Is poetry translatable?

Re: Is poetry translatable? - Big Think

If poetry is indeed emotion recollected in tranquility or the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings as Wordsworth believed,it certainly cannot be translated because the language used by the poet is uniquely his own ,created as part of his own poetic experience.A translator may try to recreate his experience by simulating for himself a similar one and try to re-create it for others in an alien language.But that is a mere approximation.

On the other hand poetry is not merely emotion recollected with a
specificity of the experience that caused it,the poetic experience can
be re-created in any language ,looking for approximate symbols for a
similar experience .This is of course on the basis that such
experiences are universal in nature ,being part of the shared human
experience .

 

The click-clock in our brain

How Your Brain Can Control Time | Memory, Emotions, & Decisions | DISCOVER Magazine

“Dean Buonomano, a neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that in order to perceive time in fractions of a second, our brains tell time as if they were observing ripples on a pond. Let’s say you are listening to a chirping bird. Two of its chirps are separated by a tenth of a second. The first chirp triggers a spike of voltage in some auditory neurons, which in turn causes some other neurons to fire as well. The signals reverberate among the neurons for about half a second, just as it takes time for the ripples from a rock thrown into a pond to disappear. When the second chirp comes, the neurons have not yet settled down. As a result, the second chirp creates a different pattern of signals. Buonomano argues that our brains can compare the second pattern to the first to tell how much time has passed. The brain needs no clock because time is encoded in the way neurons behave.”

 

Poetic justice

Lab Notes : Poetic Justice in Climate Change

Not that anything about global warming is fair, but one of the most unjust things about it is that the nations that have spewed most of the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere tend to be in the north (the U.S., Europe and now China), while the nations that stand to suffer the most—as in having their entire island covered by the rising seas—tend to be in the south. If a German researcher is right, it looks like nations will reap what they sow.

According to a new paper by Detlef Stammer of Hamburg University, once Greenland melts, most of the water will hang around in the Atlantic Ocean rather than spreading through the world’s seas. As New Scientist reported, most of the meltwater will add to the Atlantic for some 50 years, causing sea levels to rise—and rise more than if the water were evenly distributed around the globe, which it will not be. As Stammer told the magazine, a melting Greenland “is much less of a threat to tropical islands in the Pacific than it is for the coasts of North America and Europe.”

Call it poetic justice, climatologically.

 

Blog off ,you blogger

Blogging–It’s Good for You: Scientific American

“Self-medication may be the reason the blogosphere has taken off. Scientists (and writers) have long known about the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings. But besides serving as a stress-coping mechanism, expressive writing produces many physiological benefits. Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery. A study in the February issue of the Oncologist reports that cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing just before treatment felt markedly better, mentally and physically, as compared with patients who did not.”

 

“Page hit” -and- run usage and “ad-(nauseum)-sense” internet

Why my mom 1.0 hates your web 2.0 | Blue Screen of Duds

“Hit-and-run usage: The Indian Internet never grew up from the age of the eyeball bandits that spanned the early years. The mentality and thinking are pretty much the same all over the place. We have a three step routine which is hardwired into the stakeholder cranium: 1) Get the eyeballs 2) Monetize! monetize! monetize! 3) Profit!

In an era where everyone is desperately looking for better user engagement that should ideally lead to better profiling and targeting, Indian Internet is busy stomping on time’s rewind button, trying to look cool wearing floral prints and bellbottoms like the 70s never went out of fashion and wonder rather naively, “why is everyone looking funny at me?”

Why is it that we don’t like to engage our users in any meaningful fashion, beyond treating them as page view fodder? The reasons vary, but the primary source of the problem is from the old school eyeball bandit line of thinking. Secondly, it is hard work actually engaging users. It necessitates the acceptance of the fact that you may have been wrong in your thinking. It also necessitates the acceptance of the fact that a million people clicking a button in the wrong way is actually the right way, in contrast to your idea of the right way which was accepted by a sum total of four people in the senior management.

User engagement is 90% learning and 10% implementation and we in India tend to look down upon our audience. At one of my previous jobs I’d once told the COO, “we have a monopoly on the dumb Indian internet audience, they keep coming back day in and day out even if we are practically slapping them on their faces every time they come to our website.” The trouble with hit-and-run usage is that it gives you little value, incremental or otherwise. You will have a great deal of trouble, with such usage, in monetizing the traffic beyond the standard display advertising route.”

 

“Flow” -a concept in psychology

Flow (psychology) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by positive psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields.

 

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.’”