Tag: encyclopaedia

Posted in Life & Happiness

Sunset

Posted on by Jinavie

Why is the sky blue in the day, yet it becomes dyed bright red at sunset? The reason is that the atmosphere splits white light into the colours of the rainbow like a prism. Short-wavelength colours such as blue and green tend to scatter more, making the sky blue usually. But as the sun sets, the angle at which sunlight enters the atmosphere changes and the light has to travel through more atmosphere before hitting Earth. The more the light travels, the more it scatters and blue-green light is scattered so much that it can no longer be seen. At this stage, the dominant remaining colour are orange and red, which have longer wavelengths.

But this alone would only give the sky a dull red colour. The brilliant splash of red and orange across the sky every evening is thanks to the scattering of light in a certain way by cloud droplets and other particles. This is why an exceptionally bright orange sunset can suggest rain the following day.

A “perfect” sunset requires the alignment of various factors such as the angle of the sun (affected by time and season), humidity, temperature, air component and the surrounding landscape. Depending on these factors, the sunset can range in colour from a deep red to a bright orange, to a pastel yellow to baby pink or purple (or at worst, a piddly dull yellow light). This means that a perfect sunset tends to only happen at a single moment in time when these factors align to your preference.

The corollary to this is that a perfect sunset is always a fleeting moment. No matter how much you want to hold on to it, time marches on and the sunset slowly fades away. It is futile to stop the moment from passing – to cling to the beauty of the moment. All you can do is enjoy that single moment while you can. It is a time when the past day comes to a close, while the future is getting ready to start. In that moment, do not think about the past or the future – just focus on the present. Take in the brilliant colours with your eyes. Listen to the chirping of the birds returning home. Feel the cool breeze brush past you. When the sun finally sets, despair not the passing of the beautiful moment, but cherish the fact that you had such a great moment. Because as you know, another sunset awaits you tomorrow.

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Posted in Science & Nature

Sonic Boom

Posted on by Jinavie

When something moves through the air, it pushes the air in front and creates a sound. This sound spreads as a wave at the speed of 340m/s (1225km/h). As the object moves, it makes a series of pressure waves, which is why the Doppler effect happens. These pressure waves look like rings that are squashed to the side the object is moving towards. As the object moves faster, the more compressed these rings become. When the object moves at the speed of sound (340m/s), the pressure waves all overlap as the object makes a pressure wave on the same place as where the last wave reached. This is the sound barrier.

At this point, there is so much overlap of the waves that a shockwave is formed. This shockwave – made of compressed air – travels at the speed of sound (Mach 1) and originates from the front tip of the object (e.g. nose of the plane). If the object moves any faster than the speed of sound, the new wave is made even before the old wave has propagated that far. The rings are now no longer in a nice concentric pattern, but instead form a shockwave cone. Sometimes this can be seen physically if there is enough condensation in the air to create a vapour cone. The sudden change of pressure from the shockwave creates a large booming sound, which we call a sonic boom (in fact, there are two booms due to the pressure difference at the tail too).

Sound, like other waves, is a form of energy. Hence, the shockwave formed by breaking the sound barrier can cause physical damage. If a fighter jet were to fly over a building at low altitude at supersonic speeds, it may cause windows to shatter and people’s eardrums to rupture. The shockwave creates a significant problem in aircraft design, for if a plane’s wingspan is wider than the width of the shockwave cone, its wings will snap off. This is why fighter jets and the Concorde have a characteristic sleek, triangular shape. The faster the plane travels, the narrower the shockwave cone becomes and the thinner the plane’s wingspan has to be.

Then what was the first manmade object to break the sound barrier? The answer is surprisingly old and simple – a bullwhip. The crack from a whip is actually a small sonic boom made by the tip of the whip travelling beyond the speed of sound.

Posted in Life & Happiness

Juggling

Posted on by Jinavie

Imagine life is a game in which you are juggling five balls. The balls are called work, family, health, friends and integrity. You keep all of them in the air. But one day you finally come to understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered.

(from Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas by James Patterson)

(Image source: http://atte-1.deviantart.com/art/J-for-Juggle-165261440)

Posted in Psychology & Medicine

The Centipede’s Dilemma

Posted on by Jinavie

In 1889, British zoologist E. Ray Lankester published an article on the work of the motion of animals in the prestigious journal, Nature. He concluded his article with a poem (which he admitted in not knowing the author of, but commonly attributed to Katherine Craster). The poem goes as follows:

A centipede was happy – quite!
Until a toad in fun
Said, “Pray, which leg moves after which?”
This raised her doubts to such a pitch,
She fell exhausted in the ditch
Not knowing how to run.

The allegory of the centipede illustrates a strange yet hilarious psychological phenomenon, which has been called the centipede effect to honour the poem. Most of the time, we do not put much thought into day-to-day activities such as breathing and walking. We do not have to give much thought because they have become habits – a handy mechanism nature devised to let us do more while using our brain to think about more important things. Habit automatises tasks to reduce attention, but it comes at the cost of the centipede effect, where conscious thought and attention impairs the ability to do that task, much like the centipede tripping on her own leg.

For example, even a professional golf player or violinist will make mistakes the more they thinking about their individual swings or notes they play. A simple experiment you can do is thinking about your breathing. Just by reading that sentence, you consciously divert your attention to your breathing and you will find it difficult to breathe “normally”. Similarly, you can cause considerable distress and time-wasting if you point out a tiny error in someone’s habits, making them overanalyse what they are doing wrong and hyper-reflecting.

What we can learn from The Centipede’s Dilemma is that overthinking never helps. The more we think about something, the more we look at the trees rather than the forest and we get lost in the details. This means we cannot see the overall big picture, which may turn out to be very simple. So the next time you are stuck on a problem in life, stop and take a breath. Clear your mind and let your gut feeling do its thing. Your mind can build so many roadblocks by overthinking – clouding your judgement and crippling your ability to do things. But just remember, all you have to do is drive through those roadblocks and let your heart do what it wants.

Thinking Ahead

(Image source: http://xkcd.com/439/)

Posted in Psychology & Medicine

Choice

Posted on by Jinavie

Every day, we are faced with many choices. The food we eat, the clothes we wear, the work we do, the people we love… Whether you are at work, school or home, choice is an unavoidable part of life. In fact, we put a great deal of importance in choice, stating that it is a fundamental right of a free individual to make their own choice.

So what happens when this right is taken away from us? A common reaction to this is anger and revolt. People whose freedom are taken away by a dictator will throw a revolution to choose who they want as a leader. Children throw tantrums to show that they do not want their parents to decide things in their stead. There are cases of death row inmates attempting to take their own lives because “ending my life is the one choice I have the right to”.

We like to think we are free individuals, making our own decisions in life. We mock others for being sheeple – choosing to not choose by following the mainstream decision or preference. But choice is often an illusion.
Consider how many of “your decisions” are truly from your own heart. Are you drinking Coke over Pepsi because you really appreciate the taste difference, or because of effective marketing? Are you listening to that song because you enjoy the melody, or because it is at the top of the charts and everyone is listening to it? Are you eating that menu because you were attracted to what the ingredients are, or because the waiter recommended it as “the special of the day”? You would be surprised how little choice you have sometimes, no matter how free you think you may be.

But choice has an ugly, darker side. Making a choice is often difficult, mentally taxing us as we make an internal pros and cons list to try sort things in order and determine “the best choice”. There are countless research showing that the more choice that is available to you, the harder it becomes for you to choose and the more distressed you become. It could be severe to the point that you get analysis paralysis, where you spend so long making a decision that you miss out or never take an action. Not only that, but making a choice puts the responsibility on you. For example, although medicine is moving towards a patient-oriented system where the patient makes an informed choice, the patient may feel burdened with guilt if their choice results in a poor outcome. This applies to every choice we make from day to day in the form of regret. Regret is the sinister monster that makes us think “What if?”. What if we chose differently? Regret leads to blame and blame leads to sorrow and anger at yourself.

This is the paradox of choice. It feels good to be able to express your uniqueness through choice, but at the same time, the freedom of choice can cause pain and distress just as easily. If your choice goes against the group decision, it can make you stand out and cause you to be shunned. This is why so many of us “choose to not choose” and give up our right of choice. Being social animals, we have a tendency of following groupthink while ironically shouting for the importance of free will. To fight this natural tendency and making a choice reflecting your own thoughts, beliefs and identity is a brave thing to do.

However, that is not to say that surrendering your choice is always a bad thing. A couple who met through arranged marriage may have a happier relationship than those who met through romance. People who’ve grown up in communist countries say that “it was easier when we didn’t have to choose everything”. Most importantly, reflect on your childhood where so many of your parents’ decisions – no matter how oppressive they seemed then – turned out to be the right call.

So in the end, the most important choice you can make is this: do you choose to surrender your choice or do you choose free will? Choose whatever makes you happy, because there is no point choosing something and regretting it because you are unhappy.

Posted in Philosophy

Lego House

Posted on by Jinavie

Imagine that you built a house out of Lego blocks. Now break apart the house until it is reduced to individual blocks. Where is the house now? You could say that the house is still there, except now that it is in the form of a small pile of blocks. On the other hand, you could argue that the “house” itself no longer exists – only its components. The pile of blocks does not have a roof or walls or a living room. It is not a safe, homely place Mr. Lego can return to after work to relax in. However, it has the potential to be a house again. All you need to do is arrange it in a certain way to make it a beautiful home for a nice little Lego family.

What makes the Lego house a house is the specific arrangement of the bricks in an aesthetically pleasing yet functional and practical way – crafted by a creative mind and a set of hands. Through these hands, the blocks can be crafted into a house, a car or even a space station. But without them, they will forever remain a pile of unused blocks stored away in some dark container.

Now look deep inside you and ask this question: what have you made with the Lego pieces that make up your identity? How have you pieced together your strengths, your skills, your experiences and your dreams? We are all unique in the sense that we are born with certain virtues and talents, while gaining various experiences and skills through the chaos that is life. But all of these are just Lego pieces. What kind of masterpiece these pieces will be a component of is up to you to decide, design and build.

Just like Lego, if you don’t are not truly happy with what you see inside you, feel free to tweak it, add to it or even disassemble it and rearrange it into a different final product. Try emphasising your language skills, or chasing after a lost dream. Draw from different experiences and play around with your various strengths. This is not to change who you are completely; no matter how many times you break up and reassemble them, you still have the same components. All you have to do is come up with a new design, build it and judge the product. Hopefully, you will find the right arrangement of pieces that result in a product greater than the sum of its components.

So go on, get building. 1 + 1 = 3.

(Artwork by Nathan Sawaya)

Posted in Psychology & Medicine

Psychopath

Posted on by Jinavie

A common character found in psychological thrillers are those who seem to have no regard for the well-being of others, disobey social rules and act violently for seemingly no reason. They show no remorse or empathy and can be very intelligent, charming and high-functioning (although not typically). We describe these people as psychopaths, or sometimes sociopaths. To over-simplify it, a psychopath essentially has no moral conscience and do not believe in the social contract.

The terms psychopath and sociopath are often used interchangeably, but in modern psychiatry, they both fall under the diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). ASPD patients tend to have a long history of criminal charges, often relating to violence, chronic lying and fraud, drug use and other law-breaking actions. These characteristics may show from early childhood, with the typical psychopathic child being described as one murdering animals and being violent towards other kids. These children are often diagnosed with another disorder called conduct disorder.

Psychopaths are very popular in movies and TV shows due to their unpredictable nature, wanton violence and maniacal behaviour inflicting terror into the audience’s hearts. After all, who wouldn’t be afraid of a remorseless killer who finds enjoyment from others’ suffering? Unfortunately, many movies distort the image of the psychopath and blend in various other mental health disorders such as psychosis into the character. Sometimes psychopaths are even sensationalised, being described as an antihero.

It is true that many serial killers turn out to be psychopaths, but physical violence is not necessarily a feature of all psychopaths. A subset of “successful” psychopaths differentiate themselves by being less physically violent, appear to follow the social norm and succeed in challenging fields such as business, finances, law or even medicine. However, they will also have a pervasive disregard for others and will only care about having their way. Their lack of empathy allows them to act immorally, stabbing people in the back and lying, cheating and manipulating their way to the top. It is not some sick sexual perversion or power trips that motivate psychopaths, but impulsivity, egocentricity and gratification. To psychopaths, the aim of the game is to win, no matter the cost.

This makes you wonder. How many people around you are secretly a psychopath – one who would take advantage of you without a shred of guilt? How many people around you hide behind the mask of sanity?

(NB: Just putting it out there, Sherlock Holmes is neither a psychopath nor a sociopath. If anything he probably has an autism spectrum disorder like Asperger’s syndrome.)

Posted in Psychology & Medicine

Mithridatism

Posted on by Jinavie

Mithridates VI, the King of Pontus (ancient Greek/Persian state located in modern day Turkey), had a paranoia that there were people who wanted to assassinate him through poison. This likely stemmed from his father being poisoned by his mother (reportedly), who favoured his brother over Mithridates as the heir to the throne. He noticed in his youth that the meals brought to him induced stomach pains. He connected the dots and deduced that his mother was trying to poison him slowly so that his brother would become the next king. He fled to the wilderness and devised a plan to protect himself. It is said that he began taking a concoction of various poisons in non-lethal doses every day, to develop an immunity to the most common poisons available during his time. This led to the idea of mithridatism – the gradual self-administration of non-lethal doses of poison to develop immunity. Ironically, Mithridates’ plan backfired eventually when he attempted suicide by poison after a massive defeat against Rome. He found that the poison had no effect on him and had to request his bodyguard to kill him by sword.

Mithridatism has been recorded or suspected in various times of history. Indian epics tell the story of the king Chandragupta Maurya – the first king to unite India – who selected a group of beautiful girls and raised them in the palace. He gave the order to administer small amounts of poison to these girls as they grew up, making them invulnerable to toxins. He called these girls vishakanyas (poison maiden) and believed that they could be used as assassins who could kill men through the act of sex.
There are suggestions that Rasputin was also a practitioner of mithridatism and that this was why he survived an assassination attempt involving poison, but there is not much evidence for this.
The practice of mithridatism is also mentioned in various fictions, such as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Princess Bride.

The concept of taking small doses of something to build up an immunity is still used in modern medicine. Desensitisation therapy is used to treat certain allergies, by exposing the body to small doses of the allergen. It is well-known that alcoholics and drug addicts required more substance to achieve the same effect as most people because they develop tolerance to it. There is some evidence that mithridatism is an effective way to build immunity to venomous snake bites.
However, not all poisonings can be avoided with mithridatism. Poisons such as cyanide pass through the system too quickly to create any tolerance, while heavy metals simply build up in the body to create a toxic effect after a history of exposure.

Posted in Life & Happiness

The Joy Of Connection

Posted on by Jinavie

What is the commonality of the following? New parents holding their newborn baby, a young couple in love staring into each other’s eyes, catching up with an old friend and a hug. The obvious answer is that they are moments of happiness. But the real answer that lies beyond that is that they are all about connection. Human beings are social creatures and we are hardwired to like connecting with others. In the primitive days, not being connected to your tribemates meant a lower chance of survival. Over the years, we have evolved to the point where human connection is one of the greatest joys we can experience. Many things people may associate with “joy” such as money, sex and winning result in a flood of dopamine in the brain. Dopamine is great, it gives us a rush and acts as a reward system, motivating us to do more of the behaviour as it will likely result in more food or mates. However, dopamine quickly wears off and you need another “hit” to replicate the effects. The happiness produced by connection is based on a different neurotransmitter called oxytocin, which is produced en masse in events like physical contact (e.g. hug) and during childbirth. Oxytocin acts different to dopamine in that it sets up a “circuit” that is associated with a memory. If you recall a memory – either consciously or when you meet a stimulus such as a certain smell that reminds you of it – the oxytocin circuit fires up and gives you a dose of happiness. Thus, oxytocin is sustainable, true happiness.

Of course, the corollary to this is that the greatest suffering we can experience is the feeling of disconnection. Breaking up with your other half, being rejected, a dear friend moving far away, the death of a loved one… These events make us feel as if a piece of heartstring snapped, leaving a scar that aches for a long while. In prison, one of the harshest punishments is solitary confinement, where the inmate has no contact with any other human being for a set time. A characteristic of borderline personality disorder is emotional instability and impulsive decisions. A major trigger for this is the feeling of abandonment or the fear of rejection. Borderline patients tend to misinterpret a person through black-and-white thinking, conclude they must hate them, feel rejected and may go on to harm themselves or even attempt suicide. There is also some anecdotal evidence saying that babies who are brought up in institutions without a parent figure to truly connect to are more likely to develop personality and mental disorders, with an increased risk of death in infancy. To not be connected to anyone is true suffering.

So if you are still on the pursuit of happiness, go out there and connect. Whether it be the excitement of getting to know a new person or the rekindling of an old friendship, connection is the ultimate happiness.

(Image source: Puuung http://www.grafolio.com/puuung1)

Posted in Science & Nature

Pigeonhole Principle

Posted on by Jinavie

If I have three gloves, there must be at least either two left gloves or two right gloves. It is impossible to have one left glove, one right glove and a third glove that is neither left nor right (usually). This logic is called the pigeonhole principle. It is named because of the logic that if you have n pigeons and m pigeonholes where n > m (e.g. 10 pigeons in 9 holes), then at least one pigeonhole must contain more than one pigeon. This is because the biggest spread of the pigeons is putting at least one in each box, but as n > m, there is a pigeon left over and it must go in a box with another pigeon. The pigeonhole principle seems like a basic counting principle, but its implications are quite interesting.

For example, let’s say that your sock drawer is very unorganised and has a mix of black and white socks. What is the minimum number of socks you need to pick out before you get two of the same colour? The pigeonhole principle dictates that when n > m, each “slot” must be filled with more than one item. Here, the slot is colour. As there are two colours (m = 2), you only have to pick three socks out to have a matching pair (n = 3, 3 > 2).

The pigeonhole principle allows us to make seemingly impossible conjectures, such as the fact that a person living in London will have the exact number of hairs on their head as at least one other person living in London. An average human head has about 150,000 hairs and it would be a safe assumption to say that no one would have more than a million hairs on their head (m = 1,000,000). The population of London far exceeds a million (n > 1,000,000), therefore, there must at least two people living in London with the exact same amount of hair on their head. Similarly, if you are in a room with 366 other people, you are guaranteed to share a birthday with at least one person.