What Makes People Tick?

Many people around the world celebrate a worldwide religious or cultural holiday in December. This holiday may be the a version of Christmas, the Jewish Hanukkah, it may be Kwanzaa or a pagan or Wiccan Yule / midwinter celebration. To top it off, there is the world-wide counting down to midnight on December 31st and the communal celebrations of the start of the new year. Every person who celebrates a holiday in December will have a different reason for doing so. Some may celebrate for religious or religion-based reasons. Some enjoy the holidays in a secular way. Some enjoy any excuse to go shopping. Some enjoy the feeling of celebrating with others and the sense of community that it brings. Some commemorate the middle of winter and the changes that will bring. Some may simply go along with what others do and celebrate only because of chance or coincidence. No matter how or what one celebrates - What matters is that all across the world, people are doing the same thing in Decemb...

Copy of a short piece I wrote for another blog of mine. First published 12-06-2011 Happened across an article in the Daily Mail today from back in 2009 that caught my fancy. In short, it describes the find of a bunch of carved ancient stones long buried at Gobekli Tepe in eastern Turkey / Kurdistan. This site predates other ancient sites such as Stonehenge or the Pyramids by several thousands of years, meaning it is the oldest such site that has been uncovered to date. Not only does this site teach us amazing new things about our (humanity´s) past, we also learn more about the region, the practices and possible lifestyle and beliefs of the people alive at the time, and oh as an afterthought - reshapes what we thought we knew to be true about human development. Isn´t is just awesome when history, religion and science come together! Some quotes from the article: Carbon-dating shows that the complex is at least 12,000 years old, maybe even 13,000 years old. That means it was b...

While perusing today's newspapers, I came across a very interesting article. It describes research that talks about how polluted our oceans are. Reading about the different sorts of plastic that sea birds ingest really made me stop and think about what humans are doing to the planet and it's oceans. It also made me want to share the article with my readers as the pollution of our oceans is something that should matter to all of us! I've translated the Dutch article to English and posted it below. Please excuse any translation errors. No copyright infringement is intended which is why I'm only posting a part of the translation here. More and more plastic in Pacific Ocean   Vancouver - More and more plastic is adrift in the waters of the Pacific Ocean according to Canadian biologists.  Researchers examining stomach contents of Northern Fulmar birds have found an alarming increase in plastic materials. The amount of plastic in the Pacific Ocean has almost reac...

Checking out my blog statistics lately, I couldn't help but notice that this blog has gotten quite a few hits. Even though I haven't written anything for months, people still keep on visiting. It makes me feel slightly guilty, to be honest. I had such high hopes for this blog and intended to 'do so much with it' and then never quite got around to doing it... I still have this vision of what this blog could be and what it could become and in light of that, here's a post about reaching your potential and being the best you can be! I found an amazing article at Zen Habits through Google Search. It's called 7 Essentials For Living Your Fullest Potential by Jonathan Mead who is also the author of website Illuminated Mind  - a website dedicated to helping you reach your fullest potential in life! The article is full of amazing tips, hints and ideas - I strongly encourage you to read it as I found it very illuminating. Below is a very abridged (and edited) versio...

Found this quote in March, wrote a draft post for it yet didn´t end up actually writing anything more. It´s from the article "It´s time for a nuclear energy time-out" by Alice Slater, published 23.03.11. See the link below the post for the source. Let this chaos be a wake-up call for a time-out on new nuclear energy construction projects. This includes the 62 reactors around the world now under construction and the additional 158 slated to go forward. And like the massive mobilization gathering strength in Japan, with emergency workers coming from all over the world to help rescue and recover the tens of thousands of people trapped in their villages, let us make a massive global effort to put a solar panel on every roof, a geothermal pump in every building, windmills on every windswept plain, and tidal energy pumps in our rivers and seas to harness the clean safe energy of our Mother Earth. http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/23-4

Reading the article that my last post is about, I started wondering once again what it would be like to visit some of the amazing places on our planet and in our universe. The universe, well, I´m not anticipating a visit to the Moon in my lifetime or the ability to see the Earth from space with my own eyes, however there are many places on this planet that are amazing all in their own right. Places that I can get to by bus, train and airplane. For some amazing places, check out my earlier post on Unesco World Heritage Sites , as well as some of the following links: Wonders of the World - Wikipedia page Hillman Wonders of the World  - a Top 100 list Seven Wonders of the World - Travel Channel 100 Wonders of the World - a map with locations of wonders across the world

Found an amazing article online at the website of the Daily Mail that has me reeling with wonder. I reckon it fits right in at a blog entitled "what makes people tick", as it sheds an amazing amount of light on what made humans tick - long before they even learnt how to write! Check it out here: Do these mysterious stones mark the site of the Garden of Eden?