Exploring the ins and outs of how you can begin to start growing in your own backyards and balconies.

Whether its a window, balcony, garage, patio or lawn what makes urban farming a particularly viable avocation in our fast-paced daily lives is that it can be tailored to fit the budget and space you have at hand.

And while eating food youve grown yourself sits at the junction of fulfilment, tradition and modernity, adapting to a rapidly changing world and new ways of eating it isn't an easy feat.

In fact, it requires seriousness and commitment.

Essentially, urban farming is all about growing food in a densely populated city or urban environment for sale, barter or consumption, and varies greatly in terms of productivity and scale and even extends to include raising animals as well.

In Pakistan, there exists a growing urban farming community that is not only involved in promoting sustainability and adaptive food consumption but also in encouraging habits of slow food, organic eating, buying local, seasonal produce and using traceable ingredients in cooking.

By speaking to those who know the ins and outs of urban farming and gardening, Images explores how you can begin to start growing in your own backyards and balconies.

Years ago, Sanaa Zubairi started her garden when she and her aunt decided to bring a dormant turai (gourd) creeper back to life in their yard with their gardeners help. It worked, and they added a few banana trees and a lemon tree.

They grew well and we had a lot of fruit, says Zubairi, a 36-year-old mental health counsellor, clinical supervisor and life coach.

Our maali started teaching me about [farming] since he had done it before in his village. Gradually, we experimented, researched online, picked up ideas and added more vegetables to the garden.

Zubairi and her aunt were never alone on their journey. The pair was inspired early on by others in their circle with already thriving kitchen gardens and consulted with their local Karachi chapter of Ikebana International the 20,000-strong international organisation to promote the Japanese art of flower arrangement where members meet once a month for workshops, lectures and discussions of plant and flower-related subjects and Tofiq Pasha, a renowned local farmer who regularly opens his farm to the public for planting workshops and lessons.

Along the way, we started hearing a lot about others growing their own food. I also met with Tofiq Pasha and saw his farm. It was pretty clear it is possible to grow [food] at home. The best part is opening up my window to a lush garden every morning, seeing the fruit hanging all around. Theres nothing like picking your own food, heading into the kitchen and cooking up a storm.

Zubairi revealed that for the past six or seven years, they havent needed to purchase the vegetables they already grow at home. That includes loki, turai, karaila and kakri, as well as spinach for six to eight months of the year and seasonal veggies besides.

There is always something that you can grow even if you don't have resources. Our pantries are packed with seeds; potatoes, garlic and ginger are always available to begin with. When you don't have everything listed in a gardening book or website, then you truly learn how to be creative and how nature finds a way to keep producing.

We have our lemons, basil and mint throughout the year. Seasonal vegetables like broccoli, tomato, eggplant, coriander and peppers keep us going for some months. We've added more fruit and have been enjoying mulberries (shaitoot) for a while now.

Every season, she says, We assess what we want to grow that time around and how much. Some stuff we manage to freeze as well and use whenever.

With a lot of produce coming through, Zubairi shares it with family, friends and house staff, and has also set up a barter system with other growers like her.

Seema Khuled has been regularly conducting gardening workshops and training sessions across Lahore and Islamabad for years.

Each session is three hours long and begins with basic theory the hows and whys followed by a tea break and an interactive practice session.

Workshops are registration-based and cover the basics like organic kitchen gardening, but also go beyond for the more serious enthusiasts with sessions on bonsai, vertical gardening, espaliering and growing mushrooms.

We have quite an informal interactive session where the participants are at ease to ask [questions] and understand. The best part which is very encouraging is that participants execute all the ideas that we discuss during the workshop, says Khuled.

I am always there whenever they need any further guidance but they are well equipped to try on their own.

And the interactive guidance goes beyond the weekend workshops. Khuled helps run Our Gardens, a Facebook group with over 114,000 members who use the platform for everything from help identifying plants (Is this lettuce edible?), to advice on techniques (Will this trellis be strong enough to hold up my vine?; Should I repot or transfer this into the ground?) to why their tomatoes arent thriving.

People also trade seeds and plants there are even giveaways from time to time and share photos and videos of the literal fruits of their labour for others to see. Plus, lots of wholesome memes.

I believe that nobody knows everything but everybody knows something. That is why an urban gardening community is important, says Khuled.

Everyone has something to contribute [with their] experience and knowledge.

Though she'd always had an affinity for nature and the outdoors since childhood, Karachi-based sustainability educator and writer Zahra Ali became a full-time urban farmer in 2008 after she had an accident that caused her to put her career on hold as a result.

During that one year, I asked myself, what will really make me happy if I had no pressures from society and no worry about my future?

I wanted to grow my own food and since then, I have found my way in the most magical ways possible. I gave up my career, which was all about consumerism and was totally not making me happy. It was a daring thing to do back then but amazing things happen when you follow your heart.

Around the same time, she started Crops In Pots, a blog that has since blossomed into a community of urban farmers and led to other projects and initiatives. Organic City, the organisation she started with her husband Yasir Husain, holds horticulture therapy sessions with The Recovery House, runs an heirloom seed bank and opened up the Organic City Eco-Store in 2016.

Then theres The Learning Garden, an initiative that promotes sustainability and conservation in schools through classroom and experiential learning via planting and caring for an organic vegetable patch. Over 7,000 children have participated in the programme over the last 12 years.

I learned gardening skills mainly through reading online and emailing experts from around the world who were very supportive. I watched [videos] and practised. That is why I started my blog in 2008: to share what works and what doesn't, says Ali.

I also got in touch with a group of urban farmers in the Philippines that emerged after the [2004] tsunami hit their area. They used trash to make fertilisers and planters; that truly inspired me.

At home and in the gardens she manages across the city, Ali mainly grows organic heirloom vegetables, herbs and fruits in containers or grow boxes and native trees for tree plantations, along with flowers, which help attract pollinating bees.

Flowers are always a part of any organic and permaculture garden. I have grown all kinds of plants, from orchids, cacti, bonsai [to] tropical and water plants as well. All these years, I have never planted hybrid or genetically modified seeds, and all my initiatives [have also grown] only heirloom vegetables each year since day one.

Lahore-based software project manager Muhammad Khabbab has a similar story. Back in 2008, he first got into gardening because of rising tomato prices at the time. Apart from the standard vegetables and some dwarf fruit trees, he is now growing hundreds of plants on his rooftop and is also a collector of rare and exotic flowers which can get tricky thanks to the fluctuating exchange rate and import restrictions.

Like Ali, he too created a community when he could not find one.

An active member of international gardening forums like Dave's Garden and Houzz, Khabbab started a blog, discussion board and an online store selling local and exotic bulbs, seeds and plants. His forum, Gardening Pakistan, often organises workshops and he makes sure to attend workshops run by others in the city.

I always learn a thing or two whenever I attend a workshop, says Khabbab. When you meet with other gardeners who see things from another perspective, then you get to know many new ideas and many solutions which you did not know in the first place. Learning is a process which never stops.

But for the urban gardening community, the learning is not all online.

Those who have access to or contacts in the rural farmlands regularly travel to interact with farmers on the ground to gain a deeper understanding of how to grow and how to grow better.

For example, Dr Sabeeka Kazilbash, who grows guava and mango trees at her home on the outskirts of Karachi, often visits her aunts in Punjab during the sugarcane or rice harvest seasons and consults with local farmworkers there to add to her knowledge.

She also writes directly to local nurseries in Karachi to ask what theyre up to and shares her own progress.

Extreme temperatures and deadly heatwaves in Pakistan over the past decade led to recognising the impact of losing green spaces in cities to concrete and urbanisation, resulting in government and private efforts to restore tree cover and urban forests.

Although climate change was named as a key contributing factor behind the exceptionally high temperatures of up to 49 degrees Celsius during the deadly 2015 heatwave which killed nearly 2,000 people in mostly Karachi and Sindh, what really drove the phenomenon (and subsequent heatwaves) are deforestation and the loss of green spaces in densely populated areas. This is known as the urban heat island effect.

Though urban gardening and farming also took off around the same time, campaigns calling to increase greenery in cities apparently arent responsible for their popularity.

According to Ali, heatwaves have not been the driving factor behind the growing interest in growing.

Speaking of lawns, Its important to point out that the gardens under discussion almost tend to be privately-held in homes and not, for example, public or commonly-held allotments or gardens, as is often the case in contemporary cities around the world.

Heatwaves did encourage mass tree plantations, she notes, referring to drives to plant trees in public spaces but people have always wanted to be closer to nature.

Over the years, so many gardening societies have bloomed and established, garden stores are spreading and nurseries are [more] accessible. People have also started growing vegetables now and are more aware of the harmful effects of genetically-modified seeds and chemicals used in agriculture.

Khuled concurs with Ali and says growing things has been an integral part of home life for generations. If we rewind our memories, we can see our elders growing a few things and surely having one or two fruit trees in our houses. It's kind of reviving that culture again.

Though they say the heatwaves arent directly behind the rising interest in gardening, both Khuled and Ali do credit a greater awareness of climate change and its effects and declining air quality among young people.

Zubairi who is also an active member of a Karachi-based gardening Facebook group acknowledges there are lots of pitfalls when it comes to growing and sustaining your own food and garden.

In fact, she says, failure is an important teacher. It hasnt been easy dealing with bugs and birds, but the experts shared their experiences, and desi fixes, totkas and failures here and there prepped me.

It takes patience and work.

While water is a constant and omnipresent challenge in Karachi, there are ways to work around it.

Dr Kazilbash, for example, grows according to Karachis climate in a limited space and is lucky her home is on the outer edge of the city, so the soil is richer.

Certain limitations of space and resources are a common factor here [in Pakistan] and turning them into opportunities is a collective effort beneficial to all. Small space gardening is one of the primary examples on which we have gone quite far, Khuled adds, referring to the most common type of setup group members have.

For the last 10 years, 29-year-old digital marketer Mavra Azeemi and her family have grown mostly fruit trees, flowers and ornamentals within their Lahore home: kinnow, mosambi, chikoo, red and green grapes, papaya, curry leaf, lemongrass, basil, date, guava, aloe, jasmine and rose.

Then theres the empty plot of land next door, where theyve planted moringa described as a miracle tree for all its nutritious benefits and a diverse vegetable patch.

She says, Thanks to the empty plot next to our house, we've been lucky enough to grow a whole bunch of different seasonal vegetables.

And though Lahore has better soil conditions and season differentiation, the smog and other irregularities can lead to an uneven or sometimes no output, which can get expensive in terms of time and effort.

Although, for Ali, who grows heirloom and organic, it was all about learning slowly through experience over the years.

She says, It was very challenging to find organic experts, garden shops or even local gardening social media groups back then.

Nearly a decade ago, she created a guide for starting a vegetable garden on a less than shoestring budget based on her own experience.

Dr Kazilbash, who is in her 30s, grew up watching her grandparents harvest their own kitchen essentials and took on gardening as a hobby as her interest grew.

Their encouragement, however, came from the pain of their own experience.

My grandfather often recalled his pre-Partition days and always advised that if a war-like situation [like that] happens again, [you must be prepared and] you have to plant food for your own survival. I always laughed, but this point always remains in my mind.

For some, the drive and satisfaction of growing food lies in maintaining family tradition and a kind of modern pastoral nostalgia. Linked to that are concerns like eliminating food miles or avoiding pesticide biomagnification. Plus, when you grow spinach and lettuce in your own yard, you know they havent been watered with sewage.

There is nothing as rewarding as picking up fresh food from your garden just before cooking, says Ali, who grows organic produce in all her gardens.

We are missing out [on] a diverse range of vegetables thanks to commercial farming. We need to revive heirloom seeds especially because over the past few decades, the world has lost a huge percentage of heirloom seed diversity.

The joy of picking a fresh orange from the tree that grows in your garden can never be matched by anything you get in the market, explains Azeemi, who comes from a landowning family in Punjab.

The connection you feel to the food you grow runs a lot deeper. You've shared the same piece of earth and gotten the same sun, grown up together, it's like the most beautiful friendship.

Food is the basic fuel for our body, says Khuled, who notes that pesticide intake tends to be highest when it comes to raw leaves and vegetables.

Growing your own food is taking charge of your health with your own hands. It also tastes much better.

I know we cannot grow everything but at least we can grow those which are consumed raw.

Organic farming can be challenging enough at subsistence level but even more so at scale, and is much less commercially viable in comparison to conventionally grown crops. Even when produce is labelled organic, its difficult to ensure it is 100% so and hasnt been exposed to harmful pesticides or fertilisers at some point.

This means the Pakistani urban garden is atomic, individual and domestic, with no infrastructure or sustainable model to turn it into a true community project that can build social cohesion and empower people.

Commercial farms cannot be completely organic even if they try [to be] due to pesticide sprays in adjacent farms, says Khuled, alluding to the fact that, though there are exceptions, organic farms are often located near or on the same properties as conventional ones.

For Zubairi, however, the benefits of urban farming go far beyond solely clean food: it can be revitalising in terms of mental health too.

Kitchen gardening and nature are a huge personal resource to help reconnect with the world and nature, ground the self and teach and encourage others to do the same.

It also helps to enjoy the many things we discover every now and then: butterflies, all kinds of winged bugs and different birds coming in to share the fruit. Some are just absolutely fascinating.

Dr Kazilbash, who also grows herbs, garlic, ginger, eggplant, potatoes and chillies, finds similar happiness when she gives much of her produce away.

When a friend shares her experience of how she used brinjal Ive grown in tarkari and raita, Im just overwhelmed with joy.

So what does the future of urban farming look like in Pakistan?

Ali is optimistic. It is bright, especially since [many] schools have started educating children about being close to nature. I am very hopeful to see our future community leaders shaping greener communities.

Urban gardeners are getting more active with the food growing movement now, says Khuled, which indicates a break from pristine balconies and the primly landscaped yet monotonous lawn.

"Along with beautiful, colourful and fragrant gardens, we are seeing edibles grown all along. This is very encouraging.

It's going to get even better if kitchen gardening can be introduced in every school and college, Khuled echoes.

She says, It's important to bring young children close to nature. I am seeing a much greener and healthier environment in years to come with all these youngsters joining us.

Speaking of lawns, Its important to point out that the gardens under discussion almost tend to be privately-held in homes and not, for example, public or commonly-held allotments or gardens, as is often the case in contemporary cities around the world.

This means the Pakistani urban garden is atomic, individual and domestic, with no infrastructure or sustainable model to turn it into a true community project that can build social cohesion and empower people.

Mid-February to early April is the spring planting season, which means right now is the perfect time to plan and start your very own garden.

Ali recommends growing locally available flowers, herbs and vegetables.

Try to include a water feature for bees, butterflies and birds, she adds.

There is always something that you can grow even if you don't have resources. Our pantries are packed with seeds; potatoes, garlic and ginger are always available to begin with. When you don't have everything listed in a gardening book or website, then you truly learn how to be creative and how nature finds a way to keep producing.

If that seems too daunting, Khuled recommends starting small.

Start with growing things you love to see or eat, she says. Always ask others for help and information with your gardening. Don't get discouraged if you fail to grow something. That is a part of learning.

Gardening is addictive. Once youre in, there is no way back.

See the article here:

Urban farming is the future of healthy living - DAWN.com

Lets take a timeout from politics.

The American Heart Associations National Walking Day is April 3. Walking will put your brain in a meditative state, reduces stress, boosts stress busting endorphins, with a partner boosts stress relieving benefits, boosts energy and reduces fatigue.

Whether you are a Democrat, Republican or Independent, uncertainty about employment, schooling, worry about health of family and friends, and isolation, a daily walk can reduce stress and alleviate mild depression that you may be feeling.

Many of my favorite writers have been walkers. Henry David Thoreau, William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Mahatma Gandhi connected the working of their minds to the steady movement of their feet.

Walking with a purpose is taken as a sign that people are focused, with eyes on the prize. But the art of walking is not about purpose or a prize. As Immanuel Kant maintained, the creation of beauty is embodied in a purposiveness without a definite purpose. The art of walking is all about this purposeless purpose.

We typically walk in order to get somewhere: the grocery store, get the mail, to confer with someone at work. We need to walk the dog or walk in protest like Murrays Womens March for Social Justice. We walk to get in shape, counting our steps on a Fitbit. Our walking becomes a matter of proving, achieving, gaining, or winning.

The frantic attempt to get somewhere, and to be on time, amounts to a Sisyphean struggle, a task that is endless. In Greek legend Sisyphus was punished in Hades for his misdeeds in life by being condemned eternally to roll a heavy stone up a hill.

When walking, we reach a destination, then we must immediately set off again, intent on the next stopping place, then again and again.

Walking is increasingly measured by technological gadgets worn on wrists. We spend an increasing amount of time screening our world using a smart phone screen that captures objects of immediate interest. Instead of asking What do I see? We are told instead how to see, and often what to feel much of which is determined by an algorithm.

Lets instead pursue the art of walking, the opposite of screening the world we live in, and no set of rules. Walking can be a brief respite in our coronavirus stressed lives, allowing us to see life for ourselves again, not unlike a child does. In walking, we can just step out the front door, pay attention, and perceive and feel.

As a pilgrim, or an evening stroller, the pilgrim ambles for the sake of a blessing; an evening stroller may seek digestive benefits, whether walking with a companion or encountering neighbors along the way.

When we walk without a goal, there is a certain beauty in the awareness of being fully alive while moving through a given space in time. This experience cannot be gotten on a page or a smartphone screen, but only through eyes, ears, nose and skin: the sensation of light, of a buildings grace, of streams and rocks, wind and leaves, fragrances of nature, and a boundless horizon.

Someone might say, what is the point of simply ambling along? This would be like asking what the point of watching a sunset is or smelling a rose. The answer is simple: for the experience alone.

A genuine experience of the art of walking is aimless, while we can experience sunsets, fragrance of flowers, and the sounds of animals and insects.

We can travel through this world by walking in a state of awareness. We can behold, rather than being told.

When we give ourselves over to the art of walking, we exist in the moment for no reason other than that of the experience alone, for the appreciation of beauty. There is no purpose in this occurrence, only the immeasurable effect it has on our nerves, our body, our being.

We have many excellent quiet neighborhoods, many miles of new sidewalks. We have a college campus with many possible circuits. Find a partner, practice social distancing, and take your mind off the stressors of this moment.

See you out there on the walkways at a safe!

Read the original here:
The art of walking | Opinion - Murray Ledger and Times

Philosophers and psychologists may provide an explanation for the tedium some of us feel during lockdown.

The nineteenth century German philosopher Freidrich Nietzsche once asked: Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?

Thats a question millions around the world, with the privilege of self-isolating themselves amid the coronavirus pandemic, now find themselves forced to confront.

Many developed states have either ordered mandatory curfews or strongly advised people to stay at home for all but essential trips. In some cases people are now starting their third week at home with the possibility that they could be stuck there for months more.

For many of those under lockdown, there may be remote working obligations, child care responsibilities, Zoom hangouts, exercise, or a newly found penchant for cleaning or cooking to provide a break from the tedium.

Nevertheless, the spectre of boredom lurks, appearing most frequently after a long and unsuccessful trawl of offerings on Netflix or when a book or mobile phone can no longer hold the attention. A pang of ache in the wrist while refreshing a Twitter feed can give way to that most dreaded of questions: So what now?

Why do we get bored?

The consequences of boredom are not trivial. Psychologists have long documented its link to the development of harmful habits, such as binge eating and substance abuse. People who are bored are also at heightened risk of developing depression and anxiety.

But at the same time, philosophers and scientists have had a hard time defining what boredom actually is and why we feel it.

A 2012 paper by psychologist John D Eastwood summarises boredom as the aversive experience of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity.

Eastwood based that definition on the synthesis of four rival theories for the phenomenon. These are: the arousal, existential, psychodynamic, and cognitive theories of boredom.

For the sake of brevity and relevance, lets single out two of those.

The first- the arousal theory- seems most relevant to boredom induced by the lockdown. Eastwoods paper defines it as the nonoptimal arousal that ensues when there is a mismatch between an individuals needed arousal and the availability of environmental stimulation.

Put simply, we feel the urge to be stimulated but our environment is not able to satisfy that need.

Coronavirus-related lockdowns have restricted our stimulatory environments to our homes and social media. Whereas before the pandemic, there were cafes, nightclubs, and football stadiums, now we have only the contents and members of our homes, as well as those we can reach virtually through technology.

The second, the existential theory, has a more broader explanation on the phenomenon of boredom but can perhaps provide a way out of our current tedious impasse.

We will allow Eastwood to provide his definition before going our own way.

The York University academic explains: Existential theories argue that boredom is caused by a lack of life meaning or purpose; boredom ensues when an individual gives up on or fails to articulate and participate in activities that are consistent with his values.

He further describes existential boredom as: A sense of emptiness, meaninglessness and a paralysis of agency- the bored individual is unable to find impetus for action.

Boredom and the meaning of life

It seems like a dramatic jump to go from discussing the boredom felt while trying to find something good to watch on Netflix to talking about the meaning of life, but the two are intertwined, at least according to the existentialists.

Explaining philosophical ideas is hard at the best of times, let alone explaining their relevance to why you feel bored during an ongoing pandemic, so bear with us.

The starting point of existential thought is that all attempts at understanding the meaning of life start with the individual, and not an all governing cosmic order.

Human beings must reconcile the urge to find purpose in their existence, with the seeming indifference of the world around them. That inherent contradiction is the cause of anxiety, which philosophers have described as angst or dread.

Not many people are thinking about the purpose of their lives during their morning commute, shopping trip, or coffee date. Normal life provides plenty of distraction from the feeling of existential anxiety.

For some, the coronavirus pandemic will have created an upheaval of that sense of normality, exposing its construction on chaotic underpinnings, and forcing them to recognise the fundamental randomness of their environment.

This confrontation between individual purpose and chaotic reality can lead to an inertia from which boredom with everyday life is a byproduct - Ordinary activities lose their stimulatory appeal, as we can no longer find meaning in them.

Boredom and creativity

It is important to make clear that existential anxiety is not tied to specific temporary situations like the coronavirus lockdown but understanding it can provide a way out of the boredom some of us may currently feel.

Thats because for existentialist thinkers like Nietzsche and Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard, boredom was not just a weight dragging down humans into the pits of despair, but could also be the impetus for dramatic individual change and transformation.

Nietzsche described boredom as the unpleasant calm that precedes creative acts.

While for Kierkegaard, it was our abhorrence of boredom that provided the impulse for creativity.

Boredom is the root of all evil. It is very curious that boredom, which itself has such a calm and sedate nature, can have such a capacity to initiate motion. The effect that boredom brings about is absolutely magical, but this effect is one not of attraction but of repulsion, he wrote.

There is some scientific evidence to support this link between boredom and creativity.

A 2012 study by Sandi Mann, an occupational psychologist at the University of Central Lancashire, suggested that participating in boring activities led to better performance in certain subsequent creative activities.

Interestingly, Manns research provides a possible mechanism for this link, suggesting that daydreaming may prove to be an important vector in turning boredom into creativity.

At the risk of oversimplifying, Manns explanation is summarised as follows: Boredom forces people to seek out forms of stimulation. Unable to find it externally, the focus shifts to internal thoughts and feelings, which manifests as daydreaming. That inner stimulation gained by daydreaming compensates for the external lack of stimulation. This leads to more creative problem solving.

With fewer external distractions due to the pandemic, it could be that many more of us start looking internally rather than externally for our sources of stimulation.

Recent articles by the Washington Post and the Atlantic have described how Isaac Newton and William Shakespeare wrote some of their greatest works during times of pandemic. It may well have been that a series of daydreams brought on by boredom gave the world calculus and Macbeth.

Source: TRT World

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This is why youre bored in quarantine - TRT World

The memoir will feel slight in your hands, only 165 pages long. Even so, for sheer insight per page, Mans Search For Meaning has no rival among books written in the last 100 years.

It is the story of Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist from Vienna, and how he survived the Nazi death camps. It is a tale of extreme struggle, despair, loss, grief and the many ways in which life can challenge us.

In other words, a perfect book for life in the face of COVID-19.

I first read Frankls book while slogging through the crash of a marriage in my early 30s. The end of that relationship left me bitter, ashamed and feeling toxic on a daily basis.

Reading about the victims of Auschwitz and their suffering provided some much-needed perspective.

The Nazis took away everything Frankl valued: His wife, his mother, his father, his brother, his possessions, everything down to the manuscript he considered his lifes work.

What they could not steal was what Frankl describes as the last of the human freedoms to choose ones attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose ones own way.

Over the years, that quote has crossed my mind thousands of times: At the bedside of my mother as she wasted away in the hospital; in the face of professional disappointments and losses that made me angry, frustrated or despondent; while driving along the freeway and getting cut off by a moron; and over this past week, dealing with the fallout of the coronavirus outbreak.

Theres liberation in the idea: That ultimately we all get to choose our own attitude, no matter what happens around us or to us, no matter how life tests us.

Of course, Frankl wasnt done dispensing wisdom with one quote, which is why I have read his book at least once a year since the first time I picked it up.

He writes eloquently about surviving the icy cold march to a work site by fixing his imagination upon the face of his wife as he stumbled along for miles.

Her face, he explains, allowed him to grasp the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief hold for us.

The salvation of man, Frankl writes, is through love and in love.

Re-reading the book again over the past few days, I found myself thinking, of all things, about a spat I witnessed in the grocery store: A grown man threatening an elderly woman for adding what he believed to be too many cans of soup to her shopping cart. Profanities flew. The old woman gave as good as she got.

Eventually they went off in separate directions trailing f-bombs in their wake, but not before the man delivered this pearl.

B-h, youll be dead soon enough anyways.

Frankl, whose book covers far greater deprivation than a lack of Campbells chicken noodle in a can, writes with insight about suffering and how it can lead us to find meaning in our lives. Suffering pushes us to live in one of two ways, he writes.

(We) may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal.

For Frankl, finding meaning in life is the ultimate goal. Twice he quotes Nietzsche on the subject: He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.

My thought: If the COVID-19 crisis tests us in the most profound ways, youll be glad you read the book. If not and Im just being overly dramatic, youll be glad anyways.

There are far worse ways to spend a couple hours in quarantine.

View original post here:
Holocaust survivor's book applies in these times | Opinion - westvalleyview.com

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Cold Chain Tracking and Monitoring Devices Market Report by Manufacturers, Regions, Type and Application Forecast 2019 2025 - Science In Me

Pandemics reveal the true colours of human nature. Albert Camus argued as much in his novel The Plague the book which everyone is talking about (and which is now a bestseller for the first time since its publication in 1947).

Sure enough, with Covid-19 weve seen it all, from heroism, self-sacrifice and scientific endeavour to racism, ageism and mercenary self-preservation. Humans are both the salt of the earth and red in tooth and claw.

With that in mind and as a bit of light reading to keep you occupied in quarantine heres a brief look at what some of historys greatest thinkers might have to say about human behaviour (and the behaviour of governments) in the Age of Coronavirus.

Long before Jesus Christ, it was the Chinese philosopher Confucius who first espoused the Golden Rule: never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself. Or, as the government would put it: Stay home. Protect the NHS. Save lives.

Its fair to say that Aristotle would be struggling with social distancing and self-isolation. Man is, Aristotle wrote, by nature a social animal. Yet he would also be encouraged by the spirit of togetherness that Covid-19 has engendered in countries like the UK, for, according to Aristotle, the public is more important than the private.

I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, allisvanity and vexation of spirit. So says the Preacher, or Ecclesiastes, in the Old Testament. The author remains unknown, but some say it is the son of David, King Solomon.In any case, considering the bookshelf boasting and video call vanity that has become par for the course in lockdown, its hard to disagree.

Thanks to Covid-19, an adjective which derives from a school of Ancient philosophy is making a comeback: stoic. One of Stoicisms most famous proponents was the Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, whose Meditations provides many useful aphorisms for these uncertain times. Take this one: death smiles at us all, all a man can do is smile back.

You might feel like youre going through the Nine Circles of Hell, or Dantes Inferno,right now. But Dantewasnt just a religious poet. He also wrote about politics and government, arguing inDe Monarchiathat war and its causes would be eliminated if the whole earth and all that humans can possess can be a monarchy, that is, one government under one ruler. Last week, Gordon Brown made a similarargument about Covid-19.

Thomas Cromwell is all the rage right now thanks to Hilary Mantels Wolf Hall trilogy, but it is his rival, Thomas More, who we should be focusing on. After all, it was More who, in his seminal work, Utopia, popularised the idea of a universal basic income. Due to Covid-19, both the UK and US governments are now reconsidering their long-held hostility to the idea.

Writing at a time ravaged by both the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War, Thomas Hobbes compared his contemporaries lawlessness to what he called the state of nature a primordial mode of existence before laws and governments. In the state of nature, Hobbes argued that life is a war of all against all. If youve been in a supermarket recently, you wouldnt disagree.

As soon as any man says of the affairs of the state, What does it matter to me? the state may be given up as lost. So wrote Jean-Jacques Rosseau in The Social Contract. John F Kennedy recorded these words in one of his notebooks and, in his first inaugural address, asked Americans not to ask what their country could do for them, but what they could do for their country. David Cameron invoked Kennedy withhis Big Society agenda, but it is under Boris Johnson that nearly a million British people have volunteered to help the NHS.

Thomas Malthus, of Malthusian fame, would see a sinister silver lining in the Age of Coronavirus: rising mortality rates. Malthus argued that, if left unchecked, a population would outgrow its resources, leading to greater inequality and famine. Some of his ideas for keeping this in check included chastity, war and, you guessed it, plague.

Charles Darwin didnt coin the term survival of the fittest (that was Herbert Spencer), but it aptly sums up his theory of natural selection, the process by which a speciesadaptsin order tosurvive. Of course, with Covid-19, it is the least fit among us (the elderly and those with underlying health conditions) who are at most risk. And only time will tell how well the human race adapts to lockdown.

The man who provided the greatest intellectual challenge to the capitalist system would surely welcome the disruption that Covid-19 has brought upon the global economy. A universal income is on the cards, key workers are being applauded like never before and the rest of us, freed from the office, have escaped what Marx called the despotic bell. Working from home, we can now hunt in the morning and fish in the afternoon (or just watch TV all day) the communist life.

God is dead, proclaimed Friedrich Nietzsche, we have killed him. Indeed, whereas past pandemics like the Black Death and Spanish Flu were widely seen as works of divine punishment, the global reaction to Covid-19, with the exception of religious fanatics and Kourtney Kardashian, has been markedly nihilistic.

Unlike John Maynard Keynes, who would welcome both the lowering of interest rates and billion-pound stimulus packages, Friedrich Hayek will be turning in his grave. In The Road to Serfdom he argued that central planning and nationalisation lead to totalitarianism and warned against the pursuit of wartime measures in peacetime exactly the measures being introduced right now.

The pin-up of the Right, Ayn Rand wouldnt have a problem with stockpiling or wealthy Londoners fleeing to their second homes. Echoing Enlightenment figures such as Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith, Rand believed in the the virtue of selfishness and questioned both the ethic of altruism and whether humans need a moral code at all. The individual, Rand believed, should exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself.

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Covid-19 life lessons from some of history's greatest thinkers - TheArticle

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Friedrich Nietzsche, a renowned German philosopher, once said: Without music, life would be a mistake. And he was 100% right. Music has evolved out of movie theatres, radios and live shows to become our constant companion. Whether we are exercising, traveling, working or studying, music helps us do everything better. As much as we should thank the singers and the music industry for giving us our daily motivation, we should also be thankful to some consumer electronic brands who have taken several innovative measures, thereby making music portable. Especially for the young generation, carrying music along all the time is a prevalent and common phenomenon. However, some brands are dedicated to enabling their consumers to get the divine music experience with ultimate gadgets. Lets check out the brands that are leading in presenting innovative audio gadgets for the best possible user experience.

JBL is an American audio electronics company that was established in 1946. Its founder Mr James Bullough Lansing was an innovative engineer who laid the foundation for initial products offered by the company. Even though James ended his life in 1949 but his legacy lives on till today. JBL earned its fame by supplying high-end music equipment to touring artists and bands. Most music festivals and rock acts back then used JBL loudspeakers, making it a desirable brand. Today the brand offers a vast range of audio equipment both in professional and consumer categories.

Conceptualized in the early 2000s in France, ZOOOK has gained popularity for its agility in giving an instant makeover to the music delivery equipment and also making them more accessible. All the product offered by ZOOOK suggest their innovative outlook and are affordable, highly durable, and trendy! From earphones to heavy-duty party speakers, ZOOOK has developed powerful devices that are extremely comfortable to use, carry around and manage. With an increased userbase among the youngsters, they are already on their way to break stereotypes, open doors and explore the fantastic. The company has a strong brand presence across online and at offline trade channels retail stores, direct dealer channels, and e-commerce websites across the world.

This consumer electronics startup is based in India. boAt started its operations in 2016 intending to offer affordable, durable, and fashionable audio products and accessories to millennials. The company has a sharp focus on the quality of the products and has become popular among millennials for their earphones, headphones, speakers, travel chargers and premium rugged cables, etc. Today the company has created a niche for themselves in the Indian market by addressing common issues faced by millennials and Gen Z in terms of quality audio products. The company claims to work with the philosophy to create experiences and not products. So far, they have been able to win the hearts of millennials with their unique products.

Sennheiser is a German audio company that focuses on the designing and production of innovative audio products. The company offers a wide range of products under various categories such as microphones, headphones, telephony accessories and avionics headsets for personal as well as professional use. The brand is mainly famous for its headphones that provide a comfortable fit and a fantastic music experience. With time the company has been at the forefront to provide wireless transmission technology, conference and tour guide systems, aviation headsets, high-quality headphones, and headphone transducers and monitor systems.

Note: This article is published by Guest PR

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Tech companies making the people dance to their tune in India - H2S Media

It is one of those days when you feel youre on top of things. It may well be too early to celebrate but perhaps my Corona Regimen is actually working. And before dark thoughts and the persistent, surreal feeling of being in a bad dystopian novel surface again as I absolutely expect them to, let us share what I desperately hope is the secret behind the rare uplifted spirits.

So, first things first the TV is the enemy. You dont get any real news anyway and Netflix is the death of all discipline and hope. The days and even the nights have to be strictly structured sans the telly or you might find yourself eating crap at 3 in the morning. Ive done it even when there was the office to rush to. But now that were working from home, the danger of 3 am-turning-7 am is far more pronounced. And let us always be alive to the excruciating lethargy/exhaustion/drained feeling post binge-watching, only because it tends to somehow evaporate when one settles down and grabs the remote.

There was a whole series (Gone Girls although I shouldnt tell if anyone here is as hopelessly addicted as I am to Trapped, Shetland, Happy Valley, The Fall and such like) that I was settling before the PM settled for the 8 PM slot. A friend thought she might actually have Covid that evening. As it turned out, it was just a case of having had too much of the good Vodka. Were all going to die, was the text from another. And I was near hysteria over the few dishes that I was having to wash.

This wouldnt do, I thought. All the I-Ching/Zen Buddhism/Jiddu/Alan Watts et al that I have devoured over the year of failed romances and dimming career prospects have to amount to something in these dire times. And so I dusted out the Sisters Susan Brownmiller, Kate Millet and Germaine Greer for strength and inner silence because Jiddu isnt cutting it anymore. I needed real steel and found it in The Madwomans Underclothes (Greer, shes sharp, edgy, gritty and very inspiring). I was going to go through all this and come out better five kilos less, minus all the toxins I consume and inhale and stronger than I was before Covid and 8 pm.

So the TV has been off for three days except to eat dinner with Amma as she watches an old film at night with Meena Kumari in it. Thats as sure a shot at safe-distancing from binge-watching as you can get.

The next part of the Regimen is exercise, yoga in my case but it could be walking around the compound twice a day. At least for an-hour-and-half in the morning as theres no office to go to. The best way to keep it going is to get up, make your bed, wash up and get to it. If you dont do it then and lounge with tea/coffee, it just doesnt get done. Make breakfast, finish bathing, get to office work, make lunch, wash up and then some more work. An evening walk is the more preferred option than making that drink and sitting around. I tend to bathe just before I head for the bed but thats entirely optional. And read before sleeping as opposed to watching TV. Writing this diary in the evening is also another way of staying sane.

If all of this sounds excruciatingly clean and pious, I understand. But the option is to let this extraordinary event overwhelm and exhaust you. Being active, mentally and physically is just a way of staying sane.

At least that is the state that has thankfully persisted for Day 3. Theres no saying where it will be tomorrow.

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Quarantine Tools - The Hindu BusinessLine

D-Wave today made its quantum computers available for free to researchers and developers working on responses to the coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis. D-Wave partners and customers Cineca, Denso, Forschungszentrum Jlich, Kyocera, MDR, Menten AI, NEC, OTI Lumionics, QAR Lab at LMU Munich, Sigma-i, Tohoku University, and Volkswagen are also offering to help. They will provide access to their engineering teams with expertise on how to use quantum computers, formulate problems, and develop solutions.

Quantum computing leverages qubits to perform computations that would be much more difficult, or simply not feasible, for a classical computer. Based in Burnaby, Canada, D-Wave was the first company to sell commercial quantum computers, which are built to use quantum annealing. D-Wave says the move to make access free is a response to a cross-industry request from the Canadian government for solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic. Free and unlimited commercial contract-level access to D-Waves quantum computers is available in 35 countries across North America, Europe, and Asia via Leap, the companys quantum cloud service. Just last month, D-Wave debuted Leap 2, which includes a hybrid solver service and solves problems of up to 10,000 variables.

D-Wave and its partners are hoping the free access to quantum processing resources and quantum expertise will help uncover solutions to the COVID-19 crisis. We asked the company if there were any specific use cases it is expecting to bear fruit. D-Wave listed analyzing new methods of diagnosis, modeling the spread of the virus, supply distribution, and pharmaceutical combinations. D-Wave CEO Alan Baratz added a few more to the list.

The D-Wave system, by design, is particularly well-suited to solve a broad range of optimization problems, some of which could be relevant in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, Baratz told VentureBeat. Potential applications that could benefit from hybrid quantum/classical computing include drug discovery and interactions, epidemiological modeling, hospital logistics optimization, medical device and supply manufacturing optimization, and beyond.

Earlier this month, Murray Thom, D-Waves VP of software and cloud services, told us quantum computing and machine learning are extremely well matched. In todays press release, Prof. Dr. Kristel Michielsen from the Jlich Supercomputing Centre seemed to suggest a similar notion: To make efficient use of D-Waves optimization and AI capabilities, we are integrating the system into our modular HPC environment.

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D-Wave makes its quantum computers free to anyone working on the coronavirus crisis - VentureBeat

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Back in February 2020, scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago revealed that they had achieved a quantum entanglement in which the behavior of a pair two tiny particles becomes linked, so that their states are identical over a 52-mile (83.7 kilometer) quantum-loop network in the Chicago suburbs.

You may be wondering what all the fuss is about, if you're not a scientist familiar with quantum mechanics that is, the behavior of matter and energy at the smallest scale of reality, which is peculiarly different from the world we can see around us.

But the researchers' feat could be an important step in the development of a new, vastly more powerful version of the internet in the next few decades. Instead of the bits that today's network uses, which can only express a value of either 0 or 1, the future quantum internet would utilize qubits of quantum information, which can take on an infinite number of values. (A quibit is the unit of information for a quantum computer; it's like a bit in an ordinary computer).

That would give the quantum internet way more bandwidth, which would make it possible to connect super-powerful quantum computers and other devices and run massive applications that simply aren't possible with the internet we have now.

"A quantum internet will be the platform of a quantum ecosystem, where computers, networks, and sensors exchange information in a fundamentally new manner where sensing, communication, and computing literally work together as one entity, " explains David Awschalom via email. He's a spintronics and quantum information professor in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago and a senior scientist at Argonne, who led the quantum-loop project.

So why do we need this and what does it do? For starters, the quantum internet is not a replacement of the regular internet we now have. Rather it would be a complement to it or a branch of it. It would be able to take care of some of the problems that plague the current internet. For instance, a quantum internet would offer much greater protection from hackers and cybercriminals. Right now, if Alice in New York sends a message to Bob in California over the internet, that message travels in more or less a straight line from one coast to the other. Along the way, the signals that transmit the message degrade; repeaters read the signals, amplify and correct the errors. But this process allows hackers to "break in" and intercept the message.

However, a quantum message wouldn't have that problem. Quantum networks use particles of light photons to send messages which are not vulnerable to cyberattacks. Instead of encrypting a message using mathematical complexity, says Ray Newell, a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory, we would rely upon the peculiar rules of quantum physics. With quantum information, "you can't copy it or cut it in half, and you can't even look at it without changing it." In fact, just trying to intercept a message destroys the message, as Wired magazine noted. That would enable encryption that would be vastly more secure than anything available today.

"The easiest way to understand the concept of the quantum internet is through the concept of quantum teleportation," Sumeet Khatri, a researcher at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, says in an email. He and colleagues have written a paper about the feasibility of a space-based quantum internet, in which satellites would continually broadcast entangled photons down to Earth's surface, as this Technology Review article describes.

"Quantum teleportation is unlike what a non-scientist's mind might conjure up in terms of what they see in sci-fi movies, " Khatri says. "In quantum teleportation, two people who want to communicate share a pair of quantum particles that are entangled. Then, through a sequence of operations, the sender can send any quantum information to the receiver (although it can't be done faster than light speed, a common misconception). This collection of shared entanglement between pairs of people all over the world essentially constitutes the quantum internet. The central research question is how best to distribute these entangled pairs to people distributed all over the world. "

Once it's possible to do that on a large scale, the quantum internet would be so astonishingly fast that far-flung clocks could be synchronized about a thousand times more precisely than the best atomic clocks available today, as Cosmos magazine details. That would make GPS navigation vastly more precise than it is today, and map Earth's gravitational field in such detail that scientists could spot the ripple of gravitational waves. It also could make it possible to teleport photons from distant visible-light telescopes all over Earth and link them into a giant virtual observatory.

"You could potentially see planets around other stars, " says Nicholas Peters, group leader of the Quantum Information Science Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

It also would be possible for networks of super-powerful quantum computers across the globe to work together and create incredibly complex simulations. That might enable researchers to better understand the behavior of molecules and proteins, for example, and to develop and test new medications.

It also might help physicists to solve some of the longstanding mysteries of reality. "We don't have a complete picture of how the universe works," says Newell. "We have a very good understanding of how quantum mechanics works, but not a very clear picture of the implications. The picture is blurry where quantum mechanics intersects with our lived experience."

But before any of that can happen, researchers have to figure out how to build a quantum internet, and given the weirdness of quantum mechanics, that's not going to be easy. "In the classical world you can encode information and save it and it doesn't decay, " Peters says. "In the quantum world, you encode information and it starts to decay almost immediately. "

Another problem is that because the amount of energy that corresponds to quantum information is really low, it's difficult to keep it from interacting with the outside world. Today, "in many cases, quantum systems only work at very low temperatures," Newell says. "Another alternative is to work in a vacuum and pump all the air out. "

In order to make a quantum internet function, Newell says, we'll need all sorts of hardware that hasn't been developed yet. So it's hard to say at this point exactly when a quantum internet would be up and running, though one Chinese scientist has envisioned that it could happen as soon as 2030.

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We're Getting Closer to the Quantum Internet, But What Is It? - HowStuffWorks