Quote of the Day

Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good. Hence a prince who wants to keep his authority must learn how not to be good, and use that knowledge, or refrain from using it, as necessity requires.

- The Prince, Niccolb Machiavelli

The Story Of Toilet Paper

It was the 1850s - an age of invention that saw the birth of the modern sewing machine, the safety elevator and the machine gun. Readers squinting at the small print below the eye-catching headline may have been perplexed to find an advert for Joseph C. Gayetty's Medicated Paper, America's first commercial toilet paper - the "greatest blessing of the age", he trumpeted.

Gayetty's announcement proved to be surprisingly provocative. Whereas loo roll may now be considered an essential home comfort, in the 1850s the idea of forking out good money for mere "bum fodder" was greeted by a chorus of mocking laughter from scientists. Medics were particularly concerned by Gayetty's assertion that his new paper could cure piles, and soon took to the pages of leading medical journals to lampoon the loo-roll pioneer.

Despite his grandiose claims, Gayetty was not the first to "discover" toilet paper. As with the compass, the wheelbarrow, silk and gunpowder, the Chinese had got there hundreds of years earlier. Paper had been circulating in China since the 2nd century and it didn't take long for people to apply it to their behinds. Even the Emperor Hongwu, a brutal despot ruling in the 14th century, showed his more sensitive side by ordering 15,000 sheets of extra-soft, perfumed toilet paper for his imperial household.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

The dream is damned and dreamer too if dreaming's all that dreamers do.

- Rory Miller

Zero Dark Thirty

At the end of the movie I had an eerie sense of relief and disgust. But I wasn't sure if that relief was worth after disgustedly we had to become a demon to kill one.

With a larger than life portrayal of the demons by the media, we tend to forget that a demon is also a normal human albeit vicious and can be killed like any of us if properly strategized. I think killing the demon is no question tough but the real success is in not becoming a demon ourselves in the process of killing one.  It's not a difficult question with a difficult answer. We have a moral obligation not to be a demon and this should not be even debatable, period. This change needs to happen sooner or latter as it is intertwined with the progress of our civilization. After all there isn't single recorded case of any spontaneous genesis of demons. Only criteria for genesis of demons is that circumstances people create to which people like us pretend to be blindsided. These people are not from particular country or religion but rather the whole humanity in general.

Maya's tears in the final scene is a metaphor for the uneasiness we as a county feel fighting these dissonances for years (if not decades).
And the movie was brilliant.

Quote of the Day

The common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

- Douglas Adams

How Much Sleep Is "Enough"?

I am person who needs seven/eight hours of sleep; I have been vindicated by neuroscience, psychology and the whole nine yards. But following lines from Hitchen's last book Mortality has been bothering me for a while now...

"This must be some impressive toxin I’m taking. And a mercy for sleep purposes… but all the sleep-aids and blissful dozes seem somehow a waste of life— there’s plenty of future time in which to be unconscious."

I am not arguing sleep is not important but I think we should sleep only if our body wants to sleep. We shouldn't go all pharmacological if we couldn't sleep and instead just do something productive and/or fun. But on the other hand if we are feeling drowsy then we should make it a habit to simply go to bed (of-course excluding the very obvious times). Bottom line, I think we should stop forcing sleeping habits based on social preachings and start listening to the circadian rhythm. And for others who sleep more than 8 hours a day, should take Hitch's words quite literally.

Wisdom Of The Week

"It is a blessing to get old. It is a blessing to find the time to do the things, to read the books, to listen to the music."

"Live your life, live your life, live your life."

- Maurice Sendak’s Emotional Last Interview via FS

Quote of the Day

I own several guns and train with them regularly. Every month or two, I spend a full day shooting with a highly qualified instructor. This is an expensive and time-consuming habit, but I view it as part of my responsibility as a gun owner. It is true that my work as a writer has added to my security concerns somewhat, but my involvement with guns goes back decades. I have always wanted to be able to protect myself and my family, and I have never had any illusions about how quickly the police can respond when called. I have expressed my views on self-defense elsewhere. Suffice it to say, if a person enters your home for the purpose of harming you, you cannot reasonably expect the police to arrive in time to stop him. This is not the fault of the police—it is a problem of physics.

- Sam Harris

How To Spot A Machiavelli

I have become a big fan of Robert Greene since last week when I finished his reading his book The 33 Strategies of War; now voraciously reading all his other books to make up for the lost time. If you haven't read him yet, check out this interview here and you might help yourself (and in process you might become his fan too).

An example would be you enter a job or a new position somewhere and there is somebody who is suddenly extremely nice to you and you don’t know why. They’re flattering you. They’re praising you. They’re listening to everything you say. They want to know what you’re doing. They’re desire to be a friend is too fast. Usually you’re dealing with someone that’s up to something. This is a tactic they have used in life to get something from you. They’re winning your confidence over. They’re learning about you and they’re going to probably eventually betray you because if someone is genuine with their emotions they generally take time. 

Everybody is a little bit distrustful and needs to know… learn about the other person. These types that are glomming onto you right away they’ve got some kind of emptiness inside on they’re playing some kind of game and you need to be very wary of them. So the flatterers, the overt flatterers are usually hiding some kind of manipulation. I mean there are people who are genuinely like that or who have a need because they’re insecure to do that and then maybe you don’t have to worry about them. I don’t want to promote paranoia in my books. It’s not like wow, everybody is after me. You know that’s not going to be very powerful. A person like Stalin was like that and he was powerful, but it ended up completely destroying him because he couldn’t trust anyone. The idea is to be smart and not be so naïve and there are people around you who are probably playing passive aggressive games and they give off signals. You know I gave you one idea. There are many.

Robert Greene's Yale Speech On Machiavellian intelligence, Self-Reliance & Precisely What Links Napoleon Bonaparte & 50 Cent

I was surprised to hear of all people, Greene talking about Mirror Neurons.


ll of these figures from 50 Cent and Napoleon Bonaparte to Cleopatra to John F. Kennedy, I believe they all share this kind of attitude. So, I am going to talk, hopefully not too long, because I really want to get to your questions, and I encourage you to barrage me with all kinds of difficult questions. I want to talk about three aspects of this attitude. The first is, what I call, Machiavellian realism or the Machiavellian reality. The second is existential reality, what it really means to be a human being. The third is what I call aesthetic realism.
…
So, the first one, as I said, is what I call our Machiavellian reality. There is a concept that lately fascinates me that I have been using for my next book. It is a term called Machiavellian intelligence. And it is something that came about in the sixties and seventies, where various scientists, people studying the brain, they are trying to understand why is it that the human brain is so much larger than anything else we have in nature? How did this happen? Why did our brains develop in this way so rapidly and become so much more complex than any other animal on the planet?
…
There are three types of people in this world in dealing with this social reality. There are, what I call, the deniers, the people who deny this reality exists. They almost want to pretend that we are descended from angels and not from primates. That what I am talking about here is cynical. It doesn’t really exist. It doesn’t happen.

Among these deniers, you will find two types. You will find people who are genuinely disturbed by the politicking aspect of human nature. They don’t want any kind of job in which they have to do that. You will find that they are slowly marginalized. They can be happy that way. They are never going to assume a position of great responsibility because it involves all of this.

The other branch of the deniers are the people that are the passive-aggressors. I would classify this woman who had tortured me as a kind of a classic passive-aggressor. People who consciously don’t want to admit that there is any kind of manipulation involved, but unconsciously are playing all kinds of games. In my books, I often describe the many different kinds, the trickiest kind of person to deal with, the passive-aggressors.

The second type of person besides the deniers are those who love this Machiavellian part of our nature and revel in it and are master manipulators, and con artists, and connivers and are very aggressive. They have no problem handling this part. In fact, they love it. This type of person, which usually you will find one or two in an office or in an environment. They can get pretty far, but eventually they are tripped up in life because they are too Machiavellian. They don’t understand that there is the other side to that whole idea of theory of mind and the mirror neurons, which is empathy and cooperation and seducing people and getting them to work with you. They are too much involved with themselves and their own ego and they love manipulating until they go too far and they have a fall in life. There is a wall. They can never get past it.

The third type is what I am calling the radical realist. It is what I am proposing that you adopt. And it goes as follows...