Tell Me a Story

Are you sitting comfortably
Are you still comfortably?

Tell me a good story and I will listen with wide-eyed childlike wonder. Tell me a good tale and I will learn the lessons that humanity has accumulated over the ages. Spin me a yarn and I will consider you my teacher. There is no more effective way to make me understand what the truth is about the world.

The stories we tell each other reaffirm to us our shared humanity. The best ones are the ones which have been told over millennia, have evolved organically, have encapsulated the wisdom of thousands of tellers of tales.
Continue reading “Tell Me a Story”

September 11th, 2006

“Where were you on Sept 11th?” is always going to be an easy question to answer for me, and I guess for a few hundred million others. Not only the day but the exact set of events that led up to the shock of learning that something extraordinary was happening would be forever remembered and often recalled.
Continue reading “September 11th, 2006”

Steve Irwin — RIP

Steve “Crocodile Hunter” Irwin died in a freak accident.

Australian naturalist and television personality Steve Irwin has been killed by a stingray during a diving expedition off the Australian coast.

Mr Irwin, 44, died after being struck in the chest by the stingray’s barb while he was filming a documentary in Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef.

. . . The stingray is a flat, triangular-shaped fish, commonly found in tropical waters.

It gets its name from the razor-sharp barb at the end of its tail, coated in toxic venom, which the animal uses to defend itself with when it feels threatened.

Attacks on humans are a rarity – only one other person is known to have died in Australia from a stingray attack, at St Kilda, Melbourne in 1945.

I enjoyed watching his show on TV and admired his commitment to the preservation of wildlife and his opposition to any kind of hunting.

It is one of those things that I am going to remember for a long while. My month long stay in Sydney is almost over. I had just finished dinner and switched on the TV and the channel that the TV was tuned on to was just getting started with the news headlines. I could hardly believe it. Life is a random draw and you never know when your number is up.

Steve will remain a great Australian hero.

The False Bottom of the Pyramid — 2

Following up on the post “The False Bottom of the Pyramid” thanks to Raja Sekhar Malapati once again for the responses of Prahalad and Hammond to Karnani’s critique of the Bottom of the Pyramid propostion.

Edifying Entertainment

Thanks to Ameet Deshpande, I was introduced to Ted Talks. TED is “Technology, Entertainment, Design.”

Ted Talks

Since then, I have delighted in listening to many of the talks. Here is Sir Ken Robinson (mp3 audio ~18 minutes): “Sir Ken Robinson is author of Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative, and a leading expert on innovation and human resources. (Recorded February, 2006 in Monterey, CA.)” He is entertaining and instructive.

Then listen to Richard Baraniuk (mp3 audio, duration: 19:18.) “He is a Rice University professor with a giant vision: to create a free, global online education system. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA.)”

And to round up about one hour of absolutely enjoyable listening, listen to Jimmy Wales (mp3 audio, duration ~21 minutes.) “He is founder of Wikipedia, the self-organizing, self-correcting, ever-expanding, and thoroughly addictive encyclopedia of the future (Recorded July 2005 in Oxford, UK. )”

The False Bottom of the Pyramid

Apparently, to be a successful “public intellectual” one of the requirements is that one must invent a catchy tag line. The tag line must have emotional appeal through a reference to some deeply held belief or social conditioning. An example of one such is the title of the book by Thomas Friedman “The World is Flat” which attempts to upset your view of the world that it is round. Another example is “the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid” which the obvious connection to the phrase “the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”
Continue reading “The False Bottom of the Pyramid”

The Pleasure of Finding Out

I have never had the pleasure of meeting Richard Feynman (May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988). Reading the Wiki entry on Feynman is both humbling and delightful. What a prodigious brain, what a sensibility, what delight he takes in being alive and learning. But to get a better understanding of who he is, you need to watch an interview of his The Pleasure of Finding Out Things. It is 50 minutes long. I have spent too many hours watching that video. Here was a kindred spirit, I thought to myself, when I first saw that video on public television many years ago.

Watch that video. I am doing so right now as I write this. Here is a bookmark: around time-stamp 6:15, he talks about the distinction between knowing a thing and knowing the name of the thing, which his father taught him. That idea keeps bouncing around in my head. Much too often our education system concentrates on naming things and not so much on understanding the nature of the thing. Feynman was an absolutely amazing teacher because I think he was an absolutely amazing student. It was from his father that he learnt to observe and after observing, ask questions. Continue reading “The Pleasure of Finding Out”

“Free” Energy? Not Really — Part 3

[Previous Posts on “Free Energy”: Part 1, Part 2]

Keith Hudson, the author of the outstanding Daily Wisdom postings, recently commented on the matter of free energy. With his permission, I am sharing his post with the readers of this blog. Continue reading ““Free” Energy? Not Really — Part 3″