How to lose weight (about 10 kilos) in five days?

Turns out it’s pretty simple, besides it won’t cost you a penny (no pills, no specific treatment or fancy therapies), but there’s a downside — it’s a bit tough.

 All you have to do is move house ....all by yourself, providing of course it’s no less than about 1 km (the upper limit is up to you) away from you actual abode. Literally.

That's how full your trolleys should look

Which means doing it without removals van, or any external help, just with a wheel barrow, supermarket trolley or, if you prefer the hardest way, any board with wheels. Mind that first you have to take your things down from at least the third floor and then probably drag it all up to at least the second floor without using the lift. Granted, you probably won’t be able to handle things like fridges, cookers or wardrobes, but the rest is within your reach.

Another absolute must is that it should be done in a hurry, so push your cart, supermarket trolley or whatever as fast as your fitness will let you and make about 40 trips each day. And don’t you dare stop to rest during the trips or have full meals in these five days.
Afterwards stick to a low-salt low-fat balanced diet to keep your so effortfully sculpted figure.

Trust me, it works. I know it for fact — the other day a friend of mine said no way she was paying removals company that much just to move her junk several streets away, in addition her car had just broken down, so she did it her way, that is, by hand. I have to mention, though, that she lives in a small town with no much traffic, I’m not sure you could pull it off in cities like New York or London.
A week later we could hardly believe our eyes when we saw her.

The moral of the story — sometimes stinginess really pays off.

Warning: don’t try this method if you have some medical condition!
Consult your doctor first.

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Great figures in opera? All gone.In Memoriam Cesare Siepi.

I’m kind of getting off the track here, but the other day I was having a casual conversation with a couple of friends on great opera singers of all times inspired by the recent death of Cesare Siepi which eventually ended in reflections on the demise of great figures in opera. Although with some delay I’d like to pay tribute to one of my favourite bass-baritones, because I owe moments of elevated joy to artists like him.

What can you say when a genius dies?

Bewail not life with its exhausting breath,

What’s life and death? But moan about the flame,

That over the whole creation blazed,

And parts into the night, weeping as it fades.

A. Fet (copyright © 2010 by Brainstorming Ideas)

Cesare Siepi

Brain-twister with answer.

1	15	5	12
8	10	4	9
11	6	16	2
14	3	13	7

A brain-teasing question this time. A 13-year old boy challenged us to an apparently simple riddle. I suspect he just couldn’t find the answer. Much to my shame, I’ll have to rack my brain for quite some time — I’ve never been on good terms with numbers.
Anyway, can you beat us to it?

Here goes the puzzle:

Cut this square in four parts and rearrange it so that the sum of the numbers in each column, each row and each diagonal equals 34.

What are the dangers of nanotechnology?

"Science is an edged tool, with which men play like children, and cut their own fingers"  — Arthur Eddington.

Most scientists will harangue us about the highly acclaimed newfangled panacea — “nanotech”, that is basically controlling matter or building machines which could re-order matter on a molecular and atomic scale. It usually deals with 1 to 100 nanometre structures. The concept was first used by Richard Feynman to describe the possibility of manipulating individual atoms and molecules using a set of precise tools, which in plain language means we could take the building blocks of matter and create literally anything. That of course after we had got around certain problems, such as gravity losing ground to surface tension and van der Waals attraction, etc.

Breaking down the Bible. Genesis, 3 The Fall.

“I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modelled after our own — a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty." — Albert Einstein.

This is a crucial event in the book and history of mankind, because this is the point where all our misfortunes began...

Despite the fact that it should be taken as an allegory, something terrible must have happened. We became weak slavish mortals; lost all privileges and were ousted from the paradise.

The Fall.

(Capella Sistina. Michelangelo)

String Theory — The Music of The Spheres? M-theory (Superstring theory) and Brane cosmology.

String theory simplified and poeticised.

Wünschelrute
Schläft ein Lied in allen Dingen
Die da träumen fort und fort,
Und die Welt hebt an zu singen,
Triffst du nur das Zauberwort.
(Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff)

Magic wand
Sleeps a song inside all things
Dreaming in the spellbound world,
That will waken up to sing,
If you sound the magic word.

(Proverbs. Sentence poem by Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff)

Please don't copy without permission. Copyright © 2010  Brainstorming Ideas.)

String theory — science or philosophy?
This theory especially appeals to me because it’s based on a very musical idea — strings, and ‘music’, as Nietzsche put it, ‘is the true Idea of the World’ or in other words ‘world is materialised music’ (Schopenhauer).

This is what string theory is all about: the electrons, quarks and other particles are 1-dimensional oscillating "strings", possessing only the dimension of length. Their vibration determines the particles' flavour (quantum number of an elementary particle, which describes values of conserved quantities in the dynamics of the quantum system), charge, mass and spin. In addition, the superstring theory claims that a "supersymmetry" exists between bosons and fermions — force carriers and matter. But probably its most mind-boggling peculiarity is that such theory requires the existence of several extra unobservable dimensions — M-theory, for instance, puts forward eleven-dimensional space-time.

Quantum Entanglement Questions. Quantum Weirdness.

'We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.' — N. Bohr.

What I most love of quantum mechanics is that it is nondeterministic, which means that it’s generally doesn’t predict the outcome of any measurement with certainty. Instead, it just provides the probabilities of the outcomes, so that ‘measurements of a certain property done on two apparently identical systems can give different answers’ — to put it simply, the Truth is unfathomable. That’s how I’ve always perceived the universe and therefore life: governed by the uncertain definition inherent in its very core.

Quantum entanglement, also called the quantum non-local connection, is a property of a quantum mechanical state of a system of two or more objects in which their quantum states are linked together so that to describe one object you have to take into account its counterpart — even if they’re spatially separated.