Quote of the Day

If you just set out to be liked, you will be prepared to compromise on anything at anytime, and would achieve nothing.

- Margaret Thatcher

Cicero's Six “Stoic Paradoxes”

1. Virtue, or moral excellence, is the only good (conventional “goods” such as health, wealth and reputation fundamentally count as nothing with regard to living a good life)
2. Virtue is completely sufficient for Happiness and fulfilment, a man who is virtuous lacks no requirement of the good life
3. All forms of virtue are equal as are all forms of vice (in terms of the benefit or harm they do to the individual himself)
4. Everyone who lacks perfect wisdom is insane (which basically means everyone alive; we’re all essentially mad)
5. Only the wise man is really free and everyone else is enslaved (even when the wise man is imprisoned by a tyrant or sentenced to death like Socrates, he is still freer than everyone else, including his oppressors)
6. Only the wise man is truly rich (even if, like Diogenes the Cynic, he owns nothing that he can’t carry in his knapsack)

- More Here

Quote of the Day

Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century:
Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others;
Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected;
Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it;
Refusing to set aside trivial preferences;
Neglecting development and refinement of the mind;
Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.

- Marcus Tullius Cicero

Energy-Saving LED Lights Win Nobel Physics Prize

Three Japan-born scientists won the Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing energy-saving LED lights, which have upended a multibillion-dollar industry while offering the promise of lighting to people living far from an electricity grid.

Isamu Akasaki, 85, from Meijo and Nagoya Universities, Hiroshi Amano, 54, from Nagoya, and Shuji Nakamura, 60, from the University of California at Santa Barbara, will share the 8 million-krona ($1.1 million) prize for the invention of blue-light emitting diodes, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said today in Stockholm.

The work “triggered a fundamental transformation of lighting technology,” the academy said in a statement. “Incandescent light bulbs lit the 20th century, the 21st century will be lit by LED lamps.”

- More Here

Quote of the Day

Using Evolution to Design AI

8 Simple Rules to Live by From World's Greatest Deep Sea Diver

• If an undertaking was easy, someone else already would have done it.
• If you follow in another’s footsteps, you miss the problems really worth solving.
• Excellence is born of preparation, dedication, focus, and tenacity; compromise on any of these and you become average.
• Every so often, life presents a great moment of decision, an intersection at which a man must decide to stop or go; a person lives with these decisions forever.
• Examine everything; not all is as it seems or as people tell you.
• It is easiest to live with a decision if it is based on an earnest sense of right and wrong.
• The guy who gets killed is often the guy who got nervous. The guy who doesn’t care anymore, who has said, “I’m already dead—the fact that I live or die is irrelevant and the only thing that matters is the accounting I give of myself,” is the most formidable force in the world.
• The worst possible decision is to give up.
• These are literally battle hardened principles. They are rules for how to live not from some university professor but from someone who saw what life truly is—both good and bad, violent and peaceful, beautiful and terrifying.

- More Here, an adaptation from the classic book Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II by Robert Kurson

Quote of the Day

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.

- Mark Twain

Quote of the Day

As people age, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline—the illusion of the good old days.

- Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

Bear Attack & What Worries Me

Max and I spend lot of time hiking in the woods and ever since the NJ Bear attack people have started over reacting.

What worries most in life is nothing more than:

Human beings talking politely in a "civilized" setting.