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The Edge

„Come to the edge!“
„Tis too high!“
„Come to the edge!“
„We might fall!“
„Come to the edge!“
So they came to the edge and
He pushed them and
THEY FLEW!

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Y2K

Worry is a useful signal. It’s like a telephone call from your unconscious mind. So it’s good, of course, to notice the call and answer it. That allows you to make the proper response. I mean, you don’t want the phone to keep ringing. Once is enough. So just make the appropriate response immediately and then the ringing will stop.
During 1999, a very bizarre fear and worry filled the newspapers every day. It was called the Y2K problem. The year 2,000 sounds a little ominous, of course, and people may have been looking for it to have a special meaning or even to mark the end of an era in a really obvious way. Or perhaps, Y2K was a serious fear for people.
It’s interesting to consider how this problem began before we look at its more interesting consequences today. Back when computers were first invented and developed, computer memory was really really expensive. And so programmers would try to save bits and bytes wherever possible. So when a programmer was entering the format for the date, he decided to use “55″ instead of the longer “1955.” By doing this, he could use half as much memory to encode the data. Saving two bytes may not sound like much, but when a program used a date in hundreds or thousands of places, this could add up to big memory savings.
Of course, the programmer didn’t imagine that the computer and his program would still be in use in the year 2000. Back then, people imagined the year 2000 as having flying cars and amazing anti-gravity devices. Although the world has progressed enormously, it is amazing how some things can still stay around much much longer than people imagine. And that’s what happened with the code that the programmer wrote. Just like a person can keep snippets of memory from long long ago, in the same way, snippets of code can stay around in newer systems long after could be imagined.
And of course, those snippets continue to play an important role in the system. So in the year 1999, people began to worry very much about the effect of all these old snippets that remained in the system. Because what would happen when the two digit representation of the year 1999 changed into the two digit representation of the year 2000? What the programmers had never imagined – 99 would change into 00 right at the first stroke of the clock in the year two thousand.
Let’s think about this to show what it could mean. Supposing a bank is calculating your interest according to how many years you have had it on deposit. For example, let’s say that you deposited $100,000 in the bank at a simple interest rate of 4% per year.
Interest = (99-60) * 100,000 * 4% = $156,000
So far, so good. But let’s look at the calculation when “99″ changes into “00.”
Interest = (00 – 60) * 100,000 * 4% = -$240,000
Yes, that’s right, instead of being ahead by about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, your account is suddenly going to be massively depleted and you’ll be in the red by two hundred and fourty thousand dollars. That’s an overall loss of almost four hundred thousand dollars. For any investor, that is going to rate as a pretty bad one-second loss.
So it’s clear how financial institutes were worried by Y2K. But everyone else started getting worried, too. A lot of the old American military systems were also using very old snippets of code. What would happen if a nuclear missile computer got the date wrong. If the distance of a potential incoming missile were to suddenly become a minus number, would that mean that an attack had already occured and automatic retaliation was required?
Y2K was the worry of the decade and it showed. People started stocking up on food. They bought guns and gas masks. They expected World War Three, an earthquake, a famine, and a tornado to all hit simultaneously.
All the computer experts got paid huge sums of money that year to sift through these old snippets and to find any potential problems. People even worried that programmers might introduce new problems as they tried to Y2K-proof old code that was difficult to understand.
And at midnight 1999, many many people were very scared and very worried. What happened?
In a word – nothing.
Worry is a useful signal – a way of helping us to check that we have done things right and that we are prepared. But most of the time, nothing happens. The horrors that we can dream up are generally far worse than reality. So the next time worry comes to you – remember that it is like a telephone call to your unconscious mind. Go ahead. Answer the call. Check that things are ok. Make the appropriate response and then move on to a new exciting era.
©2010 by Brian Cullen

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Making Sandwiches

Every day when he opens his lunch a man says „Not peanut butter and jam sandwiches again, I hate them,“ At the end of a week of complaining a colleague asks, „Why don’t you ask your wife to make you different sandwiches next week“? „Oh I’m not married“ the man replies, „I make my own sandwiches“.

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The Bully

Our minds are like school playgrounds that are surrounded by secure high fences – they keep children in, and others out. Any bullies in that playground mean that the other children can’t escape for long. This particular bully uses verbal abuse, shouting, teasing, and threats (rather than physical violence). The children are all fenced in together, and ideally, they have just got to learn to accept and learn to be with each other. So neither can we escape our thoughts, we cannot stop them, but perhaps we can learn to live with them by seeing them differently. Along comes bully, and takes on 3 potential ‘victims’ who all react differently.
Victim 1 – believes the bully, distressed, reacts automatically (bully carries on)
Victim 2 – challenges the bully “hey I’m not stupid, I got 8 out of 10 in my spelling test this morning, you only got 4” (bully eventually gives up)
Victim 3 – looks at the bully (acknowledges the thought), then walks away and goes off to play football with his mates (dismisses the thought), then changes their focus of attention.

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The Sense of a Goose

Next Autumn, when you see geese heading south for the winter, flying in a „V“ formation, you might consider what science has discovered as to why they fly that way. As each bird flaps its wings, it creates an uplift for the bird immediately following. By flying in a „V“ formation, the whole flock adds at least 71 percent greater flying range than if each bird flew on its own.
People who share a common direction and sense of community can get where they are going more quickly and easily, because they are travelling on the thrust of one another.
When a goose falls out of formation, it suddenly feels the drag and resistance of trying to go it alone and quickly gets back into formation to take advantage of the lifting power of the bird in front.
If we have the sense of a goose, we will stay in formation with those people who are heading the same way we are.
When the head goose gets tired, it rotates back in the wing and another goose flies point.
It is sensible to take turns doing demanding jobs, whether with people or with geese flying south.
Geese honk from behind to encourage those up front to keep up their speed.
What message do we give when we honk from behind?
Finally – and this is important – when a goose gets sick or is wounded by gunshot, and falls out of the formation, two other geese fall out with that goose and follow it down to lend help and protection. They stay with the fallen goose until it is able to fly or until it dies; and only then do they launch out on their own, or with another formation to catch up with their own group.
If we have the sense of a goose, we will stand by each other like that.

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Autistic Girl

You MEET people at their own level, just as you don’t discuss philosophy with a baby learning to talk . . . you make NOISES at the baby. Now there was an autistic child at Arizona State Hospital. $50,000 had been raised and the child had been sent to Chicago for very special care. And a lot of psychiatrists, psychoanalysts worked with the child until the $50,000 was gone and they sent her back completely unchanged. One of my patients was rather lonesome and she liked to be a do-gooder and she visited the Arizona State Hospital, saw that ten year old girl, and finally persuaded the authorities to let the girl go for a walk with her. And that girl went with her, grimacing, and mouthing sounds, and grunting, and twisting and acting very peculiar. And this patient decided to bring her to see me. She brought her in. She had told me first about the girl and I told her, Yes, I’d see the girl. I assured her I couldn’t take the girl as a patient but I’d see the girl once. And she brought the girl in, and introduced the girl to me and me to the girl. And the girl made a number of weird sounds and so I REPLIED with weird sounds, and we grunted and groaned and squeaked and squawked for about half an hour. And then the girl answered a few simple questions and very promptly returned to her autistic behavior. And we really had a good time squeaking and squawking and grunting and groaning at each other. And then she took the patient back to the hospital. In the ,night time she took the patient for a walk. She told me later, „that girl almost pulled my arm off, yanking me down the street, she wanted to see you. . . the one man who could really talk her language

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A turn of the screw

There was an industrialist whose production line inexplicably breaks down, costing him millions per day. He finally tracks down an expert who takes out a screwdriver, turns one screw, and then – as the factory cranks back to life – presents a bill for £10,000.
Affronted, the factory owner demands an itemised version. The expert is happy to oblige: „For turning a screw: £1. For knowing which screw to turn: £9,999.“

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Giving Blood

Many years ago, when I worked as a volunteer at Stanford Hospital, I got to know a little girl named Liz who was suffering from a rare and serious disease.
Her only chance of recovery appeared to be a blood transfusion from her 5-year old brother, who had miraculously survived the same disease and had developed the antibodies needed to combat the illness.
The doctor explained the situation to her little brother, and asked the boy if he would be willing to give his blood to his sister. I saw him hesitate for only a moment before taking a deep breath and saying,“Yes, I’ll do it if it will save Liz.“
As the transfusion progressed, he lay in bed next to his sister and smiled, as we all did, seeing the color returning to her cheeks. Then his face grew pale and his smile faded.
He looked up at the doctor and asked with a trembling voice, „Will I start to die right away?“
Being young, the boy had misunderstood the doctor. He thought he was going to have to give his sister all of his blood.

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The Tower of Babel

After the great flood, the people of the world grew in number again and they all shared a single language.
After travelling, they came to the land of Shinar. And there, the leader of the people who was called Nimrod, decided to build a great tower that would reach high up into the sky – so high that its top would be in the heavens..
And God looked at the people and at the great tower that they were building and he said, „You are one people and you have one language, and you will be able to achieve whatever you put your mind to.“
So God decided to confound their speech – to confuse the tongues and the minds of the people. And the people became so confused by the multiple languages that they could no longer communicate easily with each other, and as a result they abandoned their efforts to build a great tower, and they abandoned many other things, too. They even began to forget that at one time, all people could communicate easily and that people can achieve whatever you put your mind to.
And much of communication turned out to babbling, little more than the sounds that a baby makes to pass time through the day. And so the tower that was never finished was called the Tower of Babel.
There are many stories of the Tower of Babel in different cultures, Indian, European, Hebrew. Perhaps one of the most interesting is the Kaballah story which tells us that …
… one third of the Tower builders were punished by being transformed into semi-demonic creatures and banished into three parallel dimensions, inhabited now by their descendants.
And when we see, hear, or feel the problems in our communication today, perhaps we are also living in three parallel dimensions.

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The Little Boy

A six year old boy asked his mother, “What is NLP?”
His mother answered, “I’ll tell you in a moment, but first go and ask your grandfather how his arthritis is today?”
The little boy went over to his grandfather and asked the question and his grandfather replied, “oh it’s terrible, my legs and hands are very painful today. It’s very hard.” And as he spoke, the little boy saw his grandfather’s face grimace and wrinkle in pain.
So the little boy went back to his mother and asked again, “What is NLP?”
His mother said, “OK, I’ll tell you in a moment, but first go and ask your grandfather what is the funniest thing that you ever did.”
The little boy asked the grandfather and immediately his grandfather’s smile broke out into a big smile. “Oh that’s easy”, he said. “I remember when you and your brother decided to play as Santa Claus and you decided you needed snow. So you put white talcum powder all over the bathroom and made it completely white! That was so funny.” Grandfather looked so happy and then said, “Or maybe it was the time that you were singing in the street as we walked together and a stranger asked you to be quiet.” You turned to him and said “If you don’t like my singing, you can just stay at home. Oh yes, you were a funny little fellow. So grandfather continued smiling and laughing to himself and looked so happy and the little boy went back to his mother and asked again, “What is NLP?”
His mother replied, “That’s NLP – with just a few words, you completely changed how your grandfather felt.”