I recently switched host providers (from Bluehost to Hostpapa) and was forced to rationalise some of my websites. But I still ended up with 17. They all seemed like part of my family and I was loath to kill any of them off after nurturing some of them for many years. I was a webmaster for the University of Otago for 10 years and after retiring in 2009, I setup a boutique business (Kalmak Consultancy Ltd) for developing websites for friends and family. Needless to say some of the people have since passed away but their web presence lives on. Some sites are the result of my scientist-cum-poet-cum-philosopher interests and activities.
10 weeks since having Covid-19 I had two blood test where my CRP (C Reactive Protein) was < 5. CRP is produced by the liver and is a sign of inflammation in the body due to infection or other conditions such as heart disease or autoimmunity. This is a sign of a recovery from Covid-19. This is something you should have routinely checked when you visit your GP -- it is a simple blood test.
I was fortunate not to have encountered the complications mentioned in my previous posting about Covid-19. I attribute this to life-style factors. I live in a peaceful retirement village within 11 hectares of beautifully maintained gardens and surroundings. One can step outside into the sunshine and be washed over with the feeling of being one with the Universe.I’ll forebear frombreaking out into song like Julie Andrews: “the hills are alive with the sound of music”. But you get the general idea of this whenever you experienced the natural sounds and beauty of a walk in nature.
The other factor is having an energy view of the world, complimented by non-materialism.. This is a cosmological view which I’ll not elaborate on here, but will leave it for future blog postings. Suffice it to say that it includes the energy of the Universe, the Chi, something briefly mention in previous postings. This was not a sudden molecular virologist’s “conversion on the way to Damascus” but a gradual move towards Shiva’s molecular dance as described by Fritjof Capra. This borders on Panpsychism, a theory that suggests that consciousness is a fundamental property ofthe Universe, another topic to explore further.
In an effort to avoid falling into the several rabbit-holes mention above, I’ll go straight to the work of Donna Edna and her energy healing. Donna’s approach is: here are the exercises, do them and you can heal yourself. No mumbo-jumbo, no change in beliefs necessary, no secret sauce, no secret handshakes involved. She does offer several courses and further instruction but they are not essential since the body knows how to heal itself. A simple daily 5-minute routine is provided below by Donna Eden and David Feinstein.
Some of the topics introduced here will be explored in future Blog posts: cosmology, panpsychism, consciousness, and fundamentals of the Universe. Some of these topics are also expounded upon at: https://cosmickiwi.com.
One of the consequence of having had Covid-19 is the predisposition of becoming depressed.
The World Health Organisation noted this year that anxiety and depression increased by 25 percent across the globe in just the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic.In a 2021 study, more than half of American adults reported symptoms of major depressive disorder after a coronavirus infection. The risk of developing these symptoms — as well as other mental health disorders — remains high up to a year after you’ve recovered. One major explanation for the increase is the unprecedented stress caused by the social isolation resulting from the pandemic. Linked to this were constraints on people’s ability to work, seek support from loved ones and engage in their communities.
It’s possible that Covid-19 may even compromise the diversity of bacteria and microbes in the gut. Since microbes in the gut have been shown to produce neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine, which regulate mood, this change could be at the root of some neuropsychiatric issues. Gut bacteria manufacture about 95 percent of the body's supply of serotonin, which affects the mood and the feeling of Zing.
Serotonin and other neurotransmitters travel from the gut to the brain via the vagus nerve. The body's longest nerve that emerges directly from the brain. Magnesium works as an important co-factor required for conversion of tryptophan (from proteins we get from food) to serotonin and melatonin. (Note to self: Must increase my intake of magnesium at night.)
(NOTE: ZING = a quality that makes something exciting, interesting,: it is enthusiasm or energy).
I am 84 years of age and in the fourth week of recovery from a severe Covid-19 illness. I am gradually getting over that zinged out feeling - that grey and shady feeling that life is too much of an effort.
t wasn’t just the virus bit, but a host of co-morbidities that contributed to my urgent rush to the Emergency Ward. The precipitating evident was my losing my balance and falling backward and hitting the hallway wall with the back of my head — resulting in the punching of a hole in the wall and a stunned feeling of surprise. I was found to be Covid-19 positive, severely dehydrated, with pneumoniaand urinary incontinence. (An aside: I had never been hospitalised for an illness before and was surprised that at my age and stage, I was asked to sign a “do not resusitate” form.) I was put on a saline drip (6 litres later) and antibiotics intravenously. I was in the Covid-19 isolation ward for 3 days.
I lost 7 kg (15 lbs) during this time and the long-lasting, chroniclung infection is only now beginning to clear. My voice is returning to its usual self andI may not need a second laryngoscopy of the vocal cords to remove some nodules. (An aside: I was developing a squeaky voice presumably due to modules on the voice chords and had an operation to remove some of them.) A feeling of zing is beginning to creep into my psyche or perhaps it is the Chi of Taoism.
An aside: In Taoism Chi is a primal substance that animates the universe I— a mysterious force introduced to us by ancient Chinese myths.
Jamie Wheal is the author of Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex and Death In a World That's Lost Its Mind, and the Pulitzer-nominated global bestseller Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work. He is the founder of the Flow Genome Project, an international organization dedicated to the research and training of human performance.
He lives high in the Rocky Mountains in an off-grid cabin with his partner, Julie; two children, Lucas and Emma; and their golden retrievers, Aslan and Calliope. When not writing, he can be found mountain biking, kitesurfing, and backcountry skiing.
From the record of past earthquakes it is possible to predict a 75% chance the fault will rupture in the next 50 years. Alsoit is calculated that there is an 82% chance the earthquake will be of magnitude 8 or higher.
The fault has disturbed this land in the past, but it is what makes the place so unique -- freshly minted by the forces of Nature. Between the Tasman Sea and the Southern Alps is this strip of land dotted with small townships and connected by Highway 6. No where else can you see snow capped mountains at sea level. The scenery is classic - the rivers run blue, the hillsides are all shades of green with a backdrop of white mountains.
It’s raw and beautiful and an obvious destination for tourists wanting to experience New Zealand’s wilderness.
(Note: this blog post and simulation is an extract from the April ABC News article.)
Can Australia and New Zealand make the Trans-Tasman Bubble work? Will they be able to keep these passengers separate at their international airports from those travelling from red-zone countries? The answer is: probably yes. Both countries have experience in herding sheep.
You are probably one of the 2.32 billion active Facebook users and see this as a convenient way of keeping in touch with friends and family. Also you probably use Google and YouTube to keep up with the news and events of the day. You know that they are the BIG DATA BEHEMOTHS of the world and that they are collecting data about you. But you view them as benign entities engaged in clickbait advertising activities — after all they have to earn money in some way to provide you with all these free services. Little do you suspect them in propagating false information or fake news or that they are the handmaidens of vested interests that are disrupting what remains of our liberal democracies.
We need to take heed of the DATA BEHEMOTHS and climate change.
According to David Attenborough we have 10 more years before the dangers of climate change began to disrupt societies. A good example of these warnings is illustrated in the TED Talk by Carole Cadwalladr.
Initially, I expected something of more depth from this book, but I ended up enjoying the book and the story telling style of Malcolm Gladwell. He narrated the Audilbe edition of his book ‘BLINK’. At times he was irksome with his repeated reference to the story of the buying of the Greek kouros by the Getty Museum. Theblinkreferred to by Malcolm is that quick subconscious impression or decision we make about things for which we later find rational reasons to justify.
Malcolm is not very familiar with recent developments in neuroscience and makes little attempt to drill deeper into the possible dynamics by which Blink might work. The subconscious remains unfathomable. He refers to it as ‘thin slicing’ and the ability of the mind to recognize patterns given the bare minimum of information.
A better explanation of ‘thin slicing’ is given by the Nobel Prize winner (2011), Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. The fast system is intuitive, and emotional; the slow system is more deliberate, and more logical.
Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives―and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble.
Gladwell on the other hand taps into a deep mystical yearning to be healed by nature, Blink exploits popular new-age beliefs about the power of the subconscious, intuition, even the paranormal. Blink devotes a significant number of pages to the so-called theory of mind reading. While allowing that mind-reading can "sometimes" go wrong, the book enthusiastically celebrates the apparent success of the practice, despite many scientific studies showing that claims of clairvoyance rarely beat the odds of random chance guessing.
Gladwell does acknowledge that intuitive judgment is developed by experience, training, and knowledge. This is the key to the understanding of ‘thin slicing’, or Blink. The brain receives billions of bits of information and where possible it fits them into patterns, much like the ‘training data’ in machine learning — the field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed (see previous post) -- the quality of the subconscious brain knowing without knowing. Also there would be the genetic bias as to how your brain works depending on what ‘traits’ you have (see previous post).
In summary then, Blink is not that mysterious, but Malcolm Gladwell knows how to spin a good yarn
