There is so much information around us these days that it’s easy to forget how incredibly advantaged are those today that wish to learn about everything and anything. It was just such a meander around the internet that brought me to a website called Science Daily, a wonderful daily digest of top science news items.
And a browse through that web site brought me to this piece on the creation of the very first stars in the universe.
June 1, 2007 — Astronomers removed light from closer and better known galaxies and stars from pictures taken with the Spitzer Space Telescope. The remaining images are believed to be the first objects in space, 13 billion light years away.
The first stars in our universe are long gone, but their light still shines, giving us a peek at what the universe looked like in its early years.
Astrophysicists believe they’ve spotted a faint glow from stars born at the beginning of time. Harvey Moseley, Ph.D., an astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, says, “The reason they’re faint is just because they’re very, very far away, they’re over at the far edge of the universe.”
I don’t know about you but I find this so deeply inspiring – a reminder of the instinctive nature of man to enquire and explore. And it is this exploratory instinct that will pull us all through from the challenges that we all face today.
Anyway, I’m wandering off the subject!
Do read the piece in full here and then watch the following video from Avi Loeb.
Oh, want to know how far 13 billion light years is? Brace yourself!
Light travels at 186,000 miles per second or more properly expressed 299,792.458 km/sec. See here. (Brilliant website by the way) That is 10 trillion kilometres a year.
So 13 billion light years is simply! 10 trillion multiplied by 13 billion kilometres. Anyone got a larger calculator?
Digital content opens up a whole new ways of thinking about price, value and success.
Book cover
Some time ago, I read the new book from Chris AndersonFree: The Future of a Radical Price It was a very busy period of my life and I had ‘parked’ the conclusions contained in the book for a later time – and then forgot about it!
Anyway, something that came into my in-box earlier today reminded me of the power of giving content away. But before going there, let me briefly come back to Anderson’s book. An extract from this link talking about what in the UK we know as jelly and in the US the name of Jell-O, (nice history on Wikipedia):
But it didn’t sell. Jell-O was too foreign a food and too unknown a brand for turn-of-the-century consumers. Kitchen traditions were still based on Victorian recipes, where every food type had its place. Was this new jelly a salad ingredient or a dessert?
For two years, Wait kept trying to stir up interest in Jell-O, with little success. Eventually, in 1899, he gave up and sold the trademark — name, hyphen, and all — to Orator Frank Woodward, a local businessman. The price was $450.
Woodward was a natural salesman, and he had settled in the right place. LeRoy had become something of a nineteenth- century huckster hotbed, best known for its patent medicine makers. Woodward sold plenty of miracle cures and was creative with plaster of paris, too. He marketed plaster target balls for marksmen and invented a plaster laying nest for chickens that was infused with an anti-lice powder.
But even Woodward’s firm, the Genesee Pure Food Company, struggled to find a market for powdered gelatin. It was a new product category with an unknown brand name in an era where general stores sold almost all products from behind the counter and customers had to ask for them by name. The Jell-O was manufactured in a nearby factory run by Andrew Samuel Nico. Sales were so slow and disheartening for the new product that on one gloomy day, while contemplating a huge stack of unsold Jell-O boxes, Woodward offered Nico the whole business for $35. Nico refused.
Anderson then explores what Woodward does next:
So in 1902 Woodward and his marketing chief, William E. Humelbaugh, tried something new. First, they crafted a three-inch ad to run in Ladies’ Home Journal, at a cost of $336. Rather optimistically proclaiming Jell-O “America’s Most Famous Dessert,” the ad explained the appeal of the product: This new dessert “could be served with the simple addition of whipped cream or thin custard. If, however, you desire something very fancy, there are hundreds of delightful combinations that can be quickly prepared.”
Then, to illustrate all those richly varied combinations, Genesee printed up tens of thousands of pamphlets with Jell-O recipes and gave them to its salesmen to distribute to homemakers for free.
(My emphasis – do read the extract in full from here.) The book is highly recommended.
So what was it that came into my email in-box? It was an email from Leo Babauta of Zen Habits, a Blog that I subscribe to. This is what it said:
I’m happy to announce that focus is now in the Kindle Store. You can get the full book — the free chapters plus bonus chapters from me and five other authors — for $8.99. It doesn’t include the videos, audio interviews and bonus PDFs in the full version.
The free version is simple: it’s 27 chapters that you can download for free, without having to give an email address or do anything else. It’s uncopyrighted, and you can share it with as many people as you like.
Again, you can share this ebook freely, so feel free to post it on your blog, Twitter, Facebook, or email.
I have no way of knowing how many downloads have been made but I suspect many more than one might imagine.
What I would be curious is to know from amongst the many Learning from Dogs readers how many of you have read this Post to the point of downloading the book for yourself, or others?
Whichever way we look, there appear to be huge problems. Not insurmountable but, metaphorically speaking, sheer vertical cliffs without any easy way up.
One might ponder if the last 50 years, that post-war period of growth and prosperity, have, in reality given society real, sustainable, core improvements or whether all the ‘gains’ have come at such a cost that the net benefit is questionable?
This could be seen as pessimism gone mad. Undoubtedly, there have been some huge gains from a scientific point of view and we now enjoy lives that are greatly enhanced and longer. But not to ask such a fundamental question is to assume the alternative, that everything in the garden is rosy.
Now this may seem a strange introduction to a topic that is going to be deeply personal and private.
But both the private, individual world of the ‘self’ and the great, interconnected world of the planet are indivisible. Every aspect of our lives, our livelihoods, our environment and the future of our children depends on how well, and how sustainably, we manage our personal, local, national and international interests.
For example, if Prof. Lovelock’s theory on the planet being a self-regulating organism is correct, his Gaia theory, then possibly in the lifetimes of our children, and certainly in the lifetimes of our grandchildren, worrying about a job or repaying the mortgage will be irrelevant. Our descendants will be worrying about their very survival!
I called this piece To Move on, First Give Up. Why?
Because the only way forward is to give up on the present.
The future depends on each of us being happy and contented with ourselves and avoiding looking out there for the magic cure to all our troubles. Being, as far as we are able, at peace with our circumstances and able to do the best, individually, as well as the best for our families, our friends and the larger world in which we work and play.
I have heard people ask the question before, “How can I best help the world?” The only truthful answer is to develop ourselves as individuals. In doing this, the field of consciousness that we are all connected to is also lifted or elevated to a higher level.
At this stage of history, either…the general population will take control of its own destiny and will
Noam Chomsky
concern itself with community interests guided by values of solidarity and sympathy and concern for others or alternately there will be no destiny for anyone to control.
-Noam Chomsky
By Jon Lavin
[Anyone who has been affected by this article and wishes to contact Jon may find his contact details here. Ed.]
SUPER-FIT and ATTRACTIVE SINGLE BLACK FEMALE seeks male companionship, ethnicity unimportant. I’m a very good girl who LOVES to play. I love long walks in the woods, riding in your pickup truck, hunting, camping and fishing trips, cozy winter nights lying by the fire. Candlelight dinners will have me eating out of your hand. I’ll be at the front door when you get home from work, wearing only what nature gave me … Call 01272-6420 and ask for Annie, I’ll be waiting …..
Luckily, we were later able to obtain a photo of this georgeous prospect, enough to make any man slaver ….
Will Hutton’s book continues to impress me; greatly.
On 28tTh October, I wrote an article about Will Hutton‘s impressive book, Them and Us. I had got to page 120 or thereabouts and could resist no longer the urge of reading the book to the end before commenting on Learning from Dogs.
Now I am reading through page 260 and, again, find myself incapable of waiting until the book is completed before offering further thoughts!
Despite being very optimistic about the long-term future, I sense that the period that we have been in since 2008 may turn out to be one of the darkest in recent history – I touched on this aspect in a recent post called Faith in a (new) future.
One of the things that strikes me is the complete lack of openness from the British Government about the likely growth scenarios over the next decade. Here was how the latest ‘growth’ figures were presented a couple of weeks ago, “The economy grew by 0.8% in the three months to September – double the rate that had been predicted by analysts.”
UK output increases by 0.8 per cent 4Q 2010
But here’s Will Hutton,
Britain is going to be much poorer than it anticipated just a few years ago.
They paint a sober picture of prolonged loss of output, high unemployment and depressed asset prices, and warn that there is no precedent for what happens after the kind of global crisis through which we have just lived. (My italics)
Hutton says that growth would need to accelerate to 3.25 per cent in order for output to reach its predicted level if the recession had not taken place.
He then says that a more plausible scenario if growth remains at 2.75 per cent (average level in recent years leading up to the credit crunch) “then it might never recover sufficiently to converge with the old trajectory.”
Hutton continues,
However, even that may be optimistic. The reality is that between the economic growth troughs of 1991 and 2009, growth in Britain actually averaged just over 2 per cent.
That would lead to a cumulative loss of output of more than £5 trillion!
It could be even worse. The economics team at Barclays believe that is it perfectly plausible for growth to average just 1.75 per cent for the first half of the current decade.
And all of this before the huge budget cuts announced by the UK Coalition Government start to bite!
So the reality is that we are a long way away from any form of real recovery, despite what the politicians are saying!
What is so impressive about the book is that Will Hutton is meticulous in his research (there are 23 pages of referenced notes at the end of the book) and from Chapter 9 starts setting out how Britain “has the opportunity to put things right fast.” So this is a book from a well-respected author that sets out carefully and logically the cause of the recession and then presents some powerful options for change.
The bottom line is that Britain has to be a much more fairer society. Not just Britain. Here’s an extract from a recent posting on Tom Engelhardt’s Blog. Tom is the author of the book, The American Way of War.
I’m no expert on elections, but sometimes all you need is a little common sense. So let’s start with a simple principle: what goes up must come down.
For at least 30 years now, what’s gone up is income disparity in this country. Paul Krugman called this period “the Great Divergence.” After all, between 1980 and 2005, “more than 80%of total increase in Americans’ income went to the top 1%” of Americans in terms of wealth, and today that 1% controls 24% of the nation’s income. Or put another way, after three decades of ”trickle-down” economics, what’s gone up are the bank accounts of the rich.
In 2009, for instance, as Americans generally scrambled and suffered, lost jobs, watched pensions, IRAs, or savings shrink and houses go into foreclosure, millionairesactually increased. According to the latest figures, the combined wealth of the 400 richest Americans (all billionaires) has risen by 8% this year, even as, in the second quarter of 2010, the net worth of American households plunged 2.8%
“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”
Read a few days ago on Baseline Scenario and I couldn’t resist using it. Not the first time, I’m sure, you have read this dear readers but still well worth another airing.
Plus it gives me a chance to remind people that Baseline really is a Blog worth following.
Learning from Dogs 