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Threes in Religion and Mythology

Chapter 4, “Threes in Religion and Mythology,”  in the book, Threes, is also the most popular mini-e-book in the series. 

Here are the contents of that chapter/mini-e-book:

Monotheism

The Significance of Abraham

The Holy Trinity

Three Notable Triplets 

Celtic Triads

Three Graces

Raja, Hatha and Bhakti

Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva

Three Fates, Three Furies and Three Pure Ones

Faith, Hope and Charity

Religion and Moral Courage

Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo

Lamarck, Darwin and Wallace

Three Arguments for the Existence of God 

I use long stories to illustrate the chapter focus.  In Chapter 4, for instance, I have narrated Darwin’s development of the theory of evolution and Galileo’s theory of a heliocentric "solar" system.  Both scientists struggled mightily against the church. 

Dunbar’s Number and Group Dynamics

Military units have typical sizes that promote strong and effective working relationships and make group management easier to accomplish. For instance, a platoon might consist of 12 to 15 individuals and have one or two officers in charge. In the early 1990s, an English anthropologist named Robin Dunbar theorized that the maximum size for any stable group of primates was determined by brain size—specifically, the size of the neocortex. The neocortex is involved in sensory perceptions, spatial reasoning, conscious thought and language. The larger the neocortex, he reasoned, the more individuals with whom they could maintain personal relationships. Dunbar compared primate brains to human brains and used the differential to predict the ideal size for a group of humans. The number he came up with was 147.8 people. Rounded up to 150, it became known as Dunbar’s number. That number, 150, has also been called a friendship circle, a limit of the number of (functionally active) friends and acquaintances you can have in your life at any time. Funeral directors know this and typically will print 200 programs for a memorial service. A U.S. Army company has about 150 individuals, give or take a few.   

A survey of ethnographic data found that hunter-gatherers around the world lived in shifting communities that ranged from 90 to 221 people, with an average of 148. Neolithic villages in Mesopotamia were thought to have around 150 people. The Roman army of the classical period used a formation of 130 men—called a maniple or double century—in combat. Hutterite communities in South Dakota split after reaching 150 people because, in their opinion, anything larger cannot be controlled by peer pressure alone. Hutterites, by the way, are one of three religious groups that trace their roots to the Radical Reformation in Europe in the 16th century. The other two groups are the Amish and the Mennonites.   

from Threes, Chapter 5, “Threes in Psychology and Sociology”  

Flow

“You are in an ecstatic state to such a point that you feel as though you almost don’t exist,” says Hungarian psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi.   Athletes can experience these feelings when they perform at such a high level that they feel invincible, when they seem to float through the competition, their bodies able to do whatever they will them to do.  It does not happen often, and when it does, it is unforgettable.  It tends to accompany a state of mind characterized by a trance-like intense, yet seemingly effortless and enjoyable, concentration of mental and physical effort.  It can be accompanied by a feeling of joy.  Csíkszentmihályi calls it Flow.

Flow is the mental state in which a person is immersed in feelings of energized focus, full involvement, and success in an activity.  Studied extensively by Csíkszentmihályi, the concept has been applied to many fields.  According to Csíkszentmihályi, Flow is completely focused motivation.  It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing.  In Flow the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but they are also positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand.  “The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task although flow is also described as a deep focus on nothing but the activity—not even oneself or one's emotions.”

The athlete cannot force Flow.  It just happens.  A Flow state will be most likely to occur when someone is wholeheartedly performing a task or activity for intrinsic purposes and sometimes with little regard for the benefit.

These three conditions are necessary to achieve Flow:        

1.      The athlete or performer must be involved in an activity with a clear set of goals.  Goals add direction and structure. 

2.      He or she must have a good balance between the perceived challenges of the task at hand and his or her own perceived skills.  He or she must have confidence that he or she is capable of completing the challenge successfully.  

3.      The task or challenge must have clear and immediate feedback.  Feedback helps the person negotiate any changing demands and allows him or her to adjust his or her performance to maintain the flow state.           

from Threes, Chapter 10, “Threes in Sports and Games” 

Read more about Flow, Zone and Joy in my new Kindle mini-e-book, Threes in Sports and Games, that’s available now at Amazon.

Three Layers of the Cloud

We hear about the cloud and cloud computing.  But did you know?…

“The ‘cloud of clouds’ has three distinct layers.  The outer one called ‘software as a service’ (SaaS), includes web-based applications such as Gmail, Google’s e-mail service, and Salesforce.com, which helps firms keep track of their customers….Going one level deeper, there is ‘platform as a service,’ (PaaS), which means an operating system living in the cloud.  Such services allow developers to write applications for the web and mobile devices.  Offered by Google, Salesforce.com and Microsoft, this market is also fairly easy to measure, since there are only a few providers, and their offerings have not really taken off yet….The most interesting layer—the only one that really deserves to be called ‘cloud computing,’ say purists—is infrastructure as a service (IaaS).  IaaS offers basic computing services from number crunching to data storage, which customers can combine to build highly adaptable computer systems.”  Market leaders are GoGrid, Rackspace and Amazon Web Services.  Amazon is by far the market leader, owning about 80 to 90% of the current capacity.  The cloud is estimated by Forrester Research to grow to $56 billion in 2020 from about $1 billion in 2010.           

from Threes, Chapter 8, “Threes in Business and Technology” 

Read more about the Cloud in my new Kindle mini-e-book, Threes in Business and Technology, that’s available now at Amazon.

The New Big Three Economies

Until just a few years ago the largest national economies existed in the developed world.  United States, Japan and Germany (The Big Three) achieved the largest gross domestic product (GDP) in 2000.  “Ten years ago rich countries dominated the world economy, contributing around two-thirds of global GDP after allowing for differences in purchasing power.  Since then that share has fallen to just over half.  In another decade it could be down to 40%.  The bulk of global output will be produced in the emerging world,” wrote The Economist in 2010.  In the last 20 years or so the developed and developing worlds have undergone a re-positioning with the explosion of rapidly expanding, formerly developing economies in Brazil, Russia, India and China, which are known collectively by the acronym BRIC.  In fact, Goldman Sachs’ projections suggest China will jump into the number two position in the new Big Three list by 2020 and will become number one, surpassing the United States by 2050, and India will become the third largest economy as measured by GDP unless something cataclysmic derails its unprecedented growth, which by some measures approaches 10% annually.   

Three forces will dictate China’s rise…demography, convergences and “gravity.” 

from Threes, Chapter 6, “Threes in Economics and Finance” 

Also included in my new Kindle mini-e-book, Threes in Economics and Finance, that's available now.

Three Transformative Events

During the highly volatile and transformative period since 2000, we have witnessed three significant ongoing events or episodes.  They have not yet played out.  These three events about which much has been written are:

simultaneously developing economies in China, India, Russia, Brazil and other countries,

the emergence of state-based capitalism in many of these same states,

and the collapse of financial systems in established capitalist economies such as the United States and the countries of western Europe.  As a result the world economic order has been recast, and the great financial shuffle will continue for years to come. 

Those who follow these developments have three worries about the effect of the ascendant emerging markets.  “The first worry is about direct competition for things that are in more or less fixed supply: geopolitical supremacy, the world’s oil and raw materials, the status and perks that come with being the issuer of a trusted international currency.…The second set of anxieties relates to job security and pay.  Ever stronger trade links between rich and would-be rich countries will mean a reshuffle in the division of labor around the world, creating new jobs and destroying or replacing existing ones….A third concern, which is at odds with the first two, is that the emerging markets are prone to crises that can cause a still-fragile world economy to stumble.  Sluggish GDP growth in the rich world means developing countries have to fall back on internal spending, which in the past they have not managed well.  It raises the risks of overspending, excessive credit and inflation that have spurred past emerging-market crises.”

from Threes, Chapter 6, “Threes in Economics and Finance”

The Third World

The term Third World arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned or neutral with either capitalism and NATO (which along with its allies represented the First World) or communism and the Soviet Union (which along with its allies represented the Second World). This definition provided a way of broadly categorizing the nations of the Earth into three groups based on social, political, and economic divisions. Although the term continues to be used to describe the poorest countries in the world, this usage is widely disparaged since the term no longer holds any verifiable meaning after the fall of the Soviet Union. While there is no identical contemporary replacement, common alternatives include developing world and Global South.