It’s the Diwali weekend and to everyone who is celebrating the festival, here’s wishing you all a very Happy Diwali! Hope the festival of lights brings your way bright sparkles of peace, contentment, joy, and happiness which stays with you throughout this year and also in the years to come. May the lamp of joy remain illuminated in your life now and forever.
I was super busy this week making sweets and savouries for the festival and by the time Friday came around, I was exhausted. I wonder if this is because I split it across the whole week or if it is because I am getting old! Previously when I used to do it across one weekend, it didn’t seem so hectic, so I guess it’s age catching up with me! Anyway, other than this and doing some deep cleaning in the house, we didn’t do much. The children are busy with school, assignments and project work.
Because this weekend is the beautiful festival of lights, lets spread some positivity. I turned to my favourite source and here are some feel good quotes from Pinterest.
Gweilo: Memories Of A Hong Kong Childhood – Martin Booth
Martin Booth died in February 2004, shortly after finishing the book that would be his epitaph – this wonderfully remembered, beautifully told memoir of a childhood lived to the full in a far-flung outpost of the British Empire…
An inquisitive seven-year-old, Martin Booth found himself with the whole of Hong Kong at his feet when his father was posted there in the early 1950s. Unrestricted by parental control and blessed with bright blond hair that signified good luck to the Chinese, he had free access to hidden corners of the colony normally closed to a Gweilo, a ‘pale fellow’ like him. Befriending rickshaw coolies and local stallholders, he learnt Cantonese, sampled delicacies such as boiled water beetles and one-hundred-year-old eggs, and participated in colourful festivals. He even entered the forbidden Kowloon Walled City, wandered into the secret lair of the Triads and visited an opium den. Along the way he encountered a colourful array of people, from the plink plonk man with his dancing monkey to Nagasaki Jim, a drunken child molester, and the Queen of Kowloon, the crazed tramp who may have been a member of the Romanov family.
Shadowed by the unhappiness of his warring parents, a broad-minded mother who, like her son, was keen to embrace all things Chinese, and a bigoted father who was enraged by his family’s interest in ‘going native’, Martin Booth’s compelling memoir is a journey into Chinese culture and an extinct colonial way of life that glows with infectious curiosity and humour.
Tomorrow is World Diabetes Day. As someone who is diabetic, this day is something that I like to write about each year so more people become aware of this silent killer. Created in 1991 by the International Diabetes Federation and the World Health Organisation in response to growing concerns about the escalating health threat posed by diabetes, the World Diabetes Day became an official United Nations Day in 2006. 14 November was chosen to commemorate the day as it is the birthday of Sir Frederick Banting, who co-discovered insulin along with Charles Best in 1922.
The world’s largest diabetes awareness campaign reaching a global audience of over 1 billion people in more than 160 countries, the World Diabetes Day draws attention to issues of paramount importance to the diabetes world and keeps diabetes firmly in the public and political spotlight.
The World Diabetes Day campaign aims to be the platform to promote IDF advocacy efforts throughout the year and be the global driver to promote the importance of taking coordinated and concerted actions to confront diabetes as a critical global health issue. The campaign is represented by a blue circle logo that was adopted in 2007 after the passage of the UN Resolution on diabetes. The blue circle is the global symbol for diabetes awareness. It signifies the unity of the global diabetes community in response to the diabetes epidemic.
Today, world-wide, 463 million adults, or an estimated one in eleven, were living with diabetes in 2019, with the number of people living with diabetes expected rise to 578 million by 2030. Many must live with the complications of diabetes and many still die young as a consequence of their condition. 1 in 2 adults with diabetes remain undiagnosed and the majority have type 2 diabetes. More than 3 in 4 people with diabetes live in low and middle-income countries and 1 in 6 live births or approximately 20 million are affected by high blood glucose or hyperglycaemia in pregnancy. Two-thirds of people with diabetes live in urban areas and three-quarters are of working age. 1 in 5 people with diabetes or about 136 million are above 65 years old. Diabetes caused 4.2 million deaths in 2019 and was responsible for at least $760 billion in health expenditure in 2019, accounting for about 10% of the global total spent on healthcare. The numbers continue to grow but the resources allocated to diabetes are often insufficient and are under increased pressure as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The WHO estimates that diabetes services have been disrupted in 50% of countries worldwide.
Every year, the World Diabetes Day campaign focuses on a dedicated theme that runs for one or more years. The theme for World Diabetes Day 2020 is The Nurse and Diabetes. This year’s campaign aims to raise awareness around the crucial role that nurses play in supporting people living with diabetes.
Nurses currently account for over half of the global health workforce. They do outstanding work to support people living with a wide range of health concerns. People who either live with diabetes or are at risk of developing the condition need their support too. People living with diabetes face a number of challenges, and education is vital to equip nurses with the skills to support them. As the number of people with diabetes continues to rise across the world, the role of nurses and other health professional support staff becomes increasingly important in managing the impact of the condition. Healthcare providers and governments must recognise the importance of investing in education and training. With the right expertise, nurses can make the difference for people affected by diabetes.
According to the World Health Organization, nurses account for 59% of health professionals and the global nursing workforce is 27.9 million, of which 19.3 million are professional nurses with a global shortage of nurses in 2018 being 5.9 million with 89% of that shortage concentrated in low and middle-income countries. The estimated number of nurses trained and employed needs to grow by 8% a year to overcome alarming shortfalls in the profession by 2030. WHO estimates that the total investment required to achieve the targets outlined in the Social Development Goals by 2030 stand at 3.9 trillion USD – 40% of which should be dedicated to remunerating the health workforce.
As highly valued members of the community, nurses do outstanding work to support people living with a wide range of health concerns. People who either live with diabetes or are at risk of developing the condition need their support too. People living with diabetes face a number of challenges, and education is vital to equip nurses with the skills to support them. The IDF wants to facilitate opportunities for nurses to learn more about the condition and receive training so that they can make a difference for people with diabetes. As the number of people with diabetes continues to rise across the world, the role of nurses and other health professional support staff is becoming increasingly important in managing the impact of the condition. Nurses are often the first and sometimes only health professional that a person interacts with and so the quality of their initial assessment, care and treatment is vital. Nurses play a key role in diagnosing diabetes early to ensure prompt treatment, providing self-management training and psychological support for people with diabetes to help prevent complications and tackling the risk factors for type 2 diabetes to help prevent the condition. Healthcare providers and governments must therefore recognise the importance of investing in education and training. With the right expertise, nurses can make the difference for people affected by diabetes.
In my last year’s post on this day, I have written extensively about the types of diabetes, so read more there.
In Russia, in the summer of 1914, as war with Germany looms and the Czar’s army tightens its grip on the local Jewish community, Miri Abramov and her brilliant physicist brother, Vanya, are facing an impossible decision. Since their parents drowned fleeing to America, Miri and Vanya have been raised by their babushka, a famous matchmaker who has taught them to protect themselves at all costs: to fight, to kill if necessary, and always to have an escape plan. But now, with fierce, headstrong Miri on the verge of becoming one of Russia’s only female surgeons, and Vanya hoping to solve the final puzzles of Einstein’s elusive theory of relativity, can they bear to leave the homeland that has given them so much?
Before they have time to make their choice, war is declared and Vanya goes missing, along with Miri’s fiancé. Miri braves the firing squad to go looking for them both. As the eclipse that will change history darkens skies across Russia, not only the safety of Miri’s own family but the future of science itself hangs in the balance.
Grounded in real history — and inspired by the solar eclipse of 1914 — A Bend in the Stars offers a heartstopping account of modern science’s greatest race amidst the chaos of World War I, and a love story as epic as the railways crossing Russia.
“You could not remove a single grain of sand from its place without thereby … changing something throughout all parts of the immeasurable whole.” – Fichte, The Vocation of Man (1800)
Have you ever wondered that sometimes a small act in one part of the world has huge consequences in another part of the world. This is what is known as the Butterfly Effect which essentially means that that small things can have non-linear impacts on a complex system. The concept is imagined with a butterfly flapping its wings and causing a typhoon.
In chaos theory, which is a branch of mathematics focusing on the study of chaos — the states of dynamical systems whose apparently random states of disorder and irregularities are often governed by deterministic laws that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state. The term, closely associated with the work of Edward Lorenz, is derived from the metaphorical example of the details of a tornado with the exact time of formation and the exact path taken being influenced by minor perturbations such as the flapping of the wings of a distant butterfly several weeks earlier. Lorenz discovered the effect when he observed that runs of his weather model with initial condition data that were rounded in a seemingly inconsequential manner would fail to reproduce the results of runs with the unrounded initial condition data. A very small change in initial conditions had created a significantly different outcome.
In an experiment to model a weather prediction, he entered the initial condition as 0.506, instead of 0.506127. The result was surprising with a somewhat different prediction. From this, he deduced that the weather must turn on a dime. A tiny change in the initial conditions had enormous long-term implications. By 1963, he had formulated his ideas enough to publish an award-winning paper entitled Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow. In simpler language, he theorized that weather prediction models are inaccurate because knowing the precise starting conditions is impossible, and a tiny change can throw off the results. To make the concept understandable to non-scientific audiences, Lorenz began to use the butterfly analogy.
The idea that small causes may have large effects in general and in weather specifically was earlier recognized by French mathematician and engineer Henri Poincaré and American mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener. Edward Lorenz’s work placed the concept of instability of the Earth’s atmosphere onto a quantitative base and linked the concept of instability to the properties of large classes of dynamic systems which are undergoing nonlinear dynamics and deterministic chaos.
Of course, a single act like the butterfly flapping its wings cannot cause a typhoon. Small events can, however, serve as catalysts that act on starting conditions.
However, in popular culture, the term “butterfly effect” is almost always misused. It has become synonymous with “leverage”—the idea of a small thing that has a big impact, with the implication that, like a lever, it can be manipulated to a desired end. This misses the point of Lorenz’s insight. The reality is that small things in a complex system may have no effect or a massive one, and it is virtually impossible to know which will turn out to be the case.
There’s a proverb that’s been around since the 14th century in English and since the 13th century in German. Benjamin Franklin offered a poetic perspective in his variation of the proverb, long before the theory of the bufferfly effect came to being. The proverb goes like this:
For want of a nail the shoe was lost, For want of a shoe the horse was lost, For want of a horse the rider was lost, For want of a rider the battle was lost, For want of a battle the kingdom was lost, And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
So the lack of one horseshoe nail could be inconsequential, or it could indirectly cause the loss of a war and therefore a kingdom. There is no way to predict which outcome will occur.
The butterfly effect is somewhat humbling—a model that exposes the flaws in other models. It shows science to be less accurate than we assume, as we have no means of making accurate predictions due to the exponential growth of errors. During the early days of computers, many people believed they would enable us to understand complex systems and make accurate predictions. People had been slaves to weather for millennia, and now they wanted to take control. With one innocent mistake, Lorenz shook the forecasting world, sending ripples which spread far beyond meteorology.
Beyond science, the Butterfly effect can also be seen in business. Marketplaces are, in essence, chaotic systems that are influenced by tiny changes. This makes it difficult to predict the future, as the successes and failures of businesses can appear random. Periods of economic growth and decline sprout from nowhere. This is the result of the exponential impact of subtle stimuli—the economic equivalent of the butterfly effect. According to Tom Breuer, we live in an interconnected, or rather a hyper-connected society with organisations and markets behaving like networks. This triggers chaotic and complex rather than linear behavior.
Preparing for the future and seeing the logic in the chaos of consumer behavior is not easy. Once-powerful giants collapse as they fall behind the times while tiny start-ups rise from the ashes and take over industries. Small alterations in existing technology transform how people live their lives. Fads capture everyone’s imagination, then disappear. Businesses have two options in this situation: build a timeless product or service, or race to keep up with change. Many businesses opt for a combination of the two. This approach requires extreme vigilance and attention to consumer desires in an attempt to both remain relevant and appear timeless. Businesses leverage the compounding impact of small tweaks that aim to generate interest in all they have to offer.
According to Dr. Rajagopal in The Butterfly Effect in Competitive Markets, most global firms are penetrating bottom-of-the-pyramid market segments by introducing small changes in technology, value perceptions, marketing-mix strategies, and driving production on an unimagined scale of magnitude to derive a major effect on markets. Companies like Procter & Gamble, Kellogg’s, Unilever, Nestlé, Apple, and Samsung, have experienced this effect in their business growth. Well-managed companies drive small changes in their business strategies by nipping the pulse of consumers. Most firms use such effect by making a small change in their strategy in reference to produce, price, place, promotion, posture which is developing their corporate image, and proliferation which is to gain higher market share and profit in a short span.
For most businesses, incessant small changes are the most effective way to produce the metaphorical typhoon. These iterations keep consumers engaged while preserving brand identity. If these small tweaks fail, the impact is hopefully not too great. But if they succeed and compound, the rewards can be monumental.
By nature, all markets are chaotic, and what seem like inconsequential alterations can propel a business up or down. Rajagopal explains how the butterfly effect connects to business. Globalisation and frequent shifts in consumer preferences toward products and services have accelerated chaos in the market due to the rush of firms, products, and business strategies. Chaos theory in markets addresses the behavior of strategic and dynamic moves of competing firms that are highly sensitive to existing market conditions triggering the butterfly effect. The initial conditions which include economic, social, cultural and political in which a business sets up are vital influences on its success or failure. Lorenz found that the smallest change in the preliminary conditions created a different outcome in weather predictions, and we can consider the same to be true for businesses. The first few months and years are a crucial time when rates of failure are highest and the basic brand identity forms. Any of the early decisions, achievements, or mistakes have the potential to be the wing flap that creates a storm.
Some historic examples of the butterfly effect, which have shaped our lives include the following:
The bombing of Nagasaki: The US initially intended to bomb the Japanese city of Kuroko, with the munitions factory as a target. On the day the US planned to attack, cloudy weather conditions prevented the factory from being seen by military personnel as they flew overhead. The airplane passed over the city three times before the pilots gave up. Locals huddled in shelters heard the hum of the airplane preparing to drop the nuclear bomb and prepared for their destruction. Except Kuroko was never bombed. Military personnel decided on Nagasaki as the target due to improved visibility. The implications of that split-second decision were monumental. We cannot even begin to comprehend how different history might have been if that day had not been cloudy. Kuroko is sometimes referred to as the luckiest city in Japan, and those who lived there during the war are still shaken by the near-miss.
The Rise of Hitler: The Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna rejecting Adolf Hitler’s application, twice. In the early 1900s, a young Hitler applied for art school and was rejected, possibly by a Jewish professor. By his own estimation and that of scholars, this rejection went on to shape his metamorphosis from an aspiring bohemian artist into the human manifestation of evil. We can only speculate as to how history would have been different. But it is safe to assume that a great deal of tragedy could have been avoided if Hitler had applied himself to water colors, not to genocide.
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand: A little-known fact about the event considered to be the catalyst for both world wars is that it almost didn’t happen. On the 28th of June, 1914, a teenage Bosnian-Serb named Gavrilo Princip went to Sarajevo with two other nationalists to assassinate the Archduke. The initial assassination attempt failed; a bomb or grenade exploded beneath the car behind the Archduke’s and wounded its occupants. The route was supposed to have been changed after that, but the Archduke’s driver didn’t get the message. Had he actually taken the alternate route, Princip would not have been on the same street as the car and would not have had the chance to shoot the Archduke and his wife that day. Were it not for a failure of communication, both world wars might never have happened.
The Chernobyl disaster: In 1986, a test at the Chernobyl nuclear plant went awry and released 400 times the radiation produced by the bombing of Hiroshima. One hundred fifteen thousand people were evacuated from the area, with many deaths and birth defects resulting from the radiation. Even today, some areas remain too dangerous to visit. However, it could have been much worse. After the initial explosion, three plant workers volunteered to turn off the underwater valves to prevent a second explosion. It has long been believed that the trio died as a result, although there is now some evidence this may not have been the case. Regardless, diving into a dark basement flooded with radioactive water was a heroic act. Had they failed to turn off the valve, half of Europe would have been destroyed and rendered uninhabitable for half a million years. Russia, Ukraine, and Kiev also would have become unfit for human habitation. Whether they lived or not, the three men—Alexei Ananenko, Valeri Bezpalov, and Boris Baranov—stilled the wings of a deadly butterfly. Indeed, the entire Chernobyl disaster was the result of poor design and the ineptitude of staff. The long-term result, in addition to the impact on residents of the area was widespread anxiety towards nuclear plants and bias against nuclear power, leading to a preference for fossil fuels. Some people have speculated that Chernobyl is responsible for the acceleration of global warming, as countries became unduly slow to adopt nuclear power.
The Cuban Missile Crisis: We all may owe our lives to a single Russian Navy officer named Vasili Arkhipov, who has been called “the man who saved the world.” During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Arkhipov was stationed on a nuclear-armed submarine near Cuba. American aircraft and ships began using depth charges to signal the submarine that it should surface so it could be identified. With the submarine submerged too deep to monitor radio signals, the crew had no idea what was going on in the world above. The captain, Savitsky, decided the signal meant that war had broken out and he prepared to launch a nuclear torpedo. Everyone agreed with him—except Arkhipov. Had the torpedo launched, nuclear clouds would have hit Moscow, London, East Anglia and Germany, before wiping out half of the British population. The result could have been a worldwide nuclear holocaust, as countries retaliated and the conflict spread. Yet within an overheated underwater room, Arkhipov exercised his veto power and prevented a launch. Without the courage of one man, our world could be unimaginably different.
So you see, something very small and something we think is inconsequential has far reaching impact on not just our world, but also on future generations.
I will end this post with a video, in which the science behind this phenomenon is explained.
Memories and Such 
