Algunas de las mentes mas talentosas del mundo se reunen en una conversacion exquisita sobre lo que significa ser Humano. Es impresionante entender las diferentes perspectivas, tomando en cuenta la gran diversidad de areas de estudio de este grupo compuesto por Biologos, Filosofos, Neurocientificos, Antropologos, Geneticistas, Sociologos, Ingenieros de Computacion y Fisicos. Realmente una oportunidad unica de ampliar nuestra percepcion y acercarnos a entender nuestro estado de humanidad.
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
Monday, September 07, 2009
WDYDWYD?
Why Do You Do What You Do? Esa es la pregunta que le hizo un niño de 12 años a Tony Deifell (foto) una noche en 1999. Pregunta profunda, que nos lleva a reflexionar diariamente sobre nuestro sentido de proposito y razon de ser.
Tony decidio hacer esa misma pregunta a otras personas creando un proyecto artistico-comunitario a nivel global combinando imagenes y texto en maneras creativas. Desde entonces cerca de 3,000 imagenes respondiendo a esta pregunta han sido posteadas en el site de wdydwyd?
Y tu, ¿Por que haces lo que haces?
Tony decidio hacer esa misma pregunta a otras personas creando un proyecto artistico-comunitario a nivel global combinando imagenes y texto en maneras creativas. Desde entonces cerca de 3,000 imagenes respondiendo a esta pregunta han sido posteadas en el site de wdydwyd?
Y tu, ¿Por que haces lo que haces?
Friday, September 04, 2009
Escala Pentatónica
Hace años que Bobby McFerrin maravilla al mundo con su genialidad. Ha grabado muchisimos discos entre ellos con estrellas como Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, con Yo-Yo Ma y muchos otros. Ha hecho jazz, se codea con los clásicos, ha ganado varios premios Grammy, y nos ha tenido tarareando "Don’t Worry, Be Happy" a muchos, muchas veces. Esta vez nos demuestra que la música tiene un lenguaje universal. Son tres minutos de sorpresa y genialidad.
Thursday, September 03, 2009
La neblina del dia a dia
Este artículo me puso a pensar en lo necesario que es tener una buena perspectiva de las cosas....
My Brain on Chemo: Alive and Alert
By Dan Barry. Published: August 31, 2009
Within the chemotherapy alumni corps there exists a mutual respect not unlike the bond shared by veterans of war. Sometimes that respect is silently conveyed; not everyone wants to talk about it. And sometimes it is shared in the shorthand of the battle-hardened.
Where? Esophagus. Who? Sloan-Kettering. What kind? Cisplatin, fluorouracil, Drano, Borax ... . Side effects? The usual: nausea, vomiting, hair loss. And the toes are still numb.
Yeah.
At this point the two chemo alums may begin to sense a phantom metallic taste at the back of their throat, a taste sometimes prompted by the intravenous infusion of the corrosive chemicals intended to save their lives. A strong drink might be in order; maybe two.
With that first, taste-altering sip, the two might begin to discuss another side effect that has received attention lately, the one rudely called “chemo brain”: the cognitive fogginess that some patients experience after completing their regimen. That fogginess does not always completely lift, and oncologists are now taking seriously what they might once have dismissed as a complaint rooted in advanced age or cancer fatigue.
For me, reading about chemo brain has resurrected that faint taste of metal. I underwent chemotherapy in 1999 and again in 2004, thanks to a profoundly unwelcome recurrence. Depending on one’s perspective, I was both unfortunate and fortunate. Unfortunate in that I endured all the concomitant fears and indignities, twice. Fortunate in that I had the option of chemotherapy, twice. Not all cancers respond; not everyone is so lucky.
I experienced all the typical side effects. Nausea: for several days at a time, though vomiting sometimes broke the monotony. Hair loss: I was balding anyway, so chemo saved me from comb-over delusions. Neuropathy: even now, my toes feel as if they were wrapped in cotton.
And, I now think, chemo brain — but a form that seems to be the common definition’s opposite. My self-diagnosis is that I had a pre-existing case of fogginess that lifted during and immediately after my chemotherapy regimen: I suddenly experienced acute clarity. Then, as the effects and memory of chemotherapy faded, my confusion returned. Twice.
In 1999, before the diagnosis of cancer and the prognosis of let’s hope for the best, I was enveloped in the haze of the everyday. Rather than rejoicing in a loving wife, a daughter not yet 2, a job I enjoyed — in being, simply, 41 — I created felonies out of matters not worth a summons. Traffic jams. Work conflicts. No Vienna Fingers in the cupboard. Felonies all.
Cancer, as is often said, tends to focus the mind. But my diagnosis hovered in the theoretical until the moment I began the first of six rounds of chemotherapy, each one requiring a five-day hospital stay. The nurse hung bags of clear, innocent-looking liquid from an IV pole, found a plump vein along my right arm — and the fog slowly lifted.
Sickened by the mere smell of food, I suddenly saw the wonder in the most common foods: an egg, a hard-boiled egg. Imprisoned and essentially chained to an IV pole, I would stare out my hospital room window at the people below, and feel a rush of the purest envy for their routine pursuits. Imagining the summer night air blowing cool through sweat-dampened shirts, I’d think how good a $3 ice cream would taste right about now, or a $5 beer, and how nice it would be to watch a baseball game of no consequence.
Men acting like boys, hitting, throwing, running on grass. I used to play baseball. In the morning, after urinating away the remnants of poisons pumped into me, I would roll my IV-pole partner back to the window and study again the people below, moving, hustling, ambling, to jobs, to appointments, to a diner, maybe, for one of the fried-egg sandwiches served countless times every morning in Manhattan.
Gradually, from midsummer to late fall, the chemotherapy transformed me into a bald guy whose pallor was offset only by the hint of terror in his eyes. But the chemo also wiped away the muddle, revealing the world in all its mundane glory. I won’t tell you that I wept at the sight of a puppy. But I did linger over my sleeping daughter to watch her tiny chest rise and fall. I did savor the complexities of a simple olive. I did notice fireflies, those dancing night sparks I had long ago stopped seeing.
After the chemotherapy, radiation and a few weeks to allow things to settle down, as my doctor put it, I was declared “clean” in February 2000. Never again, I vowed, would I take these simple things for granted. I was blind, but now I see.
The fog, of course, returned as the effects and memory of chemo faded, no matter that my wife and I were now blessed with two daughters. How I hated traffic jams. And the Vienna Fingers! Who ate the last Vienna Finger?
Then, in the late spring of 2004, probably while I was railing about something eminently unimportant, my cancer impolitely returned. Once again I felt the frigid breath of mortality at my neck. I also felt like a fool. What is the use of surviving cancer if you don’t learn from it? Are improved by it? Am I so thick that I need to receive the life-is-precious message twice?
I returned to Sloan-Kettering for more chemotherapy and more of the same side effects — including my own manifestation of chemo brain. Fog lifted, world revealed.
After the chemotherapy came major surgery, which provided the exclamation point to whatever chemo was trying to tell me. Once again I was declared clean. And this time, by God! This time!
I became a walking platitude, telling friends without a trace of irony to live every day as though it were their last. Because, man, I’ve been there. And if I weren’t so repressed I’d give you a hug.
Slowly, insidiously, the fog of the everyday has returned to enshroud me. It came in wispy strips, a little more, then a little more, wrapping me like a mummy. Just the other day, in the car with my wife and my two daughters, I began railing about being stuck in a traffic jam.
Perspective, my wife said. Perspective.
I could not hear her. You see, I’m struggling with this pre-existing human condition.
Dan Barry writes the “This Land” column in The New York Times.
My Brain on Chemo: Alive and Alert
By Dan Barry. Published: August 31, 2009
Within the chemotherapy alumni corps there exists a mutual respect not unlike the bond shared by veterans of war. Sometimes that respect is silently conveyed; not everyone wants to talk about it. And sometimes it is shared in the shorthand of the battle-hardened.
Where? Esophagus. Who? Sloan-Kettering. What kind? Cisplatin, fluorouracil, Drano, Borax ... . Side effects? The usual: nausea, vomiting, hair loss. And the toes are still numb.
Yeah.
At this point the two chemo alums may begin to sense a phantom metallic taste at the back of their throat, a taste sometimes prompted by the intravenous infusion of the corrosive chemicals intended to save their lives. A strong drink might be in order; maybe two.
With that first, taste-altering sip, the two might begin to discuss another side effect that has received attention lately, the one rudely called “chemo brain”: the cognitive fogginess that some patients experience after completing their regimen. That fogginess does not always completely lift, and oncologists are now taking seriously what they might once have dismissed as a complaint rooted in advanced age or cancer fatigue.
For me, reading about chemo brain has resurrected that faint taste of metal. I underwent chemotherapy in 1999 and again in 2004, thanks to a profoundly unwelcome recurrence. Depending on one’s perspective, I was both unfortunate and fortunate. Unfortunate in that I endured all the concomitant fears and indignities, twice. Fortunate in that I had the option of chemotherapy, twice. Not all cancers respond; not everyone is so lucky.
I experienced all the typical side effects. Nausea: for several days at a time, though vomiting sometimes broke the monotony. Hair loss: I was balding anyway, so chemo saved me from comb-over delusions. Neuropathy: even now, my toes feel as if they were wrapped in cotton.
And, I now think, chemo brain — but a form that seems to be the common definition’s opposite. My self-diagnosis is that I had a pre-existing case of fogginess that lifted during and immediately after my chemotherapy regimen: I suddenly experienced acute clarity. Then, as the effects and memory of chemotherapy faded, my confusion returned. Twice.
In 1999, before the diagnosis of cancer and the prognosis of let’s hope for the best, I was enveloped in the haze of the everyday. Rather than rejoicing in a loving wife, a daughter not yet 2, a job I enjoyed — in being, simply, 41 — I created felonies out of matters not worth a summons. Traffic jams. Work conflicts. No Vienna Fingers in the cupboard. Felonies all.
Cancer, as is often said, tends to focus the mind. But my diagnosis hovered in the theoretical until the moment I began the first of six rounds of chemotherapy, each one requiring a five-day hospital stay. The nurse hung bags of clear, innocent-looking liquid from an IV pole, found a plump vein along my right arm — and the fog slowly lifted.
Sickened by the mere smell of food, I suddenly saw the wonder in the most common foods: an egg, a hard-boiled egg. Imprisoned and essentially chained to an IV pole, I would stare out my hospital room window at the people below, and feel a rush of the purest envy for their routine pursuits. Imagining the summer night air blowing cool through sweat-dampened shirts, I’d think how good a $3 ice cream would taste right about now, or a $5 beer, and how nice it would be to watch a baseball game of no consequence.
Men acting like boys, hitting, throwing, running on grass. I used to play baseball. In the morning, after urinating away the remnants of poisons pumped into me, I would roll my IV-pole partner back to the window and study again the people below, moving, hustling, ambling, to jobs, to appointments, to a diner, maybe, for one of the fried-egg sandwiches served countless times every morning in Manhattan.
Gradually, from midsummer to late fall, the chemotherapy transformed me into a bald guy whose pallor was offset only by the hint of terror in his eyes. But the chemo also wiped away the muddle, revealing the world in all its mundane glory. I won’t tell you that I wept at the sight of a puppy. But I did linger over my sleeping daughter to watch her tiny chest rise and fall. I did savor the complexities of a simple olive. I did notice fireflies, those dancing night sparks I had long ago stopped seeing.
After the chemotherapy, radiation and a few weeks to allow things to settle down, as my doctor put it, I was declared “clean” in February 2000. Never again, I vowed, would I take these simple things for granted. I was blind, but now I see.
The fog, of course, returned as the effects and memory of chemo faded, no matter that my wife and I were now blessed with two daughters. How I hated traffic jams. And the Vienna Fingers! Who ate the last Vienna Finger?
Then, in the late spring of 2004, probably while I was railing about something eminently unimportant, my cancer impolitely returned. Once again I felt the frigid breath of mortality at my neck. I also felt like a fool. What is the use of surviving cancer if you don’t learn from it? Are improved by it? Am I so thick that I need to receive the life-is-precious message twice?
I returned to Sloan-Kettering for more chemotherapy and more of the same side effects — including my own manifestation of chemo brain. Fog lifted, world revealed.
After the chemotherapy came major surgery, which provided the exclamation point to whatever chemo was trying to tell me. Once again I was declared clean. And this time, by God! This time!
I became a walking platitude, telling friends without a trace of irony to live every day as though it were their last. Because, man, I’ve been there. And if I weren’t so repressed I’d give you a hug.
Slowly, insidiously, the fog of the everyday has returned to enshroud me. It came in wispy strips, a little more, then a little more, wrapping me like a mummy. Just the other day, in the car with my wife and my two daughters, I began railing about being stuck in a traffic jam.
Perspective, my wife said. Perspective.
I could not hear her. You see, I’m struggling with this pre-existing human condition.
Dan Barry writes the “This Land” column in The New York Times.
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Nueva Perspectiva Economica para Puerto Rico
Para el mes de noviembre 2005 estara disponible un nuevo libro sobre la economia de nuestra Isla titulado The Economy of Puerto Rico: Restoring Growth de los autores Susan M. Collins, Barry Bosworth, and Miguel A. Soto-Class, eds.. Este es un trabajo en conjunto realizado por el think tank de The Brookings Institution en el cual colaboran sobre 30 investigadores de sobre 17 instituciones academicas entre ellas la Universidad de Puerto Rico, Harvard University, Columbia University, Princeton University y Duke University.
Dejanos saber que opinas...
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
Como Lance ve el mundo.
Recientemente Lance Armstrong se convirtio en el unico ser humano en ganar 7 Tour de France. ¿Que tiene Lance que los demas no tienen? Aqui unas citas que nos brindan luz sobre sus creencias y manera de ver el mundo.
"Yellow wakes me up in the morning. Yellow gets me on the bike every day. Yellow has taught me the true meaning of sacrifice. Yellow makes me suffer. Yellow is the reason I'm here."
"I believed in belief, for its own shining sake. To believe in the face of utter hopelessness, every article of evidence to the contrary, to ignore apparent catastrophe-what other choice was there? We do it every day, I realized. We are so much stronger than we imagine, and belief is one of the most valiant and long-lived human characteristics. To believe, when all along we humans know that nothing can cure the briefness of this life, that there is no remedy for our basic mortality, that is a form of bravery." "To continue believing in yourself, believing in the doctors, believing in the treatment, believing in whatever I chose to believe in, that was the most important thing, I decided. It had to be." "Without belief, we would be left with nothing but an overwhelming doom, every single day. And it will beat you. I didn't fully see, until the cancer, how we fight every day against the creeping negatives of the world, how we struggle daily against the slow lapping of cynicism. Dispiritedness and disappointment, these are the real perils of life, not some sudden illness or cataclysmic millennium doomsday. I knew now why people fear cancer: because it is a slow and inevitable death, it is the very definition of cynicism and loss of spirit... So, I believed."
"But the fact is that I wouldn't have won even a single Tour de France without the lesson of illness. What it teaches is this: Pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever."
"Cancer is my secret because none of my rivals has been that close to death and it makes you look at the world in a different light and that is a huge advantage."
"I had learned what it means to ride in the Tour de France. It's not about the bike. It's a metaphor for life, not only the longest race in the world but also the most exalting and heartbreaking and potentially tragic. It poses every conceivable element to the rider and more. During our lives we're faced with so many elements as well, we experience so many setbacks, and fight such a hand-to-hand battle with failure, head down in the rain, just trying to stay upright and have a little hope. The Tour isn't just a bike race, it tests you mentally, physically, and even morally."
Dejanos saber que opinas...
Saludos a nuestra gente!
Hoy comenzamos a usar esta nueva tecnologia para mantenernos conectados con ustedes de manera rapida, fresca y facil. Mas que un espacio para la promocion de nuestra empresa, deseamos crear un espacio en el que se puedan crear conversaciones de transformacion personal, grupal y comunitaria. Gracias Fernando Flores!!!!!
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