The Poignant Frog

Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Of Mice,Humans and Cheese.......d'apres Dr.Spencer Johnson

drawing by marguerita
Almost 20 years ago, Dr. Spencer
Johnson wrote a legendary book titled, Who Moved My Cheese? It tells a What politicians, small business and mice have in common a s tory about four characters who ate only cheese. Early in the story all four characters went to the same place in their world – a maze – to get cheese. The first two were not picky about their cheese or where...

With Who Moved My Cheese? Dr. Spencer Johnson realizes the need for finding the language and tools to deal with change--an issue that makes all of us nervous and uncomfortable.Most people are fearful of change because they don't believe they have any control over how or when it happens to them. Since change happens either to the individual or
by the individual,Spencer Johnson shows us that what matters most is the attitude we have about change.
When the Y2K panic gripped the corporate realm before the new millenium, most work environments finally recognized the urgent need to get their computers and other business systems up to speed and able to deal with unprecedented change. And businesses realized that this was not enough: they needed to help people get ready, too.
Spencer Johnson has created his new book to do just that. The coauthor of the multimillion bestseller The One Minute Manager has written a deceptively simple story with a dramatically important message that can radically alter the way we cope with change. Who Moved My Cheese? allows for common themes to become topics for discussion and individual interpretation.
Who Moved My Cheese? takes the fear and anxiety out of managing the future and shows people a simple way to successfully deal with the changing times, providing them with a method for moving ahead with their work and lives safely and effectively
Dailyinvestorworld.com

Of Mice,Humans and Cheese d'apres Dr .Spencer Johnson

drawing by marguerita

Most people are fearful of change because they don't believe they have any control over how or when it happens to them. Since change happens either to the individual or
by the individual,Spencer Johnson shows us that what matters most is the attitude we have about change.
When the Y2K panic gripped the corporate realm before the new millenium, most work environments finally recognized the urgent need to get their computers and other business systems up to speed and able to deal with unprecedented change. And businesses realized that this was not enough: they needed to help people get ready, too.
Spencer Johnson has created his new book to do just that. The coauthor of the multimillion bestseller The One Minute Manager has written a deceptively simple story with a dramatically important message that can radically alter the way we cope with change. Who Moved My Cheese? allows for common themes to

become topics for discussion and individual interpretation.

Who Moved My Cheese? takes the fear and anxiety out of managing the future and shows people a simple way to successfully deal with the changing times, providing them with a method for moving ahead with their work and lives safely and effectively.

Almost 20 years ago, Dr. Spencer Johnson wrote a legendary book titled, Who Moved My Cheese? It tells a sWhat politicians, small business and mice have in commontory about four characters who ate only cheese. Early in the story all four charactersg went to the same place in their world – a maze – to get cheese. The first two were not picky about their cheese or where...

With Who Moved My Cheese? Dr. Spencer Johnson realizes the need for finding the language and tools to deal with change--an issue that makes all of us nervous and uncomfortable. Dailyinvestorworld.com

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Pensamentos:So close your eyes,let's dream a dream together, when two can dream a dream together

Pensamentos: Two days before my birthday and reading a fortune cookie,voila: A big fortune will descend upon you this year.

Pensamentos: Two days before my birthday

I stayed away from my Frog for quite sometime.
Nevertheless I had my Frog on my mind all the time.

Now ,tow days before my birthday,as my son Stefan inspired me again,last night,"Why Ma,have you not being posting on the Frog, I had to return.

Fabiolo,my canary and I.
When 1 was eleven years old, my father moved us to the outskirts of Sao Paulo, to Sao Miguel Paulista,where he got a position at Nitroquimica.
We lived in a house,on a dirt road,next to a very polluted Rio Tiete, an extremely poisoned river.I tended with my next door neighbor to his chickens,my only endeavor besides playing piano and listening to the radio.
I had no school.
So one day my mother went into town,where she got me Fabiolo.
He got this name in deference to Queen Fabiola,of Spain and her brother Jaime, nicknamed "Fabiolo".but my canary,become my instant companion.
He would fly out from his cage,to sit on my head,when I was playing piano.

this photo was taken in 1966.
Would a human companion do more than that?

Monday, September 28, 2015

A worm,a fly and a mouse and OUR Brain & Environment: THE SMELLS

drawing by marguerita

But is a simple worm really an appropriate model for studying the human brain?

Most of what we know about the human nervous system, we have learned from simpler animals. The most famous animal in neuroscience is the squid because it has these huge nerves that enabled people to understand the basis of the electrical transmission of information.

In fact, one of the biggest surprises in modern biology is that the genes are not that different between the different animals. Almost every gene we are interested in with humans is recognizable in a mouse. Most are recognizable in a worm or in a fly.

So what have you learned from your worm?

In 1993, we did an experiment showing that worms could smell. This wasn’t known before. Our next experiment, I think the most important my lab did, is that we made a worm neuron smell an odor it had never smelled before, and we made the animal completely change its opinion of that odor by doing that.

We had an animal that loves an odor that smells like a certain food it likes. Usually, the worm runs right toward the odor. We took the gene that is a sensor for the food from where it was normally supposed to be. We put it into a different neuron that senses things the worm finds

"Dangerous...."

Then, we “asked” the worm what it thought of this smell it usually loves. It ran away from the smell, as if it were dangerous.This said that the odor-sensing nerve cells form an innate map where each one knows whether something is good or bad about the environment. There’s a completely unlearned internal set of preferences, a set of instincts about what’s good and bad. The goal is to develop and apply new ways of studying networks of neurons involved in thought, emotion, perception and action.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/22/science/cori-bargmann-puts-her-mind-to-how-the-brain-works.html?mabReward=CTM&moduleDetail=recommendations-1&action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&region=Footer&module=WhatsNext&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&src=recg&pgtype=article

Monday, June 29, 2015

GREXIT:IN SEARCH OF PARALLELS

drawing/watercolor by marguerita bornstein

On Sunday, the Greek debt crisis entered a new and dangerous phase. In recent months, the European Central Bank has made emergency loans available to Greece’s ailing banks, increasing the size of the support as depositors have taken euros out of the banks. Despite signs of large withdrawals over the weekend, the E.C.B. did not announce that is was approving a further increase, but instead said that it was maintaining the loans at their current total, which is thought to be around €85 billion.

Precedents for such a transformation may not exist. Economists say they cannot think of a time when a developed country with an open economy dropped out of a shared currency and set up its own new moneyPolls show that the Greek people favor staying in the euro, and Greece’s leaders have said they do not want to leave the common currency. Indeed, fears of the consequences of leaving the euro could help persuade Greece’s leftist government to soften its stance and, at the last minute, forge a deal with its creditors.Continue reading the main story https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3171286968019382227#editor/target=post;postID=3896083347370383100

Monday, February 16, 2015

Shitao a point of reference

Returning Home, Qing dynasty (1644–1911), ca. 1695
Shitao (Zhu Ruoji) (Chinese, 1642–1707)
Album of twelve paintings; ink and color on paper

Each painting leaf: 6 1/2 x 4 1/8 in. (16.5 x 10.5 cm); Each album leaf: 8 5/16 x 5 5/16 in. (21.1 x 13.5 cm); W. of double page: 10 5/8 in. (27 cm)
Facing pages inscribed by the artist
From the P. Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Family Collection
Gift of Wen and Constance Fong, in honor of Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Dillon, 1976 (1976.280)

Leaf 1
Returning Home

Landscapes alternate with flowers in this album of twenty-four small leaves of paintings and poetic comments that is designed to be perused slowly, one pair of leaves at a time. Each painting and its accompanying poem were conceived as a single expressive image in a superb harmony of painting, poetry, and calligraphy. The paintings are "written" with the same type of brushstrokes as the calligraphy, while in the "painterly" calligraphy, individual characters and brushstrokes in varying sizes and ink tones frequently imitate such pictorial motifs as orchid petals and leaves and misty and wavy landscape elements. Even the painter's seals are integrated into the design. Shitao ("Stone Wave"), a scion of the Ming imperial family, became a monk and a painter after the Manchu conquest of 1644. After many years of wandering from place to place in the south and spending nearly three years in Beijing, he "returned home" to Yangzhou toward the end of 1692.

Leaf 1

Returning Home

As falling leaves descend
  with the wind,
I return by the water
  through a thinning mist;
I see a tiny hut clinging
  to the bank of a green stream,
How soft and fat the white
  clouds look in the cold air.

The phrase from which Shitao develops his first line is luo ye gui gen, "fallen leaves returning to the tree root," expressing a person's yearning to return home in his old age. The painter perhaps also feels that his life is like can yan, in line 2, literally "shredded" or "worn-out" mist. (This album was painted late in 1695, when Shitao was on his way back to Yangzhou from a visit to Hunan and Anhui provinces.)

The quality that Shitao wanted to capture in this painting is fei, the "fat" of bai yun fei (literally, "white clouds look fat") in line 4 of the poem. Here he appears to reflect the ideas of Gong Xian (ca. 1618–1689): "In painting a clouded mountain, the cloud must appear thick [hou].. For thirty years I failed to achieve this until I met a master who told me, "If the mountain is thick, the cloud will look thick … This is the painting of no-painting." Shitao's misty and wonderfully translucent landscape is composed of two types of brushstrokes: those forming the pine needles, and the softly rubbed texture strokes forming the mountain. The "fat" white clouds are merely blank spaces: the illusion of "fatness" is created by the misty forms around them. Shitao has transformed this earlier "blank-outline" technique into layers of softly rubbed, transparent brushstrokes. The deep and "fat" quality of the painting results from a subtle intermixing of brushwork and inkwash: different shades of dark and light strokes and textures, solid and void areas interpenetrate one another.

The calligraphy, rendered in Zhong You's (151–230) "regular" script, is also smooth and "fat." The round and three-dimensional individual strokes seem to move and twist gently in space, like the falling leaves of the poem. The mood is serenely reflective.

collage by marguerita

Shitao probably cut his own seals. The poem is signed "Shitao" ("Stone Wave") and is followed by a square intaglio seal, Shi Yuanji yin ("[disciple of] Shakyamuni Yuanji's seal"). The small rectangular intaglio seals on the painting read Shitao and Yuanji.