Elizabeth Renzetti Published 2 days ago Updated June 27, 2019 For Subscribers It is my curse to have been born with two black thumbs. That is, over the years I have managed to keep children and pets alive, but plants? Not so much. My gardening past is littered with carrots that came out of the [...]
Month: June 2019
Gratitude and Canada Day: a recipe for good health!
So happy we have connected and I am able to pass on your writings, especially this one. The power of gratitude is often overlooked but it is indeed quite powerful.
Monday is July 1, better known to those of us in the North as Canada Day. The Canada Day weekend is a time when the whole country takes time to enjoy family, community, and summer, and to celebrate Canada’s birthday, this year its 152nd. For me, part of that celebration is a quiet, personal sense of gratitude that by a fairly arbitrary decision taken by a 17-year old (me) 56 years ago – to attend McGill University, seemingly for 4 years – I had not only chosen a wonderful university experience in a fantastic city (Montreal), but had also serendipitously chosen a wonderful new country in which to spend the rest of my life. My gratitude for having become Canadian knows no bounds.
I don’t know how many of you are aware of this, but if you google “gratitude” and “health” you will quickly come to many links…
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Wordless Wednesday
Looks magical but there is actually ice underneath the water.
I thought I’d try a Wordless Wednesday for a change. This widely disseminated image was taken by the Danish Meteorological Institute on the melting Greenland ice sheet earlier this month.
Fakebook: Why Deep Fakes Mean Deep Trouble
These are truly mesmerizing times! Thanks Connor for your article, scary though it is.
Video and audio are the most visceral mediums of human communication. From the movies that reduce us to tears to the music that lift our spirits, what we see and hear has huge power to shape our beliefs and guide our behaviour.
We all know when we watch Star Trek or immerse ourselves in EDM that we are suspending reality in order to feel a thrill of escapism. But what if reality was suspended permanently?
The rise of “deepfake” technology has the power to fracture society’s ability to tell fact from fiction. The term ‘deepfake’ refers to video or audio that has been altered with the aid of deep learning technology, to usually show a person doing something they never did; or saying something they never said.
Though media has been artificially manipulated for decades, faster computers and easy-to-use, publicly available technology makes convincing deepfakes increasingly easy to produce and proliferate…
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Time of Crisis
A few more thoughts about crisis and opportunity.
Crisis is the mechanism used by evolution to evolve an organism to a higher level. If there is no crisis, nothing changes.
So maybe we should not be too pessimistic about the many crises that currently beset us, already listed in many other posts. They represent the opportunity for growth and change.
“The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word ‘crisis.’ One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger — but recognize the opportunity.”
Kennedy was apparently wrong linguistically, but his theme has been accepted by many as representing a fundamental insight about life.
So what are the opportunities presented, through which the crises can be successfully surpassed? As a species we must rise above the causes that lie behind our many crises. To my mind it is not difficult to see what some…
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Sorry, banning plastic bags won’t save our planet
BJØRN LOMBORG CONTRIBUTED TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL PUBLISHED JUNE 17, 2019 Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center. Last week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a plan to reduce plastic pollution, which will include a ban on single-use plastics as early as 2021. This is laudable: plastics clog drains and cause floods, [...]
The Strange Persistence of First Languages
The Strange Persistence of First Languages After my father died, my journey of rediscovery began with the Czech language. BY JULIE SEDIVY ILLUSTRATION BY SARAH MAZZETTI NOVEMBER 5, 2015 Several years ago, my father died as he had done most things throughout his life: without preparation and without consulting anyone. He simply went to bed [...]
Ketamine trips are uncannily like near-death experiences
First-hand accounts of what it is like to come close to death often contain the same recurring themes, such as the sense of leaving the body, a review of one’s life, tunnelled vision and a magical sense of reality. Mystics, optimists and people of religious faith interpret this as evidence of an afterlife. Skeptically minded [...]
An Era of Disconnect
Excellent article on the root of our situation today– overpopulation and over consumption in a finite world.
A visit to the grocery store is a weekly routine for most people in the developed world. Everything is neatly displayed for us to go through; fruits, vegetables, meats and an assortment of packaged foods. I sometimes think of how remarkable it is that practically every store I have ever shopped in contains basically the same foods. How many potatoes, oranges, tomatoes or whatever else, needs to be grown or produced in order to supply stores on a worldwide scale? How much land, manpower and machinery are required? And where do all these goods come from? I couldn’t even begin to guess; the question alone is enough to boggle the mind.
Unless one is involved in the farming industry, I question whether much thought goes into it. Life is busy these days, and filling the grocery cart is just one of many routine tasks to complete. I don’t think that…
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Mount Everest just the world’s latest victim of tourist hordes
Definitely highlights the pitfalls of travel and tourist hordes thus making local travel much more appealing.
Thought-provoking article by Kelly McParland in the National Post (May 29, 2019) follows in full, for starters.
‘Once, you travelled the world to see the world. Now, you travel to shoot the perfect selfie.
Tourists look at the view across the Grand Canal from the Rialto bridge on Sept. 9, 2011, in Venice, Italy.
Ian Gavan/Getty Images
It might seem odd to equate a torturous climb in life-threatening conditions to the world’s highest peak with mass tourism, but that’s what the trek to the top of Mt. Everest has become.
A blind man climbed it. Disabled people have climbed it. An Australian paraplegic with a wheelchair did it. A 69-year-old double amputee from China reached the summit. An 84-year-old British grandmother vowed to at least make it to the base camp, and succeeded.
Like so many others who have headed off to Nepal, Edna Northrup chose to make the climb…
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