Gratitude, or a Quick Thanks

For most of my adult life I have wondered why, in our society anyway, there were so many expressions and gestures for anger, contempt, rage, and other negative emotions and messages, but not a single one that I had ever heard of or experienced for gratitude, simple or otherwise. Not so much as a way, other than a wave, to thank someone for letting you into traffic on the freeway.

A quick internet search made it apparent that I'm not the only one who has noticed this lack. Apparently the masons have signs for many the things, but, one problem there. The whole idea is that they are (supposed) to be secret. I mean, come on guys, you really think no one has leaked the mystic goodies in all these years?

But that, of course, pretty much defeats the purpose, even if they're only "supposed" to be secret not many people know what they are, or remember if they've seen them. I'm already forgetting, but my memory is not great.

Apparently a very popular campaign is to use the sign language gesture of gratitude to thank military personnel. I think this is wonderful. They're over there fighting and dying in a war that shouldn't be happening in the first place. In my book, that certainly deserves a little gratitude. Not a great thing that it's killing off the best specimens of the males of the species. I don't think that's what the whole fighting for supremacy thing, was about, biologically speaking, back when the winner was generally left alive to mate with the chosen female. But that's getting off on a whole different subject.

I have included, here, a video of the sign for gratitude. I think a lot more people deserve it than just the military. It's still not a lot of use in traffic though. Where I used to live the disc jockeys used to actively encourage road rage, rather than the reverse, which in my opinion should not  be allowed by the FCC. We still need something that might be a little more visible, but this one is certainly a lot better than the nothing more than the thumbs up that was all we had before.Well, maybe not better, but with a bit different meaning. Thanks from the heart rather than just a quick thumbs up.

Hey! that would be a little more visible in traffic!

Oh! That!

I always wondered what it was called. 

Well, here it is folks. 

 A gesture to use is traffic, compliments of Anonymous:

Gratitude, or a Quick Thanks

Priceless!

Priceless!

The Femivore Mystique

The Femivore MystiqueBy skirtSteph, Tuesday, March 16, 2010, 2 comments:

There was an article in the NY Times over the weekend about how the new trend for stay-at-home moms is to become a locavore, a farmer of sorts, a chicken raiser. Pretty fascinating. They're calling it Femivorism.
Definition of Femivorism: "Women feeding their families clean, flavorful food; reducing their carbon footprints; producing sustainably instead of consuming rampantly."
I can't tell if Peggy Orenstein is making fun of these women, saying that they're trying to find more meaning and purpose in their stay-at-home lives by creating vegetable gardens, becoming educated about where their food comes from, making their own household items or what? It's like that show Colonial House or a return to Little House on the Prairie. How interesting that we're starting to revert to the more chore-ful ways of our foremothers. It seems, to these women, technology and innovations in food production are not all we thought they were cracked up to be.

I couldn't help wondering though, Is this just another way for women to compete with each other? Like a "my garden patch is better than yours" showdown in the carpool lane? Or will we begin to overhear, "What are you feeding your kid? Grocery-store food? Well, I have gone off the grid. I made the bread in their lunches and slaughtered the chicken in their chicken nuggets."

Femivores are women who are trying to make their home "self-sustaining, the center of labor and livelihood for both sexes." These women are canning peaches, growing kale, making soap, etc. I think it's wonderful, but worry that it could become a way for women to separate themselves. We already have the stay-at-home mom vs. working mom divide. Will this be a stay-at-home farmer mom vs. stay-at-home regular mom chasm that women can't cross? Read More...

The Femivore Mystique

Beautiful Art from the Hands of a Friend

When I first saw these pieces on YouTube, I assumed that they were computer generated. I didn't know, until my friend who goes by the professional name IEOIE told me that he actually contructs the elements using a compass and protractor and various building materials, only then adding computer elements.
His works are now for sale. His website is: IEOIE.nl, and many of his works are available for viewing on YouTube.

Beautiful Art from the Hands of a Friend

The One-Eyed Monkey

  The medium IS the Message! Marshall McLuhan

The One-Eyed Monkey

The Long-Term Effects of Short-Term Emotions

by Dan Ariely

The heat of the moment is a powerful, dangerous thing. We all know this. If we’re happy, we may be overly generous. Maybe we leave a big tip, or buy a boat. If we’re irritated, we may snap. Maybe we rifle off that nasty e-mail to the boss, or punch someone. And for that fleeting second, we feel great. But the regret—and the consequences of that decision—may last years, a whole career, or even a lifetime.

At least the regret will serve us well, right? Lesson learned—maybe.

Maybe not. My friend Eduardo Andrade and I wondered if emotions could influence how people make decisions even after the heat or anxiety or exhilaration wears off. We suspected they could. As research going back to Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory suggests, the problem with emotional decisions is that our actions loom larger than the conditions under which the decisions were made. When we confront a situation, our mind looks for a precedent among past actions without regard to whether a decision was made in emotional or unemotional circumstances. Which means we end up repeating our mistakes, even after we’ve cooled off

I said that Eduardo and I wondered if past emotions influence future actions, but, really, we worried about it. If we were right, and recklessly poor emotional decisions guide later “rational” moments, well, then, we’re not terribly sophisticated decision makers, are we?

To test the idea, we needed to observe some emotional decisions. So we annoyed some people, by showing them a five-minute clip from the movie Life as a House, in which an arrogant boss fires an architect who proceeds to smash the firm’s models. We made other subjects happy, by showing them—what else?—a clip from the TV show Friends. (Eduardo’s previous research had established the emotional effects of these clips).

Right after that, we had them play a classic economics game known as the ultimatum game, in which a “sender” (in this case, Eduardo and I) has $20 and offers a “receiver” (the movie watcher) a portion of the money. Some offers are fair (an even split) and some are unfair (you get $5, we get $15). The receiver can either accept or reject the offer. If he rejects it, both sides get nothing.

Traditional economics predicts that people—as rational beings—will accept any offer of money rather than reject an offer and get zero. But behavioral economics shows that people often prefer to lose money in order to punish a person making an unfair offer.

Ah, human nature: want to find out more about the results of this study?

The Long-Term Effects of Short-Term Emotions

A TED Talk--of Hope--From Malawi

This Morning the first thing I saw when I turned on my computer was this talk by a young man from Malawi. Those, not all--but some--disenfrancised by the Europeans' spread across the globe in the form of the East India Tea company, the Spanish and Portuguese desire to acquire the wealth of the new worlds discovered to the west, the peoples in once-prosperous lands thrown off of their traditional lands for the sake of European monoculture, whether it be mahogany, or sugar, or rubber, are starting to claim back the land, a little at a time and to grow the food to support themselves instead of rummaging through the garbage heaps of the rich and building hovels out of discarded packing materials, drinking contaminated water that has been filtered through sewage.

Twenty-seven years ago, a friend with the exact same birthday as mine, wrote a book called A Diet For a Small Planet, the premise of which was that the earth so bountiful that no one need go hungry. Seven years ago, along with her daughter, she wrote another, called Hope's Edge. She and her daughter traveled all over the world finding the pockets of determined poor, building gardens in vacant lots, in waste fields, saying: Even now, as bad as things are we still have a chance. How many times have we been given this chance and not taken it? Another Down the Rabbit Hole question. Will we make it this time or is the Earth getting ready to shake us off, once more, like a dog shaking off fleas? Are we about to get busted back to caveman again?

A TED Talk--of Hope--From Malawi

The Real Cost of Search Engines

Search Engines's Dirty Secret06 April 2010 by James Clarage

For similar stories, visit the Comment and Analysis and Energy and Fuels Topic Guides

HOW much does a web search cost? You don't pay up front, but there are costs nevertheless, and they are not just measured in dollars.

The term search "engine" is apt. Searches are powered by millions of computers packed into warehouses, all wired together to function as a single system. Like any system, it obeys the laws of thermodynamics, and therefore wastes energy.

The first law says it takes energy to do work, even if that work is only to move electrons across silicon wafers. The second law says that no engine is perfect, meaning some of the input gets lost as heat. This is the entropy, or disorder, arising from your search.

A successful results page brings clarity and order to your corner of the universe, but down in the server farms things get messy. Thermal motion of silicon atoms agitates air molecules behind the CPU racks, heating them up. More energy must be fed in to power the computer fans and air-conditioning units needed to remove this heat from the warehouses.

Whatever you search for, it boils down to the same cycle: move atoms, then cool atoms. Both these steps consume energy. How much? Let's run through some numbers, using the leading search engine as our guide. There's lots more. Read it here.

The Real Cost of Search Engines

One Man's Volunteer Effort To Plant Trees

in San Francisco

As a volunteer, Charlie Starbuck has helped to plant trees by the thousands on the streets of San Francisco, a city long on charm but short on leafy green trees. For almost 30 years, Charlie Starbuck has volunteered to plant trees all over San Francisco, one street at a time, as a member of the nonprofit group Friends of the Urban Forest.( Van Slambrouck, Contributor, April 5, 2010 San Francisco)
Charlie Starbuck has them in just about every part of this city. Walk a block or two in virtually any neighborhood, from the concrete canyons of the financial district to the windblown avenues of the Outer Sunset and Mr. Starbuck's fingerprints are there. It might be a Brisbane box, a bronze loquat, a primrose, or a purple leaf plum. Whatever the species of tree, chances are excellent that Starbuck helped plant it. Not as in ordered the tree or arranged for the planting. But as in actually put his fingers in the dirt and planted it.

A soft-spoken gentleman fond of berets, Starbuck has volunteered for a citywide tree-planting program since 1981, nearly without interruption. That's almost 30 years of weekly plantings, without pay, come rain or shine. "For Charlie to be that consistent..." says Doug Wildman, program director of San Francisco's Friends of the Urban Forest (FUF), his voice trailing off as he searches for the right superlative. "Well, he's our rock." FUF (www.fuf.net) is the nonprofit group for which Starbuck has volunteered all these years.One man's volunteer effort to plant trees in San Francisco As a volunteer, Charlie Starbuck has helped to plant trees by the thousands on the streets of San Francisco, a city long on charm but short on leafy green trees. For almost 30 years, Charlie Starbuck has volunteered to plant trees all over San Francisco, one street at a time, as a member of the nonprofit group Friends of the Urban Forest.

Unfortunately, Charlie is fighting a losing battle. Not only are we losing our forest canopy to the rapid sprawl of outlying subdivisions, we're losing out urban trees as well. And each tree lost can contribute enomously to the utility bills of urban householders and to their health-care bills as well. To read a story about this see :
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0426/p20s01-sten.html.

Would you like to be part of the solution? In addition to Friends of the Urban Forest (above) you can also visit the following website:
be the change: http://www.dailygood.org/more.php?n=4083a.

Eggs for Breakfast Reduces Calorie Consumption

A new study demonstrates that eating protein-rich eggs for breakfast reduces hunger and decreases calorie consumption at lunch and throughout the day. The study, published in the February issue of Nutrition Research, found that men who consumed an egg-based breakfast ate significantly fewer calories when offered an unlimited lunch buffet compared to when they ate a carbohydrate-rich bagel breakfast of equal calories.

This study supports previous research which revealed that eating eggs for breakfast as part of a reduced-calorie diet helped overweight dieters lose 65 percent more weight and feel more energetic than dieters who ate a bagel breakfast of equal calories and volume.Now, as ever, the moneyed class gets the most press, their proclivities and habits making headlines while the rest of humanity surges ever-onward hungrily and anonymously.

This rule is particularly true with women, in whose ranks the voices of the poor drown particularly silently. Rich women, on the other hand, have always seemed to be of particular interest to almost everybody.

In this instance, the press is working itself into a lather over the news, reported by Peggy Orenstein in the New York Times Magazine, that a few stay-at-home moms in Berkeley are raising chickens in their back yards. "Femivores," she calls them, as if women growing food for their families is a phenomenon that needs a new name. (I won't even mention my misgiving about the grammar.)

The blogosphere, in response to this prompt, busies itself with reading the scratches in the dirt: What does it all mean?Now, as ever, the moneyed class gets the most press, their proclivities and habits making headlines while the rest of humanity surges ever-onward hungrily and anonymously. This rule is particularly true with women, in whose ranks the voices of the poor drown particularly silently. Rich women, on the other hand, have always seemed to be of particular interest to almost everybody.

In this instance, the press is working itself into a lather over the news, reported by Peggy Orenstein in the New York Times Magazine, that a few stay-at-home moms in Berkeley are raising chickens in their back yards. "Femivores," she calls them, as if women growing food for their families is a phenomenon that needs a new name. (I won't even mention my misgiving about the grammar.)
The blogosphere, in response to this prompt, busies itself with reading the scratches in the dirt: What does it all mean? Read More...

Eggs for Breakfast Reduces Calorie Consumption