Isaac Asimov (1920 -1992) is arguably one of the greatest writers in the English language of the 20th century CE. He was prolific: “so prolific and diverse in his writing that his books span all major categories of the Dewey Decimal Classification except for category 100, philosophy and psychology,” says the wiki.[1]
He lived to write and admitted that “if my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.” In his 1990 memoires, he wrote, “I have had a good life and I have accomplished all I wanted to, and more than I had a right to expect I would.” Few people are as lucky as he was in that he got to do what he loved most to do, and did it exceedingly well. The graph below shows that in 1989, he published around 44 books — that’s nearly one book a week. Continue reading “Change”
“The inverse relationship between quantity demanded and price is the core proposition in economic science, which embodies the presupposition that human choice behavior is sufficiently relational to allow predictions to be made. Just as no physicist would claim that “water runs uphill,” no self-respecting economist would claim that increases in the minimum wage increase employment. Such a claim, if seriously advanced, becomes equivalent to a denial that there is even minimal scientific content in economics, and that, in consequence, economists can do nothing but write as advocates for ideological interests. Fortunately, only a handful of economists are willing to throw over the teachings of two centuries; we have not yet become a bevy of 
(The following is an excerpt from Carl Sagan’s 
“Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it”
Anarchy, the 
The notion that the individual owns himself or herself is the essential, axiomatic, necessary, defining condition of a civilized society. It’s axiomatic in the sense that it is a priori, self-evident, categorical, certain and beyond dispute. It’s apodictic — a necessary truth, an absolute certainty not requiring proof. It’s an assumption the truth of which if not assumed can never be established.
The news item reads, “UP makes it mandatory to obtain license for home bar.” It’s just one more small step on the road to serfdom.
I took a Vistara flight from Mumbai to Bangalore a week ago Sunday. In preparation for the flight, I checked out their website and came across their 
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 