Tag: Switzerland

Thinking Differently

Thinking Differently

The New Moon and Uranus team up to get you out of the box…

Jeff Jawer    Jeff Jawer on the topics of uranus, sagittarius, new moon, blogs, astrology

 

The fires of imagination are burning this week, kicked off by Monday’s incendiary New Moon in Sagittarius. This visionary sign is more interested in flying past the limits of ordinary life than hunkering down and struggling with its mundane details. Adventurous instincts stir escapist urges as we see ourselves flying away to beaches in Tahiti, ski slopes in Switzerland and ashrams in Tibet. Travel is a natural desire of the Sagittarian spirit, which can sometimes seem like a childish flight from reality. Yet the message of this week’s New Moon is especially apt at a time when most of the leaders and institutions we depend upon lack answers to our biggest questions

The current framework of ideas, our collective menu of intellectual choices, is severely limited by conventional thinking. Neither the capitalist’s eternally expanding economy or the socialist’s communal society are dreams that are likely to come true any time soon. Financial and environmental disasters come and go and could, sadly, occur more frequently in these changing times. The search for solutions runs into walls of philosophical differences where winning today’s political and profit games blinds us with short-sightedness. As personal and institutional pressures to survive increase the capacity to seek long-term solutions diminishes, especially when the strongest convictions are held by religions that promise a better life beyond planet Earth rather than a fulfilling one on it.

Back to solid ground

Unless you’re ready for the Rapture or interested in an extra-terrestrial intervention, we need to put our feet and our aspirations back on terra firma and look for ways to continue the human adventure on this beautiful blue planet. Fortunately, this Sagittarius New Moon is charged up with a creative trine from innovative Uranus that can break open our fields of inquiry and provide radically different perspectives on our current situation.

“You can’t solve a problem on the same level you created it” is a statement credited to Albert Einstein. The former patent examiner who revolutionized physics recognized the value of looking outside the box, which is exactly how Uranus works. This transpersonal planet’s trine with the Sagittarius Sun-Moon conjunction stretches minds and sparks intuitive insights that might seem impractical at first. Uranus breaks the walls of consciousness to present perspectives that shake our present view of reality. What we see often seems weird and worthless, yet could be exactly what we need.

In the end, it’s all about the journey

A good way to work with this Uranus influenced New Moon is to recognize when you’re imprisoned by your thoughts. The choices that we think we have are generally interpreted as the only ones possible, yet this Sagittarius lunation can burn off old beliefs and free us to look and live happily outside the box. Consider your usual assumptions as the starting points of a journey of discovery rather than the end of the road. Imagine that you have a mental laboratory where you get to experiment with “weird” ideas, the ones that don’t make sense right now but might prove meaningful later. Give yourself the freedom to speculate and make mistakes because Uranus’ gifts don’t come in neat packages. They arrive as messy, strange and sometimes uncomfortable notions that are habitually rejected out of hand. This holiday season give yourself the gift of weirdness, because it’s when you escape conventional thinking that you’re most likely to come up with the most brilliant and valuable answers.

Your Animal Spirit forAugust 29: The Black Swan

Your Animal Spirit for Today
August 29, 2012

Black Swan

Wherever the Black Swan appears in your reading you can expect unexpected and unpredictable events to majorly impact your life in that aspect.  Beyond noting that the influences Black Swan indicates will be extraordinarily large in scope, it may be difficult to tell if the fortune it foretells will be good or bad.  Black Swan affected events may begin so subtly that they are very difficult to identify.  When trying to discover what the Black Swan portends for you, look for events that do not occur in your life regularly or at all.

A pill that creates the desire to exercise?

By Melissa Breyer

Scientists have discovered a compound that could make sit-ups and StairMasters as attractive as snacks and the sofa.

 

More than one-third of U.S. adults are obese. Obesity-related conditions (heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetesand certain types of cancer) comprise the nation’s leading causes of death. When it comes to the competition between food and exercise, food clearly wins the blue ribbon.

But it’s not for lack of desire. Type in “motivation to exercise” in Google and prepare yourself for 61,900,000 results. It’s just hard to get into the rhythm of going to the gym. So hard, in fact, that people often opt for wacky weight loss fads (diet goggles, anyone?) and questionable diets instead (hello, feeding tube diet). Or, they simply surrender to obesity.
But as researchers are struggling to create safe and effective weight loss drugs, what if there was a pill to make you want to work out? As science fiction seemingly comes to life, it may become a reality. A team of Swiss researchers found that when a hormone in the brain called erythropoietin (Epo) was elevated in mice, the mice were more motivated to exercise.
“Here we show that Epo increases the motivation to exercise,” said Max Gassmann, D.V.M., a researcher involved in the work from the Institute of Veterinary Physiology, Vetsuisse-Faculty and Zurich Center for Integrative Human Physiology at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.
Pop a pill and champ at the bit to hit the gym? This would have remarkable benefits for a wide range of health problems — obesity, obviously, but also mental health disorders for which exercise is known to improve symptoms.
“If you can’t put exercise in a pill, then maybe you can put the motivation to exercise in a pill instead,” said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., editor-in-chief of The FASEB Journal, which published the research. “As more and more people become overweight and obese, we must attack the problem from all angles. Maybe the day will come when gyms are as easily found as fast-food restaurants.”
Now if they can just come up with a pill that motivates you to clean the house.

 

Earth Science Pic for April 9th – Bubble Columns in River Ice (Hmm..)

Bubble Columns in River Ice

April 09, 2012RiverIceBubblesIMG_1123_LR
Photographer: Roger Benoit
Summary Author: Roger Benoit; Jim Foster

This picture showing curious bubbles on the frozen Aar River was taken this past winter near Umiken, Aargau, Switzerland. It had been bitterly cold for several days prior to when the photo was snapped. It’s not known exactly how these bubbles formed, but it’s likely they were released from the riverbed and became trapped under a thin layer of ice. As deeper layers of water froze, perhaps additional bubbles became trapped further down in the ice — closer to the riverbed. Such a mechanism would also explain the flat appearance of individual inclusions. Typically, the faster the freezing rate, the greater the number and the size of the bubbles. In this case, the arrival of very cold air substantially increased the freezing rate. Note that the inside of one of the near-surface bubbles has been exposed (at right center). Photo taken on February 12, 2012.

Celebrations Around the World, January 2nd

Hags Day
Berchtoldstag (Nut Festival; Switzerland)
Run It Up the Flagpole and See If Anybody Salutes It Day
Festival of Fetishes
Ancestry Day (Haiti)
David Letterman Day (North Carolina)
Kakizome (First Writing; Japan)
Festival of Four Winds and All Sky
St. Adelard’s Day (patron of gardeners)
Good Luck Day (Macedonia)
Shigoto Hajime (Beginning of Work Day; Japan)
Advent of Isis
Granada Day (Spain)
Port Arthur Day
St. Macarius’ Day (patron of pastry cooks)
National Science Fiction Day
Feast of the Martyrs for the Holy Scripture
St. Gregory of Nazianzus’ Day
Revolution Day (Cuba)
St. Bercholt’s Day (patron of Switzerland)
Nativity of Our Lady Inanna (Sumerian Goddess)
St. Basil’s Day (Western; patron of hospital administrators, Russia)
Miniature Golf Day
Good Luck Day (Macedonia)
St. Seraphim of of Sarov’s Day
National Cream Puff Day
St. Macarius of Alexandria’s Day (patron of pastry cooks)

Earth Science Pic for Sept. 28th – Cloud Carpet Across the Alps

Cloud Carpet Across the Alps

September 28, 2011

Cloud_carpet

Photographer: Hans van Hoogstraten; Hans’s Web page
Summary Author: Hans van Hoogstraten; Jim Foster

 

This stratocumulus cloud deck is blanketing the Jungfrau, the third highest mountain of the Bernese Alps, after Finsteraarhorn and Aletschhorn. The photo was snapped at approximately 11,500 ft (3,505 m) above sea level. At such altitudes, mountain slopes are still snow covered even in mid to late summer, as can be seen in the foreground. On this day, it seemed as though you could walk across the billowy carpet of clouds to the adjacent ranges. Photo taken on July 25, 2011.

Earth Science Pic for Sept. 19th – Portjengrat

Portjengrat

September 19, 2011

Zoltan.nemeth.portjengrat 
Photographer: Zoltan Nemeth
Summary Authors: Zoltan Nemeth; Stu Witmer

Recently my friends and I climbed the Weissmies massif (13,198 ft or 4,023 m) in southern Switzerland. We began our climb early in the morning, and by the time the Sun rose we had reached an altitude of 9,495 ft (2,894 m) and the climber’s base at the Almageller hut. The clouds parted and the brilliant Sun filled the landscape dominated by the neighboring Portjengrat peak (11,995 ft or 3,656 m) shown above, which stands on the border between Switzerland and Italy where it’s known as Pizzo d’Andolla. These peaks are part of the Pennine Alps, relatively new mountains that were created during the last 30 million years (Oligocene and Miocene epochs) by the tectonic collision of Africa against Eurasia. Photo taken July 7, 2011.

Photo details: Camera Model: Panasonic DMC-TZ6; Focal Length: 5mm; Aperture: f4.5/5; Exposure Time: 1/500s; ISO equiv: 80; Exposure Bias: none; Metering Mode: Matrix; Exposure: program (Auto); White Balance: Auto; Light Source: Unknown; Flash Fired: No; Color Space: sRGB.