Gravity Collapse » health

Colossal wastes of time and the consequences

gravitycollapse — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 21:51:29 +0000

Humans have control issues. We reside in a basically chaotic universe, where shit just happens, all around us, all the time, and we have absolutely no control over it. Mother nature erupts lava into our neatly organized towns, she moves the ground under our feet and topples our carefully constructed buildings. An asteroid might come along at any minute and smash half of our planet away, creating another moon.

We even have this chaotic streak inside us, echoing the dynamism of the natural world that we are part of. You can see it in little boys, lining their toy cars up in neat little rows until they tire of the order, with a subconscious realization that it doesn’t fit the random universe they grow up in, and so they go on a rampage, impersonating some cataclysmic disaster and kicking them all around until the cars are in an disheveled pile.

One of the silliest things we humans do to install order into our decidedly disorderly lives is make our beds. From the time I was little, I thought bed making was a great big fucking waste of time. Every day people spend two minutes or so making the bed. Hell, say it takes them one minute. That’s ~360 minutes a year, or 6 hours. 6 hours in their year, and the best thing they can think to do with it is arrange sheets and blankets neatly? You’ve probably only got about 75 of those years before you die….and you want to have spent 450 hours of them making beds? Almost 20 days of your life, then, dedicated to this meaningless activity? (And that was with a very conservative 1 minute per bed making estimate…if it takes you 3 minutes…that’s 60 days of your life.)

(...)
Read the rest of Colossal wastes of time and the consequences (184 words)

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Carlo Urbani rocks

gravitycollapse — Mon, 31 Mar 2003 09:40:38 +0000

While the United States is celebrating its heroes, who are invading a foreign land and killing people, other heroes are working around the world to save people.

Dr. Carlo Urbani, an Italian doctor who spent much of his career tracking infectious diseases among children in Africa, and was among a group that won a Nobel prize in 1999, was the sharp guy that noticed that SARS (as they are now calling it) was not a normal flu virus, as was first thought.

Now, sadly, he succumbed to the same disease himself.

You know, while Bush requests that congress appropriate him 100 billion dollars to invade Iraq and murder people, it makes me think what someone like Carlo Urbani could have done with 100 billion dollars…

© gravitycollapse for Gravity Collapse, 2003. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: health, inspiration

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Err on the side of caution?

gravitycollapse — Mon, 22 Oct 2001 08:39:48 +0000

Why can’t the CDC and the government do just that?

Under what study would scientists have concluded that anthrax spores would remain neatly confined inside envelopes?

What envelope have you ever known that sealed perfectly?

Were I a relative of one of the two postal workers in Washington who probably dies from anthrax, I’d be asking why the hell they didn’t quarantine and test post offices that might have routed the Daschle mail before allowing people to work.

It seems to me that when you’re dealing with something you’ve never seen before, you need to act with caution rather than confidence.

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh