Life dancing

Yoga Journal – Yoga Philosophy – Life Dancing

Life dances and you have to dance with it, whether it is taking you on a wonderful ride or is stepping on your toes. This is the necessary price and transcendent gift of being incarnate—alive in a body. But it is just life dancing. Life will move you in the rhythm and direction of its own nature. Each moment is a fresh moment in the dance, and if you are lost in clinging to the past or clinging to your hopes or fears of the future, you are not present for the dance.

Money can’t buy time

Money Cant Buy Time – Freakonomics – Opinion – New York Times Blog

“The average human being will be substantially richer in 50 years, just as the average American today has a real income three times what it was in 1955. But the average human being will not have much more time in 50 years than today; and life expectancy has increased by only 10 percent in the U.S. since 1955, so for most people time has become relatively scarce compared to money.

Not surprisingly, we feel more stressed for time than ever before — the opportunity cost of time has risen compared to the opportunity cost of goods. In fact, people with higher incomes usually express more time stress than those with lower incomes.

It’s not only that higher-income people typically work more hours per week; even those who don’t work at all express greater feelings of being rushed than do poorer people. The reason is that it takes time to spend money and consume goods — you can’t inject a vacation in Provence into your bloodstream — you have to go there, lie on the beach at St. Tropez, go to the Picasso museum in Antibes, and tour the perfume factories of Grasse.

So the next time you hear a wealthy person complaining about having no time, tell him/her that there’s a simple alternative — give away money. Of course, a person who does that will then complain that his/her income is insufficient. Time or money: one or the other is always relatively scarce and always generates complaints!”

How right !When I come back from my office I usually find clusters of slum residents stretching their limbs in absolutely delicious leisureliness ,unthinkable in a rich man. They do not seem to be strapped for time at all.They have all the time in the world.The women dry their hair in the sun and pick lice from their children’s hair. The men sit in groups playing cards and the old men exchange gossip.What do they care if the nation is going down in terms of GDP or the inflation rate is touching 12% once again ? Come to think of it ,they have survived beautifully whatever might have been the inflation rates all these days .

Women as a group -do they need their own how-to guides? Books for women,for instance.

The Smart Set: Women’s Studies – June 4, 2008

“One of the unfortunate side effects of being female is the constant marketing of products as specifically “for women.” It’s not just deodorant and cheap pink razors. There are books, and then there are books for women. “

Government efforts to correct market failures make things worse

Shankar Vedantam – Taking More Risks Because You Feel Safe – washingtonpost.com

” “The research consistently finds that, in fact, government efforts to correct market failures have little effect, or actually make things worse.”

“There is a tendency for people to say, ‘If things are safer, then I will take more risk,’ ” he added. “It does not have to involve government interventions: Drugs are developed to reduce blood pressure, so people say, ‘Okay, I can eat more, and it does not matter if I gain weight, because I can take this pill.’”

Suddenly it is evening

Food – Eat, Memory – Family Meal – Food – Eat, Memory – NYTimes.com

Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
trafitto da un raggio di sole:
ed è subito sera.

(Everyone stands alone on the heart of the earth
transfixed by a sun ray:
and suddenly it is evening.)

Google boggles the mind

I never knew Google was THIS massive!

“The blogosphere was amazed earlier this year when it realised the true size of Google. Think Google is the King Kong of search? Think a million King Kongs and you’re getting close. Google processes 20 Petabytes of a data a day. Don’t know what a Petabyte is? Check this out:

An MP3 is about 3MB. The Beatles recorded 214 singles- that’s close to just one gigabyte. 1024 gigabytes makes a Terabyte and 1024 terabytes makes a petabyte.”

Nudging people to the desired choices

• The Obama thinktank -a book called "Nudge" defiing his policy of gently nudging people to the desired choices
  

  • people are busy, their lives are increasingly complicated and they have neither time nor inclination nor, often, the ability to think through even all important choices, from health care plans to retirement options. Therefore the framing of choices matters, particularly using the enormous power of the default option—the option that goes into effect if the chooser chooses not to make a choice.
  • the power of inertia in human behavior, and the tendency of individuals to emulate others’ behavior, that there can be huge social consequences from the clever framing of the choices
  • By a "nudge" Thaler and Sunstein mean a policy intervention into choice architecture that is easy and inexpensive to avoid and that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing an individual’s economic incentives. "Putting the fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not."

Is human expression becoming more and more metaphorical ?

Something I have been noticing in the way human expression has shaped up in the recent times.Aren’t we slowly going into a language which is more metaphorical than it has ever been ? Language has heavily come to depend upon analogy and discarding exactness or precision of a scientific expression ,it now uses symbols which are thinly veiled poetic expressions or imagery. Everything that we have invented has been conceptualized or realized as an idea through the use of metaphors. The use of metaphors is not merely for the sake of better articulation but as an effective connecting link between different stages of idea forming and idea evolution .The distinction between expression and thought gets effectively blurred as thought at some stage becomes expression and expression ,once achieved, becomes a thought in itself.

Apart from the use of metaphors by science scholars and science thinkers ,the geeks use metaphors in a big way .In a typical paragraph of technical writing you will always find a large number of metaphors .Everything that the geek expounds uses metaphors and it is through metaphors that new concepts evolve in internet and technology . Knowledge aggregation through tagging becomes possible through metaphors and lateral linkages by way of analogy and ontological methods.

“A tag cloud ” is a pretty metaphor used for the collection of the frequently used tags on the blog or website-a highly visual image. “Avatar” is a beautiful metaphor for a virtual representation of your identity.The word is Sanskrit for the incarnations of God Vishnu on the earth to rid it of its accumulated sinfulness from time to time. “a kismet” is Arabic word for “automatic Kismet”,meaning each spam comment deserves what its content is i.e.the bad ones get the boot,the good ones get the approval. “Twitter” is another beautiful metaphor for a tiny 140 character micro-messenger and the “tweets” are an extension of the bird image which has become so popular .

“Being woken in the dead of night by noisy neighbors blasting out music could soon be a thing of the past.

Scientists have shown off the blueprint for an “acoustic cloak”, which could make objects impervious to sound waves.

The technology, outlined in the New Journal of Physics, could be used to build sound-proof homes, advanced concert halls or stealth warships.”

In this piece of science writing ,watch out for the metaphors galore-neighbours blasting out music,blueprint,”acoustic cloak”,”stealth warships” etc.

The metaphors make the expression visually effective and the assimilation of the idea becomes easier .For instance , the metaphor “acoustic cloak” is a highly visual representation for the gadget developed by the scientists and the same thing would take a long time for a lay reader to understand without the extremely pretty image of the cloak.

What Schiller thought of poets

• Poetry

  The German poet, playwright, and critic Friedrich Schiller thought there were two kinds of poets: "sentimental" and "naive" (and neither term, for Schiller, was an insult). Sentimental poets, he said, are self-conscious and retrospective; they "look for lost nature" in the people and things they write about. Their characteristic works, Schiller believed, sound carefully wrought, conclusive, even if written at high speed. Naive poets, on the other hand, seem to "be nature"—poetry seems to come out of them as wind from the sky, or leaves from the trees, as if it were their native speech. Naive poets often sound as if they never revise, even when we know they’ve worked hard on many drafts; their poetry seems to flow and does not want to end.

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