Author: navin

Can a rainbow last forever?

Yesterday, I had a late-night, deep discussion with a friend of what is happiness, and she shared this poem that she had written over 10 years ago:

If I close
my eyes
i can see

As a child
prancing
to school

Dangling
onto
Pappa’s hand

The swaying palms
the washed out blue
Of an empty sky

I remember the joy
of rain bubbles
going `plink’

Delighting for hours
in rainbows
in the oil slick

But that was
aeons ago
And today, i’m wiser

I think I know
these little joys
are impermanent

I seek important
`big’ reasons
to be happy

Reasons
less ephemeral
than rain bubbles

Reasons
less elusive than
the smell of new earth

I continue in
my quest for
a permanent rainbow

My very own
that nothing, no one
can take away from me

But then why …

Do little nothings
of long ago
still gladden my heart

While I have
no memories
of yesterday or day before ?

In my search
for `meaningful’ joy
am I forgetting

To conceive today
the smiles
for tomorrow ?

Does happiness
know
the difference

Between
rainbows in oilslick
and rainbows in the sky ?

– deePa

Random Quotes – 2

This is a bunch of interesting quotes I’ve collected over the past few months. Maybe they are connected to each other, and maybe they are not:

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent
– John Maynard Keynes

Source: Wikipedia. See also this relevant article, about the US government bailout of financial institutions in September 2008.

Quotes of Kenneth Boundling, economist, which sound strangely more relevant after the global financial meltdown:

Mathematics brought rigor to Economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis

Nothing fails like success because we don’t learn from it. We learn only from failure.

Source: Wikipedia
Switching a little:

There you have it. Admiration for raw, undirected cleverness winning over a questioning of fundamental importance. I wish there’d been someone in the room like Fight Club’s Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt), who responds to a smart remark by Edward Norton’s narrator character with, “Clever. How’s that working out for you, being clever?”

Source: RibbonFarm.com

But let’s not worry so much about the crisis. Paul Graham points out that now is the best time to start a startup. However, many people think of doing startups, but not are not willing to quit their current job yet:

People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.
– Marcel Proust

Source: BrainyQuotes

But where do ideas for startups come from? Proust again:

The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

Enough about money. Let’s focus on love and happiness. Here’s Proust again:

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

We only really think when distressed, we shouldn’t worry about striving for happiness so much as “pursuing ways to be properly and productively unhappy.”
– Publisher’s Review weekly paraphrasing Proust

Source: How Proust can Change your life

Superstitions evolved to help us survive

Superstitions evolved to help us survive according to this New Scientist article.

Darwin never warned against crossing black cats, walking under ladders or stepping on cracks in the pavement, but his theory of natural selection explains why people believe in such nonsense.

The tendency to falsely link cause to effect – a superstition – is occasionally beneficial, says Kevin Foster, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University.

For instance, a prehistoric human might associate rustling grass with the approach of a predator and hide. Most of the time, the wind will have caused the sound, but “if a group of lions is coming there’s a huge benefit to not being around,” Foster says.

Foster and colleague Hanna Kokko, of the University of Helsinki, Finland, sought to determine exactly when such potentially false connections pay off.
Simplified behaviour

Rather than author just-so stories for every possible superstition – from lucky rabbit’s feet to Mayan numerology – Foster and Kokko worked with mathematical language and a simple definition for superstition that includes animals and even bacteria.

The pair modelled the situations in which superstition is adaptive. As long as the cost of believing a superstition is less than the cost of missing a real association, superstitious beliefs will be favoured.

Read the full article.