The question, of course, is what those situations are: what makes us more creative at times and less creative at others? One answer is psychological distance.

I think this is about blocking your immediate reality to make room for abstract, creative thought. Something a lot of us are already very adept at…

An Easy Way to Increase Creativity @ Scientific American.

In the face of a growing number of deaths and cases of HIV linked to drug abuse, the Portuguese government in 2001 tried a new tack to get a handle on the problem—it decriminalized the use and possession of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, LSD and other illicit street drugs. The theory: focusing on treatment and prevention instead of jailing users would decrease the number of deaths and infections.

5 Years After: Portugal’s Drug Decriminalization Policy Shows Positive Results.

The broadcaster Sir David Attenborough has become a patron of a group seeking to cut the growth in human population. On joining the Optimum Population Trust, Sir David said growth in human numbers was “frightening”.

Read more common sense here.

In this programme, David Attenborough asks three key questions: how, and why, did Darwin come up with his theory of evolution? Why do we think he was right? And why is it more important now than ever before?

David starts his journey in Darwin’s home at Down House in Kent, where Darwin worried and puzzled over the origins of life. David goes back to his roots in Leicestershire, where he hunted for fossils as a child, and where another schoolboy unearthed a significant find in the 1950s. And he revisits Cambridge University, where both he and Darwin studied, and where many years later the DNA double helix was discovered, providing the foundations for genetics.

At the end of his journey in the Natural History Museum in London, David concludes that Darwin’s great insight revolutionised the way in which we see the world. We now understand why there are so many different species, and why they are distributed in the way they are. But above all, Darwin has shown us that we are not set apart from the natural world, and do not have dominion over it. We are subject to its laws and processes, as are all other animals on earth to which, indeed, we are related.

Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, pt. 1


Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, pt. 2

Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, pt. 3

Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, pt. 4

Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, pt. 5

At Serious Play 2008, astrophysicist George Smoot shows stunning new images from deep-space surveys, and prods us to ponder how the cosmos — with its giant webs of dark matter and mysterious gaping voids — got built this way.

“I am a mathematician, and I would like to stand on your roof.” That is how Ron Eglash greeted many African families he met while researching the fractal patterns he’d noticed in villages across the continent.

Watch the video at Ted.com or below.

“Hello, Dr. Richard Feynman? May I congratulate you on the Nobel Prize.”
- “Look, this is a heck of an hour–”
“But aren’t you pleased to hear that you’ve won the Prize?”
- “I could have found out later this morning.”
“Well, how do you feel now that you know that you’ve won it?”
- “Look, some other time…”

And so Richard P. Feynman, Ph.D., FRS, and Richard Chase Tolman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech, first sleepily learned that he was an awardee of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics.

(source)

Hundreds of insect species spend much of their time underwater, where food may be more plentiful. MIT mathematicians have now figured out exactly how those insects breathe underwater.

Read on…

When I read things like this I think of theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman and his theory of self-organizating biological systems which seems magnificently true.

“You want to listen, you can’t hear; you want to speak, you are dumb; you want to call out, you cannot; you feel you are dying, dying; you want to run away. You piss with fear in your sleep.”

So I’ve been sleeping a little bit irregularly lately and I’ve been having some strange dreams because of that. The dreams feel like they’re real and they always end with me trying like hell to wake up but being unable to do so because I can’t move my limbs or open my eyes! Pretty strange and scary stuff. It’s like I’m a prisoner of my own body and I can’t do nothing about it. Hallucinations are a direct result of it and they’re scary but fascinating nonetheless. I’ve had this kind of dream (or extended hallucinations) before so I decided to google around for it. Pretty soon I stumbled on a phenomenon called ’sleep paralysis’ and it’s really interesting.

There’s people who write about it on their blogs and stuff, and ofcourse there’s a wikipedia article on it which was an eye-opener for me. It seems it’s closely related to lucid dreaming (another interesting kind of dream I’ve had before), out-of-body experiences and even alien abductions (which you can read about on this excellent page). Basically life makes a little more sense now.

I’ve looked around for some (popular) scientific writings on this subject and I’ve found a few, like ‘The Terror That Comes In The Night‘ by David Hufford and ‘Wrestling With Ghosts‘ by Jorge Conesa, excellent stuff if you’re into horror movies; there’s lots of scary folklore going round about it.

So if you’ve ever had the terrifying feeling that you can’t move your limbs or open your eyes, don’t sweat it. Although some people get it a little too often, it’s perfectly natural, a slight brain glitch which does no harm except scare the shit out of ya. Nothing supernatural or mystical about it, although a lot of people (used to) think so. I think it’s another interesting layer of reality which needs to be explored more; this specific area of research is still pretty young.

It might even be a nifty gateway to some serious lucid dream explorations… Wooo…

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

~ Carl Sagan (source, book)