How our microbes make us who we are

Rob Knight is a pioneer in studying human microbes, the community of tiny single-cell organisms living inside our bodies that have a huge — and largely unexplored — role in our health. “The three pounds of microbes that you carry around with you might be more important than every single gene you carry around in your genome,” he says. Find out why in this TED Talk.

Pascoe River

by Andy Sugarcane Collins

How to run a company with (almost) no rules

What if your job didn’t control your life? Brazilian CEO Ricardo Semler practices a radical form of corporate democracy, rethinking everything from board meetings to how workers report their vacation days (they don’t have to). It’s a vision that rewards the wisdom of workers, promotes work-life balance — and leads to some deep insight on what work, and life, is really all about. Bonus question: What if schools were like this too?

Link: How to run a company with (almost) no rules

by Ricardo Semler on TED

"Fifty Shades of Grey" - loom bands for adults

I was driving in my car with the kids yesterday and an ad came on the radio for the new "Fifty Shades of Grey" movie. 

The ad said: "This movie is a global phenomenon...".

My 10 year old daughter asks: "What's that movie about"?

I say (thinking fast...) "It's about relationships." 

"Can we go see it"? she asks.

"No, it's an adult movie." I say.

"Is it good"?

I say, "I read a few pages of the second book which a friend lent me - and it was rubbish - so poorly written. It's just a fad." 

My 8 year old son pipes up: 

"So it's like loom bands for adults?" 

"Yes." I say, "Exactly!"

No man is an island

"No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes: forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection) but still unique.

Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, 'casualties may rise to a million'. With individual stories, the statistics become people - but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child's swollen, swollen belly, the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, does it not do a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended, caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies' own myriad squirming children?

We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearl-like, from our souls without real pain.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.

A life, which is, like any other, unlike any other."

by Neil Gaiman in "American Gods"

Soulshine

When you can't find the light,

That guides you on the cloudy days,

When the stars ain't shinin' bright,

Feels like you've lost you're way,

When those candle lights of home,

Burn so very far away,

Oh, you got to let your soul shine,

Just like my daddy used to say.

[Chorus:]

He used to say soulshine,

Oh, it's better than sunshine,

It's better than moonshine,

Damn sure better than rain.

Hey now people don't mind,

We all feel this way sometime,

Got to let your soul shine, shine till the break of day.

I grew up thinkin' I had it made,

Gonna make it on my own.

Life can take the strongest man,

Make him feel so alone.

And now sometimes I feel a cold wind,

Blowin' through my achin' bones,

I think back to what my daddy said,

He said "Boy, in the darkness before the dawn:"

[Chorus:]

Let your soul shine,

It's better than sunshine,

It's better than moonshine,

Damn sure better than rain.

People don't mind,

We all get this way sometimes,

Gotta let your soul shine, shine till the break of day.

Sometimes a man can feel this emptiness,

Like a woman has robbed him of his very soul.

A woman too, God knows, she can feel like this.

And hey, when your world seems cold, 

you got to let your spirit take control.

[Chorus:]

Let your soul shine, 

It's better than sunshine,

It's better than moonshine,

Damn sure better than rain.

Lord now people don't mind,

We all get this way sometimes,

Gotta let your soul shine, shine till the break of day.

Oh, it's better than sunshine,

It's better than moonshine,

Damn sure better than rain.

Yeah now people don't mind,

We all get this way sometimes,

Gotta let your soul shine, shine till the break of day.

By The Allman Brothers Band - Writer(s): Warren Haynes 

© Music Corp. Of America Inc., Buzzard Rock Music

Basic principles of goat husbandry

© Michael Leunig - "The Age" January 24, 2015

The Walrus and the Carpenter

The time has come, the Walrus said,

To talk of many things:

Of shoes — and ships — and sealing wax —

Of cabbages — and kings —

And why the sea is boiling hot —

And whether pigs have wings.

by Lewis Carol from "Through the Looking Glass"

On frustration and reality

Seneca was a philosopher of the Roman Empire. He noticed that at the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality. We attain wisdom by learning not to aggravate the world’s obstinacy through spasms of rage, self-pity, anxiety, bitterness, self-righteousness and paranoia.

What makes us angry are dangerously optimistic notions about what the world and other people are like. How badly we react to frustration is critically determined by what we think of as normal. We will cease to be so angry once we cease to be so hopeful.

Reality comprises two cruelly confusing characteristics. We are invited to assume that tomorrow will be much like today. Yet there is a possibility that we will meet an appalling event after which nothing will ever be the same again.

When one suffers disaster, one is unable to fit the event into a scheme of justice. One alternates between a feeling that one may after all have been bad, and the feeling that one has fallen victim to a failure in the administration of justice. The belief that the world is fundamentally just is implied in the very complaint that there has been an injustice. It is based on a picture of a moral universe where external circumstances reflected internal qualities.

Frustration, anger, shock, and the sense of injustice are caused by an incorrect paradigm of the world. Wisdom lies in correct discerning where we are free to mould reality according to our wishes, and where we must accept the unalterable with tranquillity. Reason allows us to determine when our wishes are in irrevocable conflict with reality, and then bids us to submit ourselves willingly, rather than angrily or bitterly, to necessities. We may be powerless to alter certain events, but we remain free to choose our attitude towards them. It is in our spontaneous acceptance of necessity that we find our distinctive freedom.

Seneca recommended this formula:

[The wise] will start each day with the thought…

Fortune gives us nothing which we can really own. Nothing, whether public or private, is stable; the destinies of men, no less than those of cities are in a whirl. Whatever structure has been reared by a long sequence of years, at the cost of great toil and through the great kindness of the gods, is scattered and dispersed in a single day.

No, he who has said “a day” has granted too long a postponement to swift misfortune; an hour, an instant of time, suffices for the overthrow of empires. How often have cities in Asia, how often in Achaia, been laid low by a single shock of earthquake? How many towns in Syria, how many in Macedonia, have been swallowed up? How often has this kind of devastation laid Cyprus in ruins?
We live in the middle of things which have been destined to die. Mortal have you been born, to mortals have you given birth. Reckon on everything, expect everything.

From "The Consolations of Philosophy" by Alain de Botton (Adapted by Alex Fung Ho-San)

On the way to Lake Lacuna

Mr Curly transports wayfaring pilgrims away

from the bad mood of the world to the peaceful shores

of Lake Lacuna, a small, mystical and beautiful place of

sanity which lies between the large uncontrollable forces,

the great powers and the major issues. The little

goat-drawn cart has been carved from a huge potato.

by Michael Leunig

Leunig's Summer of Goats - Michael Leunig - Saturday Age, 31 January 2015