DNA

"Its not my fault! I was born this way" -now it seems that one might be able to verify this! Read more here

Hymn of Creation - Rgveda

Then even nothingness was not, nor existence.
There was no air then, nor the heavens beyond it.
What covered it? Where was it? In whose keeping?
Was there then cosmic water, in depths unfathomed?

Then there were neither death nor immortality,
nor was there then the torch of night and day.
The One Wind breathed windlessly and self-sustaining.
There was that One then, and there was no other.

At first there was only darkness wrapped in darkness.
All this was only unilluminated water.
That One which came to be, enclosed in nothing,
arose at last, born of the power of heat.

In the beginning desire descended on it—
that was the primal seed, born of the mind.
The sages who have searched their hearts with wisdom
know that which is its kin to that which is not.

And they stretched their cord across the void,
and know what was above, and what below.
Seminal powers made fertile mighty forces.
Below was strength, and over it was impulse.

But, after all, who knows, and who can say
whence it all came, and how creation happened?
The gods themselves are later than creation,
so who knows truly whence it had arisen?

Whence all creation had its origin,
he, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not,
he, who surveys it all from highest heaven,
he knows—or maybe even he does not know.

Rice or otherwise!

Test your word power here...its fun and it helps.

Book-A-Minute Classics

Romeo and Juliet

By William Shakespeare

Ultra-Condensed by Taran Horter

Romeo

Oh, Juliet!

Juliet

Oh, Romeo!

Romeo

Oh, Juliet!

Juliet

Oh, Romeo!

Romeo

Oh, Juliet! (dies)

Juliet

Oh, Romeo!......Romeo?......Dammit.

THE END

More here.

Et tu, Brute?

I've begun to feel that intelligence in humans is a little over-rated. I recently read this article on 'swarm intelligence' and it turns out that ants and birds behave better in groups than we do!

And then its reported here that monkeys tend to rationalize just like humans! So when accusing Brutus of taking a decision and then trying to rationalize it, we need to remember that any monkey in his place would have done just the same.

Ratatouille

"They’re surprisingly self-aware. They laugh when tickled, especially when they’re young, and they have ticklish spots; tickle the nape of a rat pup’s neck and it will squeal ultrasonically in a soundgram pattern like that of a human giggle. Rats dream as we dream, in epic narratives of navigation and thwarted efforts at escape:..."

Brecht: Galileo's universe

Read this in the the Hindu's literary review:

In the first version, (written in the 1930s against the background of the rise of fascism) Galileo was a hero and a martyr (even if a fallible one): under pressure, he renounces what he knows to be the truth....What is brilliant is that the unbearable tension is overcome, as it must be in life, by a specific distortion: a compromised life extended until it is a false but effective consciousness. Galileo had asked: "Could we deny ourselves to the crowd and still remain scientists?"
...
The second version of the play, written in the 1940s, resonates from the dropping of the atom bomb and the revelations of the excesses of Stalinism...Science for its own sake was meaningless — its point was not "to open the door to infinite knowledge but to put an end to infinite error". One day, Galileo predicts the gap between science and mankind will yawn so wide that "your cry of triumph at some new discovery will be echoed by a universal cry of horror".
...
"Disbelief can move mountains", Brecht says elsewhere, and the pleasure and pain of doubt occur everywhere in the subtext in the play. "Galileo" is "an optimistic tragedy", if you can learn how to doubt the "big shots". "Unhappy is the land that has no heroes," says a follower when Galileo recants. "No," says Galileo, "Unhappy the land that needs heroes."

Great Thoughts

" “He thought it was a job where he could just think great thoughts, but it didn’t turn out that way.”
.
.
Ah, I thought, that is wisdom for the ages. Who among us wouldn’t want a job where we could just sit and think great thoughts? "

Read this interesting article Spectrum recently .

Listen Ahoy...

I've just heard a wonderful discussion between Salman Rushdie and Amartya Sen about the ideas in Sen's book the "Argumentative Indians" ... It was a really entertaining and fascinating talk, do listen on here...