Harvard’s masters of the apocalypse – Times Online

• Harvard’s masters of the apocalypse – Times Online

  tags: no_tag

  • “We all failed to understand how much [the financial system] had changed in the past 15 years or so, and how fragile it might be because of increased leverage, decreased transparency and decreased liquidity: three of the crucial things in the world of financial markets,” he said.

    “We all failed to understand how that fragility could evidence itself in a frozen short-term credit system, something that hadn’t really happened since 1907. We also probably overestimated the ability of the political process to deal with the realities of what could happen if real trouble developed.

  • You can draw up a list of the greatest entrepreneurs of recent history, from Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google and Bill Gates of Microsoft, to Michael Dell, Richard Branson, Lak-shmi Mittal – and there’s not an MBA between them.
  • about a third of students were inclined to define right and wrong simply in terms of what everyone else was doing.’

          

It is better to steal than to copy a design

“Copying someone else’s work will only give yours a chance to become as good as the one you’re copying — and that’s the best case scenario. A copy will usually never be as good as the original because it always remains one step behind. Even worse, at the hands of a novice designer a copy could end up looking like a cheap imitation, lacking the finesse and flair of the original.

No — don’t copy that design. Steal it.

Wait… let me elaborate.

When you look at an inspirational design you should be inspired. Take your time to examine its aesthetic and construction in detail — look over all the nuances and intricacies of its structure. See how the creator did this and that — extract the essence of what makes this work great.

To steal a design you must collect all the pieces of the puzzle and figure out how it all works as a whole — why did the artist use this color, why these lines, why this typeface?

Stealing design is an intellectual activity — you must be able to digest and absorb the essence of an inspirational design. Stealing gives you the real gold — it gives you the knowledge to create the work in question. Expand your arsenal of design techniques through learning instead of copying.

http://www.usabilitypost.com/2008/08/21/dont-copy-a-design-steal-it

Art-the way I define it

How do I define art ?

When the past moments happened they were actually the present, which was just a boring succession of events and nothing seemed to actually happen.Now ,there is a haze which accompanies my past and the past moments are wonderful and inviting ,beautiful shells on the beach which I collect and fill my pockets with,although they had no meaning when they had happened nor will they have any significance once my pockets are emptied.

Costs of development

When Yang tided over Yin « Sa

“…even as we speak of great development, we need to ask ourselves, “What is development?” Development to me may be the ability to communicate to the world using my Apple Mac laptop built and bought in California, while I stretch on the divan in my seaside home in Cuddalore in South India. Development to the fisherman, who is my neighbour, may on the other hand, mean the ability to feed his family every day. That would mean catching fish that are not bloated and poisoned by the many Chemical factories that have made Cuddalore, formerly a thriving fishing hub, one of the post polluted towns in the country. My neighbour may never want to sell his fish. His family, however, needs to eat and he cannot afford the tinned salmon I buy from the air-conditioned store in Pondicherry 20 minutes away. Who polluted this man’s resource? Not he, but a famous Chemical factory that has grown unrestrained in the last decade.

This indicates the existence of a patriarchy in globalization – something that Vandana Shiva characterizes as an extension of the “White Man’s burden” – a desire to develop, similar to the desire, in past years, to civilize. I, however, see it as a “teacher’s burden”. The family with the Mac Book sees themselves as superior to the fisherman who has not finished school and he in turn sees people like the Koya and the Zapara as less than he. Each wants to teach the one on the “lower” rung of the ladder to “be modern.” This is only a microcosm of the world scenario, where, despite much talk about inclusivity, decisions are made top-down based on one definition of “development.”

I am able to follow the costs of development and the different things development means to different sections of people.I cannot follow how this whole evil has come about because of masculinization or patriarchy unless she means that if the resources continue to be owned by men this is what will happen-skewed development .She further makes the woman a victim and by extension,the Mother Earth herself who is supposed to be another female victim herself.

Writer’s Block

Re: How do you get past writer’s block? – Big Think

The writer’s block happens because the pool of the inner experiences which form the inspiration for writing has temporarily dried and it will be a while before it re-fills with fresh ones .The best thing will be to wait till this happens as otherwise you will be producing stuff which appears forced and without conviction.

History repeats itself

Re: Re: Re: Does history repeat itself? What have we learned or not learned fro – Big Think

History does repeat itself,not in the sense that the quality of life has not changed over the centuries nor in the sense that man has not learnt from past mistakes.It is simply in the sense that the human condition remains basically the same-a universal theme in literature.Whatever be the progression in thought or growth of the intellect, man is pitted against the environment in his struggle for existence and the events of the world are shaped by the manner in which he grapples with this problem.There is thus a tendency for the major events of the world to repeat themselves-whoever thought that after the Vietnam disaster a similar misadventure would happen after a space of a few decades in Afganisthan or Iraq ? There is a definitely a pattern to the major events of the world- on acount of an underlying consistency in human behavior.

Colour dreams or b&w ?

Black and white TV generation have monochrome dreams – Telegraph

“New research suggests that the type of television you watched as a child has a profound effect on the colour of your dreams.

While almost all under 25s dream in colour, thousands of over 55s, all of whom were brought up with black and white sets, often dream in monochrome – even now.”

I am not sure if this is really true as it assumes that our sensory perception continues in our dreams too as in our perception of the physical world while we are awake.Since colour concerns a visual perception which works with the visual faculty together with the neurons associated with it it cannot surely do a similar thing without a “real ” object provoking such a perception.I am not very sure if my own dreams are in black and white or in colour but certainly the memory of the dream does not reveal having seen colour or lack of colour.

Wonders of our blood

Basics – The Wonders of Blood – NYTimes.com

“It’s an enormous communications network,” Dr. Schafer said — the original cellphone system, if you will, 100 trillion users strong.

Blood can also be thought of as a private ocean, a recapitulation of what life was like for all the years we spent drifting as microscopic, single-celled organisms, “taking up nutrients from sea water and then eliminating waste products back into sea water,” Dr. Schafer said. Not only is blood mostly water, but the watery portion of blood, the plasma, has a concentration of salt and other ions that is remarkably similar to sea water.

Being cool makes it hot

‘The Dumbest Generation’ by Mark Bauerlein – Los Angeles Times

The problem is that instead of using the Web to learn about the wide world, young people instead mostly use it to gossip about each other and follow pop culture, relentlessly keeping up with the ever-shifting lingua franca of being cool in school. The two most popular websites by far among students are Facebook and MySpace. “Social life is a powerful temptation,” Bauerlein explains, “and most teenagers feel the pain of missing out.”

This ceaseless pipeline of peer-to-peer activity is worrisome, he argues, not only because it crowds out the more serious stuff but also because it strengthens what he calls the “pull of immaturity.” Instead of connecting them with parents, teachers and other adult figures, “[t]he web . . . encourages more horizontal modeling, more raillery and mimicry of people the same age.”

We were just wondering if a majority of the activity in the WWW is focussed on “being cool”,how come scholarship on the Net has been flourishing the same way as it used to do before the arrival of the Net. On the contrary there has been a tremendous explosion in knowledge in all spheres fueled by the uncontrolled growth of the Net. Perhaps the “cool” generation graduates to the serious pursuits once out of college and their FaceBook obsession soon changes into a technology obsession ,which is another thing one notices nowadays .If we observe closely the blogging activity ,we find a spurt in the growth of the so called technology blogs and a large number of them is now focussed on a meticulous documenting of the new developmentsin this field -like which social networking is ahead of others ,which web2.0 application is floundering ,which one is out of beta etc..

Bergson, Duration, and Metaphysics

• Bergson, Duration, and Metaphysics

  tags: no_tag

  • The concept of duration is interesting .Duration occurs as part of space-time in contrast to time which is open-ended.Time .as we understand in normal parlance is space-time but one can always envisage a Time without being tied up to space-a type of time which has relationship with a physical space.The interesting thing about this concept is the flowing time,the time that has no relationship with a specific space or an occurence. For example there is the concept of Indian time which does not recognise precise time but just an approximation to time.I have never thought there was already a concept of "Indian Time"-not Indian time as we understand it in India-but the way it is understood among the native American Indians -a concept of free flowing time .In India we joke about it when we do not adhere to punctuality in appointments ,which is a very common thing in our country. –
    
  • post by adukuri