Category: Old age of my youth – 2015

FRIDAY, 20 FEBRUARY 2015

Neanderthals

• Neanderthal DNA differs only 0.3% from that of modern humans.

• The first people with proto-Neanderthal traits lived in Eurasia 350,000 to 600,000 years ago.

• The first so-called real Neanderthals made their appearance between 200,000 and 250,000 years ago.

• A comprehensive 2014 study of Neanderthal bones and tools have proven that Neanderthals became extinct in Europe between 41,000 and 39,000 years ago.

• This estimate coincides with the start of a very cold period in Europe, and is 5,000 years after Homo sapiens had reached Europe.

• A comparison of the DNA of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens suggests that the two groups separated from a common ancestor between 350,000 and 400,000 years ago. This ancestor was probably Homo heidelbergensis.

• Heidelbergensis developed between 800,000 and 1.3 million years ago and became extinct about 200,000 years ago.

• Heidelbergensis’ habitat ranged over eastern and southern Africa, Europe and West Asia.

• It is believed that the African branch of Heidelbergensis started to develop in the direction of modern humans between 350,000 and 400,000 years ago and the Eurasian branch developed in the direction of the Neanderthals.

Read more on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal

Cro-Magnon

• According to radiocarbon dating the earliest known remains of Cro-Magnon-like people are between 43,000 and 45,000 years old.

• The Cro-Magnon people are regarded as the ancestors of modern Europeans.

• There are indications that some Cro-Magnon people had blue eyes and dark hair, and a “black” complexion.

• It is estimated that anatomically modern humans made their first appearance in East Africa 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.

• According to one theory an exodus from Africa through the Arabian Peninsula about 60,000 years ago brought modern humans to Eurasia, with one group settling in the coastal areas around the Indian Ocean and the other group moving further north into Central Asia.

• The inland group is regarded as the founders of North and East Asians, Caucasians, large parts of Middle Eastern populations, and the populations of North Africa.

• Migration from the Black Sea region to Europe began about 45,000 years ago, and by about 20,000 years ago modern humans had reached the western edge of Europe.

• Cro-Magnon people shared the European landscape with Neanderthals for 10,000 years or more, until the latter disappeared from the fossil record.

• There is uncertainty about the relationship between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon people, and about the disappearance or destruction of the former. Theories include peaceful coexistence, competition, interbreeding, assimilation and genocide.

Read more on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cro-Magnon

______________________

THURSDAY, 19 FEBRUARY 2015

I want a definition of Christianity so that I know what I mean when I talk about it.

This is how I see it: Christianity refers to a cultural and religious community that provides a philosophical and moral framework from which people who call themselves “Christians” derive a core part of their identity.

——-

The following terms are from oxforddictionaries.com.

religion = the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods; a particular system of faith and worship; a pursuit or interest followed with great devotion

philosophy = the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline; a theory or attitude that acts as a guiding principle for behaviour

culture = the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively; the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society

community = a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common; the condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interests in common

______________________

THURSDAY, 5 FEBRUARY 2015

What does 2015 mean? What does it mean that I was born in 1971? And no one except scientists even talks about 2045 or 2055!

It’s been bothering me for some time that these numbered years keep floating in my mind yet I don’t quite know how they fit together. And before I know, the numbers have changed again.

Here is one explanation:

I was born in 1871. It is now 1915, the second calendar year of the Great War. If I can avoid serious misfortune and disease and maintain a fairly healthy lifestyle, I can expect to live until roughly the mid-1940s.

That means I was born in the year when Otto von Bismarck led Prussia and allied German states to victory over France and the unification of Germany. As a South African I can talk of my contemporaries Jan Smuts, Louis Botha and Sol Plaatje. On the international scene my contemporaries include Mahatma Gandhi, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin and Vladimir Lenin.

My last days may arrive when I am in my seventies, about the time the Allies defeat the fascists in World War II, or soon after. Should I survive another decade and live until my mid-eighties, I would see in a colour magazine or possibly on black-and-white TV how a young upstart called Elvis Presley shakes his leg like no decent man would have done in my day.

   

——————–

(Acknowledgement for the Bismarck photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R68588 / P. Loescher & Petsch / CC-BY-SA 3.0)

______________________

WEDNESDAY, 4 FEBRUARY 2015

Imagine someone asks you to make a rather significant monetary contribution to a cause, and you answer, “I can’t really help you. I don’t make much money. It’s not what I do.”

“What do you mean making money is not what you do?” the person asks. “Everyone needs money!”

Not one to let a chance go by to point out a misconception, you confirm that of course most people need money, but that not everyone needs to make money. As examples you point to monks and nuns, the children of rich people, people who have inherited a lot of money, criminals who have stolen enough, and so on.

You explain that you do have a part-time job, but that you make just enough money to pay rent, buy food, pay the bills, and do something fun every now and then. Any extra money is saved so that you can afford to visit your family every year or two.

After going back and forth it might emerge that you do in fact try to make more money.

“Yes,” you admit. “That is so.”

You’re not stupid, you say. You are aware of the benefits of having more money than what you need to buy necessities and pay for necessary things. “So I try to make a little more money, but again, it’s not my first priority.”

“You don’t have children, do you?” the other person asks.

“No,” you reply. “For that I will indeed need a lot more money.”

“If making money is not your first priority, then what is?” the other person asks, by now visibly irritated.

“Like every other human being on this planet,” you start after striking an appropriate pose, “including the man or woman who lovingly raises a family, the man or woman who worships a god in great sincerity, and the man or woman who consumes large quantities of drugs or alcohol my first priority is to try and make my own life worth living. I have discovered that there are things that cost relatively little money that actually make me feel like my life is worth living, much more than was the case when I was merely trying to make as much money as possible and not much else.

“If by who I am and what I do I end up contributing to other people also being more convinced that their lives are worth living,” you add after a brief pause, “that is also good.

“But,” you say, circling back to the start of the conversation, “unfortunately I simply do not make enough money at the current moment to contribute much to this very noble cause.”

Would that be good enough for your interlocutor?

That will be the day.

______________________

FRIDAY, 23 JANUARY 2015

The One Minute Millionaire is a 2002 book written by Mark Victor Hansen and Robert Allen that explains how you might be able to make one million dollars in thirty days. The process is explained by way of a story about a woman who has just lost her husband. She is in her thirties, with two children, a meagre income, and in-laws that threaten to declare her incompetent and take away her children. She makes an agreement with them that if she succeeds in making one million dollars in one month, they will leave her alone. If she fails, she loses her children. Her desperation is exactly what she needs to shock her into action – more specifically, to approach a woman she has identified as a successful entrepreneur and ask her for advice.

For me, desperation was never enough to achieve any kind of success with any of the ways I have tried to make money since 2006. Or, as I thought on many occasions, perhaps I wasn’t desperate enough. I have always had a roof over my head, and I have no children looking at me with hunger in their eyes.

That I was, however, desperate to make money was beyond doubt. This proved to be problematic for several reasons:

1. I didn’t have money to use as seed capital.

2. I was aware of my desperation, and this awareness further undermined my self-esteem.

3. I therefore never had enough confidence to approach other people in order to ask them to work with me. I was afraid they would see me for what I was: a desperate man who needed their help.

4. If you are desperate, you don’t have time for something that will only start bringing in money in six months or a year’s time; you need money immediately.

5. Because you can’t commit to a long-term project or business you tend to jump from one idea to another.

6. Lack of seed capital, lack of confidence and reduced self-esteem, and jumping from one project to another are all factors that reduce probability of success. Your almost inevitable lack of success after three months, six months, two years, three years … make you even more desperate.

TUESDAY, 3 FEBRUARY 2015

I also have a history of issues with identity. In my writing I made capital from it, but it cannot be denied that I still struggle with it. Of course I know who I am … but where? when? with whom?

If I had decided early in 2006 I AM WEBSITES – the business of creating a website for other people or creating websites to sell, the desperation would still have had an effect but I would have overcome it quicker. If I had decided I AM SHORT REPORTS, desperation would also have had an effect, but it would eventually have faded. If I had to decide I AM SPORTSBETTING, it would still have taken me two or three years to become successful, but I wouldn’t have wasted time with anything else. The same can be said about Forex trading or sports trading or freelance writing or social media marketing for other people.

The problem was not only that I was desperate for cash, I also had no idea about “who” I wanted to be. As usual, I wanted to do everything, because everything looked good.

This is still a problem every time I am confronted with more than one option.

* * *

To be able to function and make a claim for a place in the sun we need to initially discover and eventually decide who we are and who we want to be, and then focus on being this person. If we change identity every second month – “My name is not John anymore, it’s now Tienzin, and I don’t eat hamburgers anymore because I’m now a vegetarian” – we will struggle to make a success of whatever it is we want to do.

______________________