2012-05-07

My Manifesto – How to become a better Person

Recently I came across Gretchen Rubin’s Manifesto on her blog The Happiness Project and it struck a chord with me.

Wouldn’t it be great if people had constitutions like states or manifestos like movements? A list of short guidelines that neatly encapsulate who you want to be as a person, how you want to act and what values you want to uphold.

CC0, WikiMedia Commons

So here’s my first draft, and I’m sure I will revisit this topic many times. A manifesto such as this will always be colored heavily by the current Status Quo and that is just fine. It encapsulates what is important to me right now and may not include many things that I already take for granted.

The goal of my Manifesto is to become more clear for myself how I want to be in the world, and to hold myself accountable to it. It is easy to be swept away by emotion in the heat of the moment, but in hindsight you can evaluate whether you behaved like you intended. And writing your guidelines down can be an invaluable tool to check whether you’ve been true to yourself.

My Manifesto 1.0

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2012-05-03

Challenge 02 – Lose 16kg in 16 weeks (with a Twist)

I am setting myself another tough challenge: By September 8th 2012 I will weigh less than 90kg and feel slim and well.

I have achieved this before, but unfortunately am back where I had started after 3 years. Last time I had much more leisure time to organize my food and not be stressed. On the other hand I did it entirely through nutrition and might take up just a tiny bit of sport to get there in time.

So, here is the plan. I am going to follow the same rules as previously, but this time I’ll try them with a twist.

The Gamification of Health

Following the concept of Gamification, I set out to simplify all those complicated rules and complex issues of nutrition (also see Health Month is a self-improvement RPG). Of course it is important to be aware of them, to eat the right foods and to make healthy choices, but all too often the complexity can be a major hindrance.

My little Healthy Lifestyle Game - actual excel sheet

Playing the Game of Health

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2012-05-02

The Nature of Evil, and how it comes about

“Evil – Inside Human Violence and Cruelty” by Roy Baumeister tells a great story of what Evil is, what causes it and how it comes to be. With plenty of anecdotal stories, historical examples and based on psychological research he presents a tour de force of one of the most fascinating human traits.

A fantastic insight into the darker corners of the human psyche.

What is Evil, Anyway

When something bad happens to you, you are primed to look for a causal chain of events. Because we have a hard time accepting random events, we tend to search for meaning in our lives. There are basically two options you can go for, when something bad happens to you: You can either accept that you deserved what happened, or that another agent brought this upon you undeservedly. Psychologically, the first option is almost as hard as accepting the randomness of things, and thus the concept of Evil is born.

“If victimization is the essence of evil, then the question of evil is a victim’s question. Perpetrators, after all, do not need to search for explanations of what they have done.”

CC-BY by kevin dooley

The Magnitude Gap – “It hurts me more than it hurts you”

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2012-04-29

What are Trees made of?

I came across this fantastic video that asks the questions where tree get their mass from. It is fantastically made and really shows how much we think we know and yet have never questioned.

Spoiler – Please watch the video first before reading on, it’s really worth it.

An Unintuitive Answer

The answer to the question “Where do trees get their mass?” was really unexpected for me. As was said in the video, I had never given this much thought, and since trees have a texture a little bit like earth, I assumed that by association earth had to have something to do with it.

The reason we do not intuitively consider air as a source for mass is – I guess – that we are completely immersed in air, don’t know how it is to be without air, and do not attribute mass to it. For one thing because it’s gaseous and thus has low density and also because any mass we attribute to objects is relative mass to the displaced air.