Favorite Bits: We are made of stuff

The phrase that comes to mind when I consider the move from movabletype to wordpress for this blog is disruptive change, that phrase so beloved of those worthies who write those content-free fat management books. I think the change is nice but it has disrupted all kinds of things. Links internal to the blog are no longer functioning and one gets the highly informative 404 error message. So I have had to spend hours manually fixing broken links and categorizing posts. While doing that I re-read bits I had written. I am pleasantly surprised that I like what I wrote and want to point to one of my favorites: we are made of stuff.

I have recently, thanks to my colleague Saee at Netcore, added in the right hand column a list of blogs which I read. They are a mixed bunch but have one thing in common: their authors have the good sense to consider me worth reading (ha, ha!) Seriously now, the list is under construction and I would get it all done in a few more days.

Intergenerational Transfer — An Example

A few days ago I wrote about an educational model involving intergenerational transfers. Now I came across this BBC story which is an example. Quote:

. . . CIDA City Campus – has become a remarkable success story, gaining blue-chip sponsors, a campus and a reputation for innovation. Five years later, it has taught 1,600 students.

Apart from only being available to poor students, who get a virtually free education, it is unique in what it expects from its intake.

Students have to help run and maintain the university buildings, and in their holidays they have to teach young people in their home villages – reaching hundreds of thousands.

When they graduate, they have to pay for the university costs of another student who will follow in their footsteps.

Jane Goodall’s Lessons of Hope

In my list of heroes, Dr. Jane Goodall appears around the top. Her work among the chimpanzees of the Gombi National Park is the stuff of legends. She is the founder of Roots and Shoots — the Jane Goodall Institute, whose goal is “to promote care and concern for animals, the environment, and the human community.”

Lessons for Hope: Activities to sustain yourself and the world around you, is the kind of work she inspires. From their website: “Lessons of Hope is produced in collaboration with the Center for Applied Technologies in Education at University at Buffalo, is a web-based project, weaving service learning into high school curriculum. Inspired by the work of Dr. Jane Goodall, students are given opportunities to make a positive difference not only at school but also in their communities and even around the world. Lessons for Hope inspires high school students by helping them recognize their personal values and by encouraging them to translate those values into activities that benefit their communities.”

One of the lessons is the story of Jon.

Jon Stocking, a cook on a tuna fishing boat, was horrified to see how fishermen would accidentally trap and drown dolphins in their fishing nets while fishing for tuna. When he heard the crying of a baby dolphin and its mother gazed into his eyes, he found himself leaping into the water boiling with the thrashing of huge and terrified tuna, sharks, and dolphins. Jon, terrified himself, managed to release the dolphin and its mother. Then, with his knife, he cut the net and freed the rest of the animals.

Of course, Jon was fired. When he finally got home, he thought about the dolphin situation and all the animals being driven to extinction. What could he do? He had no degree and was not wealthy, but he desperately wanted to make a difference. So he founded the Endangered Species Chocolate Company. For each candy bar the company sells, “Chocolate Jon” donates 10% of the profits annually to organizations dedicated to fighting for the species’ survival. Dr. Jane and “Chocolate Jon” created a chimpanzee bar that raises money for the Jane Goodall Institute.

Heart warming, isn’t it?

36500 Days Ago

About 36,500 days ago, the man I admire the second-most published a paper called On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies. He was a patent examiner at the Swiss Patent Office in Berne. His name which I take with deep reverence was Albert Einstein. That paper introduced his theory of relativity to the world. For the record, a few lines from the introduction to the English translation of the paper:

. . . the unsuccessful attempts to discover any motion of the earth relatively to the “light medium,” suggest that the phenomena of electrodynamics as well as of mechanics possess no properties corresponding to the idea of absolute rest. They suggest rather that, as has already been shown to the first order of small quantities, the same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good.1 We will raise this conjecture (the purport of which will hereafter be called the “Principle of Relativity”) to the status of a postulate, and also introduce another postulate, which is only apparently irreconcilable with the former, namely, that light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body. These two postulates suffice for the attainment of a simple and consistent theory of the electrodynamics of moving bodies based on Maxwell’s theory for stationary bodies. The introduction of a “luminiferous ether” will prove to be superfluous inasmuch as the view here to be developed will not require an “absolutely stationary space” provided with special properties, nor assign a velocity-vector to a point of the empty space in which electromagnetic processes take place.

[Thanks to Saheli’s Musings and Observations for the reminder.]

Teaching Adults to Think


Adults can be taught to think pretty much like a dog can be taught to walk upright on its hind legs. It is a nice amusing trick but does not get the dog very far. DeBono’s books are the equivalent of a dog-trainer’s handbook.

[Source: How to Think, to Fast, and to Wait.]

My Favorite Bits: A New Category

I have started categorizing the posts on this blog a bit at a time. I just added a category My Favorite Bits. One such is something which I call The Triple Point of the World at Zero Degrees Humanity. What I like about it is it rambles along and makes detours and finally reaches a conclusion that I found surprising.

As time permits I will add more to this category from the archives.

Swaggering Imbeciles

I have been reading and writing on the usenet for donkey’s years. It is a wonderful mine of information and an amazing sink of time. You could waste time like there is no tomorrow (or should that be the other way around?). Anyway, here is one gem from someone who writes under the pseudonym of Uncle Al.


Newly educated and semi-educated classes – social or intellectual – seek positions in government bureaucracies or social advocacy rather than in industry and commerce where competence is inarguably measured at the end of every business quarter. The growth of bureaucracies needed to absorb these swaggering imbeciles is precisely opposed to society’s growth and development both as direct philosophical enemy and as infinitely hungry sump to resources otherwise needed to support productive endeavors.

I like his expression swaggering imbeciles. Reminds me of the idiot politicians of India, especially the ruling dynasty.

Memory of Truths Never Known

tree silhouette

The beautiful things we shall write if we have talent are inside us, indistinct, like the memory of a melody which delights us though we are unable to recapture its outline. Those who are obsessed by this blurred memory of truths they have never known are the men who are gifted… Talent is like a sort of memory which will enable them finally to bring this indistinct music closer to them, to hear it clearly, to note it down…

Marcel Proust in Against Sainte-Beuve

Meditations on a New Education Model

Vipassana is a 2500-year old Buddhist meditation practice that claims its lineage to the Buddha himself. Various institutions carry on the tradition of teaching Vipassana and one such is led by Shri S.N.Goenka. Goenkaji, as he is known by his students, has his headquarters in Igatpuri, a small town near Nashik in Maharashtra, India. I came across Vipassana about 15 years ago in California through some American friends who are his students. Continue reading “Meditations on a New Education Model”