The basic idea of Dr. Andrulis’ framework is that all physical reality can be modeled by a single geometric entity with life-like characteristics: the gyre. The so-called “gyromodel” depicts objects—particles, atoms, chemicals, molecules, and cells—as quantized packets of energy and matter that cycle between excited and ground states around a singularity, the gyromodel’s center. A singularity is itself modeled as a gyre, wholly compatible with the thermodynamic and fractal nature of life. An example of this nested, self-similar organization is the Russian Matryoshka doll.

Talk about thinking outside the box! The abstract of Dr. Andrulis’ paper provides an even better summary of his theory:

Abstract: Life is an inordinately complex unsolved puzzle. Despite significant theoretical progress, experimental anomalies, paradoxes, and enigmas have revealed paradigmatic limitations. Thus, the advancement of scientific understanding requires new models that resolve fundamental problems. Here, I present a theoretical framework that economically fits evidence accumulated from examinations of life. This theory is based upon a straightforward and non-mathematical core model and proposes unique yet empirically consistent explanations for major phenomena including, but not limited to, quantum gravity, phase transitions of water, why living systems are predominantly CHNOPS (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur), homochirality of sugars and amino acids, homeoviscous adaptation, triplet code, and DNA mutations. The theoretical framework unifies the macrocosmic and microcosmic realms, validates predicted laws of nature, and solves the puzzle of the origin and evolution of cellular life in the universe.

The abstract and a link to the 105 page article (PDF) is provided here. I skimmed through the PDF, and could probably develop a decent understanding of the theory if I spent the rest of my life on it. But I think I’ll wait for the Cliff Notes version.

Anyway, this is a totally new approach to looking at the origin of life, and a totally new way of modeling quantum gravity. Further development of the theory could lead to the theory of everything that scientists have been seeking for about a century. Who knows … given that the gyre has life-like characteristics, maybe the theory can even explain consciousness, which is perhaps the greatest mystery of all.

Dr. Anrulis’ work confirms that we sometimes have to get way outside the box to make advances in thinking and understanding.

Update: An Ars Technica article is very critical of the theory and the “peer review process” that allowed it to not only be published but also promoted. It does seem a bit incredible, and does not really propose any means of testing its validity. Hence, while innovative, it probably lacks what it needs most: some resemblance to the truth of how things really are.

I think Google + is what Facebook should have been. But it’s years too late. When I set up a G+ account, I figured several of my friends and family from FB would follow me on it, but only a few did. They are still using just FB and not posting on other social media sites.

I found G+ to be pretty interesting, at first, but now it’s sort of old hat … I don’t see anything on it that I didn’t see first on FB, techmeme, or Twitter. There are a few good discussions but they are buried amongst too much self-serving crap.

And then there is the annoyance of notifications. Everyday I get notified once or twice that 5 or 10 people have followed me. But a few days later my follow count is back to about what it was, suggesting that they only followed me to get me to follow them, and then unfollowed me when I didn’t. It’s the same follow game that’s played on Twitter, and it’s just annoying. I send all my Twitter notifications about new followers to the trash can — I began doing this sometime ago, after discerning that it’s just “spam bots” or social media “zealots” that are following. But, I can’t do that with G+, so I am just deleting it altogether.

I think quitting G+ will help me get a bit more focus in my life, along with deleting my posterous and tumblr accounts, and training myself to spend less time on the few social media sites I will keep (FB, twitter).”

Admittedly, the Tumblr and Posterous accounts were not actually distracting me, because I haven’t posted to them in a long while. They were experiments that didn’t pan out.

But, I suspect my subconscious still had to deal with the occasional question of “why not post to Tumblr/Posterous today?” So, hopefully deleting them frees my mind up a tad bit more.

Do you have any social media accounts that are more distracting than useful?

In Danny Sullivan’s summary of Google Zeitgeist conference, he quotes Google cofounder Larry Page as saying

There are no companies that have good slow decisions. There are only good companies that have fast decisions.

Larry had apparently deduced this from analyzing data from lots and lots of corporations. He apparently also had in mind that Google had not acted fast enough regarding a recent Motorola decision.

But, does his quote make for sound advice? It seems to me, as an outsider looking in, that Apple makes slow and thoughtful decisions. Do they perhaps miss some opportunities? Sure. We are Always going to miss some opportunities. Every one of us, from individuals to the most successful companies.

And Ray Dalio, head of the world’s most successful hedge fund, also focuses on making slow, but correct, decisions, as noted in this highly interesting interview of him.

The key of course is to make the Right decisions … sometimes you can do that with due speed, but often it takes a thoughtful approach with a lot of weighing of pro’s and con’s.

Back to the point about missed opportunities, Jeff Bezos emphasized, in this Bloomberg discussion of the Kindle Fire, that Amazon focuses on opportunities:

Bezos says he doesn’t think defensively.

“Everything we do is driven by seeing opportunity rather than being worried about defending,” he says. Given Apple’s inroads into the media business, that’s hard to believe. Bezos is magnanimous toward Jobs.

“On a personal level we have a tremendous amount of respect for Apple and Steve. I think that’s returned,” he says. “Our cultures start in the same place. Both companies like to invent, both companies like to pioneer, both companies start with the customer and work backwards. There’s a like-mindedness.” Pause. “Are two companies like Amazon and Apple occasionally going to step on each other’s toes? Yes.”

In thinking back over my 62 years on this little planet, I’d say that I sure could have benefitted from being more focused on opportunity than on “defense.” I can think of way too many opportunities that I let go, thinking that they would come again, never to see them again. And, sometimes I let opportunities pass because I didn’t see them at the time. Sometimes you are not going to see an opportunity if you don’t have an opportunity-mindset.

That’s it for today. Lots for you to think about (for example, did Larry Page draw the wrong conclusions from the data he looked at, because of one recent experience? If so, how would you avoid doing it yourself? Are there opportunities in your life that you have just been overlooking? [You have to take some time to really think on this one.} And so on.)

It seems like we are learning something new in this area almost every day. For example, yesterday’s New York Times recently carried an article on how scarcity of dollars (poverty) and scarcity of time (the average overworked person in the US) can negatively impact thinking, and even IQ. As if the poor weren’t stricken enough, they get a double-whammy:

A quick question: What is the starting taxi fare in your city? If you are like most upper-middle-class people, you don’t know. If you are like many struggling people, you do know. Poorer people have to think hard about a million things that affluent people don’t. They have to make complicated trade-offs when buying a carton of milk: If I buy milk, I can’t afford orange juice. They have to decide which utility not to pay.

These questions impose enormous cognitive demands. The brain has limited capacities. If you increase demands on one sort of question, it performs less well on other sorts of questions.

Shafir and Mullainathan gave batteries of tests to Indian sugar farmers. After they sell their harvest, they live in relative prosperity. During this season, the farmers do well on the I.Q. and other tests. But before the harvest, they live amid scarcity and have to think hard about a thousand daily decisions. During these seasons, these same farmers do much worse on the tests. They appear to have lower I.Q.’s. They have more trouble controlling their attention. They are more shortsighted. Scarcity creates its own psychology.

And, regarding scarcity of time:

Princeton students don’t usually face extreme financial scarcity, but they do face time scarcity. In one game, they had to answer questions in a series of timed rounds, but they could borrow time from future rounds. When they were scrambling amid time scarcity, they were quick to borrow time, and they were nearly oblivious to the usurious interest rates the game organizers were charging. These brilliant Princeton kids were rushing to the equivalent of payday lenders, to their own long-term detriment.

The world-wide impact of these findings is staggering, given that almost half the people on this planet live on less than $2 each/day, and given that scarcity of time impacts almost everyone in the Western world. While I don’t know that any of us, individually, can do much to help those who have the problem of scarcity of time, most of us can do more to help those who are poor. One way to do this is through donations to organizations in your area that help the poor. Another is to use a trusted international organization, such as World Vision.

As to the broad topic of behavioral economics, Edge.org has a master class on the topic. I have yet to go through all of the items (it is extensive), but have been fascinated by what I’ve learned from it so far. Of course, the books referenced above are also excellent resources.

“She’s done. She’s been on this cross-country bus tour to promote her folksy ways, and now she has quit halfway through. This is a woman with a very short attention span and a complete lack of discipline and focus; she couldn’t complete her governorship, she can’t finish a bus tour, there’s no way she could cope with a grueling presidential campaign. And if, by some bizarre fluke, she were to actually get elected, I think she’d get bored halfway through the presidential oath of office and decide to go moose hunting, instead.”

I don’t worry about the impact of this on the political scene. I worry that this sort of behavior is representative of a growing segment of our society.

So, we would have no qualms in recommending mentoring/counselors to our friends as an avenue for further growth.

But, what about when we ask whether we ourselves are providing enough mentoring and counseling?

I recently came upon a pastor’s highlights of a typical pastor’s week. The key thing that stood out to me were the number of times he provided mentoring and counseling, with some of those instances being:

• Talked to a pastor ready to quit
• Talked with a man questioning his marriage
• Helped a pastor think through strategic change
• Talked to parents distressed over a son who got in trouble
• Wrote 9 blog posts
• Met with a staff member considering a new direction for his ministry
• Talked to a husband thinking his marriage is over
• Helped a businessman think through organizational changes

I began to wonder if I am doing enough mentoring. And, while I now think I probably am, things that I often considered just a lunch with a friend was considered by many of those friends as receiving some mentoring.

One thing I know, which you might not have realized yet, is that: anyone who has worked in an area for thousands of hours has the ability to mentor others.

Since I don’t want to come across as preachy, I’ll let this be the end of the post. I don’t like to be preachy … I just like to share information that I believe might be helpful to you, and let you think about how to apply it in your life.

Take care.

And, I had not even planned to write today, until I came across an article that is so inspiring that I felt that I must recommend it to you: Jon Morrow’s On Dying, Mothers, and Fighting for Your Ideas. Technically, Jon should have died before he was two. Instead, he is 27 and highly successful, thanks to the impassioned actions of his mother, along with his own determination. Did prayer make a difference, too? I don’t know. Maybe. I would even say probably. Regardless, I do know that action and determination made a huge difference.

If you have already read it, read it again. There is so much that we can learn from this story that it’s hard to absorb it all with just one reading. You might even want to write down what you have learned it.

And he does load himself up, and has all of his life, because he wants to make sure he can contribute as much as possible in this life. Anyway, after our chat, I thought to myself that it’s better to take on too much than to take on too little. When you get to the end of your life and look back, if you are a reflective person, you are either going to conclude that you took on too much or that you took on too little. No reflective person would consider that they had bitten off just the right amount.

I say all that to get you to think about whether you are living life at the right tempo. Frankly, I feel that I have not bitten off enough, and I believe I need to pick up the pace and take more on. (Yes, being retired gives me an excuse, but I still have to face looking back on my life when I come to the end of it … I don’t want to be too disappointed.)

Another way of looking at this is to ask yourself whether you want to live life to the fullest or whether you will be satisfied with less.

Anyway, something to think about.

“That Keener sure did know a lot.”

With another friend saying

“Yes, but it would have been better if he known less and had done more.”

And another one said

“Yeah, he sure didn’t do much with all he knew.”

Ouch. Obviously my conscience was talking to me.

So, I thought over my actions of the past several months and found that I had been spending a lot of time on Twitter, using it to find links to a lot of articles to read. And, I had been spending a lot of time reading articles through my RSS feeds, and reading one book after another. Yet, I could not think of a single instance in which I had really enriched anyone’s life.

I had become an information addict. Acquiring information had become a focus in my life.

I had let what could be a strength (learning new things) turn into Resistance to Worthwhile Action. While you might not be an information addict, you too probably have resistance in your life, so I want to say a few words about it.

Steven Pressfield, in his highly acclaimed The War of Art, talks about resistance as if it were something external to us. In fact, he claims that demons, and even the devil, make up Resistance, noting that their aim is to keep you from accomplishing your destiny. (Scott Peck had some of this theme in one of his Road Less Traveled books, where he talked about how he had come to view his time as God’s time, and how he had become determined to not waste any of God’s time.)

A more prevalent view is one described by Seth Godin in his book Linchpin. He devotes an entire chapter to Resistance, and talks about how the oldest part of our brain (which he calls the lizard brain) fears change, and works to keep us from changing and from doing anything it doesn’t consider to be in our best interests.

I’m inclined to think there is some truth to both views. Regardless, I do believe it pays for us to look at where there is resistance in our lives. Pressfield would say that the areas where we encounter the most resistance are the most important ones, the ones most worthy of our attention and effort.

Of course it will do no good to just acknowledge that there are areas where you face resistance. Ultimately we have to do something to deal with it. In my case of information addiction, where it is causing me to spend time unwisely, I have taken the action of abandoning Twitter for at least a month. I’m also working on getting a handle on purchasing books, to cut down to something reasonable.

Regular readers may be wondering if I am now saying that we should not be constant learners. No, I am not saying that. In fact, I was pleased with my buddy Paul Stamatiou for his article yesterday on how he switched from WordPress to Jekyll … one of Paul’s motivations was to do this just so he could learn. (I also love that Paul shares what he learns.) Many has been the time when I have taken something on just so I could learn from it. I do not plan to stop doing that … it is part of my nature. And, I still strongly believe that we have to keep learning just to ensure our brains stay in shape and so that we can develop fresh insights, instead of remaining stale.

But, ultimately there must be balance, even in our efforts to learn. The clock is constantly ticking, and, in the end, it’s what we get done that will matter, not what we knew.

I decided to try a small change to help me break an addiction to Twitter, and it has worked wonderfully. A couple of weeks ago, I moved the Twitter apps off of the home page on my iPhone and iPad, and that has been all it has taken to keep me off Twitter for since that time. When I had Twitter on my home screen, I was checking it more than 20 times a day. But, with it out of sight, it is out of mind, and I must say that I feel so much better. Not that I really have anything against Twitter, but it was getting to the point that it was “owning me.” (I may go back to it in time, or I may not … I’m undecided.)

In the post I linked above, I mentioned a couple of books that talk about the importance of baby steps. I also came across a Stanford study that mentions it:

I believe you can find this concept useful in your life. If you have a success story about using it, it would be great to hear from you in the comments.