Image via WikipediaSilence !
or "The map is not the territory."
In the New Year Eve, at Arieseni, Alba, Romania, 1982, an well educated physician from Cluj, bring in our attention at every half hour one word: Silence ! Of course standing up on the table full of food and alcoholic beverages, including rose champagne, that's an another story, hardly yielding in order to cover some Beatles or ABA music at maximal level for that time. His hard working lesson, ended for him at 5 0'klock in the morning landing on the floor and remain there,have a strange end for me now, here in Ann Arbor, Michigan, after Obama visit, the city was incredibly quiet.
Now Don’t Hear This
The old idea of quiet zones around hospitals has found new validation in studies linking silence and healing. These are macro benefits, but often silence feels good on a purely animal level.
These problems are everywhere, but can be especially acute in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Too many people think of silence only in terms of “being silenced,” of suppressing truth. In consequence, silence itself is now often suppressed.
Another report a 50 percent drop in their general noise annoyance levels if residential buildings have a quiet side. These modest sanctuaries can provide at least a taste of silence, which is then recognized not to be silence at all, but the sounds of the larger world we inhabit: birdsong and footsteps, water, voices and wind.
Even a little bit of silence can create a sense of connection with our environment that diminishes alienation, and prompts a desire to discover more quiet.
Sleep
Another people goal is to educate Americans about the science and benefits of healthful sleep, and this, plus his title — senior director of sleep innovation and clinical research — makes him seem deliberately more man-of-science than mattress-salesman. The distinction is less clear-cut when it comes to the man himself.
For years, doctors have been discouraged by Americans’ disregard for and mismanagement of their sleep. Sleep may finally be claiming its place beside diet and exercise as both a critical health issue and a niche for profitable consumer products.
“The good news is, there’s more and more awareness about the power of a good night’s sleep,” says David Perry, bedding editor of the trade magazine Furniture Today.
The bad news: “What we’re doing in America is, we’re drugging people to make it through the night on, in many cases, a lousy bed.”
Underlying public attitudes about nuclear power is, if not fear, at least lingering anxiety. This is the industry that gave American English the all-purpose term for disaster, from the financial markets to a toddler’s tantrum: meltdown. The recent deaths of 29 coal miners in West Virginia, of six construction workers at a natural gas plant in Connecticut in February and of five maintenance workers at a hydroelectric plant in Colorado in October 2007 have not shaken the popular conception that it is nuclear power that is dangerous. This seems to be true even as the meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979, before many Americans living today were born, fades into memory.
“The nuclear industry is just so far removed from people’s lives, they don’t have much feeling for it,” said Baruch Fischhoff, a professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “They don’t really trust it. Although it hasn’t done anything recently to lose the general public’s trust, it hasn’t done anything to gain people’s trust.”
Among the elements of such calculations are whether Congress will pass legislation on carbon-dioxide emissions, which would help their project by handicapping the competition; the overall demand for power; and the price of natural gas, which is always volatile but has been especially low lately, partly because new drilling techniques have raised the amount of gas believed to be available.
... but the industry was dormant for so long that it hardly noticed that the new requirements exceeded its abilities. So Most such parts come from Japan Steel Works....For an American company to do the same would require an enormous capital investment.(Kyoto at work !)...he believed that business would continue to grow, but “at this point we’re not really sure what the winner is going to be at the end.”
“If you’re interested in investing in energy and water, you become interested in investing in agriculture,”
“Sustainable ag smells like clean tech, but it’s not so obscure that you’ve never heard of it but obscure enough there’s no competition,” said Ms. Yorio, who added that investors had approached her about bringing the Agriculture 2.0 conference to Canada, Europe and India.
...the challenge would be to build a Silicon Valley-style ecosystem around sustainable agriculture.
Instead of a stimulating cup of coffee, bracing dose of truth. “People have such very poor sense of time,”
Humans make errors. We make errors of fact and errors of judgment. We have blind spots in our field of vision and gaps in our stream of attention. Sometimes we can’t even answer the simplest questions. Where was I last week at this time? How long have I had this pain in my knee? How much money do I typically spend in a day? These weaknesses put us at a disadvantage. We make decisions with partial information. We are forced to steer by guesswork. We go with our gut.
That is, some of us do. Others use data.
Most thoughts are tagged with date, time and location. What for other people is an inchoate flow of mental life is broken up into elements and cross-referenced.
Charles Dickens was already making fun of this obsession in 1854, with his sketch of the fact-mad schoolmaster Gradgrind, who blasted his students with memorized trivia. But Dickens’s great caricature only proved the durability of the type. For another century and a half, it got worse.
If Isaac Newton weren't this kind of quantifier our culture would be quite stunted in our knowledge of physical phenomena and the rules that allow us to model and make predictions... A pity I can't make myself do this sort of thing. I recognize there is a correlation between weather, humidity, barometric pressure and the grind setting on my coffee grinder with regard to making an optimal espresso.
The trend that I see is man vs. machine and that over time we are becoming more like them; 24x7, quantitatively driven, etc. as the chip (computer brain) keeps doubling every 18 months over time this will only continue.
Isn't progress based on someone working in that area of the "known-unknown", where we know that we don't know?
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