It took the suicide of the headteacher of Hendon School in North London to get pupils and staff talking about mental health. The terrible event shocked them into dialogue, and two years later a group of more than 30 pupils have organised conferences for other schools and created a mental health app to help fellow students find support.
It’s a new year, so how about a new you?
Most of us are free to move around and do what we like, but is that true for our minds? We tend to associate our thoughts with our sense of self, and according to mindfulness teachings, that is an illusion that leads to suffering.
People will always need medical care, so any job associated with the medical profession is a long-term winning proposition. And doctors like getting paid, so they need people to sort out their billing for them. Medical billing in the United States is a professional job involving medical jargon and a complex system of codes and insurance terms. People familiar with this environment are in high demand and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.
How do you speak without opening your mouth? With your hands of course. American Sign Language is a fully-fledged and widely-spoken language consisting of a standardised set of gestures and expressions. It helps to prevent the sign language version of the Tower of Babel, allowing signers worldwide to avoid misunderstanding and confusion. And you don’t have to be deaf to speak it.
What was Edison thinking when he invented the light bulb? Did it occur to him that his bright invention would deprive millions of healthy sleep patterns for the rest of time? Before electrification, we tended to go to bed when it got dark, to avoid the tedium of stumbling into furniture by the feeble light of oil lamps or candles. We pretty much went to sleep when most animals did. Sure, bedtime changed with sunset times throughout the year, but people practiced natural ‘sleep hygiene’. We evolved to function in this way, after all.
On the coast of Cornwall in England lies a section of coastline that has become legendary in UK surfing circles. Surf stores, hire shops and board makers huddle around this gem of a surfing site, with a west-facing beach that gathers Atlantic swells and turns them into consistent, powerful, breaking waves of up to 30 feet that are ideal for the sport. Newquay is the surf capital of the UK and Fistral Beach is its focus. Many of the best surfers in the world can be seen in action at the competitions held there.
If we really want the cool stuff we see in Science Fiction Movies, we are going to have to train more people in nanotechnology: the manipulation of matter on an atomic, molecular and supramolecular scale. We’ve already got graphene, bendy screens, hydrophobic coatings and bandages infused with silver nanoparticles to help heal wounds faster. Those are cool. But where is Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak? Where are the sci-fi chairs that grow out of the floor and disappear when you stand up?
In 2010, Katy Perry walked into the MET Costume Institute Gala wearing a dress that constantly changed colour. 3000 shimmering LEDs created the effect, with Perry lighting up like a rainbow in the couture dress designed by wearable tech company CuteCircuit. Back in 2009, Sony Ericsson and the London College of Fashion ran a contest to design digital clothing, and the winner was a Bluetooth-enabled cocktail dress that lit up when a call was received.
When we go into a restaurant, we put our trust in its staff to give us food that’s in tip-top shape. Our health and happiness depend on procedures like maintaining the cold chain, cleaning surfaces, sterilizing utensils, checking cooking temperatures and a lot of other details that can make the difference between healthy and dangerous. A chef can kill a customer with a bad scallop, and even if everything is impeccably clean, you can still kill an allergy sufferer with a fragment of peanut. Hence the need for a tightly-regulated catering industry.
The macros function within Excel is such a powerful feature that only the initiated can handle it. You are ready to enter the realm of Excel macros when you are a confident and experienced use of Excel and comfortable creating formulas and manipulating spreadsheet data. A little experience in Visual Basic won’t go amiss, either. You will have mastered most of the functions that come as standard with Excel and be ready to create your own.
If you are into comic books, it can seem that their creators are so far beyond the rest of us in skill and imagination that only they have the divine right to produce comic books. The fantastic epics that roll off the presses and into comic book stores seem to be born in another realm to which mere mortals have no access. Yet if you stop to think about it, those people had to start somewhere and were once shaky novices producing forgettable work.
