down (in)to Earth

Just started reading "The descent", and if the book turns out to be half as breathtaking as "L'abisso", it's going to be a few exhilarating intensive hours of full immersion ...
... and it turns out "The descent" is such an american book, written by a non-speleologist, not as rich in historical details, and really just scratching the surface of the underworld, and the emotions that it triggers, but hey, it's still about exploring the underworld !

List of world caves, for curiosity:
http://www-sop.inria.fr/agos/sis/DB/database.html
http://www.caverbob.com/

systematic approach to everything

‎"A solution is not a solution if it doesn’t work for the people for whom it’s intended. To work within any system without causing harm to it, you must see and understand every aspect of it. There is no substitute for immersion and understanding of the context in which you are working."
- Cheryl Heller

if you aren't worried yet, consider starting now

We can get worried about our projects, our salary, or our romances, but somehow we do not get worried about our specie, and other forms of life on Earth. Dan Gilbert says that it's because things change too slowly with climate: we do not "see" the impact, and because climate change does not have a face, and we LOVE to associate evil with faces.
Truth is, if we do not start acting upon our daily behaviours, we're doomed to kill ourselves, maybe slowly, but we'll sure loose face in this universe.
Forget about Terraforming on Mars, we need Terrapreserving in here !

if I were a superhero it would be batman

Hey, I did not say it was likely :-)
Why batman? Well, surely not catwoman, for obvious reasons, and superman is from somewhere else than the Alps. Pretty much no superpowers, just a lot of determination, hard work, fears, and a deep sense of justice. Justice to be defended with any means.
It just feels right. And maybe the caving origin helps too :-)

what a wonderful home

It's mind blowing, it's our home, it's been given to us for free, it does not need maintaining, it offers food, water, shelter, warmth, protection, entertainment and a high degree of stability, considering the universe around us. And yet, we manage to scavenge it, pollute it, create imaginary borders, cover it with ugly landscapes, and sell its produces.
It has survived the most amazing series of catastrophic events, and will overcome us. But will we ?

http://www.youtube.com/homeproject
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/planet-earth-the-complete-bbc-series/
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/life/

in case you wanted to go to Mars

One day we'll be able to go, and once we do, you'll need to know when it's the best time to start, and what to take with you for the journey. We'll consider only economy travel, not business, first class, and not hitchiking either.

It's all about physics. We're so attracted by our planet that leaving it is just too hard. If you disagree, try to jump, and see what happens. That law of attraction is not "The Secret", but it's surely proportional to your mass (sure enough, if you eat less, you'll be able to jump higher), and to the mass of the Earth. It would be much much easier to jump up from the Moon. So, first of all, we need a kick start, and that kick start will be larger if we need to carry a lot with us. But we'll think of that later. 

The kick shall be large enough to free us from this Earth attraction and circle around it, just like the Moon does, into an orbit around the Earth. And then another kick shall move us in the direction of Mars. 

As soon as we move away from Earth in fact we'd be captured into an orbit around the Sun, this last kick would put us in a transfer orbit, called Hohman transfer, which at some point interjects the orbit of Mars. At that time we'd just need breaking a couple of times, and we'd fall into the red planet.

But leaving the Earth to go to Mars is not an everyday business. Only once every two years the planets are in such a relative orbital configuration, which allows them to meet after some time.

So, first important thing to retain: you can go to Mars only every two years.

And if you really want to save fuel, you'd take the best of the opportunities, which only happens roughly every 15 years. 

Now, assume you want to go, you'll have a couple of choices. One way to go is via a longer route, which takes 1000 days round trip. You'll have quite a journey back and forth, but you'll be able to stay on Mars for 500 days. This longer route is also the cheaper, it's using a conjunction orbit.

The other option, using an opposition orbit, is mosre costly in terms of energy (it requires a larger kick), but it's faster, it ONLY takes 500 days round trip. The problem is, you'll only have 60 days on Mars. And that's not such a long time. Plus, you'll better not forget the departure time, and keep your rocket fueled and the batterie charged, because in case you missed, you'll have to wait for another two years to come back.

The good news is, you'll have plenty of time to refuel or recharge your batteries. That is, if you took enough water and food for the extended trip ...

open (and powerful) education

Learning is what we do, what motivates us, what makes us capable of the astounding things we do. But there is so much to learn, and a lot is so boringly provided, or it is just too costly for most people to afford.
But some people have been excellent at creating learning which is free, and exciting.

Animated stories, powerful visualisations:
The Khan Academy
RSA Animate
Gapminder
Big History Project
Crash Courses

Some cool infographics:
http://www.infographicsshowcase.com/
http://www.coolinfographics.com/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/01/14/monday-inspiration-data-visualization-and-infographics/

And a lot of inspirational videos and open course material:

TED talks

The DO lectures
Learners TV
PopTech
big think
iTunesU
Udacity
Coursera

The science network

The Reith lectures

University of California TV

UCLA courses

UCSD TV

Openculture
Open university open learning

Open courseware consortium

MIT open courseware

YALE online lectures

Utah university open courseware

Stanford University

University of Edinburg

Education for all

Academic hearth

Open courseware finder

Online lecture sources
Cosmo learning
NovoEd
Edx
Minutephysics
PhD comics tv
Sci Show

too good to be true?

It was just an evening chat, trying to find good topics for a dinner discussion, avoiding work and potentially conflicting issues.

The first potential topics introduced were italian mafia, european politics, football ... yuk! I introduced my preferred topics: psychology, neurology, cognitive sciences, innovation, closed cycles ... and the light was ignited.

Can it really be true? Will we really implement a sample self-sustainable building, and have our engineers operate it, learning how to autonomously maintain a settlement? Will we finally set ourselves as models of real sustainable behaviour?

is (lack of) assertiveness the problem?

Is lack of assertiveness the problem we face? Is it the reason why we hardly stand up in front of injustice ans authority, and allow bad things to happen? Or the contrary, take things in our hands, and get violent? I'm fully convinced it is. The good news is that assertiveness can be trained. The key is how to train it at best? I think I'll really give it a deep thought.

leadership issues

Does a team need a chef though? Or does an emergent consciousness and a clear defined goal suffice? Ants do not need directions, and yet they work perfectly as teams. Maybe because they lack individualism? 

luckily volcanoes still exist

photo by ovaratli

We're sure very actively trying to destroy ourselves via economic growth, industrial evolution, globalisation, preventive wars, oil rigging, mining, buy&throw-away habits, linear cradle to grave production.
But we can thank nature for having thought of how to cope with our attempts to destroy its wonders. Plate tectonics will save Earth from us, as it saved it from previous settlers, sometimes with a little hand from outer space friends too.
It may get a bit hectic, but floods, tsunamis and large eruptions will settle things down. Some sort of life will surely survive. It's refreshing to think that there will be life after us.

Why do volcanoes erupt?
http://open2.net/mountain/inside_mountain.html

Some informative documentaries:
http://documentaryheaven.com/inside-planet-earth/
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-core/
http://documentaryheaven.com/supervolcanoes/
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/how-earth-made-us/
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/earth-story/
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/time-machine/
Earth, power of the planet: volcano (also: atmosphere, ice, oceans and rare earth)

And a more extensive, although a bit dramatized, series:
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/how-the-earth-was-made-season-1/
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/how-the-earth-was-made-season-2/

Or an intire course on geology
http://www.archive.org/details/elements_geology_1010_librivox

And the history of our planet, and of how life survived and then thrived
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/earth-making-of-a-planet/
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/david-attenboroughs-first-life/

subconscious clues

I love my subconscious. I've been looking for the name of a website which offers online movies. My memory did not want to remember its name. All it did remember was that there was a word that has something to do with movies, an x and a .to. My mind wandered about words like film, movie, picture, cinema, theatre ... without really finding the link. And then I suddenly had the urge of looking up if the original movies theathre in Cologne has its own app. And there I found myself looking for Metropolis KINO ... and there it was ... at last, the word I had been looking for just popped out from my fingers, and made it to my consciousness. Kinox.to ... that's the site.

Isn't it fascinating, how our brain is able to give us clues, while giving us the impression it's been us who have sorted it all out ? Brilliant !

to infinity and beyond ...

I always have to laugh at how things develop. When I sat there being interviewed in minute 42 of the video, I was trying to avoid saying something stupid about ESA's involvement in Mars missions. At the time of the shooting ESA had already abandoned the programme, I was upset.

And guess what ... that sentence sounds like "to infinity and beyond!"

the power of arithmetics

I have forgotten maths ! I used to love maths, even when it was explained to me as a purely theoretical endeavour. It was structured, regular, predictable, and if you followed the rules, the results were stunning. Now, had it been taught with real life examples, I believe I would have chosen to dwelve into it for the rest of my adult life.
Back to the video. A fantastic metaphora on video n.3 on the bottle full of bacteria, and our inability to realise when we are 1 minute before 12.

musical brains

Aren't we cooperative beings, just in need of an inspiring director? 

how to save the economy

Isn't it incredible that the more materialistic we become, the more we rely on a virtual economy, the less we are in touch with reality and even less we are capable of judgment ?

that would be me?

At a workshop on leadership for women some years ago (almost as good as teaching men how to knit as a way to become successful fathers), I was told that you should google yourself from time to time, just to check what others would see if they do. So when I am really bored, I sometimes decide to look up my friends, and a few days ago I looked for my own name, but I decided to look it up with the word "game". 

Very high up in the list I found a real surprise. A company was citing me as an example of out-of-the-box thinker, to then proceed to promote their own teaching methodology. 

Interesting, I thought ... they have no clue who I am, I never published anything easily accessible on what I do, but a couple of magazines in the last months had published articles about a couple of my projects, and they have used a very colourful language.

Did I go from being a very boring civil servant to a source of inspiration in innovative paradigms for immersive training?

And then I was thinking: what if they had met me in person, and had heard me speaking enthusiastically about those projects ... they would probably have ignored me, while busily looking for luminescent covers in popular magazines.

baffling start of a personal project

I am going to explore the world, self, and other things, from a very prejudicial and opinionated perspective, in no plausible sequence, with best intentions.
This is going to be a sparse collection of events in my life, possibly with some sprouts of my inner thoughts about them, and the rest.