The Aeroplane

I would like to share a story that my very inspiring biology teacher once shared with us during her class. (This is not the exact story and I have made many modifications, but the morals remain the same.)

“There was once an aeroplane flying among the clouds carrying its regular load of people. For a long time the aeroplane flew effortlessly through the air without any problems, the people inside were having a happy and comfortable journey.

Then one of the screws of the aeroplane suddenly popped out and fell into the lap of a man sitting on the plane. The man thinking that it wasn’t a major problem, tossed the screw aside and continued reading his book. Very soon, more screws started falling near more people but nobody seemed to notice them. After a while, an aluminium bar, nearly 1 metre long, fell with a distinct clang on the pathway of the aeroplane. Some of them glanced to look at it, but that was the only reaction they gave before returning into their own peaceful world. Soon the aeroplane was falling apart, more metal bars were falling, windows were cracking and the wings were gradually reducing their length. But the humans inside weren’t too bothered. Nothing had happened to their seats and they were completely engrossed in their own activities. They didn’t know that the only thing holding them up was falling apart, right in front of them.

Soon the wings snapped, the windows and doors of the plane broke causing a gust of cold, 9000 ft high, air to enter the cabin. The aeroplane’s tip was pointing towards the ground. Suddenly, everybody in the cabin started panicking, their lives were at stake. Helpless cries rung in the cabin as the people inside prepared to meet their fate. They began to call their loved ones and hold their children in their arms, telling them that everything was going to be alright. How wrong they were. The aeroplane within a matter of minutes crashed into the ground, killing everyone on board. The newspaper’s next day declared the death of 300 “innocent” people. Tears were shed at funerals as people mourned the loss of their loved ones who died for no mistake of theirs

But the parts of the plane were recycled and built into another plane. The different parts of the plane were simply remodeled and built into a structure of a different and better form. Soon, there was a bright new aeroplane of a better class.”

Normal air crash story? Imagine the aeroplane to be nature and the people in it to represent the people of the entire world and read this story again and draw your own conclusions about nature, neglect and playing your role.

Dexter Britain – Clear, Soulful Music

The War In My Head – Dexter Britain

 

I hereby attribute the above music to Dexter Britain.

xmlns:cc=”http://creativecommons.org/ns#” xmlns:dct=”http://purl.org/dc/terms/” about=”http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Dexter_Britain/Creative_Commons_Volume_5/”>Creative Commons Volume. 5 (Dexter Britain) / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

Everyman Sleep Cycle Experiment – Introduction

I have been reading quite a bit about alternative sleep cycles recently and I’ve read a lot of positives as well as negatives about it. For those who aren’t aware, sleep is basically of two types – monophasic (1 period of sleep in a day) and polyphasic (2 or more periods of sleep in a day). Under polyphasic sleep, there are many different types of cycles that you can follow such as the Everyman Cycle, Uberman Cycle and the Dymaxion Cycle. Each of these cycles have a very different way of partitioning the sleep periods and also result in variation of total length of time spent sleeping.

Firstly, lets address a very simple question. Why do we need to move from one sleep cycle to the other? Well the main reason the motivates most people including me is that you can save a lot of time. A monophasic sleeper spends an average of 7 hours sleeping (although it can be reduced further to about 51/2 hours, continuous periods of less sleep results in sleep deprivation causing exhaustion, fatigue, slow thinking and other such negative effects). Polyphasic sleep however guarantees lesser amount of sleep (following the everyman sleep cycle for example reduces sleep time to about 41/2 hours and its the least stressful of the 3 sleep cycles mentioned) with none of the ill effects that are associated with sleep deprivation. How true this claim is can be debated, but this is what I want to test through experimentation and the lab rat is me. Students dream of days being 30 hours long instead of 24 and time is always against us. Those few hours everyday are very precious and could make all the difference. If you want to know more of the science behind it, here’s a link.

I will be aiming to follow the Everyman Cycle, because it’s the easiest to adapt to and also fits best with my school schedule. I have been advised not to do this by my parents after I began trying it out for a few days, but I think I am going to be a bit rebellious for once and see how this plays out. I will be chronicling my experiences on a weekly basis to tell you how things are going and how well I am adapting. My health is pretty important to me, so if i feel the health effects are getting to me, then I will be calling it off. There is a science behind, lets see if I can use it to my advantage.

It’s very difficult to change from one sleep cycle to another. You are going to invariably face exhaustion and fatigue for a minimum of 1 week if you decide to follow a new cycle. I have been fiddling around with this type of sleep for some time and the one thing I can say for sure is that it’s not easy to shift to the new sleep times. The Polyphasic Society suggests two ways of doing this (for the Everyman Cycle) – by depriving yourself of sleep for 1 whole day and then partitioning your sleep the next day or by slowly breaking your sleep cycle over a period of time into the sleep cycle of your choice. Frankly, the 1st option seems a bit too extreme for me and the 2nd method …….. lets just say I want to jump straight to it.

Do you want to shift to a polyphasic sleep cycle? i recommend going through the Polyphasic Society webpage and read about it from some other trusted resources. If you do find some interesting links, please share it in the comments.

Sources of Information

1. The Polyphasic Society

Stop Making Lawns, Lets Plant a Forest!

This is an interesting talk by Shubhendu Sharma about the quickness in which we can initiate afforestation and the negative environmental impact of lawns. I thought it was an interesting talk even though most of the facts that he stated were actually well known. The idea which he puts forward is simple but important. Lawns are nice to play on, look at and generally have in your backyard but for an environmental standpoint it is a waste of time, resources, water and space which has the potential to house a mini-forest.

In, Bangalore, where I live, there has been a drop in the population of sparrows and this is just one of many indicators of the way the environment has been maintained over the years. Although Bangalore is known as the “garden city” and is comparatively better in terms of green cover, there is still a lot of room for improvement. We need biodiversity, a large variety of plants, to flourish to maintain ecological balance.

One of my history lessons comes to mind. The British, in their efforts to gain more and more resources, maintained forests in which only 1 type of tree, poplar, teak and other varieties which provided good timber, were allowed to grow. It was strictly maintained, with consistent spacing between trees and killing of other species which tried to grow. Scientific forestry, as it was called turned out to be in reality very unscientific, as the same nutrients were drained repeatedly from the soil, exhausting it and wildlife was limited.

So let’s get back to lawns and why we shouldn’t be growing them.

1. Require more fertilizer and pesticides than an agricultural area of the same size.
2. Reduces the biodiversity of an area as lawns are monocultures.
3. A typical lawn consumes 800 litres of mostly clean water per day.

One of my dreams is to have forests and cities in the same place, a coexistence of man’s development and his association with nature. It is by no means simple and remains a dream that I need to achieve. Hopefully once I’m bit older and know how to combine two of the most contradicting ideas in today’s culture, I’ll be more optimistic.

I think that one of the main problems to be faced is inside our heads. We have for a long time distanced ourselves from nature, thinking that we are in some vague sense better than it. But what we do not realise is that we are part of it and the psychological solution to solving eco problems is to understand that we must live in harmony with nature. By building huge cities with rows after rows of cement buildings, greedily and mercilessly cutting down forests and in a general sense, resisting nature, we are only digging our own grave.

A good first step, I think, would be to stop having lawns.

Tricky Questions

The UN had released the results of its UNAID programme. It highlighted how the AIDS epidemic had been successfully tackled all around the world. It got me to think about how our race was being affected by this process of defending ourselves from disease. We are in many ways making ourselves invulnerable by wiping out all (well at least most) of the causes of human death. Will that make us, as a species, live on this Earth forever? Or will nature itself make changes to ensure that it doesn’t happen? Are global warming and ozone depletion nothing but these changes? One thing is definite, we cannot fight nature. If we do our loss is guaranteed. It is like fighting somebody who already knows everything about us, how we we were created and how we shall perish. The dinosaurs disturbed the ecological balance and became simply unsustainable and we all know how nature dealt with them. What makes us think that the same thing will not happen to us?

Another thought that struck my head was that by wiping out the causes of disease and by creating more and more aseptic conditions will our own inherent defense, natural immunity, breakdown over the years? But again we can’t let people die from preventable diseases, everybody has the right to life. This thought, on introspection is simply because of our attachment to our own race. We want to protect and help our own race flourish and provide each and every being some rights. For example, even a tiger would feel the same closeness to his/her species but what sets us apart is our superior forebrain, helping us to take thoughtful steps towards our goal.

Well, if we felt this same way towards other animals, would we treat them the same way as we are doing right now? This direction of thinking poses many questions, whose solutions contradict each other. A cow which eats and drinks from the roadside gutter may die and its son, grandson and so on may die too. But one day, one of its lineage will be able to live and resist the contaminants, passing on that crucial gene to its offsprings. Therefore it was the sacrifice of the cows which died that helped the species to become collectively stronger and more adapted to their environment. The proof is that the cows in Bangalore are not dying. Another interesting thought is that, in the coming years will cows (and other animals) evolve to resist plastic bags and other such human interventions?

However this theory cannot be as easily applied to the human scenario simply because of the value attached to each and every person or in other words the love we feel for a fellow human being. We cannot stop providing the simple defenses, such as vaccinations, telling them that they should sacrifice their lives for the rest of us. It is something that violates the principles that we stand for and honestly I wouldn’t accept it myself. But is it the right thing to do?

My strong feeling is that we cannot go on disassociating ourselves from nature. No matter how great and life-changing is the technology, we are still a part of the bigger picture. By resisting it we are simply digging our own grave because nature is a self-sustaining system, and it is us who depend on it and not the other way around. A simple revelation of this idea is that we do not accept ourselves as animals and take offense into being described as one. But yet, at our core, what are we if not animals that roam this Earth?

The advanced human brain, I feel, gives us a lot of power as well as a lot of problems. A lioness ( a male lion hardly ever kills, it is the lioness which chases and kills its prey but the male lion gets “the lion’s share” of the meal. Thus I use lioness to indicate the real killer) will kill its prey whenever it feels hungry. There are no second thoughts, in fact there are hardly any so-called thoughts there is only instinct, a situation presents itself and the most natural response is offered, ie, I am hungry, thus I will eat. The lioness does not think, “The deer will die.” , “I am killing another being, simply to satisfy my hunger.” and so and so forth. There is only a stimulus and a response.

But this is the dilemma that we face. We act based on knowledge and in this case, knowledge is the opposite of instinct. The point I am trying to arrive at is that our specialised forebrain has changed the life of every single human simply because we can think before we can act. And the reason why I keep mentioning forebrain is because their are still times when the more “ancient” or “undeveloped” parts of our brain continue to dominate. Love, in the case of infatuation , is one example where it has been proved the the parts of our brain which are responsible for judgement and decision-making are turned off. Well the conclusion we can draw is that some basic instincts, such as reproduction and nutrition, still dominate for the survival of the species and the organism respectively. But what about the things we do in our “free time” where the more specialised parts of our brain take over? And what about the times when there is an overlap, which will you favour? If you ask me that same question, I would say that I would trust my own reasoning. The very fact that we have an advanced brain allows us to make decisions which are not only the best for us, but the best for all around us including nature.

There are again questions which arise about what is “best” for us. If we continue to value each and every human on Earth then our population will grow as it is growing now, and no matter how sustainable are the measures we adopt, the resources, such as land, energy and water will not suffice. Well, then what is the solution? What is the conclusion? In simple words, I don’t know. I do not know how we are going to move forward as a species and as a members of nature. But one thing I do trust is science. Science and knowledge of our past will allow us to make informed decisions. As we acquire a deeper and deeper knowledge of ourselves and nature we will be able to see more clearly where we fit in this seemingly complex (and crowded) puzzle. Science may (and probably will) propose difficult changes, during which we must lay aside our ego and accept them wholeheartedly, just like the cows that sacrificed themselves to ensure that their offsprings survived and became stronger than themselves.

For now science has given us one thing very clearly, that we are seeing so often that it has almost crept into our value basis, that the lifestyle that we are living is unsustainable. The UN keeps setting goals, NGOs keep telling people and the Indian government has more “pressing matters”. The ecological balance is being disturbed. I can almost imagine a politician answering, “ Who cares a damn, huh? Will I win the elections for being environment friendly?”. Now, what would happen if, we the educated community, said yes to this? What would happen if the party that was the most eco-friendly and philanthropically active would regularly win the elections? Wouldn’t this make parties run after eco solutions and upliftment of the poor as they run after money?

But for now, we still have a government which does not have such ideals, a government which is too worried about growth to make it sustainable. But why does a lazy government translate to lazy people? Why do we disrespect our country because the politicians do? Why can’t we show that we can be the most eco-friendly and philanthropically active despite a procrastinating government? Why don’t we feel for nature, the poor, the country and the world like we feel for our parents, spouse or children? The latter may be more important on a personal level but the former remains and will remain more important on the macro level. We must, and definitely must modify our values and actions such that they are directed towards the former.

Well if you ask a teenager, he will say he wants to have fun. If you ask a worker he will say he wants more free time (probably to enjoy him/herself). If you ask any privileged person what they want to do in a random, or rather neutral situation, they will say they want enjoyment, happiness and so on and so forth. Why are we so directed towards ourselves? Do we not realise that there are probably lakhs of people who are going hungry in the world and that nature is being destroyed by our nearly every act while we are oblivious to all this and want to have “fun”? Isn’t the purpose of education to make us realise this and work towards solving these problems instead of having “fun”? If not, then what differentiates us from a person who hasn’t gone through any formal education? Is it the ability to become richer or to remain happy in the midst of the unseen destruction around us?

That is why I also maintain the view that there is a difference between the educated and literate. A literate person is anybody who can read and write but an educated person is something deeper than that. An educated person, in my view, is anybody who understands what is right and what is wrong and works towards what is right. Is working 12 hours a day in front of a computer right? Is urinating on the road correct? Is throwing the garbage on the roadside while no one is looking justifiable?

Then according to this definition aren’t most of us uneducated simply because we do not do what is right but we do what is easy or what is “fun”. Don’t we completely disregard the environment and the weaker parts of our society in our decisions, big or small? Don’t we wait for someone else to do it first? Don’t we think that our hard earned money cannot be “wasted” on such things? In my opinion, these are the very thoughts that show our selfish and “uneducated” character. “Ignorance is bliss” maybe true as a statement, but as a goal it is the most misleading, and in my opinion, the most false.