Wednesday, November 30, 2011

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?

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

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? 

Monday, November 28, 2011

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: atmosphereiceoceans 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/

Sunday, November 27, 2011

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.

Saturday, November 26, 2011

musical brains


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

Sunday, November 20, 2011

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 ?

Saturday, November 19, 2011

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.