Viraj's Weblog

An old but very interesting speech. An excerpt:

Out of the 168 hours in each week, my children sleep 56. That leaves them 112 hours a week out of which to fashion a self.

My children watch 55 hours of television a week according to recent reports. That leaves them 57 hours a week in which to grow up.

My children attend school 30 hours a week, use about 6 hours getting ready, going and coming home, and spend an average of 7 hours a week in homework - a total of 45 hours. During that time, they are under constant surveillance, have no private time or private space, and are disciplined if they try to assert individuality in the use of time or space. That leaves 12 hours a week out of which to create a unique consciousness. Of course, my kids eat, and that takes some time - not much, because they've lost the tradition of family dining, but if we allot 3 hours a week to evening meals, we arrive at a net amount of private time for each child of 9 hours.

reddit has directed me to these funny videos:

• Real life Simpsons
• Amazing Ping Pong
• Space Balloon
• Natalie Portman Rap

At work there are really interesting tech talks that go on many times during the week. Sometimes they are not even related to computers.

I saw a recent talk about stone tools and their relationship to human evolution. Hopefully they will put it on video.google.com soon.

Anyway, it was explained that at some point in human evolution the pre-humans started making stone tools. One of the major possible benefits of such tools was breaking the hide of animals, accessing bone marrow, etc. This allowed humans to tap into a high fat meat diet, which in turn caused an increase in energy supplied to the brain, and further allowing an increase in brain size. A feedback look was created, and brain size skyrocketed from the apes. There was a direct correlation between human invention and human evolution.

What was also cool is the presenter went through brain imaging scans while trying to make stone tools, as well as did research trying to analyze the body physiology during toolmaking.

It made me think of how we can affect our evolution by our actions, and how much significance a change in diet was. I think we need to be careful what sort of diets we get into. Ultimately we eat to provide energy for our brain. If the foods don't do that, it may cause more damage than we think.