DIY Meat

Well it's not really about Do-It-Yourself meat... at least not yet.

But the signs are good!

Especially after seeing a movie like Samsara or maybe Food, Inc (which I haven't seen yet actually), you can tend to start thinking about becoming a vegetarian.

But the truth is we love meat.

And it's not really much we can change in the production of meat at the moment... but the solution is coming!

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2009-11/dutch-scientists-grow-first-vitro-pork

That's an actual picture of pork growing inside a machine. The muscle is being exercised so it stays fit and healthy - and not one animal was harmed in the making of this (ok, I admit, they did steal some cells from a pig...).

And what's really cool is imagining that in 20 years you'll be growing your own meat at home. Not just pork... nonono! We're talking about zebra meat and beaver meat and duck meat and anything you want.

Well the machine look nice from the outside, but guess what? The product has already been tested:

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-08/first-lab-grown-hamburger-served

Awesome! Great job, science!

A Huge Brain!

I'm a physicist, yet I am convinced that the evolution of our language is more important than the progression of science and technology.*

Why?

Without the proper methods to communicate, it is impossible for people to effectively, quickly and deeply share their ideas and thoughts. Without rich vocabularies and very delicate grammatical structures it would be difficult for one person to pass on the right temperament of an idea, feeling or thought.

Does the correct temperament of a message count this much? Yes it does - that provides the basis for profound understanding between the halves, which opens the way to a deeper, more understanding conversation.

Is this important in the sciences? Yes, although maybe not as much as in other fields of life, but notice that mathematics and physics and so on and so forth needed to build up a distinct vocabulary and language. This is necessary for the advancement of any field.

Here's the truth: I don't think languages are very important because of what I just told you. What I think is the really amazing thing about advanced languages is that they connect us! That's the most important task that language has - to connect people.

Imagine that perfect communication exists (maybe with the help of this!).
Perfect communication means COMPLETELY understanding each other in an instant without any effort - basically you look at another person and you know everything they know - thanks to perfect communication!

What this would do is create the largest-ever brain - a brain where people are the brain cells. Just imagine how much thinking potential and creativity such a construction of humans would have! It would be quite a thing.

We are on the way to perfect communication, although we will never get there probably :) The key to this, I think, is the evolution of languages - this (with the help of information technology) will help us get closer to the "super brain state".



(What's the * at the end of the first sentence? I'm not extremely convinced that it's the most important part of development anymore. In the beginning it was obviously the most important factor (cavemen and ancient societies), but today maybe not so much.

I'm imagining the sophisticated-ness of communication as a sort of logarithmic function of time dedicated to improving communication - in other words the later we are in time, the less it matters that we are trying to make a more profound language, but still communication can become infinitely perfect if we have infinite time! So good luck with that!)

Samsara

Prepare to be mesmerized, terrified and amazed by the world you live in: Samsara

The Trailer:

Samsara is one of my favorite films. I saw it in the Budapest Urania movie theater, and it was not at all what I expected. The movie has no speech in it at all, only images and music, which gives the topics a very mystical and profound touch. The imagery is stunning and beautiful.

So Samsara is a very strongly recommended film for everyone who lives on Earth. The movie is less than 2 hours long, have at it:

The full movie (!!! Switch to HD quality !!!) : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icIv7nJqjuQ

Would YOU be Beckham?

Here's the deal: If you could be anyone in the world, who would you be?

Seriously, anyone! Pick a person; you can choose a specific person from the present or even the past, or you can just choose a description (e.g.: the richest person ever, the happiest person alive, the...).


There are two options to talk about here:

a) If you chose a specific person, for example Beckham.

So this is a real situation here, I asked this from one of my friends and he said Beckham, and it really started bugging me:
If I were Beckham, would I be Beckham?
I'm asking this in the sense that if I was born in Beckham's place, in his body, would I have had the motivation and ambition to become the most famous football player of my time? Would I have been able to exploit my skills and talents in such an amazing way?

And the following question has really really really bothered me since: What am I NOT bringing out of myself? Am I destroying a great person, am I choking myself by not using my time well enough, by wasting too much energy and time and focus on things that aren't important instead of becoming the MOST that I could be?

b) If you chose a description of a person (the smartest..., the richest...,  a Nobel prize winner, the fastest..., the strongest...), then
Why aren't you that person??? It's like... this is the most self-reflective question ever and I think there are huge masses of people out there that don't really think about this question at all: Who do you want to be?

If you want to be the happiest person in the world, then go! Have at it, live your life like such! If you want to be someone really skilled at something: GO! DO IT! If you want to embrace the world and travel and meet people - what are you waiting for?! Do you want to be an artist - someone who paints and designs his/her own living room and bedroom in funky and wicked ways, go ahead! Why aren't who you want to be?

And that's the best part of living here and now! We have so many opportunities to choose from on who we want to be - and yet so many people are just going through the norm procedure of education and workplaces because they forget to ask themselves the question: who do I want to be?

Boundaries - Friends or Foes?

Think of something. Or give yourself 2 minutes to think.

Stop. Now answer this question:
What would you rather do, let a train hit five people tied to the tracks or switch the tracks so that only one person gets hit?

                                                                                            

Ok just forget about thinking. Do something, anything.

Stop. Now do what I tell you: take a box of LEGOs and build a tower at least 10 centimeters high, containing more red blocks than any other color blocks, and the tower should have at least one helicopter landing spot, two stairs that lead to the top and 3 or more floors altogether.

                                                                                            

What's the point of all this?

If I ask you to think of something, anything at all, than you have a huge amount of freedom in your thinking. Yet you progress much more when I tell you to think about something very specific - in that case you immediately start thinking and you are fully involved and immersed in that specific question.

In this case if you think enough on the railroad question, you might enhance your thinking, learn something new, progress to new interesting territories while encountering challenging parts in the thinking process, maybe think of some wildly new idea that can influence the way you or others live!

If you have to build a LEGO tower, you start building and you encounter obstacles that you MUST overcome with your creativity and unorthodox thinking.

When I tell you to just do something, or just think of something, you would have probably done or started to think about something simple or just very random stuff or just about nothing at all.

By giving you no boundaries, it's hard (although not impossible) for you to do anything outstanding.

By giving you the right amount of boundaries, you can achieve amazing things.

However giving too many boundaries leaves you trapped.

Having the proper amount and types of boundaries that push us has key importance in our development and learning. It's very hard to give other people or ourselves the correct boundaries - this is one of the most important tasks of teachers and trainers.

Physics analogy: In flowing water, the less space you give it to flow the faster it flows!

Where else are boundaries a propelling factor instead of a bounding factor?

What's a Higgs?

The Higgs boson's original name is the Englert–Brout–Higgs–Guralnik–Hagen–Kibble boson. For understandable reasons no one uses the long name.

It's gotten quite a bit of attention from the media, especially since it was dubbed "The God Particle" and because it was successfully proved to exist in the July of 2012 at CERN (<3). I'm going to give you guys a short summary on how you can imagine what the Higgs boson does - (unfortunately it's not God; it's just a particle).

First off we need to introduce the concept of the Higgs field. The Higgs field is a special field that is everywhere - imagine an invisible web filling out the whole space in the universe!

Ok now instead of the field imagine a cocktail party full of people evenly distributed.

These nice people represent the Higgs field.

When a celebrity enters the room the people are all exited about the famous newcomer and gather around him/her.

The celebrity is actually any kind of particle - for example a proton, a neutron or an electron. The new mass of people around her make it harder for her to move and makes  her and the people  accumulated around her harder to stop (if they move together) - in other words her inertia grew! She has now successfully gained mass!

So the Higgs field gives particles their mass - a very elemental property of physical things.

The Higgs boson? In the same room, imagine someone from the outside whispering a rumor to one of our Higgs field representatives.

Since that person has an interesting story, many of his/her neighbors group around him/her and a local cluster comes to life. The rumor spreads on its own, and wherever it is there's a group of people talking about it.

That newly-formed cluster is a Higgs boson. It's actually a particle with mass, that was created from an unusual excitation of the Higgs field. This is why the finding of the boson was important - it proves (or at least strongly suggests) that the Higgs field, the mass-giving field, exists!