Quote of the Day

We cannot have peace among men whose hearts find delight in killing any living creature.

- Rachel Carson

Quote of the Day

How much human nature loves the knowledge of its existence, and how it shrinks from being deceived, will be sufficiently understood from this fact, that every man prefers to grieve in a sane mind, rather than to be glad in madness.

- St. Augustine

Quote of the Day

Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.

- Albert Einstein

Quote of the Day

Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

Garph !

Homecoming - 07/20/2019

He is more like a dog than a cat; extremely calm and friendly. In his short life of 1 year and 11 months has seen too much than I have in my 44 years.

He is three legged and I owe, Dr. Hallihan for saving Garph after his parents wanted to euthanize him instead of operating him after he lost his leg in an accident.

As usual, life is wonderful with fellow creatures who emote, understand, love and most importantly have ability to change minds better than Sapiens.

Wisdom Of The Week

Paul Frankland, a neuroscientist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, had also found evidence that the brain is wired to forget. Frankland was studying the production of new neurons, or neurogenesis, in adult mice. The process had long been known to occur in the brains of young animals, but had been discovered in the hippocampi of mature animals only about 20 years earlier. Because the hippocampus is involved in memory formation, Frankland and his team wondered whether increasing neurogenesis in adult mice could help the rodents to remember.

In a paper published in 2014, the researchers found precisely the opposite: rather than making the animals’ memories better, increasing neurogenesis caused the mice to forget more3. As contradictory as that initially seemed to Frankland, given the assumption that new neurons would mean more capacity for (and potentially better) memory, he says it now makes sense. “When neurons integrate into the adult hippocampus, they integrate into an existing, established circuitry. If you have information stored in that circuit and start rewiring it, then it’s going to make that information harder to access,” he explains.

Because the hippocampus is not where long-term memories are stored in the brain, its dynamic nature is not a flaw but a feature, Frankland says — something that evolved to aid learning. The environment is changing constantly and, to survive, animals must adapt to new situations. Allowing fresh information to overwrite the old helps them to achieve that.

[---]

Hardt thinks that Alzheimer’s disease might also be better understood as a malfunction of forgetting rather than remembering. If forgetting is truly a well-regulated, innate part of the memory process, he says, it makes sense that dysregulation of that process could have negative effects. “What if what’s actually going on is an overactive forgetting process that goes haywire and erases more than it should?” he asks.

That question is yet to be answered. But more memory researchers are shifting their focus to examine how the brain forgets, as well as how it remembers. “There’s an increasing understanding that forgetting is a collection of processes in its own right, to be distinguished from encoding and consolidation and retrieval,” Anderson says.

In the past decade, researchers have begun to view forgetting as an important part of a whole. “Why do we have memory at all? As humans, we entertain this fantasy that it’s important to have autobiographical details,” Hardt says. “And that’s probably completely wrong. Memory, first and foremost, is there to serve an adaptive purpose. It endows us with knowledge about the world, and then updates that knowledge.” Forgetting enables us as individuals, and as a species, to move forwards.

“Evolution has achieved a graceful balance between the virtues of remembering and the virtues of forgetting,” Anderson says. “It’s dedicated to both permanence and resilience, but also to getting rid of things that get in the way.”

- More Here

Quote of the Day

Misanthropy arises out of the too great confidence of inexperience;—you trust a man and think him altogether true and sound and faithful, and then in a little while he turns out to be false and knavish; and then another and another, and when this has happened several times to a man, especially when it happens among those whom he deems to be his own most trusted and familiar friends, and he has often quarreled with them, he at last hates all men, and believes that no one has any good in him at all. … Experience would have taught him the true state of the case, that few are the good and few the evil, and that the great majority are in the interval between them.

- Plato

Quote of the Day

The greatest remedy for anger is delay: beg anger to grant you this at the first, not in order that it may pardon the offence, but that it may form a right judgment about it:- if it delays, it will come to an end. Do not attempt to quell it all at once, for its first impulses are fierce; by plucking away its parts we shall remove the whole.

- Seneca

Isaac Asimov Asks, “How Do People Get New Ideas?”

The history of human thought would make it seem that there is difficulty in thinking of an idea even when all the facts are on the table. Making the cross-connection requires a certain daring. It must, for any cross-connection that does not require daring is performed at once by many and develops not as a “new idea,” but as a mere “corollary of an old idea.”
It is only afterward that a new idea seems reasonable. To begin with, it usually seems unreasonable. It seems the height of unreason to suppose the earth was round instead of flat, or that it moved instead of the sun, or that objects required a force to stop them when in motion, instead of a force to keep them moving, and so on.

A person willing to fly in the face of reason, authority, and common sense must be a person of considerable self-assurance. Since he occurs only rarely, he must seem eccentric (in at least that respect) to the rest of us. A person eccentric in one respect is often eccentric in others.

Consequently, the person who is most likely to get new ideas is a person of good background in the field of interest and one who is unconventional in his habits. (To be a crackpot is not, however, enough in itself.)

Once you have the people you want, the next question is: Do you want to bring them together so that they may discuss the problem mutually, or should you inform each of the problem and allow them to work in isolation?

My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required. The creative person is, in any case, continually working at it. His mind is shuffling his information at all times, even when he is not conscious of it. (The famous example of Kekule working out the structure of benzene in his sleep is well-known.)

The presence of others can only inhibit this process, since creation is embarrassing. For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones, which you naturally do not care to display.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

Animal factories are one more sign of the extent to which our technological capacities have advanced faster than our ethics.

- Peter Singer

Quote of the Day

The problem is that humans have victimized animals to such a degree that they are not even considered victims. They are not even considered at all. They are nothing; they don’t count; they don’t matter. They are commodities like TV sets and cell phones. We have actually turned animals into inanimate objects – sandwiches and shoes.

-  Gary Yourofsky

Quote of the Day

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

- Friedrich Hayek

Quote of the Day

To change one’s life:
1. Start immediately.
2. Do it flamboyantly.
3. No exceptions.

- William James

Quote of the Day

But feelings can't be ignored, no matter how unjust or ungrateful they seem.

- Anne Frank

Wisdom Of The Week

1. I write every day.  I also write to relax.

2. Much of my writing time is devoted to laying out points of view which are not my own.  I recommend this for most of you.

3. I do serious reading every day.

4. After a talk, Q&A session, podcast — whatever — I review what I thought were my weaker answers or interventions and think about how I could improve them.  I rehearse in my mind what I should have said.  Larry Summers does something similar.

5. I spent an enormous amount of time and energy trying to crack cultural codes.  I view this as a comparative advantage, and one which few other people in my fields are trying to replicate.  For one thing, it makes me useful in a wide variety of situations where I have little background knowledge.  This also helps me invest in skills which will age relatively well, as I age.  For me, this is perhaps the most importantly novel item on this list.

6. I listen often to highly complex music, partly because I enjoy it but also in the (silly?) hope that it will forestall mental laziness.

7. I have regular interactions with very smart people who will challenge me and be very willing to disagree, including “GMU lunch.”

8. Every day I ask myself “what did I learn today?”, a question I picked up from Amihai Glazer.  I feel bad if I don’t have a clear answer, while recognizing the days without a clear answer are often the days where I am learning the most (at least in the equilibrium where I am asking myself this question).

9. One factor behind my choice of friends is what kind of approbational sway they will exercise over me.  You should want to hang around people who are good influences, including on your mental abilities.  Peer effects really are quite strong.

10. I watch very little television.  And no drugs and no alcohol should go without saying.

11. In addition to being a “product” in its own right, I also consider doing Conversations with Tyler — with many of the very smartest people out there — to be a form of practice.  It is a practice for speed, accuracy in understanding written writings, and the ability to crack the cultural codes of my guests.

12. I teach — a big one.

Physical exercise is a realm all of its own, and that is good for your mind too.  For me it is basketball, tennis, exercise bike, sometimes light weights, swimming if I am at a decent hotel with a pool.  My plan is to do more of this.

- Tyler Cowen on How I Practice at What I do

Quote of the Day

The friend in my adversity I shall always cherish most. I can better trust those who helped to relieve the gloom of my dark hours than those who are so ready to enjoy with me the sunshine of my prosperity.

- Ulysses S. Grant

What I've Been Reading

It is one thing to study warand another to live the warrior's life. 

- Telamon of Arcadia, mercenary of the fifth century B.C.

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield.

A hidden gem that I have missed all this years ! If you need a slap of face wake up call (and even if you don't need one), please pick up this short book.

• The more important a call or action is to our soul's evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pushing it.
• The danger is greatest when the finish line is in sight. At this point, Resistance knows we're about to beat it. It hits the panic button. It marshals one last assault and slams us with everything it's got.
• Cruelty to others is a form of Resistance, as is the willing endurance of cruelty from others.
• Creating soap opera in our lives is a symptom of Resistance.
• Instead of applying self-knowledge, self-discipline, delayed gratification, and hard-work, we simply consume a product. Many pedestrians have been maimed or killed at the intersection of Resistance and Commerce.
• People aren't sick, they're self-dramatizing. Sometimes the hardest part of a medical job is keeping a straight face. As Jerry Seinfield observed of his twenty years of dating: "That's a lot of acting fascinated".
• The paradox seems to be, as Socrates demonstrated long ago,  that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.
• The more Resistance you experience, the more important your unmanifested art/project/enterprise is to you - and the more gratification you will feel when you finally do it.
• An support we get from persons of flesh and blood is like Monopoly money; it's not legal tender in that sphere where we have to do our work. In fact, the more energy we spend stoking up on support from colleagues and loved ones, the weaker we become and the less capable of handling our business.
• The Marine Corps teaches you how to be miserable. 
• The sign of the amateur is overglorification of and preoccupation with the mystery. The professional shuts up. She doesn't talk about it. She does her work. 
• The professional conducts his business in the real world. Adversity, injustice, bad hops and rotten calls, even good breaks and lucky bounces all comprise the ground over which the campaign must be waged. The field is level, the professional understands, only in the heaven. 
• The professional is sly. He knows that by toiling beside the front door of technique, he leaves room for genius to enter by the back. 
• The principle of organization is built into nature. Chaos itself is self-organizing. Out of primordial disorders, stars find their orbits, rivers make their way to the sea. 
• The Ego produces Resistance and attacks the awakening artist. 
• If we were born to overthrow the order of ignorance and injustice in world, it's our job to realize it and get down to business. 
• The artist must operate territorially. He must do his work for its own sake. 
• The artist can't do his work hierarchically. He has to work territorially. 
• A territory returns exactly what you put in. Territories are fair. Every erg of energy you put in goes infallibly into your account. A territory never devalues. A territory never crashes. What you deposited, you get back, dollar-for-dollar.  What's your territory?
• If you're all alone on the planet, a hierarchical orientation makes no sense. There's no one to impress. So if you'd still pursue that activity, congratulations. You've doing it territorially. 

Were you put on earth to be a painter, scientist, an apostle of peace? In the end the question can only be answered by action. Do it or don't do it.  

Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It's a gift to the world and every being in it. Don't cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you've got. 

Quote of the Day

As a low-level experience of cognitive dissonance, how does one maintain faith in an organization when some of the most basic claims are contradicted by evidence and ordinary experience?

- James R. Lewis

Quote of the Day

First say to yourself what you would be;
and then do what you have to do.

- Epictetus

Quote of the Day

Of all the follies of the world, that which is most universally received is the solicitude of reputation and glory; which we are fond of to that degree as to abandon riches, peace, life, and health, which are effectual and substantial goods, to pursue this vain phantom and empty word. … And of all the irrational humours of men, it should seem that the philosophers themselves are among the last and the most reluctant to disengage themselves from this.

- Michel de Montaigne

Quote of the Day

Many men have got a great name from the false opinions of the crowd. And what could be baser than such a thing? For those who are falsely praised, must blush to hear their praises. And if they are justly won by merits, what can they add to the pleasure of a wise man’s conscience? For he measures his happiness not by popular talk, but by the truth of his conscience.

- Boethius

Quote of the Day

A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite.

- Leo Tolstoy

Quote of the Day

Wisdom Of The Week

When Henry David Thoreau chronicled life on Walden Pond in the mid-19th century, the nearest town—Concord, Massachusetts—was approximately four degrees cooler than it is today. Thanks to climate change, the whole region is warmer than it was 168 years ago, when the writer-botanist-philosopher started observing New England’s plant species. And those rising temperatures have caused drastic shifts in the blooming schedule of native trees and wildflowers.

Now, a group of scientists studying the effects of climate change in Massachusetts are mimicking Thoreau’s methodology and using his historic observations as early data sets for their research

"Thoreau made very detailed, helpful observations on bird arrival times for more than 50 species of birds [and] hundreds of [plant] species between 1851 and 1858,” says Richard Primack, a biologist at Boston University and the director of the Primack Lab. “His observations were clearly very informed and accurate. He would go out every day of the week in Concord for four hours a day, [observe] the leafing of trees, and compile it into tables. It was an extraordinary effort for that time."

Primack and his team have been conducting research at Walden every spring since 2004, visiting the same places Thoreau did. Their low-tech method for studying when these trees and wildflowers begin to flower involves simply hiking around near Concord with a notebook and pencil, writing down their observations of each individual plant, and taking photographs of the area’s flora. Then they organize Thoreau’s observations and their modern field notes into tables for further study.

- How Thoreau’s 19th-Century Observations Are Helping Shape Science Today

Quote of the Day

It is possible to fail in many ways … while to succeed is possible only in one way (for which reason also one is easy and the other difficult — to miss the mark easy, to hit it difficult).

- Aristotle

Walden Wasn’t Thoreau’s Masterpiece

Thoreau was deeply affected by the rhythm of the natural world, and his urgent anticipation of renewal is everywhere. His moods, he said, were “periodical” and “the seasons and all their changes are in me.” He worried in mid-August about winter: “How early in the year it begins to be late.” And then in late October, it was almost as if he had to remind himself of the beauty of scarlet oaks’ fiery foliage in order to escape his impending winter melancholy: “Look at one completely changed from green to bright dark scarlet—every leaf, as if it had been dipped into a scarlet dye, between you and the sun. Was this not worth waiting for?” When the darkness arrived, his mood sank, and on a cold mid-November afternoon, he wrote:

The landscape is barren of objects—the trees being leafless—and so little light in the sky for variety. Such a day as will almost oblige a man to eat his own heart. A day in which you must hold on to life by your teeth. You can hardly ruck up any skin on nature’s bones. The sap is down—she won’t peel … Truly a hard day, hard times these. Not a mosquito left. Not an insect to hum. Crickets gone into winter quarters. Friends long since gone there—and you left to walk on frozen ground, with your hands in your pockets.

Yet even this entry shows how he considered himself an integral part of the natural world, the ecological community—a lonely traveler missing his old friends from summer. There is nothing reminiscent here of the haughty and sanctimonious Thoreau who is folded into the pages of Walden. In his journal, the punctilious scientist revealed himself as an observer whose soul was open to immediate connection with the big messy web of life: The sounds, colors, and smells of the seasons triggered emotions without a need for elaborate explanations. Nature, he wrote in January 1852, “is a plain writer, uses few gestures, does not add to her verbs, uses few adverbs, uses no expletives.” He aspired to do the same.

Thoreau wondered whether anything he ever wrote could be better than his journal, comparing his words in those pages to flowers that were freely growing, not transplanted or rearranged:

I do not know but thoughts written down thus in a journal might be printed in the same form with greater advantage—than if the related ones were brought together into separate essays. They are now allied to life—& are seen by the reader not to be far fetched—It is more simple—less artful—I feel that in the other case I should have no proper frame for my sketches. Mere facts & names & dates communicate more than we suspect—Whether the flower looks better in the nosegay—than in the meadow where it grew—& we had to wet our feet to get it! Is the scholastic air any advantage?

To me the answer is clear. Thoreau’s love for nature sings off his journal pages in spring. His winter writing slices right into the heart. His entries, day after day, are testimony to the power of renewal and rebirth—and to the importance of harnessing the human sense of wonder to better understand and protect the Earth. In our age of the Anthropocene, as we distance ourselves from the cyclical rhythms of nature, we are disconnecting from our planet. Thoreau’s journal is a reminder of what is at stake.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire.

- Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Quote of the Day

It’s courtesy and kindness that define a human being. That’s who possesses strength and nerves and guts, not the angry whiners.

- Marcus Aurelius

Quote of the Day

No great genius has ever been without a touch of insanity.

- Seneca

Quote of the Day

You are capable of more than you know. Choose a goal that seems right for you and strive to be the best, however hard the path. Aim high. Behave honorably. Prepare to be alone at times, and to endure failure. Persist! The world needs all you can give.

- E.O. Wilson

Quote of the Day

When the opinions of masses of merely average men are everywhere become or becoming the dominant power, the counterpoise and corrective to that tendency would be, the more and more pronounced individuality of those who stand on the higher eminences of thought. It is in these circumstances most especially, that exceptional individuals, instead of being deterred, should be encouraged in acting differently from the mass. … In this age the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service.

- J. S. Mill

Quote of the Day

People would rather believe than know.

- Edward O. Wilson

Wisdom Of The Week

In Gunung Leuser National Park, a World Heritage site, I was assured I was part of a reciprocal exchange. Ecotourism here, say both UNESCO officials and local people, is a way to protect these forests for the orangutan, to provide a livelihood for locals and so lessen the drive toward deforestation for palm-oil plantations. It was also, I learned, a vital way to take care of abused and mistreated orangutans, the most terrible case of which was a female orangutan who had been captured, kept in a brothel in Kalimantan, shaved, and chained for sexual purposes. The national parks sought to protect both animals and the forests themselves.

The parks, I soon learned, did not always live up to their promises. The guides constantly called out to the orangutans, who don’t like being disturbed. Stressed by the shouts, they move away and the guides can catch sight of them. “We do it because they don’t like it,” one of the guides said candidly. The guides want to make the tourists “happy” by making the orangutans unhappy; it is not a good exchange.

Breaking one park regulation after another, the guides gave food to the orangutans and then brought a large group of tourists not only far too close to a mother orangutan and her child but between them. One of the guides then began provoking the mother, leaping at her, goading her, and laughing. Another stood over her with a stick, waving it in her face. She was distressed. I was angry and walked away, telling the other tourists that none of us should be there. I’d never knowingly been complicit in an act of gang cruelty, and I was upset.

[---]

Animals find unexpected ways to let us in: the honeyguide bird knows where the bees’ nest is, but it cannot actually get the honey out on its own. It needs human hands to break open the hive, while humans need the bird to guide them to the right tree. Hence the honeyguide rule: a happy human-animal relationship depends on reciprocal exchange. The honeyguide is an emblem of the best kind of relationship between humans and the more-than-human world, leading the psyche to sweetness.

If humans deliberately call for help from honeyguides, the birds will directly respond. Such communication between animals of different species is rare, but other examples include the relationship of the orphaned baby hippopotamus looked after by an Aldabra giant tortoise 130 years old. The two vocalize together in neither typical hippo nor typical tortoise ways.

[---]

Loneliness is, we know, a root cause of unhappiness, while a sense of community enlivens us and makes us happy, but there is more: interspecies community matters. Animals are crucial for our happiness because as a species we crave companionship. But this is the age of our solitude, and many humans feel estranged from the world in this species-loneliness, outcast from the intensity of the fully thriving world. The nonhuman world of plants and animals is the only other life we know of in the universe; without them, how silent and foreboding the loneliness of humanity. The philosophy of human exceptionalism, that arrogant and ultimately self-injurious idea that humans are a species both separate and superior, reaches its apogee in mass extinctions.

- The Loneliest of Species

Quote of the Day

A good statement of an inherently imprecise concern – and most important concerns in the world are imprecise – must capture that imprecision, and not replace it by a precise statement about something else. You should learn to speak in an articulate way about ideas that are inescapably imprecise (as a man called Aristotle explained more than two millennia ago). And that is one of the reasons why the humanities are important. A novel can point to a truth without pretending to capture it exactly in some imagined numbers and formulae.

- Amartya Sen, A Wish a Day for a Week

Happiness and Social Behavio

Abstract
It is often assumed that there is a robust positive symmetrical relationship between happiness and social behavior: Social relationships are viewed as essential to happiness, and happiness is thought to foster social relationships. However, empirical support for this widely held view is surprisingly mixed, and this view does little to clarify which social partner a person will be motivated to interact with when happy. To address these issues, we monitored the happiness and social interactions of more than 30,000 people for a month. We found that patterns of social interaction followed the hedonic-flexibility principle, whereby people tend to engage in happiness-enhancing social relationships when they feel bad and sustain happiness-decreasing periods of solitude and less pleasant types of social relationships that might promise long-term payoff when they feel good. These findings demonstrate that links between happiness and social behavior are more complex than often assumed in the positive-emotion literature.

- Full paper here

Quote of the Day

Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century:

1. Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others;
2. Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected;
3. Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it;
4. Refusing to set aside trivial preferences;
5. Neglecting development and refinement of the mind;
6. Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.

- Marcus Tullius Cicero

Quote of the Day

Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by a difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought to be deprecated. I was in hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy, which has marked the present age, would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination so far that we should never again see the religious disputes carried to such a pitch as to endanger the peace of society.

- Founding Father George Washington, letter to Edward Newenham, October 20, 1792

Quote of the Day

Nothing great … is produced suddenly, since not even the grape or the fig is. If you say to me now that you want a fig, I will answer to you that it requires time: let it flower first, then put forth fruit, and then ripen. Is, then, the fruit of a fig-tree not perfected suddenly and in one hour, and would you possess the fruit of a man’s mind in so short a time and so easily? Do not expect it, even if I tell you.

- Epictetus

Quote of the Day

Double-think means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously and accepting both of them.  The party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered, therefore he knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of double think, he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated.

- George Orwell

Quote of the Day

The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

- Carl Gustav Jung