by Justin on May 17, 2013
I was raised Christian, and first believed, as I was told, that God created people.
When I was old enough to start reasoning, I heard about evolution as well as many of the holes that people try to poke in it (for example “Imagine a hurricane going through a junkyard and accidentally assembling a Boeing 747. That’s the kind of random chance required by evolution – it’s nuts!”)
The idea that random chance caused all life on earth did seem to me like a crazy idea. But an all-powerful God sitting outside the universe pulling invisible strings seemed like an equally crazy idea. I realized it didn’t make sense to reject one crazy idea (evolution) only to replace it with another crazy idea (God) for which I had no evidence.
So for a long time my opinion on how we came to exist was an agnostic “I don’t know.” [click to continue…]
by Justin on April 30, 2013
I know someone who has over 2 million followers on Google Plus. Inspired by her success, I decided to dust off my profile that I’d never really used and spend a month becoming a G+ celebrity like her.
I didn’t have a concrete goal, but hoped that I’d make interesting or useful connections with people, learn new things, drive traffic to this blog, and get some exposure for the company I work for.
I spent about an hour a day on G+. I updated my profile, followed a whole lot of people, joined communities based on my interests, participated in discussions, and created & shared posts.
It was hard. Not hard like climbing Mount Everest hard, but [click to continue…]
by Justin on March 30, 2013
A typical night’s sleep from BEFORE I started polyphasic sleeping. This graph is from the night of Feb 11. Each bar in the graph represents 5 minutes of sleep. Time awake is 0:00 because it only counts only times woken up DURING the night; not time awake before falling asleep or after waking up in the morning.
They say there’s a way to add more waking hours into each day. It’s called “polyphasic sleep”. I’ve always wanted more waking hours (who wouldn’t?) so I decided to try polyphasic sleep for a month.
The idea is that by having naps throughout the day (“polyphasic sleep”), rather than by sleeping just once at night (“monophasic sleep”), you can get by on dramatically less sleep overall. [click to continue…]
by Justin on February 27, 2013
Kale: A common food during my vegan month.
While I was doing the Paleo Diet last year, an acquaintance suggested that I try eating vegan. In his opinion it was healthier, and he pointed out that some top athletes are vegan.
So last month I finally gave the vegan diet a try, and something happened that I never expected (more on that later). [click to continue…]
by Justin on January 6, 2013
Tonglen is a meditation where you visualize yourself inhaling the suffering of others (taking their suffering upon yourself), and exhaling love and compassion back to them. I did it for 30 minutes every day (almost) for the month of December. I’ve meditated before, but this was my first time doing Tonglen.
Why
My goal was not to actually reduce the suffering of anyone else. If that happened I wasn’t going to complain, but it wasn’t something that I expected. Rather I hoped that Tonglen meditation would affect me. [click to continue…]
