The Flight Attendant Who Took Down The Dictator

Vesna Vulović isn't a household name anywhere outside of the country of Serbia. She should be for two reasons.

First, in late 2000 her home country of Serbia had some serious problems - most notably with their reviled president Slobodan Milošević. After soundly losing his presidential re-election, he refused to step down. He had good reason to - he wasn't a very nice guy to say the least. He was later indicted by the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for these atrocities:

• genocide; 
• complicity in genocide; 
• deportation; 
• murder; 
• persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds; 
• inhumane acts/forcible transfer; 
• extermination; 
• imprisonment; 
• torture; 
• willful killing; 
• unlawful confinement; 
• willfully causing great suffering; 
• unlawful deportation or transfer; 
• extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly; 
• cruel treatment; 
• plunder of public or private property; 
• attacks on civilians; 
• destruction or willful damage done to historic monuments and institutions dedicated to education or religion;
• unlawful attacks on civilian objects

What was Vesna's role? She was a very vocal voice in the revolution that overthrew him. She risked life and limb to rally her people to take down this bad guy. She was already somewhat of a celebrity whom the public adored - Why?

Well, that's the second reason she should be a household name. In 1972, she was a flight attendant on an airplane that disintegrated 6 miles (10 kilometers) in the air. She fell (without a parachute), landed, and sustained some serious injuries. She made a full recovery and was instantly a household name in her home country.

How did she survive? Was it a hoax? At the end of the day, the only thing that the people in Serbia would care about was that she made their lives better. She could have chosen to stay out of the public spotlight, but she didn't. It still makes one wonder how serendipitous these two amazing events were and just how much "luck" was involved.

Don't Believe Everything You See... Hear... Wait, What?

Watch the following 4 second video and pay close attention to the man's mouth.

http://youtu.be/HYgIiGaJ9_g

http://youtu.be/HYgIiGaJ9_g

You heard Dah Dah... Dah Dah... Dah Dah... right?

Play it again, but this time turn your head away from the screen and just listen. What did you hear?

You heard Bah Bah... Bah Bah... Bah Bah... right?

How can this be? Without going too deep into science, let's first accept the fact that this happens (well, to most people). The theory behind it is that your hearing is actually dependent upon what you see and not solely on what you hear. This is called an auditory illusion - similar to an optical illusion except the illusion is centered on what you hear. This particular illusion is called the McGurk effect. It was discovered - completely by accident - in 1976 by Harry McGurk.

1976 wasn't too long ago in the grand scheme of things. This means that mankind has been unknowingly sitting on this for thousands of years and it was right in front our faces the entire time. It makes one think: How many other illusions do we experience continuously but don't know it? This accentuates the point that you should listen to your other senses even if it isn't obvious at the time.

Do As The Animals Say And No One Will Get Hurt

Animals sense disaster, right? We've heard of all the stories of dogs barking before earthquakes, tornadoes, and the like. Are these stories true?

Here is National Geographic's take on it.

To save you some time from reading the article: Scientists don't know and they've given up on finding out.

Many animals have more keen senses than humans do. Dogs have better smell and hearing. Cats have superior night vision. Humans are better than animals at other senses (e.g., we can see better than dogs in plain light).

If you've owned pets, you may notice that sometimes they will go berserk for no apparent reason. Your dog will start barking at seemingly nothing and, more often than not, you will find whatever it was they were barking at. However over-sensitive they may appear, consider how many times that they've ever been wrong in reacting to something you didn't see, hear, or notice in any fashion? Not very often and most likely they've never been wrong - simply because we find whatever it was that bent them out of shape.

Smoke alarms alert you of fire. Carbon monoxide alarms alert you of carbon monoxide. Animals are danger alarms and they've been historically really good at it. Don't over-think it, rather, look at the results.

Your Daily Butterfly Effect

Admittedly, I woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning... Or was it that I need my cup of coffee? Or I'm having a case of 'The Mondays' on a Tuesday?

Something happened this morning that is setting my backdrop for the rest of my day and it's pretty negative. What was it? I forgot something I had to mail and I didn't realize it until I got to the post office. Of course there are a multitude of other things that could have happened that are equally (or greater) annoying. It's easy to say that attitude is everything but in practice it's much harder to do. The reality is that very few of us are capable of just pressing an internal button and just letting go.

There's a bigger problem with this scenario: Most people are NOT morning people. Most people start their day with a negative disposition; they don't mean to - it's a prominent side effect of being forced to do something (i.e., get up and re-enter the daily grind) that you really don't want to. If anything - however slight - disrupts your morning process you find that you're hypersensitive to its effects.

The downside to these disruptions is that you won't be yourself until you can decompress and if something else negative happens you have a compounding effect. Your negative attitude will inevitably spread to others who, just like you, may have had a stressful morning. Finding a way to remove these stressful mornings will mean that you will be able to listen to your other senses, like intuition, more clearly - you won't have a phantom negative emotional attachment to it.

Try this: Have a plan as to how you can generically cope with negative stress in the morning. For example, if you get stuck in traffic unexpectedly have your favorite songs ready to go OR make it a plan to take a longer lunch to have some alone time OR make it a plan to find some funny videos on YouTube. You know yourself best. You know that stressful mornings will hit. Find your own way to cope with them before they hit, before it is a crisis.

Do You Really Believe Everything You See?

Optical illusions are fun but they also have an indirect, yet deep philosophical point to make: Don't always trust what you see. Perhaps the most common - and unintentional - fact that humans ignore is that optical illusions occur in our everyday lives. The optical illusions that you see in print have two important aspects. First, you are told it is an optical illusion. Second, the optical illusion is optimized to demonstrate its illusion.

Source (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/89/Scintillating_grid.jpg)

The graphic above is an optical illusion; there are white dots at every intersection but you can only see the white dots that you're looking directly at. What if you weren't told that you were looking at an illusion? What about the photo below?

Source (http://www.moillusions.com/oldboy-optical-illusion.html/kid-dad-op-ill/)

Who is holding who? If I didn't tell you this was an optical illusion, what would you think of it? There has to be some trickery, right? Below is the same picture, but I've traced where the child's face is; he's being held by a man whose face is on the right side of the red line, serving as a well-blended backdrop for the child's face. The child's face also traces out as if it was a shadow on the man's face.

The point is that you have very valuable senses, such as sight; however, those sense aren't always telling the truth and there's nothing you can do about it. You will experience optical illusions like this all of the time and most of the time you won't even know about. The next time your "intuition" tells you something different than what another sense is telling you, consider listening to it.

Be Careless Or Paranoid?

How many times have you left home without locking your front door? The odds are typically very low that someone will try to open it, so why would you do it? You could probably go for the rest of your life without ever locking your front door and never have your home entered by an unwanted person. The odds are so low that you could be labeled paranoid for locking your front door. However, the label of 'paranoid' quickly shifts to 'careless' once someone does. Imagine just how extreme the label of paranoid goes for those with uber security systems...

We are frequently faced with decisions in life that have extraordinary low probabilities of ever happening BUT have dire consequences if they do. You have a decision of being labeled as paranoid or careless. And, if your paranoia pays off, then you can also be upgraded to 'smart' or even 'genius' - consider a neighbor saying they saw someone trying to enter your home... especially if you had that uber security system. Hindsight has the amazing power to make paranoia become wisdom.

I carry band-aids with me whenever I travel. Once, while on travel, a colleague of mine noticed the band-aids. He thought it was a little over-the-top. He poked fun at me for an hour straight; he had time because we were on a three hour drive. Just when it was starting to get really really really old, he reached to scratch his ankle. His arm brushed against a sharp edge on the center console, causing a three-inch long gash. All of my band-aids were used. He was quiet for about 20 minutes - upon which he said, "I deserved that."

It is always better to be labeled paranoid before the fact than careless after the fact.

Can't Remember What Happened Yesterday?

It seems that whatever we want to remember we aren't very good at and whatever we don't want to remember (or don't intend to) we seem to be very good at. Your most intense memories are usually those of when you were growing up - a special birthday, your first date, your bully, your first broken bone, etc. Once we hit adulthood it seems the days go by slow and the years go by fast. If you are an adult reading this blog, what do you remember most about the last 100 days? Last 10 days? Yesterday? Don't make a list of things you probably did, rather, what specifically - in detail - do you remember?

If you were given a list of a hundred random numbers, how many could you remember if you had an hour to memorize them? That would be a chore... a very boring chore.

We remember most things - without trying - when there are more senses involved (i.e., sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell). Memorizing a list of numbers is just using sight whereas your first date would involve the sight of your date, the sound of their voice, the touch of holding hands, the smell of perfume/cologne, and the taste of dinner. This is true for things we don't want to remember; for example, a bloody car accident. This would involve the sight of the horror, the sound of the pains, perhaps the smell of fuel, and the touch of trying to help someone who's hurt. The retention of a memory is stronger when it is new because it hits these senses in a more profound way.

There are other senses beyond the traditional five that could be involved - such as a sense of humor. Things that are funny tend to stick in our memories better. A sense of danger is another one. How many times can you recall getting an eerie feeling about NOT doing something?

The next time that you wonder where all of the years went, why not try to make memories of future years instead? Make it a point to immerse yourself in situations that would involve stroking as many senses as possible in new ways. The old advice of find a hobby or try new things is absolutely true - and it isn't a matter of finding a new way to be bored. It is true that you have to find ways to mix it up. When you were younger everything was new. As you get older that slows down dramatically, but it's up to you to do something about it.

Head or Tails? It Depends...

We've all gone through school or have heard somewhere that flipping a coin gives an equal chance to land on heads or tails. Many sport matches begin with a coin flip. Some elections are decided by a coin flip. If you flipped a coin and got heads ten times in row, that would be very luck; the math would actually say you'd have a 1 in 1023 chance of making that happen.

There are many things in life that you can attribute to luck, to chance. When it comes to flipping coins, don't count on it. The weight of coins isn't distributed equally - most notably is the U.S. penny. When it comes to flipping a penny, studies have shown that heads does come up more often. Moreover, if you were to spin the penny on a table, it would rest with its tails-side up about 80% of the time.

http://mathtourist.blogspot.com/2011/02/penny-bias.html

There are many lucky instances in life that are difficult to attribute to a line of logic. Flipping coins isn't one of them. It wasn't luck. It was simple physics.


If you wanted to see an example of an election decided by a coin flip:
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/oddnews/town%E2%80%99s-mayoral-election-decided-by-coin-toss-223602840.html