How to save the world - 2

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(Free-Press-Release.com) May 24, 2005 -- How to save the world?

6. Synthesis, Distillation and Restatement: When you recapitulate and condense what you've read or heard, you force yourself to use your own words to say what they had to say. You can learn as much from this about their way of thinking, and your own, as you can from the reading or listening experience itself.

7. Reading (and Writing) Fiction: The most important character in stories is the narrator, not the protagonist. While empathy with the protagonist will keep you reading, it is from understanding the perspective of the narrator, and contrasting it with your own, that you learn the most. Here as an illustration is an excerpt from Mark Haddon's wonderful book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (thank you to the reader who recommended this book to me) -- told from the point of view of an autistic child::

And then I thought about how for a long time scientists were puzzled by the fact that the sky is dark at night, even though there are billions of stars in the universe and there must be stars in every direction you look, so that the sky should be full of starlight because there is very little in the way to stop the light from reaching Earth. Then they worked out that the universe was expanding, that the stars were all rushing away from one another after the Big Bang, and the further the stars were away from us, the faster they were moving, some of them nearly as fast as the speed of light, which is why their light never reached us.

I like this fact. It is something you can work out in your own mind just by looking at the sky above your head at night and thinking without having to ask anyone. And when the universe has finished exploding, all the stars will slow down, like a ball that has been thrown into the air, and they will come to a halt and they will all begin to fall towards the centre of the universe again. And then there will be nothing to stop us from seeing all the stars in the world because they will all be moving towards us, gradually faster and faster, and we will know that the world is going to end soon because when we look up into the sky at night there will be no darkness, just the blazing light of billions and billions of stars, all falling.

Except that no one will see this because there will be no people left on Earth to see it. They will probably have become extinct by then. And even if there are people still in existence, they will not see it because the light will be so bright and hot that everyone will be burned to death, even if they live in tunnels.

8. Psychoactive and Other Drugs: They work for some people, and have for thousands of years. Nope, don't have any on me.

9. Learning a New Language: Linguists say all human languages are so similar than an alien would see them as indistinguishable, but anyone who doesn't see how a language entrenches cultural preconceptions, ideas, and ways of thinking probably has never mastered a second one. The vocabulary, the syntax, the way in which it is ordered, the nuances of meaning, all push you to new ways of thinking.