India's greatest gift to mankind

Sri Krishna Pattabhi Jois ('Guruji') taught ashtanga yoga for 70 years. Until he was about 60, he barely had any success at all, having only five or less students a time. As he died yesterday, aged 93, his teachings have improved, directly or indirectly, the health and happiness of millions.

May I talk to your inner chimp?

Taken from Nature Newsfeature 29/01/2009: "much of a person’s everyday life is determined not by their conscious intentions and deliberate choices, but by mental processes put into motion by their environment" [...] "humans lived in social groups long before language evolved, and the language function presumably exists on top of a more archaic brain system for non-linguistic social signalling."
So despite our sophisticated linguistic communication, it's still our inner chimp that rules our world. Of course we're clever enough to exploit this knowledge to "improve sales success by as much as 20 %". 20 % more of things we neither want nor need, now that's fantastic progress; congratulation, Homo!

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité; For the French, this is not a motto, it is a ranking.
Liberté (to do what ever you want to do, regardless if it harms or annoys anyone): that's the most important!
Far, far behind, there is Egalité (meaning equally low; it is not because you work your bum off that you get more than those who do nothing).
and at the end of the list, there is Fraternité. Nobody knows what that means, really, but it comes at the end, so it shouldn't be important anyway.

SUEs

Unfortunately, our memory of persons tends to be dominated by Single Unpleasant Events (SUEs). Maggi is the one who farted during yoga class, Celine the one who burped at the beginning of a sentence...

Publicity

Publicity, adverts, displayed, played, popping up, appearing everywhere, all over, ever more agitated and noisy. Somehow it feels that these are the last hectic spasms of a dying system. Dying because it at last managed to bite its own bum.

Cacophonie

Science is about observing and deducing.
CONTEXT: The toilets in our new institute are sufficiently hear-through to allow, sitting on one, establishing statistics for the other.
RESULTS: With N>50, I now report that only about 5 % (+/- 2 %) of all toilet visitors wash their hands after usage.
CONCLUSION: While this explains with good confidence the impressive recurrence and spread of gastro-enteritis infections in our institute, further studies are needed to link this behaviour with the reputation of French citizens to be scruffy.

Petri Heil

Petri said: Spirituality is not something you do once in a while in a candle-lit room, wearing baggy clothes and burning incense, but something you do in your daily life.
Here we go.

Majority Problem

The problem of the French: they all want to be in the opposition. they want to be against. All of them...

Give way

This grey morning, I gave way to a lady in the street, in a small passage.
She looked at me and said: "Thank you"
I was surprised.
And then I was surprised that I was surprised.
2012?

Hug a Grandmother

Hey it's Grandmother's day today in France.
Don't forget to hug one on your way home!
Yep, anyone will do. They all deserved to be hugged, especially those with a pink perm.

Convulsive intelligence II

Is the major part of our mind solely devoted to finding remedies to problems our mind itself causes? By inflating our brain beyond reason, our species also inflated our emotions beyond reason. More than any other organism, we love, we hate, we envy, we miss, we regret, we stress, we fear, we are bored, especially on a Sunday, and oh well, and we want more, much more. Homo drama queeniens. As a result we need law, police, the military to regulate, we need science, medicin and psychology to cure from stress, accidents, wars, polution, and we need entertainment. And if nothing helps and we are still unhappy, then we need religion, we need yoga, to calm our mind, and we need drugs. All sorts of drugs.
No other species needs so much fuzz to live and survive happily in big societies. And we're not even particularly happy! Because the more we get the more we need, that's simply how our sensory organs are conceived; only changes are sensed, and only increase is success, keeping the same level means regression. That's how our senses work, and that's how our happiness, our economy and stock exchange fail to work, at least at the moment. No other animal is as much fooled by it's own emotions as we are; but we still think we're more advanced than everybody else. Ask ants if they want our brain -
Ok, I need some holiday!

21st Century Boy

Was opening my email inbox today, silently hoping for some exciting new messages;
There was a greatly followed-up email threat on "Stereo projection with Coot"
and
Araiza Wein sent a message entitled: More orrgasms
and
Lucie Ladika sent a message entitled: More orgaasms
... oh well ...

Cycling like God in France

Bicycle lanes in France are used as (in order of frequency):
Dog-poo depository
Place where to smash empty wine or beer bottles
Speedway for motorbikes and pizza-delivery mopeds
Short-to-middle term parking spaces for vehicles of all sorts
Place where pedestrians can walk, while listening to loud music and staring at their feet (to avoid dog-poo)
Bicycle lanes

Intranet

As the internet gets faster and bigger, the new capacities get increasingly (ab)used by spam, malware and publicity. How long will it take for that the internet is so filled up with crap that it becomes both, highly dangerous and virtually useless?

Indian Wisdom

John and Ellen Derby called their first son Shankara, their second son Krishna, and their third son Derek.

Convulsive intelligence

Is human intelligence just a human's illusion? Does human intelligence only help to remedy problems it creates, and to explain hypotheses it invents? Human intelligence produced modern medicine, helping people to survive after injuries from wars and car accidents; helping to cure cancer and depression, created by stress and anxiety; helping to cure auto-immune diseases coming from poluted environment; helping to correct problematic eyesight from staring too much at computer and TV screens. Does human mind just investigates a universe itself creates? Without theories of big bangs, would we need to search for signs of it? Is human intelligence convulsive?

Socially Unacceptable

My today's socially unacceptable business idea: Ask Ricky Martin to do a "I kissed a boy, and I liked it" cover version of Katy Perry's "I kissed a girl", and sell it to gay clubs.

Catch me if you will

That’s the catch 22 of our species. The very same human features that made us dominate the world will prevent us from doing so in a sustainable way. Without them, we wouldn’t be where we are today, but because of them, we will not be able to remain here for much longer.
I guess I just should stop listening to the news.

The Better Choice

I wonder what would have happened if Jesus had dictated his New Testament, word after word, to his disciples, rather than letting a bunch of people compile it according to their own ideas, long time after his death. A bit like the Qur'an. But in a way that would not allow abusing his teachings to support acts of violence. Probably impossible - we are a bunch of clever people. And Jesus wasn't lawyer, but a poor carpenter. Yep, a clever lawyer would have been better. Given all the atrocities that were carried out in his name, over the centuries, did God chose the wrong guy? But then, wouldn't this mean he probably wasn't God. Maybe just the milkman?

Tickle That Rat

Truly seen on TV: There was this grey-bearded serious scientist, who spent two years tickling rats on their bellies - and found out they liked it. And there was this biologist, who recorded elephant sounds in Africa, and played them to elephants in a European zoo - and found out they were intrigued.
No, this was not a poorly known Monty Python sketch, this was a serious TV report on animal's feelings...
It's been 150 years that the Origin of the Species has been published, and still experts in the field are surprised to see that other mammals behave and feel in a way very similar to us...
Poor Darwin.