Quote of the Day

The goods of fortune … still need taste to enjoy them. It is the enjoying, not the possessing, that makes us happy.

- Michel de Montaigne

Quote of the Day

Were you to live three thousand years, or even thirty thousand, remember that the sole life which a man can lose is that which he is living at the moment; and furthermore, that he can have no other life except the one he loses. This means that the longest life and the shortest amount to the same thing. For the passing minute is every man’s equal possession, but what has once gone by is not ours. Our loss, therefore, is limited to that one fleeting instant, since no one can lose what is already past, nor yet what is still to come–for how can he be deprived of what he does not possess? So two things should be borne in mind. 

• First, that all the cycles of creation since the beginning of time exhibit the same recurring pattern, so that it can make no difference whether you watch the identical spectacle for a hundred years, or for two hundred, or for ever. 
• Secondly, that when the longest-and the shortest-lived of us come to die, their loss is precisely equal. For the sole thing of which any man can be deprived is the present; since this is all he owns, and nobody can lose what is not his.

- Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

What I've Been Reading

Words at the Threshold: What We Say as We're Nearing Death by Lisa Smartt.

Three major message I got from the book (and I more or less agree with those):

• How we live life translates into what we speak at end of life. 
• There is more to ours senses than language; we lose those senses as we grow out of our childhood and then we get back before death. 
• There is tons we don't know; we have our limitations as a species (which most don't agree and delude themselves). 

Another great lesson was on what to do and what not do when a person is in his death bed (nobody taught us this even though this is the most concentre and inevitable things in life).

• Language is sequential, but the near-death experience is often described as having no spatial or temporal sequence. This non-sequential quality of the near-death experience makes it necessary for people to reach not only for metaphorical but also for paradoxically descriptions. 
• The metaphor of death as a journey is deeply rooted in who and what we are. This is true not only for us as individuals but also of human beings collectively, since metaphor emerges in languages and cultures throughout the world. 
• Do we speak of dying as a journey because have no other means to make sense of the end of life? Or do we use the journey metaphor because there are no literal words to describe the passage we are making? Perhaps we are, indeed, boarding a train for a new destination, a place that can be described only in intensified and figurative language - a place so magnificent that it led Steve Jobs to exclaim, "Oh wow!, Oh wow! Oh, wow!"
• A distinguishing characteristic of nonsense is that the context is missing. For example, if one hundred years ago someone had said, "The astronauts are going to the moon," the sentence would have been unintelligible. What are astronauts? How can anyone get to moon? Many things that once would have seemed like nonsense are completely sensible today. Situational and linguistic nonsense are important in studying the language of the threshold because the language does not correspond to our current understanding and may hold hints of knowledge we don not yet have. As a matter of fact, a survey of many of the great discoveries in science is also a survey of concepts that we described at one time as complete nonsense. What looks like nonsense at any given point is often a harbinger of new frontiers. 
• I even cry with the guys in the hospice units in prison. I gave up on all I learned about not crying. I just think a life is worth crying over - most of them have not had their live cried over. 
• The American psychologist William James observed that self-contradictory expressions like "dazzling obscurity," "whispering silence,"  "teeming desert," and "the Soundless Sound" are common in the writing of mystics. Apparently, prosaic language is inadequate for describing the transcendent level of consciousness. Raymond Moody suggests, "We delight in nonsense because it short-circuits the brain by bypassing the rational mind."
• 2012 paper titled "Essence Theory", indicate that parents and infants communicate energetically and "telepathically" before spoken language is fully mastered. As infants gain spoken language, the ability to communicate in nonverbal ways diminishes. They explain that the same kind of communication that is documented in near-death experiences as "telepaths and nonlinguistic" can occur in the communication between babies and their caregivers. 

Quote of the Day

If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it.

- Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Wisdom Of The Week

Beautiful ! The Last Neanderthal - A Film

For decades, we've thought of our Neanderthal cousins as brutish, primitive beings. Second-class humans driven extinct by their own fallibility and stupidity. 

But as we are fast learning, the truth about who they were and how they died is far more intriguing. 

In a special series, BBC Earth has recreated the last days of the last Neanderthal.

Quote of the Day

In the hopes of reaching the moon, men fail to see the flowers that blossom at their feet.

- Albert Schweitzer

Quote of the Day

He who laughs at himself never runs out of things to laugh at.

- Epictetus

Quote of the Day

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Quote of the Day

Any fool can make a rule and any fool can mind it.

- Henry David Thoreau

Quote of the Day

Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: Some things are within our control, and some things are not. It is only after you have faced up to this fundamental rule and learned to distinguish between what you can and can’t control that inner tranquility and outer effectiveness become possible.

-  Epictetus

Quote of the Day

Freedom is the only worthy goal.

- Epictetus

What Lies Beneath - Robert Macfarlane Travels 'Underland'

The underland keeps its secrets well. Last December scientists revealed their discovery of a vast “deep life” ecosystem in the Earth’s crust, twice the volume of the world’s oceans, containing a biodiversity comparable to that of the Amazon, and teeming with 23bn tonnes of micro-organisms – hundreds of times the combined weight of all living humans. Only in recent decades have ecologists traced the fungal networks that lace woodland soil, joining individual trees into intercommunicating forests via a “wood wide web” – as fungi have been doing for hundreds of millions of years. The notion of discovering a new mountain in Britain is laughable, but in Derbyshire in 1999 cavers broke through into a cavern now named Titan, since confirmed as the biggest known natural chamber in Britain, large enough to hold St Paul’s Cathedral four times over. It was as if another Ben Nevis had been found, somewhere near Chesterfield. A thousand feet below ground in northern Italy, I rappelled into a huge rotunda of stone, cut by a buried river and filled with dunes of black sand. Traversing those dunes on foot was like trudging through a windless desert on a lightless planet.

The underland’s impenetrability to vision and its obstructiveness to entry have long made it a means, across world cultures, of alluding to what cannot easily be seen or said: trauma, memory, grief, death, suffering, the afterlife – and what Elaine Scarry calls the “deep subterranean fact” of pain. Deliberately to place something in the underland is often a strategy to shield it from view. Actively to retrieve something from the underland often requires effortful work, physical or psychoanalytical.

For nearly two decades I have been writing about the relationships of landscape and the human heart. I began on the summits of the world’s peaks, wishing to solve a personal mystery (why I was so drawn to mountains when young that I was, at times, ready to die for love of them) but also a historical one (why the western imagination underwent a revolution of perception concerning mountains in under 300 years, from superstitious fear to secular worship). From that high ground, over the course of five books and 2,000 pages, I’ve followed a downwards trajectory, exploring the storeys of matter that lie beneath the surface of both land and mind. “The descent beckons / As the ascent beckoned,” wrote William Carlos Williams in a late poem.

[---]

“Deep time” is the phrase coined by John McPhee in 1981 to denote the dizzying expanses of Earth history that stretch in all directions from the present moment. It echoes James Playfair’s description of the “abyss of time” he glimpsed while viewing a strata unconformity at Siccar Point in 1788, when geology was first emerging as a science. McPhee and Playfair’s phrases both evoke a temporal vertigo. For deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: millennia, epochs and aeons, instead of minutes, months and years. Deep time is kept by rock, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Seen in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains rise and fall. We live on a restless Earth.

There is a perilous comfort to be drawn from deep time. An ethical lotus-eating beckons. What does human behaviour matter when Homo sapiens will have disappeared from Earth in the blink of a geological eye? Viewed from the perspective of deserts or oceans, morality looks absurd, crushed to irrelevance. A flat ontology entices: all life is equally insignificant in the face of eventual ruin.

We should resist such inertial thinking; indeed, we should urge its opposite – deep time as a radical perspective, provoking action not apathy. The shock of the Anthropocene requires a new time literacy, a rethinking of what the geologist Marcia Bjornerud calls “our place in time”. This is already happening. Deep time is the catalysing context of intergenerational justice; it is what frames the inspiring activism of Greta Thunberg and the school climate-strikers, and the Sunrise campaigners pushing for a Green New Deal in America. A deep-time perspective requires us to consider not only how we will imagine the future, but how the future will imagine us. It asks a version of Jonas Salk’s arresting question: “Are we being good ancestors?”

- Robert Macfarlane writes about his new book Underland: A Deep Time Journey

Quote of the Day

The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the cooperation or consent of his deliberate reason.

- Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, XV

Wisdom Of The Week

COWEN: Are we less creative if all the parts of our mind become allies? Maybe I’m afraid this will happen to me, that I have rebellious parts of my mind, and they force me to do more interesting things, or they introduce randomness or variety into my life.

BOYDEN: This is a question that I think is going to become more and more urgent as neurotechnology advances. Already there are questions about attention-focusing drugs like Ritalin or Adderall. Maybe they make people more focused, but are you sacrificing some of the wandering and creativity that might exist in the brain and be very important for not only personal productivity but the future of humanity?

I think what we’re realizing is that when you intervene with the brain, even with brain stimulation, you can cause unpredictable side effects. For example, there’s a part of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. That’s actually an FDA-approved site for stimulation with noninvasive magnetic pulses to treat depression. But patients, when they’re stimulated here . . . People have done studies. It can also change things like trust. It can change things like driving ability.

There’s only so many brain regions, but there’s millions of things we do. Of course, intervening with one region might change many things.

[---]

COWEN: Ultimately, do you believe in reductionism — that what is the brain can be understood by physical science, and by materials, and by cause and effect the way we would understand, say, a computer?

BOYDEN: If you say, can we understand the brain in terms of chemical underpinnings, I would say yes.

COWEN: And consciousness?

BOYDEN: Again, I think we don’t have a good definition of consciousness in the sense that we cannot detect it through a consciousness meter, and we don’t have a creation method of consciousness engine. So the jury’s still out on that front, but I hope to study it.

Science can fail. There are certain things that science can’t yet answer, like what happened before the Big Bang and so forth. But I think we have to give it our best shot.

[---]

COWEN: I worry sometimes that would make things worse. I think of people on Twitter: they see what each other have to say; they like each other less. There’s some partial evidence that, if you try to mentally put yourself in someone else’s shoes, you realize that what they think conflicts with your values, and you may be less inclined to agree with them. Is it possible we have too much empathy, and we should just be more objective, more Spockian, rational calculators?

BOYDEN: It also might be that we have to think of empathy in a new way. As we talked about earlier, suppose that what we are consciously aware of is being generated by some unconscious processes that happen right beforehand. Maybe when we are trying to experience empathy at a certain point in time, there are other processes in the brain that occurred beforehand that we don’t have access to. But if we could access those processes, we could have a greater kind of empathy.

Some of this language is used in meditative and consciousness-oriented and mindfulness practices that try to understand compassion and empathy in a greater way. But I wonder if there’s a precise neuroscientific way to tackle such things.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

Only the wise man is content with what is his. All foolishness suffers the burden of dissatisfaction with itself.

- Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

Quote of the Day

If you want the shortest version of my answer to the question of why Buddhism is true, it's this: Because we are animals created by natural selection. Natural selection built into our brains the tendencies that early Buddhist thinkers did a pretty amazing job of sizing up, given the meager scientific resources at their disposal. Now, in light of the modern understanding of natural selection and the modern understanding of the human brain that natural selection produced, we can provide a new kind of defense of this sizing up.

- Robert Wright, Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor & Exercise

Every time you work out, your muscles, fat cells, and liver release a variety of molecules into the bloodstream. Some of these molecules circulate through the body and travel up to the brain, where they cross the blood-brain barrier. Once inside, they trigger a cascade of beneficial changes that can make you feel sharper and happier.

One of the most crucial changes is the release of a growth hormone called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF. When it comes to exercise’s positive effects on the brain, BDNF is the star.

“This is one of the most important molecules for brain function in connection to the effects of exercise,” says Gomez-Pinilla. “BDNF is very important for all of the basic processes related to learning and memory in the brain.”

BDNF helps the brain build new connections, or synapses, between neurons — a process called synaptic plasticity that is thought to be the foundation for learning. Cells communicate through these connections both within and across areas of the brain. For example, neurons in the hippocampus create synapses with cells in the prefrontal cortex, another region that significantly benefits from exercise. The prefrontal cortex is where a lot of our higher-level executive functions originate, like decision-making and attention, processes that are also improved with exercise.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

Mankind’s true moral test consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect, mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.

- Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

What I've Been Reading

To know reality you have to know beyond knowing.

[---]

One cannot do evil in awareness. But one can do evil in knowledge or information, when you know something is bad.

[---]

How does one cope with evil? Not by fighting it but by understanding it. In understanding, it disappears. 

Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality by Anthony De Mello.

One of the best books I have ever read ! Anthony De Mello blunt truths bringing in religion, philosophy and psychology is a treasure for life.

• The three most difficult things for a human being are not physical feats or intellectual achievements. They are, first, returning love for hate; second including the excluded; third admitting that you are wrong.
• Do I do anything to change myself? I've got a big surprise for you, lots of good news! You don't have to do anything. The more you do, the worse it gets. All you have to do is understand.
• People react so quickly because they are not aware. You will come to understand that there are times when you will inevitably react, even in awareness. But as awareness grows, you react less and act more. It really doesn't matter.
• Pleasant experiences make life delightful. Painful experiences lead to growth. Pleasant experiences make life delightful, but they don't lead to growth in themselves. What leads to growth is painful experiences. Suffering points up an area in you where you have not yet grown, where you need to grow and be transformed and change. If you knew how to use that suffering, oh, how you would grow.
• I remember that when my own mother got cancer, my sister said to me, "Tony, why did God allow this to happen to Mother?" I said to her, "My dear, last year a million people died of starvation in China because of drought, and you never raised a question."
• This is what is ultimate in our human knowledge of God, to know what we do not know. Our great tragedy is that we know too much. We think we know, that is our tragedy; so we never disconnect. In fact, Thomas Aquinas says repeatedly, "All the efforts of the human mind cannot exhaust the essence of a single fly."
• Flags are in the heads of people. In any case, there are thousands of words in vocabulary that do not correspond to reality at all. But do they trigger emotions in us! So we begin to see things that are not there. We actually see Indian mountains when they don't exists, and we actually see Indian people who also don't exists. Your American conditioning exists. My Indian conditioning exists. But that's not a very happy thing.
• As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life. But life has no meaning; it cannot have meaning because meaning is a formula; meaning is something that makes sense to mind. Every time you make sense out of reality, you bump into something that destroys the sense you made. Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.
• The only tragedy there is in the world is ignorance; all evil comes from that. The only tragedy there is in the world is unwakefulness and unawareness.
• A nice definition of an awakened person: a person who longer marches to the drums of society, a person who dances to the tune of the music that springs up from within.
• You don't need conscience when you have consciousness; you don't need conscience when you have sensitivity.
• You lapsed into what the gospels call "the world" and you're going to lose your soul. The world, power, prestige, winning, success, honor etc., are nonexistent things. You gain the world but you lose your soul. Your whole life has been empty and soulless. There is nothing there. There's only one way out and this is to get deprogrammed! How do you do that? You become aware of the programming. You cannot change by an effort of the will; you cannot change through ideals; you cannot change through building up new habits. Your behavior may change, but you don't. You only change through awareness and understanding.

Quote of the Day

Next to the ridicule of denying an evident truth, is that of taking much pains to defend it; and no truth appears to me more evident, than that beasts are endowed with thought and reason as well as men. The arguments are in this case so obvious, that they never escape the most stupid and ignorant.

- David Hume

Take Care Of Your Mind & Body - Warren Buffet

In his essay for “Getting There,” Buffett elaborates on a message that he thinks “is very important to get across to younger people”: Take care of your mind and body.

Sounds simple, right?

But Buffett takes it a step further by offering an analogy: “Let’s say that I offer to buy you the car of your dreams. You can pick out any car that you want, and then when you get out of class this afternoon, that car will be waiting for you at home.”

As with most things in life, Buffett says there’s just one catch: It’s the only car you’re ever going to get...in your entire life.

“Now, knowing that, how are you going to treat that car?” he asks.

“You’re probably going to read the owner’s manual four times before you drive it; you’re going to keep it in the garage, protect it at all times, change the oil twice as often as necessary,” says Buffett. “If there’s the least little bit of rust, you’re going to get that fixed immediately so it doesn’t spread — because you know it has to last you as long as you live.”

And then, like a bag of bricks, Buffett hits us with a brilliant realization: The position you’re in with your car is exactly the position you’re in concerning your mind and body.

In other words, the way you treat your car should be no different than the way you treat your body.

“You have only one mind and one body for the rest of your life,” Buffett says. “If you aren’t taking care of them when you’re young, it’s like leaving that car out in hailstorms and letting rust eat away at it. If you don’t take care of your mind and body now, by the time you’re 40 or 50, you’ll be like a car that can’t go anywhere.”

- More Here

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

A slight sound at evening lifts me up by the ears, and makes life seem inexpressibly serene and grand. It may be Uranus, or it may be in the shutter.

- Henry David Thoreau

Quote of the Day

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object of which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

- The Last Paragraph of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species

Wisdom Of The Week

Longmate’s If Britain Had Fallen went further into the moral entanglements of a Nazi occupation of Britain. Like Lampe and Clarke, he searched the records for individual Britons whose lives would have been different under German rule. The members of the Auxiliary Units and the 2,700 people on the Germans’ notorious ‘Black List’, slated for immediate execution after the invasion, grabbed his attention. If Britain Had Fallen also specifically considers collaborators as a social type. It emphasises that Germans expected the cooperation of a British civil authority, and planned to delegate most of the administration of civilian life to it. The entire British legal system was to remain intact, as were the functions of teaching, policing, postal service, even customs administration.

Indeed, Longmate points out that the Germans presumed the French model of occupation by referring to ‘occupied’ and ‘unoccupied’ zones, and that the Germans’ invasion force was projected at only 250,000. They would have needed a compliant figurehead and government ministers, who might have been found, ‘somewhere among the noble families which feared a revolution and which had fawned upon von Ribbentrop or been entertained by Göring at his hunting lodge’. Longmate declined to name individuals, but his description is specific enough to bring to mind the Cliveden set of upper-class individuals, who met at the homes of the viscountess Nancy Astor, members of the Anglo-German Fellowship, and even diplomats such as Neville Henderson.

If Britain Had Fallen stresses that these British Nazis would not have been representative of the occupied British nation. Longmate portrays the struggles of British judges, lawyers, district nurses and doctors, postmen, teachers, tax collectors, mayors and city clerks pressed between the subjugated people and the Nazi overlords. If Britain Had Fallen gives us a very different Nazi Britain from Clarke’s England Under Hitler. Clarke’s model of British behaviour had been Major Colin Gubbins, the head of the Auxiliary Units, assassinating Nazi perpetrators after a village massacre. Twelve years later, in Longmate’s If Britain Had Fallen, the exemplary Briton is the anonymous civil servant, ‘a good mayor or, perhaps even more, a good town clerk’, bearing the day-to-day burden of carrying out German orders and consequently ‘likely before long to be unpopular all round’.

[---]

Times have certainly changed, but what lasts is the tendency to use a counterfactual thought-experiment to explore the question of whether Britons belong in Europe or not. Regardless of whether the thought-experiment concludes that Britons are typical Europeans, or that they’re intrinsically different, it starts with the same question: what would have happened if the island had been invaded and/or occupied in 1940?

This is, to be sure, a question that can never be definitively answered and, since Britons can never know how they would have acted under the heel of Nazi oppression, they are likely to continue speculating about it. Perhaps that is the one characteristic that truly does separate Britons from other Europeans.

- The Many Counterfactual Histories of Nazi-Britain

Quote of the Day

People may think of Endo and Folkman as great inventors, but arguably their greatest skill was investigating failure. They learned to separate False Fails from true fails.

- Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

Quote of the Day

You must love the crust of the earth on which you dwell more than the sweet crust of any bread or cake; you must be able to extract nutriment out of a sand heap.

- Henry David Thoreau

Quote of the Day

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.

- Richard P. Feynman

Erisologists..

Inspired a few years ago by this rapid disruption to the way disagreement usually works, Nerst, who describes himself as a “thirty-something sociotechnical systems engineer with math, philosophy, history, computer science, economics, law, psychology, geography and social science under a shapeless academic belt,” first laid out what he calls “erisology,” or the study of disagreement itself. Here’s how he defines it:

Erisology is the study of disagreement, specifically the study of unsuccessful disagreement. An unsuccessful disagreement is an exchange where people are no closer in understanding at the end than they were at the beginning, meaning the exchange has been mostly about talking past each other and/or hurling insults. A really unsuccessful one is where people actually push each other apart, and this seems disturbingly common.

The word erisology comes from Eris, the Greek goddess of discord, who proved in antiquity that you could get people into fights by giving them ambiguous messages and letting them interpret them self-servingly and according to their own biases

[---]

The concept of decoupling is erisology at its best. Expanding on the writing of the mathematician and blogger Sarah Constantin, who was herself drawing on the work of the psychologist Keith Stanovich, Nerst describes decoupling as simply the idea of removing extraneous context from a given claim and debating that claim on its own, rather than the fog of associations, ideologies, and potentials swirling around it.

[---]

Once you know a term like decoupling, you can identify instances in which a disagreement isn’t really about X anymore, but about Y and Z. When some readers first raised doubts about a now-discredited Rolling Stone story describing a horrific gang rape at the University of Virginia, they noted inconsistencies in the narrative. Others insisted that such commentary fit into destructive tropes about women fabricating rape claims, and therefore should be rejected on its face. The two sides weren’t really talking; one was debating whether the story was a hoax, while the other was responding to the broader issue of whether rape allegations are taken seriously. Likewise, when scientists bring forth solid evidence that sexual orientation is innate, or close to it, conservatives have lashed out against findings that would “normalize” homosexuality. But the dispute over which sexual acts, if any, society should discourage is totally separate from the question of whether sexual orientation is, in fact, inborn. Because of a failure to decouple, people respond indignantly to factual claims when they’re actually upset about how those claims might be interpreted.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

There is a certain respect, and a general duty of humanity, that attaches us not only to animals, who have life and feeling, but even to trees and plants. We owe justice to men, and mercy and kindness to other creatures that may be capable of receiving it. There is some relationship between them and us, and some mutual obligation.

- Montaigne

Quote of the Day

It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully. We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own … Yet there is no use our mounting on stilts, for on stilts we must still walk on our own legs. And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting only on our own rump.

- Montaigne

Quote of the Day

Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened. In other words, we would not consciously engage upon tasks whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming. Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be.

- Gift of Doubt 

Wisdom Of The Week

The asteroid was vaporized on impact. Its substance, mingling with vaporized Earth rock, formed a fiery plume, which reached halfway to the moon before collapsing in a pillar of incandescent dust. Computer models suggest that the atmosphere within fifteen hundred miles of ground zero became red hot from the debris storm, triggering gigantic forest fires. As the Earth rotated, the airborne material converged at the opposite side of the planet, where it fell and set fire to the entire Indian subcontinent. Measurements of the layer of ash and soot that eventually coated the Earth indicate that fires consumed about seventy per cent of the world’s forests. Meanwhile, giant tsunamis resulting from the impact churned across the Gulf of Mexico, tearing up coastlines, sometimes peeling up hundreds of feet of rock, pushing debris inland and then sucking it back out into deep water, leaving jumbled deposits that oilmen sometimes encounter in the course of deep-sea drilling.

[…]

The dust and soot from the impact and the conflagrations prevented all sunlight from reaching the planet’s surface for months. Photosynthesis all but stopped, killing most of the plant life, extinguishing the phytoplankton in the oceans, and causing the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere to plummet. After the fires died down, Earth plunged into a period of cold, perhaps even a deep freeze. Earth’s two essential food chains, in the sea and on land, collapsed. About seventy-five per cent of all species went extinct. More than 99.9999 per cent of all living organisms on Earth died, and the carbon cycle came to a halt.

[…]

One of the authors of the 1991 paper, David Kring, was so frightened by what he learned of the impact’s destructive nature that he became a leading voice in calling for a system to identify and neutralize threatening asteroids. “There’s no uncertainty to this statement: the Earth will be hit by a Chicxulub-size asteroid again, unless we deflect it,” he told me. “Even a three-hundred-metre rock would end world agriculture.

- The Day the Dinosaurs Died

Quote of the Day

Cats Recognize Their Own Names—Even If They Choose to Ignore Them

“This new study clearly shows that many cats react to their own names when spoken by their owners,” says biologist John Bradshaw, who studies human-animal interactions at the University of Bristol’s Anthrozoology Institute and was not involved in the new study. But Bradshaw says he is less convinced cats can recognize their names when spoken by someone unfamiliar. “I think that it’s entirely possible that some cats are able to generalize between one human voice and another, but I’d like to see more trials before I’d say that the evidence is compelling,” he says.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

- Marcel Proust

Three Types of Companionship - Montaigne

Among the essays highlighted is Montaigne’s “Of Three Commerces,” a reflection on companionship. In it, the philosopher ranks his favorite relationships, comparing the three kinds of companions who occupied most of his life. Writing about the first two, Montaigne says he’s enjoyed the company of “beautiful and honorable women” and had “rare and exquisite friendships,” both of which he considered “fortuitous.”

Of these first two types of relationships, the philosopher ranked friendship superior, considering it the only true freely-formed bond two people can have. Love and romance, on the other hand, were associated with marriage which is contractual and constrains freedom, he believed.

Yet, it is third relationship—the company of books—that the philosopher ranks highest. Romance, according to Montaigne, “withers with age.” Meanwhile, true friendship is “troublesome by its rarity.” Neither of these bonds could “have been sufficient for the business of my life,” Montaigne writes. But books are reliable companions and our ties to them are wholly personal. The philosopher explains:

[Reading] goes side by side with me in my whole course and everywhere is assisting me: it comforts me in old age and solitude; it eases me of the troublesome weight of idleness, and delivers me at all hours from company that I dislike; it blunts the points of grief if they are not extreme, and have not got an entire possession of my soul. To divert myself from a troublesome fancy, ’tis but to run to my books; they presently fix me to them and drive the other out of my thoughts, and do not mutiny at seeing that I have only recourse to them for want of other more real, natural, and lively commodities; they always receive me with the same kindness.

[---]

Now, we—like Montaigne was centuries ago—are again poised on the brink of another new age, having replaced books with all manner of devices and entertainments, Compagnon argues. He worries that we may be leaving our old friend the printed tome behind, perhaps not realizing just how nourishing this particular kind of literary relationship can be.

Before we abandon this fine companion, the professor suggests, we should recall the comfort, understanding, and wisdom that books have provided generations of readers for centuries. “They never complain, or protest when they are neglected as flesh-and-blood women do,” Compagnon writes, echoing the words of Montaigne. “The presence of books is always a kindly and serene one, while the moods of friends and lovers vary.”

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Marine is Reunited With Puppy He Saved While in Afghanistan

Quote of the Day

... As to speech, it is certain that if it be not natural it is not necessary. Nevertheless I believe that a child which had been brought up in an absolute solitude, remote from all society of men (which would be an experiment very hard to make), would have some kind of speech to express his meaning by. And 'tis not to be supposed that nature should have denied that to us which she has given to several other animals: for what is this faculty we observe in them, of complaining, rejoicing, calling to one another for succour, and inviting each other to love, which they do with the voice, other than speech? And why should they not speak to one another? They speak to us, and we to them. In how many several sorts of ways do we speak to our dogs, and they answer us? We converse with them in another sort of language, and use other appellations, than we do with birds, hogs, oxen, horses, and alter the idiom according to the kind:

Thus from one swarm of ants some sally out,

To spy another's stock or mark its rout.

- The Language of Animals by Michel de Montaigne

Quote of the Day

The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks which the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets. Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer’s kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts,—from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this?Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb,—heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board,—may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society’s most trivial and hand selled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!

I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us.Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

- Final paragraph of Henry David Thoreau's Walden

Quote of the Day

The planting of a tree, especially one of the long-living hardwood trees, is a gift which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble, and if the tree takes root it will far outlive the visible effect of any of your other actions, good or evil.

- George Orwell

Quote of the Day

The commonest and cheapest sounds, as the barking of a dog, produce the same effect on fresh and healthy ears that the rarest music does. It depends on your appetite for sound. Just as a crust is sweeter to a healthy appetite than confectionery to a pampered or diseased one.

- Henry David Thoreau