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Whether you own a hybrid, SUV, or station wagon, you're still operating an energy technology that is aging, inefficient, and environmentally problematic. Unfortunately, we're stuck with this technology for a while longer. What if in the meantime to a better solution you could balance out that inefficiency? That's the idea behind TerraPass (http://www.terrapass.com).

Brainchild of Dr. Karl Ulrich at the University of Pennsylvania and his students, their website is simple. You start by entering your make and model, your emmissions are calculated, and you're recommended an equivalent "TerraPass" good for one year. Behind the scenes, your money is essentially pooled together with other TerraPass owners, and this money is used by their organization to purchase contracts for energy efficient technologies (wind power, biomass, etc). They've essentially, and brilliantly, condensed the complexities of buying efficient energy contracts into something that's applicable to mere mortals.

Once in a while something comes across your plate and it just "makes sense". For me, this is definitely one of them. Thanks to my brother for bringing this my attention!

The Earth is flat. The Earth is round. Atoms are the smallest unit of matter, now electrons, now quarks, now..?

Thinking back to my public education, from elementary onwards, the thing that bothers me most is the definitiveness of its presentation. The teachers and teachings leave no room for open ended discussion, future developments, or possibility. Students are presented with "facts" with no potential for something beyond the facts. This is stifling for an eager, exploring mind. If everything is "fact", what's left for the young mind to discover?

Physicists generally recognize (now) that matter may be infinitely subtle in its variations. Infinitely. To say that the atom or the quark or insert-next-found-particle-here is the smallest unit of matter is becoming increasingly careless. What's more, at each smaller variation of matter discovered we get further away from our known day-to-day laws about 3 dimensional reality. Properties that we take for granted at this "level", no longer exist at these subtle variations. Particles may simultaneously exist in two different locations, for example, bridging spacetime.

But, the infinite and therefore undiscovered variations behind our world aren't what we come away with from our formative years in school. And not just physical science, but philosophy, history, and even creative arts, are subject to a falsely definitive teaching treatment. I remember my first philosophy class in college — "Philosophy of the Mind". I thought, "Now here's a class where surely we'll be able to throw about ideas with reckless creative abandon…" So we started with analyzing the iconic philosophers of the past. Great, I'm all for talking about the past — let's willingly and admittedly stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. But then that's all we did. As though everything that had already been thought on this topic was all there was to think.

Now one might say that a "higher level" college philosophy course might encourage some freer thought. That may be, but should we really be waiting until late college years before we start encouraging people to explore their own creative potential? Let's open up the ends of education earlier on, from the beginning. Let's not falsely close knowledge down into a neat packaged unit that's already finished for consumption. It makes the adults and teachers feel safe, but it stifles the natural creative inclinations of our youth.

Even as a starting point, this wouldn't require sweeping changes in public education. It would instead require only a change of attitude amongst teachers and textbooks. An attitude of discovery instead of an attitude of closed finality. A recognition that the teachings presented in any subject area only came out of times when those questions were open. If people had thought them closed, then those discoveries would never have been made to teach. Let's admit to our students that there are still infinite open questions, that most "answers" in teaching are still open questions themselves, and that education isn't closed. Creativity should not start once teaching ends, but should be an inherent part of teaching itself. My guess is that this is always one secret behind remarkable teachers — their recognition of the open-endedness of all thought and ideas whether from the pages of a textbook, or the mouth of a child.

A review of The Universe in a Single Atom by the current Dalai Lama.

First, this is an enjoyable read, written from the perspective of a non-scientist as he is "looking into" modern science — quantum mechanics, relativity, questions of consciousness, genetics, etc. This makes it easy to relate to since many of us are also outside of science looking in. The Dalai Lama has had the unique opportunity, however, to have spoken with some of the greatest scientific (and philosophic) minds of modern times. Thus, his experience of science is colored by direct conversations with some of its biggest thinkers.

Second, this isn't a book of revelation. How many books really are? You're not going to find magical knowledge that is only now being revealed by the Dalai Lama. But, that's a good thing here, in a book clearly intended for a wide audience, crossing religious and scientific boundaries. What you'll get is a coherent, well-thought, and well-purposed book. As a bonus, you could view the entire book as an introduction to portions of Buddhist thought. This was perhaps the greatest treasure for me. After reading this book, I realize now that the Buddhist tradition is one of exploration — exploration of the human condition.

The book aims to (gently) relate and contrast modern scientific thought with Buddhist thought. To that end, he presents an excellent analogy/term/concept which I found at once simple and unique. He terms modern science as "third person science". That is, it looks out to the world as an observer and studies and considers valid only what is observable in that world. In contrast, Buddhist thought could then be considered a "first person science". That is, it looks into the world of the private mind, emotion, thought, spirit, consciousness, studies that and considers it as equally valid as the observable external world. Buddhist tradition, like modern third person science, is also one of corroboration. They corroborate multiple first person perspectives much as modern science corrobrates multiple third person perspectives. Through this corroboration they draw an ever more complete view of the internal map of the mind, as modern science draws an ever more complete view of the external map of the world.

The analysis and comparison of these two perspective traditions, Buddhism and modern science, is the overarching theme of the book. The Dalai Lama clearly values and is fascinated by modern science, its implications and treasures, and has been since he was a child. Ultimately the proposition is that a complete view, a complete map of reality, can only be had by melding these two perspectives, first and third person. Or, at the very least letting them interact to mutual benefit of each perspective.

It's not hard to tell from the articles on this site that I agree principally with this book — there is a missing piece to modern science — a piece that science has gotten along without for some time, but which is quickly becoming more problematic (for progressional and ethical reasons). If we could gently begin expanding the perspective of science, then I can only agree that there would be mutual benefit to its perspective and our own. This is no easy task, and the Dalai Lama does not offer a solution, but instead a general recognition that a discrepancy exists nonetheless. And, I guess recognition is a good place to start.

We’re taught early on now, in school and culture, to think of time as a dimension — height, width, breadth, and time. The 4th dimension of time. Post-Einstein science has brought us a world view where time and space are an inherent part of the same stuff — spacetime. Move through time, move through space.

We’re excellent at moving through 3D space. Sight, touch, taste, smell, and hearing ensure that we can navigate and probe 3D space as experts. Five senses, each with an easily identifiable and corresponding body part no less, all devoted to probing a 3D space. But with five senses devoted to probing spatial dimensions, have we given any thought to whether we’re equipped with at least one “sense” to probe time?

Actually, time as a concept has had a long journey in our culture. Only in the last 100 years have we put it on the same unified playing field as the other 3 dimensions we’ve become so familiar with. This unified view is actually a big deal conceptually — it means that time is less “mysterious” and more knowable than we previous thought. The fact that a unified spacetime is such a relatively new concept, coupled with the fact that we don’t have a nose-for-time sitting somewhere on our face with most of our other spatial senses, makes it difficult to start thinking about time in anywhere but academic circles.

But what if we did, now, start thinking about time differently? If physics so easily and verifiably integrates it with space, maybe we should start doing the same with our day-to-day concept of it. What if we started thinking about time as something that can be “sensed”? Sensed, probed, investigated, and explored just like the five senses do so well with the 3 spatial dimensions.

Taste, touch, smell, hearing, and sight help us to operate in the physical world by simultaneously enriching and limiting our awareness of it. They enrich by adding to the information we have available to us about the physical world. They limit by being selective about just what information is available. For example, our 5 physical senses are only keyed to a small range of what we know physically exists — our eyes only detect a narrow window of actual lightwaves, our noses are certainly not as keen on the full scope of smells that a dog’s nose is, and so on.

Perhaps the experience of time is similar, and it features a corresponding sense. Just as we probe a specific spectrum of lightwaves with our eyes, what if we can probe time in an analogous way? Just as we can conceive of a larger spectrum of light, yet only naturally perceive a subset of that spectrum, perhaps we can’t ultimately sense time to the full degree that we can conceive of time, but to a degree nonetheless. As our physical senses provide information about a temporal, time based, world (first 3 dimensions). Our time sense in turn provides us with information about a non-temporal world, outside of time (4th dimension).

If we possess both temporal faculties and non-temporal faculties, why are the temporal faculties so exaggerated and obvious? Simply, we're so excellent and conditioned to think in terms of temporal activities and physical senses, that our non-temporal "time sense" is atrophied. We're not sure how to access it, and we're not sure when we're accessing it. Like other faculties, some of us are better at it than others by default. The implications of a time sense are many and staggering (and unifying). I had considered writing down some of these implications, but this article is about getting us thinking in a new direction, so I'm choosing to keep it focused. We don’t feel “stuck” in our 3D space. We’re free to look through it, receive sounds from across the room, take its temperature, and even consume it. But we feel stuck in time, despite its unity with space. If we could collectively start thinking about our total being in terms of both types of faculties on day-to-day basis, we may be able to start exploring, considering, and hopefully experiencing this time sense as a more normal part of our experience.

Recently an acquaintance of mine asserted that she would not stop eating an enormous amount of fast food despite its health consequences. What was her reasoning? As she put it: “I smoke cigarettes, so what’s one more bad thing?”

This reminded me of the “broken window effect”. Coined in a criminology book, it deals with the consequences of how one problem, if not fixed, compounds into other problems. Needless to say, this general theory can apply to many different topics. Quoting an article:

Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it’s unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.

Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars.

Our bodies, and more generally our lives are the building. What broken windows do we have that may be less obvious than smoking? Have you ever experienced that sigh of relief or surge of productivity after simply cleaning up a room in the house, finishing a serious talk with someone that has been put off for ages, or finally getting around to that project? You just fixed a broken window.

I love tidbits of information like this — the things we take for granted about our body.

We typically associate a runny nose with the cold virus. So when we step outside into the cold air feeling perfectly fine, it’s a little confusing when our nose starts running. We know that we didn’t instantly catch the cold virus, after all. Well here’s the answer!

Before the air travels to your lungs, your body tries to warm the air up. As a part of this warming process, small structures in your nose swell up. This swelling occurs so that there is more surface area within your nose that the air must travel across — more surface area means more opportunity for the air to warm up.

But, the same mechanism that causes the swelling action to occur also sends a signal to create more mucus! There you have it. Mystery explained. I’m reminded time and again that our bodies really are magically working on our behalf.

A recent article by Steve Pavlina inspired my article here. He asserts in the article Beyond Self-Delusional Positive Thinking: “A common criticism of positive thinking is that it’s self-delusion. [...] I happen to think this criticism is perfectly valid.”

I disagree with this criticism. Although there are many perspectives on what “positive thinking” actually refers to, positive thinking as I conceive it is neither self-delusional nor counter-productive. Instead, it comes down to a simple matter of skill. As a matter of fact, we are far better at negative thinking than we are at positive thinking. We are excellent critics of ourselves and everyone around us. It didn’t help that we had to grow up with a million older know-it-alls around us — constantly telling us that there’s a better way to do it, someone already thought of it, you did it “wrong”, etc.

Most internal dialog with ourself is in fact negative. We do far more dialoging with ourselves like “I should have done it that way”, “she should have done it this way”, “why can’t he be more XYZ”, “I need to get that done soon or I’m going to behind in everything else..”, etc. We do far less of “Hey, I did a great job on this!”, “She sees that differently than I do, and that’s OK!”, etc. (It was actually easier for me to write the 4 negative examples versus the 2 positive examples.)

The point is: we’re excellent, skilled negative thinkers and critics. We’ve been doing it so long, and it’s been done so long to us, that most of our internal dialog defaults to negative thinking. So, what’s wrong with practicing positive thinking as a skill? After all, when you’re just learning a new sport, instrument, karate move, etc, you’re (hopefully) not thinking “Just by practicing this new skill I’m being self-delusional…”! Instead, you’re (hopefully) thinking: “This is awesome right now, I’m glad I’m doing this, and as I practice it I’m going to continue to get better at it, enjoying it all the while. Like any skill, I’ll develop it over time as I use it.”

That’s ultimately what a criticism of positive thinking is saying: “You’re self-delusional just to practice the skill of positive thinking…” Just typing that sounds ridiculous. How can you ever expect to get better at something if you can’t practice it? We’re already far too practiced in negative thinking — let’s give that a rest, and try on a different hat.

Steve’s article actually goes on to suggest several excellent areas to work on, and they’re worth a read to be sure. However, I think ultimately positive thinking itself can be valued as the opposite of a skill we’re already far too good at. And in that light, I’m up for kicking my negative thinking skill to the sideline for a bit, and giving my positive thinking skill the workout it’s been waiting for!

To preface, I value science. I value most outcomes of science. The act-of-science and its outcomes in general represent very creative and magnificent acts in their own right.

I’m concerned for science in general, however — concerned for the scientific community, and those deeply involved with it. And, I’m concerned for those of us sitting outside of science looking in. That’s most of us using scientific outcomes, reading about its latest developments, theories, proofs, etc.

Science right now is our guiding light. It is our reality arbiter — our current judge of reality standing in a place once exclusive to the Roman Catholic Church (for westerners). The current Roman Catholic Church, in contrast to its colorful past, has become quite secondary to life — it has lost its world dominance as the sole arbiter of reality.

Science might be next. In the future we may look back and see that it followed in the historical footsteps of the Roman Catholic Church. What once was a primary source on reality’s truth, now a secondary source. Whether it knows it or not, science is dealing with its own midlife crisis right now.

For science as we think of it to persist, to survive into the wise-old-stage of existence, it must expand its definition of reality. It must be brave enough to explore deeper truths, deeper than the skin of physical reality. I question science’s ability to evolve and adapt to other frameworks. The Roman Catholic Church could not adapt to a new framework (physical science), and it was subsequently reduced as a source of truth. We reduced it in time because we recognized that what once seemed a legitimate source of truth appeared shallow in the light of science. Science said there was more to it all, and we agreed.

However, there were other mass-accepted frameworks in the past than the Roman Catholic Church and [physical] science. It would be naive to think that we are not headed for additional mass-accepted frameworks in the future. Can science survive its midlife crisis and adapt to inevitable new frameworks…? Ideally science could be the harbinger of the next framework, but it may not be up to the task.

That task may be up to us, you and me.

What could the next framework be? Possibly a framework that values and explores consciousness and private / personal reality… The exploration of this next framework would take place not with the expensive tools and particle colliders of science, but with the one “tool” that is inherent to every being — consciousness.

“What do you want to be when you grow up…?”

“Umm, an astronaut!?” “A ballerina!?” “A movie star!?”

Seems like an innocent enough question coupled with equally innocent answers, right? I’d love to know how many children are asked this in a given day, or how many times a single child is asked this during their childhood.

While on the surface the question appears harmless, I actually believe this question to be meaningless and ultimately insulting. As a simple example, let’s say that a top earning 40-something asked that same question to a college 20-something. Despite the 20 year difference between the two, there’s almost no way that question could be received in a positive way. The 20-something is going to feel demeaned and devalued. Per the question’s meaning: they’re “not grown up yet”, the 40-something has experience on them, and they’re just a “kid” waiting for the “next stage” in life.

So, we can easily illustrate the ability for that question to devalue even in older folks. The main problem boils down to the question’s inherently false assumption that there is a “next stage” that is going to be more magnificent than the stage we’re at now. That’s really what we’re asking: what is the magnificent thing you can imagine that you’ll be doing that you aren’t doing right NOW.

What’s worse for the child is that they’re conceptual reasoning sense is still developing. Therefore, for them to conceive of a future to that degree and abstraction is just not physically possible. (And no, this question does not “help” them do that). Arguments in favor of the question abound: 1) gets the child to use their imagination, 2) gets the child to dream of their own potential and possibilities, 3) gets them to think about the “real world”, etc…

The answers to those arguments are simple. A child has a far more developed and active imagination than any adult. They don’t need “help” or prompting to develop their already developed imagination. Trying to get them to conceive of your “real world” is simply insulting. You’re grown up, they’re not. They get the picture already, let’s not rub it in with this question. Being a grown up is not a more valuable stage in life than being a child, and this question implies that it is.

What I wish a child could seriously ask the adult is: “What do you want to do with the next 5 minutes of your life? What world can you imagine right NOW?” That’s the world that the child is thinking, dreaming, and imagining, and they’re doing a masterful job of it in every moment. Instead of devaluing the child’s current world by encouraging them to replace it with the grown-up-world in that question, let’s hold up and value their world as it stands! As a result, we’ll value the person that they inherently and currently are, and at every future magnificent life-stage that child-come-adult will feel a deeper connection to their own inherent value because of the value that was given to their “world” as a child.