That great Indian teacher, Gautama who became the Buddha, had once instructed his followers to stop dithering. He said, “Bhikshus, when you sit, you sit. When you stand, you stand. Don’t dither.”

Will Durant (1885 – 1981) was an American historian, writer and philosopher. His most famous work is the 11-volume “The Story of Civilization”, published between 1935 and 1975. In a 1931 work, “The Case for India“, he had this to say about India.

This morning I was reminded of the words of a song “Impossible Dream”. The song goes thus:

Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826), the third President of the United States (1801–1809), the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776) had this to say about Christianity –

Cities are the engines of growth. Therefore, a policy that promotes urbanization of the population is an indispensible instrument for economic growth and development. In the following TED Talk, Paul Romer, a world-class growth economist at Stanford, makes the case.

“If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” ask Clay Shirkey in a blog post “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.” (March 2009). The full implications of technological change is impossible to foresee even by those who are responsible for the change.

From Carl Sagan to you know who via me.

Garrett Hardin (April 21, 1915 – September 14, 2003) proposed what he called the First Law of Ecology, which states “You cannot do only one thing”. He is also the author of the 1968 paper, The Tragedy of the Commons. I admire Hardin for his deep ecological thinking. Here’s a quote from his book ‘Living Within Limits:Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos‘ (1993, OUP).

Marvin Minsky of MIT is a cognitive scientist and an artificial intelligence pioneer. I recently came acros his 1981 paper on “Music, Mind, and Meaning” which I found informative and profoundly thought provoking. Here’s an extended quote from it, for the record.

We all want to make a difference. That comes effortlessly when one is dissatisfied with the current order of things. As the wise old dipsomaniac Omar Khayyam put it,
“Ah love, could thou and I with fate conspire,
To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire;
Would we not shatter it to bits,
And remold it nearer to our hearts’ desire!”

The web is a wonderful place where if you have the required smarts, you can get yourself a pretty decent education. Just having a lot of information at the click of a mouse would not do. You have to know what to take and in which sequence. What you get out of a book — or the web — obviously depends on you. But we can safely assume that one is reasonably well educated and can reason effectively at some level. If that is so, then the task becomes one …

An excerpt from today’s mail from Keith Hudson, a respected friend who lives in Bath, England. “Ideas in one’s head are slippery, slidery things and it’s not until one acts on them — in the form of changed behaviours or the production of tangible items — that their validity can be fully tested in the real world. Writing about them is only a halfway stage. However, the words one uses (and perhaps the new terms one invents) are rather like seeds that plants produce. They can float away in the …

Good work is not done by ‘humble’ men. It is one of the first duties of a professor, for example, in any subject, to exaggerate a little both the importance of his subject and his own importance in it. A man who is always asking ‘Is what I do worthwhile?’ and ‘Am I the right person to do it?’ will always be ineffective himself and a discouragement to others. — G H Hardy.

“All people dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their mind, wake in the morning to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous people, for they dream their dreams with open eyes, and make them come true.” – T.E. Lawrence

Without having read a single word of the Harry Potter novels, I guessed that JK Rowling must be an extraordinary person. The possessor of an imagination so remarkable that it captures the hearts of hundreds of millions cannot but be extraordinarily talented.
But I am wary of objects of popular fascination — whether they be religions, politicians, movie stars, cult leaders, popular movements, fads and fashion. I have never been one to judge anyone good merely because millions of people hold him or her in high regard. I am extremely …

Go. Profit from exile. To see, listen, walk, pause beside wisemen; question savages and madmen; and listen to stories. It is always pleasant and, sometimes, improves you.
– Jean C. Carriere in his play based on the Indian epic The Mahabharata.

I confess that if there is one human whom I come close to worshiping, it is Albert Einstein.

[Picture source.]
“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity… Never lose a holy curiosity.”

Keynes on what it takes to be an economist:
The study of economics does not seem to require any specialized gifts of an unusually high order. Is it not, intellectually regarded, a very easy subject compared with the higher branches of philosophy or pure science? An easy subject, at which very few excel! The paradox finds its explanation, perhaps, in that the master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher–in some degree. he must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate …

A brief reminder is in order here because from time to time, I do resort to very simple economic models. The utility of simple models in assisting thinking about complex matters is under-appreciated by most of us whose professional interests do not require model-based thinking. In the hard sciences, physicists and cosmologists commonly use models to clarify their thinking and illuminate the essential features of the complex theoretical subjects they study. Where the search space of a solution is unmanageable large, simulations based on simple models come in handy, such …

Really productive ideas, like internal combustion and the assembly line, are hard to find… But the techno-hype that surrounds us has some real costs. It causes businesses to waste money; it causes politicians to seek high-tech fixes (give every child a laptop!) when they should be getting back to the basics (teach every child to read). The slightly depressing truth is that technology has been letting us down lately. Let’s face up to that truth, and get on with our lives.
That is Paul Krugman writing in Dec 1996.