until the outage last month left lots of folks high and dry for a brief while.

Who uses Amazon's Web Services for their business' online? Big online names like Dropbox, Foursquare, Netflix, Reddit and Zynga, to name a few. Amazon now operates in most areas of the world and provides services for online companies almost everywhere.

Oh, it’s not yet financially up with the Googles, but as far as technology goes, it is a big player in online business and climbing rapidly.  

Amazon has quietly expanded into Web services and has done well at reading consumer and online business needs. Other companies that Amazon owns include IMDb, the famous movie database, bargain hunter Woot!, web analyzer Alexa, audio bookseller Audible.com, and over a dozen others.

Amazon began in a 400 square foot storage room and has parlayed that into 26 million square feet of integrated, networked and communicative warehouses and server centres.

Talk about movers and shakers, eh!

See ya!

Bob

Something fishy about Tilapia?

Hi ya! Welcome back. Good thing you clicked by when you did ‘cause I almost lost your seat. Had to wave off some senior I saw headed this way. Fill your mug, grab a treat and c’mon over. My question for you today is, “Do you like fish?” Me? I like fish that doesn’t taste like fish.  Can’t handle fish that are getting ‘ripe’ if you know what I mean. And I don’t ‘do’ fish for breakfast. Forget it! 

Here in the Kingdom, we get a lot of fish. A lot of Tilapia, just like everywhere else. I was reading up on Tilapia and I wanted to tell you about it. Tilapia have very low levels of mercury as they are fast-growing and short-lived with a primarily herbivorous diet, and thus do not accumulate mercury found in prey. Tilapia is a low saturated fat, low calorie, low carbohydrate and low sodium protein source. It is a source of phosphorus, niacin, selenium, vitamin B12 and potassium.

However, farm raised tilapia (the least expensive and most popular) has a high fat content (though low in saturated fats). According to recent research, farm raised tilapia may be worse for the heart than eating bacon or a hamburger. The research suggests the nutritional value of farm raised tilapia may be compromised by the amount of corn included in the feed. The corn contains omega-6s that contribute to the build-up of these materials in the fish. "Ratios of omega-6 to omega-3 in tilapia averaged about 11:1 compared to much less than 1:1 in both salmon and trout." 

Wide spread publicity encouraging people to eat more fish has seen tilapia being purchased by those with lower incomes who are trying to eat a well balanced diet. The lower amounts of omega-3 and the higher ratios of omega-6 compounds in US farmed tilapia raise questions of the health benefits of consuming this fish. What that all means is that Tilapia has too much Omega-6 ad that can be bad for your health. Salmon is more expensive but much better for you.

Here’s a tasty recipe for Tilapia Chowder. Of course, you can substitute any other whitefish.

1 lb tilapia fillets

2.5 oz. bacon, diced

1 large onion, diced

9 oz potatoes, cubed

1tsp crushed garlic

1 tsp curry powder

9 oz. fresh cream

2 oz flour

2 oz butter

1 qt. fish stock (or water)

Salt and pepper to taste

Cut the tilapia fillets in 1 oz squares

Sauté the onions, garlic and bacon in a large pan for 2-3 minutes.

Add the stock and cook 5 minutes. Season with salt and pepper.

Add tilapia and potatoes. Cook 5 minutes.

Melt the butter and slowly mix it with the curry powder and flour.

Add the mixture slowly into the pan. Cook 2 more minutes.

Add the fresh cream and serve.

Makes 4 servings.

For a Thai twist on this recipe, instead of fresh cream, use coconut milk and go very easy on the curry powder.  Like I said, you can substitute any other fish for Tilapia and it should taste just as good.

Gone fishin…

Bob

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How weird is that, eh?

Hey there, as always, a real pleasure to see you. Grab a mug of steaming hot coffee, a treat to go with it and mosey over here. You didn’t happen to see any weirdos on your way here, did ya? I mean, not counting Wal Mart shoppers, eh… But you know, people called “weird” by their peers may have a leg up in life, at least in one respect.

Researchers have found that a quirky or socially awkward approach to life, often considered a hindrance, may be a key to becoming a great artist, composer or inventor.

Vincent van Gogh, Self Portrait, 1889. The deeply troubled artist is believed by some psychologists to have had a schizotypal personality.

The researchers studied people with “schizotypal” personalities—who act oddly, but aren’t mentally ill—and found they’re more creative than either normal or fully schizophrenic people. To access their creativity, these people rely heavily on the right sides of their brains. (which could mean they lean to the left, right? Though not necessarily politically, I mean, but come to think of it…)

Psychologists believe a number of creative luminaries had schizotypal personalities, including Vincent Van Gogh, Albert Einstein, Emily Dickinson and Isaac Newton.

“The idea that schizotypes have enhanced creativity has been out there for a long time,” but no one has studied how their brains work, Folley said. He and Park conducted two tests to compare the creative thinking processes of schizotypes, schizophrenics and “normal” people.

In the first test, participants were shown pictures of various household objects and asked to make up new functions for them. Schizotypes were found to be most creative in suggesting new uses. (We use that same exercise in ESL teacher training, fyi. I suppose some people’d consider it weird to want to go halfway around the world to teach English.)

Schizophrenia has also often been linked to creativity, but many schizophrenics have disorganized thoughts “almost to the point where they can’t really be creative because they cannot get all of their thoughts coherent enough to do that,” Folley said.

“Schizotypes, on the other hand, are free from the severe, debilitating symptoms surrounding schizophrenia and also have an enhanced creative ability.” (Roses are red, Violets are blue. I’m schizophrenic…and so am I!)

In the second test, the three groups again were asked to identify new uses for everyday objects, as well as to perform a non-creative task, for comparison. During all tasks, their brain activity was monitored using a brain scanning technique called near-infrared optical spectroscopy.

The results showed all groups used both sides of the brain for creative tasks. But activation of the right sides of the schizotype brains was dramatically greater than that of the schizophrenic and average subjects.

“In the scientific community, the popular idea that creativity exists in the right side of the brain is thought to be ridiculous,” since both halves of the brain are needed to make new associations and perform other creative tasks, Folley said. 

But he found something slightly different.

“All three groups, schizotypes, schizophrenics and normal controls, did use both hemispheres when performing creative tasks. But the brain scans of the schizotypes showed a hugely increased activation of the right hemisphere compared to the schizophrenics and the normal controls.”

The researchers said the results suggest schizotypes and other psychoses-prone populations draw on the left and right sides of their brains differently than the average population. This use of the brain for a variety of tasks may be related to enhanced creativity.

Folley cited work by Swiss neuroscientist Peter Brugger, who found that the left side of the brain controls everyday associations, such as recognizing the car key on your keychain, and verbal abilities; whereas the right side controls new associations, such as finding a new use for a object or navigating a new place.

Brugger speculated that schizotypes should make new associations faster because they are better at accessing both sides of the brain – a prediction verified in a subsequent study, Folley said.  

Absolutely. I totally agree with whatever it was he said! And all I can add is that the guy who wrote “101 Uses For A Dead Cat” and “101 More Uses For A Dead Cat” must have been a schizotype.

See ya!

Weird Ol’ Bob

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