Saturday, March 3, 2012

Keri Smith


"Wreck This Journal" is not your ordinary journal at all. In fact, the pages prompt you to do things like scribble wildy, spill your coffee on it, drag it down the sidewalk, and take it into the shower with you. I know it sounds a little weird, but once you get past your fears of ruining a brand new book, you'll have an insane amount of fun completing the tasks!

I absolutely loved it

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

20 things you didn't know about nothing

1-There is vastly more nothing than something. Roughly 74 percent of the universe is “nothing,” or what physicists call dark energy; 22 percent is dark matter, particles we cannot see. Only 4 percent is baryonic matter, the stuff we call something.

2-And even something is mostly nothing. Atoms overwhelmingly consist of empty space. Matter’s solidity is an illusion caused by the electric fields created by subatomic particles.

3-There is more and more nothing every second. In 1998 astronomers measuring the expansion of the universe determined that dark energy is pushing apart the universe at an ever-accelerating speed. The discovery of nothing—and its ability to influence the fate of the cosmos—is considered the most important astronomical finding of the past decade.

4-But even nothing has a weight. The energy in dark matter is equivalent to a tiny mass; there is about one pound of dark energy in a cube of empty space 250,000 miles on each side.

5-In space, no one can hear you scream: Sound, a mechanical wave, cannot travel through a vacuum. Without matter to vibrate through, there is only silence.

6-So what if Kramer falls in a forest? Luckily, electromagnetic waves, including light and radio waves, need no medium to travel through, letting TV stations broadcast endless reruns of Seinfeld, the show about nothing.

7-Light can travel through a vacuum, but there is nothing to refract it. Alas for extraterrestrial romantics, stars do not twinkle in outer space.

8-Black holes are not holes or voids; they are the exact opposite of nothing, being the densest concentration of mass known in the universe.

9-“Zero” was first seen in cuneiform tablets written around 300 B.C. by Babylonians who used it as a placeholder (to distinguish 36 from 306 or 360, for example). The concept of zero in its mathematical sense was developed in India in the fifth century.

10-Any number divided by zero is … nothing, not even zero. The equation is mathematically impossible.
11 It is said that Abdülhamid II, sultan of the Ottoman Empire in the early 1900s, had censors expunge references to H2O from chemistry books because he was sure it stood for “Hamid the Second is nothing.”

12-Medieval art was mostly flat and two-dimensional until the 15th century, when the Florentine architect Filippo Brunelleschi conceived of the vanishing point, the place where parallel lines converge into nothingness. This allowed for the development of perspective in art.

13-Aristotle once wrote, “Nature abhors a vacuum,” and so did he. His complete rejection of vacuums and voids and his subsequent influence on centuries of learning prevented the adoption of the concept of zero in the Western world until around the 13th century, when Italian bankers found it to be extraordinarily useful in financial transactions.

14-Vacuums do not suck things. They create spaces into which the surrounding atmosphere pushes matter.

15-Creatio ex nihilo, the belief that the world was created out of nothing, is one of the most common themes in ancient myths and religions.

16-Current theories suggest that the universe was created out of a state of vacuum energy, that is, nothing.

17-But to a physicist there is no such thing as nothing. Empty space is instead filled with pairs of particles and antiparticles, called virtual particles, that quickly form and then, in accordance with the law of energy conservation, annihilate each other in about 10-25 second.

18-So Aristotle was right all along.

19-These virtual particles popping in and out of existence create energy. In fact, according to quantum mechanics, the energy contained in all the power plants and nuclear weapons in the world doesn’t equal the theoretical energy contained in the empty spaces between these words.
20-In other words, nothing could be the key to the theory of everything.

Creating Balance In Your Life

1. Know what matters to you most
It is important to know what your priorities are. Not what you think they are, not what you think they should be, not what you think others would like them to be for you.
What matters to you is what is most important.

2. Identify what you can do without
Go through your day, your home, your relationships, your job and your life. What’s sapping your energy? What are you doing that doesn’t need to be done?
Identifying what you can do without is a major step toward freeing yourself up to focus on the things that do matter.

3. Eliminate the tolerations in your life
Tolerations are those things that we put up with, that we accept and take on, and that drag us down. This includes other people’s behavior, difficult situations, unmet needs, crossed boundaries, unresolved issues, frustrations, problems, and even your own behavior. These are energy zappers-the things that wear you out.
Cross off items when you have worked them out of your life, it will do wonders for your commitment to finding balance.

4. Define your clutter
To gain balance, you have to define and eliminate the clutter in your life. This may be physical stuff, emotional baggage, mental images, etc. Clutter takes up space in your mind, heart, home and life. Begin to make space for what you want by getting rid of what you don’t.

5. Be Where You Are
Every day, our minds race ahead to think of the things we need to do or haven’t done right. There’s so much to see when we focus on being present. There are people to be with and share joy with. So much is missed when our minds leave our bodies and go somewhere else. Look down at your feet and ground yourself in the moment.

6. Please Yourself
We’re taught at an early age to do our best to please others. Many of us walk around trying to please everyone else. If we try to make everyone else happy, we set ourselves up for failure. Find the things that please you and make you happy.
It’s time to shift the focus from pleasing others to pleasing ourselves.

7. Go for the Joy
When we smile, we actually tell our brains that we’re happy and our whole body and being responds accordingly. As the old saying goes “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional”.
If you put your focus on something that brings you joy, you’re liable to have and feel more joy in your life.

8. Ask for what you want
You need to be very clear about what you want. You need to know it, live it, breathe it, expect it, and ask for it. Ask for what you want from the universe. It doesn’t matter how it comes your way, just that it does. When you ask for something and it is delivered, you start to believe that life can and does work out.

9. You can have it all
You CANNOT do it all. Having it all comes after you live your life based upon that notion. When you make a commitment to yourself to not do the things that aren’t in your best interest or aren’t worth your time and effort-you give yourself room to enjoy where you are and what you have.
And you realize that you already have all you need.

10. The Rest is up to YOU!
It is up to you when to take the plunge and begin applying these steps to your life. You’ll realize you had more balance than you thought you did. You’ll begin to define balance in a way that encompasses the realities and constraints of your life as it is now

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Quote of the day

“You have to activate the mind because most people are asleep. When they look at something they don’t see it. But when ambiguity is present, they try to figure it out. So the use of ambiguity is about moving the brain to action, making something happen, because our species is a problem-solving species.”
~ Milton Glaser