I really love this quote about the Earth and how small and insignificant we really are.

It was written by the astronomer Carl Sagan and originally accompanied this picture of Earth (called Pale Blue Dot) taken from more than 6 billion kilometers away!

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

The Economist has an article about anti-mosquito laser defense systems.

Seriously.

The first device described is called a photonic mosquito fence:

• A series of posts about 100m apart
• Each post has a cheap camera and light source and is connected to a central computer
• When a camera detects movements it analyzes the source (mosquito species have distinctive wing-beat frequencies)
• If the source is a mosquito the computer “trains a laser onto the insect and blasts it into oblivion”!

That is awesome! Apparently the system is also cheap enough to compete with current malaria protection.

The other system described uses a ‘curtain’ of infra-red light to which mosquitoes are highly sensitive. Also very cool.

I believe that a lot of life is a big confidence game.

From sport to public speaking, to work, to relationships I have found that self-belief goes a long way. I call it my confidence trick and it’s worked very well for me.

The Economist has an article outlining experimental results that suggest positive thinking can leave you worse off – if you don’t believe the positive thoughts.

Read the article for details of the experiment, but in short the results were:

• High self-esteem => benefit from positive thoughts
• Low self-esteem => worse off because of positive thoughts!

The article goes on to suggest that the positive thoughts clash with the self beliefs of those with low self-esteem thereby reinforcing those negative self-perceptions!

So, positive thoughts do help – but only if you believe them.

Pott’s confidence trick has experimental support!

Incidentally, I think that this is the reason that religion is beneficial to many. Religion is a positive thoughts believability engine. The problem is that it so often gets co-opted into ignorant or political ends.

I just discovered a little time saving trick that I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know before. When you spend as much time behind a computer as I do, little things like this are great.

In many screens you’ll encounter buttons with one letter underlined. For example the ‘A’ is underlined on the ‘Replace All’ button in the screen below.

Instead of lifting my hand from the keyboard and clicking the button with the mouse, I can just hit ALT+A to press the button!

Similarly I could click the ‘Replace’ button with ALT+R or even untick the ‘In selection’ with ALT+I

Trust me, that makes a big difference.

My wife is a super graphic designer and I’ve learned a bit about the industry from her.

I can tell you for sure that she would DIE before publishing this image! It comes from the main page of a News24 website (otherwise quite a cool site).

I can’t believe that this got through to the public. Is it just me or does it look like Luke Watson has donated a lower leg to Natalie du Toit?

For those who don’t know, Natalie du Toit is one of South Africa’s greatest athletes. She lost her leg in an accident as a teenager but has gone on to be an amazingly successful Paralympic and Olympic athlete!