I have been reading Tuesdays With Morrie (Mitch Albom), an inspirational book. Morrie is Albom's professor at university who contracts a terminal illness. In his dying days, he spends time with Mitch every Tuesday, discussing life and various other lofty matters.
Books like these, I have found, make little sense when everything is okay in our lives. But when you are feeling battered and sunken and every day becomes a chore, reading a chapter or two can help so much that is hard to believe its power. Here is an excerpt I liked a lot.
"All this emphasis in youth—I don't buy it," [Morrie] said. "Listen, I know what a misery being young can be, so don't tell me it's so great. All these kids who came to me with their struggles, their strife, their feeling of inadequacy, their sense that life was miserable, so bad they wanted to kill themselves ...
"And in addition to all the miseries, the young are not wise. They have very little understanding about life. Who wants to live every day when you don't know what's going on? When people are manipulating you, telling you to buy this perfume and you'll be beautiful, or this pair of jeans and you'll be sexy—and you believe them! It's such nonsense."
Weren't you ever afraid to go old, I asked.
"Mitch, I embrace aging."
Embrace it?
"It's very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed twenty-two, you'd always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It's growth. It's more than the negative that you're going to die, it's also the positive that you understand you're going to die, and that you live a better life because of it."
Yes, I said, but if aging were so valuable, why do people always say, "Oh, if I were young again." You never hear people say, "I wish I were sixty-five."
He smiled. "You know what that reflects? Unsatisfied lives. Unfulfilled lives. Lives that haven't found meaning. Because if you've found meaning in your life, you don't want to go back. You want to go forward. You want to see more, do more. You can't wait until sixty-five.
"Listen. You should know something. All younger people should know something. If you're always battling against getting older, you're always going to be unhappy, because it will happen anyhow."
(--Mitch Albom, Tuesdays With Morrie, 1997)
"Leon Wright and his wife took home a 14.75kg lump of ambergris, found in the innards of sperm whales and used in perfumes after it has been vomited up.
"... Worth up to $20 a gram, Mr Wright's find on a South Australian beach could net his family US$295,000 (£165,300)."
Slashdot is discussing a research study of brain activity in partisan people. Apparently, their brain shuts itself out of contradictory data, and they will not "see" it even if it exists.
Related: Confirmation bias
I burst out in laughter after reading this. Brilliant anticlimax!
For Richard, figuring out these problems was a kind of a game. He always started by asking very basic questions like, "What is the simplest example?" or "How can you tell if the answer is right?" He asked questions until he reduced the problem to some essential puzzle that he thought he would be able to solve. Then he would set to work, scribbling on a pad of paper and staring at the results. While he was in the middle of this kind of puzzle solving he was impossible to interrupt. "Don't bug me. I'm busy," he would say without even looking up. Eventually he would either decide the problem was too hard (in which case he lost interest), or he would find a solution (in which case he spent the next day or two explaining it to anyone who listened). In this way he worked on problems in database searches, geophysical modeling, protein folding, analyzing images, and reading insurance forms.Link: Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine
REUTERS: Police in Kentucky are looking for a customer who succeeded in paying for a $2 order at a fast-food restaurant with a phony $200 bill like the one passed in Pennsylvania. The back of the bill features lawn signs saying things such as "We like broccoli."
If you had a choice between two toilets, the Open GNUFeces gtkSepticPort, or a CrapThrasher 3000, is there any question which you would select? Calling a graphics program The GIMP (yeah, I know it's meant to be a snarky acronym; newsflash: after the age of 16, nobody cares.) is like naming your son Susan.
--Comment in Slashdot on Linux's counter-intuitive program names
What matters to you this holiday season?
"If you were asked to describe the ideal holiday season, what would you say? Perhaps you would include the company of loved ones, good food, fun and relaxation... maybe an inch or two of snow. Aiming higher in our holiday daydreams, we might even envision a feeling of tranquility and peace blanketing our homes, our community, the wide world.
"Whatever you imagined, contrast it now with the typical mid-December scene at the mall, where countless holiday shoppers weave between traffic, oscillating between oppressed weariness and panic, as they search for non-existent parking spaces and that perfect gift that says "I had no earthly idea what to get you, but chose this particular item because, um, it is shiny and appears to cost what I could reasonably be expected to spend."
"Not so lofty, is it? It seems simple, but the holidays, meant to be a time of peace, reflection, and celebration, too often exhaust rather than uplift us. If you sometimes feel trapped by the shopping, spending, crass displays, and frenzied preparations, you aren't alone. Our national surveys consistently show that Americans feel put upon by the commercialization of the season and want more of what matters... not just more stuff."
Visit New American Dream if you are interested.
"Dr Schneider said: 'It looks like an Ernst Wilhelm Nay. He was famous for using such blotches of colour.'
"But in reality, the painting was made by female chimpanzee Banghi, from Halle Zoo."