Whatnot At Work

Bring Your Worms To Work

Bring your worms to work and bring compost home for your garden. California is starting a Zero Waste Initiative to reduce waste and encourage reuse and recycling. One of those efforts involves recycling food scraps using composting and vermicomposting (using worms to compost the food scraps).

Californians throw away more than 5 million tons of food scraps each year.  That’s 16 percent of all disposed materials going into landfills from businesses, residents, and institutions such as schools and prisons. Although green material collection programs have been implemented in many cities and counties, management of food scraps provides additional opportunities to help meet the State’s diversion goals as well as provide greater uses for this resource. A suggested order for food scrap management is to (1) prevent food waste, (2) feed people, (3) convert to animal feed and/or rendering, and (4) compost.

Inspired For Greatness

What inspired the great thinkers of our times to take up science? That is what a new survey asked recently. From the website:

What Inspired You? is a survey of key thinkers in science, technology and medicine, conducted by spiked in collaboration with the research-based pharmaceutical company Pfizer. Survey respondents hail from all corners of the globe, ranging in age from 19 to 93 and ranging in experience from new talents to Nobel laureates. Each of these individuals was asked: 'What inspired you to take up science?'

And the survey results say:

• Inspirational teachers and mentors
• Hands on experience and experimentation
• Space exploration, social upheaval and scientific progress
• Family inspiration
• Literature - both scientific and science fiction
• Innate curiosity and predisposition towards science
• The natural world

Read the details from all the respondents on what inspired them to choose the field of science.

Nine Rules Of Being Human

The nine rules of being human:

1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it will be yours for as long as you live.  How you take care of it or fail to take care of it can make an enormous difference in the quality of your life.
2. You will learn lessons.  You are enrolled in a full-time, informal school called Life.  Each day, you will be presented with opportunities to learn what you need to know.  The lessons presented are often completely different from those you think you need.
3. There are no mistakes, only lessons.  Growth is a process of trial, error and experimentation.  You can learn as much from failure as you can from success. Maybe more.
4. A lesson is repeated until it is learned.  A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it.  When you have learned it (as evidenced by a change in your attitude and ultimately your behavior) then you can go on to the next lesson.
5. Learning lessons does not end.  There is no stage of life that does not contain some lessons.  As long as you live there will be something more to learn.
6. “There” is no better than “here”.  When your “there” has become a “here” you will simply discover another “there” that will again look better than your “here.” Don’t be fooled by believing that the unattainable is better than what you have.
7. Others are merely mirrors of you.  You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects something you love or hate about yourself.  When tempted to criticize others, ask yourself why you feel so strongly.
8. What you make of your life is up to you.  You have all the tools and resources you need.  What you create with those tools and resources is up to you.  Remember that through desire, goal setting and unflagging effort you can have anything you want. Persistence is the key to success.
9. The answers lie inside of you.  The solutions to all of life’s problems lie within your grasp.  All you need to do is ask, look, listen and trust yourself.

Happiest Countries In The World

Adrian White, an analytical social psychologist at the University of Leicester has created an interactive map showing the happiness quotient of each country. According to his research, happiness is more closely tied to health than it is to wealth or education. The rankings:

1. Denmark
2. Switzerland
3. Austria
4. Iceland
5. Bahamas
6. Finland
7. Sweden

Canada came in 10th and United States came in 23rd. We wrote about a previous study that found Switzerland had the highest quality of life, followed by Canada and Austria.

Hedgehogs To Live Another Day

McDonald's agreed to change their McFlurry ice cream containers to save countless hedgehogs. The hedgehogs would squeeze their heads through the cup top to scavenge any remaining McFlurry from discarded cups and then get stuck there. McDonald's is making the cap hole smaller so their heads won't fit in.

Sammy The Duck

Sammy has been working at the Cypress Palms assisted living community for a year now. Found in a clump of discarded egg shells and raised by a human, Sammy is more comfortable with people and air conditioning than animals and the outdoors.

Sammy and [his human] work double shifts on the weekends and a regular shift every other Wednesday.

Before and after dinner time, Sammy and Diane go room to room checking on residents.

Get Happy

New research has discovered the key to happiness. Here's the formula:

H = S + C + V

H is your enduring happiness quotient. S is your genetic contribution. C is your life circumstances and V are factors under your voluntary control. According to the research, your life circumstances (C) only accounts for between 8 and 15%. Things under your voluntary control account for 40%. That's what the research gets people to change, the things under their control.

Some background from the article: Learned helplessness experiments on dogs showed that if you zap dogs with a shock that are allowed to escape will quickly learn to escape. If the dogs are not allowed to escape, they quickly give up and even when they are later allowed to escape, do not try. The interesting thing is that some dogs never give up. About one out of three dogs always try to escape even when there is no way available. Similar studies with people gave the same ratio. These are natural optimists (S in the formula above).

The researchers found there are three (intervention) techniques that work well to increase your happiness quotient over the long term:

1. Gratitude Visits - Write and read a letter to someone from your past that you are grateful to.
2. 3 Good Things - Each day write down three good things that happened for one week.
3. Using Signature Strengths - Figure out your personal strengths and use your top strength in a different way each day for one week.

Participants in the research showed marked improvement in happiness that lasted a month for 1 above and 6 months for 2 and 3 above.

The researchers admit that it is not possible nor desirable to be happy all the time. But what is possible and is desirable is to ignore negativity when it is unproductive and heed it only when it is useful to do so.

The best approach is one he calls flexible optimism, in which a person learns to dispute unproductive, catastrophic thoughts but to listen to pessimistic ones and heed them when warranted.

Here's the site for the happiness research at University of Pennsylvania: Authentic Happiness

An Honest Man

Charles Moore, a homeless man in Detroit, found $21,000 in savings bonds in a dumpster and returned them to their owner. The owner rewarded him with $100.00, but other folks are rewarding him more. So far he has received $4000.00 for his honesty. A quote from Moore: "the best policy is honesty and
that honesty pays off."