12 Elements of Emotional Intelligence By Marcia Sirota

Intellect and emotional intelligence are very different things. The former is the cognitive ability to synthesize and analyze data; to problem-solve and make associations based on available information. 

The latter is a set of innate and learned skills which facilitate relationships and enable a person to negotiate more easily through all areas of life.

Intellect can be measured by standardized IQ tests but there is no actual measure of the “EQ,” or Emotional Quotient. Even without a test, it’s obvious when someone has a high IQ and it’s just as obvious when someone has a high EQ. 

Rather than try to measure it, though, it’s more useful to look at the various elements that go into emotional intelligence.

While the IQ remains stable over a person’s lifetime, the EQ can be developed. Acquiring and practicing the following elements will enable you to boost your EQ.

The first element of emotional intelligence is empathy. The ability to understand what other people are feeling will make you more sensitive and aware and will result in more meaningful relationships. (this is true, but the real boon of empathy vs. sociopathy is reading minds)

The second element is the recognition that your actions have consequences. This understanding will enable you to make conscious choices in your life and to avoid unnecessary difficulties. (like giving you grandfather a heart-attack, so we are talking about the unforeseeable consequences of social relations, not simply physical consequences) 

Third on the list is good judgment. The gift of making well-thought-out decisions and seeing people for who they really are will maximize the possibilities of success in all areas of your life. (this is true, but what we're really talking about is 'good judgement' about other people, not good judgement about the weather, or how long it will take to learn to drive)

Number four is personal responsibility. When you hold yourself unaccountable and don’t blame anyone else for YOUR mistakes or misfortunes, you are empowered to change things for the better. Other people respect you, because you own up to your part in your relationships. (own your mistakes, not others, unless it helps with manipulating them)

The fifth element is insight. The ability to see yourself clearly and to understand your own motivations allows for the possibility of personal growth. Insight into others allows you to have a greater impact in your relationships. (manipulation)

Element number six is mental flexibility. Being able to change your mind or to see things from different points of view makes it possible for you to navigate all sorts of relationships and to succeed where other, more 'rigid thinkers' would fail. (cognitive dissonance gives one moral flexibility)

The seventh element is compassion. Being honest with yourself can be painful but with a kind and gentle attitude, it’s much easier. (I think she's speaking of forgiveness, not just understanding)

This type of compassion facilitates personal transformation (i.e. public humbleness), while compassion toward others supports deeper, more loving connections. (i.e. codependence and loyalty through extortion)

The eighth element is integrity. Following through on commitments and keeping your promises creates much good-will in personal and professional relationships and promotes success in both arenas. (this is true, live to your word or else)

Ninth on the list is impulse control. Thinking before speaking or acting gives you a chance to make deliberate, even sophisticated choices about how you present yourself to others. (seems to contradict honesty and integrity)  Not acting out of primitive impulses, urges or emotions avoids social embarrassment. (perhaps the problem is the society, no one should be  embarrassed) 

The tenth element is the ability to defer gratification (goes with nine). It’s one thing to want something but the ability to put off having it is empowering (the ability to endure frustration, and feign dispassion is a good tactical move) . Mastery of your needs allows you to prioritize around life goals.

Number eleven on the list is perseverance. Sticking with something, especially when it’s challenging, allows you to see it through to completion and demonstrates to others that you are dependable and potentially a high achiever. (dependable? high achiever?)

The twelfth and final element is courage. Emotional courage (as opposed to the physical variety) is the ability to do the right thing, see the truth, open your heart and trust yourself and others enough to be vulnerable, even if all this is frightening. This causes others hold you in high regard. (yea, that's what is important, what other's think about you)

All these elements combine within you to make up your emotional intelligence. With a high EQ, even a simple person is at an advantage in life. Without it, even someone with the most brilliant intellect is at a disadvantage.

© Marcia Sirota 2010 For More about Dr Sirota, 

http://www.ruthlesscompassioninstitute.com/

Having written extensively about healthy relationships, I believe seven simple steps will make it possible for you to have the best possible relationship. These are:

1. There’s no substitute for good communication. Expecting your partner to read your mind and know your needs and feelings without you having to tell them is a recipe for disaster. Assuming that you know what’s in your partner’s head without them telling you is equally problematic. Both people should be clear about what they want, how they feel, and what doesn’t work for them. This is the only way to know if you’re compatible.
2. You can’t change the other person. It’s hard to change, and people won’t do it unless they’re highly motivated. That being said, it takes a lot of time and effort to make significant changes. Assuming that you can get your partner to quickly and permanently alter some fundamental belief or ingrained behavior just because you want them to is setting yourself up for frustration and disappointment.
3. You won’t be happy if you’re not genuine. Trying to be a different person to please your partner will result in resentment toward your partner and dissatisfaction with the relationship. If you put on a false front, you’ll exhaust yourself. If your partner doesn’t know the real you, you’ll never feel truly loved.
4. Tolerating the unacceptable or settling for less doesn’t work. When you continually put up with behavior that upsets you or constantly settle for less than what you need, you’ll be miserable. You’ll never know if your partner is capable of giving you what you want unless you ask for it.
5. A relationship can’t thrive without mutual respect. You can’t take your problems out on each-other. Being together is not an excuse for dumping on one-another. Treating your partner with respect will deepen the trust and the love between you, whereas disrespect will undermine these bonds.
6. When you value yourself, you’re more likely to be valued. You can’t expect to be loved and respected if you don’t love and respect yourself. If you walk around with low self-esteem, you’re far more likely to attract losers who’ll want to exploit or mistreat you. When you’re confident and have good self-worth, you’ll attract happy, successful people who admire you and care about your well-being.
7. A relationship can’t fix your emotional wounds or compensate for childhood losses. Your partner can’t heal you or complete you. You need to deal with the baggage from your past, or forever be doomed to re-enact painful scenes from your childhood and adolescence in your present relationship. Dealing with your past hurts and putting them behind you will free you to have an adult, empowered relationship in which two intact people come together to share their full lives with each-other.

If you follow these seven simple steps, you’ll increase your chances of having the most fulfilling, successful relationship possible.

     

- See more at: http://marciasirotamd.com/about-dr-sirotas-5-areas-of-focus/relationships#sthash.0ujK70v1.dpuf

The Fire Next Time

Copied outright from the American Scholar 
The dangers of revolutionary thinking

By William Deresiewicz

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A new idea seems to be at loose in the land, on the fringes and Facebook, among the young and the disaffected. The system is collapsing—so let it just collapse. There’s nothing we can do about it anyway, and that is probably the best solution after all. The government, the corporations, the fat cats, the vested interests: let them all go smash. We’ll pick up the pieces afterwards and start again.

This is a philosophy (to use the term loosely) that seems uniquely suited to the age. Call it passive revolution. Everything is going to change, and all we need to do is sit back and let it happen. No ideas required, no program or effort. The messianic illusion—of which this, like all visions of revolution, is a form—is a permanent temptation of political life, especially for the young (and we’re all young now). It gave us Obama in 2008, Occupy in 2011. But revolution’s not a game. I wonder, when I hear people talk, with a sort of suppressed schadenfreude, about the coming collapse, whether they have taken the trouble to think, for even a moment, about what they’re suggesting. We’ll pick up the pieces afterwards? What are those “pieces”—the wreck of every system that keeps us fed and safe—going to look like? What makes us think we’ll be the ones who get to pick them up?

Joseph Conrad, who had seen a revolution or two, put it this way:

A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first. Afterwards comes the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the time … The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane and devoted natures, the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement—but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims—the victims of disgust, disenchantment—often of remorse. Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured—that is the definition of revolutionary success.

Liberal democracy, for all of its enormous and inherent flaws, is not a thing to be discarded lightly. The only alternative so far, in modern society, is fascism—and I see lots of fascists at both ends of the political spectrum, lots of would-be commissars and commandants, who would be happy to step into the vacuum. We’ve been here before, between the world wars. Economic crisis, political stalemate: despair at liberal democracy is exactly what they brought on, and fascism, too often, was precisely the result. The hazy dream, the purifying fire: not these again, not these.

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William Deresiewicz is an essayist and critic. His book Excellent Sheep: Thinking for Yourself, Inventing Your Life, and Other Things the Ivy League Won't Teach You, which will be published next year, is based in part on his essays “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education” and “Solitude and Leadership.” To read all the posts from his weekly blog, “All Points,” click here.

You have all the weapons you need. Now Fight!

Sweet Pea: And finally this question, the mystery of who's story it will be. Of who draws the curtain. Who is it that chooses our steps in the dance? Who drives us mad? Lashes us with whips and crowns us with victory when we survive the impossible? Who is it, that does all of these things? Who honors those we love for the very life we live? Who sends monsters to kill us, and at the same time sings that we will never die? Who teaches us what's real and how to laugh at lies? Who decides why we live and what we'll die to defend? Who chains us? And Who holds the key that can set us free... It's You.

You have all the weapons you need. Now Fight!

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0978764/?ref_=ttqt_qt_tt

Forged

Many of you are confused, uneducated, or have lost heart in these astonishing times of hypocrisy and injustice. Even our visionaries lament the end of civilization. Have confidence, my friends, that we are up to the challenge. 

Your analysis of the state of our systems is correct, we see the evidence of elitism and arrogance in the unguarded faces of the broadcast media, and even at the local pub, as the very men who should be protecting the weak and feeding the poor, instead delight in their suffering and seek to rob them until they perish. The spectacle of of injustice is infuriating to those wise enough to see it. Still, I ask for your perseverance. Respectfully, gentlemen, we must not waste your energy in useless complaints. 

Do not lose confidence. You were born to the challenge. Your lives have been spent in training, study, and preparation for the times upon us. It is our time, we must take action.

I see a population of educated citizens, capable of any potential, yet held back from that promise by those who benefit from systems designed to protect their positions. We are worthy of more. There has never been a time more ripe for heroes. You have the talent, the minds, the abilities necessary to use the tools at your disposal, as no generation that came before.

Can you see around you? Do you recognize yourself in your peers? There is a storm brewing, and you will be tested. I guarantee you have the character to endure. You will succeed. The only question is our goal. 

When we are at our worst hour, there is a susceptibility to depression. In the face of the seemingly insurmountable crises in front of us, quitting becomes quite an attractive option. It is likely, that you are dwelling on those things outside your control. Don't be trapped by that distant focus, ours is not the task of fixing the entire world at once, ignore the odds. Don't waste mental energy thinking beyond your means. Simply stretch out your arms to those things within your reach. There is plenty of work close at hand.

You and I are heroes, and our service is in demand. There will be opposition, but there will also be other champions who will applaud and praise us. You will recognize them by their actions. Did you think it would be easy? Does anything worthy of us come without effort? Is there excellence without pain? 

To achieve a great transformation requires not just one superhuman effort, but the amassing of countless small deeds. Nor does it require the agreement of the entire population to achieve justice, but the work of a small number of dedicated citizens, who are committed to the goal. There will be obstacles, endless snags, and unexpected problems, but do not lose heart. We are made of the stuff of dreams, stardust, born in the furnace of conflict. 

In the midst of the chaos, calm yourself, stand-up and express your mind, honestly, communicate your perspective. This is all the courage necessary to change the future. Listen, learn, reach out to those willing to change themselves, and create a future worthy of you all. Your compassion will be seen in your actions, your words, how you spend your time. This will ignite the imagination of others, and together you can illuminate the darkness we travel through. 

Be bold, show no mercy, but open yourself, be vulnerable and humble, tolerant of others mistakes, yet willing to hold them accountable even at great cost of yourself. This is the essence of justice, it is the brave who stand and speak the truth, even when it threatens to dethrone them. Others will recognize your integrity; they will feed on your strength. If you are up to the task, it is one of the most powerful things you can do, to speak truth to power.

At times you may feel defeated, we have all experienced loss and become lost. It is normal, when you can see the potential of this world, to be discouraged and pity one's lot in life. These thoughts are not worthy of you. Leave them at the side of the road, and move forward, do not carry them with you.

In my bones I know, as you do, that there can be no pessimism for those who know the truth. We are the survivors of a thousand generations of war. Our ancestors were warriors, the very kings and their soldiers, masters and slaves of millennia long conflicts that killed the weak and left only the strong. We are quickened, indestructible, weapons honed to a fine edge. How can a tool have doubt? We were forged for a purpose. 

Now we must ask the question, if we are to survive, to prosper, to embrace our collective potential, what is to be our common goal? Is it wealth beyond our needs? Is it power? Greatness? Fame? I think we can do better. I believe in reason, in our ability to change the world, and to create what we imagine. 

We are our only enemy. Division, deception, destruction, these are the tools of evil. In this world of scarcity and injustice, war is no longer sustainable. I imagine a world of abundance, where truth and justice are the highest values. I know it is our potential. I know we have the ability to reach it. You have free-will, It is up to you.

Thomas Schelling

"[Y]ou're standing at the edge of a cliff, chained by the ankle to someone else. You'll be released, and one of you will get a large prize, as soon as the other gives in. How do you persuade the other guy to give in, when the only method at your disposal – threatening to push him off the cliff – would doom you both?"

"Answer: You start dancing, closer and closer to the edge. That way, you don't have to convince him that you would do something totally irrational: plunge him and yourself off the cliff. You just have to convince him that you are prepared to take a higher risk than he is of accidentally falling off the cliff. If you can do that, you win."

The Strategy of Conflict, which Schelling published in 1960

ABSCAM 1977 - FBI investigation and sting of Congress

This is a good time to do what we did before.

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/11/30/the-real-life-fbistingbehindamericanhustle.html

Money plays a much bigger and more important role in Congress than in those days. It's become so egregiously escalated since Abscam that we are ripe for another scandal.

Craig Holman

government-affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen

This wasn't the way the government was supposed to work. I didn't realize it was this bad. Sometimes when you catch a murderer, for example, you are elated. This was different. I wished it wasn’t happening. There were tears in the room

Francis 'Bud' Mullen

former FBI assisant director

Genetic Complexity = Writing Idea

A new study led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute suggests that the replication process for DNA -- the genetic instructions for living organisms that is composed of four bases (C, G, A and T) -- is more open to unnatural letters than had previously been thought. An expanded "DNA alphabet" could carry more information than natural DNA, potentially coding for a much wider range of molecules and enabling a variety of powerful applications, from precise molecular probes and nanomachines to useful new life forms.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120603191722.htm

Teleforce

Tesla's claim (bluff) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleforce
(writing idea)

Seven Styles of Overtone Singing (Tuvan Throat Singing)

Tuvan Throat Singing

Red Bull Stratos FULL POV - Multi-Angle + Mission Data

Believe it or not I had this same idea in 2002, but was unable to raise the $100,000 to become famous. If I had a $Million I would break this record within a year.

Why aren't there more female philosophers?

Philosophy debates about Sexual Bias

Are women inherently irrational (or more irrational than men)?

If love is a rational emotion and must exist for reproduction, then why does it lead to such bad decisions?

How long until we get the next Ayn Rand?

Testosterone

Until women experience male levels of Testosterone they can not understand men.

The fatal flaw of the contemporary U.S. 'Libertarian'

The fundamental flaw with libertarian thought, which this Salon Article fails to adress, is not that they fail to study history, that is a common flaw of most ideologies. No, the fundamental flaw with libertarian thought is the belief that libertarians themselves are somehow elite, superior, or in any way more deserving of the privileges of liberty based upon some inherent merit. 

They fail to recognize that liberty must be earned by participation and investment through duty and cooperation within society. The only independent objective gage of one's 'merit' is one's value to others. Until the 'libertarian' extremists realize that any wealth they amass is largely a result of the work of others, the justice system, and random chance, that ownership of capital resources is not the equivalent of ability, intelligence, or merit, and thus ownership of capital is no indication of superiority, but more a factor of unearned characteristics such as place and time of birth, inheritance, or luck, they will never begin to understand the necessity of social cooperation under law (a.k.a. 'statism') they consider so unpalatable.

It has less to do with compassion than with survival. Put in a fair competition, people who cooperate always out compete those who prefer individual conflict. Families, Teams, and Tribes, Communities, States, and Nations, are all a result of the fundamental undeniable MERIT of cooperative strategy. Social cooperation is the strength libertarians lack. Politically, locked into the ideal of individual liberty, they fail to see their own lack of merit. 

The egalitarian ethic upon which our Constitution is founded, is not the presumption that all will become equal, only that all SHOULD be treated equally, given equal opportunity, and not limited by circumstances of birth, from reaching their potential. In providing just social structures, we not only increase our collective liberty, we maximize individual potential. That is the secret to success that elitists of all stripes fail to understand. 

The way out is easy, however, all it really requires is maturity. Once one accepts one's own inevitable dimise, and finds a way to redefine their SELF as something greater than their individual body or life, then enlightenment can be obtained. The fundamental problem with that process is that most people become afraid when contemplating their death, and succumb to irrational thinking. Only rational enlightened self-interest, where SELF is defined in the broadest and most global scope, can create the opportunity for long-term survival.  All else is folly.

Time Crystals and perpetuum mobile

‘Time Crystals’ Could Upend Physicists’ Theory of Time

• BY NATALIE WOLCHOVER, SIMONS SCIENCE NEWS
• 04.30.13
• 9:30 AM

Physicists plan to create a “time crystal” — a theoretical object that moves in a repeating pattern without using energy — inside a device called an ion trap. Image: Hartmut Häffner

In February 2012, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek decided to go public with a strange and, he worried, somewhat embarrassing idea. Impossible as it seemed, Wilczek had developed an apparent proof of “time crystals” — physical structures that move in a repeating pattern, like minute hands rounding clocks, without expending energy or ever winding down. Unlike clocks or any other known objects, time crystals derive their movement not from stored energy but from a break in the symmetry of time, enabling a special form of perpetual motion.

“Most research in physics is continuations of things that have gone before,” said Wilczek, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This, he said, was “kind of outside the box.”

Original story reprinted with permission from Simons Science News, an editorially independent division of SimonsFoundation.orgwhose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

Wilczek’s idea met with a muted response from physicists. Here was a brilliant professor known for developing exotic theories that later entered the mainstream, including the existence of particles called axions and anyons, and discovering a property of nuclear forces known as asymptotic freedom (for which he shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 2004). But perpetual motion, deemed impossible by the fundamental laws of physics, was hard to swallow. Did the work constitute a major breakthrough or faulty logic? Jakub Zakrzewski, a professor of physics and head of atomic optics at Jagiellonian University in Poland who wrote a perspective on the research that accompanied Wilczek’s publication, says: “I simply don’t know.”

Now, a technological advance has made it possible for physicists to test the idea. They plan to build a time crystal, not in the hope that this perpetuum mobile will generate an endless supply of energy (as inventors have striven in vain to do for more than a thousand years) but that it will yield a better theory of time itself.

A Crazy Concept

The idea came to Wilczek while he was preparing a class lecture in 2010. “I was thinking about the classification of crystals, and then it just occurred to me that it’s natural to think about space and time together,” he said. “So if you think about crystals in space, it’s very natural also to think about the classification of crystalline behavior in time.”

When matter crystallizes, its atoms spontaneously organize themselves into the rows, columns and stacks of a three-dimensional lattice. An atom occupies each “lattice point,” but the balance of forces between the atoms prevents them from inhabiting the space between. Because the atoms suddenly have a discrete, rather than continuous, set of choices for where to exist, crystals are said to break the spatial symmetry of nature — the usual rule that all places in space are equivalent. But what about the temporal symmetry of nature — the rule that stable objects stay the same throughout time?

The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek often develops outlandish theories that eventually enter the mainstream. “Of course not everything I do works,” he says. Image: Frank Wilczek

Wilczek mulled over the possibility for months. Eventually, his equations indicated that atoms could indeed form a regularly repeating lattice in time, returning to their initial arrangement only after discrete (rather than continuous) intervals, thereby breaking time symmetry. Without consuming or producing energy, time crystals would be stable, in what physicists call their “ground state,” despite cyclical variations in structure that scientists say can be interpreted as perpetual motion.

“For a physicist, this is really a crazy concept to think of a ground state which is time-dependent,” said Hartmut Häffner, a quantum physicist at the University of California at Berkeley. “The definition of a ground state is that this is energy-zero. But if the state is time-dependent, that implies that the energy changes or something is changing. Something is moving around.”

How can something move, and keep moving forever, without expending energy? It seemed an absurd idea — a major break from the accepted laws of physics. But Wilczek’s papers on quantum andclassical time crystals (the latter co-authored by Alfred Shapere of the University of Kentucky) survived a panel of expert reviewers and were published in Physical Review Letters in October 2012. Wilczek didn’t claim to know whether objects that break the symmetry of time exist in nature, but he wanted experimentalists to try to make one.

“It’s like you draw targets and wait for arrows to hit them,” he said. “If there’s no logical barrier to this behavior being realized, then I expect it will be realized.”

The Big Test

In June, a group of physicists led by Xiang Zhang, a nanoengineer at Berkeley, and Tongcang Li, a physicist and postdoctoral researcher in Zhang’s group, proposed creating a time crystal in the form of a persistently rotating ring of charged atoms, or ions. (Li said he had been contemplating the idea before reading Wilczek’s papers.) The group’s article was published with Wilczek’s in Physical Review Letters.

Since then, a single critic — Patrick Bruno, a theoretical physicist at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France — has voiced dissent in the academic literature. Bruno thinks Wilczek and company mistakenly identified time-dependent behavior of objects in excited energetic states, rather than their ground states. There is nothing surprising about objects with surplus energy moving in a cyclical fashion, with the motion decaying as the energy dissipates. To be a time crystal, an object must exhibit perpetual motion in its ground state.

Bruno’s comment and Wilczek’s reply appeared in Physical Review Letters in March 2013. Bruno demonstrated that a lower energy state is possible in a model system that Wilczek had proposed as a hypothetical example of a quantum time crystal. Wilczek said that although the example is not a time crystal, he doesn’t think the error “calls into question the basic concepts.”

“I proved that example is not correct,” Bruno said. “But I have no general proof — so far, at least.”

The debate will probably not be settled on theoretical grounds. “The ball is really in the hands of our very clever experimental colleagues,” Zakrzewski said.

An international team led by Berkeley scientists is preparing an elaborate lab experiment, although it may take “anywhere between three and infinity years” to complete, depending on funding or unforeseen technical difficulties, said Häffner, who is co-principal investigator with Zhang. The hope is that time crystals will push physics beyond the precise but seemingly imperfect laws of quantum mechanics and lead the way to a grander theory.

“I’m very interested in seeing if I can make a new contribution following Einstein,” Li said. “He said that quantum mechanics is not complete.”

To Build an Ion Ring

In Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity (the body of laws governing gravity and the large-scale structure of the universe), the dimensions of time and space are woven together into the same fabric, known as space-time. But in quantum mechanics (the laws governing interactions on the subatomic scale), the time dimension is represented in a different way than the three dimensions of space — “a disturbing, aesthetically unpleasant asymmetry,” Zakrzewski said.

The different treatments of time may be one source of incompatibility between general relativity and quantum mechanics, at least one of which must be altered for there to be an all-encompassing theory of quantum gravity (widely viewed as a major goal of theoretical physics). Which concept of time is right?

If time crystals are able to break time symmetry in the same way that conventional crystals break space symmetry, “it tells you that in nature those two quantities seem to have similar properties, and that ultimately should reflect itself in a theory,” Häffner said. This would suggest that quantum mechanics is inadequate, and that a better quantum theory might treat time and space as two threads of the same fabric.

An illustration of the time crystal experiment planned at UC-Berkeley. Electric fields will be used to corral calcium ions into a 100-micron-wide “trap,” where they will form a crystalline ring. The scientists believe a static magnetic field will cause the ring to rotate. Image: Hartmut Häffner

The Berkeley-led team will attempt to build a time crystal by injecting 100 calcium ions into a small chamber surrounded by electrodes. The electric field generated by the electrodes will corral the ions in a “trap” 100 microns wide, or roughly the width of a human hair. The scientists must precisely calibrate the electrodes to smooth out the field. Because like charges repel, the ions will space themselves evenly around the outer edge of the trap, forming a crystalline ring.

At first, the ions will vibrate in an excited state, but diode lasers like those found in DVD players will be used to gradually scatter away their extra kinetic energy. According to the group’s calculations, the ion ring should settle into its ground state when the ions are laser-cooled to around one-billionth of a degree above absolute zero. Access to this temperature regime had long been obstructed by background heat emanating from trap electrodes, but in September, a breakthrough technique for cleaning surface contaminants off electrodes enabled a 100-fold reduction in ion trap background heat. “That’s exactly the factor we need to bring this experiment into reach,” Häffner said.

Next, the researchers will switch on a static magnetic field in the trap, which their theory says should induce the ions to start rotating (and continue doing so indefinitely). If all goes as planned, the ions will cycle around to their starting point at fixed intervals, forming a regularly repeating lattice in time that breaks temporal symmetry.

To see the ring’s rotation, the scientists will zap one of the ions with a laser, effectively tagging it by putting it into a different electronic state than the other 99 ions. It will stay bright (and reveal its new location) when the others are darkened by a second laser.

If the bright ion is circling the ring at a steady rate, then the scientists will have demonstrated, for the first time, that the translational symmetry of time can be broken. “It will really challenge our understanding,” Li said. “But first we need to prove that it does indeed exist.”

Until that happens, some physicists will remain deeply skeptical. “I personally think it’s not possible to detect motion in the ground state,” Bruno said. “They may be able to make a ring of ions in a toroidal trap and do some interesting physics with that, but they will not see their ever-ticking clock as they claim.”

Original story reprinted with permission from Simons Science News, an editorially independent division of SimonsFoundation.org whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

Why Atheists Make Better Warriors

Stunning Videos Reveal the true nature of 'supernatural' powers, as a martial artist makes the mistake of believing his own myth.

"It's probably true that certain human accomplishments depend upon people's neurotic needs for achievement or their lust for money or power. A lot of art comes from a place of being captivated by selfish illusions. And if a person were to permanently dispel the illusion of the self, he might not write great novels or start the next Apple. Buddhahood might be incompatible with being the next Nabokov or Steve Jobs. Luckily, no one has ever had to choose between becoming a great artist or entrepreneur, or the next Buddha." - Sam Harris

Your mind will be active in any case, no matter how much you meditate. The goal is not to be without thought, but to be aware of the character of your experience in each moment and not suffer unnecessarily. Almost all our suffering is the product of our thoughts. We spend nearly every moment of our lives lost in thought, and hostage to the character of those thoughts. You can break this spell, but it takes training just like it takes training to defend yourself against a physical assault.

Sam Harris is best known as a vocal opponent of religious faith. But he is also a student of martial arts and armed self-defense, and a practitioner of daily silent meditation.

In the May issue of The Atlantic, Graeme Wood recounts the experience of learning meditation and Brazilian jiu-jitsu with him. Harris is finishing his next book, Waking Up: Science, Skepticism, Spirituality, about self-transcendence in the absence of religion. Following their encounter, Wood caught up with Harris to discuss violence, faith, and meditation.

Would you rather be attacked by one person with a knife, or several unarmed individuals equally intent on killing you?

Both situations are invitations to a track meet: You want to run. One of my teachers, Mark Mikita, specializes in knife fighting, mostly derived from the Filipino martial arts, and one of his teachers told him: "If you train with me for ten years, and someone pulls a knife on you, and you just turn and run, then your training has been successful." The problems of a knife and multiple attackers are similar, in that they rarely end well for a person who is alone and unarmed.

FROM THE MAGAZINE

The Atheist Who Strangled Me

Even if you know how to defend yourself against one person, fighting several people is a hugely different situation. You could be a Golden Gloves champion, but while you confront your first attacker, you'll have one or more people taking your flank. Underestimating the gravity of this problem is one of the more dangerous illusions that martial artists acquire. It is true that uncommitted or unsophisticated attackers might approach you serially, and if you have good skills, you might prevail over one at a time. But if you're swarmed by several people at once, it becomes a problem for which no martial art has a solution. Only having a weapon makes you likely to prevail.

Similarly, a knife attack is always a disaster for an unarmed person. Somebody who gets out of 10 years in a maximum-security prison has basically gone to graduate school for shanking people. A person who is seriously intent upon killing you with a knife is not going to attack in the way you've learned to expect from martial-arts class. Most martial artists have done knife-defense drills where their partners attack in a very stereotyped way--lunging forward with a single thrust and leaving their arm out there so that you can perform the technique. This is just a pantomime of combat, and it is dangerously misleading.

The reality of a knife attack is that even if you stop 50% of the thrusts and slashes, you will be taking damage with every other move. And getting cut with a knife of any size is physiologically horrible in a way that few people realize. It is arguably worse than getting shot. A bullet is a tiny ball of metal that may or may not hit something vital. Unless you're shooting someone in the brainstem or heart, you're basically waiting for blood loss to incapacitate him. A knife--especially in the hands of someone who knows how to use it--cuts through everything it touches, and it's not going to malfunction or run out of bullets. It is also much harder to wrestle a blade out of a person's hand, because you can grab a gun without getting your fingers cut off.

A book called Put 'Em Down, Take 'Em Out!: Knife Fighting Techniques From Folsom Prison is one of the scariest things I've ever read,

Heading for a Resource-Shock World

From "The Coming Global Explosion"
by  ENVIRONMENT  Tom Dispatch / By Michael T. Klare

Entering a Resource-Shock World 
How Resource Scarcity and Climate Change Could Produce a Global Explosion 
By Michael T. Klare

Brace yourself. You may not be able to tell yet, but according to global experts and the U.S. intelligence community, the earth is already shifting under you.  Whether you know it or not, you’re on a new planet, a resource-shock world of a sort humanity has never before experienced.

Two nightmare scenarios -- a global scarcity of vital resources and the onset of extreme climate change -- are already beginning to converge and in the coming decades are likely to produce a tidal wave of unrest, rebellion, competition, and conflict.  Just what this tsunami of disaster will look like may, as yet, be hard to discern, but experts warn of “water wars” over contested river systems, global food riots sparked by soaring prices for life’s basics, mass migrations of climate refugees (with resulting anti-migrant violence), and the breakdown of social order or the collapse of states.  At first, such mayhem is likely to arise largely in Africa, Central Asia, and other areas of the underdeveloped South, but in timeall regions of the planet will be affected.

To appreciate the power of this encroaching catastrophe, it’s necessary to examine each of the forces that are combining to produce this future cataclysm.

Resource Shortages and Resource Wars

Veronica Mars Movie Raises $5.7-million on Kickstarter

They broke all the KickStarter Records, most donors (over 90,000), most money for a movie project. Most radical fun. Can't wait for the movie in 2014!

Veronica Mars (AKA Kristen Bell) ROCKS!

On the Brain

These TED Talks explain how your brain works with various phenomena. The thing is I've been exposed to these 'tricks' of the mind, and always understood the 'flaws' in human consciousness that cause cognitive illusions, and so I've learned to always check my own couscous perceptions whenever reasonably possible.

As I grew up, I found my mother's descriptions of events to be highly 'interpretative'. That is, she would tell people what she experienced from her personal emotional point of view, rather than what happened from an objective scientific point of view.

Later, after growing up to 'adult'-hood, and realizing all the cognitive flaws of my child-mind, such as the SIZE of objects relative to my body, my mother would often recount my childhood events, experiences we both shared, but with significant differences. I never trusted my mother's emotionally skewed account of things in the present, but unable to verify my child-mind's experience, I gave her the benefit of the doubt. I preferred her old adult memory to my own childhood memory of the events. Then I found a way to verify my own memory, with video and pictures, and now I don't trust my mother again.

The issue is this, my mother doesn't "LIE" in that sense of deceiving others. She is only deceiving herself (unconsciously), but if you believe her she will also deceive you. And further, if you choose NOT to believe my mother on anything then you will also lose good data, because if you think about it, she's only being self-deceptive about things she cares about, in one way or another. So, she tends to be a fairly good reporter of things she has no opinion about.

The trick then, is to understand what she cares about, and how she cares, in short to understand her state of mind. Which is a very scary proposal for me, because mom isn't rational, and as such mirroring her state of mind is dangerous, and could cause insanity, but it is necessary to be able to comunicate. And since we have no real choice about caring about our mothers, and we must communicate to survive, much less to fulfill our moral social lives, then we are all bound to be a bit irrational, a little insane.

Ultimately, I've found in my life that I'm TOO rational to communicate well with most human beings. My perceptions are generally more objective and accurate than others. I contribute this to the fact that I play sports and was well trained in mathematics and philosophy, and love science. Sometimes, I still am effected by irrational states of mind, when I'm asleep, or somewhere between conscious and unconsciousness. I value accurate information, I want to make good decisions to be successful, I don't take drugs for this reason.

As it turns out, communicating with others, understanding their state of mind, and understanding their motivations are more critical to 'success' in a social environment than anything else, even objective evidence. This has been the hardest thing for me to accept, and it has made me question my decisions. It turns out that taking drugs, like alcohol, can deaden the parts of the brain that control our rational thinking, and thus release our irrational 'id' or lizard brain. If you do this often enough you learn how your 'id' works and this gives you insight into others.

What most people will find 'surprising' about the TED talks about our irrational brain, I find common sense, and thus unremarkable, and that is surprising. It is remarkable that I don't understand people's flawed perceptions to such an extent that I fail to be able to predict their wonder when exposed to the flaws. I need to learn to trust my perceptions and my instincts to become successful, but it is my questioning of my emotional states and perceptions that makes me valuable. It is a conundrum.