Childhood origins of adult resistance to science

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/316/5827/996

innocent man...

Human dignity is an intrinsic, intimate, and absolute sense of honor; the very sense that brought about such noble ideas as human rights and democracy. Listening to Billy Joel’s "Innocent Man":
"Some people live with the fear of a touch
And the anger of having been a fool
They will not listen to anyone
So nobody tells them a lie
…
I am an innocent man"

it reminds me of the bleared boarder between one’s sense of dignity and the fear of violation, betrayal, and humiliation. A friend of mine once said she prefers to be a first hand friend rather than a second hand concubine.
I‘m not motivated to carry on this line of thought! For the very reason that, in practice, one often is better off acting spontaneously and go with the flow! Could it be wrong?

Yet another cycle ...

Today John commented that the there is a generational cycle that starts with a child from a poor lower social class, choosing an engineering career, as a way of making a decent living and moving up the social ladder. Engineering turns out to be- in particular- a suitable choice. since it requires hard work and diligence; characters that a determined person can acquire through discipline.
The next generation generally ends up pursuing a career in medicine, law, or a number of other higher level social sciences.
Psychology, philosophy, and a number of other liberal arts areas dominate the career choice of the descendents of these lawyers and doctors, whose children end up experiencing a modest life style. And so the cycle continues …. Makes me think!

Oscar Wilde on Poetry

A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets make a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise.

Be Cool!

What does it take to be cool?
I'm preparing my presentation for my defense. I'm on a slide titled "Self-adjoint Operators Commuting with the Fourier Transform". A voice comes out of nowhere and tells me "be cool"! How rude! How true!

Life is the peace of contraries,
And Death is the proof of this war.

--Rumi

The age of Comformity

Most Americans want to be cultivated, but only comfortably cultivated. They dabble with the intellectual just enough to avoid being lowbrow and escape being highbrow. Middlebrowism looks like cultivation because it is so clearly superior to vulgarity, but to be satisfied with it is to make the good the enemy of the best. It merely dresses and domisticates the commonplace.

--The age of Comformity, Regnery

disconnected (firstcomet)

I’m all disconnected now
It wasn’t hard, like to know how?

You pull the plug from your gadgets
You leave you calendar unset

Then you put on your anti-noise headset
The rest is assisted by the upcoming sunset

If the music ain't up to your taste then pause it
If that didn’t quite work then just toss it!

I haven’t yet figured out the rest
But, I’ll try to do my best :-)

The Daylily Lullaby (firstcomet):

Sitting in the North-oval, facing towards the Boyd
The bells are ringing, and the sun is drifting away.
I wish everyday was a sunny day,
Every tree was a fruit tree,
Every seed an elixir; panacea of all ailments.

Then I wish I was a Daylily born in a sunny day,
Woken up by the gentle hands of the sun,
Boozed by the most limpid dews before the sun was up!
My day, my only day, is the pollination day;
Dispersing love freely, unknowingly, unceasingly!

But then the bells start to ring again:
Not just once, but twice, thrice, many times
And the nightingales begin to sing their favorite song:
The Daylily Lullaby!

OU--

5/17/2007

A vanished friend ...

Around the corner I have a friend,
In this great city that has no end,

Yet the days go by and weeks rush on,
And before I know it, a year is gone.

And I never see my old friends face,
For life is a swift and terrible race,

He knows I like him just as well,
As in the days when I rang his bell.

And he rang mine but we were younger then,
And now we are busy, tired men.

Tired of playing a foolish game,
Tired of trying to make a name.

"Tomorrow" I say! "I will call on Jim
Just to show that I'm thinking of him."

But tomorrow comes and tomorrow goes,
And distance between us grows and grows.

Around the corner, yet miles away,
"Here's a telegram sir," "Jim died today."

And that's what we get and deserve in the end.
Around the corner, a vanished friend.

-anonymous

Social Clock!

Give me four-five more years and I'll attend.... I think I told you once that I'm at odd with the social clock! You never asked me why ... because …. The way I look at it life is too long and too short. Now, it really becomes matter of attitude; in general, when it is longer it is also slower and when it is shorter it is much faster. Fast is one thing and fast as "it was so fast I did not realize it passed me by" is something else. But, these are all beside the point. Why the social clock anyways? Expectations and so forth … which take us back to our original discussion.
By the way, I realized capitalism can not allow unbounded individualism. It can only tolerate it at small scales. That’s the state of affairs in America.

In progress...

What am I to make of myself? The vicious cycle of me, my thoughs, no thoughts, my life, mylife, Mylife .... Nevertheless, still in progress ...!

The Girl From Ipanema: Antonio Carlos Jobim

Also see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKfl15c-Kh0

Moon River

Moon River, wider than a mile,

I'm crossing you in style some day.
Oh, dream maker, you heart breaker,
Wherever you're going I'm going your way.
Two drifters off to see the world;
There's such a lot of world to see.
We're after the same rainbow's end,
Waiting 'round the bend,
My huckleberry friend,
Moon River and me.

Tired of OCPMS?

Leaders are readers!

It seems like I'm always on page 2 out of 6 of some paper. HEEEEEEELP!

Update: I'm currently on page 43 out of 168 of a dissertation. No help is needed. sknahT!

Belief in reincarnation tied to memory errors - LiveScience - MSNBC.com

Belief in reincarnation tied to memory errors - LiveScience - MSNBC.com

I always found this fascinating that certain individuals have a strong tendency to form false memories of past events. It's easy to label them as liars but over time you come to realize that it is not voluntary!

"I am offering you an RA position in my group at MIT for the Fall and Spring of the coming academic year .... Welcome to Cambridge, MIT and my research group!" --J. W.

> And so continues this less travelled journey of mine!
> In progress ...

... and the inevitability of delays in airports and the inevitability of death on earth are coupled in a single concept called life! And how fragile is Now and how fatigued is Me ...

Great expectations!

When expectations are not met within an anticipated time frame, worries pour in to occupy the vacuum. For most part, anticipations have Poisson distributions which are tilted in the direction of increased worry! Empirically, modes of such anticipatory curves reside increasingly towards the tail of these distributions. This is partially due to our natural predisposition to overestimate the expected timing (mean of Poisson-like anticipatory probability distributions) of occurrence of events that are of grave importance to us.
Engaging in alternative activities while anticipating future events can effectively provide the necessary adjustment to mean. One of such activities is writing!