The function of the university

Oh, wouldn't that have been nice, if the following was what we would have gained from our education?

"What you have done here at the university, if you spent your time well, is to cultivate the intelligence and sensitivity you will need to meet those challenges, and thus to make life better and fuller and richer across a wide spectrum -- both for yourselves and for those whose lives you will touch and shape and improve. That is the true freedom, the positive freedom to achieve things, to build a life that can pretend to happiness." -- Lanier Anderson

"The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a centre of polite society; if is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment from which forms the secret of civilization.
...
The riddle of existence is the college curriculum that was laid before the Pharaohs, that was taught in the groves by Plato, that formed the trivium and quadrivium, and is to-day laid before the freedmen’s sons by Atlanta University. And this course of study will not change; its methods will grow more deft and effectual, its content richer by toil of scholar and sight of seer; but the true college will ever have but one goal,—not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes." -- W.E.B. DuBois

(Frome the course The Art of Living, at the Stanford University)

Mysteries of female life

Over the mysteries of female life there is drawn a veil, best left undisturbed. -- Louisa May Alcott (Little Women)

It's a blessing to have sister(s)/friend(s) to share some of these mysteries.

Nonlinear

It's unfortunate that we are trained to have linear minds!

"People take the longest possible paths, digress to numerous dead ends, and make all kinds of mistakes. Then historians come along and write summaries of this messy, nonlinear process and make it appear like a simple, straight line." -- Dean Kamen

The results don't always add up...

"Passion has a funny way of trumping logic." (Source: Nike ad)

Far as human eye could see

When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see;
Saw the Vision of the world and all the wonder that would be.
-- Tennyson (Locksley Hall)

Isaac Asimov has a book with the same name (Watch an old interview of his on World of Ideas).

Someone, Anyone

...
+ I could have been someone
* Well so could anyone
...
-- The Pogues (Fairytale Of New York)

The two eaqually easy solutions

To doubt everything or to believe everything - these are two equally easy solutions, because both of them relieve us of the necessity of thinking. -- Jules Henri Poincaré

Cogito, ergo sum, so I guess there is no easy way out!

The most dangerous assumption

"Nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume that our views of science are ultimate. That there are no mysteries in nature, that our triumphs are complete, and that there are no new worlds to conquer" -- Humphrey Davy

Brian Cox finishes his brief talk on the LHC at this years TED with this quote. If you wonder what this LHC (The Large Hadron Collider) is, listen to this rap song, or visit its homepage at CERN.

This LHC is quite a fantastic adventure the world's scientists have embarked upon. It is huge, and there was a huge enthusiasm among almost everyone at the academia, especially in Europe and especially in Switzerland before the start of the tests. I was in Zurich last fall when the first tests were scheduled and when it had to be shut down due to the defects. I could feel the excitement in the air before the initial tests, and the disappointment after the defects were found. I hope that they would get it working soon. Not that I suspect a breakthrough to come out of the studies on the tests, but the mere fact that such a huge scientific project was put together with the collaboration of so many nations and so many scientists, and the huge budget that was allocated to prepare the technology that was required to build and maintain such a thing, is already a breakthrough.

Fortunate

Dear reader,
there are people in the world who know no misery and woe. And they take comfort in cheerful films about twittering birds and giggling elves.

There are people who know that there's always a mystery to be solved. And they take comfort in researching and writing down any important evidence.

But this story is not about such people. This story is about the Baudelaires. And they are the sort of people who know that there's always something.
Something to invent,
something to read,
something to bite,
and something to do, to make a sanctuary, no matter how small.

And for this reason, I am happy to say, the Baudelaires were very fortunate indeed.
-- Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events

There is indeed always something. Something to invent, something to read, and something to bite. :)

Circumstances

"People are always blaming circumstances for what they are. I do not believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they cannot find them, they make them." -- George Bernard Shaw

I'm discovering Bernard Shaw lately, some nice quotes are attributed to him. He has a special way of putting things, there is a name coined for it in English , for his ironic wit, as "Shavian" (see Wikipedia). Here is another quote of his: "My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world."

Measure anew...

The person who behave sensibly is my tailor, he takes my measures anew everytime he sees me. All the rest go on with their old measurements. -- George Bernard Shaw

That is a key point to keep in mind, that people experience, learn, grow, and therefore change as time goes by. The fellow you have seen yesterday, is not the same person today. Life is not a deterministic finite automaton, and not even a probabilistic Markov Chain, you can never predict someone's future or all possible futures, just based on what you've seen from him or her in the past or present. The only thing that stays the same is that people are people, they are human beings, regardless of how cruel or how inhuman they have been so far. So every time we see people, we should treat them as a human being deserves, we should measure them anew.

With no loss of enthusiasm...

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. -- Winston Churchill

The importance of stupidity in scientific research

That is the title of an article by Dr. Schwartz, a professor of Biomedical Engineering at U of Virginia. A short and interesting article, and probably helpful for those who are struggling with some research project. If you have done a research project on your own, you are familiar with the moments when you just want to bang your head against the desk, or monitor (or whatever hard place you can find), from the frustration of days and nights of being stuck with apparently unsolvable questions and problems at hand, and feeling you are the most stupid person in the universe. How to manage your stupidity or at a higher level, how to turn it into "productive stupidity", is quite a lesson you should learn in the course of a good research work.

A good adviser could play a key role here, in helping you over come the frustration you'd feel from time to time. Whenever I feel frustrated or hopeless after some time of not making progress or even having results that shows some assumptions from the beginning were false, my adviser here tells me, "hey that is science, if it was supposed to be easy and straightforward, we would have been out of business!"

Anyway, here are some interesting excerpts from the article:

What makes it difficult is that research is immersion in the unknown. We just don’t know what we’re doing. We can’t be sure whether we’re asking the right question or doing the right experiment until we get the answer or the result.

Science involves confronting our ‘absolute stupidity’. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown. Preliminary and thesis exams have the right idea when the faculty committee pushes until the student starts getting the answers wrong or gives up and says, ‘I don’t know’. The point of the exam isn’t to see if the student gets all the answers right. If they do, it’s the faculty who failed the exam.

Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right.

...but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.
-- Martin A. Schwartz

In the dew of little things...

In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed. - Kahlil Gibran

Be my friend

Don't walk in front of me,
I may not follow.
Don't walk behind me,
I may not lead.
Just walk beside me and be my friend.
-- Albert Camus

Brave or Cautious

The brave may not live forever, but the cautious do not live at all. (Princess Diaries)

Instead of puzzling over mysterious, he puzzled over the commonplace!

His cocky contempt for authority led him to question received wisdom in ways that well-trained acolytes in the academy never contemplated. And as for his slow verbal development, he thought that it allowed him to observe with wonder the everyday phenomena that others took for granted. Instead of puzzling over mysterious things, he puzzled over the commonplace. "When I ask myself how it happened that I in particular discovered the relativity theory, it seemed to lie in the following circumstance," Einstein once explained. "The ordinary adult never bothers his head about the problems of space and time. These are things he has thought of as a child. But I developed so slowly that I began to wonder about space and time only when I was already grown up. Consequently, I probed more deeply into the problem than an ordinary child would have." -- W. ISAACSON

That is a paragraph of an interesting article on TIME, called Einstein & Faith. It is just a great gift, to be able to puzzle over the commonplace. I have always envied people who have an eye for the marvel and beauty of the simple.

Confusion

When you are thinking about something you don't understand you have a terrible, uncomfortable feeling called confusion. It is a very difficult and unhappy business, and so most of the time you are rather unhappy actually, with this confusion, you can't penetrate this thing.

Now, the confusion is, because we are all some kind of apes that are kind of stupid trying to figure out how to put two sticks together to reach the banana, and we can't quite make it. So I always feel stupid. Once in a while, I put the two sticks together, and I reach the banana. --Richard Feynman

That was a very interesting piece I came by on Shefa. This explains a lot about why I look unhappy sometimes. That is because I am easily confused, I'm not that bright!* You can watch Feynman saying the above in an interview here.

--
* Read that with Chandler's intonation when saying:
"And we’re easily confused. We’re not very bright." (Friends, E10.15)

Know what you are!

"Everyone sees what you seem to be, but few know what you are."
-- Niccolo Machiavelli

Good to remember this from time to time, sometimes the personality people see or rather want to see in you, eludes you of what you truly are. Therefor it is important to have some people in your life (friends or even foes) who can really see through you, and remind you of your true self.

Exalt your reason to the height of passion...

...Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion; that it may sing; And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through it's own daily resurrection and like the phoenix rise above it's own ashes.

I would have you consider your judgment and your appetite even as you would two loved guests in your house. Surely you would not honour one guest above the other; for he who is more mindful of one loses the love and the faith of both.
-- Kahlil Gibran (The Prophet, On Reason and Passion)

It is all about balance... all about being "the lover of all your elements"!