There are at least two emails each month asking me how to introduce science to the young generations. My answer is simple: know the customers. Let me explain it briefly to you. Introducing science is similar in influencing people to buy a new product – it is bit like ‘sales strategy’ there. We need to know the market. We need to know the customer.

I am going to tell you  about ‘5Ps Formula’ which I learn from my entrepreneurship trainings as part of ‘Elevator Pitch’ training. ‘Elevator Pitch’ is a concise, carefully planned, and well-practiced description about your product/company that your mother should be able to understand in the time it would take to ride up an elevator (1-3 mins). I believe this strategy can also be used not only introducing a product but also many other things like science. Since many of my friends are religious people who are eager to convert other people – well introducing a belief – in my humble opinion has the same principle. Good examples for this are CBBC (Children BBC) http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/ or contemporary Christian movement http://www.hillsong.co.uk/. I am adding an extra explanation for them – I will use Christian evangelism as an example. I provide the explanation in a table; I will use ‘drug discovery’ for science as I have the most experience with it. It might look reductionistic but you get my point. Click the image below to enlarge it.

The strategy comes with “5Ps”. They are:

1. People                  : who are the targets?
2. Pain                       : what is the problem?
3. Premise               : what do we offer to help?
4. Proof                     : what is the evidence?
5. Purpose               : why our ‘product’, not something else?

Sometimes we are so contained to our own ‘comfort zone’ or beliefs which make us presumptuous. It is crucial to begin from the same starting point. It is very easy to ‘assume’ that the person know already about ‘basics’. I used to assume that children know about ‘medicines’ but apparently not. They know ‘Calpol’ – a brand for Paracetamol – but mostly that is all. We might think that children know about ‘bacteria’ or ‘viruses’ but it is wrong.  I learnt that children know more about ‘germs’ but less than ‘bacteria/virus’. The same thing is with ‘evangelization’. How can you approach someone who does not believe in Bible or in God and try to convince them that Bible is the Word of God? It sounds silly for me. No wonder Jesus Himself said that the best thing to show Christian values is from ‘loving you neighbours and enemies’.

Aside from the way we approach our market, we might also consider WHO the people in our ‘front line’ are.  There are definitely people who are introvert or ‘geeky’ (no offense intended) – in general, I, personally, would put them ‘behind the screen’. You are all familiar with fashion shows; the fashion designer of course only put the young, good-looking, and fit models to wear their latest ‘fashion products’. The same with science, I, personally, would not put people who are really geeky and have bad public speaking skills to engage with public. It would only put people/children off – maybe even for good. I am not suggesting to discourage ‘introvert/geeks’ from public engagement. They do also have specific niche. For example, ‘Christian geeks’ are needed to ‘evangelize’ the ‘non-Christian geeks’. I believe ‘first impression’ does matter. Approaching someone with white lab coat and shabby hair or try to approach a non-believer with ‘Jesus Loves You’ T-shirts would only make you ‘weirdos’. Whether it is science or religion/beliefs, it is important to show them that we are just like them – ordinary and ‘normal’ people with interesting ‘products’ to offer.

Just my two pence…

It was half past twelve midnight. I had not gone to bed yet. I had been replying to all my wall-posts on Facebook, bombarded by birthday wishes (thank you guys!). While watching the latest ‘Desperate Housewives’, I heard that my Facebook page ‘ping-ed’ me (oh, not again!) and I realized it was Nga-chi, one of my fellow GeNeYouS survivors from The Netherlands. I paused the show and started to chat with her, continously… time flew and it became really late.

I was intrigued by how Facebook has drawn me to connect with people from the past and also ‘potential’ friends. It is not my first time using social networking website. I used to use Friendster which I abandoned after it gets more and more disorganized. I do not really use Twitter as it is too much to do plus I have my own website anyway to share my thoughts – much more official I presume.

Just last week, my friend Merry Magdalena, posted her thought on Facebook and she observed how she becomes connected with people from past, present, and people that she does not know but share ‘mutual’ friends. She calls the relationship as ‘Facebook-hood’. For me, I would prefer to call it as ‘Facebook-ship’, a relationship through/by/on Facebook. I would not call it as friendship as friendship requires something more profound like face-to-face social meetings and personal connections.

Facebook has revolutionized the way we treat people. It is very easy to ‘invite’ people to be one of of our friends, but it is also easy to simply ‘remove’ them from our friends list. There are even agency that can help people to have more friends by fake profiles (how pathetic is that?)

One interesting thing that I just learnt from my friends list is the fact that I have such a broad network from friends from the age of 12 to the age of 69; friends from students to CEOs even celebrities. I have to make confession here, some I have never met but we have been chatting all the time, some I have never met and talked at all except being introduced by someone else, and even some people whom I am longing to to read their reply to my messages or wall-posts. Definitely, Facebook is a nice tool to get in touch and discuss many things but personally I do really dream to have a community like the ‘Inklings’.

The downside of Facebook, people often confused friendship with the companionship which grows up among those who work and socialize together, but real friendship is something more. They think that once we have ‘Facebookship’, we are friends in real world. It is not always the case. Just like many of people working in offices/labs think that  working colleagues are friends - oh come on, get a life! I guess this is why CS Lewis defines friendship in his book The Four Loves (1960) very simple and profound, “Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one” Of course, making acquitances and colleagues are definitely positive but to instantly assuming they are friends? Hey dude, wait a sec!

By Christopher Hart (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1200486/The-Genesis-enigma-How-DID-Bible-evolution-life-3-000-years-Darwin.html)

Last updated at 12:13 AM on 18th July 2009

The revalation came to Professor Andrew Parker during a visit to Rome. He was in the Sistine Chapel, gazing up at Michelangelo’s awesome ceiling paintings, when a realisation struck him with dizzying force.

‘A Biblical enigma exists that is on the one hand so cryptic it has remained camouflaged for millennia, and on the other so obvious one cannot miss it.’

The enigma is that the order of Creation as described in the Book of Genesis, and so powerfully depicted in the Sistine Chapel by the greatest artist of the Renaissance, has been precisely, eerily confirmed by modern evolutionary science.

Myth or divine inspiration: Was the book of Genesis a gateway into the evolution of life?

Yet how on earth could this be possible? And why had nobody noticed it before?

Such was the starting point of Parker’s jaw-dropping new book, The Genesis Enigma: an astounding work which seeks to prove that the ancient Hebrew writers of the Book of Genesis knew all about evolution – 3,000 years before Darwin.

It takes a journey back through aeons of geological time, and also into the minds and imaginations of the ancient Israelites.

Andrew Parker is a leading scientist in his field: a research fellow at Oxford University, research leader at the Natural History Museum, and as if that weren’t enough, a professor at Shanghai’s Jiao Tong university.

As a scientist he never paid much heed to the Book of Genesis, assuming, like most of his colleagues, that such primitive mythology – which is believed to have been compiled from several sources between 950 and 500 BC – has long since been ‘disproved’ by hard scientific fact.

But after his Sistine Chapel moment, he went back to look at Genesis in more detail. And what he read astonished him. It was even, he says, ‘slightly scary’.

Somehow – God alone knew how – the writer or writers of that ancient text had described how the evolution of life on earth took place in precise detail and perfect order.

It is always disturbing and haunting to encounter an ancient wisdom that seems to anticipate or even exceed our own.

More fanciful writers immediately start to theorise wildly: that those who built the pyramids, or Stonehenge, must have been guided by super-intelligent aliens, that sort of thing.

Andrew Parker, a scientist and proud of it, has no time for such twaddle. But he does gradually come to understand, in the course of his investigations, that our ancestors of thousands of years ago, though they may not have had iPods and plasma-screen televisions, nevertheless possessed a wisdom that was, quite literally, timeless: as true now as it was then.

In the Book of Genesis, God first and most famously creates heaven and earth, but ‘without form’, and commands: ‘Let there be light.’ A perfect description of the Big Bang, that founding moment of our universe some 13 billion years ago, an unimaginable explosion of pure energy and matter ‘without form’ out of nothing – the primordial Biblical ‘void’.

He then creates the dry land out of the waters, but it is the water that comes first. As Parker points out, scientists today understand very similarly that water is indeed crucial for life.

When ‘astrobiologists’ look into space for signs of life on other planets, the first thing they look for is the possible presence of water.

On the third day, we are told: ‘God said, “Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.”‘

Now factually speaking, grass didn’t evolve until much later. In the Triassic and Jurassic epochs, the dinosaurs knew only plants such as giant conifers and tree ferns. But since grass did not in fact evolve until much later, a sternly literal-minded scientist would declare the Bible wrong, and consign it to the nearest wheelie bin.

But wait a minute, says Parker. If you take ‘grass, herb and tree’ to mean photosynthesising life in general, then this is, once again, spot on.

The very life forms on earth were single-celled bacteria, but the first truly viable bacteria were the ‘cyanobacteria’ – those that had learned to photosynthesise.

As a result, they began to expire oxygen, creating an atmosphere that could go on to support more and more life. They were the key to life on earth.

Naturally, says Parker, ‘the ancient Israelites would have been oblivious to any single-celled life form, let alone cyanobacteria’, but ‘grass’ as a loose description of life forms that photosynthesise?

Breathtaking: The enigma that the order of Creation as described in the Book of Genesis, and so powerfully depicted in the Sistine Chapel has been precisely, eerily confirmed by modern evolutionary science

On the fourth day, Genesis famously becomes confusing. On the first day, remember, God has already created light, and made Day and Night. But it isn’t until day four that he makes the lights in heaven, the greater light to rule the day and the lesser the night.

Hang on – so he made ‘Day’ three days before he made the Sun? Houston, I think we have a problem.

Yet the writers of Genesis were just as well aware as us, surely, that the sunrise causes the day. You don’t need a degree in astronomy to work that one out. What on earth did they mean?

Here, The Genesis Enigma comes up with a stunningly ingenious answer. For Parker argues that day four refers to the evolution of vision.

Until the first creatures on earth evolved eyes, in a sense, the sun and moon didn’t exist. There was no creature on earth to see them, nor the light they cast.

When Genesis says: ‘Let there be lights… To divide the day from the night,’ it is talking about eyes.

‘The very first eye on earth effectively turned on the lights for animal behaviour,’ writes Professor Parker, ‘and consequently for further rapid evolution.’

Almost overnight, life suddenly grew vastly more complex. Predators were able to hunt far more efficiently, and so prey had to evolve fast too – or get eaten.

The moment that there were ‘lights’, or eyes, then life exploded into all its infinite variety.

And yet again, that’s what Genesis says happened, and in the correct environment too. In the sea.

For on the very next day of Creation, the fifth day: ‘God said, “Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life.”‘

That is exactly what happened. Life that had hitherto been lived in the dark, by simple, slow-moving, worm-like creatures, erupted into dazzling diversity. We know all about it from the world famous Burgess Shale fossils.

They were discovered in the summer of 1909 by one Charles Doolittle Walcott, on holiday with his family in the Canadian Rockies. Walcott began to chip away at the shale with his geological hammer, and quite by chance stumbled upon one of the greatest finds in all science.

For the shale records what happened on our planet around 508 million years ago, long before the first dinosaurs: the ‘Cambrian expolosion,’ which most scientists now think was indeed the direct result of the evolution of vision.

The life-forms discovered look like nothing else: fabulous, phantasmagoric, alien beings. One had five eyes, and a long wavy snout with jaws on the end. Another looked like an octopus with its head stuck in a beaker, and another can only be described as ‘a swimming pea with a pair of beady eyes, bull’s horns, a pair of “hands” and a fish’s tail.’

Others resemble balls of spines, vase-shaped pin-cushions, or badminton shuttlecocks with chameleon-like tongues. Anyone who doubts the power of evolution by natural selection only has to look at the Burgess Shale fossils.

How does Genesis describe the teeming aquatic life of the Cambrian explosion? ‘And God said, “Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life.” ‘ Immediately following the creation of vision.

How did the writer/writers know that life suddenly diversified into this rich and staggering variety, under the oceans, not on land? Why would a very much land-based people, pastoralists and shepherds, even think like this?

After the Cambrian come the Ordovician, Silurian and Devonian periods – or the appearance of ‘great whales’, as Genesis succinctly puts it.

How better to describe those epochs which gave us such monsters of the deep as Dunkleosteus, a carnivorous armoured fish whose appearance, says Parker, was ‘simply terrifying’. Some 35ft long, ‘the size of a small coach’, with massive, bone-crunching jaws, even its eyes were armoured.

And after the sea monsters come the birds, the animals, cattle, and finally, homo sapiens. All present and correct, and all still in the right order. Once again, ‘In describing how the planet and life around us came to be, the writer of the Genesis narrative got it disturbingly right’.

So what should we make of the extraordinary findings of The Genesis Enigma?

Professor Parker is clear on this subject. ‘It would be a great shame if my findings were either misused in an attempt to suggest that scientists themselves are unsure about science, or pounded out of all recognition into support of the seven-day creation premise.’

There is no doubt that literal-minded Creationists do a disservice to the triumphant achievements of modern science, and to the beauty and poetry of the Bible. Evolution is taking place around us all the time. It’s why the MRSA superbug has become so dangerously immune to antibiotics, why the race is on to beat the swine flu virus.

Nevertheless, when Parker comes to explaining how the writers of Genesis knew what they knew, he can only conclude that it was due to ‘divine intervention’, or ‘a lucky guess’. Since the odds of the latter seem fantastically remote, Parker tentatively suggests the former.

The writers of Genesis didn’t posses scientific knowledge, they didn’t have Darwin or Victorian geology so how did they know?

Parker clearly demonstrates what an extraordinary text the Bible is – and even more so, not less so, in the light of modern science. But he is surely wrong to think that the only way of coming by knowledge is either through science or ‘divine intervention’.

A vast amount of what we know, and how we behave, is based upon much less clear-cut kinds of knowledge and awareness of the world around us: intuition, gut feeling and imagination.

Imagination isn’t simply ‘making up stuff that isn’t true’. The Sistine Chapel itself is a towering work of imagination, but you’d have to be pretty Philistine and unfeeling to stare up at it, shake your head and dismiss it as nothing but a pack of lies.

There are different kinds of truth. A novel like Anna Karenina is certainly fiction. There is not a single hard scientific or verifiable fact in it. Yet it’s one of the most profoundly true books ever written about how humans think and feel and love.

I believe this relates closely to the so-called Genesis Enigma. The writers of Genesis didn’t possess scientific knowledge, they didn’t have Darwin, or the earth-shattering findings of Victorian geology. They didn’t, as Parker himself says, have ‘so much as a magnifying lens’.

But that doesn’t prove divine intervention either. Instead, they possessed an ancient, intuitive wisdom of great poetry and beauty.

One could compare this with the wisdom of other, pre-scientific cultures, which often turns out to correspond closely to the findings of modern science.

Darwinian evolution teaches us that all life on earth is related. We human beings are 99 per cent genetically identical to chimpanzees and orang-utans. But as the great Professor Steve Jones always loves to point out, we are also 90 per cent mice, and even 50 per cent banana.

Don’t worry, Jones adds reassuringly. This doesn’t actually make you half-banana – nor for that matter does it make bananas half-human, or the ethics of eating banoffee pie would just get too complicated.

But the surreal comedy of this science aside, there is serious matter here. For just as Darwinian evolution confirms much of the Book of Genesis, it also confirms other, supposedly ‘primitive’ ways of looking at the natural world.

The American Indians, for instance, poetically talked of ‘Brother Eagle’ or ‘Brother Wolf’. But wasn’t this also a deep, intuitive recognition of a primal truth, now confirmed by the hard science of DNA analysis? Wolves really are related to us.

To appreciate the power of pre-scientific wisdom is not for a moment to downgrade the achievements of modern science. But it does emphasise incredible power and, more surprising still, the accuracy of more ancient, ‘poetic’ ways of seeing. As an ancient proverb has it: ‘The mountain has only one summit, but many paths up.’

And the Bible, that sublime portrait of humanity in all its wonder, violence and ‘divine discontent’, and its restless search for something we call ‘God’, will live on. It will continue to haunt our imaginations as it haunted Michelangelo’s.

For as the author of The Genesis Enigma says, it remains ‘that most illustrious and mysterious book of all’.

The more friends you have, the more you earn, says a study. But modern life can allow little time to maintain meaningful relationships, so what’s the optimum number of friends?

It’s widely accepted that friendships are invaluable to the soul but few of us were aware that they could also boost the bank account.

A study of 10,000 US students over a period of 35 years suggests the wealthiest people are those that had the most friends at school. Each extra schoolfriend added 2% to the salary.

The researchers said this was because the workplace is a social setting and those with the best social skills prosper in management and teamwork.

‘I HAVE 700 FRIENDS’ Toks Timson, 41, from Croydon, has 707 Facebook friends ‘I actually know or have met or worked with or went to school with or am related to at least 550. ‘The others are just friends of friends or random adds from people. ‘Having that number of friends is a lot of work for sure. I’m a bit of a raver and also someone who makes friends easily.’

If a wide circle of friends is taken as a popularity indicator, does that mean the more you have the more successful and happy you are? Or can you have too many? What is the best number?

The average number is about 150, says leading anthropologist Robin Dunbar.

It may sound like a lot, but think of your Christmas card list – 50 cards to 50 couples = 100 friends.

“It’s the number of people that you know as persons and you know how they fit into your social world and they know how you fit into theirs. They are a group of people to which you have an obligation of friendship.”

They usually consist of an inner circle of five “core” people and an additional layer of 10, he says. That makes 15 people – some will probably be family members – who are your central group and then outside that, there’s another 35 in the next circle and another 100 on the outside. And that’s one person’s social world.

Aristotle said friends must have eaten salt together Philosopher Mark Vernon

Friendships help us develop as people, says Mark Vernon, author of The Philosophy of Friendship, but the very term “friend” covers a whole range of relationships. You have a very close friendship with your partner but with others it may just be a common interest or history or simply children the same age.

“Aristotle said friends must have eaten salt together and what he meant is there’s a sense that people have lived a significant part of their life together. They’ve sat down and shared meals and the ups and downs of life.

“You really have to have mulled over things with them to become really good friends and there’s only so many people you can do that with.

“You can have friends because of what you do together or enjoy something together like football or shopping, but they’re not as profound friends as those who you love for themselves because of something in their character. And it doesn’t matter what you’re doing with them, even sitting alone in a room.”

‘One in, one out’

There’s a limit to how many close friends like this you can have and it’s probably between six and 12, he says.

“I think this idea that you can have virtually limitless numbers of friends does water down the concept of friendship. I think it’s one of those things where less is more.”

Not if you’re a socialite like designer Nicky Haslam, who recently threw a party for 800 friends. But even people who don’t inhabit the heady world of fashion and celebrity have too many friends to manage.

A newspaper columnist once told of her shock when, having struck up a rapport with a man over dinner, she was told at the end of the meal he had no vacancies for friends. He was operating a “one-in, one-out” policy. Six months later she received a card stating he was now available for friendship.

That’s an extreme example but many people view their friendships scientifically and regulate them accordingly.

‘I STREAMLINE FRINGE FRIENDS’ Penny, a 35-year-old mum of two in Brighton, says she has 12 good friends but of those would only really confide in four ‘There’s not enough hours in the day or days in the week to see everyone. ‘Certain people ask if I’m around to meet and I don’t really want to commit because I’ve got other people I want to see. ‘So you do start streamlining, but your oldest friends are always there.’

Julie, a 34-year-old PR consultant in London, says she has three categories of friends. Firstly there are nine close friends – the Premier League – whom she could ring any time of day or night and they would drop everything and come if necessary.

“I try to see them every few weeks and speak at least once a fortnight. I have a rota in my head and try and ring one of them each night as I drive home from work. It shows how pressured we are for time that speaking to friends is multi-tasking.”

Julie’s next social group has about 20 people, mostly men, whom she would see every couple of months, then there are more than 100 people beyond that on the outer fringes – friends from work, friends from her last job and friends from travelling.

“There are two people whom I don’t really want to stay friends with but I don’t have the heart to say no to. People I used to work with, they invite you to dinner and then you feel you have to invite them back, but you really don’t have the time and it gets really stressful, especially since getting a boyfriend.

“I want to spend two nights a week with him, two nights to myself at home and two nights at the gym, so that leaves one night to see people.”

Far-fetched it may be, but five close friends is about average

There is a perception that as society has become more mobile, and traditional family bonds have loosened, friendships have become more fleeting. But on the other hand, modern technology has meant we can stay in touch with more people than ever.

“First email, then mobile, and now social networking sites like Facebook have made it much easier for people to grow their circle of friends beyond their immediate inner circle,” says digital media expert Dan Clays of BLM Quantum.

“But the swelling is predominantly in the outer-reaches of their circle, and often the fringe group. If you were to examine the profile of someone’s group of friends on Facebook, the probability is that a large contingent were accepted as friends out of curiosity and after an initial exchange, the level of dialogue slows down to a trickle.”

This is especially apparent in the 16-24 audience group, the digital generation, he says, so it will be interesting to see if they are able to maintain that contact later in life.

But maybe we’re too fixated on numbers, says Mr Vernon.

“Ask yourself about the quality of your friendships, not about the quantity.”

Source: BBC News (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7920434.stm), Retrieved 15 May 2009

“Two beautiful boys fall in love, but that love is a crime. Patrick Wilde directs his award-winning, funny, heart-breaking and ultimately triumphant tale of courage and defiance.”

Yesterday I had the priviledge to enjoy a very moving play with title ‘ What’s Wrong with Angry?‘ in Edinburgh Festival (organized by EdFringe) after looking for the ticket desperately (it is always sold out, so I book the ticket in a week advance). The play was beautifully-played – one of the best perfomance I have ever seen (I wonder how the actors/actresses could act like that – day by day during the 25 days of Edinburgh Festival). ‘What’s Wrong with Angry?’ is not new for me since I have watched the movie (Get Real, 1998) and r – this play is much better. More

The play’s combination of politics, humour, a fantastic pumping soundtrack and a heart breaking love story has meant it has sold out almost everywhere it has played, and was described by Time Out as “popular theatre at it’s best – a real crown pleaser”. Though it tells of a time when things in theory were much tougher for young gay people, it still stands a celebration of the human spirit and determination to triumph, and in Patrick Wilde’s new shorter version directed by the playwright himself remains a poignant reminder of how recently things were very, very different. (http://whatswrongwithangry.com/)

I do know that the story about gay-love-story but what I do like is the message: ‘Live your life although you are different. Everyone has the right to be happy, the right to be accepted in family, school, and society -equally.’ It is not only for being gay, but also for being Asian, for being black, for being religious, for being atheist, … for being whoever we are!