My main professional background is in the earth & life sciences, but I now also explore topics in the broad area of bioethics. That's about equality, fairness, justice, diversity and inclusivity. It's also about people's biases, the associated otherization and everything that this can result in. That includes poverty, homelessness and poor health, shabby looks and shrinking personal bubbles, exposure to chemical and noise pollution and lots more. It's also about law, philosophy, neuroscience, technology, forensic psychology, politics and public policy (governance). Diversity and inclusivity are much bigger challenges than I used to believe. I for example now think that society's lack of genuine acceptance and support for people whose brains work very differently can among other things result in destructive behaviours for which the forensic psychology terminology is sadistic stalking or resentful stalking. My own experiences on the receiving end of something like this caused me to start looking into personality disorders and neurodiversity. That is how I stumbled upon bioethics. Seeing the massive inequality in England had something to do with it too. No, I don't have all the answers. Do you?
I’ll find a better life for you The stars have said our love’s untrue And just because we shared a lie There is no reason for a soul to die Oh, oh-oh-oh Oh, oh I’ve got a soul, and you broke my heart Find a new scene, and let us depart Don’t hang around and let yourself Be caught in this You’ll find a better people there A friendly love, the kind who care And not the sort like me you’ve found We’re mean and hard, and we push around Oh, oh, wee-ooh Ooh-wee I’ve got a soul, and you broke my heart Find a new scene and let us depart Don’t hang around and let yourself Be caught Doo-doot-n-doo-n-dee-doo Doot-dee, doo, doot, doo I’ve got a soul, and you broke my heart Find a new scene and let us depart Oh, no Oh-oh-oh, no Oh, no
Here is Flow State, as performed at The Globe, Newcastle for Jazz North East on 26th March 2023 (but, as she puts it “Outlines is my new avant jazz project, playing my original compositions with plenty of space for improvisation“):
While enjoying my morning coffee I ran into the following.
If you’d invested $1,000 in Nvidia on 15 April 2005, you’d now have $566,624.
Sure.
If I had been a little boy on 15 April 2005, I’d be a man in my twenties now.
If you’d invested $1,000 in different stock than Nvidia, you might be left with nothing now.
Had you even heard of Nvidia back then?
People who do things like build their own computers did know about it. Come to think of it, yes, I built my first computer around that time, in a super sleek, fully lockable blue case that was great to work in.
The right questions to ask are “what do you base your investment decisions on?” and “how much risk are you willing to take?”
(Along with “what tools do you use to invest?”)
(I’m talking investments now, not trading, obviously, although if you aren’t into it for dividends and to help enable the company in question to function, but plan to sell your shares later, you can see it as long-term trading.)
Update: it’s actually pretty good as it is, what I whipped up today. It wasn’t the vinegar of which I added too much, it was ground mustard seeds. They are pretty good.
In an attempt to lower the number of (plastic) jars of vegan mayo I purchase and throw less stuff away that is actually useful and nutritious, I just tried my first aquafaba recipe.
I didn’t get the proportions right as the recipe was on my computer in another room and I mixed up teaspoons and tablespoons – and I was using cups, anyway. I’m also not using a fridge. Instead, I placed the mixture in the microwave and heated it up; that too thickened it up really nicely. (That possibly was because I had resorted to adding some corn starch, which I may not do next time.)
I used a plain metal whisk, by the way, not a blender. (Bamboo whisks exist too.)
I used olive oil, but I didn’t want to use up all my olive oil because I didn’t see much thickening, likely because I had added to much vinegar.
A tip: If you heat olive oil, it can lose its super healthy properties that help protect your heart and vascular system (according to a BBC program that I watched a few years ago). I don’t know at what temperature that deterioration kicks in, but heating a bowl in the microwave for one or two minutes is probably very okay.
My very first mayo attempt is a little too tart – my fault – and to make up for that, I’ll add some ground almonds. Ground almonds, that’s my shredded cheese.
Next time, I’ll get it right. I can tell. I’m very pleased.
Did you know that you can also use tofu juice and the juice in a can of peas as aquafaba? Can, that’s tin, for Brits.
If I tin do this, so tin you.
What sparked this? I was eating courgettes and chickpeas yesterday and thought “Some mayo with this would be nice.” Chickpeas come with the best aquafaba. Courgettes, that’s zucchini, for Americans. (Ameritins?)
(Also, I am being ravaged by gnats in my sleep. Apparently, they hate the smell of vanilla. I don’t. So I’m going to try that too.)
Need more inspiration for what you can do better in terms of sustainable living? This may help:
I too really wrestle with the fact that the actions of the species Homo sapiens are often so harmful and so thoughtless.
I’ve seen a pigeon realize that mice, no matter how annoying mice can also be to pigeons, need food to survive, to my amazement. I had a pet pigeon who often spilled her food and I had a neighbor with mice who would sometimes venture into my place. It dawned on the pigeon what was happening and she stopped spilling food where she spent most of her time, and where she did not want to see any mice, but I also saw her spill food off a high shelf one day, very deliberately – and then look down to see what would happen.
I’ve seen another bird species have empathy for cats.
The difference may be how secure biological beings are, in terms of food and shelter.
If that is the case, then greater equality and facilities like universal income might make a huge difference in the long run. It’s not easy to have empathy when you are struggling to support yourself, when you struggle to feed and house yourself. It makes total sense, doesn’t it?
The step toward living more sustainably becomes easier too, then.
I’ve also recently realized that my life in the past two decades would have been much easier if I had owned a car. I’m still digesting that. The issue is actually a different one, but today’s world sometimes forces certain choices and limitations on us. Balancing them out is a bit like choosing between local loose apples that are not organic or organic apples or vegan products that are packaged in plastic and can have been shipped around the world. Not easy.
The solution is to find a local grower who does not use plastic to package organic fruits and vegetables in. In some regions, there are apps that make that possible, that allow you to connect with local organic farmers and order products from them.
Somewhere, someone may still have a copy of an essay that I wrote in primary school… about the year 2000.
The kids in my class laughed. (No, that didn’t make me angry.)
Now these things are starting to happen, a little later than I anticipated.
I’ve also predicted that we’ll be using CRISPR and fish genes so that we can change the color of our skin like putting on new clothes and be done with so-called racial discrimination. (So-called because race is a cultural concept. There is only one human species and a wide range of diversity, which is the spice of human life.) It’s already been done with cats and other mammals, making them fluorescent in the dark, though the ability to change the color is going to be a challenge.
I’ve been looking back at my life and was astonished to see how often I was hit by sheer bad luck, mere negative coincidences, things that happened, sometimes without me being aware of at the time. I’m wondering what I can still do with that, and what it all means, if anything, whether I could have done some things differently, responded differently.
And then I see this and I despair. What is going to become of the over 50,000 children who disappeared within the EU within a period of three years? The actual number is likely much higher, researchers say.
Then this.
Yes, I know that the news makes us depressed these days. There is so much negative news that people now apparently do things like consider education in their own country very bad – but not their own children’s education – and consider the economy very bad – but not their own situation. (Surveys reveal this.) They seem to be basing their opinions on negative news that they read, not on their own experiences.
They’d been plaguing me for far too long (a few weeks now) but are slowly starting to go away…
(Yes, they’ve hampered me recently. What can I say? I am merely human. Having a bad headache usually doesn’t result in brilliant thinking.)
I was – am still – dealing with gallbladder congestion, massive sinus congestion and esophagus issues. (It’s all related and in turn can affect circulation.) I know how to deal with this. We all have our weaknesses. My body needs to be working like a race-horse’s because if it isn’t, it really starts to buck to get my attention. That’s the non-conscious part of the brain kicking in, trying to get through to the conscious part.
Also… I just wrote the following… (see below). Then, when I was looking for an address to send a book to, I discovered that I have a niece who’s just completed a BA in psychology (though her thesis calls it a BSc, likely as per Dutch university instructions). Topic? Bullying in care homes (among residents). That’s an interesting coincidence. (I took a quick look. I suspect that I might really like you, niece, if we ever were to meet.) It’s made me smile.
I think that I should mention now that because of the housing situation and the plethora of regulations and registration requirements in the country that I am currently in, I am living in an actual nursing home – care home – in a small municipality surrounded by agricultural land, miles away from anything, far away from places where I would like to be and need to be.
I thought I’d be content (and resourceful) enough to make it work. I was completely unprepared for the lack of privacy – which I have found some solutions for – and the fact that when nothing is physically wrong with you and you are much younger than most other residents, almost everyone assumes that you either have dementia or must be learning-disabled (“except most of the residents,” I should probably add).
I’d also not at all considered the fact that people who go live in such places go live there to die there. Ambulances are frequent visitors as are undertaker vans (and removal lorries), along with the daily tides of carers. The hopelessness and emptiness is often overwhelming and the lack of respect and consideration with which you get treated is not really cheering me up either.
That’s partly my fault because I feel so out of place here. (That’s for other reasons, too, including having lived abroad for so long.)
At first, strangers who didn’t know that I was living here too even sometimes made remarks along the lines of all people who live here no longer being interested in anything whatsoever, everything passing them by. To almost everyone else, you become a thing when you live in a place like this. You’re seen as frail, by definition.
I had really underestimated how incredibly hard this would be.
(Don’t worry, not everything is bad.)
Hundreds of people – all kinds of staff and other visitors – walk in and out throughout the day and because there are also people with dementia here, you have to go through a set of sluice doors – that’s a lock – of glass doors. After hours, you need to tap in a code to be able to leave. During the day, you have to wait for the other doors to have closed but there is enough staff and a receptionist to keep on eye on wandering dementia patients.
(I am still struggling with the colors, also because I have no idea what this will look like IRL. Goes for the spacing too. Will have to find out. I don’t have the original file of the cover image. The resolution is not high enough of what I do have, so I had to compromise.)
From this bundle, which contains poems and one short story, you can read the short story below.
Berry-picking
(September 2011)
He tiptoed around the toadstool and knocked on the door. “Are you up yet?” “Depends on who you’re asking, the toadstool or me,” she yelled and opened the door in the angled toadstool, tiara in hand. “Yes?”
“I thought maybe we could go berry-picking today.” “You’re right, it’s a marvelous day for it. Let me put some shoes on and I’ll join you.” When she came back to the door, he was no longer at her toadstool’s doorstep. Where’d he gone off to? She looked around and spotted him, when he yelled from the garden around his parents’ toadstool. “My mom wants me to have a decent breakfast first.” “Okay,” she hollered back. “Meetcha in an hour!” And she went back inside, did the dishes, brushed the cat and checked her e-mail because she’d already had breakfast.
“Are you ready?” he asked an hour later, impatiently jumping up and down on her doorstep. “Yes, but let me quickly close the kitchen window,” she replied, and went inside to close the window. When she stepped outside, he was nowhere in sight. Where’d he gone off to this time? She looked around and then spotted him when she heard him yell from the garden around his parents’ toadstool. “My dad wants me to go fly-fishing with him. Shall we go berry-picking this afternoon instead?” “Okay,” she hollered back. “See ya at two!” And she went back inside, posted an update on Twitter, did her bookkeeping, and made a mushroom omelet for lunch.
“Come on, come on!” He was pacing up and down and around her toadstool impatiently while she wrapped up an exchange in one of her Facebook groups, and paused the new track she’d been listening to on MySpace, grabbed her berry-picking satchel and walked toward the door, where she was met with an icy silence. She turned her hands into fists and put them on her hips. Where the devil had he gone off to now? She looked around and spotted him, yelling from the garden around his parents’ toadstool. “My mother wants to teach me how to bake cookies. I suggest we go berry-picking tomorrow.” She grumbled and didn’t holler back “Okay!” but “Enjoy your cookies!” and went berry-picking all by herself. The pattern repeated itself day after day, until one day, her toadstool was gone and the door no longer there to knock on. She had turned the berries into jam, used the jam in cakes, and started selling cakes from her toadstool. But she had remembered the “Location, location, location” chant from her college days and had the toadstool moved to a prime location in town, while preserving its precarious yet precious angle, as it made her toadstool so easy to recognize from a distance. He had to go on Twitter to find her, and found she had thousands of followers, all wanting to go berry-picking with her.
There will always be people who want to hold you back. Don’t let them. Don’t ever let them disempower you.
(Tony Robbins, Awaken the Giant Within)
In this book, Tony Robbins talks about breaking wood with your bare hand, karate-style, as he calls it. He says that instead of taking 18 to 24 months to learn how to do it, he took a different approach. Oh really, Tony?
” One of the things that most powerfully changed my life was something I first learned years ago. In Canada I found a man who was breaking wood karate-style. Instead of spending a year and a half to two years to learn to do it, with no martial arts training, I simply found out what he was focusing on, how he was focusing (the brightness and so on) in his head, what his beliefs were, and what his physical strategy was— how he specifically used his body to break the wood.I practiced over and over his physical movements identically with tremendous emotional intensity, sending my brain deep sensations of certainty. And all the while, my instructor coached me on my movements. Barn! I broke through one piece of wood, then two pieces, then three pieces, then four. What had I done to accomplish this? 1)1 raised my standards and made breaking the wood a must, something I previously would have accepted as a limitation; 2) I changed my limiting belief about my ability to do this by changing my emotional state into one of certainty, and 3) I modeled an effective strategy for producing the result.“
There’s probably no better indication of having healed after rape than forgetting when it happened. When I was just into my earth science journey, I got raped by an intruder. A few years ago, I realized that I no longer know when exactly that was. It had been etched in my mind for a long time but life never stands still and a lot of other things have happened since.
After the rape, I tackled the matter heads on. I for example signed up for self-defense classes for women. I was the first person asked in the group to tell the others why I had enrolled in the class. That broke the ice, if there ever was any.
Well, Tony, break wood is simply something we all did one evening. We all just did it. It took one woman – I remember her face but not her name – three to four tries, but she did it too. Whether you believe you can or believe you can’t, you’re right, regardless of what it is that you believe. That’s the secret of breaking wood.
Sure, the grain and the type of wood matter too. It was plain pinewood for us, and the grain was likely favorable, but still, we all just did it.
If you have a thorn in your foot, you can either leave it in to remind you of the long road you have walked or you can pull it out (and take care of your foot).
A negative belief can also be like a thorn in your foot.
For the past four months, there’s been something really disruptive in my life that wasn’t initiated by me but that admittedly, I should have dealt with in a better way.
Yesterday, I decided not to pay any further attention to the party that’s been causing this distraction. Because the matter was draining my energy and gobbling up my attention, while the party was making quite clear that they aren’t interested in establishing a dialogue.
They initially wouldn’t take no for an answer. I held my ground.
I woke up to a markedly increased level of peacefulness and clarity. Serenity.
I did the right thing.
I can breathe again.
People who are immensely intent on “helping” you, certainly if you did not ask for their help in the first place, often merely want to hamper you and hold you back, even if they aren’t even aware of it.
The funny coincidence is that I had actually intended to ask these people for assistance in January. I’ve changed my mind about that. I now see the chaos that they voluntarily started adding to my life as of some time last year as a sign that it is better not to engage with them at all.
While looking for a code for a software program, I just stumbled upon an old print in relation to a symposium I co-organized for women in science and technology in the Netherlands, with contact data etc for speakers, workshop leaders and panel members.
‘Op naar de top’
Symposium date?
17 November 1990… 😊
… when my printer paper was still tear-off. Dot matrix printers they were called, I think.
Never ever ask for help when you (desperately) need help and certainly not if you’re being stalked, most certainly not if it’s by someone who has advanced IT expertise and is extremely cunning.
Only ask for help when you don’t really need help but are interested in what people might tell you that you didn’t know yet.
Perfection when it counts. This is why you should always do the best you can, not the least you can get away with. In this case, this person saved not only his own life and that of his instructor (besides the plane, but that’s less important here).
In other cases, it will be something totally different, but there’s no greater joy than excelling at something and surpassing yourself, your own expectations. It’s not about you. It’s goes way beyond that.
Yesterday evening, I watched a film about a math student who figured out what an alien lifeform was communicating, by using the universal language of math. It doesn’t get any better than that.
It’s also about the synergy. Perhaps it’s particularly about the synergy.
