Quote of the Day

What is the essence of America?  Finding and maintaining that perfect, delicate balance between freedom "to" and freedom "from."

- Marilyn vos Savant, in Parade

Limiting Debt May Be Good For Your Mental Health

"Jenkins and colleagues in the United Kingdom studied the relationship between a variety of economic indicators and risk for presence of a mental disorder in over 8000 individuals in England, Scotland and Wales. The previous well-documented association between lower socioeconomic status and increased risk for mental disorders was found in this research study. Risk for any mental disorder (neurotic disorder, psychotic disorder, alcohol or drug use disorder) ranged from 24% of the highest earners to over 40% for lowest income group in men. For women the difference was 18% for the highest income group compared to 33% for the lowest income group.

Examining the relationship between income and risk for mental disorder in more detail in this sample produced an interesting finding. Income was strongly associated with the number of debts and the number of debts strongly correlated with rates of mental disorders. When the presence of personal debt (and other socioeconomic factors) was controlled, the association of income and mental illness vanished or was greater reduced. A small effect for income on rates of neurosis persisted after controlling for number of debts."

- More Here

Radio Afghanistan

Quote of the Day

"Sometimes, apparently rational self-interested strategies turn out (as in the prisoners' dilemma) to be self-defeating. This may look like a defeat for rationality, but it is not. Rationality is saved by its own open-endedness. If a strategy of following accepted rules of rationality is sometimes self-defeating, this is not the end. We revise the rules to take account of this, so producing a higher-order rationality strategy. This in turn may fail, but again we go up a level. At whatever level we fail, there is always the process of standing back and going up a further level."

- The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker

Wisdom Of The Week

• "As a Prussian general once put it, 'No plan survives first contact with the enemy'. What matters is how quickly the leader is able to adapt.
• This idea of allowing several ideas to develop in parallel runs counter to our instincts: we naturally tend to ask, "what is the best option?" and concentrate on that. But given that life is so unpredictable, what seemed initially like an inferior option may turn out to be exactly what we need. It's sensible in many areas in life to leave room for exploring parallel possibilities..."
  
  -FS Notes on Tim Harford's New Book, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

The Big Loot - How To Bring Money Back From Swiss Banks

"The Swiss Parliament, it may be noted, passed a new law in February 2011. Termed as the Restitution of Illicit Assets Act (RIAA), this law has the potency to make and mar the reputation of several PEPs across continents.


What is pertinent to note here is that, among other things, the law according to some experts allows the Swiss cabinet to freeze contentious assets of PEPs even if a country has not formally asked Switzerland to do so."

- More Here

Quote of the Day

"Of all the civilizations on this planet, science is weakest in the land of Islam. The dangers of this weakness cannot be over-emphaized since the honorable survival of a society depends directly on its science and technology in the condition of the present age."

- Adbus Salam

Why Quantum Physics Ends The Free Will Debate - Michio Kaku

What I've Been Reading

The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance by Jim Al-Khalili. An apt book especially now that Islam has become synonymous with Jihad in every non-Islamic part of the world. I am not big fan of reading Persian/Arabic history but that very trait forced me to pick up this book. The most enlightening part was on the translation movement; how Arabs translated Greek, Persian, Syriac and Indian books and laid a strong foundations for science. 


"Al-Ma'mun was not satisfied with simply listening to what these learned men had to say. He was well aware of the treasures to be found in the ancient texts of Greek philosophers, some of which had already begun to be translated for the Abbasid caliphs before him. He would send emissaries great distances to get hold of these scientific texts. Often, foreign rulers defeated in battle would be required to settle the terms of surrender to him with books from their libraries rather than in gold. Al-Ma'mum was almost fanatical in his desire to collect all the world's books under one roof, translate them into Arabic and have his scholars study them. The institution he created to realize his dream epitomizes more than anything else the blossoming of the scientific golden age. It became know through out the world as the House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma). Or so the story goes."

Quote of the Day

"There is a limit to how much honest feedback most leaders really want to hear; and because we know this, most of us sugar-coat our opinions whenever we speak to a powerful person. In a deep hierarchy, that process is repeated many times, until the truth is utterly concealed inside a thick layer of sweet-talk. There is some evidence that the more ambitious a person is, the more he will choose to be a yes-man and with good reason because yes-men tend to be rewarded."

 - via FS (this not only applies to leaders but we as society got "adapted" and thrive in a quagmire of white-lies)