Peace...............................

"The very word 'success' has become contaminated by our ideas of someone extraordinary, very rich, etc., and that's really unhelpful. . . . Ultimately, to be properly successful is to be at peace as well."

-Alain de Botton, as quoted here

Sometimes............................

2.  If you have the power to make someone happier today, do it.  The world needs more of that.

5.  Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, and honest compliment, or the smallest act of love—all of which have the potential to turn a life around.

13.  The single greatest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.  Too often we don't listen to understand, we listen to reply.  Bring awareness to this.  And listen for what's truly behind the words.

15.  Sometimes it is better to be kind than to be right.

-Marc & Angel Chernoff, from their chapter 20 Morning Mantras to Start the Day Loving People (instead of Judging or Ignoring Them) in 1000+ Little Things Happy Successful People Do Differently

Eurocentric..................................

     Although I try to maintain a global perspective throughout this book, many readers will find its focus overly Eurocentric.  Were not the Chinese—the inventors of paper, the printing press, and gunpowder—the great innovative engineers of the premodern world?  Were not the early Arab empires oases of learning and culture during a time when Europe was mired in the Dark Ages?  did not mathematicians in India devise a numerical system, incorporating the concept of zero, far more advanced that the Greco-Roman letter based system?  To all these questions, the answer is a resounding yes.  Yet not one of these societies was able to turn the modern Western trick of continuously and permanently raising its citizens' standard of living.  Furthermore, the four factors responsible for modern wealth—property rights, borne on the common law, scientific rationalism, advanced capital markets, and the great advances in transportation and communication—were largely European in origin.  Although prosperity has become a global phenomenon, there is no escaping the fact that its nursery lay in the area between Glasgow and Genoa.

-William J. Bernstein, The Birth Of Plenty:  How The Prosperity Of The Modern World Was Created

Curious................................

Later in life, remembrances of his restrictive educational experience continually reminded Bucky of just how debilitating our educational system can be for curious young minds.
     He felt that, like almost all human organizations, including government, industries, and religions, the primary function of the educational system is self-perpetuation and acquisition of fame, fortune, and power for the people who control it.  Rather than contributing to the wisdom and well-being of everyone, he believed organizations attempt to indoctrinate individuals into accepting traditional dogma, restrict the perspective of members, and influence individuals to believe rather than think for themselves.

-Lloyd Steven Sieden, Buckminster Fuller's Universe:  His Life And Work

irreducibly wild...........................

. . . Job wants justice;  God offers only awe.
     But as we read in the Book of Proverbs, the beginning of wisdom is awe.  God is going to bring Job wisdom, and to do so God has to strip Job of his anthropocentric view of reality.  God cannot be reduced to human ideas of right and wrong, just and unjust.  Creation does not run in harmony with human notions of law and order.  Creation is irreducibly wild . . . chaotic and unformed.  There is no conquering the chaos of life.  There is no avoiding the terror of merely being alive.  There is only learning how to make meaning in the madness. . . .

-Rabbi Rami Shapiro, from this essay included in Roger Walsh's The World's Greatest Wisdom:  Timeless Teachings from Religions and Philosophies

enlargeable photo and description here

I haven't been blogging....................

........................much here of late, mostly because I've stayed away from the computer.  It seems like a logical conclusion that paying to much attention to what passes for news these days does not enhance one's mental well-being.   However, it is a given that checking in regularly with these fine people does enhance one's mental well-being.   Stuff like this for instance:

 I'm a glutton for punishment but I would love to watch a Jeopardy! showdown between CNN's Jim Acosta and Wolf Blitzer. I'd put the combined over/under for correct answers for the entire show at 5. I'd also bet that neither would qualify for Final Jeopardy because they would both be well into negative numbers...

Like Danny used to say, "he cracks my head up."

a great and strange reputation...............

     So science has, it seems, been so successful that it has inevitably earned a great and strange reputation.  If it has never yet been defeated, presumably it is all-powerful.  And since science is, after all, the work of scientists—for one seldom encounters disembodied science—then presumable these scientists are both so clever and so wise that they can do anything.  Perhaps we should turn the world over to this superbreed.  Perhaps they could, if properly supported, really liberated, and put in charge—perhaps they could solve all problems of human relations, of economic stability, of international peace, and of the good life.  Perhaps they should design not only the churches, but the creeds also.  Perhaps the best music and the loveliest poetry will, in a short time, come out of a machine.
     The sad fact is that some scientists themselves appear to believe precisely this.  And this arrogant attitude quite naturally irritates, or even angers, the social scientists, the humanists, the moralists, and the creative artists.  The classic protest is surely that of Keats:

               Do not all charms fly
               At the mere touch of cold philosophy?  
               There was an awful rainbow once in Heaven:
               We know her woof, her textures; she is given
               In the dull catalogue of common things.
               Philosophy will clip and Angel's wings.

-Warren Weaver, Science and Imagination, 1967

Asking history to repeat itself............

Initial responses are inevitably confused. But trial-and-error learning happens and we do get better. The U.S. was horribly unprepared going into WWI and WWII but, once on track, American productivity stunned enemies as well as friends.

-Peter Gordon, from this list of ten things we are re-learning

As long as Scott................

................................keeps introducing (some of) us to new music, the future will be normal enough for me.  Stay healthy my friend.

Freed.............................

"Refusal to forgive leads to a self-imposed imprisonment.  It's time we freed ourselves by letting old pain dissipate into the darkness, so that new opportunities can take us to greater heights of joy."

-Marc & Angel Chernoff,  1000+ Little Things Happy Successful People Do Differently

Worth their salt......................

     Today, thousands of years of coveting, fighting over, hoarding, taxing, and searching for salt appear picturesque and slightly foolish.  The seventeenth-century British leaders who spoke with urgency about the dangerous national dependence on French sea salt seem somehow more comic than contemporary leaders concerned with a dependence of foreign oil.  In every age, people are certain that only the things they have deemed valuable have true value.
     The search for love and the search for wealth are always the two best stories.  But while a love story is timeless, the story of a quest for wealth, given enough time, will always seem like the vain pursuit of a mirage.

-Mark Kurlansky,  Salt:  A World History

On education...........................

I wrote two books on education and spent a lot of time thinking about it but, as anyone might have expected, I was better at talking about it than at doing.  I am not a believer in complete freedom during childhood.  I think children need a fixed routine, though there should be days when it is not carried out.  I think also that, if a person when adult is to be able to fit into a society, he must learn while still young that he is not the center of the universe and that his wishes are often not the most important factor in a situation.

-Bertrand Russell, Portraits From Memory and Other Essays

On cares..............................

There are many things you should care about

Like sick animals, dying trees, and saving the bees.

What other people think of you

is not one of these things.

-Courtney Peppernell, Pillow Thoughts III:  Mending the Mind

An interesting book.................

As we all know, predictions are difficult, especially about the future.  Our fearless authors are undaunted by the task.  Essentially, they explore the intersection of the exponential growth of a wide swath of technologies and the convergence of those various technologies in unpredictable ways.   The future they envision sounds amazing—and cheap, as technological advances solve one problem after another.   The one thing they seemed to ignore is human nature and our love of mischief (and control).   Well, they did devote three whole paragraphs to the subject before dismissing it.  The authors note:

. . . we're going to experience a hundred years of technological progress over the next ten years.  In fact, many of the most powerful technologies we'll have at our disposal—artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, biotechnology—are only starting to come online.  So yes, the threats we seem to face might seem dire, but the solutions we already possess will only continue to increase in power.

We will see.

Fun with math.........................

more fun here

Steven Pressfield.................

..............takes a stab an defining an all important ethic:

It’s the ability to keep on working with undiminished focus and effort even when we believe (or at least strongly suspect) that there will be no external reward or recognition at the finish.

            In other words, the act of performing a function for its own sake entirely.

thanks Chris

Horrorscope........................?

Can't even pretend that this is a bad sign.........................

via

The times, well they have changed..........

"The Congress is ordinarily courteous and patient about listening to testimony, but gives not evidence of being willing to delegate any of its authority."

-Warren Weaver, Science and Imagination:  Selected Papers, circa 1959

Gone, but not forgotten.......................

"We've upped our standards.  Up yours."

 "To get to the meat of the matter, I will come right to the point, and take note of the fact that the heart of the issue in the final analysis escapes me."

-One of Pat Paulsen's campaign slogans, followed by one on his stock answers to most questions.

the good life.............................?

     True leisure, however, is neither a luxury nor a vice.  It is as vital to our brains as Vitamin C is to our bodies.   There's not a person on earth who on their deathbed thinks, "Had I only put a few more hours at the office or sat in front of the tube some more."  Sure, swimming in a sea of spare time will not be easy.  A twenty-first century education should prepare people not only for joining the workforce, but also (and more importantly) for life.  "Since men will not be tired in their spare time," the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in 1932, "they will not demand only such amusements as are passive and vapid."
      We can handle the good life, if only we take the time.

-Rutger Bregman, Utopia For Realists:  How We Can Build the Ideal World