General Interest Archives - Page 9 of 57

When will you climb Mt. Everest?

One of my favorite fictional characters, Travis McGee, complains that there is no point in retiring when you are too old to enjoy retirement. Hence, he takes his retirement in installments. As soon has he has enough money to coast for a while, he retires until the money runs out. Rinse. Repeat.

Do you have a list of things you would like to do some day? And is that “some day” likely to get postponed until you are too old to actually do those things?

You should consider doing these things now. I can hear people whining that they can’t drop what they are doing and start taking off on vacations. But when you really think about it, whatever you are doing for your day job, you can really take time off (and save enough money) to do the things in your to-do list. My friend Ketan loves traveling and has traveled to the remotest corners of the world. Probably over 40 different countries. And some of these trips take more than a month. He has a wife (who is also working) and a kid (who’s in school) and yet they all manage to take time off for these trips. And he managed to found and run a startup while doing all this. Are you really more busy than him?

This line of thought was triggered by an e-mail from my father-in-law who is preparing to trek to Mt. Everest Base Camp at the age of 64. He has loved travelling and adventure, but unfortunately when he was young, circumstances were such that he could not indulge. So now, he is trying to make up and has already been to Antartica amongst many other places. Mind you, he hasn’t yet retired – he is running a very successful business while he is doing this. He just sent us this e-mail on the eve of his trip to Everest Base Camp that makes for interesting reading:

Since the time I read during my school-times that Edmund Hillary climbed Mt Everest, it has been my wish to get a feel of the great mountain. With my completion of the other trekking and visits to breezing cold places like [Antartica] and trekking to places like Mansarovar-Kailash Parikrama (19,800 ft altitude), Amarnath, Uttaranchal mountains, Hem Kund, etc, I thought of making it to Mt. Everest also. At one stage, I accepted the fact that with advancing age; I should give up this idea. I was disappointed by the things I didn’t do twenty years back than by the ones I did do. However during the cruise to Antarctica, my meetings during the 18 days of journey together with the current world fame mountaineer Mr. Peter Hillary (son of Mr. Edmond Hillary) inspired me that I must try to fulfill my child-hood ambition of embracing Mt. Everest.

God willing, I will be trekking Mt. Everest starting 10 April 2008. With 14 days of steep trekking of 7-10 hours each day, I surely wish to complete it atleast up to the base camp (before the peak Summit). Going further ahead would depend on the various circumstances prevailing then.

Many well wishers have raised the question whether it is right on my part to take this trip at this age. No doubt, I have been told that It is one of the toughest physical and mental challenges one will ever face as it is a difficult and demanding trek in (a) sub-zero temp –10 to -20 deg C (b) heavy chilly wind (c) at a very high altitude with (d) with acute shortage of oxygen. So, it sounds difficult, but I think I am different, so it may not be difficult.

All my above adventures so far, without exception, were with my better half Pushpa. However, this time I will miss her a lot as she has dropped out as her knees may not stand to the strenuous trekking of Mt. Everest. I have been waiting for another company for the last 1-2 years without success and hence I have decided to go all alone, an adventure in my own way. I will hire out a guide/porter to carry baggage from Kathmandu.

Hope I carry your good wishes and surely will have a lot to share with you, on my return.

When are you going to Mt. Everest?

Taaz.com is way too much fun

Taaz.com is a very easy to use online service that allows you to give any photo a makeover:

This was the original:

If you look closely (by clicking on the photo to get the full size version), you’ll notice that I’ve applied lipstick, foundation, blush, blue contact lenses, mascara, and of course, changed the hairstyle. For each one of those, there are many different options to choose from. Obviously, the “doctoring” of the photo is very visible, but I did not spend too much time trying to get it just right. I have other things to do.

But, try Taaz.com yourself. You’ll have lots of fun.

Why I cannot resist surfing the web

Apparently, scientists are doing research into why I spend so much time surfing the web (and indeed why you are reading this). New information, or information that needs to be analyzed gives us a high. Wall Street Journal has an article about this research:

Dr. Biederman first showed a collection of photographs to volunteer test subjects, and found they said they preferred certain kinds of pictures (monkeys in a tree or a group of houses along a river) over others (an empty parking lot or a pile of old paint cans).

The preferred pictures had certain common features, including a good vantage on a landscape and an element of mystery. In one way or another, said Dr. Biederman, they all presented new information that somehow needed to be interpreted.

When he hooked up volunteers to a brain-scanning machine, the preferred pictures were shown to generate much more brain activity than the unpreferred shots. While researchers don’t yet know what exactly these brain scans signify, a likely possibility involves increased production of the brain’s pleasure-enhancing neurotransmitters called opioids.

In other words, coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom.

It is something we seem hard-wired to do, says Dr. Biederman. When you find new information, you get an opioid hit, and we are junkies for those. You might call us ‘infovores.’ ”

For most of human history, there was little chance of overdosing on information, because any one day in the Olduvai Gorge was a lot like any other. Today, though, we can find in the course of a few hours online more information than our ancient ancestors could in their whole lives.

Apparently, this is hardwired into our brain due to evolutionary forces. Just like cats and laser pointers:

Many cat owners know that the lasers are the easiest way to keep the pet amused. The cats will ceaselessly, maniacally chase it as it’s beamed about the room, literally climbing the walls to capture what they surely regard as some form of ultimate prey.

Obviously, cats are hard-wired to hunt down small, bright objects, like birds. But since nothing in nature is as bright as a laser, they are powerless to resist its charms.

[…]

Watching a cat play with a laser, you realize the cat never learns there is no real “prey” there. You can show the cat the pointer, clicking it off and on, and it will remain transfixed.

But we can hope that:

People presumably are smarter than cats, and as we become more familiar with the Web and its torrent of information, maybe we’ll do a better job learning what is useful and what isn’t.

Then again, maybe not.

See full article.