NPR reports that Positive Psychology has become a very popular course in Harvard. Tal Ben-Shahar, the professor, has the following advice for happiness.
I read a book on Mahabharata over the past couple of weeks: a book (in Kannada) analyzing the various characters that appear in the grand epic. The title of the book is Sri Mahabharata Paatra Prapancha, the author is Prof. K S Narayanacharya.
I started reading it because I had no other book at hand, but after a few pages I was totally engrossed in its content. The author analyzes the words and actions of prominent characters like Bhishma, Dhrutarashtra, Duryodhana, Yudhishtira, and many others, and brings out the personality of each of them. Why did Bhishma keep quiet, despite knowing full well that Kouravas were villainous? Why did Dhrutarashtra turn blind to his son's misadventures? What was the flaw in Yudhishtira? Why did the Pandavas follow adharma in killing some of the great names in the Kourava army -- was it wrong or not on their part?
As I read along, I realised how relevant the characters are even today. The author too quotes present day people. He mentions people who are blind to misdeeds, giving them silent approval -- just like Dhrutarashtra. He mentions Hitler, who did wrong upon wrong and went down killing thousands of innocents, a la Duryodhana. Gandhi and Buddha are like Yudhishtira, full of kindness and benevolence, even to an extreme. Shakuni-like characters abound in politics. True: I see people plotted in Mahabharata all around me. I have seen the good, the bad, the indifferent, the money-minded, the selfish, the generous. They are all there, just as they exist in the epic too.
I will quote here one couplet that I think is very insightful. It is attributed to Duryodhana:
janami dharmam na cha me pravrutthih janamyadharmam na cha me nivrutthih |
kenaapi devena hrudhisthithena yatha niyuktosmi thatha karomi ||I know what is dharma (=righteousness), yet I cannot get myself to follow it! I know what is adharma, yet I cannot retire from it! I am but a puppet in God's hands, who plays as he wills!
I think the first stanza is particularly important. It upholds the innate nature of a person as the determinant of his long-term personality. That is why Duryodhana says: "Although I know what is bad, I cannot stop doing it! Although I know what is good, I cannot do it!" Why? Because it was his nature to do evil, not to do good. To be a good man was against his nature; he would not be comfortable being so. He would feel uneasy, as if he were being pricked by a thousand pins.
Abraham Maslow said: "A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What one can be, one must be." This is the power of nature, a power that almost always wins over others in the long run of life. Maybe this is why a cheat cheats, a murderer kills, a robber steals: it is in their nature. They all know that what they are doing is wrong, yet they cannot help it. They are helpless.
What then is the purpose of dharma, or of nurture? The answer is: attenuation. Dharma may not turn a criminal into a saint, but where he would kill a hundred, he may kill one. The aim of dharma is to keep evil at bay, and to let good prosper. Not all bad people are extreme cases like Duryodhana -- the world has seen but one Hitler. For all of them, and for the rest of humanity, dharma is the hope. Dhaarayati iti dharmah.
This seems to be horror movie material, only unfortunately it's for real.
Africans explained that these unlucky villagers had become hosts the Guinea Worm. The reason victims were walking around with the worm twirled around a stick was that the worm could only be coaxed out a few millimeters per day. Those who tried to pull it out soon died a terrible death: the worm's head came off, and its body died and putrefied inside the victim, who rotted while still alive. Since the Guinea Worm can be up to three feet long, the process of drawing it out of your body could take weeks.
Prince of Parasites: The Guinea Worm
Wikipedia: Dracunculiasis
I had read about hunting mostly through Jim Corbett stories, but a story published in yesterday's New York Times made for compelling and thoughtful reading. How does it feel to lie crouching in the forest, waiting for game? How does it feel when you press the trigger, or pull the dead pig's guts out, or prepare the meal and lay it out on table and be complimented for?
Michael Pollan brings out, very touchingly, philosophical undercurrents of what we all too hastily dismiss as a ruthless and inhuman act.
The fact that you cannot come out of hunting feeling unambiguously good about it is perhaps what should commend the practice to us. You certainly don't come out of it eager to protest your innocence. If I've learned anything about hunting and eating meat, it's that it's even messier than the moralist thinks. Having killed a pig and looked at myself in that picture and now looking forward (if that's the word) to eating that pig, I have to say there is a part of me that envies the moral clarity of the vegetarian, the blamelessness of the tofu eater. Yet part of me pities him too. Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris. Ortega suggests that there is an immorality in failing to look clearly at reality, or in believing the force of human will can somehow overcome it. "The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted."
(from The Modern Hunter Gatherer)
An enigmatic topic, together with eclectic and amusing anecdotes, make this article on optimization of computer programs a very interesting and insightful reading. If you are a techie, give it a shot! :-)
So anyway, this compiler group discovers that they no longer have 32K, or 128K, or 512K. Instead, they now have a 4GB virtual address space. "Hey, let's use a really big hash table!" you can hear them saying, "Like, how about 1 MB table?" So they did. But they also had a very sophisticated compiler technology designed for small and relatively dense hash tables. So the result was that the symbols were fairly uniformly distributed over the 256 4K pages in that 1MB, which meant that every symbol access caused a page fault. The compiler was a dog. When they finally went back to a 64K symbol table, they found that although the algorithm had poorer "absolute" performance from a purely algorithmic viewpoint (taking many more instructions to look up a symbol), because it did not cause nearly as many page faults, it ran over an order of magnitude faster. So third-order effects do matter.
Link: Optimization -- Your Worst Enemy
See also: Other essays by Joseph Newcomer
NPR reports that Positive Psychology has become a very popular course in Harvard. Tal Ben-Shahar, the professor, has the following advice for happiness.
I found it rather amusing that each of these appears, most directly and some worded differently, in my lyfe document. Given that I am just a layman and a young one at that, does it mean that everybody already knows the secrets to happiness? I think yes. The Buddha resides within each of us. We only have to realise it!
Link: Finding Happiness in a Harvard Classroom
Whenever someone is lost in waves of e-mail and information, they're often oblivious to the deepest tragedy of their time. It's not the stress of dealing with so many requests and obligations (as real and challenging as that stress might be). It's that somewhere in the wash of interactions and split attentions is the missed possibility they're looking for: Meaning. Depth of experience. Connection. To quote Pirsig, "The truth knocks on the door and we say, "Go away. I'm looking for the truth". In the race to clean out inboxes and scratch items off the to-do list, we miss chances to find the thing we've created the inbox and to-do list for. Like an American tourist in Europe racing from site to site with barely a moment to take a picture or talk to someone not on their tour bus, we're trapped in a quantity mentality, despite our quality based desires.Link
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Link
An article that traces the history of Microsoft.com made an engrossing reading for me, because my site too has undergone quite a lot of avatars.
Six years [as of 1999] may not sound like a lot of time, but in "Internet time" that's almost half a lifetime. Internet time is sometimes likened to dog years - the first year is like 14, and every subsequent year is roughly equivalent to seven virtual years. By that reckoning, microsoft.com is pushing 50.
By that logic, my site is 42. ;-)
How about a stroll on a glass floor, 4000 feet above ground? That's what The Grand Canyon Skyway will offer when it is opened. That is nearly three times as tall as Sears Towers, and if you fall, you have "almost a full minute" to enjoy before you hit the ground. The project has been delayed because of engineering issues; also, nobody's coming forward to give insurance cover.
The article is interesting, but as usual, it's the comments that are fun. Somebody thought it would be great to have an open-ended toilet up there:
I know the environmentalists would hate it, but then, animals take dumps out in the wild too. And after falling for 4000 feet, the dung would practically be disintegrated, if not by the wind, then upon impact. Just hope nobody's down there.
From: Alarm clock guide
The picture says it all. ;-)
(More info)