Jonny Robinson on Seeking vs. Knowledge

A simple but yet wise thoughts from Jonny Robinson:

Would you rather have a fish or know how to fish? Again, we need some more information. If having the fish is the result of knowing how to fish, then once more the two halves of the disjunction are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and this combination is the ideal. But, if the having is the result of waiting around for someone to give you a fish, it would be better to know how to do it yourself. For where the waiting agent hopes for luck or charity, the agent who knows how to fish can return to the river each morning and each evening, throwing her line into the water over and over until she is satisfied with the catch.

And so it is with knowledge. Yes, it’s better to know, but only where this implies an accompanying attitude. If, instead, the possession of knowledge relies primarily upon the sporadic pillars of luck or privilege (as it so often does), one’s position is uncertain and in danger of an unfounded pride (not to mention pride’s own concomitant complications). Split into two discrete categories, then, we should prefer seeking to knowing. As with the agent who knows how to fish, the one who seeks knowledge can go out into the world, sometimes failing and sometimes succeeding, but in any case able to continue until she is satisfied with her catch, a knowledge attained. And then, the next day, she might return to the river and do it all again.

A person will eventually come up against the world, logically, morally, socially, even physically. Some collisions will be barely noticeable, others will be catastrophic. The consistent posture of seeking the truth gives us the best shot at seeing clearly, and that is what we should praise and value.

Good Bye Freeman Dyson

Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God’s gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences. 

- Freeman Dyson

You were the last man standing from the classic physicists. Thank you sir for all the wisdom and discoveries. We will all prerish but you will be remembered for centuries to come.

In his memory, let's cherish and not abuse technology.

Best Movie Scenes - Was It Worth It?

Sometime when I was around 31/32 years old, I fell in love in Max. I don't remember the exact moment or day but all I know is something unique happened to me that changed my mind and body.

I also knew consiciously what I was getting into. I was building a solid foundation for life long pain of losing him someday and living without him for longer than living with him. I broke one of the fundamental priciples of stoicism:

Stoic love is moderated by a sense of future loss, by the potential for betrayal, for the reality that our own feelings might change over time as well. Having accepted these basic condition, the irrationality of these powerful, biological feelings we have becomes a little more rational—and life a little more manageable.

As a matter of fact, I reveresed that princinple. Mindful of future loss, I loved him more and my time had became synonymous with our time together.

There is a beautiful lyrics from a 1960's Hindi song which I think is true for my relationship with Max.

It is a strange story, Where it starts and where it stops, What destinations are these, Niether they nor we could understand it.

[---] 

You have become so close to someone that you went far away from everyone else. 

The question naturally comes after decade of breaking stoic pricinples, becoming far from everone else and now having to continue life without Max - Was it worth it?

I think, I already answered that question here:

I had the pleasure of immense "Moral Luck" to spend 13 years with Max. I am eternally grateful for that time. I would gladly pick any day of those 13 years to be with him in an eternal Ground Hog Day.

In the movie City of Angles, Nicholas Cage's character sums up nicely the answer to that stupid question -Was it worth it?:

I would rather have had one breath of her hair, one kiss from her mouth, one touch of her hand, than eternity without it.

P:S:
One of the most suprising things I learned in the recent years was how much Tim Ferris's changed since his dog Molly came into his life. Tim is kind of type A personality and highly competitive guy; at cursory social level comparison - Tim and I are very different personalities (with blots of depression and stocism being the commonality between us).

Here's is Ryan Holiday asking him that as the very first question and another episode where he talks about how life could be after Molly. A reader comment's:

Hi Tim, I’ve enjoyed and leared much from your books and podcasts for three years. I’ve also enjoyed many books you recommended in your podcasts. Well, your comments about your dog Molly brought tears to my eyes. I’ve had three yellow labs over the span of 20 years. The third lab passed away only a month ago. I would give up almost everything I own to have them back with me again. 

East to Eden - History of Apple

In the foothills and valleys of the Tien Shan range, the new apple found itself in a genuine paradise. Bears, deer and wild pigs lived in the spreading woodlands, eating the wild fruit in autumn and selecting the sweeter, juicier apples while bees laboured in the pollination department of the same evolutionary project. The bears, living in the abundant caves of the Tien Shan, were avid fruit-eaters, and pips could pass through their guts unharmed to germinate in the dung. As Juniper pointed out, the baseball-glove claws of bears are perfectly suited to the grasping of apples. He had seen how enthusiastically they will vandalize a tree bearing a favourite sweet apple, dragging off whole branches in a kind of rough pruning. Out on the steppe, huge herds of wild horses and donkeys also browsed on the ripe apples and helped them spread westwards and south along the range towards what is now Almaty. Like the bears, they kept on selecting the larger, juicier, sweeter apples, so that as it spread west, the apple gradually became larger. At the same time this evolutionary pressure changed it from a ‘bird’ fruit with edible seeds to a ‘mammal’ fruit with poisonous seeds. The bitter taste of apple pips is cyanide, and the smooth, hard, teardrop seed coat evolved as the perfect streamlined vehicle to pass intact through an animal’s guts.

Juniper believed that by the time the ‘new’ apple had populated the northern slopes of the eastern Tien Shan and reached near Almaty, it had evolved into something like its present size and culinary appeal. Later, as human populations began to travel back and forth along the old animal migration routes between east and west, they helped to spread the new fruit. People call these routes ‘The Silk Roads’, but they were in use five or six thousand years before the discovery of silk, which lent its name to the route only during the period from ad 0 to 400. In the early days, said Juniper, camels would have been the means of transport along the routes, but, although they are as fond of apples as any other herbivore, their digestive system is so efficient that not even apple pips will survive it. Then, around 7,000 years ago, something momentous happened on the plains of Kazakhstan. The horse was domesticated, and soon started to travel the trading routes. The more direct northern trade routes led from Shanghai and Xian via Urumchi in north-west China to Almaty, Tashkent and Bokhara, then through Anatolia all the way to the Mediterranean coast. During winter the Tien Shan Mountains were impassable in the snow, so traders took the long way round to the south. But when the snows melted in July, the caravans turned north and until the first snows in November travelled through the Ili Valley and the Tien Shan range via Almaty, passing through fruit forests on the way.

- More here from Late Roger Deakin with a brilliant introduction and postscript by Robert Macfarlane.

The food we eat is divine and it is god. But yet most don't respect and worse waste so much.

There is a wise story in Mahabratha on wasting food; Lord Krishna would fill his hunger with a single grain of rice which was going waste.

I always carry these beautiful lines from Wendell Berry's essay "Pleasures of Eating" in my wallet as a constant reminder:

Eating with the fullest pleasure — pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance — is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend. 

Exposome - Tracking A Lifetime Of Exposures To Better Understand Disease

“We think about all health and illness as a combination of genes and the environment, and now it really is time to fill out the environment side of that equation,” says Julia Brody, a toxicologist affiliated with Brown University and the leader of the Silent Spring Institute, which studies environmental links to breast cancer. “We’ve made an enormous investment in understanding the genome and almost nothing comparatively to focus on the exposome.”

Impossible or not, researchers are forging ahead, breaking off bits and pieces of a lifetime’s exposure to put under the microscope. Still, discussions continue about how to make real progress and how to collect and examine information in a meaningful way.

Some scientists are advocating for more air monitors in cities and homes. Others are developing wearable monitors that soak up pieces of the environment as people move through their day. Some are trying to match tracking data from cell phones to satellite indicators of air quality, helping to assess individual exposures based on a person’s locale and movements. Still other researchers are looking inside the body, hoping to identify chemical footprints that distinct exposures may have left behind.

[---]

It was a concern for unexplained diseases that led cancer researcher Christopher Wild to first come up with the term “exposome” in 2005. Wild had closely followed the race to sequence the human genome, which had successfully concluded two years prior, and worried that, in its eagerness to advance genetics, the world had forgotten the importance of environmental exposures in health. It’s a sentiment that has only grown stronger in recent years as genetics has failed to yield clear links to many cancers and other diseases. A recent study looked at the prevalence of 28 chronic conditions in twins and found that genetics explained less than 20 percent of the risk in most of the illnesses examined. Even in asthma — which ranked highest in terms of genetic contribution — genetics explained less than 50 percent of the risk. For leukemia — on the other end of the rankings — genetics explained only 3 percent.

[---]

Simply getting a handle on how many chemicals are out there is harder than it sounds. A recent study attempted this in 100 consumer products. Toothpaste contained 85 chemicals, while one plastic children’s toy contained about 300. Across all the products, the study detected 4,270 unique chemical signatures and tentatively identified 1,602 of those. But only 30 percent of those 1,602 chemicals could be matched to public lists of known ingredients in consumer products or compounds of toxicological interest.

“There’s got to be tens of millions — hundreds of millions, if not more,” says Jon Sobus, an environmental health scientist at the US Environmental Protection Agency and coauthor on the consumer products study. “Where does the number of chemicals end?”

- More Here

A Single-Dose HPV Vaccine Would Have A Big Impact On Cancer Prevention

Up to half of cancers are preventable — they never have to occur. While cancer typically afflicts older individuals, most of cancer’s instigators plant their seeds during childhood. That means decisive action early in life can prevent cancer-related suffering and death for countless individuals as adults.

This fact, combined with emerging information about a preventive strategy against the human papillomavirus (HPV), creates a potential game changer in the fight against cancer. HPV, the most common sexually transmitted infection, can cause several cancers: cervical cancer in women, penile cancer in men, as well as some throat, anal, and other cancers. In the U.S., the number of cancer cases linked to HPV have soared by nearly 45% over the past 15 years.

In 2006, the FDA approved a safe and effective HPV vaccine that, when administered between the ages of 11 and 26, can prevent almost 90% of HPV-related cancers. (The vaccine produces the strongest immune response in 11- and 12-year-olds, before they are exposed to the virus). The vaccine currently requires two doses, with the second given six to 12 months after the first. Unvaccinated men and women ages 27 to 45 can also get the HPV vaccine and should consult with their physician about the benefits given their individual health needs.

[---]

Thanks to Nobel Prize-winning science, we know that millions of cancers — up to 15% of all new cancer cases each year — can be prevented from ever starting by eliminating infectious agents responsible for them. HPV alone, which affects nearly all adults in their lifetimes, causes one-third of these preventable cancers.

The body’s immune system usually clears out an HPV infection. But the virus persists in some people, causing HPV-related cancers in more than 600,000 men and women worldwide each year, the majority of them (85%) in low- and middle-income countries where cancer treatment is suboptimal or nonexistent. In these low-resource settings, cancer prevention may be the best option to save lives.

- More Here

Milk Consumption During Teenage Years and Risk of Hip Fractures in Older Adults

Abstract

Importance  Milk consumption during adolescence is recommended to promote peak bone mass and thereby reduce fracture risk in later life. However, its role in hip fracture prevention is not established and high consumption may adversely influence risk by increasing height.

Objectives  To determine whether milk consumption during teenage years influences risk of hip fracture in older adults and to investigate the role of attained height in this association.

Design, Setting, and Participants  Prospective cohort study over 22 years of follow-up in more than 96 000 white postmenopausal women from the Nurses’ Health Study and men aged 50 years and older from the Health Professionals Follow-up Study in the United States.

Exposures  Frequency of consumption of milk and other foods during ages 13 to 18 years and attained height were reported at baseline. Current diet, weight, smoking, physical activity, medication use, and other risk factors for hip fractures were reported on biennial questionnaires.

Main Outcomes and Measures  Cox proportional hazards models were used to calculate relative risks (RRs) of first incidence of hip fracture from low-trauma events per glass (8 fl oz or 240 mL) of milk consumed per day during teenage years.

Results  During follow-up, 1226 hip fractures were identified in women and 490 in men. After controlling for known risk factors and current milk consumption, each additional glass of milk per day during teenage years was associated with a significant 9% higher risk of hip fracture in men (RR = 1.09; 95% CI, 1.01-1.17). The association was attenuated when height was added to the model (RR = 1.06; 95% CI, 0.98-1.14). Teenage milk consumption was not associated with hip fractures in women (RR = 1.00 per glass per day; 95% CI, 0.95-1.05).

- Full paper here 

The point is to reduce (or even stop) milk intake. It's crazy that people drink so much milk every day with an illusion of calcium causing so many sufferings to dairy cows. 

Cruelty Persists Since We Fear The Idea Of Personal Change

I think we’ve become very disconnected from the natural world. Many of us are guilty of an egocentric world view, and we believe that we’re the centre of the universe. We go into the natural world and we plunder it for its resources. We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow and steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakeable. Then we take her milk that’s intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal.

We fear the idea of personal change, because we think we need to sacrifice something; to give something up. But human beings at our best are so creative and inventive, and we can create, develop and implement systems of change that are beneficial to all sentient beings and the environment.

- That was Joaquin Phoenix's Oscar acceptance speech. Thank you, sir.

So here you go. Most people I know are non-religious and they think they are the center of the universe. And sponsor this cruelty every day.

Disconnected is not the correct word. We are disconnected from cancer but we all care about finding a cure for it. We are disconnected from the stock market but we all care about making money through it one way or another.  The correct word is - most people don't care. I think it is important to use the correct words and phrases.

So convenient a thing to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.

- Benjamin Franklin

For once in life, we need to heed to Gladwell's thoughtful proposal to "embrace the uncomfortable luxury of changing one's mind."

Swimming Spot

Neo visited Max's favorite swimming plot today - A perfect spring day before spring.
This is the first time, I went there without Max for over 13 years.

There's something about a place you've been with someone you love. It takes on a meaning in your mind. It becomes more than a place. It becomes a distillation of what you felt for each other. The moments you spend in a place with someone... they become part of its bricks and mortar. Part of its soul.”

― Cassandra Clare, Lord of Shadows 

The Warning Signs - Intimations of an Ending

Barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly will commit every conceivable atrocity. The danger does not come merely from habitual hooligans; we are all potential recruits for anarchy. Unremitting effort is needed to keep men living together at peace; there is only a margin of error left over for experiment however beneficent. Once the prisons of the mind have been opened, the orgy is on. … The work of preserving society is sometimes onerous, sometimes almost effortless. The more elaborate the society, the more vulnerable it is to attack, and the more complete its collapse in case of defeat. At a time like the present it is notably precarious. If it falls, we shall see not merely the dissolution of a few joint-stock corporations, but of the spiritual and material achievements of our history. 

- Robbery Under Law, Evelyn Waugh

There is something unique and beyond imagination going on here... they have unleashed the worse demons of our nature. They have caught the tiger by the tail and I think, it's too late to revert anything back. It is going to be bad, really bad for the world unless... lessons of history and morality are unleashed to demolish these demons. It might sound impossible but it can happen easily. Until then this brutality continues while the mobs of "good" and "decent" humans celebrate this fanatism.

If decent people I grew up with and some, who even raised me as a kid can not only elect and tolerate a monster but celebrate... well as usual, why I am not surprised by this human capacity for barbarism and idiocy? What people don't reflect on is that every time barbarism raises, a new "normal" becomes the norm. The next generation of barbarism naturally tries to "up" this new norm and this becomes a vicious cycle. I am not clairvoyant but any moron could understand this even if they read and understand little into human history.

I have great respect for Arundhati Roy; she has the balls that I never had. For over 25 years she has dedicated her life to something remarkable. People like her is what makes me say the change can happen easily. Please read her new piece and reflect on what your celebrating, Intimations of an Ending: The rise and rise of the Hindu Nation:

In India today, a shadow world is creeping up on us in broad daylight. It is becoming more and more difficult to communicate the scale of the crisis even to ourselves—its size and changing shape, its depth and diversity. An accurate description runs the risk of sounding like hyperbole. And so, for the sake of credibility and good manners, we groom the creature that has sunk its teeth into us—we comb out its hair and wipe its dripping jaw to make it more personable in polite company. India isn’t by any means the worst, or most dangerous, place in the world, at least not yet, but perhaps the divergence between what it could have been and what it has become makes it the most tragic.

[---]

Not all the roaring of the sixty thousand in the Houston stadium could mask the deafening silence from Kashmir. That day, 22 September, marked the forty-eighth day of curfew and communication blockade in the valley.

Once again, Modi has managed to unleash his unique brand of cruelty on a scale unheard of in modern times. And, once again, it has endeared him further to his loyal public. When the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Bill was passed in India’s parliament on 6 August, there were celebrations across the political spectrum. Sweets were distributed in offices, and there was dancing in the streets. A conquest—a colonial annexation, another triumph for the Hindu Nation—was being celebrated. Once again, the conquerors’ eyes fell on the two primaeval trophies of conquest—women and land. Statements by senior BJP politicians, and patriotic pop videos that notched up millions of views, legitimised this indecency. Google Trends showed a surge in searches for the phrases “marry a Kashmiri girl” and “buy land in Kashmir.”

It was not all limited to loutish searches on Google. Within weeks of the siege, the Forest Advisory Committee cleared 125 projects that involve the diversion of forest land for other uses.

[---]

In December 2014, a two-judge bench of the Justices Gogoi and Rohinton Fali Nariman ordered that an updated list of the NRC be produced before the Supreme Court within a year. Nobody had any clue about what could or would be done to the five million “infiltrators” that it was hoped would be detected. There was no question of them being deported to Bangladesh. Could that many people be locked up in detention camps? For how long? Would they be stripped of citizenship? And was India’s highest constitutional court going to oversee and micromanage a colossal bureaucratic exercise involving more than thirty million people, nearly fifty-two thousand bureaucrats and a massive outlay of funds?

In the less fertile chars that I visited early last month, the poverty washes over you like the dark, silt-rich waters of the Brahmaputra. The only signs of modernity were the bright plastic bags containing documents which their owners—who quickly gather around visiting strangers—cannot read but kept looking at anxiously, as though trying to decrypt the faded shapes on the pages and work out whether they would save them and their children from the massive new detention camp they had heard is being constructed deep in the forests of Goalpara. Imagine a whole population of millions of people like this, debilitated, rigid with fear and worry about their documentation. It’s not a military occupation, but it’s an occupation by documentation. These documents are peoples’ most prized possessions, cared for more lovingly than any child or parent. They have survived floods and storms and every kind of emergency. Grizzled, sun-baked farmers, men and women, scholars of the land and the many moods of the river, use English words like “legacy document,” “link paper,” “certified copy,” “re-verification,” “reference case,” “D-voter,” “declared foreigner,” “voter list,” “refugee certificate”—as though they were words in their own language. They are. The NRC has spawned a vocabulary of its own. The saddest phrase in it is “genuine citizen.”

[---]

How do you translate this in modern terms if not as the National Register of Citizens coupled with the Citizenship Amendment Bill? This is the RSS’s version of Germany’s 1935 Nuremberg Laws, by which German citizens were only those who had been granted citizenship papers—legacy papers—by the government of the Third Reich. The amendment against Muslims is the first such amendment. Others will no doubt follow, against Christians, Dalits, Communists—all enemies of the RSS.

The Foreigners Tribunals and detention centres that have already started springing up across India may not, at the moment, be intended to accommodate hundreds of millions of Muslims. But they are meant to remind us that India’s Muslims truly belong there, unless they can produce legacy papers. Because only Hindus are considered India’s real aboriginals, who don’t need those papers. Even the four-century-old Babri Masjid didn’t have the right legacy papers. What chance would a poor farmer or a street vendor have?

This is the wickedness that the sixty thousand people in the Houston stadium were cheering. This is what the president of the United States linked hands with Modi to support. It’s what the Israelis want to partner with, the Germans want to trade with, the French want to sell fighter jets to and the Saudis want to fund.

We can only hope that, someday soon, the streets in India will throng with people who realise that unless they make their move, the end is close.

If that doesn’t happen, consider these words to be intimations of an ending from one who lived through these times.