NORTHERN PLANNER

I make no secret of my love for tea and here’s more persuasion to choose the leaf over the bean.

"Wake up with the Freedom fighters" declares the website for Contra Coffee. It offers coffe grown by the former Contras, the CIA backed militia that waged the dirtiest war against Nicaragua’s Sandinista governement. During the 80’s they carried out a campaign of torture, rape and massacre throughout the peasant communities, with the clandestine funding of the Reagan administration.

But now you can curb the spread of socialism through more peaceful means— purchasing Contra Coffee online with the guarantee that the ex-assasins get a fair price (how nice).

Charles Darwin was a shy man and avoided public debate, but he still welcomed criticism.

When he first published his theories on evolution, his argument was flawed but thankfully, lots of people wrote and told him so.

He read every single letter and used the continuous feedback to refine his work in later editions. Without the willingness to listen to honest critiscism,  historians think Darwinism may have stalled before it really began.

By the way, in his lifetime Darwin’s best selling book was actually about earthworms.

..and well on the way to turning into a ‘grup’.

According to German sleep physicians, our bodies are out of synch with the world we now live in resulting in social jet lag. Thanks to a mismatch of about two hours between our biological clocks and the demands of our jobs,at least half the population feels sluggish,disoriented and dazed. They say the solution is to match natural sleep rythms with daily routine – the average person prefers to sleep between 12midnight and 8.30am.

More examples include the need to sweat in  gymns now that work is less physically demanding, or female bodies that require getting pregnant at young age while culturally many women now want to have children later in life.

Read more about it here in article from the Observer.

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‘The Happiness Hypothesis’ by Jonathan Haidt explains a lot about heart v head. He explains that animals run on automatic processes – in-  built mechanisms that give us a little dopamine reward when we’ve done something like eating or having sex, anything that ensures our long term survival. Humans have managed to make it complicated for themselves by evolving controlled processes as well – the planning something consciously or analysing stuff for possible outcomes, something integral to the development of language. Haidt asks us to think of someone riding a horse – the horse is the automatic stuff, the rider is the controlled processes.

Automated processes have been around a lot longer, so they’ve had more time to get really, really good. Controlled has some catching up to do, which is why we can make a machine that can add up better than us, but no car can sense a speeding 4 x 4 in the third lane.

So we’re riders trying to control a horse that wants to ignore us since it thinks it knows where to go better than we do. Our conscious self is constantly in conflict with our primitive automatic tendencies – part of us wants to follow reason while the other is hell bent on disseminating genes.

Emotions are the expression of how the rider and the horse interact. Happy people manage this interaction well, unhappy people are having constant conflict between rider and horse. It doesn’t help that the horse is a coward – largely scared of unfamiliar situations and experiences. In other words, we make it hard for ourselves to try something new.

There’s lots of other stuff about gossip as the key to human culture since it’s risk free – the idea that it spreads new thinking thanks to the fact it’s endorsed by many and you can blame someone else for what you are saying.

Interesting to think about this balance being able to weigh up risks and your primitive self shouting "NO!".

Remember The Terminator? BBC News has a report of bionic muscles, 100 times the strength of human muscles. They operate in a very similar way to real muscles, consuming oxygen, alcohol and hydrogen. Imagine all the changes this will make to everything around us. Will we have to change stuff deal with super-human strength? Laws may have to be rewritten, our social codes might have to change. It gets you thinking about how being different can affect everything around you.

There’s a lot of campaigns around for small small cars that have more space (and isn’t the Bigsmall Yaris simply speaking Micra – Modtro?), since a lot of people find bigger cars difficult to handle but find small cars, well, too small. If the issue is the handling, and a small car will never have all that much room, shouldn’t more people be developing a big car that’s as easy to handle as a small one?

According to a poll done by Men’s Health magazine, 43% of men are happy with their reflection in the mirror. According to the women in the office, not even 1% of the men here should be. Are blokes the vainer sex, or simply deluded?

I’ve been reading a bit about Brad Gilbert recently. Not only is he one of the most successful tennis coaches out there, he was also a pretty good player. He’s the first to admit that he wasn’t the most talented, but he got to number four in the world. The secret of his success? Hard work,  and making the strengths he had work, instead of worrying about weaknesses.

Being talented can make you lazy, why practise when it comes this easy? Being average can mean being tenacious and recourseful enough to somehow make it work.

Carol and Rob have made some interesting contributions to the debate about what contemporary culture can teach us. Here’s a some wisdom from Curb Your Enthusiasm series 5 on the mysterious distance between and man and a woman.

Cheryl: Goodnight Larry.. what are you doing?

Larry: That was a quick snuggle, I’m just coming in for longer one

Cheryl: No Larry, get off!

Larry: What’s the problem? I just want a snuggle.

Cheryl: You always try to turn snuggling into sex

Larry: What’s wrong with that? It’s a natural progression

Cheryl: Ok come here….get of my ass!