10 fiendishly simple principles to success

Below you will find 10 fiendishly simple principles towards fast tracking your journey through life with a high probability of flawless decision making, almost instant relief of guilt and grief and abundantly high levels of happiness and bliss.

 Use them at your own risk.

1. Regret is more often than not the result of an emotional decision.

2. Our journey to the point of choice is exactly what we need to make it.

3. The most important moment is right now.

4. Failure does not need a reason, what matters is the journey you took.

5. Changing your perspective is the only way to improve your perception.

6. Whenever life gets you down you are carrying too much.

7. As a general rule of thumb, things with value have no worth.

8. The most important choice you can make every day is your attitude.

9. Honest communication is the only way to discover yourself and to grow.

10. Where the mind goes energy flows, that is how we create reality.

May the road come up to greet you, and may love take care of the rest.

Similarities between biological and crystal growth patterns

You may be forgiven if at first glance you mistook the picture in this post as a snowflake. The picture is only one of a whole range of bacterial growth patterns, and part of research being done by Eshel Ben-Jacob, a professor of physics at Tel Aviv University in Israel.

Professor Ben-Jacob is collaborating with colleagues at the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics at the University of California to determine how the growth of biological systems and colonies are influenced by different environmental stimuli. According to New Scientist: "In order to flourish in difficult living conditions the colony must adapt. This requires communication and cooperation from the individual microbes to organise the entire colony."

What immediately struck me as odd was the similarity between snowflakes and these colonial growth patterns. Whereas the petri dish pictures are the direct effect of different environmental influences on biological growth and diversification, the complex formations we can observe in snowflakes result from the interaction of water vapor and the environment.

Snowflakes grow in very cold environments as water vapor condenses directly to ice. While we do not fully understand the mechanisms responsible for the formation of snow crystals, recent research on the nature of water suggest that it has something to do with the behavior of electrons within the water molecule. These charged subatomic particles influence crystal formation and provide water with many of the characteristics that have baffled scientists for decades.

The link between the growth patterns and water can be found in research published by CU-Boulder physics Professor Noel Clark. According to an article in Science Daily they found that surprisingly short segments of DNA, life's molecular carrier of genetic information, could assemble into several distinct liquid crystal phases that "self-orient" parallel to one another and stack into columns when placed in a water solution. Life is widely believed to have emerged as segments of DNA- or RNA-like molecules in a prebiotic "soup" solution of ancient organic molecules.

(Images courtesy of Eshel Ben-Jacob and snowflakes.com)

Calling for a revolution

When the French call for a revolution you would think that people would stop and listen. After all they have been at the centre of one of the most well known revolutions in history, and who has not heard those famous words “… let them eat cake” which started it all!

This is exactly what French President Sarkozy recently announced at the launch of a report he commissioned into the measurement of economic progress, when he called for world leaders to join in a revolution. According to the report the “Gross National Product” or GDP that is currently used to measure the health and growth of world economies is flawed, and it recommends looking at household income, consumption and wealth rather than national production for a better reflection of material living standards.

“For years, people said that finance was a formidable creator of wealth, only to discover one day that it accumulated so many risks that the world almost plunged into darkness.” Sarkozy said. “The crisis doesn't only make us free to imagine other models, another future, another world? It obliges us to do so!”

According to Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz who co-authored the report, Governments’ addiction to inflating the GDP of their economies has endangered the planet by encouraging risky behavior that has led to overconsumption. And it is overconsumption that is at the root of the large scale environmental damage that is causing alarm bells to go off all over the world.

The report further advises that more prominence be given to non-market activities such as house cleaning, crime statistics, the distribution of income and wealth, as well as access to education and health. According to Stiglitz, France’s ranking would rise in comparison to the US because of better access to health care, and because it has a lower percentage of people in jail.

So far it does not look as if the rest of the world is very impressed by this “second” French revolution, but the French President is unperturbed and will be implementing measures to change the way it measures progress. It seems as if the lessons of history has not been lost on the French.

“Vive la révolution"!”

The brain - A users manual: Part 1

As little as 20 years ago, most people believed that our brain start a slow route to decay shortly after we turn six. According to then, any injury we cause would lead to permanent damage and incapacitation. People understood their mind as something of value, something they had to protect, and people started to say things like: "... the mind is a terrible thing to waste...".

While this is still technically true, we now know that our brain does have stem cells that gives it a regenerative capability, although we have not really seen it in action. Our brain also undergo a second growth spurt after the one that ended at the age of six, and with the onset of puberty our brain start to "rewire" and restructure into the organ that will become host to our adult mind.

The secondary spurt of neural growth that occur at the age of our sexual awakening also adapts our hormonal and sensory apparatus to our sexual choice, fine-tune the control of our voluntary muscle system to adjust for the additional power and mass, and make the final neural path adjustments in response to our environmental experience and exposure. It is only after this fine-tuning has been completed that our brain can be considered as fully developed, finishing a process that started before our birth.

At least, that is what our current level of knowledge would tell us. As for tomorrow, who knows? We already know that science is investigating the possibility of artificially increasing our neurons in an attempt to treat age related dementia, and there are various other drugs under investigation that promise to boost our mental capacity. Right now I believe in the age old wisdom that you lose it if you don't use it. I never could adapt to using it's modern counterpart: "You snooze, you lose..."

Communication

Communication

If you would have to ask me right now what the most accurate sign would be for a successful relationship it would have to be communication. Successful communication. Communication where all the parties involved would be honest and true to their own opinion.

Even though it sounds rather simple there are a few things we need to remember when we attempt to communicate, as successful communication is some thing that I have found to be quite rare. The following serves as a quick-and-dirty guide:

Communication require a sender and a receiver. And that is pretty much it. The problem is that we are so caught up in either being the sender or the receiver all the time, that we forget that there has to be both for communication to take place.

Communication require a clear message. Clear as in honest and true, not clear as in "my mouth is moving but I'm thinking of something different" or clear as in "I'm only saying this to you because I know this will make you... whatever" or "I'm saying this to you because I... whatever". Clear as in honest and true. Communication require a clear message.

Communication also require a receiver that understands the medium of communication. It does not mean that there is any communication if the receiver does not understand the language this carries the message. It does not help if you are sending all the right signals if both of you went to the same signal school. Or at least a signal school where the same curriculum was being taught. In fact, the best option would be if both of you were in the same class. Communication requires a receiver.

And it is important that the receiver reply in the same language what he or she thinks in reply to the message, and that the receiver reply with a message that is honest and true.

If that happens continuously for more than one reply, successful communication takes place, and continues until one of the messages isn't clear and true, or until the receiver doesn't understand, or try to understand the message. Communication therefore continues until a message is lost or invalid.

These rules are only valid while both parties remain emotionally detached from the subject they are discussing. But that is the subject of a totally different article!