Month: January 2010

Secrets to Good Health and a Long Life

~ Tim ~ Leave a comment

Use it or lose it   — Supply and Demand —  Reason for Being

Yup, that’s the secret to being healthy, in my opinion. Aside from the obvious, like muscles getting weak from lack of exercise, what I mean here is that the body instinctively responds to the use—to the demand we give it and supplies us with health. Exercise especially stimulates the Life force within us, getting the message accross to our brain that the body needs to stay around a little while longer. It takes years and years for the body to deteriorate and eventually die. Many adults exercise very little or not at all and eventually lose the ability to do simple things, like walking. We mistake that as part of the natural aging process, but it’s not and a lot of recent research has proven that. There is even a lot of new research showing how well exercise beneficially influences the actual physical conditon of our brains, which in turn affects our mental and emotional attitudes of course.

I was having a problem with my knee a couple years ago and went to see a Kinesiologist. One of the things he had me do is start practicing squats, first with both legs together, then one leg at a time, and then one leg at a time while standing on a Bosu! I’ll never forget what he said to me one day when I was complaining about doing them, “Tim, you’re doing this now so that when you’re EIGHTY-THREE you won’t need to have a big guy like me help you to get up and down on the toilet! I stopped my complaining.

But aside from exercise—and not everyone is able to exercise of course—I also observed that people with a strong reason for being also seem to live more healthy and longer lives. We’ve all heard the stories about people who retire from their jobs and then drop dead a week later. Or of the old man or woman whose spouse dies, and they die shortly thereafter. In these cases, I think that it’s because their reason for being was suddenly gone, and the lack of demand (the will or interest to continue living) caused the body to fail to supply.

Have you ever noticed how many famous people, including actors, artists, musicians, scientists, politicians, or any one else in a position of great importance, often live well into their 80’s and 90’s and continue to lead healthy productive lives right up to the day that they die? They keep going because they have to keep going and they to want to keep going. Their reason for being, for continuing to live because they are famous or important becomes the demand that stimulates the Life force to supply.

That, in a nutshell is my theory of good health and longevity. Live long and prosper!

The Theory of Everything

~ Tim ~ Leave a comment

 The Size of the CERN Accelerator

In the past couple of months I have been following the latest developments at the “CERN” laboratories just outside Geneva, Switzerland, on the border between Switzerland and France. CERN has recently started up their most ambitious project to date, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is a 17 mile circumference particle accelerator. They are in search for “Bosons”, and especially for the infamous “Higgs Boson” which if discovered will move the science of Physics that much closer towards connecting various theories into one unified theory called a theory of everything!

Sounds pretty grand doesn’t it? Professor Peter W. Higgs, a particle physicist, who will be 81 years old in May, has devoted most of life towards the realization of his boson theory. The boson he hopes to see discovered is basically the “Glue of Life”….the thing that allows all matter in the Universe to have mass, to exist. By smashing particles together at enormously high speeds the CERN accelerator is going to be able to reproduce close to what supposedly happened at the beginning of our universe and time—during the “Big Bang”, and hopefully will produce the bosons that Professor Higgs has devoted his life towards discovering..

In 2000, CERN did in fact discover some evidence for the Higgs boson, but before they could confirm that the older accelerator was shut down to make room for the new and vastly most powerful Large Hadron Collider, which has taken almost 9 years to complete!

Well, just before Christmas, the LHC came online and successfully accelerated and collided particle beams to 1.4 TeV (teraelectronvolts) breaking all world records. On February the 14th, the accelerator will go back into action, being fired up in an attempt to increase that velocity to 7 TeV. Trillions of protons will race around the accelerator ring 11,245 times a second, which is 99.99% as fast as the speed of light! Collisions between the protons will occur at 14 TeV, creating some 600 million collisions every second!

The hope at CERN and in particular with Professor Higgs is that those collisions will produce and reveal the Higgs Boson, and if so, may very well give us a theory of everything, which is about as close as science can get towards discovering the philosophical meaning of life!

Given the nature of my website, perhaps now you can see why I might be a bit excited about all of this! There is a lot more than I have just described that I think is fascinating about CERN and the LHC experiment. There is even a bit of dooms-day speculation and mystery surrounding the potential outcome of it all—including the possibility of Black Holes being created that will suck in and destroy the earth! We will get into all of that here later!

T.

New Year’s Resolutions

~ Tim ~ Leave a comment

On January the 1st of each year many people make “New Year’s Resolutions”. This tradition dates back 4,000 years to the Babylonians! They made resolutions, or promises, to the gods to win favour. If the resolution was broken it was considered bad luck. More recently, back around 153 B.C. the Romans placed their mythical King “Janus” at the head of their calender, which thanks to Julius Caesar became our modern day calender, with January 1st being the first day of the year.

Janus was the earliest “Two-faced” individual! Well, they said that he had a face on the front of his head and another on the back of it, giving him the ability to see into the the future and into the past simultaneously. On December 31st, the Romans imagined Janus looking back at the old year and forward to the new. They also believed that Janus could forgive transgressions (or wrong-doings), so at the beginning of the new calender year they would give gifts to each other and make promises to one another and to Janus with the belief that he would see this and then bless their life for the entire year. And that, in a nutshell, is how New Year’s Resolutions all began.

I’ve never been one to entertain this tradition. Well, I did as a kid, but gave it up as an adult when I realized that certainly I—and amost everybody else who make resolutions never achieve their goals. In fact recent research shows that only about 12% of the people who make resolutions actually do achieve them. Well, 12 people out of 100 is still 12 people, isn’t it!? So at least some do—and it is that little fact that is motivating me this year to break my decades old pessimistic tradition and go for it! But…I’m only making TWO.

My first resolution for 2010 is to write something in my jounal/blog here on my website EVERY DAY of the year. I recently saw the delightful movie, “Julie and Julia”. Julie made a new Julia Child recipe every day for a year AND blogged about it! A true story! So, if she can do that, I can at least write a little blog/journal entry every day here, right? I don’t even have to cook! So, why not!? Indeed. That’s my first resolution for the year.

My second resolution is a little more personal, and from what I understand quite a common one—that is most commonly broken! Since I was about 22 or 23 years of age I have had the almost nightly habit of having a drink or two… Beer has been my beverage of choice, “IPA” (India Pale Ale) my favourite. If not beer, then wine. Nothing else. I can’t stand hard-liquor. But, after almost 30 years my evening habit has started to sort-of catch up with me. That has led me to the point today of making the resolution that for the next year at least, and perhaps for the rest of my life, I want to drink alcohol ONLY on special occassions, like at party’s, fancy dinners out and that sort of thing, so perhaps only a few times a month at most, and that will be it.

I accomplished my second resolution in September actually, going two weeks without my evening libations, but then was suddenly slammed by my Pulmonary Embolisms (see previous postings). The doctor’s said that my “libations” had nothing to do with my sudden illness…? Anyway, I was a bit worried about all of that for a bit, so delayed my resolve, my resolution till now.

Some who know me might say that I’m quite likely to achieve my first resolution, but un-likely to achieve the second. Well, I’m content to let the skeptical dog’s bark. I know who I am in my own heart. I know what I can or cannot do. Well, TODAY is soon to be over, and I’ve already accomplish BOTH of my New Year’s resolutions! Yes, of course it’s only day 1. But you know, I really believe that there comes a time in a persons life when we finally KNOW what we need to do, and with that “resolve” can come the strength to accomplish it, either single-handedly, or with help if need be. The only absolute prerequisite to the accomplishment of anything in life is first—the willingness to do it, and second—taking the first step. I’ve taken that first step today.

I wish you all a most wonderful New Year.
T.