A Very MAD Blog
Month
Our population is currently at around 7.5 billion and “The world has added one billion people since 2005 and two billion since 1993.” It is predicted we will reach a population of 9.8 billion by 2050. (United Nations, 2017).
According to Gimenez (2012), we Currently have enough food to feed 10 billion people and people starve because of greed. Furthermore, Edward O. Wilson (2002) also said that the earth can currently support 10 billion people in his book ‘The Future of Life’. However, neither of these sources linked back to any research or where they got their numbers. Alternatly, Waggoner (1996) says we should also consider and leave room for nature to survive, to do this we would need to drastically change our habits.
I believe (and I am not alone) that we can easily feed everyone on this planet with our current food productions. So why do people go hungry? Three main reasons Greed, Wastage, and poverty gaps. “The global volume of food wastage is estimated at 1.6 billion tonnes of ‘primary product equivalents.’ Total food wastage for the edible part of this amounts to 1.3 billion tonnes.” (Food wastage: Key facts and figures, n.d.). The average person eats 500kg per year (How Much Food Does the Average Person Eat per Year, 2013) so dividing that from the edible part of the food waste, that is enough to feed 2,600,000 people for a year.
The solution to wase food is up to you. How much food do you throw out or is left uneaten? how often do you overeat? If you own a business, how much food goes to waste there?
One solution to growing more food without destroying more forests is vertical farming.
With vertical farming, you can grow a lot more in a smaller land area. This has shown to be very effective when adding hydroponics and LED lighting. This video goes into the basics of the idea:
“The world has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.” - Mahatma Gandhi
Food wastage: Key facts and figures. (n.d.). Retrieved 10 24, 2017, from Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/196402/icode/
Gimenez, E. H. (2012, 02 05). We Already Grow Enough Food For 10 Billion People — and Still Can’t End Hunger. Retrieved from The Huffington Post: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-holt-gimenez/world-hunger_b_1463429.html
How Much Food Does the Average Person Eat per Year. (2013). Retrieved 10 24, 2017, from A to Z of Brain, Mind and Learning: http://health.learninginfo.org/how-much-food-average-person-eat-per-year.htm
United Nations, D. o. (2017). World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision, Key Findings and Advance Tables. New York: United Nations.
Waggoner, P. E. (1996). How Much Land Can Ten Billion People Spare for Nature? Daedalus, The Liberation of the Environment, 125(3), 73-93. Retrieved 10 23, 2017, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/20027371
Wilson, E. O. (2002). The Future of Life. Paw Prints.
How do excessively Creative People Live?
Creatively! Creative people tend to do the following things according to some of the links below: They are extremely passionate about everything they do, and might not do things that they aren’t passionate about; They tend to daydream or get lost in thought; they enjoy solitude, more introverted people tend to be more creative; They have an openness to exploring new ideas and learning/experiencing new things; they tend to be more observant; They have better mindfulness; and they turn bad times into an advantage and build creative ideas from these experiences. This all boils down to thinking differently from the majority.
However, some other sources such as telentsmart sats some other things creative people do, like wake up early or work to a strict schedule.
So, How should creative people live?
More Creatively!
Do everything creatively!
For example, look at how this restaurant serves its deserts creatively.
By doing everything creatively, you enforce all of your creative thoughts and ideas.
Studies have also shown the benefits of having your own creative space to work, such as a workshop or studio and keeping to a schedule. But, at the same time being flexible to your ideas.
How can you live creatively? The following video raises some good points:
“we’re living in an age of information overload and the crisis of fake news” we need to stay open-minded and make our own ideas from our own research. see nothing as truth, all truths could change. See a news article? try to find their sources and make your own conclusions. Make new ideas even if they challenge the standard ways or ideas of life, it is these ideas that will either change the world or enforce the methods in place.
References:
https://blog.musicbed.com/articles/how-a-creative-person-should-manage-their-day-to-day-99u/257
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/858670600/tillera-minimal-and-seamless-device-for-tracking-y
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/249931
http://www.talentsmart.com/articles/6-Unusual-Habits-of-Exceptionally-Creative-People-2147446622-p-1.html
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/04/creativity-habits_n_4859769.html
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/ten_habits_of_highly_creative_people
http://web.mit.edu/STS.035/www/PDFs/think.pdf
https://www.fastcodesign.com/90137664/the-reason-your-brain-loves-wide-products
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5OJZ8XRzvKXellrWnlQeV9WX2s/view
https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/navigating-information-overload/
What is Creativity? Is that even an answerable question? The dictionary says Creativity is “The ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.; originality, progressiveness, or imagination”- http://www.dictionary.com/browse/creativity
I decided to ask a friend of mine and she said “being creative is the expression of an idea that cannot be fully defined simply by describing it” I found this interesting as it makes sense yet it differs from the definition.
To me, creativity is the result of thinking openly and expressing ideas that some may never uncover.
So, How do you grow a creativity? How do you become creative?
according to https://thenextweb.com/creativity/2017/06/21/11-brutal-truths-about-creativity-that-no-one-wants-to-talk-about/#.tnw_L5nbPTen You already are creative, everyone is creative. I think the problem is a mix of self-criticism and close-mindedness.
The best ways to expand your creativity seems to be teaching your brain new things and opening your brain to new ideas. As said a previous post, music can increase creativity. However, not just learning an instrument but just listening to it as was said here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2017/09/06/listening-to-happy-music-may-boost-creativity-study-says/#79ad72d63357
I want to challenge you to grab a pencil and draw something or pick up any instrument and try to play it.
Take this video as an example:
However, Being creative is not just all about arts. Creative thinking helps with everything from problem-solving to living a happier life. - https://www.bestpracticeconsulting.com.au/_blog/Articles/post/Fostering_creativity_in_the_workplace/
My conclusion is, no matter who you are or where you are from, you should try being more creative as it could improve your life.
Music is becoming less and less taught in schools in western countries according to the following video. He also says music is all about patterns and using them creatively. He uses dubstep to show the patterns of music and frequencies. He also says how learning music helps with creative thinking which could boost grades.
Below are some Creative Music Videos that I thought could be related as they are doubbly creative.
Below is a video showing sound being visualized:
There is creativity in music and by learning a musical instrument you are expanding your brain and your creativity. This is why I took up the melodica, a strange instrument, but, I feel it fits me perfectly. We need more teaching of music in schools and not just of classical western style. The more creative the better!
For starters, what is the purpose of a blog anyway?
A blog has many purposes such as a company updating customers on progress or new products, a person with something interesting to share like traveling, or a student trying to pass a creative paper…
Blogs are used as a tool to give the same bit of information to a set audience easily and repetitively. For this purpose, they have other good uses as well, such as a portfolio.
So, if your goal is spreading information to a set group of people, how do you make the perfect blog post?
The first three things you should think about is who is your audience, what is the purpose of this blog post, and what do you want the reader to do or feel after reading it. (for example, a blog post aimed at my fellow students about how to make a decent post)
After figuring these out, if your goal is to make people read your post, the most important thing is a good title to draw people in and make the reader interested. One way to do this is to get them hooked with a question that they want the answer to. Like instead of ‘How to Make The Perfect Blog Post’ I put ‘ What Makes The Perfect Blog Post?’ this makes the reader curious, however, both are good titles in my opinion.
Next is a decent intro, something to draw the audience in and keep them reading.
After all of that is out of the way, comes your main content followed by an optional call to action. The content should also contain a decent summary. With your content, you should add images and graphics to split up the text and make it more enjoyable to read. This graphic should be related and useful to the content.
Lastly, check grammar and spelling. As boring as it sounds it is essential to a decent blog post. I personally use as many tools as I can to help, like Grammarly.
From another angle what shouldn't you do? Here is an interesting video I found:
References:
https://www.salesforce.com/ca/blog/2015/10/anatomy-of-a-blog-post.html
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-to-write-blog-post-simple-formula-ht
Lives are busier than ever! “According to a study by the American Psychological Association, 18 to 35 year olds are the most stressed out generation ever—earning ourselves the nickname “Generation Stress.”” - https://relevantmagazine.com/life/millennials-are-most-stressed-out-generation-and-s-spiritual-problem “stress is caused by three primary factors—money, work, and the economy” - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-15/americans-just-broke-the-psychologists-stress-record
Stress on its own will kill you, mentally if not physically. However, part of stress (at least for me) is not having enough time in the day. A solution often used is to reduce sleep to get everything done, allowing us to relax. The problem with this is how sleep affects the body.
“Sleep deprivation actually causes the brain to feed off of neurons and synaptic connections“ - http://nypost.com/2017/05/30/the-brain-literally-eats-itself-when-its-overtired-study/
“Your body needs sleep, just as it needs air and food to function at its best. During sleep, your body heals itself and restores its chemical balance. Your brain forges new connections and helps memory retention. Without enough sleep, your brain and body systems won’t function normally. It can also dramatically lower your quality of life. A review of 16 studies found that sleeping for less than 6 to 8 hours a night increases the risk of early death by about 12 percent.” - https://www.healthline.com/health/sleep-deprivation/effects-on-body
“If sleep deprivation continues long enough, you could start having hallucinations—seeing or hearing things that aren’t there. A lack of sleep can also trigger mania in people who have manic depression.“ Which I have experienced. More than once I have gone 3 days without sleeping and the most I have gone is 4.
From this research, I have learned I need to make a change to my sleeping habits or it might actually kill me. Another factor is, sleeping statistically also makes you more productive making any excuses for not sleeping irrelevant.
The article “Is It Time To Go Back To Basics With Writing Instruction? “ by mind shift, says many students struggle with expressing their ideas through writing and many students are at a low writing level. They speak of a teaching style/course that teaches from the basics.
I believe writing is a limited medium, yes it is important, no it shouldn't dictate everything. In Highschools, most subjects (at least the graded ones) are either marked in math or English from my experience. If you do not excel at Literacy or Numeracy, you can be extremely limited. Another problem is the content as is introduced in the following music video:
Sure, it is a bit controversial, but, he raises good points. School hasn’t changed in over a century. We have made huge advancements and the whole world is a different place now, yet the school system hasn’t changed at all. This is talked about very well here.
So what can we do? We need to change, the world is going in the way of creativity, most of the factory line jobs that school was designed for don’t exist anymore and the rest won’t exist in the near future. School needs to stop killing creativity (and it does) and start making it stronger. According to the following article, Creative jobs will be the last to be automated.
http://fortune.com/2015/04/22/robots-white-collar-ai/
Our only way forward as a species is to be more creative and remove greed. Those together could solve all the worlds problems and they already are.
Related Blog Posts:
Investigation: http://blog.epsilum.co.nz/post/165778762014/so-i-went-to-the-library-for-a-couple-of-hours
Research: http://blog.epsilum.co.nz/post/165929646609/looking-deeper
Documentation: http://blog.epsilum.co.nz/post/165950877374/connections
Review:
My Chosen Books are: School Journal Number Two 1971 Part 3, Everyday Electronics Jan-Feb Apr-June 1991, The Listener 1988-89, SAS Survival Guide, and Veterinary Physiology. At first, these books look totally unrelated and are in completely different categories. However, after much research and digging; they have quite a few connections. The School Journal, Veterinary Physiology and The SAS Survival Guide are all related to teaching the reader something important. The School Jurnal is aimed at primary school children and teaches a wide range of subjects from English to geography, the SAS Survival guide is all about staying alive in any situation you might find yourself in, whereas, Veterinary Physiology is the only one that is aimed at academics and teaches a high level of the subject.
My favorite quote from the school journal is “Tigers bathe but cats hate water”
The Listener and Everyday Electronics are more about reporting. The Listener is a Newspaper that was a collection of newspapers from the listener between 1988 and 1989. Seeing the styles used back then and the stories were very interesting and Everyday Electronics is like a subscription magazine and gives a good idea about the electronic devices of the time and also the electronic knowledge of the time. Most of the devices I saw are similar to what you would find in kits in electronic stores now, both look very similar though. They also both display products and latest breakthroughs.
Both SAS Survival Guide and Veterinary Physiology can be used in emergencies. SAS Survival Guide has a lot of information about certain situations and getting out alive and Veterinary Physiology has literally everything you could need to know to diagnose a problem with an animal such as a cat or dog.
The Listener, School Jurnal, and Everyday Electronics are quite old. all published between 1988 and 1991. All of these were found on the bottom floor of the library.
I really struggled to connect all of these together, the best I could get is they all contain a lot of information and they all are interesting to me.
Something I did not expect when researching these books is how far down the rabbit hole you can go, this I realized when writing my research blog post. Everyday Electronics mentions a machine that emits pink noise which is advertised to put you into a deep sleep, I then found myself finding the formula for pink noise, a 10-hour video of pink noise, and a lot of science behind it; including a paper from the 1880s. The dream machine I found very interesting. according to Everyday Electronics, this emits pink noise, pink noise is advertised here to hypnotically induce deep sleep and claims dentist have used it to pull out teeth without anesthetic, sounds unethical but interesting so I did a bit of digging. Pink Noise is “Pink noise is acoustical energy distributed uniformly by octave throughout the audio spectrum (the range of human hearing, approximately 20 Hz to 20 kHz). Most people perceive pink noise as having uniform spectral power density – the same apparent loudness at all frequencies. In pink noise, the total sound power in each octave is the same as the total sound power in the octave immediately above or below it. An octave is a band whose highest frequency is exactly twice its lowest frequency.” - http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/pink-noise
I can relate all of these books through research and going way outside the box, so far from the box that you cant even see it anymore.
The school Journal could have been used to teach the people that then went on to write Everyday Electronics. During their teen years, they could have started reading the listener. After doing a bit of electronic work they could have decided to get into veterinary studies and used Veterinary Physiology as their first textbook. While at uni they decide they want to know some more about how to survive certain situations with all the commotion going on in the world so they pick up the SAS survival guide.
Another way these books relate without making it into a story is through content. The SAS Survival Guide shows first aid skills for humans whereas the Veterinary Physiology book covers it for animals. The listener covers events where first aid was needed and Everyday electronics has some examples of the latest medical tech of the time. The School Jurnal, however, contains little medical knowledge as it is aimed at children, but, it does have basic biology knowledge.
In conclusion, These books have no connection to each other at first glance, however, after thinking deeply and research they can be related. The further down the rabbit hole you go the more connections you find.
So I made a diagram trying to map out the connections between my chosen books and this was the result:
It was very hard finding words to connect all of the books so I connected a few at a time with very broad words.
Then I factored in my research and found that there are a lot of indirect ways this information could relate, leading me to research what else was going on during those time periods. For example, The owner of The Wellington-Manawatu Railway Company could have been listening to pink noise at the same time as reading a news paper similar to the listener about the woman's’ vote being allowed and possibly redesigning his house to be more secure like it describes in the SAS guide.
I wondered whether any of the directors signed a pension for woman’s vote and eventually found the names listed here http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Cyc01Cycl-t1-body-d4-d19-d2.html then I searched on this database https://nzhistory.govt.nz/politics/womens-suffrage/petition none of their names were there but it was an interesting find.
I went a bit further into the history and was shocked at “They warned that any disturbance of the ‘natural’ gender roles of men and women might have terrible consequences. The liquor industry, fearful that women would support growing demands for the prohibition of alcohol, lobbied sympathetic Members of Parliament and organised their own counter-petitions. “ - https://nzhistory.govt.nz/politics/womens-suffrage/brief-history well the liquor industry is just fine…
And I end with an art work from 1885 https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/christchurch-life/art-and-stage/visual-art/95742048/from-the-christchurch-art-gallerys-collection-among-the-sandhills
The dream machine I found very interesting. according to Everyday Electronics 1991, this emits pink noise, pink noise is advertised here to hypnotically induce deep sleep and claims dentist have used it to pull out teeth without anesthetic, sounds unethical but interesting so I did a bit of digging.
Pink Noise is “Pink noise is acoustical energy distributed uniformly by octave throughout the audio spectrum (the range of human hearing, approximately 20 Hz to 20 kHz). Most people perceive pink noise as having uniform spectral power density – the same apparent loudness at all frequencies. In pink noise, the total sound power in each octave is the same as the total sound power in the octave immediately above or below it. An octave is a band whose highest frequency is exactly twice its lowest frequency.” - http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/pink-noise
This is a 10-hour video of pink noise, I think it almost sounds like water on a beach.
An interesting report in New Zealand Law Report VOL. 3 1885 was a case against Wellington-Manawatu Railway Company.
“The Wellington and Manawatu Railway Company (WMR or W&MR) was a private railway company that built, owned and operated the Wellington-Manawatu railway line between Thorndon in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, and Longburn, near Palmerston North in the Manawatu, between 1881 and 1908, when it was acquired by the New Zealand Government Railways. Its successful operation in private ownership was unusual for early railways in New Zealand.” - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wellington_and_Manawatu_Railway_Company
It was interesting to find out about this company as it was uncommon for privately owned railways to do well.
