Random Monday Thoughts

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I have been exploring different areas of my life and so this may not be entirely fitness related, but mind-expanding none the less. I consider myself a generalist instead of a specialist, and thus try to constantly engage myself in new and different things to learn many different disciplines. This lends me to having many random thoughts, of which I forgot most of them, but the few that I can remember are below…. 1. Why the Earth is on an a tilt of 23.4 degrees? I found myself pondering this question as I have been learning basics about celestial orbits, and aeronautics. In grade school we are overloaded with so much material, its like throwing spaghetti against the wall and seeing how much of it sticks. Suffice to say, not much of that material sticks later in life, and I can’t ever remembering why the the Earth is on its tilt. We learn so much about planets, and the solar system, physics, and other random earth science. But how come this never seems to come up? As you may or may not already know, the tilt has a very important role. Without the slight tilt, life as we know it would be completely different. As you visualize a even keeled earth, it would cause it to be in the same relative position during all points in its orbit. This would cause the equator to be hotter and the poles to be colder. These temperature differences may be too extreme for human life, and if nothing else the demographics would be completely different than today. After researching this some more, it turns out scientists don’t really know why. Their best guess comes from the early formation days during the Hadeon Eon about 4.5 billion years ago. During this Eon, the earth was bombarded with pre-planetary rocks, debris, asteroids, etc and it was the aggregate of all these collisions that led to its current tilt of 23.4 degrees. This is also the Eon where the moon was formed. 2. What happened to commonsense? While everything these days seems to be data driven, evidence based, goal orientated and is heavy on the analytics, what happened to common sense and intuition? I am a numbers guy so I love that stuff, but does everything really need to be analyzed to the nth degree? Im a realist and practical, so what ever happened to getting just what you need and no more or no less? I have been victim of paralysis by analysis before, and I think it has seeped into many areas of our world today from small and big companies to school systems to politics, etc. The world today is so immense and complex that it cannot rely on black and white thinking and data analysis to fix the problems that we have. We need that data, but it needs to be supplemented with commonsense, intuition, and personal skills to work the grey areas of our society to make the right decisions. It takes a higher level of thinking to think like that, but it is necessary. Malcolm Gladwell talks about this in his book Blink, when he explains how the U.S. Military war simulation, Millennium Challenge, was rigged after Commander Paul K. Van Riper defeated the U.S. Military’s sophisticated and modern war ships with primitive technologies. The U.S. adjusted the rules of the games afterwards to show their superiority, and is a display of how NOT to grow and learn.

3. The chair is the worst invention of the modern century. Sitting is the problem of the obesity epidemic in our world today. As I sit and write this post, I have to constantly remind myself to sit up properly and maintain good posture. Bad posture can increase intervertebral forces up to 190%, and even though sitting with good posture is bad, its the lesser of the two evils. This means that standing exerts less force and justifies the adage of getting up to walk around every so often to alleviate back pain. Just take a look at this graph below.

http://www.boostphysio.com/blog/2012/05/20/physiotherapy-finchley-hendon/

Ill keep my thoughts to a minimum today, and let you all soak it up. Have a good Monday, enjoy!