Wisdom Of The Week

Andrew's beautiful post on Neibuhr's final form of love - Forgiveness:

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint.
Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.


And then one reads this story. A 27-year old Rais Bhuiyan was working at a gas station when a white supremacist enraged by 9/11 came in and shot him in the face. The attacker was on a spree of non-white killings and was captured, tried, and sentenced to die next month. Buiyan wants to commute his assailant's sentence, despite having his face almost destroyed and being blind in one eye. Here's why:


"I strongly believe he was ignorant," Bhuiyan explained to the audience. "He couldn't differentiate right from wrong. ... By executing him now, we are losing everything." His Muslim faith, he said, teaches forgiveness, not vengeance.


Nadeem Akthar, the brother-in-law of another of Stroman's victims, Hasan, spoke at the press conference as well. "The last 10 years have been a long 10 years," he told the audience. "We've been going through a lot of turmoil ... but we made it here." He quoted Sura 5, verse 32 from the Quran, something he said his sister, Hasan's wife, had wanted him to share. "If someone slays one person, he has slain mankind entirely," reads the verse. "And if someone has saved one person, he has saved mankind entirely."

Jim Al-Khalili Talk With The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams

What I've Been Reading

Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing by Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe. Barry Schwatz's TED speech catapulted him to well deserved quasi-celebrity status and this book delivers more than that famous speech. This is probably the only book where one can find the wisdom of a janitor and judge on the same page. 

"We can experience fear, confidence, desire, anger, pity, and generally any kind of pleasure and pain either too much or too little, and in either case not properly . But to experience all this at the right time, toward the right objects, towards the´right people, for the right reason, and in the right manner - that is the median and the best course, the course that is a mark of virtue." - Aristotle  

2500 years ago, Aristotle summed up particle wisdom in those simple words.  
Practical wisdom deficit in this country makes the economic deficit look minuscule. But yet nothing much can be done collective unless we as individuals perpetually hone the traits of sharing, learning, compassion and being conscientious. All this should be self-evident else... and yes, it's not self-evident to many. 

"The 24 character strengths Seligman identified include things like curiosity, open-mindedness, perspective, kindness and generosity, loyalty, duty, fairness, leadership, self-control, caution, humility, bravery, perseverance, honesty, gratitude, optimism, and zest. He organized these strength into six virtues; courage, humanity and love, justice, temperance, transcendence, and wisdom and knowledge. Aristotle would have recognized many of these strengths as the kind of "excellences" or virtues he considered necessary for eudaomonia, a flourishing or happy life." - Authentic Happiness by Martin Seligman

Quote of the Day

“A little bit of agitation gives motivation to the soul, and what really makes the species prosper is not peace so much as freedom"

- Jean Jacques Rousseau

The Truth of False - Shankar Vedantam

Crazy but scary... here:

"Shankar Vedantam, a reporter for The Washington Post, explains that right after reading the flyer, people mostly remembered the false statements as false.


SHANKAR VEDANTAM: But about 30 minutes later, older people started to remember some of the false statements as true, and three days later, very large numbers of older people and significant numbers of younger people also started remembering increasing numbers of myths as true.


The true statements did not suffer the same kind of deterioration with time. In other words, over time we tend to remember false things as true but not true things as false.


BOB GARFIELD: Hmm — well, I guess there's some hope in that. By what mechanism is this taking place?

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: The mind relies on a number of rules of thumb, and one of the rules of thumb that it uses is that things that are more easily recalled are true even if the context in which they originally heard the statement was that the statement is false."

Animals & Love: Exclusive Excerpt From Exultant Ark

Excerpts from the new book Exultant Art: A Pictorial Tour of Animal Pleasure by Jonathan Balcombe - Here , an eye opener (for most); a must read:

"On the question of love’s existence in the hearts and minds of animals, science has been mainly mute. Few textbooks on animals discuss the possibility of love. For instance, the word love can be found in neither the index of The Oxford Companion to Animal Behavior nor the Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior. There are, I think, two main reasons for this. First, it is difficult, if not impossible, to prove feelings of love in another individual, even a human. This is the challenge of private experiences. It is why the study of animal feelings in general was largely neglected for the century following the 1872 publication of Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. But humans can at least give verbal expression to their loving feelings; so far, animals cannot, although there is the potential for revelations from language-taught great apes.


Second, our sense of superiority over other animals has made us loath to accept the idea that they can have such presumably complex feelings as love. That nonhumans are conscious remains controversial for some scientists, although their numbers are dwindling. Nevertheless, biologists usually use the term bond in place of love when referring to nonhumans. This is a safety net to avoid anthropomorphism.


As scientific interest in animal emotions has grown in recent years, new discoveries have suggested that animals too can feel love. One such discovery is that spindle cells occur in nonhumans. These large neurons, named for their shape, occur in parts of the human brain thought to be responsible for social organization, empathy, and intuitions about the feelings of others. Spindle cells are also credited with allowing us to feel love and to suffer emotionally. Long believed to exist only in the brains of humans and other great apes, in 2006 spindle cells were discovered in the same brain areas in humpback whales, fin whales, killer whales, and sperm whales. Furthermore, the proportion of spindle cells in whales’ brains is about three times that in human brains. It appears that spindle cells evolved in whales about thirty million years ago, some fifteen million years before humans acquired them, so the fact that the common ancestor of cetaceans and primates lived more than ninety-five million years ago means that spindle cells evolved separately in these lineages. In 2008, spindle cells were reported in both African and Indian elephants."

How to Print a Bicycle - 3D Printing

Quote of the Day

"There's been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we've built with the same body and brain."

- Steven Jay Gould

Meditation & Creative Mind

"The closest analogues are the so-called executive functions, brain systems involved in planning, integrating of sensory information, and abstract thinking, that are thought to be concentrated in the prefrontal cortex. There is, says Aronson, a way to improve executive functioning, and it's the very same practice prescribed by Alexander: mindfulness meditation. In fact, Aronson is currently planning a meditation study with undergrads at NYU. "Some studies show that people who do mindfulness meditation gain as much as 10 IQ points," he says. "What that seems to indicate is that it works on the ability to screen out irrelevant information, to clear out the mind of distractions, and to focus intently on relevant stimuli, which frees up resources to solve problems."
Subjectively, after a few weeks of practice, I can say that meditation does seem to quickly bring on a sense of quiet and clarity. Still, being creative is not as simple as being relaxed. It also involves the ability to make unexpected connections, to move fluidly among concepts, to consolidate past memories, ideas, or impressions and arrive at new insights. Alexander calls this second step "accessing your creative unconscious," and he believes meditation can set the stage.


 - More Here

How To Innovate - Fareed Zakaria

Again, life without TV comes with a cost; after "three" days of waiting, the video podcast of  Restoring the American Dream: How to Innovate is online now. A must watch (embedding disabled).

Len Baker perfectly  sums up the two personality traits he looks out for in the future entrepreneurs:

• High energy level
• Intellectual honesty and eagerness to seek negative feedback

Obviously, we as a nation has a surfeit of the former trait but the latter dissipates amongst the denizens of Lake Wobegon.

Fareed's Innovation story on Time magazine - here:

"What is innovation? We don't really have a good fix on the concept. We know it when we see it. But this much is clear: it encompasses more than just scientific or technological breakthroughs, as becomes apparent when you look at which companies are considered the most innovative. In the world of business rankings, it is very rare for a company to rank first in every survey, since the criteria often vary greatly. Yet when tackling innovation, one company, Apple, utterly dominates the lists, whoever puts them together.

So how would one define Apple's innovations? It is not a company that focuses on pathbreaking science and spews out new inventions and patents. The 2010 Booz & Co. ranking of companies by their expenditures on research and development places Apple 81st. As a percentage of its revenue, the company spends less than half of what the typical computer and electronics company does and a fifth of what Microsoft spends. Apple's innovations are powerful and profound, but they are often in the realms of design, consumer use and marketing. This is hardly unusual. In fact, the application of technology in service of a consumer need or business objective is what true innovation always has been.

Viewed from a historical perspective, that combination at the heart of successful innovation becomes clear. Len Baker, one of the founding fathers of the Silicon Valley venture-capital industry, says, "My favorite example is Isaac Merritt Singer, who invented the first commercially successful sewing machine. The real benefit to society was that he was the first person to sell to women, because prior to this it was assumed that women couldn't operate machinery. His company invented the installment plan and the trade-in. That's innovation. Think of eBay: eBay didn't create new technology. It used technology and revolutionized the way people do things." This idea of innovation as a new business process is of course older than modern capitalism itself. The system of accounting called double-entry bookkeeping, invented in Renaissance Italy, was powerfully connected to the development of trade and commerce. New ideas in all kinds of fields can fuel economic growth."


P.S.: CDO's doesn't count as innovation.