Victoria Park III

Victoria Park III

No one will tell you what grief is or how you may experience it. You can't imagine what to expect. You feel bewildered and you wonder it you are in your right mind. When I die, I hope someone will miss me enough to shed a tear or two, but not more, please!

Slowly you begin to experience an emotional reaction to the death of your loved one.

We are all different, there is no predictable timetable, but it may happen one day.

Nonetheless, some of the emotions connected to grief cause confusion.

When the death of a person you love comes, some people cannot cry.

Because people are in shock, they cannot believe what has happened.

When tears do emerge, some people cry a lot and other cry less.

Some people push back their tears because they feel others are expecting them to be strong.

But don't push back your tears - doing this may lead to problems later, and you'll cry.

Crying is a normal reaction to a loss, don't try to hide these emotions, cry if you feel so.

How can we be expected not to cry, if we have had a loss?

They say - "your loved one wouldn't want you to cry."

We miss the person, we hurt, so if we feel like crying, we cry.

There is evidence to show that crying has a therapeutic value, as has been already proved.

Stress produces unhealthy chemicals; the body gets rid of them through the tear ducts.

That we miss the person enough to shed a tear is a high compliment to the relationship.

Accept the grief. When you feel tears arising, do not suppress them.

Big girls do cry, and so do real men, do not be afraid to cry. It may help.

Do not be afraid to show emotions in front of children, it does no harm.

When children see adults cry and grieve, they learn that it is okey to have feelings.

Express your feeling. In the grieving process you may find it difficult to concentrate.

You cannot think straight when you suffer a loss. You can't analyze anything. Impossible.

You find yourself in the middle of a sentence and suddenly you forget what you were about to say.

You may have a sense of disorganization. At times you would forget even important appointments.

You can recall little details about events in the distant past, yet some days you forget everything.

Sometimes you cannot remember whether or not you had eaten lunch.

Body Types

Body Types

Are you an apple or a pear?

Weight around the hips is healthier than around the belly

When talking about body types, how your weight is distributed may be even more important than how much weight you have in the first place. At least when it comes to determining risks to your health. If you are carrying around too much weight in your upper body, your health is at far greater risk than if you are carrying extra weight around your hips, buttocks and thighs.

All of that excessive fat about the hips, around the belly and in the upper torso has been found by researchers to be associated with an increased risk of breast and uterine cancer, hart disease and diabetes, as well as a host of other aliments.

To assess whether your weight distribution puts you at higher risk, ask yourself whether your body more closely resembles the shape of an apple or the shape of a pear. “Apples” carry extra weight in the upper body and are often bigger at the waist than in the hips – traits found more often in men than in women. “Pears”, on the other hand, carry their weight low. Their waists are smaller than their hips. They are usually women.

A more precise assessment can be obtained by measuring your hips and waist, and then dividing your waist measurement by your hip measurement. If the result is 0.75 or less, you are pear-shaped. If the result is 0.75 to 0.80, you are mildly apple-shaped. And a result greater than 0.80 puts you squarely in the Apple category. If that’s the case, you’d benefit from directing some of your energy toward taking off some pounds in the right places.

Body Types. Photo by Elena

That may be easier said than done, however. According to a team of researchers at Rockefeller University, humans have a gene that tips the brain off when the body has stored all the fat it needs to get by and it is best to stop eating. But mutations in that gene can prevent it from signaling when it’s time to push away from the table, the researchers have suggested, resulting in chronic overeating for some.

If you unlucky enough to have inherited such an “obesity gene,” proper exercise will behoove you all the more.

Looking into the funhouse mirror: About one in four American adults has a serious weight problem, but a lot more than that wish they were svelter.

The Body Politic

The Endomorph: Grover Cleveland was the heaviest: His bull neck and barrel chest rank him as a rare endomorph among American presidents.

The Mesomorph: George Washington had a powerful physique with broad sloping shoulders, making him a classic mesomorph.

The Ectomorph: Abraham Lincoln was tall and thin at 6 feet, 4 inches, and weighed only 180 pounds, making him an ectomorph.

Jogging. Photo by Elena

Do You Weigh What You Should?

For decades, medical guidelines on how to figure the ideal weight for your height have been based on life insurance industry tables, showing the heights and weights at which their customers have had the greatest longevity. The U.S. Government, citing the results of recent research, has published a height/weight table blessing slightly higher weights for people over the age of 35. But other authorities are questioning the wisdom of that message.

Trascendental Numbers

Transcendental Numbers

by Carl Sagan

By human standards it could not possibly have been artificial: it was the size of a world. But it was so oddly ant intricately shaped, so clearly intended for some complex purpose that it could only have been the expression of an idea. Gliding in polar orbit about the great blue-white star, it resembled some immense, imperfect polyhedron, encrusted with millions of bowl-shaped barnacles. Every bowl was aimed at a particular part of the sky. Every constellation was being attended to. The polyherdral world had been performing its enigmatic function for eons. It was very patient. It could afford to wait forever.

…

The old Motorola radio was on the shelf where she remembered it. It was very big and heavy and, hugging it to her chest, she almost dropped it.

On the back were the words “Danger. Do Not Remove.” But she knew that if it wasn’t plugged in, there was no danger in it.

With her tongue between her lips, she removed the screws and exposed the innards. As she had suspected, there were no tiny orchestras and miniature announcers quietly living out their small lives in anticipation of the moment when the toggle switch would be clicked “on”.

Instead there were beautiful glass tubes, a little like light bulbs. Some resembled the churches of Moscow she had seen pictured in a book. The prongs at their bases were perfectly designed for the receptacles they were fitted into. With the back off and the switch “on”, she plugged the set into a nearby wall socket. Is she didn’t touch it, if she went nowhere near it, how could it hurt her?

How did the music of the orchestras and the voices of the announcers get in the radio? On the air? Is radio carried by the air? Image by Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

After a few moments, tubes began to glow warmly, but no sound came. The radio was “broken”, and had been retired some years before inn favor of a more modern variety. One tube was not glowing. She unplugged the set and pried the uncooperative tube out of its receptacle. There was a metallic square inside, attached to tiny wires. The electricity runs along the wires, she thought vaguely. But first it has to get into the tube.

One of the prongs seemed bent, and she was able after a little work to straighten it. Reinserting the tube and plugging the set in again, she was delighted to see it being to glow, and an ocean of static arose around her. Glancing toward the closed door with a start, she lowered the volume. She turned the dial marked “frequency”, and came upon a voice talking excitedly – as far as she could understand, about a Russian machine that was in the sky, endlessly circling the Earth.

Endlessly, she thought. She turned the dial again, seeking other stations. After a while, fearful of being discovered, she unplugged the set, screwed the back on loosely, and with still more difficulty lifted the radio and placed it back on the shelf.

Carl Sagan, Contact

Doomsday

Doomsday

The global balance of terror, pioneered by the United States and the Soviet Union, held hostage the citizens of the Earth. Each side draws limits on the permissible behavior of the other. The potential enemy is assured that if the limit is transgressed, nuclear war will follow. However, the definition of the limit changes from time to time.

Each side must be quite confident that the other understands the new limits. Each side is tempted to increase its military advantage, but not in so striking a way as seriously to alarm the other. Each side continually explores the limits of the other’s tolerance, as in flights of nuclear bombers over the Arctic wastes; the Vietnam and Afghanistan wars – a few entries from a long and dolorous list. The global balance of terror is a very delicate balance. It depends on things not going wrong, on mistakes not being made, on the reptilian passions not being seriously aroused.

So we look back at L. F. Richardson, a British meteorologist interested in war. He wished to understand its causes. There are intellectual parallels between war and weather. Both are complex. Both exhibit regularities, implying that they are not implacable forces but natural systems that can be understood and controlled. To understand the global weather you must first collect a great body of meteorological data; you must discover how the weather actually behaves. Our approach must be the same, Richardson decided, if we are to understand warfare. So, for the years between 1820 and 1945, he collected data on the hundreds of wars that had been fought on our poor planet.

Doomsday: this is merely another way of saying what we have known for decades: the development of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems will, sooner or later, lead to global disaster. (Quotations from Megan Jorgenson). Anime Light World War. Image by © M. Jorgenson (Elena)

Richardson’s results were published posthumously in a book called The Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. Because he was interested in how long you had to wait for a war that would claim a specified number of victims, he defined an index, M, the magnitude of a war, a measure of the number of immediate deaths it causes. A war of magnitude M=3 might be merely a skirmish, killing only a thousand people (10-3). M=5 or M=6 denote more serious wars, where a hundred thousand (10-5) or a million (10-6) people are killed. World Wars I and II had larger magnitudes. He found that the more people killed if a war, the less likely it was to occur, and the longer before you could witness it, just as violent storms occur less frequently than cloudbursts.

In the Richardson’s diagram the solid line is the waiting time for a war of magnitude M – that is, the average time we would have to wait to witness a war that kills 10-m people (where M represents the number of zeroes after the one in our usual exponential arithmetic). Also shown, as a vertical bar at the right of the diagram is the world population in recent years, which reached one billion people (M=9) around 1835 and is now about 4.5 billion people (M-9.7). When the Richardson curve crosses the vertical bar we have specified the waiting time to Doomsday: how many years until the population of the Earth is destroyed in some great war. With Richardson’s curve and the simplest extrapolation for the future growth of the human population, the two curves do not intersect until the thirtieth century or so, and Doomsday if deferred.

But World War II was of magnitude 7.7: some fifty million military personnel and non-combatants were killed. The technology of death advanced ominously. Nuclear weapons were used for the first time. There is little indication that the motivations and propensities for warfare have diminished since, and both conventional and nuclear weaponry have become far more deadly.

Thus the top of the Richardson curve is shifting downward by an unknown amount. If its new position is somewhere in the shaded region of the figure, we may have only another few decades until Doomsday. A more detailed comparison of the incidence of wars before and after 1945 might help to clarify this question. It is of more than passing concern.

Nuclear Superpowers

Every major power has some widely publicized justification for its procurement and stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction, often including a reptilian reminder of the presumed character and cultural defects of potential enemies (as opposed to us stout fellows), or of the intentions of others, but never ourselves, to conquer the world. Every nation seems to have its set of forbidden possibilities, which its citizenry and adherents must not at any cost be permitted to think seriously about. In the Soviet Union these includes capitalism, God, and the surrender of national sovereignty. In the United States, socialism, atheism, and the surrender of national sovereignty. It is the same all over the world even today.

We know who speaks for the nations. But who speaks for the human species? Who speaks for Earth? 3D Model. Image by © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

How would we explain the global arms race to a dispassionate extraterrestrial observer? How would we justify the most recent destabilizing developments of killer-satellites, particle beam weapons, lasers, neutron bombs, cruise missiles, and the proposed conversion of areas the size of modest countries to the enterprise of hiding each intercontinental ballistic missile among hundreds of decoys? Would we argue that ten thousand targeted nuclear warheads are likely to enhance the prospects for our survival?

What account would we give of our stewardship of the planet Earth? We have heard the rationales offered by the nuclear superpowers.

Viking Lander

Viking Lander

The Viking lander extends human capabilities to other and alien landscapes. By some standards, it is about as smart as a grasshopper; by others, only as intelligent as a bacterium. There is nothing demeaning in these comparisons. It took nature hundreds of millions of years to evolve a bacterium, and billions to make a grasshopper. With only a little experience in this sort of business, we are becoming fairly skilful at it. Viking has two eyes as we do, but they also work in the infrared, as our do not; a sample arm that can push rocks, dig and acquire soil samples; a kind of finger that it puts up to measure wind speed and direction; a nose and taste buds, of a sort, with which it senses, to a much higher precision than we can, the presence of trace molecules; an interior ear with which it can detect the rumbling of marsquakes and the gentler wind-driven jiggling of the spacecraft; and a means of detecting microbes. The spacecraft has its own self-contained radioactive power source. It radios all the scientific information it acquires back to Earth. It receives instructions from Earth, so human beings can ponder the significance of the Viking results and tell the spacecraft to do something new.

But what is the optimum way, given severe constraints on size, cost and power requirements, to search for microbes on Mars? We cannot – at least as yet – send microbiologists there. Carl Sagan once had a friend, an extraordinary microbiologist named Wolf Vishniac, of the University or Rochester, in New York. In the late 1950’s, when they were just beginning to think seriously about looking for life on Mars, he found himself at a scientific meeting where an astronomer expressed amazement that the biologists had no simple, reliable, automated instrument capable of looking for microorganisms. Vishniac decided he would do something about the matter.

Small devices lead to great discoveries (quotations from Megan Jorgensen). Image: by © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

He developed a small device to be sent to the planets. His friends called it the Wolf Trap. It would carry a little vial of nutrient organic matter to Mars, arrange for a sample of Martian soil to be mixed with it, and observe the changing turbidity of cloudiness of the liquid as the Martian bugs (if there were any) grew (if they would).

The Wolf Trap was selected along with three other microbiology experiments to go aboard the Viking landers. Two of the other three experiments also choose to send food to the Martians. The success of the Wolf Trap required that Martian bugs like liquid water. There were those who thought that Vishniac would only drown the little Martians. But the advantage of the Wolf Trap was that it laid no requirements on what the Martian microbes must do with their food. They had only to grow. As the other experiments made specific assumptions about gases that would be given off if taken in by the microbes, assumptions that were little less than gossips.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which runs the United States planetary space program, is subject to frequent and unpredictable budget cuts. Only rarely are there unanticipated budget increases. NASA scientific activities have very little effective support in the government, and so science is most often the target when money needs to be taken away from NASA. In 1971 it was decided that one of the four microbiology experiments must be removed, and the Wolf Trapp was off loaded. It was a crushing disappointment for Vishniac, who had invested 12 years in its development.