Today’s poem is one of the saddest I have read in the English language. It is by W. H. Auden, dated around 1945. The last line encapsulates deep despair and sadness. I think it is best to read it when things are fine and life is not turbulent.

Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But today,
Today we have naming of parts. Japonica

You only live twice,
Or so it seems.
One life for yourself,
And one for your dreams. . . .

” . . . the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly …

I am continuing to read E. O. Wilson’s The Diversity of Life and recently I quoted from it. Today I continue to quote some more.
The best of science doesn’t consist of mathematical models and experiments, as textbooks make it seem. Those come later. It springs fresh from a more primitive mode of though, wherein the hunter’s mind weaves ideas from old facts and fresh metaphors and the scrambled crazy images of things recently seen. To move forward is to concoct new patters of thought, which …

The great entomologist E O Wilson’s The Diversity of Life (Harvard University Press, 1992) should be required reading for all who care to understand the complex web of life that we all are part of.
What is urgently needed is knowledge and a practical ethic based on a time scale longer than we are accustomed to apply. An ideal ethic is a set of rules invented to address problems so complex or stretching so far into the future as to place their solution beyond ordinary discourse. …

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess of the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s great civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual …

What I Have Lived For
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy – ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I …

Garrett Hardin’s 1968 Science paper The Tragedy of the Commons introduced many to the problem implicit in open access to common-pool resources. I believe that every thinking person must understand the tragedy of the commons because living in a world which is getting congested, we have to know the causes of our problems if we have to have a chance at solving them.
Here is Hardin within in his book Living within Limits:
… Professional publicists know there is always a good living to be made by catering to the public’s …

Guess who said the following and about whom?
“Throughout the 20th century small groups of men seized control of great nations, built armies and arsenals, and set out to dominate the weak and intimidate the world.”
See the comments for the answer.

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags …

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.]

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 …

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

Stanislav Andreski in Social Sciences as Sorcery (1972)

So long as authority inspires awe, confusion and absurdity enhance conservative tendencies in society. Firstly, because clear and logical thinking leads to a cumulation of knowledge (of which the progress of the natural sciences provides the best example) and the advance of knowledge sooner or later undermines the traditional order. Confused thinking, on the other hand, leads nowhere in particular and can be indulged indefinitely without producing any impact upon the world.

Economic change is a process, and in this book I shall describe the nature of that process. In contrast to Darwinian evolutionary theory, the key to human evolutionary change is the intentionality of the players. The selection mechanisms in Darwinian evolutionary theory are not informed by beliefs about the eventual consequences. In contrast, human evolution is guided by the perceptions of the players; choices — decisions — are made in the light of those perceptions with the intent of producing outcomes downstream that will reduce uncertainty of the organizations — …

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.

Daniel Burnham, Chicago architect. (1864-1912)

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Those lines from Shakespeare’s Macbeth are a sure-fire way of deflating any false sense of importance one might have while going about one’s business. Blogs, …

One of my favorite bits from Shakespeare. This one is from Act 3, Scene 1 of The First Part of King Henry IV:
Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?
The “vasty deep” is so evocative. I see visions of deep dark oceans with strange creatures never seen on earth dwelling there. And spirits that are powerful and perhaps evil.
Anyway, …

Yesterday at a meeting where we were discussing India’s development, someone mentioned Justice Louis D. Brandeis. That recalled to my mind something that Justice Brandeis had noted about the dangers of government which I find absolutely applicable in the Indian context.

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty
when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are
naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded
rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment
by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

Amen to …