The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.
Edward Gibbon
Sunday, April 28, 2013
Things that happen in a person's life that are so scorched in the memory...!
There's things that happen in a person's life that are so scorched in the memory and burned into the heart that there's no forgetting them.
John Boyne
John Boyne
Friday, April 26, 2013
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
Ghosts don't haunt us!
Ghosts don't haunt us. That's not how it works. They're present among us because we won't let go of them.
Sue Grafton
Sue Grafton
For man is essentially alone!
For man is essentially alone, and one should pity him and love him and grieve with him.
Halldór Laxness
Halldór Laxness
When thinking tends to establish generalities!
"Is it not already perhaps a symptom of decadence when thinking tends to establish generalities?"
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Sunday, April 21, 2013
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream!
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
I had to sink to the greatest mental depths!
“I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew. I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths....in order to experience grace.” - Hermann Hesse
I can well understand why children love sand!
"I can well understand why children love sand."
—Wittgenstein
—Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein was the only man who looked puzzled at his lectures!
"When I was still doubtful as to his ability, I asked G. E. Moore for his opinion. Moore replied, 'I think very well of him indeed.' When I enquired the reason for his opinion, he said that it was because Wittgenstein was the only man who looked puzzled at his lectures."
—Bertrand Russell
—Bertrand Russell
Everything depends upon how a thing is thought!
"What an extraordinary change takes place ... when for the first time the fact that everything depends upon how a thing is thought first enters the consciousness, when,
in consequence, thought in its absoluteness replaces an apparent reality."
—Kierkegaard
in consequence, thought in its absoluteness replaces an apparent reality."
—Kierkegaard
Saturday, April 20, 2013
The world that only formerly-blind people can see
The world that only formerly-blind people can see
One of the earliest-known cases of regained sight is Virgil, the Roman poet. At age fifty, he had cataract surgery and regained his sight. Soon after, he wished he hadn’t. This is common to many blind people who regain their sight. Unlike infants, who are catered to, whose brains are primed for learning, and who have no option but to learn, blind people are asked to replace a familiar sensory system that reliably guides them through the world with an unfamiliar one that does nothing but confuse them. Sometimes the strain of assimilation is too much. Like many other patients, Virgil would shut his eyes and pretend he was still blind when the situation became overwhelming. He became depressed and died of pneumonia soon after his surgery. Although he had seen the world with his eyes, he retained his “mental blindness,” or what experts call “visual agnosia.”
For someone to see an object, the eye needs to pick it up, but the brain also needs to recognize it. This process takes both practice and a certain physical ability in the brain. Agnosia patients have generally suffered brain injuries and lost the ability to understand what they see – they see a rectangular object with a brown circle on top and a loop on one side, but don’t understand that they’re looking at a cup of coffee. There are only shapes. Those who have been blind most of their lives “wake up” with a certain amount of visual agnosia.
One of the earliest-known cases of regained sight is Virgil, the Roman poet. At age fifty, he had cataract surgery and regained his sight. Soon after, he wished he hadn’t. This is common to many blind people who regain their sight. Unlike infants, who are catered to, whose brains are primed for learning, and who have no option but to learn, blind people are asked to replace a familiar sensory system that reliably guides them through the world with an unfamiliar one that does nothing but confuse them. Sometimes the strain of assimilation is too much. Like many other patients, Virgil would shut his eyes and pretend he was still blind when the situation became overwhelming. He became depressed and died of pneumonia soon after his surgery. Although he had seen the world with his eyes, he retained his “mental blindness,” or what experts call “visual agnosia.”
For someone to see an object, the eye needs to pick it up, but the brain also needs to recognize it. This process takes both practice and a certain physical ability in the brain. Agnosia patients have generally suffered brain injuries and lost the ability to understand what they see – they see a rectangular object with a brown circle on top and a loop on one side, but don’t understand that they’re looking at a cup of coffee. There are only shapes. Those who have been blind most of their lives “wake up” with a certain amount of visual agnosia.
It is inevitable that we face problems!
"It is inevitable that we face problems, but no particular problem is inevitable. We survive, and thrive, by solving each problem as it comes up. And, since the human ability to transform nature is limited only by the laws of physics, none of the endless stream of problems will ever constitute an impassable barrier. So a complementary and equally important truth about people and the physical world is that problems are soluble. By ‘soluble’ I mean that the right knowledge would solve them. It is not, of course, that we can possess knowledge just by wishing for it; but it is in principle accessible to us."
Friday, April 19, 2013
When mighty empires were doomed they began to have numberless laws!
"An old Chinese sage once said he had heard that when mighty empires were doomed they began to have numberless laws"
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
A balanced perspective!
A balanced perspective cannot be acquired by studying disciplines in pieces but through pursuit of the consilience among them. Such unification will come hard. But I think it is inevitable. Intellectually it rings true, and it gratifies impulses that rise from the admirable side of human nature. To the extent that the gaps between the great branches of learning can be narrowed, diversity and depth of knowledge will increase.
—Edward O. Wilson, Consilience
—Edward O. Wilson, Consilience
WordPress, Joomla Sites Under Brute-Force Password Attack
http://securitywatch.pcmag.com/security/310350-wordpress-joomla-sites-under-brute-force-password-attack
Thousands of WordPress and Joomla sites are currently under attack by a large botnet brute-forcing passwords. Administrators need to make sure they have strong passwords and unique usernames for their WordPress and Joomla installations.
The attack looks for common account names, such as "admin," on the site and systematically tries common passwords in order to break into the acocunt.
Administrators don't want someone breaking in getting access to their sites, as that attacker could deface the site or embed malicious code to infect other people with malware. However, the organized nature of the attack and its large-scale operation implies even more sinister goals. It appears likely the attackers are attempting to get a foothold onto the server so that they can figure out a way to take over the entire machine. Web servers are generally more powerful and have bigger bandwidth pipes than home computers, making them attractive targets.
The attack volume is a hint at the botnet's size. HostGator estimated at least 90,000 computers are involved in this attack, and CloudFlare believes "more than tens of thousands of unique IP addresses" are being used.
A botnet is made up of compromised computers receiving instructions from one or more centralized command-and-control-servers, and executing those commands. For the most part, these computers have been infected with some kind of malware and the user is not even aware that the attackers are controlling the machines.
Thousands of WordPress and Joomla sites are currently under attack by a large botnet brute-forcing passwords. Administrators need to make sure they have strong passwords and unique usernames for their WordPress and Joomla installations.
The attack looks for common account names, such as "admin," on the site and systematically tries common passwords in order to break into the acocunt.
Administrators don't want someone breaking in getting access to their sites, as that attacker could deface the site or embed malicious code to infect other people with malware. However, the organized nature of the attack and its large-scale operation implies even more sinister goals. It appears likely the attackers are attempting to get a foothold onto the server so that they can figure out a way to take over the entire machine. Web servers are generally more powerful and have bigger bandwidth pipes than home computers, making them attractive targets.
The attack volume is a hint at the botnet's size. HostGator estimated at least 90,000 computers are involved in this attack, and CloudFlare believes "more than tens of thousands of unique IP addresses" are being used.
A botnet is made up of compromised computers receiving instructions from one or more centralized command-and-control-servers, and executing those commands. For the most part, these computers have been infected with some kind of malware and the user is not even aware that the attackers are controlling the machines.
Bing Delivers Five Times as Many Malicious Websites as Google
http://securitywatch.pcmag.com/security/310268-bing-delivers-five-times-as-many-malicious-websites-as-google
Searches on Bing returned five times more links to malicious websites than Google searches, according to an 18-month study from German independent testing lab AV-Test. Though search engines have worked to suppress malicious results, the study concluded that malware infested websites still appear in their top results.
The study concluded that while all the search engines the lab evaluated delivered malware, Google delivered the least. It was followed by Bing, which returned a disconcerting five times as much malware as Google. Yandex, the Russian website, delivered 10 times as many malicious sites.
Thankfully, the 5,000 pieces of malware the study found are concentrated in Yandex results—which had 3,330 malicious links out of the 13 million the AV-Test looked at. Bing had a little under half that, with 1,285 malicious results out of 10 million pages. Google returned a mere 272 malicious results in 10 million while Bleko had even fewer: 203 out of around three million.
Searches on Bing returned five times more links to malicious websites than Google searches, according to an 18-month study from German independent testing lab AV-Test. Though search engines have worked to suppress malicious results, the study concluded that malware infested websites still appear in their top results.
The study concluded that while all the search engines the lab evaluated delivered malware, Google delivered the least. It was followed by Bing, which returned a disconcerting five times as much malware as Google. Yandex, the Russian website, delivered 10 times as many malicious sites.
Thankfully, the 5,000 pieces of malware the study found are concentrated in Yandex results—which had 3,330 malicious links out of the 13 million the AV-Test looked at. Bing had a little under half that, with 1,285 malicious results out of 10 million pages. Google returned a mere 272 malicious results in 10 million while Bleko had even fewer: 203 out of around three million.
All philosophy is a justification of oneself!
"All philosophy is a justification of oneself. The only original philosophy would be the one that would justify someone else."
Albert Camus, Notebooks (1945)
Albert Camus, Notebooks (1945)
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
...f you knew how to get the most out of it!
"You would not write about loneliness so much if you knew how to get the most out of it."
Albert Camus, Notebooks (1940)
Albert Camus, Notebooks (1940)
Philosophy would render us entirely Pyrrhonian!
"Philosophy would render us entirely Pyrrhonian, were not nature too strong for it."
David Hume
David Hume
Monday, April 15, 2013
I'm glad you like adverbs!
I'm glad you like adverbs — I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.
Henry James
Henry James
In this sense, existentialism is optimistic...
"Existentialism is nothing less than an attempt to draw all the consequences of a coherent atheistic position. It isn't trying to plunge man into despair at all. But if one calls every attitude of unbelief despair, like the Christians, then the word is not being used in its original sense. Existentialism isn't so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn't exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing. There you've got our point of view. Not that we believe that God exists, but we think that the problem of His existence is not the issue. In this sense, existentialism is optimistic, a doctrine of action, and it is plain dishonesty for Christians to make no distinction between their own despair and ours and then to call us despairing."
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Jean-Paul Sartre
You live in fear and despair before the nothingness of the world!
"As Block puts it, without proof of God’s existence, the idea of God is nothing more than suffering — a suffering that people would be better to do without. The idea of God, as Block sees it, is a reminder to you that you live in fear and despair before the nothingness of the world. As he puts it, “Why can’t I kill God within me? Why does he live on in this painful and humiliating way even though I curse him and want to tear him out of my heart? I want knowledge, not faith. . . . I want God to stretch out his hand toward me, reveal himself to me.”"
Sunday, April 14, 2013
The heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head!
The heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head.
Noah Webster
Noah Webster
Friday, April 12, 2013
Sweeping Statements
"Sweeping statement is the term used when you give conclusive or decisive comment about something or someone. You may not know but you give sweeping statements several times a day and if you don't mind let me say that most of the time you are wrong. :-)
You might have said to your colleagues that this manager has no sense of management whereas if someone asks you to give a ten minutes non-stop lecture on management, you may not be able to deliver it because you too may not have real in depth knowledge of the domain. So, instead of saying "no sense of management" you could more precisely say that you don't agree to "this particular aspect of management” of that person and then elaborate your observations. The later approach in this example is not a sweeping statement instead it is a specific focal point of your point of view.
If you are in habit of giving sweeping statements, you may, at some point in time spoil your relationship with someone permanently especially when you give sweeping statement to the person face to face by annoying and irritating severely. Because when you give sweeping statement you are missing a whole lot of detailed aspects of the subject and may emotionally kill the person.
Also when you give sweeping statement it’s not about them only, it’s about you as well because it indicates the fact that you are not careful in your thinking. Which means you have a zoom-out attitude when it comes to observing people whereas zoom-in (high level) and zoom-out (detailed micro level) approaches are required to be used according to the situation.
Some other examples of sweeping (sometimes insulting) statements:
1- A man argues with his house wife "what exactly you do at home all day long?"
2- This whole nation or country is arrogant/corrupt.
3- Mom to her child "you never do good work"
4- when you say to your colleague, "you have no idea about it, so leave it to me"
So the bottom line is that instead of being judgmental and passing the remarks instantly one must strive to understand things fairly prior to giving remarks and then use appropriate words and an effective way of communication to describe ones stance in order to improve the situation, not in order to harm it by any mean."
You might have said to your colleagues that this manager has no sense of management whereas if someone asks you to give a ten minutes non-stop lecture on management, you may not be able to deliver it because you too may not have real in depth knowledge of the domain. So, instead of saying "no sense of management" you could more precisely say that you don't agree to "this particular aspect of management” of that person and then elaborate your observations. The later approach in this example is not a sweeping statement instead it is a specific focal point of your point of view.
If you are in habit of giving sweeping statements, you may, at some point in time spoil your relationship with someone permanently especially when you give sweeping statement to the person face to face by annoying and irritating severely. Because when you give sweeping statement you are missing a whole lot of detailed aspects of the subject and may emotionally kill the person.
Also when you give sweeping statement it’s not about them only, it’s about you as well because it indicates the fact that you are not careful in your thinking. Which means you have a zoom-out attitude when it comes to observing people whereas zoom-in (high level) and zoom-out (detailed micro level) approaches are required to be used according to the situation.
Some other examples of sweeping (sometimes insulting) statements:
1- A man argues with his house wife "what exactly you do at home all day long?"
2- This whole nation or country is arrogant/corrupt.
3- Mom to her child "you never do good work"
4- when you say to your colleague, "you have no idea about it, so leave it to me"
So the bottom line is that instead of being judgmental and passing the remarks instantly one must strive to understand things fairly prior to giving remarks and then use appropriate words and an effective way of communication to describe ones stance in order to improve the situation, not in order to harm it by any mean."
Thursday, April 11, 2013
You can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand!
Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand.
Dorothy Allison
Dorothy Allison
You use names for things as though...
You use names for things as though they rigidly , persistently endured; yet even the stream into which you step a second time is not the one you stepped into before.
— Heraclitus
— Heraclitus
Now the fearful is only fearful!
Before this binary world—the fearful was also sacred, now the fearful is only fearful.
— Hyatt
— Hyatt
With paradox came the priest, the politician and the psychologist!
When the world was made binary man began to live in paradox. With paradox came the priest, the politician and the psychologist. These three thieves of the soul became the maker and solver of riddles, making the poet and artist seem profound.
— Hyatt
— Hyatt
To have neither great desire nor great despair!
To have neither great desire nor great despair — This — this is the goal of all "great" civilizations .
— Hyatt
— Hyatt
While we desperately yearn for the exotic and wondrous...
While we desperately yearn for the exotic and wondrous our first act on meeting it is to turn it into ourselves. — Hyatt
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Man's body was "a curse of fate"!
"Man's body was "a curse of fate," and culture was built upon repression -not because man was a seeker only of sexuality, of pleasure, of life and expansiveness, as Freud thought, but because man was also primarily an avoider of death. Consciousness of death is the primary repression, not sexuality. This is what is creaturely about man, this is the repression on which culture is built, a repression unique to the self-conscious animal. Freud saw the curse and dedicated his life to revealing it with all the power at his command. But he ironically missed the precise scientific reason for the curse."
He can never banish anxiety!
"In other words, as long as man is an ambiguous creature he can never banish anxiety; what he can do instead is to use anxiety as an eternal spring for growth into new dimensions of thought and trust. "
Saturday, April 6, 2013
Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together!
Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together.
Francesco Petrarca
Francesco Petrarca
Action seems to follow feeling!
"Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go
together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct
control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is
not."
William James
William James
Friday, April 5, 2013
In the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale!
"Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting
on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that
one begins to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid."
Soren Kierkegaard
Soren Kierkegaard
That which can be asserted without evidence!
That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
Christopher Hitchens.
Christopher Hitchens.
They think they have seen something!
"People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new
stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall
into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think they have
seen something."
Soren Kierkegaard
Soren Kierkegaard
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
How much the heart can hold!
Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.
Zelda Fitzgerald
Zelda Fitzgerald
The reality is that our choices are unstable!
"People also believe that choices are dispositional. That is to say, they reflect the underlying nature of the person making the choice, rather than the situation in which the person finds himself. We have previously discussed the fact that we all tend to believe that other people’s actions reflect their ‘personality’ or underlying disposition, whereas we believe our own actions are the result of the situation in which we find ourselves (the fundamental attribution error). We tend to see choices in exactly the same way. Since we tend to believe that choices reflect underlying nature, we expect them not to change. However, the reality is that our choices are unstable, shifting upon visceral influences."
People expect feelings to fluctuate overtime, but expect choices to be constant!
"Indeed, Van Boven and Kane (2005) suggest that it is the difference between the two that accounts for the differing reactions. They argue that people expect feelings to fluctuate overtime, but expect choices to be constant. As they put it:
“It would not seem off to people if their best friend wakes up cheerful, gets bored during morning classes, grumpy after a lunchtime argument, embarrassed while giving a presentation, and proud after receiving an A on an exam”
but
“It would seem odd to people if their best friend chose to dance in front of an audience in the morning, refused to dance at lunchtime, and was again ready to show his moves after dinner.”"
“It would not seem off to people if their best friend wakes up cheerful, gets bored during morning classes, grumpy after a lunchtime argument, embarrassed while giving a presentation, and proud after receiving an A on an exam”
but
“It would seem odd to people if their best friend chose to dance in front of an audience in the morning, refused to dance at lunchtime, and was again ready to show his moves after dinner.”"
To me, it's a license to go out and murder!
"We've had 87 years to think what war is. To me, it's a license to go out and murder."
~ Harry Puteh
Impact bias!
"Impact bias is easy to see in our behaviour. People predict that they will be very unhappy for a very long time after a romantic relationship ends. In fact, psychologists have found that people quickly return to their baseline level of happiness. The return to ‘normal’ occurs much faster than people predict."
We are actually very poor at forecasting both our future feelings and actions!
"As Dunn puts it, we as a species are unique in our ability to be emotional time travellers.We alone can fast forward to imagine future events and how we will feel and act in those events. However, while we have the ability to perform such acts, we are actually very poor at forecasting both our future feelings and actions."
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
Future business leaders are better off...
"Future business leaders are better off reading histories, philosophical
essays, or just a good novel, than pursuing degrees in business."
---- Matthew Stewart, author of "The Management Myth", and founder of a management consulting firm that at its peak had 600 employees.
---- Matthew Stewart, author of "The Management Myth", and founder of a management consulting firm that at its peak had 600 employees.
Monday, April 1, 2013
Confirmatory bias!
"We have a very bad habit of looking for information that agrees with us. This thirst for agreement rather than refutation is known as confirmatory bias. When Karl Popper wrote his philosophy of science, he stated that the only way of testing a view is to form the hypothesis and then spend the rest of the day looking for all the information that disagrees with it. But that isn’t the way most of us work. We tend to form our views and then spend the rest of the day looking for all the information that make us look right.
Our natural tendency is to listen to people who agree with us. It feels good to hear our own opinions reflected back to us. We get those warm, fuzzy feelings of content. Sadly, this isn’t the best way of making optimal decisions. What we should do is sit down with the people who disagree with us most. Not to enable us to change our minds (because the odds are staked massively against such an outcome), but rather to make us aware of the opposite point of view. We should look for the logical error in the opposite point of view. If we can’t find such an error, then we shouldn’t be so sure about holding our own view as strongly as we probably do.
A supplementary problem for trying to follow this path is that we often find ourselves suffering the hostile media bias. That is, not only do we look for information that agrees with us, but when we are presented with information that disagrees with us we tend to view the source as having a biased view!"
Our natural tendency is to listen to people who agree with us. It feels good to hear our own opinions reflected back to us. We get those warm, fuzzy feelings of content. Sadly, this isn’t the best way of making optimal decisions. What we should do is sit down with the people who disagree with us most. Not to enable us to change our minds (because the odds are staked massively against such an outcome), but rather to make us aware of the opposite point of view. We should look for the logical error in the opposite point of view. If we can’t find such an error, then we shouldn’t be so sure about holding our own view as strongly as we probably do.
A supplementary problem for trying to follow this path is that we often find ourselves suffering the hostile media bias. That is, not only do we look for information that agrees with us, but when we are presented with information that disagrees with us we tend to view the source as having a biased view!"
Everything is I
"Everything is I, and I am no thing."
-- Wei Wu Wei (Taoist philosopher Terence James Stannus Gray)
-- Wei Wu Wei (Taoist philosopher Terence James Stannus Gray)
The need to belong!
"1. Under emotional distress, people shift toward favoring high-risk, high-payoff options, even if these are objectively poor choices. This appears based on a failure to think things through,caused by emotional distress.
2. When self-esteem is threatened, people become upset and lose their capacity to regulate themselves. In particular, people who hold a high opinion of themselves often get quite upset in response to a blow to pride, and the rush to prove something great about themselves overrides their normal rational way of dealing with life.
3. Self-regulation is required for many forms of self-interest behavior. When self-regulation fails,people may become self-defeating in various ways, such as taking immediate pleasures instead of delayed rewards. Self-regulation appears to depend on limited resources that operate like strength or energy, and so people can only regulate themselves to a limited extent.
4. Making choices and decisions depletes this same resource. Once the resource is depleted, such as after making a series of important decisions, the self becomes tired and depleted, and its subsequent decisions may well be costly or foolish.
5. The need to belong is a central feature of human motivation, and when this need is thwarted such as by interpersonal rejection, the human being somehow ceases to function properly.Irrational and self-defeating acts become more common in the wake of rejection."
2. When self-esteem is threatened, people become upset and lose their capacity to regulate themselves. In particular, people who hold a high opinion of themselves often get quite upset in response to a blow to pride, and the rush to prove something great about themselves overrides their normal rational way of dealing with life.
3. Self-regulation is required for many forms of self-interest behavior. When self-regulation fails,people may become self-defeating in various ways, such as taking immediate pleasures instead of delayed rewards. Self-regulation appears to depend on limited resources that operate like strength or energy, and so people can only regulate themselves to a limited extent.
4. Making choices and decisions depletes this same resource. Once the resource is depleted, such as after making a series of important decisions, the self becomes tired and depleted, and its subsequent decisions may well be costly or foolish.
5. The need to belong is a central feature of human motivation, and when this need is thwarted such as by interpersonal rejection, the human being somehow ceases to function properly.Irrational and self-defeating acts become more common in the wake of rejection."
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